Cross-posted from XCity Magazine

The future of journalism, according to The Guardian’s ’3 Little Pigs’ film, is “open journalism”. Users are becoming part of every element of news production. The newsroom no longer has walls.

If that is going to happen then journalists need to huff, and puff, and blow down three particular houses of our own: our preconceptions around the sources that we use online; around why people contribute to the news process; and about how we protect our sources.

The house of straw: the myth of democratisation

It’s well documented that not everyone has access to the web, and that that access is unequally distributed according to age, class, and various other factors. Even among those who have access, some are more vocal, more literate, and generally busier than others.

At a basic level, even when we seek out voices, we narrow the possible ‘sample’ of voices by relying on particular channels: we prefer Twitter over Facebook, Facebook over forums, and forums over Flickr groups. So as our processes rely more on these platforms we need to make sure that we challenge those habits (picking up the phone doesn’t solve things: not everyone has a listed landline either) and make ourselves as accessible as possible across numerous platforms too.

More importantly, perhaps, we need to monitor the ways that social media platforms can – and are – effectively censored by authorities and organisations in the UK. Those wanting to find critical voices on the day of the royal wedding, for example, would have found a surprising lack of them on Facebook, where 50 legal activist pages, including UK Uncut, had been shut down in the run up to the May Day bank holiday. The map, as they say, is not the territory.

The house of sticks: giving users the tools

It’s good to see that we’re moving beyond the ‘build it and they shall come’ mentality of publishing; the assumption of the gate keeper that we don’t need to give people a reason to contribute. In an open journalism system we’re no longer gatekeepers, and we need to give people the means, motive and opportunity to come to us – or for us to go to them.

We need to give our sources as many reasons as possible to participate in ‘open journalism’ – whether that is freedom of information (FOI), open data, acknowledgement, or picking up the batons that they hand on.

In some cases that will involve lobbying for a retention or extension of laws such as the FOI Act, or for release of publicly-funded data, as The Guardian has with Charles Arthur’s Free Our Data campaign. Or for more protection of whistleblowers.

More broadly, we should be concerned with legal developments that make it easy for organisations or public authorities to prevent the publication of information they do not like. Some recent examples include the use of harassment law, Section 127 of the Communications Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act (see this recent decision and video), copyright laws, and so on.

The house of bricks: protecting sources at every point of contact

One of the reasons for Wikileaks’ success was the way it solved a security problem between sources and journalists. Part of that was technical, but part also legal: when the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera launched their own Wikileaks clones, commentators pointed out that not only did they both have security weaknesses, but that that they would still be no match for requests from government agencies:

“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, [Al Jazeera's service] can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” [WSJ's] SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is“insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”

Providing a secure facility for passing on leaked documents is just the most obvious aspect of the contact between journalists and sources, but with so much of that contact taking place digitally, journalists will need to understand the data trail that is being laid by both parties.

Brian McDermott, for example, writes about how facial recognition technology “might be driving some sources away” from the news. In 2010 Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was quoted saying:

“Show us 14 photos of yourself, and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the Internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”

Even bloggers are vulnerable. Previously on OJB I blogged about the sad case of Nightjack, a police blogger outed by The Times. Their report, it now turns out, relied on the hacking of Nightjack’s email account, while Belle de Jour and Girl With A One Track Mind say they were also hacked. Hacking from a different source appears to have been used against journalists in Tunisia.

For journalists working in an ‘open’ system this is problematic: trust is our bargaining chip. Local journalists understand this when they see their national counterparts parachuting into an area and acting unethically, giving their profession a bad name without having to stick around to take the consequences.

Nowadays a journalist or brand using questionable methods to get their story will find those methods associated with their name on Google.

We can give users the means, but without trust they have no motive to choose that particular journalist to work with.

In timely fashion, Cleland Thom offers a checklist of 10 ways for journalists to protect online sources. What’s notable from this generally very useful list is the ‘horse has already bolted’ reaction to some of the points.

• Is it possible for us to cover a patch without ‘friending’, following or connecting to anyone who might potentially leak a story to us at some point?
• Even the first tip – to use direct messaging instead of public messaging – has a vulnerability: if the person registered with the service using their work email, then a DM will show up in the work’s email inbox.
• Operating from an assumption that we will already be connected to potential sources, how can we protect them?

Thom covers a lot of the ground already: don’t talk about who you’re meeting; assume all your electronic communication is or will be made public. But perhaps there’s an educational role here as well. When we do meet a contact in person, ask which email account their Twitter DMs go to; ask if their mobile phone is owned by their employers; and make sure no one is taking pictures for their Facebook account. If we have to make a call, to use Skype, and tell the other person to delete their call log.

Increasingly, police will not need to ask journalists for their sources: interception of communications; approaches to web hosts and ISPs; and a quiet word with the social media platform hosts are all now options.

As users become more savvy to the vulnerabilities of living in public, we’ll have to up our game with our new ‘open’ colleagues if we are going to earn their trust.

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Cross-posted from Help Me Investigate

The Stirrer was an independent news website in Birmingham that investigated a number of local issues in collaboration with local people. One investigation in particular – into the employment of CCTV cameras in largely muslim areas of the city without consultation – was picked up by The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who discovered its roots in anti-terrorism funds.

The coverage led to an investigation into claims of police misleading councillors, and the eventual halting of the scheme.

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, founder Adrian Goldberg – who now presents ‘5 live Investigates‘ and a daily show on BBC Radio WM – talks about his experiences of running the site and how the story evolved from a user’s tip-off.

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A must-read for any data journalist, aspiring or otherwise, is Simon Rogers’ post on The Guardian Datablog where he compares public and private sector pay.

This is a classic apples-and-oranges situation where politicians and government bodies are comparing two things that, really, are very different. Is a private school teacher really comparable to someone teaching in an unpopular school? What is the private sector equivalent of a director of public health or a social worker?

But if these issues are being discussed, journalists must try to shed some light, and Simon Rogers does a great job in unpicking the comparisons. From pay and hours worked, to qualifications and age (big differences in both), and gender and pay inequality (more women in the public sector, more lower- and higher-paid workers in the private sector), Rogers crunches all the numbers:

“[T]he proportion of low skill jobs in the private sector has increased, and the proportion of high skill jobs in the public sector increased to around 31% of all jobs by 2011, compared 26% of all private sector jobs.

“But, at the same time, people who are most highly qualified actually get paid worse in the public sector.

“… Public sector workers tend to be older … Average mean hourly earnings peak in the early 40s in both sectors. They decline slightly approaching retirement although the decline happens earlier in the private sector than in the public sector, possibly because the higher earners in the private sector are more likely to leave the labour market earlier.

“It also shows that if you’re older in the public sector, you get paid better than in the private sector.

“… [T]he bottom 5% of workers in the public sector earn less than £6.91 per hour, whereas in the private sector, 5% of workers earn less than £5.93 per hour.”

When you find yourself in an apples-and-oranges situation you can’t avoid, this is the way to do it. Any other examples?

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The Guardian has been talking about being ‘of the web’ rather than ‘on the web’ for some years now, with a “federated” (as some staff call it) approach to publishing which often involves either selling advertising across, or pulling in content from, other sites (disclosure: this is one of them). Its Open Platform is a technical expression of the same idea, allowing others to build things with its content – which can then take advertising with it. And its successful Facebook app shows its ability to adopt any platform that works.

Now it has announced a partnership with arts organisations – and YouTube – that demonstrates a further development of this approach. 

It’s a recognition that it’s not just media organisations that are now in the content business (witness Manchester City’s policy of recruiting digital heads from press and TV) – and a news publisher’s role has to be re-assessed in that context (better to be partners than competitors, perhaps?).

Here is a list of what’s going to be produced as a result:

• Glyndebourne: live-streaming five operas, as well as “recordings to accompany two other productions this season [...] Each opera will be available to view again on the Guardian’s website, and each will be accompanied by a series of podcasts and videos as well as related editorial, blogs, picture galleries and live chat with the Guardian’s expert team of critics.
• Royal Opera House with YouTube: streaming “a full day of rehearsals from The Royal Ballet from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, featuring live streams of two ballets currently in development”
• The Young Vic: “working with them to develop an exclusive short film starring Patrick Stewart”
• The Roundhouse:  live streaming Cirkus Cirkör Undermän
• Artangel: streaming “intimate live performances and recorded podcasts by a number of renowned artists”

Naturally, acting as a platform for third party content raises the question of how this affects editorial integrity. In the announcement Stephen Folwell, Business Director, Multimedia and Brand Extensions, Guardian News & Media, mentions “the diverse [multimedia*] packages we can offer other potential partners.” But it wouldn’t be the first time a news organisation has had to manage this tension, as I coincidentally blogged about in my previous post - it’s just the old problem in a new suit.

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, art critic Jonathan Jones writes about how his role changed as readers became content producers too.

*Clarification from a GNM spokesperson, who adds: “We also offer sponsorship opportunities around multimedia content”

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Over the weekend Fleet Street Blues has had a bee in its bonnet about the “pretence” of data journalism and Saturday’s Guardian front page: “Half UK’s young black men out of work“.

This, says FSB, is a lie that demonstrates the ”pretence” that “‘crunching the numbers’ is somehow an an abstract, scientific, mathematical task”.

There are two problems with this: the first is that I’ve never heard a data journalist make this claim; and the second is that the ‘lie’ does not come from a data journalist (they generally don’t write headlines). It is, in short, a straw man.

The story itself is, however, perfectly valid. While FSB points to the exclusion of students, for example, The Guardian’s story mentions that early on.

It’s fair to say that those who are economically inactive should not be included in unemployment figures. Indeed, the Datablog post which expands on the data does a very good job in explaining how that activity is mentioned:

“Youth unemployment figures are always slightly odd, and as with many things in life, it’s students that get the blame.

“Students can be counted in three different ways: a full-time student doing an evening job in a bar counts as employed. A student who wants bar work but can’t get it is unemployed. A full-time student who’s not topping up his income with a job (and isn’t trying to) is economically inactive.”

Fleet Street Blues uses the raw data published by the Datablog to highlight a number of other ways of interpreting the data, all of which are interesting – and in fact, I’ll probably use them in future as an example of how the same data can tell many different stories.

More than one story

But again, this proves nothing about the ‘pretence’ of data journalism. All it proves is that there is more than one story to be found in a dataset, and that journalists will pick the one that is most newsworthy for their particular market.

In fact, not only journalists, but politicians, PR staff, marketers, scientists, lobbyists and anyone else who wants to tell a story.

It’s because of this that data journalism is not something which should be snootily written off as a “fad”. Data is important. Journalists need to be able to interrogate it and find the stories that are not being told.

That is exactly what The Guardian have done. Yes, the headline could be more accurate* – but how many times has a headline writer omitted key details due to the limitations of space (on every type of story)? And yes, as one FSB commenter points out, the inclusion of whole numbers would have added further context.

But the irony is that it’s precisely because The Guardian isn’t trying to pretend to be ‘The Only Truth’ that FSB and its commenter can interrogate the data, and that the reader can understand the subtleties in how data is gathered and classified.

If there is a pretence about data journalism, it is a wider one: a  belief in society that somehow numbers equate to truth. A belief which is exploited by politicians but which is coming – and should come – under increasing scrutiny from journalists. (The story, for example, began as a column by a Labour politician in The Guardian, fact-checked by Channel 4 News, and followed up by The Guardian’s journalists)

The more good data journalism we have, the less that anyone – including journalists – can pretend to the idea of a “scientific” process.

*(Notably, the online version includes a second headline which is clearer: “Unemployment rate for black 16 to 24-year-olds available for work now double that for white counterparts, ONS data shows”)

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There’s something almost seminal about this video promoting The Guardian’s ‘open journalism’. I’m not sure whether it’s the unusually honest acknowledgement that news is more complicated than it is often presented; the way that the video itself plays with our preconceptions, drawing attention to them in the process; or the portrayal of a production process in which non-journalists are a vital part.

I lie, of course: it’s all of those things. It’s an image of journalism utterly different from how it presented itself in the 20th century, different – if we’re honest – from the image in most journalists’, and most journalism students’, minds.

I expect I’ll be showing this a lot. Watch it.

PS: If you have another 3 minutes, here’s Alan Rusbridger giving a slightly less dramatised angle on the same topic:

…And then move on to these videos linked from this page on how to get involved: from head of news Ian Katz:

…and on sports journalism:

…and culture reporting:

…and comment:

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Here’s a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism that goes beyond the weekend’s player ratings. As one of the biggest names in European football goes into administration, The Guardian carries a piece by the author of Rangerstaxcase.com, a blogger who “pulled down the facade at Rangers”, including a scathing commentary on the Scottish press’s complicity in the club’s downfall:

“The Triangle of Trade to which I have referred is essentially an arrangement where Rangers FC and their owner provide each journalist who is “inside the tent” with a sufficient supply of transfer “exclusives” and player trivia to ensure that the hack does not have to work hard. Any Scottish journalist wishing to have a long career learns quickly not to bite the hands that feed. The rule that “demographics dictate editorial” applied regardless of original footballing sympathies.

“[...] Super-casino developments worth £700m complete with hover-pitches were still being touted to Rangers fans even after the first news of the tax case broke. Along with “Ronaldo To Sign For Rangers” nonsense, it is little wonder that the majority of the club’s fans were in a state of stupefaction in recent years. They were misled by those who ran their club. They were deceived by a media pack that had to know that the stories it peddled were false.”

Over at Rangerstaxcase.com, the site expands on this in its criticism of STV for uncritical reporting:

“There does not appear to be a point where the media learns its lessons. There is no capacity for improvement. No voice that says: we have been misled by people from this organisation so often in the past that we need to get corroboration before we publish anything more. Alastair Johnston, you will recall, artfully created the impression for Rangers’ supporters and shareholders  that the payment of the tax bills that are now crushing their club would be the responsibility of the parent company. His words then were carefully chosen to avoid actually lying, but his intended audience seemed in little doubt at the time as to what they thought he meant.  Either Mr. Johnston has been misrepresented by STV or he appears to be trying to gain an advantage in the battle to oust Whyte by misleading Rangers’ supporters.”

The piece also includes some interesting reflections on collaborative journalism and crowdsourcing:

“Rangerstaxcase.com has become a platform for some of the sharpest minds and most accomplished professionals to share information, debate, and form opinions based upon a rational interpretation of the facts rather than PR-firm fabrications. In all of the years when the mainstream media had a monopoly on opinion forming and agenda setting, the more sentient football fan had no outlet for his or her opinions. Blogs and other modern media, like Twitter, have democratised information distribution.

“Rangerstaxcase.com has gone far beyond its half-baked “I know a secret” origins to become a forum for citizen journalism. The power of the crowd‑sourced investigation initiated by anyone who is able to ignite the interest of others is a force that has the potential to move mountains in our society. All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard.”

Rangerstaxcase.com is not unique. Combine the passion of sports supporters with the lack of critical faculty in much sports journalism and you have potentially fertile ground.

For my own club, Bolton Wanderers, for example, I turn to Manny Road (site currently laid low by a malware attack).

For the Olympics there will be a regular and easy supply of good news stories to wade through, but also an extremely active network of local and international blogs from people scrutinising the foggier side of the Olympic spirit, which is why I set up Help Me Investigate the Olympics and am encouraging my students to connect with those communities.

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In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some topline developments in the hyper-local space during 2011. He also asks for your suggestions of great hyper-local content from 2011. His more detailed slides looking at the previous year are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.

2011 was a busy year across the hyper-local sphere, with a flurry of activity online as well as more traditional platforms such as TV, Radio and newspapers.

The Government’s plans for Local TV have been considerably developed, following the Shott Review just over a year ago. We now have a clearer indication of the areas which will be first on the list for these new services and how Ofcom might award these licences. What we don’t know is who will apply for these licences, or what their business models will be. But, this should become clear in the second half of the year.

Whilst the Leveson Inquiry hasn’t directly been looking at local media, it has been a part of the debate. Claire Enders outlined some of the challenges facing the regional and local press in a presentation showing declining revenue, jobs and advertising over the past five years. Her research suggests that the impact of “the move to digital” has been greater at a local level than at the nationals.

Across the board, funding remains a challenge for many. But new models are emerging, with Daily Deals starting to form part of the revenue mix alongside money from foundations and franchising.

And on the content front, we saw Jeremy Hunt cite a number of hyper-local examples at the Oxford Media Convention, as well as record coverage for regional press and many hyper-local outlets as a result of the summer riots.

I’ve included more on all of these stories in my personal retrospective for the past year.

One area where I’d really welcome feedback is examples of hyper-local content you produced – or read – in 2011. I’m conscious that a lot of great material may not necessarily reach a wider audience, so do post your suggestions below and hopefully we can begin to redress that.

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Today sees the UK’s biggest strike in decades as public sector workers protest against pension reforms. Most news organisations are covering the day’s events through liveblogs: that web-native format which has so quickly become the automatic choice for covering rolling news.

To illustrate just how dominant the liveblog has become take a look at the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Guardian’s ‘Strikesblog‘ or The Telegraph. The Independent’s coverage is hosted on their own live.independent.co.uk subdomain while Sky have embedded their liveblog in other articles. There’s even a separate Storify liveblog for The Guardian’s Local Government section, and on Radio 5 Live you can find an example of radio reporters liveblogging.

Regional newspapers such as the Chronicle in the north east and the Essex County Standard are liveblogging the local angle; while the Huffington Post liveblog the political face-off at Prime Minister’s Question Time and the PoliticsHome blog liveblogs both. Leeds Student are liveblogging too. And it’s not just news organisations: campaigning organisation UK Uncut have their own liveblog, as do the public sector workers union UNISON and Pensions Justice (on Tumblr).

So dominant so quickly

The format has become so dominant so quickly because it satisfies both editorial and commercial demands: liveblogs are sticky – people stick around on them much longer than on traditional articles, in the same way that they tend to leave the streams of information from Twitter or Facebook on in the background of their phone, tablet or PC – or indeed, the way that they leave on 24 hour television when there are big events.

It also allows print outlets to compete in the 24-hour environment of rolling news. The updates of the liveblog are equivalent to the ‘time-filling’ of 24-hour television, with this key difference: that updates no longer come from a handful of strategically-placed reporters, but rather (when done well) hundreds of eyewitnesses, stakeholders, experts, campaigners, reporters from other news outlets, and other participants.

The results (when done badly) can be more noise than signal – incoherent, disconnected, fragmented. When done well, however, a good liveblog can draw clarity out of confusion, chase rumours down to facts, and draw multiple threads into something resembling a canvas.

At this early stage liveblogging is still a form finding its feet. More static than broadcast, it does not require the same cycle of repetition; more dynamic than print, it does, however, demand regular summarising.

Most importantly, it takes place within a network. The audience are not sat on their couches watching a single piece of coverage; they may be clicking between a dozen different sources; they may be present at the event itself; they may have friends or family there, sending them updates from their phone. If they are hearing about something important that you’re not addressing, you have a problem.

The list of liveblogs above demonstrates this particularly well, and it doesn’t include the biggest liveblog of all: the #n30 thread on Twitter (and as Facebook users we might also be consuming a liveblog of sorts of our friends’ updates).

More than documenting

In this situation the journalist is needed less to document what is taking place, and more to build on the documentation that is already being done: by witnesses, and by other journalists. That might mean aggregating the most important updates, or providing analysis of what they mean. It might mean enriching content by adding audio, video, maps or photography. Most importantly, it may mean verifying accounts that hold particular significance.

These were the lessons that I sought to teach my class last week when I reconstructed an event in the class and asked them to liveblog it (more in a future blog post). Without any briefing, they made predictable (and planned) mistakes: they thought they were there purely to document the event.

But now, more than ever, journalists are not there solely to document.

On a day like today you do not need to be journalist to take part in the ‘liveblog’ of #n20. If you are passionate about current events, if you are curious about news, you can be out there getting experience in dealing with those events – not just reporting them, but speaking to the people involved, recording images and audio to enrich what is in front of you, creating maps and galleries and Storify threads to aggregate the most illuminating accounts. Seeking reaction and verification to the most challenging ones.

The story is already being told by hundreds of people, some better than others. It’s a chance to create good journalism, and be better at it. I hope every aspiring journalist takes it, and the next chance, and the next one.

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This is the second of a three-part guest post by Paul Lewis that originally appeared in the book Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive? You can read the first part here.

The investigation into Tomlinson’s death began in the hours after his death on 1 April 2009, and culminated, six days later, in the release of video footage showing how he had been struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by a Metropolitan police officer, Simon Harwood. The footage, shot by an American businessman, was accompanied by around twenty detailed witness accounts and photographs of the newspaper seller’s last moments alive and successfully disproved the police’s explanation of the death.

The result was a criminal investigation, a national review of policing, multiple parliamentary inquiries and, by May 2011, an inquest at which a jury concluded Tomlinson had been “unlawfully killed”. At the time of writing, Harwood, who was on the Met’s elite Territorial Support Group, was awaiting trial for manslaughter.

In media studies, the case was viewed as a landmark moment for so-called “citizen journalism”. Sociologists Greer and Laughlin argue the Tomlinson story revealed a changing narrative, in which the powerful – in this case, the police – lost their status of “primary definers” of a controversial event.

Significantly, it was the citizen journalist and news media perspective, rather than the police perspective, that was assimilated into and validated by the official investigations and reports. Ultimately, it was this perspective that determined “what the story was”, structured the reporting of “what had happened and why” and drove further journalistic investigation and criticism of the Metropolitan Police Services.

The initial account of Tomlinson’s death put out by police was that he died of a heart attack while walking home from work in the vicinity of the protests, and that protesters were partly to blame for impeding medics from delivering life-saving treatment. Neither of these claims were true, but they fed into coverage that was favourable to police.

A public relations drive by the Met and City of London police was bolstered by “off the record” briefings to reporters that suggested – also wrongly – that Tomlinson’s family were not surprised by his death and upset by internet speculation it could be suspicious. These briefings contributed to a broader media narrative that endorsed police and criticised protesters.

How the police account left so many questions unanswered

The morning after father of nine died, the newspaper he had been selling outside Monument tube station, the Evening Standard, carried the headline: “Police pelted with bricks as they help dying man.” But it was plain to us, even at an early stage, that there could be more to the story. The overlydefensive police public relations campaign gave the impression there was something to hide. Embedded in the small-print of press releases, there were clues – such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s notification of the death – that left unanswered questions.

Most obviously, anyone who had ventured near to the protests near the Bank of England on the evening Tomlinson died would have known he collapsed in the midst of violent clashes with police. It seemed implausible, even unlikely, that the death of a bystander would not have been connected in some way to the violence. But pursuing this hunch was not easy, given the paucity of reliable information being released by police, who at times actively discouraged us from investigating the case.

All that was known about Tomlinson in the 48 hours after his death was that he had been wearing a Millwall football t-shirt. That, though, was enough to begin pursuing two separate lines of inquiry. One involved old school “shoe leather”; trawling through notepads to identify anyone who may have been in the area, or know someone who was, who could identify Tomlinson from press photographs of him lying unconscious on the ground.

That yielded one useful eye-witness, with photographic evidence of Tomlinson alive, with images of him walking in apparent distress, and lying at the feet of riot police 100 yards from where he would eventually collapse. Why was Tomlinson on the ground twice, in the space of just a few minutes? And if those photographs of the father of nine stumbling near police officers, moments before his death, were put online, would anyone make the connection?

Becoming part of a virtual G20 crowd

The answer was yes, as a direct result of the second line of inquiry: by open sharing information online, both through internet stories and Twitter, we became part of a virtual G20 crowd that had coalesced online to question the circumstances of his death. In this environment, valuable contributions to the debate, which were more sceptical in tone than those adopted by other media organisations, worked like online magnets for those who doubted the official version of events. Twitter proved crucial to sharing information with the network of individuals who had begun investigating the death of their own accord.

I had signed-up to the social media website two days before the protest, and became fascinated with the pattern of movement of “newsworthy” tweets. For example, a YouTube video uploaded by two protesters who did not see the assault on Tomlinson, but did witness his collapse minutes later and strongly disputed police claims that officers treating him were attacked with bottles, was recommended to me within seconds of being uploaded. Minutes later, Twitter investigators had identified the protesters in the film and, shortly after that, found their contact details.

Similarly, those concerned to document Tomlinson’s last moments alive, including associates of the anarchist police-monitoring group Fitwatch, were using the internet to organise.

Through Twitter I discovered there were Flickr albums with hundreds of photographs of the vicinity of this death, and dissemination of blog-posts that speculated on how he may have died. None of these images of course could be taken at face value, but they often contained clues, and where necessary the crowd helped locate, and contact, the photographer.

Journalists often mistakenly assume they can harness the wisdom of an online crowd by commanding its direction of travel. On the contrary, in digital journalism, memes (namely, concepts that spread via the internet) take their own shape organically, and often react with hostility to anyone who overtly seeks to control their direction. This is particularly the case with the protest community, which often mistrusts the so-called mainstream media. Hence it was incumbent on me, the journalist, to join the wider crowd on an equal playing-field, and share as much information as I was using as the investigation progressed.

Establishing authenticity and context

There were times, of course, when we had to hold back important material; we resisted publishing images of Tomlinson at the feet of riot police for four days, in order to establish properly their authenticity and context.

Internet contact usually does not suffice for verification, and so I regularly met with sources. I asked the most important witnesses to meet me at the scene of Tomlinson’s death, near the Bank of England, to walk and talk me through what they had seen. We only published images and video that we had retrieved directly from the source and later verified.

A different standard applies to sharing images already released on Twitter, where journalists such as National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin in the US have proven the benefits from sharing information already in the public domain to establish its significance and provenance. The break, though, as with most scoops, was partly the result of good luck, but not unrelated to the fact that our journalism had acquired credibility in the online crowd.

Chris La Jaunie, an investment fund manager, who had recorded the crucial footage of Harwood pushing Tomlinson on a digital camera, had become part of that crowd too, having spent days monitoring coverage on the internet from his office in New York. He knew the footage he had was potentially explosive. The options available to Mr La Jaunie were limited. Fearing a police cover-up, he did not trust handing over the footage. An alternative would have been to release the video onto YouTube, where would it lack context, might go unnoticed for days and even then could not have been reliably verified.

He said he chose to contact me after coming to the conclusion that ours was the news organisation which had most effectively interrogated the police version of events. It was more than a year later that my colleague Matthew Taylor and I began inquiring into the death of Mubenga. By then we had recognised the potential reach of Twitter for investigative journalism and our decision to openly investigate the death of the Angolan failed asylum seeker was a deliberate one.

Not all investigations are suited to transparent digging, and, indeed, many stories still demand top secrecy. This has been true for the three outstanding UK investigations of our times: the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal and, at the Guardian, the investigations into files obtained by WikiLeaks and phone-hacking by the News of the World. However, Tomlinson had shown that open investigations can succeed, and there were parallels with the death of Mubenga.

In the third and final part, published tomorrow, Lewis explains how he used Twitter to pursue that investigation into the death of Jimmy Mubenga, and the crucial role of verification.

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