In this episode of the Media Innovatie Podcast, hosts Lars Anderson and Philippe Remarque speak with none other than Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat and a pioneer of open source investigation: journalistic detective work based on publicly available data such as satellite imagery, flight data, or videos on social media.

Higgins' story remains a remarkable one. In 2011 he was out of work and, under the name Brown Moses, waded into discussions about the Arab Spring on internet forums. To win an online argument, he pulled up a YouTube video from Syria and set out to prove his point using Google Maps. That's how he discovered that you can verify events using nothing but open sources.

Out of this 'weird hobby', as he calls it himself, grew a worldwide collective. Three days after he founded Bellingcat in 2014, flight MH17 was shot down in Ukraine. Bellingcat demonstrated that it was a Russian Buk missile that struck the aircraft. Later, Bellingcat made its name with investigations into the poisonings of Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny. Today Bellingcat counts some 38 staff members all over the world.

In the podcast, Higgins explains what OSINT means for journalism today, why he'd rather no longer use the term open source intelligence, how actor Hugh Grant is actually the reason Bellingcat exists at all, and why he has a love-hate relationship with AI. He also sketches out what a completely transformed information landscape means for journalism: why transparency builds trust, and how local media and public participation are, in his view, part of the solution.

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Hosts
Lars Anderson en Philippe Remarque

Over de makers

Lars Anderson is Manager Innovation at DPG Media. As a journalist, he has written for news outlets such as Vrij Nederland, Het Parool, de Volkskrant, and the travel magazine Columbus Travel. He is also the co-founder of Fosfor Longreads, an innovative journalistic platform for long-form digital storytelling.

Philippe Remarque is deputy editor-in-chief for the Dutch newspaper AD. He was previously the editor-in-chief of de Volkskrant, a political reporter, and a correspondent in Russia, Germany, and the United States.

Artwork
Lucas van Esch

Fotografie
Malou van Breevoort