Howley.dataj.global.v2

January 2013

investigative data journalistbrendan howley

datavisualization: offshore capital flows 2011(World Bank)

Friday, January 11, 2013

76 Nile Street! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 8 January 2013 Stratford ON! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !N5A4C5

re Senior Producer | investigative data journalism team

Ladies and gentlemen

I’m a guy who’s on the cutting edge of digital storytelling design, execution, ROI measurement, and monetization, on all platforms...who happens to be a veteran investigative journalist. My data investigative skills are broad and deep, ranging from forensic accounting/asset tracking to covert operations to white collar crime and war crimes, datelined Cuba to Russia to Serbia to Dubai.

I live where data meets news meets media. I bring investigative stories to life through a unique combination of data, design and superb, multi-award-winning storytelling—across all media: digital, print, mobile and web.

A veteran freelance investigative reporter at the fi"h estate since 1992, I’ve worked in newsrooms on and off since 1989; I’m one of a handful of Canadians who’ve won the Heywood Hale Broun Award from The Newspaper Guild (USA) for my editorial chops.

Moreover, I’ve worked with some of best digital minds in North America, from UX designers to digital anthropologists to data scientists to mobile network specialists. Did I say I was in the (virtual) room when Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the world wide web) predicted data journalism was the future of the internet back in 2010? I was, all ears.

An excellent team leader who builds teams whose confidence, ésprit de corps and crack talent are the envy of those not on them, I’m a mad Irishman with a great sense of humour—mostly directed at me. It’s what the Irish call “the humbling.” Why? Because I deserve it: because I’ve always pushed myself, I’ve made more mistakes than anybody I know—and made a point of learning bigtime. Laughter leads learnings, I do believe. And shared learnings spell inspiring leadership.

As a producer, I’m a guy who really knows how to inspire great work in others by respecting autonomy, creativity and personal work—my solid peer and report evaluations reflect this management style: more importantly, people go the extra mile to get stuff done because they love the work we’re producing together. I try to lead by solid good example.

I’m humble but I’m not shy: investigative data journalism is hacking history—and I love it, everything about it. I’d love to speak with the Global investigative team about a possible fit with your team, your work and your own ambitions in this pioneering news space.

Want the nittygritty? Check out the cheeky slideshow that follows. Thank you.

Brendan Howley | inkfish (at) wightman (dot) ca | 226.880.1449 | @brendanhowley


Killer investigative storytelling—across all media.

I’m a rare bird.

I’m an investigative journalist of 20 years’ experience who’s not only assembled, mentored and led crack teams (as a multi-award-winning Fortune 500 communications specialist) but who’s also totally immersed in the cutting-edge methodologies of digital investigative storytelling: taking a piece of news from raw, uncontextualized data-set to assignment to script development/datavisualization to responsive mobile to web series to integrated storytelling across all media, all platforms.

I’ve worked as a novelist (three so far), on newspapers (over 20 years), in magazines (ditto), in film (telling stories visually), in radio (telling stories out of thin air), in branded content magazines (telling stories to sell stuff) and branded comedy webisodes (telling brand stories for laughs) and in episodic television (entire novels for television, for international co-pro cable series).

Done it all, winning not a few international awards for editorial and creative along the way. And stayed humble, because I know that knowing what you don’t know is the key to learning how producing great stuff: you learn and you share those learnings. And you lead by serving your people first: do that and the project magically comes together.

(Plus I may be one of the few investigative journos on the planet who’s worked with more hackers, web developers, UX designers, dataviz artists, media strategsists and data scientists than...journalists.)


The leadership trifecta.

For the role of senior producer at Global’s data journalism desk, I bring three key leadership skillsets:

✦ management

A servant manager, I do my utmost to make people’s jobs creative, engaging and fulfilling. People climb walls to help me advance a project. Why? Because I lead by example, fairness, and a terrific work ethic. I believe the best management is reciprocal learning.

✦ mentoring

I’m a legit data journalist, in the hardcore sense of the term, as you’ll see: I’ve generated big stories from small numbers, yielding terrific context from the smallest clues. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’m a superb mentor—I love teaching what I know.

✦ motivation

The straw that stirs the drink: I work beautifully with web developers and designers. A visual guy who’s also a tekkie, I get the most out of digital talents because I understand their work-world...and I’ve a filmmaker’s eye for visuals and design.


Begin at the beginning.

When in doubt—as I learnt a long time ago from a New York homicide detective of my acquaintance—make like Alice in Wonderland: begin at the beginning.

Trained as an immunologist (a discipline all about numbers and complex systems), I’ve compulsively mapped human behaviour as an investigative journalist—a freelancer at the fi"h estate since 1992—a crime novelist, a documentary filmmaker, an award-winning screenwriter and branded content guy. I’ve worked in radio, on mobile apps and even designed an internet radio game UX for Fortune 500 client Acura.

But most of all, I’ve been an investigative data journalist since I was a kid: the Canadian-born son of a Liverpudlian IBM Fellow and research scientist, I grew up in downstate New York on equal parts Raymond Chandler crime stories and data processing.


a pattern language.

My entire working life, I’ve lived (mostly without knowing it!) the Brené Brown precept that story is data with soul.

Why? Because it’s a$ about patterns: that’s why I love history, why I love teasing the story out of multiple clues—it’s all about the pattern language, what it says, what it means.

That’s the secret heart of investigative data journalism and I have that talent—and the drive to share that talent collaboratively—in spades.


first data storytelling.

• I’ve been a working data journalist since 1992, when, as a veteran courts journalist covering Attawapiskat’s fly-in criminal court as the first white man to witness Cree sentencing circles, I built simple data frameworks to demonstrate the failure of the new processes, 20 years before the current brouhaha.

• I reported this in a groundbreaking piece for En Route on the collapse of the fly-in native courts system; I donated the datasets to the Federal Ministry of Justice report on aboriginal justice


fifth estate: first gig

• My first formal training in building data frameworks stemmed from my freelance work in the wartime Balkans in 1993 for CBC-TV’s the fi"h estate and Saturday Night Magazine.

• I assembled the data frameworks that tracked, using original wartime Gestapo records, the killing of WW2 hostages in Belgrade authorized by Canada’s last WW2 war crimes suspect, Radislav Grujicic.

Kragujevac massacrecentral Serbiaautumn 1941


from Belgrade, with data

• That fi"h estate film also involved my archival data expertise, gleaning damning evidence from declassified ‘NATO top secret’ RCMP Security Service intelligence files (cleared for disclosure to defence counsel in the same trial).

• For the story Emmy Award-winning host-reporter Linden Macintyre termed “one of the three most important stories in my career,” I established how the RCMP had hidden dozens of ex-Nazi informants 1945-1985 by cross-tracking case file numbers and ID photographs in primitive spreadsheets. I proved all the RCMP’s ex-Nazi informant file dockets were false-flag.

• All those images provided cover for Vatican ‘ratlines’ Nazi war crimes suspects who were brought to Canada to surveil labour unions postwar as ‘anti-Communist’ specialists—part of a NATO-sponsored FBI/RCMP domestic spying scheme using former Nazi collaborators as ‘anti-communist specialists’ I also uncovered.


Data investigation from a master.

• Upon my return from former Yugoslavia in 1993, I continued to learn, this time from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Prof Cherif Bassiouni of DePaul University law school, who shared his best practices while assembling the first database of eyewitness atrocity reports, covering the horrors from 1991 onwards.

• Prof Bassiouni’s database work became the evidentiary basis for the criminal prosecutions of dozens of senior war crimes suspects from Serbia and Croatia at the International Courts of Justice at The Hague.

• At the same time, helped by Canadian bank regulators in the Cayman Islands, I learned how to track criminal asset movements, launching my personal work in connecting moneylaundering and Kosovar terrorist networks connected with Afghan heroin wholesalers to southern Europe.


Cuba’s psychiatric hellholes (data again)

• In 1997, again on contract with the fi"h estate, I laddered up leaked Cuban suicide rate statistics against leaked psychiatric committal statistics from the Cuban health ministry, in order to track the incarceration of dissident journalists in Cuba’s Soviet-style psychiatric hospitals.

• This data work proved multiple assaults on and attempted murders of innocent journalists by the criminally insane in the criminal psychiatric wards of Cuban state hospital system by the Castro regime 1975-1995.

• This investigative work was published in Shi' Magazine in 1997; I shared the data with the American Psychiatric Association (who had confronted the Cuban psychiatrists involved at the international conference in 1996) and with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Cuba. I was commended in writing for this investigative data work on behalf of Cuban dissident journalists by then-External Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy.


An ‘investigative novel’ for Random House

• My next data journalism project was personal work, working with US Holocaust Memorial Museum investigator and looted art expert Marc Masurovsky, I spent four years establishing the data underpinnings for an “investigative novel,” published in 2007 by Random House of Canada, The Witness Tree.

• This novel turned on the collaboration of the Vatican Bank, the IOR, with Nazi efforts to offshore the billions in loot in Berlin’s hands via Vatican/German joint ventures 1942-45.

• I learned how to track joint venture assets across multiple jurisdictions and created a successful data methodology for tracking corporate shell companies as a counterintelligence officer would, thanks to training from several former UK and Israeli intelligence officers


Dirty oil.

• A 2005 contract investigative piece for The Gulf Times of Dubai/UAE unearthed open source data about post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi oil ministry officials offshoring cash.

• The data work here involved reconstructing Iraqi investigations with my contacts in US security firms protecting the oil tanker truck shipments overland to the Basra waterfront, mapping those investigations against oil transhipments data.

• The story pointed to moneyseams known to benefit al-Qaeda as one of the ultimate beneficiaries of the diverted oil, based on UN and US security firms’ investigations.

al-Basra offshore oil terminal No. 1

2005


Technology data journalism

works in progress

Present data journalism work includes two contract investigative/analysis projects for Nanomarkets, a Washington DC-based business intelligence publisher, book-length intelligence reports detailing the emerging technology markets globally for the ‘Internet of things’—the coming internet of connected smart devices—and haptics, the art and science of touch interfaces.

*

The Big Pivot: how a revolution in data storyte$ing is changing media, markets and brands

A non-fiction book and allied digital experiences.

Co-written by Gunther Sonnenfeld (SVP RAPP LA) and Sasha Grujicic (EVP Aegis Media Toronto)

Represented by FolioLit Agency, NYC. Publication Q4 2013.

For more on The Big Pivot visit this three-part blog series

http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/11/the-big-pivot-part-i/http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/13/the-big-pivot-part-2/http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/18/the-big-pivot-part-3/


http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/11/the-big-pivot-part-i/

http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/11/the-big-pivot-part-i/

http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/13/the-big-pivot-part-2/




What my last boss thinks of me.

Rob TaitManaging Director, Strategy & Production Branded Entertainment and Branded Content at Silent Joe Inc.

The nice thing about working in this field for over 20 years is that you get a chance to work with some of the very unique and innovative thinkers. And of all those innovative and creative thinkers, Brendan may just top the list. I've worked with Brendan in two capacities: as his Creative Director when he was an editor-in-chief at Redwood and as business partner when I was President at Fresh Baked. In both capacities, the name of our game was excellence in branded content… creatively, strategically, financially (for the client). Creative excellence? Well, he's won an armful of awards both for branded content and journalism. Strategic excellence? Few minds are as sharp or as insightful when it comes to wrestling a great strategy to the ground. Financial excellence? Let's just say it's never creative for creative sake with Brendan, but creative for ROI's sake. A team leader and a team player, Brendan is a big media thinker and a constant learner with a passion for unearthing the great story and telling it with panache.


http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6044477&authToken=U2bF

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6044477&authToken=U2bF

What my partner thinks of me.

Gunther SonnenfeldTechnologist. Digital strategist.Global advisor & co-author, "The Big Pivot" (coming 2013). Co-Founder, Heardable. Venture Partner, K5.

I've known Brendan for 4 years, but I'd rather think that I've known him for 39 years, 7 months and 10 days. We've worked together, built software together, and contemplated every possible solution to a wicked problem in the content and journalism spaces. We've even thought about how inanimate objects can tell stories. This is easy when you're working with a guy who's been on the cutting-edge of investigative journalism and branded communications for the last 20 years, with a background in scientific disciplines like immunology. But here's the thing, and why his experience really counts in this day and age: anyone can write, do research and figure out macro or micro communications streams. But can that person think critically? Can that person apply knowledge to move the needle of a media, a business and a market? Can he or she understand the value of a network, its resources and its potential to actually affect change? There are very, very, few people who can do that. Brendan is one of those very few. If you're lucky enough to hire him, use the opportunity wisely... He's full of surprises. You know, the good, visionary and empathic kind.


http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5891280&authToken=7ArZ

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5891280&authToken=7ArZ

Awards +

I’ve won several awards for my editorial and creative work.

2002 The Newspaper Guild’s Heywood Hale Broun Award (USA) for excellence in magazine editorial/reportage as editor-in-chief of Scan, the monthly magazine of The Canadian Media Guild2007 Pearl Award (USA), best editorial, AcuraStyle Magazine2008 Magnum Opus Award (USA), best overall editorial, AcuraStyle Magazine2009 Harold Greenberg Award (CDA) for my feature film screenplay 90 Days2010 National Magazine Award (CDA) for Marketing Magazine feature profile of Canadian Obama digital strategist Rahaf Harfoush

professional development

Society of Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Level I certification from Academy of Competitive Intelligence, Tel Aviv (in progress)

Awards are great. But the best compliment anyone’s ever paid me was when Linden Macintyre thanked me,

saying that I’d unearthed, researched, shaped and helped get to air “one of the three most important stories of my career”


Brendan Howleyawardwinning branded content + data journalism

226.880.1449mobile | inkfish(at)wightman(dot)com | @brendanhowley

The author of three crime novels for Random House, Brendan has documented the civil wars in Bosnia, spent years as an underground journalist in Castro’s Cuba, and worked all over Eastern Europe as a war crimes and covert operations specialist, contributing to six major broadcast documentaries for the CBC and The History Channel. Brendan’s trusted connections to the world of intelligence/counterintelligence offer a rare window on the hidden history our time, from Ottawa to Washington DC to London to Tel Aviv to Moscow—giving Brendan a unique understanding of human networks and how they operate.

That depth of life and narrative experience teaches you stuff.

You learn how to create successful, awardwinning multiplatform storytelling offerings for clients from Fortune 500 giants to tiny culinary microproducers (raising $400K via a groundbreaking online microfinance initiative) to non-profit/for-good cause marketing collaborations with solar technology cooperatives and public library networks—from branded interactive to web series to innovative learning/gaming experiences for mobile.

The son of an IBM Fellow and one of the leading logicians in the company, Brendan learned early to combine a solid science background—his degree is in biophysics/immunology—with a profound curiosity about how human beings create value together through shared language and story.

With his partners in Los Angeles and Toronto, Brendan is at present prototyping a revolutionary collective intelligence engine. Brendan, the project’s logic design and language

Brendan's twice blessed: he’s a story-magnet. And he lives where story meets media meets technology.

A CBC-trained investigative journalist with deep roots in media design, content strategy and digital technologies, he's done multi-awardwinning work with image and story for clients as diverse as CBC TV’s flagship investigative show, the fi#h estate (where Emmy Award-winning PBS Frontline host Linden Macintyre described Howley's investigative work as producing «one of the top three stories I’ve ever worked on in my career») to Fortune 500 clients Acura (US), Frito-Lay (US), Johnson & Johnson, Conagra, The Principal Financial Group (US), Sotheby’s (UK/US), and (for one brief shining moment) Goldman Sachs.


technologies lead, has also designed and executed a groundbreaking community collaboration methodology to enable libraries to market and fund themselves as trusted repositories of community data.

Brendan’s creative horsepower made him one of a handful of Canadian winners of The Newspaper Guild’s prestigious Heywood Hale Broun Award (US) for editorial excellence, Brendan led a Toronto-based content team at Redwood Custom Communications (Canada/UK: Omnicom Group) that swept the US custom publishing awards in 2008 and 2009 for its branded content work for Acura (US), including a best-in-class 2009 Pearl Grand Award for overall editorial/design excellence.

Brendan has worked successfully in literally all media, from print (from The Globe and Mail to Abu Dhabi’s The National) to a hit CBC Radio drama, Saturday A!ernoons at the Patronato, to Virtual Mom, a CBC movie of the week co-created with and starring Sheila (Little Mosque on the Prairie) McCarthy to a dramatic feature film in development with Telefilm Canada and Apsara Productions,90 Days. Howley is also collaborating with multi-awardwinning scriptwriter/actor/producer Susan Coyne (Slings and Arrows) onJuice, a new dramatic TV series, a family saga set in the fragrance industry, in development for international co-production with Take5 Productions (The Tudors, The Borgias, Camelot), BBC4 and Canal+/France.

In September, 2010, Howley won both an $18,000 Harold Greenberg Award for his screenplay for 90 Days (in development with Telefilm Canada) and the coveted Kenneth R. Wilson Gold Medal for business writing, for his Marketing Magazine profile of Rahaf Harfoush; Harfoush was the only Canadian volunteer at Obama’s campaign HQ and key player in Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ smash iPhone/Facebook marketing strategy that raised U$500mn online.

Reporting from datelines as diverse as Havana, wartime Belgrade, Warsaw, Budapest, Rome, Paris, and St Petersburg, Russia, Brendan has contributed, among many others, to The Walrus, Marketing Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The National (Dubai/UAE), and The Christian Science Monitor.

education: Vassar College, University of Western Ontario


thank you.


Documents

Howley.dataj.global.v2