From Grassroots Sleuthing to Global Uptake: Epistemic Legitimation of Open-Source Investigations in Journalism Through Mediazona’s War Casualty Project in Russia’s War on Ukraine

Abstract

This study examines how open-source investigation (OSINV) is legitimized within journalism through an analysis of a casualty-counting project by Mediazona, an exiled independent Russian newsroom documenting Russian military deaths in Ukraine. Drawing on Mediazona’s public-facing project materials and coverage by seven international news organizations, the analysis traces how epistemic authority is established and re-anchored as the project circulates across journalistic institutions. The findings show that Mediazona constructs epistemic authority through a rich epistemic repertoire grounded in procedural rigor, radical transparency, and aesthetic sense-making. As the project gains global uptake, however, these articulations do not circulate intact. Instead, news organizations selectively mobilize elements of Mediazona’s epistemic repertoire in ways that reflect their editorial routines, epistemological commitments, audience expectations, and culturally resonant interpretive frames. In this process, Mediazona’s epistemic labor—and that of its citizen contributors, whom news organizations consistently avoid labeling “sleuths”—receives varying degrees of recognition: elevated as that of an independent outlet, absorbed into the institutional authority of international collaborators, or folded into professional routines that recast the project through a data-journalistic vocabulary and original field reporting. Taken together, the findings show that OSINV legitimation is uneven and context-dependent, shifting away from amateurist connotations toward more methodologically disciplined epistemic labor.