Stefan Candea, Romania, is a freelance journalist and co-founder of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI), a nonprofit registered in Bucharest, Romania. 

He started Sponge, an open and collaborative media innovation lab for Eastern Europe. The lab created an in-depth magazine, The Black Sea, a lifeboat for journalism in the region. He is the initiator of Investigative SmartGrid, a new, open business model for a modular journalistic enterprise that was shortlisted for the European Press Prize 2013, the Innovation Award. 

He teaches investigative journalism at Bucharest University and was the 2011 Carroll Binder Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Between 2012 and mid-2013 Stefan coordinated, on behalf of CRJI, the ICIJ Eastern Europe research and reporting hub for the Offshore Leaks project, one of the largest cross-border investigative reporting collaborations in history. Canada has won and shared in several awards including the IRE Tom Renner Award, and an Overseas Press Club of America Award for an ICIJ investigation into tobacco smuggling.

He started as an investigative journalist in Bucharest, in 1999, where he covered the connections between international organized crime networks and high-ranking politicians and public servants.

Since 2001, he has been a correspondent for Reporters sans Frontieres in Romania. He has worked for Deutsche Welle, for print, radio, TV and online and has done freelance research and production work for several foreign media outlets, including the BBC, Channel 4, ITN, ZDF, and Canal Plus. Other investigations by Candea have included the international arms trade, illegal international adoption, an investigation of the separatist region of Trans-Dniester and the diamond business in Romania.He is currently enrolled as a PhD student with the University of Westminster, analyzing the structures of cross-border investigative networks and coordinates EIC.network which he co-founded in 2015

  • Investigations