Investigative reporting has changed with the Internet as more and more reporters use it to get hints and help with fact checking. They inform their community about their investigation, asking what is known to them, or whom it might be good to talk to.
“After every good investigative story, the reporter usually gets calls saying: great story, but here is what you’ve missed,” says Dan Gillmore, author of the book, We the Media, who has also done investigative reporting during his journalistic career.
He says the best outcome of an investigation is reached by announcing that it is going on.
“Like in every investigation, much of what will come in using a crowdsourced technique will be useless, and some will actually send you down the wrong path, but at the same time plenty of evidence will come from that,” he said.
Making investigative reporting into a process rather than a product to be delivered is not a new aspect for veteran journalists. There is rarely a big investigation without a followup. However, tweeting and blogging have added further possibilities that allow journalists not only to publish what has been investigated, but to turn the investigation into a public conversation and ask for hints.
“I wasn’t convinced about Twitter at first, but it quickly turned out to be quite useful for investigating,” the Guardian’s Paul Lewis says. “Twitter is not just a Web site and not micro-blogging, it is an entirely different medium — like e-mail, fax or even newspapers. The way in which information travels on Twitter — the shape of it — is different to anything that we’ve previously known.”
Lewis, who last year won the Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism, thinks the value you get from people knowing that you are working on a story, trumps the slight disadvantage that your rivals also know.
The longstanding religion correspondent for the Times, Ruth Gedhill, started using the Internet early on as a research facility, and had her own Web site in the 1990s. She launched her Times blog, “Articles of Faith,” in 2006 to explain news stories further, link to sources and to engage with her readers.
“Often stories come to me through the blog, but I still find that getting out is the best way to get stories. That you can do so much on Google doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go out there,” Gedhill says, but adds: “Sometimes my readers contact me with stories, often really strong stories. Even if readers comment with pseudonyms, you get to know them after a while.”
Engaging with readers is part of this new “frontier” style of journalism, as a community needs to be built first.
“If a reporter wants to use crowdsourced journalism, it requires that you have a strong enough relationship within a community,” explains Paul Bradshaw, a senior lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University, England.
Bradshaw founded the crowdsourcing project, “Help Me Investigate,” last year as the reality is journalists and interested citizens can’t just open a Twitter account and post that they are looking for information as nobody would listen. As with all sources they need to establish trust with their community.
Paul Lewis, whose investigation revealed facts surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper vendor who died on his way home from work during the G20 summit protests after being brought to the ground by the police, uses his Twitter account to keep readers informed about the topics he writes about. Lewis picks up ideas from other tweeters as much as he asks for thoughts, for help with identifying people on pictures or to submit material for his stories.
“Most of the journalists that are skeptical about Twitter think they already know what they need to find out. But I need to find what to know,” he said.
Asked if the Internet has made a difference to investigations, Gedhill gives it much thought. Finally, she says that in her opinion the Internet lies at the heart of unveiling the clerical child abuse scandal in Ireland.
“Many of these cases we are hearing about now are historic, and I can’t help thinking that the Internet made a big difference. Documents were becoming available online,” she said.
“Would the Holocaust have happened if there would be the Internet?” she suddenly asks. “Could the evidences have been denied in the same way?”
Surely, the Internet hasn’t replaced getting out and talking face-to-face to people during an investigation, but in a time of information overload, asking readers for help can direct a reporter to a piece of information or a direction of investigation that has been overlooked.
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