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VIDEO from the Global Investigative Journalism Conference

Paul Bradshaw — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:55:36 +0000

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev earlier this year I interviewed four individuals whose work I admire: Stephen Grey (talking about internet security for journalists), Luuk Sengers and Mark Lee Hunter (on organising your investigation), and Bo Elkjaer (on investigating networks).

I’ve been publishing these videos individually on the Help Me Investigate blog, but thought I would cross-publish them as a group here.

Here’s Mark Lee Hunter with his tips on gathering information before speaking to sources:

Stephen Grey on internet security considerations for journalists:

Luuk Sengers on organising your investigation:

And Bo Elkjaer on how he used computer technology to follow the money through network analysis:

Crowdsourcing investigative journalism: a case study (part 1)

Paul Bradshaw — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:08:50 +0000

As I begin on a new Help Me Investigate project, I thought it was a good time to share some research I conducted into the first year of the site, and the key factors in how that project tried to crowdsource investigative and watchdog journalism.

The findings of this research have been key to the development of this new project. They also form the basis of a chapter in the book Face The Future, and another due to be published in the Handbook of Online Journalism next year (not to be confused with my own Online Journalism Handbook). Here’s the report:

In both academic and mainstream literature about the world wide web, one theme consistently recurs: the lowering of the barrier allowing individuals to collaborate in pursuit of a common goal. Whether it is creating the world’s biggest encyclopedia (Lih, 2009), spreading news about a protest (Morozov, 2011) or tracking down a stolen phone (Shirky, 2008), the rise of the network has seen a decline in the role of the formal organisation, including news organisations.

Two examples of this phenomenon were identified while researching a book chapter on investigative journalism and blogs (De Burgh, 2008). The first was an experiment by The Florida News Press: when it started receiving calls from readers complaining about high water and sewage connection charges for newly constructed homes the newspaper, short on in-house resources to investigate the leads, decided to ask their readers to help. The result is by now familiar as a textbook example of “crowdsourcing” – outsourcing a project to ‘the crowd’ or what Brogan & Smith (2009, p136) describe as “the ability to have access to many people at a time and to have them perform one small task each”:

“Readers spontaneously organized their own investigations: Retired engineers analyzed blueprints, accountants pored over balance sheets, and an inside whistle-blower leaked documents showing evidence of bid-rigging.” (Howe, 2006a)

The second example concerned contaminated pet food in the US, and did not involve a mainstream news organisation. In fact, it was frustration with poor mainstream ‘churnalism’ (see Davies, 2009) that motivated bloggers and internet users to start digging into the story. The resulting output from dozens of blogs ranged from useful information for pet owners and the latest news to the compilation of a database that suggested the official numbers of pet deaths recorded by the US Food and Drug Administration was short by several thousand. One site, Itchmo.com, became so popular that it was banned in China, the source of the pet food in question.

What was striking about both examples was not simply that people could organise to produce investigative journalism, but that this practice of ‘crowdsourcing’ had two key qualities that were particularly relevant to journalism’s role in a democracy. The first was engagement: in the case of the News-Press for six weeks the story generated more traffic to its website than “ever before, excepting hurricanes” (Weise, 2007). Given that investigative journalism often concerns very ‘dry’ subject matter that has to be made appealing to a wider audience, these figures were surprising – and encouraging for publishers.

The second quality was subject: the contaminated pet food story was, in terms of mainstream news values, unfashionable and unjustifiable in terms of investment of resources. It appeared that the crowdsourcing model of investigation might provide a way to investigate stories which were in the public interest but which commercial and public service news organisations would not consider worth their time. More broadly, research on crowdsourcing more generally suggested that it worked “best in areas that are not core to your product or central to your business model” (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, p82).

Investigative journalism: its history and discourses

DeBurgh (2008, p10) defines investigative journalism as “distinct from apparently similar work [of discovering truth and identifying lapses from it] done by police, lawyers and auditors and regulatory bodies in that it is not limited as to target, not legally founded and usually earns money for media publishers.” The term is notoriously problematic and contested: some argue that all journalism is investigative, or that the recent popularity of the term indicates the failure of ‘normal’ journalism to maintain investigative standards. This contestation is a symptom of the various factors underlying the growth of the genre, which range from journalists’ own sense of a democratic role, to professional ambition and publishers’ commercial and marketing objectives.

More recently investigative journalism has been used to defend traditional print journalism against online publishing, with publishers arguing that true investigative journalism cannot be maintained without the resources of a print operation. This position has become harder to defend as online-only operations and journalists have won increasing numbers of awards for their investigative work – Clare Sambrook in the UK and VoiceOfSanDiego.com and Talking Points Memo in the US are three examples – while new organisations have been established to pursue investigations without any associated print operation including Canada’s OpenFile; the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism and a number of bodies in the US such as ProPublica, The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Huffington Post’s investigative unit.

In addition, computer technology has started to play an increasingly important role in print investigative journalism: Stephen Grey’s investigation into the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme (Grey, 2006) was facilitated by the use of software such as Analyst’s Notebook, which allowed him to analyse large amounts of flight data and identify leads. The Telegraph’s investigation into MPs’ expenses was made possible by digitisation of data and the ability to store large amounts on a small memory stick. And newspapers around the world collaborated with the Wikileaks website to analyse ‘warlogs’ from Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. More broadly the success of Wikipedia inspired a raft of examples of ‘Wiki journalism’ where users were invited to contribute to editorial coverage of a particular issue or field, with varying degrees of success.

Meanwhile, investigative journalists such as The Guardian’s Paul Lewis have been exploring a more informal form of crowdsourcing, working with online communities to break stories including the role of police in the death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson; the existence of undercover agents in the environmental protest movement; and the death of a man being deported to Angola (Belam, 2011b).

This is part of a broader move to networked journalism explored by Charlie Beckett (2008):

“In a world of ever-increasing media manipulation by government and business, it is even more important for investigative journalists to use technology and connectivity to reveal hidden truths. Networked journalists are open, interactive and share the process. Instead of gatekeepers they are facilitators: the public become co-producers. Networked journalists “are ‘medium agnostic’ and ‘story-centric’”. The process is faster and the information sticks around longer.” (2008, p147)

As one of its best-known practitioners Paul Lewis talks particularly of the role of technology in his investigations – specifically Twitter – but also the importance of the crowd itself and journalistic method:

“A crucial factor that makes crowd-sourcing a success [was that] there was a reason for people to help, in this case a perceived sense of injustice and that the official version of events did not tally with the truth. Six days after Tomlinson’s death, Paul had twenty reliable witnesses who could be placed on a map at the time of the incident – and only one of them had come from the traditional journalistic tool of a contact number in his notebook.” (Belam, 2011b)

A further key skill identified by Lewis is listening to the crowd – although he sounds a note of caution in its vulnerability to deliberately placed misinformation, and the need for verification.

“Crowd-sourcing doesn’t always work [...] The most common thing is that you try, and you don’t find the information you want [...] The pattern of movement of information on the internet is something journalists need to get their heads around. Individuals on the web in a crowd seem to behave like a flock of starlings – and you can’t control their direction.” (Belam, 2011b)

Conceptualising Help Me Investigate

The first plans for Help Me Investigate were made in 2008 and were further developed over the next 18 months. They built on research into crowdsourced investigative journalism, as well as other research into online journalism and community management. In particular the project sought to explore concepts of “P2P journalism” which enables “more engaged interaction between and amongst users” (Bruns, 2005, p120, emphasis in original) and of “produsage”, whose affordances included probabilistic problem solving, granular tasks, equipotentiality, and shared content (Bruns, 2008, p19).

A key feature in this was the ownership of the news agenda by users themselves (who could be either members of the public or journalists). This was partly for reasons identified above in research into the crowdsourced investigation into contaminated pet food. It would allow the site to identify questions that would not be considered viable for investigation within a traditional newsroom; but the feature was also implemented because ‘ownership’ was a key area of contestation identified within crowdsourcing research (Lih, 2009; Benkler, 2006; Surowiecki, 2005) – ‘outsourcing’ a project to a group of people raises obvious issues regarding claims of authorship, direction and benefits (Bruns, 2005).

These issues were considered carefully by the founders. The site adopted a user interface with three main modes of navigation for investigations: most-recent-top; most popular (those investigations with the most members); and two ‘featured’ investigations chosen by site staff: these were chosen on the basis that they were the most interesting editorially, or because they were attracting particular interest and activity from users at that moment. There was therefore an editorial role, but this was limited to only two of the 18 investigations listed on the ‘Investigations’ page, and was at least partly guided by user activity.

In addition there were further pages where users could explore investigations through different criteria such as those investigations that had been completed, or those investigations with particular tags (e.g. ‘environment’, ‘Bristol’, ‘FOI’, etc.).

A second feature of the site was that ‘journalism’ was intended to be a by-product: the investigation process itself was the primary objective, which would inform users, as research suggested that if users were to be attracted to the site, it must perform the function that they needed it to (Porter, 2008), which was – as became apparent – one of project management. The ‘problem’ that the site was attempting to ‘solve’ needed to be user-centric rather than publisher-centric: ‘telling stories’ would clearly be lower down the priority list for users than it was for journalists and publishers. Of higher priority were the need to break down a question into manageable pieces; find others to investigate those with; and get answers. This was eventually summarised in the strapline to the site: “Connect, mobilise, uncover”.

Thirdly, there was a decision to use ‘game mechanics’ that would make the process of investigation inherently rewarding. As the site and its users grew, the interface was changed so that challenges started on the left hand side of the screen, coloured red, then moved to the middle when accepted (the colour changing to amber), and finally to the right column when complete (now with green border and tick icon). This made it easier to see at a glance what needed doing and what had been achieved, and also introduced a level of innate satisfaction in the task. Users, the idea went, might grow to like to feeling of moving those little blocks across the screen, and the positive feedback (see Graham, 2010 and Dondlinger, 2007) provided by the interface.

Similar techniques were coincidentally explored at the same time by The Guardian’s MPs’ expenses app (Bradshaw, 2009). This provided an interface for users to investigate MP expense claim forms that used many conventions of game design, including a ‘progress bar’, leaderboards, and button-based interfaces. A second iteration of the app – created when a second batch of claim forms were released – saw a redesigned interface based on a stronger emphasis on positive feedback. As developer Martin Belam explains (2011a):

“When a second batch of documents were released, the team working on the app broke them down into much smaller assignments. That meant it was easier for a small contribution to push the totals along, and we didn’t get bogged down with the inertia of visibly seeing that there was a lot of documents still to process.

“By breaking it down into those smaller tasks, and staggering their start time, you concentrated all of the people taking part on one goal at a time. They could therefore see the progress dial for that individual goal move much faster than if you only showed the progress across the whole set of documents.”

These game mechanics are not limited to games: many social networking sites have borrowed the conventions to provide similar positive feedback to users. Jon Hickman (2010, p2) describes how Help Me Investigate uses these genre codes and conventions:

“In the same way that Twitter records numbers of “followers”, “tweets”, “following” and “listed”, Help Me Investigate records the number of “things” which the user is currently involved in investigating, plus the number of “challenges”, “updates” and “completed investigations” they have to their credit. In both Twitter and Help Me Investigate these labels have a mechanistic function: they act as hyperlinks to more information related to the user’s profile. They can also be considered culturally as symbolic references to the user’s social value to the network – they give a number and weight to the level of activity the user has achieved, and so can be used in informal ranking of the user’s worth, importance and usefulness within the network.” (2010, p8)

This was indeed the aim of the site design, and was related to a further aim of the site: to allow users to build ‘social capital’ within and through the site: users could add links to web presences and Twitter accounts, as well as add biographies and ‘tag’ themselves. They were also ranked in a ‘Most active’ table; and each investigation had its own graph of user activity. This meant that users might use the site not simply for information-gathering reasons, but also for reputation building ones, a characteristic of open source communities identified by Bruns (2005) and Leadbeater (2008) among others.

There were plans to take these ideas much further which were shelved during the proof of concept phase as the team concentrated on core functionality. For example, it was clear that users needed to be able to give other users praise for positive contributions, and they used the ‘update feature’ to do so. A more intuitive function allowing users to give a ‘thumbs up’ to a contribution would have made this easier, and also provided a way to establish the reputation of individual users, and encourage further use.

Another feature of the site’s construction was a networked rather than centralised design. The bid document to 4iP proposed to aggregate users’ material:

“via RSS and providing support to get users onto use web-based services. While the technology will facilitate community creation around investigations, the core strategy will be community-driven, ‘recruiting’ and supporting alpha users who can drive the site and community forward.”

Again, this aggregation functionality was dropped as part of focusing the initial version of the site. However, the basic principle of working within a network was retained, with many investigations including a challenge to blog about progress on other sites, or use external social networks to find possible contributors. The site included guidance on using tools elsewhere on the web, and many investigations linked to users’ blog posts.

In the second part I discuss the building of the site and reflections on the site’s initial few months.

Has investigative journalism found its feet online? (part 1)

Paul Bradshaw — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:56:19 +0000

Earlier this year I was asked to write a chapter for a book on the future of investigative journalism – ‘Investigative Journalism: Dead Or Alive?‘. I’m reproducing it here. The chapter was originally published on my Facebook page. An open event around the book’s launch, with a panel discussion, is being held at the Frontline Club next month.

We may finally be moving past the troubled youth of the internet as a medium for investigative journalism. For more than a decade observers looked at this ungainly form stumbling its way around journalism, and said: “It will never be able to do this properly.”

They had short memories, of course. Television was an equally awkward child: the first news broadcast was simply a radio bulletin on a black screen, and for decades print journalists sneered at the idea that this fleeting, image-obsessed medium could ever do justice to investigative journalism. But it did. And it did it superbly, finding a new way to engage people with the dry, with the political, and the complex.

Now the internet is growing up too, finding its feet with the likes of Clare Sambrook, Talking Points Memo, PolitiFact and VoiceOfSanDiego all winning awards, while journalists such as Paul Lewis (the death of Ian Tomlinson), Stephen Grey (extraordinary rendition) and James Ball (Wikileaks) explore new ways to dig up stories online that hold power to account. As these pioneers unearth, tell and distribute their stories in new ways we are beginning to discover just what shape investigative journalism might take in this new medium.

Funding investigative journalism

There is a now-familiar refrain that rumbles across the newsroom as regularly as a train: that online publishing cannot support what is needed for proper journalism – the journalism we have to call “investigative”. The argument is simple. Done the way it has been done for the past 50 years in newspapers and broadcasters, investigative journalism requires a reporter’s time – and, therefore, money. Online publishing – or at least, online advertising – does not currently offer a publisher the same margins that they enjoyed in the past.

But investigative journalism does not have to be pursued – or funded – in one particular way. The newsroom investigative journalist was an endangered species well before the internet arrived, while over the last decade NGOs and activist organisations have taken on an increasing role in funding investigations.

Indeed, the argument that the commercial pain of news organisations leads to cuts in investigative journalism is contradicted by research undertaken by Dutch-Flemish investigative journalism organisation VVOJ. They found that there was no relationship between the financial health of a news organisation and the amount of investigative journalism that was undertaken there.

It is notable that some of the biggest investigative stories in decades have come during one of the worst commercial periods for the newspaper industry: and while the MPs’ expenses and Wikileaks stories may not prove anything about the health of investigative journalism as a whole, they do serve as canonical examples of how it is changing. Because the web specifically – and digital technology more generally – offer new business models around investigative journalism. Primarily these come down to two features: a lowering of costs, and a broadening of revenue streams.

One of the costs of investigative journalism, for example, is that of organisation. As the internet makes it significantly easier to collaborate and communicate with others, the need for a formal news organisation is much reduced. The way that the Wikileaks revelations were managed both with that organisation and between publications in different countries is just one very visible example. My own project Help Me Investigate, meanwhile, proved that it was possible to conduct investigations (such as that into a £2.2m overspend on a council website) with the help of self-organising groups of individuals.

Another cost is time – and here, again, the internet offers efficiencies: a visit to the library is replaced with a visit to the library website, or a database. The FoI Act and related online services make it easier to obtain official documents. Social networks and forums make it easier to find leads, sources and experts.

This is not to argue that investigative journalism can be replaced by an entirely online process, merely to point out that previously time-consuming elements of the process have now been considerably accelerated.

The funding opportunities presented by the web are particularly interesting. Print and broadcast journalism relied on three streams of funding: advertising, for most; cover sales for some; and the licence fee.

Online, those organisational capabilities and reduced costs have opened up other streams: donation-funded investigations, for example, may not be new for charities and NGOs, but even those middlemen are now not always needed. The US website Spot.us, for instance, has successfully facilitated the sponsorship of numerous investigations by users. Other crowdfunding platforms offer the same possibilities to non-journalistic organisations. It is also difficult to pick apart how many subscribers to a platform such as Malaysiakini, for example, are paying for content, and how many to support a cause – its founder notes how subscriptions rise and fall in direct relation to negative actions by the government.

Meanwhile the funding of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, ProPublica and the Huffington Post Investigations Fund (coming from sources other than traditional advertising or cover sales) suggest that we may be seeing a partial separation of the investigative and watchdog roles of the media from those of entertainment, information and current affairs which previously subsidised it. It is not yet clear, of course, how sustainable the individual examples are – but the broader trend towards a wider diversity of funding streams and business models remains.

Part 2, Investigative Journalism As A Genre, is now live here.

UK investigative journalism foundation established – asks for pledges of support

Paul Bradshaw — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:42:59 +0000

There have been rumblings for a while about the establishment of a UK investigation foundation, and now it’s here. They’re not accepting cash at the moment, just pledges of support and help. So go help them.

Here’s their open letter:

Sir,

A group of journalists – among them some of Britain’s most experienced investigative reporters – has been meeting to consider what should be done to address the deep and sustained crisis in our craft.

Even before the onset of the recession, thousands of media jobs had been lost across Britain. The internet, digital television, falling advertising revenues and the commercial pressures of the 24/7 news cycle have all had an impact. While there continues to be great examples of courageous journalism, a growing number of news outlets are increasingly putting emphasis on entertainment, on rapidly-delivered and recycled news rather than the investigation and discovery of what the public wants and needs to know.

And yet the need for information that can hold public institutions to account is as great as ever. Scandals such as MPs’ expenses, the intelligence failings in the run-up to war in Iraq or the behaviour of bankers which led to crisis in the world economy show how many aspects of public life remain critically under-examined.

We have decided to announce the formation of a Foundation for Investigative Reporting to look at what practical steps can be taken, both to experiment with new means of funding essential investigations and to inspire a new generation of reporters. The Foundation will act as an incubator for new ways of conducting journalism and for new ideas of how to finance this kind of reporting.

None of us profess to know the answers, but we are convinced it is time for some bold experiments. In particular, we would like to persuade all those who believe in the value of serious reporting in the public interest to join an open debate about journalism’s future – and to support this work financially.

As of today, we are creating a new rolling fund that will aim to help provide the initial cash required for the kind of risky, challenging reporting and film-making for which there is a crying demand, but few sponsors. This not-for-profit venture will not compete directly with established media, but will instead provide the seeds from which the big stories can grow.

We ask anyone interested in joining the debate to pledge their support or partnership, as well as to offer their views about what should be brought to public light – and isn’t. Further information can be obtained from our website: www.investigationsfund.org.

Yours sincerely,

Antony Barnett, Martin Bright, Heather Brooke, Peter Barron, Nick Davies, Nick Fielding, Misha Glenny, Stephen Grey (editor), Mark Hollingsworth, Andrew Jennings, Philip Knightley, Paul Lashmar, David Leigh, Jason Lewis

Model for the 21st century newsroom pt.6: new journalists for new information flows

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:33:00 +0000

new journalists for new information

Information is changing. The news industry was born in a time of information scarcity – and any understanding of the laws of supply and demand will tell you that that made information valuable.

But the past 30 years have seen that the erosion of that scarcity. Not only have the barriers to publishing, broadcast and distribution been lowered by desktop publishing, satellite and digital technologies, and the web – but a booming PR industry has grown up to provide these news organisations with ‘cheap’ news.

Information is changing. Increasingly, we are not seeking information out – instead, it finds us. The scarcity is not in information, but in our time to wade through it, make meaning of it, and act on it.

Information is changing, and so journalists must too. In the previous parts of this series I’ve looked at how the news process could change in a multiplatform environment; how to involve the former audience; what can now happen after a story is published; journalists and readers as distributors; and new media business models. In this part I want to look at personnel – and how we might move from a generic, hierarchy of ‘reporters’, ‘subs’ and ‘editors’ to a more horizontal structure of roles based on information types.

Quality versus quantity

The strategy of many news organisations so far has been to simply require existing journalists and editors to do more – to make videos and podcasts, take photos and write blogs; to scour social networks and forums and video sites; to encourage user generated content and audience participation. Some have created new positions for community editors, Flash developers and even ‘Data Delivery Editors‘, but those positions are still relatively rare – and the skillsets to do those jobs, even rarer.

I’ve identified 6 journalist roles based on 3 core types of information that I see journalists dealing with in a networked environment. Perhaps you can suggest other roles – or other types of information: This is by no means a complete list.

The 3 types of information:

Feeds (RSS) – not just from news sites and blogs, but anywhere. This post on Passive Aggressive Newsgathering has more.
Social networks – online and offline. You might have called them ‘contacts’ before, but the online element puts things on a different scale and footing. And here’s why: contacts should now be as likely to seek you out, as vice versa.
Databases - publicly available, accessed through processes such as Freedom of Information requests, and built in-house.

The 6 new journalist roles:

The Aggregator-Sub

In the traditional newsroom, the sub sat between the journalist’s content and the reader. In the 21st century newsroom, this is inverted. In a world of information overload, those subbing skills take on a new role to collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.

In other words, what many bloggers have been doing for years in providing a ‘pre-filtered web’ by highlighting the good stuff in their RSS feeds – and for this reason, the Aggregator-Sub may be an existing blogger employed part time or paid a syndication fee (presumably with some training in areas of concern such as law and house style).

The Aggregator-Sub could also perform an important role in the newsroom, highlighting useful leads for other journalists to pursue, or building widgets that present selected aggregations of feeds. A good example is Jemima Kiss’s Newsbucket.

The Mobile Journalist (MoJo)

As news organisations cut the budgets and focused on efficiencies, reporters found it harder and harder to justify time outside the office, becoming increasingly reliant on public relations and official sources in their pursuit of regular, reliable copy.

Ironically, one of the most positive developments of networked technologies is to enable journalists to leave the office while still being connected via mobile phone and 3G/wifi-enabled laptop.

The MoJo, then, is permanently ‘on the road’, Twittering as they go, streaming live video from their phone and posting raw audio from the field. They have a brief to dig out the people and stories that are offline – and give them an online presence. Reuters have experimented with this, as have Gannett, and Trinity Mirror are investing in N96s and wifi laptops for their Midlands reporters. As Chuck Myron says:

“It’s a smarter way of doing business. I’m in the field where stories are happening instead of sitting at my desk, waiting for a phone to ring. I don’t miss important calls, either, since I’ve got a cell phone that’s always in my pocket and not ringing away at my desk while I’m out of earshot at the copier. Technology has made people more mobile, and journalism has to react.”

The Data Miner

The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics. Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org is the godfather of the form, while the New York Times recently launched its own Visualisation Lab. More recent examples include Stephen Grey, Heather Brooke, Louise Acford, and Dominic Casciani.

For an idea of the job spec, here is what the Chicago Tribune was asking of applicants, and here is what the Roanoke Times expected the person to do. For examples of database journalism in action, see my Delicious bookmarks on the topic.

The Multimedia Producer

For all the quality versus quantity arguments, there is nothing inherently wrong with some journalists becoming jacks of all trades (after all, that’s what they have had to be editorially). An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.

The Multimedia Producer has this understanding, and most likely technical skills across audio, video and image production, blogging, using databases, mapping and mashups. They may not do all the work themselves – for example, working with Flash developers on database-driven interactives, or asking a MoJo to get a particular piece of video – but they can see the possibilities.

Here’s a job description from the Roanoke Times (again); another at The Day; and here’s an interview with Regina McCombs of the Star Tribune about her Multimedia Producer role.

The Networked Specialist

This is the specialist reporter for the 21st century: now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.

The successful blogs – Mashable, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, Boing Boing, TPM – are past masters at this: not just reporting on what’s happening, but engaging, passing on, and acting as a crossroads of traffic.

Community Editor

I said earlier that the online element puts community contacts on a different scale and footing. Sources become collaborators, co-writers and distributors, and the Community Editor’s role is to manage that, building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.

There are plenty of journalists performing a community editor role, including Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, Joanna Geary at the Birmingham Post and Mail and Andrew Rogers, head of UGC at Reed Business Information. I’ve been conducting a series of interviews asking community editors for their top three lessons.

The obligatory conceptual diagram

As you can see, the different roles relate to expertise in different types of information. Databases are used particularly by the Data Miner and the Multimedia Producer; feeds by all except the Data Miner (it’s not essential to what they do but could be fed into it, for example a Google Spreadsheet has an RSS feed); and social networks are important in the work of the Community Editor, Networked Specialist and MoJo.

But as always, this is a work in progress. What unusual jobs have you come across as news orgs move to new media? How is information changing, and how does that affect journalists’ roles?

An investigative journalism conference worth paying for

Paul Bradshaw — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:22:51 +0000

Taking place this Friday, the ‘Investigative Journalism Goes Global’ conference at the University of Westminster has one of the most impressive casts of panelists you could ask for (and I’m not just saying that because I’m on one of the panels). An event like this deserves a good turnout – I’m hoping it can spark off some ideas about how we can maintain investigative journalism in a new media world, so if you want to meet up and chat about that let me know. Here’s the full running order:

9:30

Keynote: John Pilger, Author, Freedom Next Time

10:00

Panel ARE THERE LIMITS TO WHAT AN IJ SHOULD DO?

Chair: Steven Barnett, Professor and co-author, Westminster Tales: The 21st Century Crisis in British Political Journalism
David Leigh, The Guardian,
Nick Davies, Author, Flat Earth News,
Andy Bell, BBC Editorial Complaints
Donal MacIntyre, MacIntyre Undercover

Panel UNDERCOVER: HOW FAR CAN YOU GO?

Chair: Geoffrey Davies, Head of Journalism Department, University of Westminster
Marcus Ryder, BBC “Whistleblowers”
Kevin Sutcliffe, Channel 4
Mark Daley, BBC “The Secret Policeman” (tbc)
Shabnam Grewal, BBC Producer
Mike Lewis, ITV

12:00

Investigative Journalism and the Internet in China

Clips from Chinese TV I/J to be shown; Q&A session with

Wang Lei, Southern City News,
Zhou Kangliang, Yunnan TV,
He Wei, Chinese internet specialist,
Hugo de Burgh, Director, China Media Centre

14:00

Panel GLOBAL OPERATIONS Sourcing globally, reporting globally

Chair: Deborah Vogel, Course Leader, Postgraduate Journalism
Stephen Grey, Investigative journalist and author of Ghost Plane,
Gavin McFadyen, Director,Centre of Investigative Journalism,
Paul Bradshaw, Lecturer in Online Journalism, Birmingham City University
Paul Lashmar, Freelance investigative journalist
Deborah Davies, Channel 4 Dispatches

Panel: Academic study of IJ

Chair: Michael Bromley, Head of School of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland
Ivor Gaber, Emeritus Professor of Broadcast Journalism, Goldsmiths College
Meiming Yan, Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University,
Garry Horne, University of the Arts, London
Simon Cross, Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University
Amira Halperin, PhD student, University of Westminster
Stephen Quinn, Associate Professor, Deakin University

16:00

Debate IJ TODAY IS DROSS BY ANOTHER NAME

Chair Sally Feldman

For

Peter Oborne, Investigative journalist & polemicist
Simon Ford, Executive Producer ‘The Tower’ series
Steven Barnett, Professor and co-author, Westminster Tales: The 21st Century Crisis in British Political Journalism

Against

Nick Davies, Author, Flat Earth News,
Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs, Channel 4
Shabnam Grewal, BBC Producer

18:00 Wine Reception