Credit...Yifan Wu

Times Insider

On The Times’s Visual Investigations team, Christiaan Triebert combines social media sleuthing and traditional reporting to piece together complex stories.

• Feb. 4, 2026

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For Christiaan Triebert, an investigative video journalist at The New York Times, a detail as unassuming as the length of a person’s shadow can be key to uncovering the site of an extrajudicial killing.

“Most of the information I’m using is accessible to anyone with an internet connection,” said Mr. Triebert, a member of The Times’s Visual Investigations team. “It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together.”

Mr. Triebert specializes in open-source reporting: verifying and analyzing publicly available digital information, such as social media videos, satellite imagery or flight tracking information, to nail down a complex story. He has worked on more than 60 projects at The Times since he joined the newsroom in 2019, including two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations.

His recent work has tracked the “ghost fleets” moving oil in and out of Venezuela, and an investigation last month found that the United States had attacked a boat in the Caribbean Sea with an aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane.

“It’s strong motivation for all of us when we can hold power to account,” said Mr. Triebert, who studied international relations, philosophy and Arabic at the University of Groningen in his native Netherlands.

In an interview, he shared how he got started in open-source journalism and the surprising ways he has cracked a case. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What is open-source reporting, and what can readers learn from it?

The work we do in Visual Investigations, a 21-person team, combines openly available information with traditional journalism, like knocking on doors of witnesses. A majority of the information is available to anyone, and we’re just analyzing it, making sure it’s correct and then drawing conclusions based on all these different elements. It’s a very transparent way of reporting.

How do you ensure that the information you’re using hasn’t been manipulated or fabricated?

That’s always a concern. For instance, videos generated by A.I. can look very real nowadays, and we need to verify: Did this actually happen? If an explosion happened in the video, can we see it on the satellite image? And can we link all these different pieces of information to make sure the narrative we are presenting is correct?

What kinds of stories do you investigate?

We reconstruct a lot of big news events, usually when there’s a suggestion of misconduct — whether that’s by a police department, the U.S. military or any other military abroad.

One of the first investigations we worked on was the bombing of hospitals in Syria. A lot of fingers were being pointed at Russia and other actors, and the big question was, could we establish who was repeatedly bombing hospitals? We obtained cockpit audio, and we heard the Russian pilots actually speaking out the coordinates of a hospital before they bombed it.

Another example: When the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, it conducted an airstrike in Kabul, the capital. The U.S. military said the strike was justified, but people on the ground were telling our colleagues, “This was a civilian family that’s just been wiped out.” Using closed-source information, like surveillance camp security camera footage, the team was able to establish that the United States had killed an aid worker. A week after we published the article, the Pentagon apologized. That shows the importance of the work we’re doing.

How did you get started in open-source journalism?

What’s striking about our team is that many people don’t have a traditional journalism background, me included.

When I was in college in the Netherlands, I realized that the Dutch air force was conducting strikes under a U.S. coalition set up to bomb the Islamic State. The Netherlands is home to the International Criminal Court, but the United States was being more transparent with their airstrike data. As a Dutch citizen, I found that very interesting. I used Google Maps, Google Earth and satellite imagery to see if I could connect specific airstrikes by the Dutch military to exact locations in Iraq and Syria.

This caught the eye of Bellingcat, a group that uses openly available information to investigate alleged war crimes and human rights abuses. While I was doing volunteer write-ups for Bellingcat in my free time as a student, I applied to Dutch newspapers. But they all told me, “Christiaan, what you’re doing is very interesting, but this is not really journalism.”

Then in 2017, I was investigating a suspected chemical attack in Syria. So was The New York Times, which had just started its Visual Investigations team. When The Times contacted me, I thought they wanted to interview me about what I was doing. They were like, “No, we want you to work for us.” And I was like, “What? Are you sure?”

How has your work changed over time?

The technology has advanced so much. We have imagery from almost the entire globe available to us every day. Part of refining my skills has been determining what to focus on, because there’s just so much to potentially investigate.

Social media is also becoming a bigger part of what I do. Facebook is becoming a smaller part of our investigations, not because fewer people are using it — in many parts of the world, it’s still the most popular social media platform — but because Facebook itself has really fenced off what you can find. But then there are newer platforms popping up, like TikTok. The exciting thing is that we can learn something new in each investigation we do.

What keeps you motivated to do this job every day?

It can be heavy, because the material we’re working with is often intense. You want to do the best you can to figure out what happened to someone’s loved ones. What keeps me going is that it feels like we can put a spotlight on things that matter. We push to hold power to account. And it’s riveting work: It’s like putting a big puzzle together.

Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Journalist Who Looks for Clues in Plain Sight. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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