Fourteen years ago, Eliot Higgins started blogging, partly to “win arguments on the internet”. 

Now he helps run an award-winning international collective of journalists investigating everything from war crimes to wildlife trafficking. 

What began as a hobby is now a larger-scale global project, but Bellingcat founder and creative director Eliot Higgins tells PIJI the focus on utilising open-source information remains unchanged. 

Higgins first drew attention for his analysis of events and weapons in Syria and Libya during the Arab Spring, training himself to use sources ranging from YouTube videos to satellite maps to report on his blog, Brown Moses (named after the Frank Zappa song). 

In 2014, he launched Bellingcat to unite citizen investigative journalists using open-source information and to provide a place for others to learn how to find and use these resources themselves.  

The name was inspired by the fable ‘Belling the Cat’, in which a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat’s neck to warn them of its approach, but fail to find a volunteer to do the job. 

“My intention [when launching Bellingcat] was to give a place where people go and learn how to do this stuff themselves,” Higgins says. 

“I really believe in the value of open-source investigation, and I believe that this isn’t something that has to be done by a traditional institution – I’m living proof of that.  

“If I can do it, I’m sure there’s plenty of other people in the world who can do it as well … so getting those tools, techniques and methodologies out there is really important.” 

Sharing the knowledge with ‘thousands’

Bellingcat is primarily known for its investigative work, but Higgins says the organisation is also focused on building knowledge and infrastructure around open-source research through workshops, online resources and collaborations with universities to create investigative hubs.

“We’ve trained thousands and thousands of people from all kinds of backgrounds and different jobs – lots of journalists,” he says.

“When you see open-source investigation being done by a traditional newsroom, that’s very frequently because we trained them to do that.” 

For Higgins, this work is particularly important because the internet is “really good” at directing users towards populist, authoritarian or conspiratorial content.

He says this creates a need for spaces which encourage good quality, verifiable information. 

Part of that could require a shift in traditional dynamics between journalists and communities. 

“I think sometimes it’s very easy to just think as journalism as, ‘We create great information for the public to read,’” Higgins says. 

“But in this current era, we’ve moved from a very top-down, institutional gatekeep model of information to a peer-to-peer, many-to-many system where the public are not just recipients of information, but participants in its creation and spread.” 

A group effort

Social media is often a regular feature of a journalist’s newsgathering toolkit; in Australia, 65 per cent of journalists say they use social media to source stories, according to a 2026 Medianet report. 

The report found Facebook and Instagram were the biggest sources of professional social media usage for Australian journalists. 

Discord didn’t make the list, but for Bellingcat, the platform – which allows users to create and join servers centred around specific interests – can be a valuable resource. 

Bellingcat’s Discord server has more than 42,000 members, and hosts channels dedicated to topics ranging from violence-based misogyny to the geolocation of material from Russia’s Ukraine invasion.  

Higgins says Bellingcat’s Discord members form an “interactive” community that get involved in investigations, with some earning bylines in resulting articles. 

“A number of stories” have come from the server, such as Bellingcat’s investigation into the perpetrator of a 2024 oil spill off the Tobago coast.  

Higgins says the oil spill did not initially spark much international interest and it was beyond the capacities of local media to investigate.  

So a “small group” of Bellingcat’s Discord members began using resources such as traffic information and satellite data to identify the responsible vessel and its port of origin.  

“We were able to publish on that, then that meant the local media in Trinidad and Tobago could also publish on it and tell the local people what was going on,” Higgins says. 

“That informed the local parliamentary debate about what was happening. 

“We did a few more stories with the Discord server participants …  and then eventually we had the UN’s marine insurance organisation contact us … for all our data so they could make a payout to the local government there to clean up.” 

Bellingcat is also trying to meet audiences where they are. 

Higgins says the fragmentation of audiences seeking information ecosystems that appeal exactly to them means partnerships are “really important” to work on a range of topics without having to build an audience for each specific one. 

For example, a partnership between Bellingcat and geopolitics and sports-focused YouTube channel Search Party resulted in a video about cartel involvement in mixed martial arts that has garnered 2 million views a month since its release. 

Reverberations of USAID funding cuts a ‘devastating blow’  

Some events demand quick turnarounds, such as the January shooting of Alex Pretti by US federal agents, for which Higgins says Bellingcat quickly collated and analysed videos to prebunk any narratives from government officials claiming Pretti was armed at the time he was killed. 

But other investigations can take years to complete, while still requiring funding in the meantime.  

Although Bellingcat does not accept money from organisations that are fully funded by individual governments, such as USAID, Higgins says the “devastating blow” of last year’s USAID funding cuts “had a huge negative impact on the whole funding ecosystem”.  

Now, funding is “a real struggle to come across”. 

This has encouraged the organisation to explore ways to diversify funding, including an upcoming paid membership program which will offer features like special online events, but won’t put Bellingcat’s investigations behind a paywall. 

“Over the last several years, we’ve always had a little bit [of funds] left over, so that reserve has allowed us to survive longer than a lot of other organisations,” he says. 

“We’re doing really great work, we just need money to be able to keep on doing it.” 

Bellingcat is registered as an ANBI (public benefit organisation) in the Netherlands – a status that can only be obtained if an organisation’s efforts are at least 90 per cent committed to the public benefit.  

Higgins says up to 45 per cent of Bellingcat’s income comes from running workshops, small donations and Patreon subscriptions; the rest comes from a combination of foundations, postcode lotteries and the European Union. 

Bellingcat’s website does not feature ads, and the organisation does not accept money directly from individual governments – Higgins says doing so could be weaponised by critics. 

But he says governments could play a legislative role in supporting independent journalism, particularly as the industry loses much-needed clicks to new tech like Google’s AI summaries. 

Another option he says could be explored is a tax placed on tech giants’ advertising revenue, with resulting funds to be distributed to local and independent media.  

Something similar could become reality in Australia under the upcoming News Bargaining Incentive, if companies like Meta and Google choose to pay a penalty of 2.25 per cent of their revenue instead of entering commercial deals with news publishers.  

– Sezen Bakan