The Bane Of Big Fish: Helgi Seljan On Life As An Investigative Journalist

“It’s not always as glamorous as people might think,” says Helgi Seljan as I meet him at the spacious RÚV headquarters. Having started as a deckhand in his hometown of Reyðarfjörður, Helgi has grown into one of the country’s most influential investigative journalists and played a key role in breaking the Fishrot story — which you can read more about on page 14. We talk about what it takes to do the job in a country this small, the challenges journalism faces today, and what helps him take his mind off work, at least for a bit.

I never had any ambitions to become a journalist. I didn’t [go to a journalism school]. I haven’t even finished high school. I learned by doing, basically. Since I was 17 or 18, I was on and off working as a deckhand on a fishing trawler and at a fishnet factory. When I was 23, I started working at a weekly newspaper in the East. I was quite lucky — there were two of us, my editor and I, and he always encouraged me. We were really focused on doing hard news at the time, which was obviously not what people were used to — it was new. We believed that there was just as much need for hard news in the local papers as there was in the big daily papers with bigger circulation. Through doing that, we managed to do stories that were picked up by the big media. I don’t know why I wanted to do that. I guess I’m nosy.

“We’re kind of accustomed to the fact that you’re going to run into people at the grocery store whom you’ve just been covering in the news and whatnot.”

The first story of mine that got picked up by the big media was about a young man who lost his life in an accident during the construction of the big, controversial Kárahnjúkar Dam. He was working in a gorge when a rockfall happened. He lost his life, and another man got seriously injured. All the media in Iceland basically told the story about this tragic accident. But I heard a rumour that the security measures were… at least not as good as they were supposed to be. I managed to get a safety guy from the site to admit that they had been asking the big contractor — an Italian company — to take certain measures so that things like this wouldn’t happen. They had done so just two weeks before the accident, but they [the contractor] didn’t comply. So basically, the story was that the death of this man could have easily been avoided if certain measures were taken.

Large fish, small pond

One of the reasons why I’ve kept doing this job is the fact that there’s no ordinary routine. Sometimes when you’re working with large data sets, you might be doing the same thing — just reading through and making notes — for days, weeks, even months at a time. But there’s no typical daily routine. The only thing that makes every day feel like the one before is probably the fact that I’m on the phone for around three to four hours a day.

We’re kind of accustomed to the fact that you’re going to run into people at the grocery store whom you’ve just been covering in the news and whatnot. A lot of people who were probably at one point angry towards me, or maybe not towards me, but towards stories that I’ve written, and then eventually me — have, as time goes by, ended up having a good relationship with me. We’re constantly dealing with this in one way or another.

There’s a group of 10 people currently being investigated for alleged bribery of foreign officials in Namibia. At least two of them are related to me. One of them grew up in the town next to where I grew up. I have family members who work for Samherji or subsidiaries of the company. But there’s an upside to it — it’s generally easier for us to get in contact with people. That doesn’t mean though that it’s easier to get them to talk. The fact that we are so few makes people unwilling to criticise their employers, or the employers of their family members, and even politicians — because they’re often dealing with large fish in a small pond, so to speak.

The chilling effect: government version

I think the biggest challenge [of working in investigative journalism today] is the fact that, although the general public’s mindset in Iceland has changed about what the media is supposed to do and people have shown that they want us to do stories where we dig deeper, doing real investigative journalism — at the same time, there has been a kind of “moving the goalposts” in terms of what is accepted now by politicians, large companies, all kinds of lobbyists and such.

The pushback and the attacks, for lack of a better word, against journalists have been more a part of our daily routine. For example, I’m currently waiting for my lawyer to call me because we got a letter from the chief of police in Selfoss, who is now investigating the story we did [the one about police officers hired to spy on citizens by Iceland’s richest man]. And now the police are asking us to basically hand over all of the data we have from the data leak — not only the data, but they want every hard drive and every computer we used, which is just a ludicrous thing for the police to do.

That’s one of the things that gets really tiring. The bosses here at RÚV and other media outlets have been more and more willing to help journalists spend time doing stories and investigating but at the same time, we’re having to spend a lot more time basically fighting for telling the stories.

The chilling effect: corporate version

The Fishrot case was a game changer because there was a lot of pushback against the journalists who did the story — against us. New methods were used. We were also kind of naive at first, not pushing back as hard as we should have. The fact that the pushback and the methods they used ultimately managed to divert the attention from the real story, while we were busy tackling all kinds of things — letters from lawyers, smear campaigns, all sorts of stuff that kept us busy. And it had an effect not only on us, but the media in Iceland as a whole. It had a cooling effect.

“The Fishrot case was a game changer because there was a lot of pushback against the journalists who did the story — against us.“

For the last four years, most of the stories written about the Fishrot case, treated the original story as a footnote while the focus has been on the company’s pushback, whether it’s the police investigation related to the leak, the self-proclaimed guerrilla squad, or something else. I think other people, institutions, companies, politicians and everybody have seen that this works: to question either the methods or the motives why the media are doing critical stories. It’s kind of cliché to talk about it in terms of some kind of Trumpism, but in a way, it’s the same. Shooting the messenger has become a norm. I’m not talking about the actual criticism or the fact that, of course, journalists make mistakes. It’s something much more [bigger] and I think people who follow the news know the difference between these attacks and corporate terrorism.

Addiction, burnout and trawler therapy

[During his career, Helgi Seljan has occasionally taken breaks from journalism to work as a deckhand on fishing trawlers.]

I obviously think I burned out, so I’ve tried to do that every now and then. It’s usually been in the summertime, when I could use my summer vacation. It was a way for me to get some extra money, but also a good way to relax — in the sense that you can relax by doing manual labour instead of what we’re doing here. It’s also some kind of nostalgic thing.

Last time, when I quit at Heimildin, I was also going to go on a fishing boat, but I then got offered a job at the Red Cross, so I was working at a harm reduction centre for addicts before I came back to RÚV. I’ve also been volunteering for the Red Cross Frú Ragnheiður project.

I struggled with addiction myself when I was in my late teens, so I’ve always been aware of the fact that the difference between me and a lot of other people, “the clients” of Frú Ragnheiður — is that I turned left when they turned right. I can’t really explain it — I don’t have a hobby, and I’m trying to switch my mind off work and stuff. I believe that there’s no such thing as a selfless good deed anyway, and that’s okay. It’s not like I consider myself godlike for going out and doing things. But in a way, it gives you self-worth. It’s kind of satisfying to be able to help.