PUPIL

PUPIL is an independent investigative project concerned with the people and institutions the public is asked to trust. Its reports set what is presented to us against what lies underneath: the documents, records and statements that rarely reach the surface of the news.

The form is deliberate. Investigative work is often accurate and nearly unreadable, and much of it goes unseen for that reason. PUPIL treats presentation as part of the work: image, type, rhythm and sound are used to make complex subjects digestible and to lower the barrier to understanding, without asking the facts to bend to the form. The idea has a long tradition. The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion brought the novelist's tools to reporting. Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, a highly stylised documentary, helped free Randall Dale Adams in 1989, and Morris himself cautioned that "style doesn't guarantee truth." Julian Assange later argued for what he called scientific journalism: a story should let the reader go directly to the document it rests on. PUPIL takes both lessons seriously, and its approach comes from years of studying these subjects, many others like them, and the ways they are told.

Making verified information hold attention matters more now than it ever has. More people get their news from social and video feeds than from news sites or papers, and those feeds are full of disinformation, competing claims to authority and conflicting opinions, which makes it difficult to know whom to trust. The problem has grown as the institutions and people meant to lead and protect us have, at times, become among the least trustworthy sources of all. The Patriot Act was used to collect Americans' phone records in bulk for years before a federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that the law never allowed it. The CIA's venture fund was one of Palantir's first investors. Russia's troll farm ran accounts on Reddit. The New York Times reported an Israeli government ministry paying for fake accounts aimed at US lawmakers. The Pentagon ran fake accounts in the Philippines to put people off China's Covid vaccine. These are the institutions we're told to trust, and some of them have been caught doing what they warn us about.

In that environment, staying informed and staying clear-headed can pull in different directions. PUPIL is meant to help with both: to offer verified information in a form people will engage with, and to support the slower work of judging for oneself what is real, without the cost to attention and emotional health that following such an upsetting world so often carries. Our hope is to present the record and leave its interpretation open.

In an attention economy, the difficulty is to be engaging without becoming one more voice that works on its audience's emotions. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote that the discipline of verification "is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art." PUPIL rests on the view that verification is also what allows journalism to be art. It has no sponsors, no advertisers and no commercial stake in its subjects.