The revival of investigative journalism in Romania

In 2016, Romanian journalists published a series of investigations on health care, education and illegal logging, which led to prosecutions and changes in the society. After years of apathy, investigative journalism kicked back to life in Romania in the online world. What led to this revival in 2016 and what were the major stories that broke last year?

At the end of September 2015, a team of two journalists from the independent Romanian publication dela0.ro released a video documentary about the death of investigative journalism in Romania. It shows how big Romanian newspapers lost their investigative departments. In the beginning of 2008, all the major media outlets in Romania had investigative teams. Seven years later, they completely vanished from Romania’s main newsrooms. Meanwhile, many big media outlets also closed down altogether. In the last part of the documentary, Catalin Tolontan, chief editor of sports newspapers Gazeta Sporturilor, says: “The major corruption cases that turned into convictions or lawsuits or indictments were preceded by investigations in the written press. If this were the last wave of the written press, it is a legacy before which we must smile and be content.” Then Tolontan adds, almost prophetically: “But I don’t think this is the last wave of the written press.” Two months later, the journalist and his small team published a major investigation following the fire that killed 64 people in the Bucharest club Colectiv, the biggest tragedy of the Romanian society after the 1989 revolution. Some of the victims survived the fire, but were killed by nosocomial infections, revealed an article written by Tolontan and his team. It presented the testimony of a doctor working for the Burn Hospital in Bucharest, who argued that some of the people who had been wounded in Colectiv actually died in “a biological bomb, because of hospital-acquired infections.” Even more, the doctor said that people had been dying at the Burn Hospital for years due to bacteria-developed septicemia. That story led to a series of eye-openers on the medical health care in Romania and proved to be the beginning of a new wave of independent investigative journalism in Romania.