Schoofs hails golden era of reporting

When Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs was ­approached about joining BuzzFeed, he had to be honest | PODCAST

Mark Schoofs, global head of investigations for BuzzFeed. Picture: Britta Campion.

He has won a Pulitzer and distinguished himself as an investi­gative reporter at The Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica.

So when Mark Schoofs, 55, was ­approached about joining the news and entertainment site BuzzFeed, famous for its listicles (“12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Music”), he had to be honest: “I did not know what Buzzfeed was.”

Five years on, no investigative reporter remains in ignorance about BuzzFeed, in no small part because of the investigative unit that Schoofs was asked to create.

Over a coffee (actually, he ­prefers tea) before recording an interview for The Australian’s ­Behind the Media podcast, available ­online, Schoofs, visiting Australia to attend the Walkley Foundation’s Storyology conference, appears ­unassuming.

But get him on to BuzzFeed investigations, which has netted the site two Pulitzer nominations, and his passion is evident.

BuzzFeed has broken worldwide exclusives on a series of Russian assassinations in Britain, a global tennis match-fixing scandal and “shameless corruption”, as he puts it, in US soccer.

And last year the site blew up US politics by publishing the ­infamous Steele dossier, memos written by Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6, which makes some ­incred­ible allegations about US President Donald Trump, the most salacious of which was that Trump hired prostitutes during a Moscow trip to urinate in front of him.

Publication was hugely controversial, as neither BuzzFeed nor anyone else could verify many of the claims in the dossier and rival media companies ruled out publication on that basis. But Schoofs is stout in his ­defence of the publication in Jan­uary last year.

“Well, first of all we did get a lot of heat from it but, you know, it’s interesting, we don’t get any heat for it any more,” he said, his voice rising.

The dossier had circulated through Washington but the public were denied access, he said.

“You publish it because it is a critical document to understanding the processes of government. And so we feel, felt, then and feel now, that publishing this document was publishing a critical piece of what makes and influences American policy decisions, and that the American people had a right to see that document.”

The ructions as a result, particularly over the investigations by the FBI and the special counsel ­investigation by Robert Mueller into alleged Russian collusion, are still being felt. And Schoofs says central claims in the dossier about Russian attempts to influence the US presidential election have been shown to be true.

So how did a website set up on a kitchen table to share viral content across the internet find itself at the centre of all this?

BuzzFeed, famous for viral con­tent such as a picture of a dress that sparked a global debate about whether it was blue and black or white and gold, has boosted its news content by launching a related site, BuzzFeedNews.com.

“Like all of the great media companies, they span a whole realm,” says Schoofs.

“And I think that’s how you should think of BuzzFeed: as a great news and entertainment company for the 21st century.”

In fact, Buzzfeed has even greater ambitions, which Schoofs articulates in reference to the BBC, with which it collaborated in Britain on a major investigation into tennis match fixing.

“It made me realise, also with great respect, of the scale that a place like the BBC has developed over time. And that’s the scale and that’s the ambition that BuzzFeed News has: to become a ­global news organisation for the internet generation.”

The tennis match-fixing scandal came about via one of the key weapons in the contemporary ­investigative journalism armoury: data. BuzzFeed data journalist John Templon realised that betting data, combined with player rankings, could indicate which players were likely to fix matches. And Heidi Blake, UK ­investi­gations editor poached from The Sunday Times, was brought in and found that global tennis authorities had ignored ­repeated warnings about match fixing.

BuzzFeed in Britain was small at that stage so the site entered a collaboration with the BBC for the investigation. “The BBC came in pretty late in the game and they were terrific partners and they helped to land a fantastic interview,” Schoofs says.

But the British national broadcaster was also brought in to make an impact.

“I mean, millions of people read it. Top tennis players tweeted about it and then parliament ­demanded an investigation.”

Such joint investigations are a global trend but rare for the news site. “We are big enough that we don’t need anybody else. I’m sorry if that sounds arrogant; I don’t mean it to.”

He is on the record as saying we exist in a golden age of investigative journalism.

“The internet might reduce print on paper but it has exploded text. There is more text in the palm of my hand (he points to a mobile phone) than probably all of human history had until 1980 through out all of time. And it’s right there in the palm of my hand.”

Schoofs is unconventional for several reasons. He is a philosophy graduate and holds two US ­patents for a device that assists swimmers. “What is philosophy but an ­inquiry into what is true? Philosophy teaches you two skills which I think are very valuable. It ­teaches you how to think and it teaches you how to write.”

Which is harder, I wonder, philosophy or investigating the Russian state’s interference in the West? “They are both very ­difficult,” he says. “They are difficult in different ways.”

But another set of circumstances that occurred after he graduated from university in 1985 had a profound impact.

“What changed my career forever was the AIDS crisis,” says Schoofs.

Returning home after college to the San Francisco Bay Area, Schoofs helped to build the first AIDS hospice in San Francisco and slid into journalism through the gay community. Then a small gay and lesbian newspaper asked him to be its editor in Chicago, and from there he moved to New York’s famous Village Voice newspaper.

While at The Village Voice, he won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for an eight-part series that was described as a “provocative and enlightening series on the AIDS crisis in Africa”.

But it was while reporting through the fear and hysteria ­surrounding AIDS in the 1980s and the complexities of the science that Schoofs learned a central lesson that it is easy to believe has been lost in this excessively opinionated era.

“I began to learn the power not of opinion, not of empathy … but of simply hard fact.”