Help Me Investigate.com blog

The news that Help Me Investigate was being funded by 4iP and Screen West Midlands was broken by the Media Guardian on Monday, which described it as a “collaborative investigation site, which invites the public to pose and explore questions around local issues.”

It was followed up by reports in PaidContent, Press Gazette, Broadcast, Journalism.co.uk, the Editors Weblog, and the Birmingham Post. Bad Idea magazine also covered the story and posed some questions. Curiously, my comment answering those went unpublished.

As always I’m more interested in challenging reports and the Telegraph’s troll-in-residence Milo Yiannopoulos did his duty in reporting on Channel 4’s Recasting the Net event, where 4iP head Tom Loosemore mentioned HMI:

“Collaborative investigative journalism… feels good because it’s messy,” said [Tom] Loosemore, “and could work better than the old models.” Oh, yeah? I’d like to see a “messy” collective of Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians conduct the sort of rigorous analysis necessary for the Telegraph’s recent MPs’ expenses investigation. Can you imagine social media achieving anything like it? Of course you can’t: great journalism takes discipline and training – neither of which exists in Loosemore’s collaborative utopian fantasy.

Knowing his reputation I hesitated to respond to Milo and give him the Googlejuice he so clearly craves (the biggest hole in his argument being that the Telegraph bought the expenses information and the person most responsible for its existence was Help Me Investigate’s own Heather Brooke).

Thankfully, Paul Canning wrote the very post that was in my mind, pointing out how social media had already achieved “anything like it”:

“When the US House Judiciary Committee released a huge pile of documents relating to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by Former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales TalkingPointsMemo (TPM) faced exactly the same problem that the Telegraph has with the MPs expenses documents - making sense of their contents and finding the juicy stuff.

“So what did they do? TPM turned to their readers, their thousands and thousands of readers.”

Meanwhile, Milo’s fellow Telegraph blogger Basheera Khan went to the source and found herself supporting the idea:

“having read Bradshaw’s manifesto for ‘Slow Journalism’ – exactly the sort that fuelled the MPs’ expenses exposé – I daresay we’re witnessing the birth of a new wave of journalism.

“It’s not messy, it’s just distributed. It’s not citizen journalism, but it harnesses the power of the masses. And if it’s done right, it should champion the sort of rigourous investigative journalism that has the crooked, coffer-lining set quaking in their ill-gotten Armani boots.”

At the same time Ryan Sholin wanted to interview me about the project - and on Wednesday night we had an impromptu Skype interview which was later published on PBS’ MediaShift IdeaLab. Here it is:

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Tags: media