A Day In The Life Of… George Greenwood, Investigations Reporter at The Times

Criminals, oligarchs and crooked politicians, look away now. George Greenwood is at the heart of The Times’ investigations team, where he focuses on exposing financial crime, lobbying malpractice, and foreign influence.

In 2023, he was shortlisted for the European Press Prize in recognition of his work with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on how key Putin allies manage to evade Western sanctions. We spoke to George at the Student Publication Association National Conference 2024 about a day in the life of an investigative reporter, the importance of transparency in public life and how young journalists can begin to prowl their patch.

How would you describe your job on the investigations team?

I do a lot of this transparency work on UK government. I also do a lot of financial crime and a lot of stuff around Russia and China and how UK public authorities and businesses deal with them. I try to shed light on things that either shouldn’t be going on or are illegal. It’s that sort of traditional public interest journalism, really, but using slightly different techniques.

My boss, Paul Morgan-Bentley, is just one of the best in the country at undercover reporting. That’s not something I’m as good at. What I am good at is looking at spreadsheets, putting things together, finding the story, but then doing the ringing around and door-stepping people. So you get the leads from the data, but then you do all the traditional sleuthing on top of that to make it work. I think there aren’t enough people who are both proper old school hacks and coders and data experts and FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lawyers. So for my job, I have to be a lawyer, a data analyst and a hack. It’s just a random coincidence of events that led me to develop that skillset.

Reporters need to focus on those hard skills and I think you can get really amazing stories by just having those scientific skills and legal skills, as well as just being able to ring someone up and have a conversation. In a way, in journalism [training], I wish they did focus on those hard skills. You have data courses, but just things like teaching you to do Excel properly, because a lot of news reporters won’t have that, but it opens up this world of possibility of stories if you can just do Excel competently.

What would an average day be like for you? Is it very dependent on whatever you’re working on, or do you have a routine?

So, I tend to have a routine which ramps up and down depending on what’s coming up. A normal day is that I probably get into the office at about 8am in the morning. I spend an hour going through my FOI appeals. You could just spend all your time doing this, but you have to be quite strict, only spend an hour or two a day on it. I’ll file my appeals, I’ll make my requests, I’ll go through my backlog to see if I’ve got anything back that’s interesting and then maybe make a note to write a memo for the news desk on it.

Then, probably, the rest of the day, nine to five, it will be working on the main project. So at the moment it’s this investigation about money laundering and it’ll be making the calls, looking through the cuts, doing the calculations, searching through databases, looking for material and talking to our lawyers about things going on, updating editors.

Then the rest of the time will be spent meeting sources, so that could be anything from a mate I know does something, to somebody who wants [to meet] in a cafe with no mobile phones. It’s a real variety and I think just going for coffee with people is really important because they may say they’ll say things in a less guarded way than on the phone, because they [know] that you know you’re not recording them.

I almost find that sometimes it’s good not to turn up with a notepad, because I think as soon as you get your notepad out, people seize up a bit. Not to say you don’t take one, but just don’t open it until you really need to write something down in it that you’re going to forget, because, if you’ve got a good enough memory, sometimes remembering the key facts is better in terms of what you get out of people.

How many FOIs do you currently have in?

Hmm. So I’ve got probably only about 15 or 20 live ones at the stage of they haven’t responded yet, but I think I’ve got about 32 live ICO [Information Commissioner’s Office] complaints, seven live first-tier tribunal cases and one live upper-tier tribunal case.

Do you ever turn off or are you always thinking about your work?

One thing I’ve had to make a real effort towards doing for my mental hygiene is to be quite disciplined with myself because it is a job that I could spend 24 hours working on and I’d still have things to look into.

I think one of the key things you learn when you get into your mid-career is that you can’t save everybody, you can’t find every story, there’s just too much going on in the world. What you can do is make a big difference in your area. One thing I do is get up early, get out the door. I work in the office almost every day because I think having that separation between home and work, when it can be all-consuming, is really important, so psychologically you switch off when you get home. It doesn’t mean you don’t check your emails or respond to people, but it does reduce the stress.

I have to read a book before I go to bed; it has to be fiction or [specific] non-fiction,  like history. It has to be nothing about politics, because it just will get your brain. Then I also like cooking decent-sized meals and I’ve got very into running in the last 18 months, so I go to a running club and it’s nice to do exercise with other people as well. So, it’s just doing that good mental hygiene, trying to either get to the gym or get out of the office for 10-15 minutes. I don’t have packed lunches; I tend to take myself out for lunch. It’s a bit more expensive, but it just physically gets you out of the office for a break. I think it’s all about realising that these things do get on top of you and you need to have that really strict discipline about your life, taking time off. I’m still not perfect at it, but I’ve got a lot better in the last few years.

What have you done in the past that you’re proudest of or what do you most hope will come to fruition as a big project?

I’ve loved working on the Acquind story, this wonderfully colourful former Russian arms dealer from Ukraine, who’s trying to build this power cable across the Channel. He’s a massive Tory donor and he’s just very colourful character and looking into his business ties and the way he’s lobbied government — the project’s been really fun. And it’s been really fun [to see them] them going from sending me legal letters the whole time, to having a very nice PR man who rings me up occasionally, and we have a very nice chat because they worked out that the legal letters weren’t working. But that’s been really fun. We had about a two-year break reporting on this because things didn’t come up, [but] we recently had another thing on that come up a couple of weeks ago, so it’s been fun to get back into that.

I really love working with a group called OCCRP. It’s one of these big international investigations groups and it’s just so fun working on projects with 50 people. We’re their UK partner for certain stories and being able to work on stuff with them, where you have this amazing leak and then you just get to pull all these stories you’d kill for. It’s just there in emails and it’s just really straightforward to do because they can’t lie about it. You’ve got the records showing they did the thing and it’s so much fun.

How would you recommend that an aspiring journalist to breaks into the industry to do what you do?

Learn the hard skills. Learn to code, get really good at enforcing your legal rights — so, not just putting in FOIs, but actually, how do you force them to [release] what you want? Journalism, a lot of it is soft skills, but actually the hard skills are undersold, so learning how the government actually works if you want to do political reporting.

Get a really good understanding of the technocratic structure of what you’re trying to report on. Say, with business, how is the company actually structured? Learn how to do accounting, so that you can look at a set of accounts and say: “That looks strange.” It’s just learning these boxes of hard skills that mean when you work somewhere, and you [want to] do a really cool story using those skills, you’ve actually got a proposition they can invest in beyond just that you’re a good reporter, because there are loads of good reporters and not everyone’s going to walk into a newsroom. Whereas if you can say: “I’ve got this very specific set of skills,” it makes it easier for you to be hired because people can make a case for you more easily, because we don’t have someone who does this and it just pulls you out separately.

That’s how I got onto the investigations team. I started as a data journalist, but they were just getting confused why everyone else was doing charts and data stories and it was: “Why do you keep getting legal letters, George? People in the data team shouldn’t be getting legal letters.” But then they just thought, at the end of the day: “Well, what you do is investigations, so let’s just put you on the investigations team.’

What is the future of data and investigations in the British press?

I think that is something that’s better in newsrooms now. There’s one other coder on the business desk who I work with quite a lot, but in terms of actual news reporters, there are two coders in the room of 50 people. That should be 10, really. For all the downsides of media — there are problems with the reach model, or relying on clicks — but subscriber-based places are doing great. I mean, we’re [The Times] doing really well, The Telegraph are doing really well, the FT are doing brilliantly. As that works better, those newsrooms can expand than actually there is the funding to do this really hard-hitting stuff.

There’s a big problem for local journalism in that, of course, how it replicates that model. I think hyper-locals are probably the way you do that, like The Bristol Cable, which is excellent. But with these subscriber-based things, you can invest in that speciality, because it turns up stuff your readers want.