Media & Archives Research Resources

How to use these sources

Media and archival sources serve four distinct purposes:

• Historical-record verification — confirming what a website, social-media post, public statement, or document said at a given point in time, using web-archive snapshots.
• Adverse-media review — identifying prior reporting about a subject, including allegations, regulatory action, litigation, or integrity concerns.
• Investigative-consortium output — accessing the documented findings of major cross-border investigative projects, with the underlying methodology and source attribution.
• Freedom-of-information access — identifying what government records may be obtainable on lawful application.

Each serves a different evidentiary purpose. None replaces primary-source verification through the originating court, registry, or regulator.

Web archives

Internet Archive — Wayback Machine

Type: Web-page snapshot archive. · Maintained by: Internet Archive (US not-for-profit).

Cost / access: Free, no registration. Bulk download tools available.

Useful for: Capturing what a webpage said at a specific date — including pages that have since been altered or deleted. Essential for verifying historical claims, archived corporate statements, archived terms of service, and disputed prior content.

Limitations: Coverage is not universal — not every page is captured, and capture frequency varies. Pages with robots.txt opt-out, paywalls, or dynamic content may be partially or entirely absent. The capture is the page as the crawler saw it, not necessarily as visitors saw it.

Official link: web.archive.org · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

archive.today

Type: On-demand web-page snapshot service. · Maintained by: archive.today (independent project).

Cost / access: Free.

Useful for: Capturing a specific page on demand when it needs preservation, including pages that the Wayback Machine has not crawled or has been opted out of.

Limitations: Each capture is initiated manually. Some sites attempt to block archiving. Provenance and reliability are weaker than the Internet Archive but the service is the recognised supplement when the Wayback Machine cannot serve.

Official link: archive.today · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

Common Crawl

Type: Periodic open web-crawl dataset. · Maintained by: Common Crawl Foundation.

Cost / access: Free dataset (large; requires technical tooling).

Useful for: Researching historical web content at scale where the Wayback Machine’s interface is insufficient. Used primarily by data scientists and OSINT analysts with the infrastructure to process petabyte-scale datasets.

Limitations: Heavy technical lift. Not a casual lookup tool.

Official link: commoncrawl.org · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

Investigative consortia

ICIJ — International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Type: Cross-border investigative outputs and document archives. · Maintained by: ICIJ (US not-for-profit).

Cost / access: Free.

Useful for: Documented findings from major cross-border investigations including the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, FinCEN Files, Implant Files, and others. The Offshore Leaks Database aggregates corporate-structure data disclosed across multiple investigations.

Limitations: Coverage is investigation-specific; absence from ICIJ datasets does not imply absence of issues. Underlying documents are partially redacted to protect sources.

Official link: www.icij.org · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

OCCRP — Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

Type: Investigative-journalism network and document platform. · Maintained by: OCCRP.

Cost / access: Free for public reporting. Aleph (the document and data platform) requires registration for some functions.

Useful for: Cross-border investigative reporting focused on organised crime, public-sector corruption, and illicit finance, with strong Eastern European, Central Asian, and Latin American coverage. Aleph is one of the more powerful OSINT discovery surfaces for connections between persons, entities, and leaked datasets.

Limitations: Investigative reporting reflects journalistic conclusions, not legal findings. Use as a lead, not as proof.

Official link: www.occrp.org · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

Freedom of information

US Federal FOIA

Type: US federal freedom-of-information request portal. · Maintained by: US Office of Management and Budget and individual federal agencies.

Cost / access: Request portal free. Per-request fees may apply for processing and copying.

Useful for: Obtaining federal-agency records that are not already public, subject to statutory exemptions. Each agency operates a FOIA Reading Room with previously released records.

Limitations: Processing times vary from weeks to years. Many agencies are heavily backlogged. Statutory exemptions are wide.

Official link: www.foia.gov · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

UK Freedom of Information

Type: UK freedom-of-information request system. · Maintained by: Information Commissioner’s Office, with individual public authorities responding.

Cost / access: Free for most requests; fees may apply where retrieval cost exceeds statutory thresholds.

Useful for: Obtaining UK public-authority records.

Limitations: Devolved and security-related authorities operate under different frameworks. Section 12 (cost limit) and section 41 (confidence) exemptions are commonly invoked.

Official link: www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

Australian Office of the Information Commissioner

Type: Australian Freedom of Information regulator. · Maintained by: Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Cost / access: Free to make a request. Agencies may charge for processing.

Useful for: FOI applications to Australian federal agencies, plus published OAIC decisions on disputed releases.

Limitations: Federal only. State and Territory FOI regimes operate under separate legislation.

Official link: www.oaic.gov.au/freedom-of-information · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

High-reliability news archives

Selected investigative and reference media. Listing a publication is not a quality guarantee — for adverse-media review, multiple sources should be cross-referenced and primary-source documents consulted where available.

• BBC News — global news coverage, archive search.
• Reuters — international news wire, archive search.
• Financial Times — business and financial news (paywalled).
• The New York Times — investigative reporting, archive search (paywalled).
• The Guardian — investigative reporting, archive search.
• The Wall Street Journal — business and financial news (paywalled).
• The Economist — business and political analysis (paywalled).
• The Sydney Morning Herald / The Age — Australian reporting (some paywalled).
• ABC News (Australia) — Australian public-service broadcaster.

Document and data platforms

DocumentCloud

Type: Document-hosting platform used by investigative journalists. · Maintained by: MuckRock Foundation.

Cost / access: Free for public documents; account required to upload.

Useful for: Searching original documents (court filings, government records, internal corporate documents) released through investigative reporting.

Limitations: Not an exhaustive document index; coverage is what journalists have chosen to upload.

Official link: www.documentcloud.org · Last reviewed: 2026-05-24.

What’s coming in Phase 2

Country-specific investigative outlets (with care taken to recommend recognised publications only); academic databases with public-research access (Google Scholar advanced, SSRN, JSTOR open content); specialist financial-crime and AML reporting outlets; country-specific FOI regimes (Canada Access to Information Act, EU Right of Access, individual EU member-state FOI authorities); transport-tracking tools (with notes on lawful use); and geospatial sources (Sentinel-2, OpenStreetMap, geospatial commercial-services overview).