A Day In The Life Of… Henry Dyer, Investigations Reporter at The Guardian

Ever since his time at the University of York’s student paper The Lemon Press, Henry Dyer has had a panache for debunking things. So, things have been no different since he joined the investigations team of The Guardian in 2022, with a particular focus on British politics.

Henry spoke to Journo Resources at the Student Publication Association National Conference 2024. He told us about a day in the life of an investigations reporter, his path into reporting, how he comes up with the next line of inquiry, and his favourite subjects to dig deep into.

What’s your daily routine and how much do you know about what you’re going to be doing on any given day when you get into the office?

The first thing I do in the morning normally is to read the Politico newsletter. It’s just become routine, that’s the first thing I do. I look at some of the political news of the day, the main stories that are leading the newspapers and I would probably have stayed up the night before to have a look at the front pages as well.

I generally have an idea of what I’m going to be working on, it’ll normally be advancing an investigation that I’m working on.

Do you decide what stories to pursue or do you take an editorial steer?

I’ve got quite a lot of latitude in terms of, I have a special subject being British politics, which I will keep up to date with and check in on various things. Then occasionally I will be asked by an editor “Can you look into this?” or “Can you check this out?” Or, alternatively, you work with a colleague on an investigation on this subject or that subject to see if you’ve got something that you might be able to contribute.

What story are you proudest of?

Last year I did an investigation called Westminster shareholdings, which I was very proud of. I did it in my first year at The Guardian and it was a first-of-its-kind investigation. It was using a fairly obscure part of the Companies Act to get copies of the entire shareholder register of FTSE 100 companies. Working with lawyers, we had to go back to the original committee stage debate of the bill to prove when I wrote to these companies and I asked for these databases that I had a legitimate purpose for doing so.

I wrote to these companies and got this data —huge, huge data sets. I had to identify parliamentarians and their close family members who had shares in companies that they hadn’t disclosed. I revealed, for instance, that a former minister in the Scotland Office — who used to work for BP — before becoming an MP, he appeared to have moved all of his shares to his wife.

He’d been responsible for energy policy and there was no disclosure that he had shares. He’d spoken subsequently in debates about oil and gas and the windfall tax, especially on companies such as BP. He’d say: “I declare my interest as my industry experience”, but there was no mention that his wife, and by extension him, had an interest in terms of £50,000+ worth of shares. That’s something that is of significant public interest.

I did that and a number of other stories from this big data project and I really enjoyed it because I felt that it was a very innovative investigation. Stories had been done before 2006, especially in the ’90s, about shareholder registers and conflicts of interest there. So that angle of it wasn’t new, but the way we got the information and the methods we used to search the information, that was new and was really exciting.

Do you ever manage to switch off from the news?

Very rarely and with great suffering. I’m quite happy with it, I love what I do. I love cracking a mystery. I did some OSINT (open-source intelligence) work recently — I don’t normally do OSINT work, but I did a bit of satellite imagery research and that was great fun. It’s just like solving a puzzle, it’s really satisfying, and so, because I’ve got that mindset, a lot of the time I don’t feel like it’s work, which is a very fortunate position to be in.

But you do have to be careful. I’m very fortunate because the stories I do are not very emotionally draining, but I’ve got colleagues who do work on very difficult stories about topics like what’s happening in Gaza, people being killed and awful things happening. That can really have an effect on you and you can’t work on it for too long because you get burnt out. It doesn’t need to be horrors happening overseas, it can be social poverty and systemic issues here in the UK that have a real effect.

Do you tend to cast a wide net and hope something comes up or know what you’re looking for when you start an investigation?

I think it depends. I think most of the time it’s that there’s a tip-off of some kind. It might be that someone’s got in touch to say: “This smells a bit odd and I’ve got these particular concerns”. Otherwise, it will come from reading a news story about something, realising that there are unanswered questions in that story which could be worthy of investigation and that gives you a lead.

My colleague, Tom Burgis, has this great metaphor: “An investigation is a bit like an invasion — you have to build a beachhead [a military term for when a unit arrives at a landing beach by sea and begins to defend the area as more reinforcements arrive].” This is the core fact, which I know is accurate, and this is the rock upon which I can then start to fan out, learn more, identify where the issues are, and then focus in on them.

Have you always been interested in investigations or was this something you grew into?

No, when I was a student journalist, I wrote satire. I did one proper investigation which was into a different student newspaper and claims that they made about being the UK’s most awarded student newspaper. Through 50 years of archive research, I proved that wasn’t true and had never been true, which I still think was an excellent investigation.

What was your path into journalism and would you advise young journalists to either replicate it or try to stay clear of your pitfalls?

I was very lucky, I think, but to some extent, you build your own luck. I think journalists here [at the SPA National Conference] this year have a good opportunity especially if they’re interested in politics because there’s going to be a general election which means that there will be a lot of investigations that can be carried out and should be carried out. Young journalists are in a good position to do that because they have a lot of time on their hands, whereas national news reporters will be completely swept off their feet going from constituency to constituency, without the time to do it.

In 2019, I was hired as a general election reporter at a very small outlet to do investigations on candidates, party finance, and political spending. It just ballooned from there, I was freelance for another year-and-a-half, writing mostly for Private Eye and The Times, worked on some books and then I joined the lobby as a politics reporter for Business Insider. I was there for about a year before The Guardian’s jobs opened up and I applied for a role there as an investigations reporter, which I was very fortunate to get. I joined the paper in August 2022.

How would you recommend people come up with ideas for investigations?

They don’t need to be new ideas, I think is the key — you don’t need to come up with something new in news. ‘Man Bites Dog’ is a story 20 years ago and is still a story today. The dog might be different but if you can reflect back, this was a matter of public interest ten years ago, five years ago, twenty years ago, it’s still a matter of public interest today. I think that’s a good way to do it.

What’s the future of long-form investigative journalism?

Hopefully increasingly supported, long-lasting and diverse in opinion, in coverage, and in the people that write it. It’s a challenge for the industry as a whole to ensure that we’re not just carving out jobs for people who’ve been on a graduate scheme or people who’ve gone to a Russell Group University and then done a Masters in investigative journalism at City [University].

I’ve got no formal qualifications to do my job — you don’t need them. I’m not saying that they don’t help, but you don’t need them. A broader net in terms of journalists and access to journalism means that we’ll have better journalism.

In only three words, how would you sum up investigative journalism?

Annoying but useful.