Conference Reporter

February 2, 2025 (Updated )

From studying journalism to grabbing scoops at Bloomberg, The Financial Times and The Guardian, Nimra Shahid has carved out an impressive niche in just a few years. Now focused on climate, sustainability, and investigations, she’s explored the money behind Amazonian oil developments, how UK pensions are funding new oil wells, and how UK homes are becoming inhabitable as the climate emergency worsens.

We caught up with Nimra at the Student Publication Association’s National Conference 2024, just as she made the jump to freelance life.

Did you always think you would be a journalist?

It’s been quite a journey, when I think about it. I started just before Covid happened. I realised I really wanted to get into journalism and had been trying for a few years, applying to different internships and honestly, without much luck. It can be really, really hard to break into this industry.

I then came across the concept of training in journalism and heard of funding to do a master’s in journalism at City, University of London. That was a mix of data journalism [and other things]. Funnily, I didn’t know I was going to do climate or investigative journalism. I was just enjoying trying out different things as part of my course.

When Covid hit I was a bit lost for a while — but thought there was no harm in trying still. So, I called up The Guardian general switchboard and said I wanted to pitch a story and they gave the names of these different editors. I just kept pitching more and more stories and, as I was doing that, I started to get tips along the way. People started to notice me and reach out saying they knew things that were happening behind the scenes. I built up this contact base and kept in touch with all these people.

What happened next in your career?

Having some bylines, combined with the data journalism [experience] from my degree, gave me a path to apply for a data fellowship at the Bureau. But, before that, I ended up getting a big tip-off that resulted in a Guardian story. It was about how a [civil-service] contractor had been hired after Dominic Cumming’s blog, [which had called for ‘weirdos and misfits’ to apply]. The contractor called for Black people to be shot. I started working together with the Guardian investigations team to piece together this story.

After that, I went on to my fellowship with the Bureau. A lot of people who aren’t familiar with data journalism may find it daunting and think it’s just a lot of spreadsheets! But, what I learnt, is that a lot of data can just be people. It’s just another form of interviewing someone — you’re interviewing the spreadsheet like you’re interviewing someone.

Some of Nimra’s stories written for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

When my fellowship ended, I went on to an internship with Bloomberg and that was my first experience with business journalism; that small experience ended up being really foundational to where I am now. After that ended, I applied for a job at Global Witness, which is an NGO that does a combination of hard-hitting investigations and campaigns.

I had applied for a job in their forest team, which was looking into the role of finance in deforestation. By the time I finished at Global Witness, I had worked on a number of investigations, ranging from central finance and deforestation to how many lobbyists were at COP.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I feel like my day can really vary. It’s really different from a daily newsroom, for example, because you might be working on a story for a week, a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, and also what treatment that story might need. So, it might be easier to run through the life cycle of an investigation!

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"I called up the Guardian switchboard and said I wanted to pitch a story... I just kept pitching more and more stories and, as I was doing that, I started to get tips along the way. People started to notice me and reach out saying they knew things that were happening behind the scene. I built up this contact base and kept in touch with all these people."
Nimra Shahid, reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

At the very beginning is our scoping phase, that’s where we might approach potential contacts in an area or look for different types of data. Another avenue I find really helpful to get stories [going] is reading around what’s already been reported, which might sound counterintuitive, but if you reverse engineer a story, you start thinking about ways to go about getting that story.

I then gather all this data and look for anything that answers my hypothesis. I look for other data, usually open data sources, like on Bellingcat, to do deep searches into, say, financial documents. All of this drives you, eventually, to writing it all up and approaching people for colour and right of replies, before we give the green light to publish.

I should add that throughout this process there’s rigorous fact-checking too — and making sure that each piece of evidence is footnoted.

What would you tell budding investigative journalists?

With investigations, because you don’t always have a daily output like news, it helps to have a timeline and set deadlines for tasks within that. It can be really useful to give yourself timeframes to do certain things because investigations can sometimes lead you nowhere, or make you think you were onto something when you weren’t.

With investigative journalism, there are a few things I realised; one is that you don’t necessarily have to be an investigative reporter or correspondent by title to be doing investigations as part and parcel of your job.

There are so many different ways and avenues to get into investigative journalism. It’s more of a distinction of whether you want to do it freelance and if investigations are just a part of your reporting, or the entire thing. There are so many brilliant reporters out there who are not investigative by title but started off in a specific specialism, whether that’s housing, education, or the environment.

After a while of working in journalism, you realise that there are different characters, different contexts, different settings — but they might follow a broadly similar model. If I see a story that’s written through an FOI, I wonder what they would’ve asked to get that information and, based on that, what information could I ask to get another set of information.

As frustrating as it can be when someone scoops you, I guarantee you almost every journalist has had that feeling at some point in their career. Someone told me that if someone scoops you, it means that you have a nose for a story because there were others on the same path as you.

Shakthi Thyagarajan
Shakthi Thyagarajan

A first-class journalism graduate from the University of Sheffield, Shakthi served as the Deputy Editor of Forge Press. She has a keen interest in feature writing and crafting compelling stories that resonate with readers.

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