From Cafés and Laptops to the Supreme Court

The Spanish government did not expect a small newsroom of ten people to drag it all the way to the Supreme Court. But that is exactly what happened.

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Civio, an independent Spanish investigative outlet that blends journalism, data analysis, and strategic litigation, has now won multiple cases at the country’s highest court, forcing the government to release information it initially refused to disclose. For co-director David Cabo, the moment still carries a certain disbelief.

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“The feeling of beating a government ministry at the Supreme Court,” he says, “is a wonderful feeling.”

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“The feeling of beating a government ministry at the Supreme Court is a wonderful feeling” - David Cabo | Co-founder, Civio

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What makes the victory slightly surreal is that Civio did not begin as a newsroom at all. In fact, if you had visited the organisation in its earliest days, you might have struggled to identify what it was supposed to be. There was no office, no editorial structure, and no clear funding model; there was just a small group of people convinced that if they could get government data into the open, something useful might happen.

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Data to set us Free?

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Civio was founded in 2012 by David and a colleague after time spent abroad, where they had seen transparency organisations flourishing in places like the United Kingdom and the United States. Spain, by comparison, felt like a blank map. The idea seemed simple enough: collect public data, publish it online, and allow citizens — and journalists — to make sense of how power worked.

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“We thought data would set us free,” David says.

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It was a belief shared by many technologists during the early optimism of the open-data movement. Governments were beginning to release datasets. New digital tools promised to visualise them. The internet, it seemed, would take care of the rest. The problem was that no one was reading them.

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“We quickly realised you can release data and nothing happens,” David says. Journalists often lacked the time or technical skills to analyse the material, and citizens had little reason to sift through raw spreadsheets. The breakthrough came with the arrival of a journalist.

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Eva Belmonte joined Civio the following year as its first full-time employee. On her first day, she unlocked the organisation’s new office, still empty, and spent the morning cleaning it while waiting for the furniture to arrive.

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“I broke in the office,” she jokes.

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The Arrival of the Journalist

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Eva had spent years working in traditional newsrooms, where she had developed an unusual habit: every morning she read Spain’s Official State Gazette, the dense publication where the government quietly publishes laws, subsidies, regulations, and administrative decisions. To most people the document is impenetrable, but to Eva it is a goldmine. Her skill lies in translating bureaucratic language into practical information: what a policy actually means, who it affects, and what citizens need to know.

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“I was already doing this on my own blog,” she says. “Reading the official bulletin every morning and explaining it.” At Civio, the same approach became journalism.

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The organisation began turning datasets into investigations and stories rather than simply publishing tools. One early project, the Indultómetro, analysed government pardons and revealed patterns hidden inside official records.

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“Instead of giving the data to someone else, we could publish the stories ourselves” - David Cabo | Co-founder, Civio

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“That’s when we realised this worked much better,” David says. “Instead of giving the data to someone else, we could publish the stories ourselves.”

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Accidental Strategic Litigation

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Around the same time another element entered the picture almost by accident: lawsuits. When Spanish authorities refused to release certain public records, such as the passenger lists of official government flights, Civio began challenging those decisions in court. At first the cases were driven by frustration, but over time they became strategy. And winning those cases did more than secure individual pieces of information: they established legal precedents that strengthened Spain’s access-to-information laws.

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“It showed that what we were doing wasn’t just about us getting a document,” Eva says. “It was for the common good.”

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More than a decade after those improvised beginnings, Civio has grown into a hybrid newsroom unlike any other in Spain. Its team of roughly ten includes journalists, developers, and data specialists who move fluidly between reporting, coding, and legal battles.

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Their work has helped push issues like government procurement and transparency into the public conversation. In the process, they also helped introduce data-driven investigative journalism into Spanish media, where similar teams now exist across major outlets.

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Finding a Sustainable Future

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But the road has been anything but smooth. Some early projects collapsed under their own ambition. A large investigation into public works contracts consumed far more time than the crowdfunding it could sustain. For several years the organisation relied heavily on European Union project grants. It was stable funding, but it often dragged Civio into work far removed from its core mission.

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“We were ambitious in the wrong way sometimes,” Eva says.

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Still, Civio endured in a media landscape where many similar initiatives disappeared after a few years. Eva considers that survival itself a major accomplishment.

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“A lot of projects that started when we did closed two or three years later,” she says.

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The organisation’s biggest surge in readership came unexpectedly during the Covid-19 pandemic. As Spain’s government issued a flood of emergency rules, Civio began publishing practical explanations about what citizens were allowed to do, from movement restrictions to financial aid. Traffic doubled. Membership doubled. Suddenly thousands of readers were relying on Civio’s reporting to navigate daily life. Today about 45 percent of the organisation’s budget comes from members, a slow but steady shift toward reader support.

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“We celebrate every new member like it’s a lottery win,” Eva says.

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David pauses when asked whether he would start Civio again today. The political climate is harsher, he says. The media landscape more polarised, more cynical. But then he remembers the court victories, the investigations, the emails from readers thanking them for explaining how government decisions affect their lives. And the answer becomes slightly easier.

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“You want to be uncomfortable. You want to make it harder for people in power to do whatever they want.” - David Cabo | Co-founder, Civio

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“You want to be uncomfortable,” he says. “You want to make it harder for people in power to do whatever they want.”

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For a newsroom that began in cafés with laptops and no real plan, that mission has turned out to be surprisingly durable.

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