Let's talk investigations

There's a lot of chatter about 'new' ways of doing investigative journalism - those 'new' ways being, inevitably, online, connected, networked, two-way, global and local etc etc.

The problem is, very few of the acts of journalism that the 'new' ways enable are actually investigative. Sure, they're ways of getting below the surface of data and issues and public policy - but 'investigative journalism' they just ain't.

This matters. Because there's any number of external pressures squeezing genuine investigation out of mainstream journalism. And it would be journalism's and the public's loss if we journalists stood by and allowed the name 'investigative journalism' to become hollowed out - but that's what's happening.

Examples. This from Vadim Lavrusik - who teaches social media at the Columbia School of Journalism in the US and for that reason alone is unlikely to be lukewarm about the journalistic possibilities of networking.

His is a beguiling account of "a society more connected than ever" in which "investigative journalists ... are now taking advantage of their online community relationships to help ... uncover potential wrongs".

He goes on to argue that 'tomorrow's reporters' will be able to:

"create contextualized social story streams that reference not only interviewed sources, but embedded tweets, Facebook postings and more."

And already, journalists are:

"leveraging the vast reach of social networks in unprecedented ways ... social media is enabling watchdog journalism to prosper."

Fine. As far as it goes. No-one could possibly argue with the benefits of networks that enable journalists to dig into any story. Or to tap into the experience and expertise that's out there. Or to commission communities and audiences to wear out some of the real or figurative shoe-leather that has to be sacrificed in the interests of reporting.

But this is, rightly, called Distributed Reporting. And it's a long way from investigative journalism, though it might well throw up leads that generate an investigation. But in essence, it's no more than .. well, basic journalism. All journalism has inquiry at its heart - anything else is PR or advertising. But inquiry is not the same as investigation.

Crowd sourcing, or community sourced mapping, is often cited as another 'new' form of investigation - but again, it's anything but and often falls some way short of even being journalism's raw material.

While it's possible to point to examples of mapping that have been robust, timely, accurate and of public use, there are - as I wrote here - those that haven't been and which, in spite of good intentions, ended up lacking rigour, being quickly out of date, misleading and inciting community behaviour that was anything but beneficial.

The third main category of 'new investigative journalism' is more properly a form of watchdog journalism' - the best UK example is Paul Bradshaw's beta site Help Me Investigate. It's a hugely successful site, of immense value which delivers a new form of networked journalism and has seeded a number of successful investigations.

But in itself, it's not investigative journalism - actually, Paul doesn't claim that it is. At its best, it's an exciting, broadly based watchdog journalism - helping keep the community's attention on the things power does in its name. And seeking answers.

All in the name?

Perhaps all we have here is a difference in terminology - but it's one that matters and matters a lot.

Investigative journalism is much more than sifting data or collecting data that would otherwise be uncollected. It's much more than asking the pointed, significant questions that take journalism beneath the surface facts. More than ensuring power is challenged.

In truth, all journalism is about one or more of those.

At some point, all investigative journalism is about uncovering something that's being deliberately hidden. Something that's it's in someone's interest to keep out of the light.

And it's about assessing the veracity, motives and context of sources that help you uncover what's hidden ... often without anything other than strong, circumstantial evidence to rely on.

It's about persistence - getting the key player to speak. Getting sight of the key document. Joining the dots hidden in confusing and often contradictory testimony.

And the relentless, self-critical checking and counter checking, testing hypotheses, testing alternative interpretations of the limited facts you have ... making the call on what you can and can't say. What's true not just in the detail but in the overall account.

The obvious point. It takes time, it takes money and it takes commitment - both of the individual reporter and of the news organisation.

Of course, inviting audiences and communities in, to use those networks to grind through what can be ground through or to add the expertise that's out there. But does anyone really think that we could have networked our way to the truth about Thalidomide or uncovered the 'third man' or identified the Omagh bombers. Or crowdsourced or community watchdogged our way to those hidden truths?

No. Thought not.

And the danger is, if we allow the term 'investigative journalism' to be applied to something that can be made to look and feel a bit like it's 'investigative' but really isn't. And which, into the bargain requires nothing of the same time, money and commitment - is a hollowed out shell - we'll lose the real thing.

Paying for quality

Of all the arguments in favour of newspaper paywalls, one is utter tosh. It is that we - the readers - must pay to preserve "the best newspapers in the world".

Now, as a general rule it's always a good idea to reach for your revolver when you hear anyone say any country has the best TV/Health Service/Newspapers/Football teams ... anything "in the world".

Not because we/they don't, necessarily. But because life's more complicated than that.
But one thing we absolutely, certainly, assuredly don't have here in the UK is the best newspapers in the world. Full stop.

If we did, a quarter of those who used to buy them wouldn't have stopped doing so over the past twenty years - a desertion that long predates the web, incidentally. If we did, our press wouldn't be one of the least trusted institutions in the land and our newspaper journalists the least trusted in the world.

We wouldn't have journalists sent to prison for hacking into mobile-phone mailboxes. Nor editors fired for printing fake photographs or "setting the agenda" while, by their own admission, still drunk from the night before or admitting that they pay policemen to breach their public trust and give information to journalists.

A newspaper group wouldn't have had to pay the McCanns hundreds of thousands of pounds for quite literally making up over 100 separate defamatory articles.

Websites such as Tabloid Watch would have nothing to watch: they'd not be able to point to astonishing examples of poor journalism, like this or this or this or this We might have less of a warped obsession with celebrity.

And sites such as 'The Sun - tabloid lies' wouldn't have such a rich source of raw material.

Now, it's true that our democracy needs journalists who aren't intimidated by power. Who aren't browbeaten. Who need to be, on occasion, rude, offensive, disrespectful and bloody-minded - but, you'd have thought, as a means to and end not an end in itself.

NewsCorp argues that good journalism has to be paid for - which is true. Of course, it might help their argument if more newspaper journalism were better than it is. Worth paying for.

But beware the chopped logic here. Well-funded journalism doesn't unavoidably entail its readers paying to be let in through a turnstile to read it. Apart from anything else, readers have never been the major source of newspaper revenue. And as Alexander Lebedev has shown at the Evening Standard - and may well show with the Independent - you can give newspapers away free and still make a profit. Still fund good quality, original, investigative journalism.

Nor is paying at the door somehow morally superior to - or really very different from - other ways of paying. Like, errrr, the BBC licence fee, for example. News isn't free just because it's been paid for in advance.

The clock should have struck thirteen when News Corp's James Murdoch told his Edinburgh audience last autumn that

"Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet."

A broad attack on anyone making news by following a business model different from NewsCorp's. But flawed. The idea that news - in all its novel, invigorating, refreshing, chaotic, demotic forms - is not 'flourishing' on the web flies in the face of reality. It's news, Jim, but not as you know it. And it's flourishing.

What isn't flourishing is journalism built to fit the old model and the old mindset. Bundles of readers buying bundles of news printed on bundles of ads.

And this is the thing to watch. The terms of the debate have changed and continue to change. If we want to understand that debate, the changed world and how journalism fits in, we should take care not to allow those whose interests paywalls serve - as well as outdated understandings of what journalism is - define its terms.

Emerging into the light

It now looks pretty certain that December 14th will be the day the BBC College of Journalism goes truly global with the launch of its new website on bbc.co.uk - free to UK users, under subscription overseas.
It's been a pretty frustrating couple of months - not with the build of the site; that's been going rather well thanks to the patience and expertise of Web Manager Jon Jacob. There's one niggly little techie thing to finish and then we're there.
No, the frustration has been around the prep work - writing, editing, blogging - to build the content, knowing that no-one outside the BBC can see it yet.
Vital though that constituency is for us - our mantra is 'BBC learning for BBC journalists by BBC journalists' - it has meant that a lot of our discussions on the site have had a dimension missing; journalists and audiences outside the BBC.
Anyhow, here's another sneak preview of the homepage:
A large part of that front page is, as you can see, feeds of various kinds.
We're using del.icio.us, for example, to share blogs and articles that have some learning for journalists in them.
Some of you will be familiar with the College on Twitter - once we're fully public, we'll be able to link from our tweets to our content and blogs ... not being able to do that, for fear of annoying the hell out of non-BBC followers, has felt very restrictive for the last few months.
But there are also links to the content - liking the carousel top centre? And there's a lot of content inside.
About 2,500 pages at the last count. And something like a couple of hundred videos. And dozens of 'virtual newsroom' scenarios ... and quizzes ... and tests. And. And. And.
It's all arranged into four main categories: Ethics and Values, Law, Skills and Briefing. There's also a cross-category bit of the site - the Glossaries.
We've tried to keep the structure as flat as possible - the idea is that you should be able to go exactly where you want with no more than a couple of clicks ... something that's helped by the site's 'intelligent learning environment' - each page's metadata should ensure that you're offered on that page something else similar or related to the learning you're reading or watching.
We'll be adding new content regularly - there's already more stuff in the pipeline on court reporting, numbers, field production and political reporting - and building what we hope will be one of the most important networks around journalism and journalism education in the world.
We'll see.

Getting nearer day by day

One of the most frustrating things about the stage we're at with the new BBC College of Journalism website is that we're so close to publishing ... and yet can't really show anyone what's going on.
I guess it must always be like this. But to bring up to speed those of you who haven't been able to follow ... here's a quick summary of the game so far.
We launched a BBC College of Journalism intranet site back in January 2007 ... aimed at the 7,500 journalists in the BBC (not all of them in News, incidentally).
It wasn't lavishly resourced and some of us - me - who were probably supposed to be thinking strategy and direction learned instead about coding and HTML and Flash and and and ...
A handful of us put together about 1200 pages of learning - guides, tips, advice - and about 250 bits of video; a blog, podcasts, interactive tests and quizzes and built the tools to deliver them. A lot of late nights and a lot of really satisfying work.
Satisfying, too, because we put into effect some really cool ideas about informal learning and were able to find out how early and mid career journalists learn best. (Clue - it's not in the classroom and not from people the journalists don't respect or even admire).
Something went right - about half of our client group visited the site at least once a month (many more than that) and stayed for about 25 minutes using about 14 pages per visit.
The plan always was to share this content with the people who'd paid for it - UK licence fee payers. And to make it available for BBC journalists to work on at home or in parts of the world where a www connection was more reliable than an intranet link.
Which is where we more or less are now.
We've taken all the intranet content; re-shot some of it, re-authored most of it; added to it to create an initial offer of about 1800 pages of learning, 200+ films, audio and interactive tests and quizzes ... and put it all on a bbc.co.uk site.
You can peek at the front page here.
Anyhows ... the wraps come of for BBC users on 13 October; it being gently launched as a beta site with the inention that our colleagues will help us improve it.
Then - mirabile dictu - sometime just before or around Christmas it'll be available free to UK users and, probably, to global users under subscription.
And though we're sharing BBC learning, the website will remain a site for BBC journalists by BBC journalists - anyone going there will be able to experience exactly the same learning material that BBC journalists use.
Coming soon ... promise.