Szymon first became acquainted with GNI in 2020, when he participated in the Warsaw News Lab Summer School organized by the local Google team. So, when it came time to investigate the football scandal, he knew that GNI could help.

Szymon participated in one-on-one training on the latest features of Pinpoint, a Google research tool that helps journalists and academics analyze large collections of documents. He then used Pinpoint to digitize the court archives via his mobile phone, even old documents that were sometimes in poor condition. “Pinpoint did a great job with those, because it was able to read and analyze everything, even from pictures that weren’t readable to the human eye,” he says. He also used Pinpoint’s speech-to-text function to transcribe interviews in Polish.

Once uploaded to Pinpoint, Szymon could easily search documents for names and phrases that allowed him to draw a clear connection between the Hairdresser and the team manager. “Pinpoint was crucial in organizing the data sets and analyzing them,” Szymon says.

After two and a half months of research, Magazyn WP published Szymon’s story in June 2022. In the first month, the story generated over 1.3 million page views and nearly 730,000 unique visitors. Plus, it was quoted 94 times by leading media outlets across Poland to reach over 11 million Poles – nearly one-third of the population. ”It’s not about saving hours of investigations,” says Szymon. "Without Pinpoint, the story about corruption in Polish football would have been impossible to investigate.”

Szymon continues to use Pinpoint to collect data, preserve his archive, and transcribe interviews. With recent elections and a new government in Poland, he calls it the perfect situation for an investigative journalist to fish for stories. “The previous government was infamous for blocking access to public information, so I’m looking forward to using Pinpoint when information becomes available,” he says. “In that sense, I’m expecting a golden age.”