Last week, following deadly events on the Kurdish-Turkish border, a ‘spontaneous’ demonstration occurred in front of the American embassy in Brussels. Blogger and freelance journalist Mehmet Köksal was on the scene when some Grey Wolves (a jingoistic youth organisation) recognised him and tried to lynch him. He escaped, severely beaten.

No English-speaking media reported it except for some hard-line Armenian sites.

On Monday, Köksal wrote his last post. He quits blogging, “victim of [his] blog’s success” and intimidation. Without downplaying his long-lasting courage and works, one cannot but notice he ceases publication to protect himself and his family.

As a journalist, Köksal reclaims his subjectivity, he said in an interview last year, and his anti-extremist opinions make his articles especially interesting. As a blogger, he wrote with a dry and humorous wit to entertain his readers.

Now, extremists tend to display an underdeveloped sense of humour. On the other hand, they display a higher-than-average propensity to react by violent or illegal means when they consider their cause to be under attack.

Within large news organisations, such risks are shared between the journalist and its editor, at least. When actions are needed, unions come to the frontline, usually with much-advertised support from local politicians.

Several Belgian bloggers, such as Damien Vanachter, expressed deep regrets at Köksal’s decision and deeper anger at the local authorities’ inaction. Journalistic work is hampered on a regular basis, with more or less intensity. But we prefer to think of such peril as a fixture of exotic governments.

Moreover, Belgium scored 5^th on the 2007 World Press Freedom index, 139 slots above Russia. So where’s the problem?

This story represents a huge disincentive for ambitious bloggers. They may enjoy more influence and address a wider influence than traditional news outlets. They, however, hardly enjoy any protection from such power.

Governments not considering the right to blog as an integral part of the right to freedom of expression is yet another symptom of administrative backwardness. But its consequences may be far more significant than your local MP not reading her email.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns.

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The concluding part of this draft book chapter sums up some of the key points and looks at the future paths of investigative journalism in a new media age. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Conclusion

Blogs and new media have undoubtedly changed the landscape of investigative journalism. In terms of its form, journalism as a whole has become more conversational, and iterative, as readers seek to contribute to the story, and journalists open more of their processes to public view. The time and space offered by the internet has provided opportunities for these conversations to take place, and for journalists to make raw material available to fuel them. And the networked nature of the Web has facilitated coordination of contributors across borders and industries, along with a now global distribution of material.

The current period offers both significant threats and opportunities to investigative journalism. The sheer quantity and accessibility of information means that quality is becoming a precious commodity. Technological tools have made the investigative journalist’s job of gathering and analysing data, and identifying and contacting sources, easier, but when the source of information is a blog, journalists face the challenge of evaluating both the information and the source, sometimes without knowing what partisan, ideological or commercial affiliations the blogger may have (Friend & Singer, 2007). The protection and access afforded to journalists – in particular, access to certain areas or people, and the ability to protect a source – are not routinely offered to those working outside mainstream media (Gant, 2007), while at the same time the past two decades have seen courts being increasingly reluctant to offer protection even to journalists working for large publishers (Henry, 2007).

The use of blogs for investigative journalism raises a number of challenges and ethical issues. Investigative journalists may find it hard to protect their sources in an age where so much is recorded. There are useful tools that help – such as Invisiblog.com for free anonymous blog hosting and The Online Policy Group (OPG) for privacy-protective domain name registration, while the likes of Tor and Anonymizer.com allow bloggers to hide their IP address (location) and Pingomatic allows bloggers to quickly broadcast an entry while making the poster untraceable (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2005) – but there are always concerns about weaknesses in such technologies emerging in the future.

Equally, for journalists going undercover there are new issues around invasion of privacy – particularly when the distinction between private and public spaces becomes blurred online. Lee Wilkins notes that

“the Web provides journalists (and others) with ways to invade privacy on a worldwide scale … Most journalists don’t hide in bathrooms to get stories – because hiding in the bathroom means we can’t ask follow-up questions or seek multiple and other points of view … So lurking and then quoting without first identifying yourself seems, to me, to be a pretty easy call.” (in Friend and Singer, 2007: 85)

Furthermore, new media technologies allow the subjects of investigations to tell their stories, too – as demonstrated by the video released by Scientologists of BBC journalist John Sweeney “losing it” while conducting his investigation into their activities (Sweeney, 2007).

Economically, the traditional support structures for investigative journalism – large news organisations – are, at least in their own terms, struggling, and investigative journalism is having to look elsewhere for funding. While BlogAds and AdSense have allowed some bloggers to operate through traditional advertising-based models, others have relied on reader donations facilitated by technologies such as PayPal and ChipIn, while foundations are playing an increasing role in supporting investigative journalism – but few have found a reliable revenue stream.

The future of investigative journalism is likely to lie along at least three paths. On the one hand, in a new media world of information overload where ‘anyone can be a journalist’, investigative journalism offers a way for the mainstream media to provide a distinctive product and prevent the readership migrating elsewhere online (Bradshaw, 2007). News organisations with declining budgets but a commitment to public service may be inclined to outsource part of their investigative work, taking advantage of their brand and experience and using crowdsourcing approaches to pursue investigative journalism. Finally, and perhaps more realistically, it is likely that foundations and reader donations will increasingly support investigative journalism as an important contribution to society. For investigative journalists themselves, the biggest concern is lack of job security - or at least an increasing requirement for new skills in managing volunteers or enterprises. For readers, however, the latter two routes, dependent as they are on active public support, offer some assurance that investigations will be undertaken in the public interest rather than the media’s own self-interests. For this to happen, however, requires a change in the cultures of news organisations. As journalism becomes less a product – ‘what sells’ – and more a service – what people want to use – the need for that change will become increasingly pressing.

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Part five of this draft book chapter looks at how blogs have changed the funding of journalism through their ability to attract reader donations, as well as other increasingly important sources such as licensing and foundations. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Fundraising

Just as new media technologies are challenging publishing and distribution conventions, traditional business models have also been disrupted in a news industry which has, at least in the West, been facing declines in readership and advertising revenue for decades (Meyer, 2004). In this environment investigative journalism has been one of the first to suffer from cuts to staff and resources (Knightley, 2004; Outing, 2005; Freola, 2007), or to be targeted towards the more profitable areas of celebrity coverage.

In response to this decline in funding, blogs have offered a new way to finance investigative journalism.

In April 2003 former AP reporter Christopher Allbritton posted a notice on his site, Back-to-Iraq.com, asking for readers to donate money so he could cover the Iraq war. In response, 320 people donated $14,334 through the site. As Allbritton filed stories, donors were put on a ‘premium e-mail list’, receiving stories early – as well as extra reports and pictures. They also passed along story ideas and “occasionally berated him for overheated metaphors. “Readers were my editors,” he says” (Ante, 2003).

Freelance journalist David Appell repeated the experiment successfully when he asked readers of his blog to support him in investigating a sugar lobbying group (Bowman and Willis, 2003), while Talking Points Memo also relied on reader donations for its continuing existence before BlogAds allowed Josh Marshall to fund his operation through advertising (McDermott, 2007).

Readers of Firedoglake.com donated enough money to cover the travel expenses of six volunteer bloggers and $3,500 a month rent on a Washington apartment so that they could report on the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby (Shane, 2007). These donations of both money and time meant the site was able to draw on “more boots on the ground than any commercial news operation … more background, savvy and commitment to the case. And they dominate[d] the coverage of a big news event. Journalists themselves use[d] it to keep up and get their bearings.” (Rosen, 2007).

Jay Rosen added of the fundraising:

“What makes it possible are the people who gather at the site, and the falling cost for those people to meet up, realize their number, find a common mind, and when necessary pool their dollars to get their own correspondents to Washington … the cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, and work together is falling— dramatically. And so things unthinkable or impractical before might be quite doable now.” (Rosen, 2007).

Marshall Kirkpatrick (2007), writing specifically about video journalism, notes three models for financially sustaining investigative work: foundation support, viewer donation and licensing/advertising. Typically, the reality is a mix of all three. Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Mexico, for instance, aim to finance their work through licensing deals with mainstream media, but the team has also drawn on donations, subscriptions and prize money (Gannes, 2007). Democracy Now! is financed by foundations and viewer donations, while Collateral News, says Kirkpatrick, “appear [to] do commercial video production to support their investigative journalism”. Michael Yon, on the other hand, has added to reader donations by selling photographs online, and copies of a book (Yon, 2007).

Read the conclusion of this chapter here.

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1. The Rake Today: Lambert to the Slaughter

   “Next Monday appears to be the date for former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer to reveal his plans for the launch of a professionally edited and reported online newspaper.”

   to onlinejournalism independentjournalism

2. Newspaper offer readers ‘Riddle’
   A British indie feature is rewriting distribution rules by becoming the first to preem as a “covermount” DVD given away free with a newspaper.
   to televisioninteractivity covermounts film dailymail

3. USA Today Distributes News by ‘Widget’: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

   “USA Today is plunging into a hot new Internet technology, offering its online users the ability to install “widgets” on their blogs and personal Web pages that contain news updates and other information from the newspaper.”

   to onlinejournalism usatoday widgets blogs

4. OK! Relaunches Website with Eyes on TMZ | Folio Magazine

   “Celebrity glossy wunderkind OK! magazine relaunched its Web site today with an Escalade’s worth of features—“web exclusive, continuously updated breaking news, celebrity updates, photo galleries, videos, reviews, blogs and numerous interactive features…”

   to onlinejournalism newmediamagazines onlinevideo blogs galleries

5. Why Glossies Went Mass – Forbes.com

   “On Web sites such as Style.com, consumers can see looks from September’s shows an hour after they are premiered on the runway. Followers don’t have to have some high-ranking editor in New York to tell them what was hot or not. They can see and decide for…”

   to newmediamagazines onlinejournalism onlinevideo …

6. Blogging Without the Time Sink

   Blog your initial brainstorming. Blog your research. Blog your interactions.

   to blogs onlinejournalism … saved by 2 other people …

7. Conversational Journalism: Credibility Gained or Status Lost?
   In a sense, clinging to objectivity as an achievable goal denies our humanity. That puts us in awkward situations almost daily. And don’t think our audiences and communities don’t recognize that. Often, they’re laughing at us for it.
   to onlinejournalism ethics transparency community conversation objectivity …

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A former student of mine, Gareth Main, has launched his own magazine, and on the whole I’m pretty impressed with his business model and online approach. Bearded Magazine covers the independent music industry, is free and distributed through shops, and already has a website and (well designed) MySpace page. Users can subscribe to receive email updates, view online PDFs (with hyperlinks – although these could be better signposted), sign up to an RSS feed, talk on the forum, browse the photo gallery (by band, venue, category or photographer – nice touch), and listen to podcasts. The user can also order a physical copy of the mag through a Paypal link

Gareth takes up the story:

 ”As we’re giving the magazine away in the shops I thought it would be important to be able to view the magazine online so that it can reach a wider audience than we can reach through print. We are running it by basically loading the pdf into the page so that you can navigate around the magazine like you would an ordinary pdf, including hyperlinks to bands’ myspace pages and advertisers’ websites.

Our online medium allows us to add additional extras we cannot get in the physical copy of the mag. This includes an exclusive podcast with cover star Matt Berry, podcasts about the magazine, blogs, up to date news, more reviews and features that don’t find themselves in the mag for whatever reason (usually that by the time the mag is released the newsworthiness will have diminished so we get it online instead). We also can manage a mailing list and RSS feed so that people know when the new issue is uploaded.

It has been a rip-roaring success thus far. We haven’t pushed the mag as much as we’d like to – that will come after issue one – but in the seven weeks we have been online we have had in excess of 5,000 hits and have a massive subscriber base – some of whom have even taken out a paid subscription for the physical magazine even though it is free to pick up in the shops. The money is worth it though – £25 for a year subscription, £3 an issue - both are cheaper than any other nationwide music mag and the magazine is made of better quality materials than any other music mag – probably because we don’t have a large publishing house’s pockets to line!”

There’s more about Gareth and the mag at http://www.mediacourses.com/news.asp?newsID=149

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I’m calling it Indie Journalism: journalists going it alone with new business models for the new media era. And having interviewed indie football journalist Rick Waghorn recently on his relaunch, I thought I’d do the same with James Fryer, who, with fellow journalist Michelle Byrne, recently launched SoGlos, a local online-only magazine for Gloucestershire.

What is the business model?

We see the business model as working in a similar way to a conventional print publication (with some differences, of course!). Readers will never be charged for any content, but businesses are offered the opportunity to reach our readers through conventional display advertising.

In addition, we also have the most comprehensive directory of arts and entertainment venues in Gloucestershire – all researched over the course of a year, with information written for each by one of our journalists – which can be ‘enhanced’ by businesses to include 100 words of their choice, images, a Google map, web link, email link and priority positioning in our directory.

Sadly the Internet is swamped with low quality directory websites which don’t offer any local expertise, or information for a specific restaurants for example, but our readers, and customers, are quickly realising SoGlos.com is something very different. The directories in each section, however, are there to support the editorial content in each case, and rather than being a ‘listings’ or ‘directory’ site, we are strictly an online magazine.

How did it come about?

After working for publications and websites in London and Dubai (Michelle had previously worked for the likes of Guardian Unlimited and ThisIsLondon.co.uk, and TimeOut in Dubai, whilst I had previously worked for publications including What’s On in Dubai), we returned to Gloucestershire and quickly discovered the traditional media were doing a very poor job at representing the region’s outstanding arts and entertainment scene.

Utilising our experience in the arts and entertainment field, we spent a full year conducting market research, assessing existing print media in the area and, in line with the trend of people spending more time every week surfing the Internet than reading newspapers and magazines combined, set about planning SoGlos.com.

SoGlos.com officially launched at the end of July after a ‘soft launch’ period of six weeks during which time it attracted 60,000 readers, and it’s since being going from strength to strength with a current readership of in excess of 50,000 unique readers per month and 250,000 hits.

How are your rivals reacting?

We’ve actually had a really positive response from many existing local publications, who as soon as they saw what we were doing immediately got in touch to see how they could get involved. In terms of the publications who haven’t yet been in touch – they’ve subscribed to our newsletter and are clearly visiting SoGlos.com every day! A number of journalists working on local newspapers and magazines have also been in touch to ask about contributing or joining the team.

The reaction from the media industry on a national level has been outstanding – with senior figures from many of the large publishing groups having got in touch to say how impressed they are with SoGlos.com. It’s something that has never really been done before in the regions – a completely-online magazine run by professional journalists and updated on a daily basis – and I think we’ve created quite a stir.

How do you see the future of the site and local journalism generally?

We see the site as it stands at present as SoGlos.com v1 – all of the groundwork is in place and we have established a good readership – but we’re continually speaking to readers and customers, and are already planning v2 which will see some small changes and big new ideas come through.

One overriding theme will be ensuring we get readers involved and embrace the idea of citizen journalism, whilst also keeping SoGlos.com a professional and trusted source. Providing readers with a mobile service is also something we’re working on, as well as thinking about innovative ways to work with Google’s mapping technology.

The ‘So’ idea is definitely something that we see as a great franchise opportunity – which could work in any city or county with a strong entertainment scene – and in each case it would require a team of experienced journalists who understand arts and ents, as well as online journalism.

We really feel this is all in line with how the media industry is moving nationally – not just on a local level. People are spending more time every week surfing the web than reading newspapers and magazines combined – and while the national newspapers have been working to create a unique online offering, regional publications just haven’t reacted on the same level. Existing publications in Gloucestershire aren’t providing readers with what they want – a free resource which is updated continually, available 24/7 and not restricted by a print publication – but SoGlos.com is.

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As solo sports journalist Rick Waghorn relaunches his Norwich City news website in the first step towards franchising the service, I spoke to him about going solo, the importance of advertising, and the likely first places for the franchise to expand.

Originally, Waghorn says, the plan was to offer a franchise “in much the same way as you would set up a bathroom shop and people would buy the kit off the shelf from you.” But the plan has changed.

“I’m not sure that’s realistic in that perhaps that works for someone with a redundancy package to self-start a franchise from us, but I think the way it may work is: I’ve got some funding that we use to actually pay salaried journalists to open a Sheffield bureau or a Manchester bureau rather than someone actually buying a franchise off me.”

The new-look site is an impressive effort from a team of three people – putting most local newspaper sites to shame with clear layout and even up-to-the-minute features such as the ‘most read’ section, podcasts, blogs and a text service. Most impressive is a set of RSS feeds from what, in old media, would have been called ‘the competition’ – Waghorn clearly recognises that making your site a destination is more important than pretending the competition doesn’t exist. “If people only have ten minutes at lunch to go online, they’ll want a site that has all the details.”

In the 14 months since launching RickWaghorn.co.uk with money from a redundancy package, the site has exceeded Rick’s “wildest expectations”.

“It is very much hard work. In year one we roughly took about £35-40,000 which was done on a commission split with my ad man. It has been a huge voyage of discovery.”

Now Waghorn is planning “another voyage of discovery.”

“The theory is that what we’ve done with Norwich should be equally applicable to most other provincial football clubs,” says Waghorn, “so we’re starting to have discussions with different regional journalists. Now the question is how you service that in an advertising sense, but one of the interesting things is if you can start offering, if you like, regionality, then I can start offering, say, advertising in Suffolk to companies in Norfolk.

“Or, let’s say we looked at the three Championship sides in South Yorkshire. If we had those we could serve them all with one advertising rep, but offer someone advertising on all three, and do a bundle sale.”

Teaming up with senior advertising executive Kevin O’Gorman has been crucial, with O’Gorman working “the local beat, bringing little local firms onto the internet who have built their own websites and need to market them.

“We give them a friendly face – someone they’ve been dealing with on a local basis in the last few years, and he holds their hand and helps them online. I do the editorial and he services the advertisers in a very old-fashioned newspaper sense – and then you find a mate with a background in web design and get the lucky breaks, but I’ve found a ‘Team Rick’ which has worked well so far.”

Another key to the site’s success has been its flexibility, and speed.

“It’s very peculiar for football because few regional papers have a Sunday edition, and at Norwich Evening News I was the last match report anyone ever read – at 5 o’clock Monday night when the paperboy put the paper through the door it was 48 hours after the event. In the age of rolling news that doesn’t make sense. Now, arguably after the official club site, I’m the first match report they read because my match report goes up on the website five minutes after the match finishes. All of a sudden I become a Sunday newspaper because I put out my match report, my interviews on Sunday. Now that presents a challenge to local newspapers because what are they going to put in their Monday night newspapers?

“Also, when you’re not part of a local newspaper group you’re nimble. I can hold my hand up to dozens of mistakes we’ve made but because you’re only two or three people we can say ‘Oh, that didn’t work, let’s try that,’ and I think that nimbleness is another of the key factors in dealing with the internet.”

Rick’s advice to journalists wanting to go it alone is to recognise the importance of advertising. “Start talking to your advertising department, because just as much as the editorial department is suffering from redundancies, so is the advertising department. Most journalists will tell you that the only time you bump into anyone from the advertising department is at the Christmas party when you’re trying to get off with one. But these people have skills and contacts, and you bolt the two of us together and that’s where it’s worked, so I’d start taking your friend from the advertising department out for a drink.”

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