Howley.dataj.global.v2

datavisualization: offshore capital ﬂows 2011
(World Bank)

investigative data journalist
brendan howley

January 2013

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 massacre
central Serbia
autumn 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
al-Basra offshore
US security firms’
oil terminal No. 1
investigations.
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/


What my last boss
thinks of me.

Rob Tait
Managing 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.


What my partner
thinks of me.

Gunther Sonnenfeld
Technologist. 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.


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 Guild
2007 Pearl Award (USA), best editorial, AcuraStyle Magazine
2008 Magnum Opus Award (USA), best overall editorial, AcuraStyle Magazine
2009 Harold Greenberg Award (CDA) for my feature film screenplay 90 Days
2010 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 Howley
awardwinning branded content + data journalism

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

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.

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


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.


Howley.dataj.global.v2

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