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.
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).
Last month I invited Tim Ireland to take questions from students at City University about his experiences in SEO and related issues. One particular section, when he spoke of the role of networks in the legend of Paul Revere, and the significance of the Daily Mail’s false Amanda Knox report, struck me as particularly interesting, so I’m republishing it here.
The video is Creative Commons licensed – feel free to remix it with other video.
In September I spoke at the Balkan Investigative Reporters Network (BIRN) Summer School in Croatia. I took the opportunity to film brief interviews with 4 journalists on their tips for investigating companies, bribery and corruption, and finding and analysing data and experts.
As always these videos are published under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to re-edit the material or add it to other work, with attribution. (In fact, these videos were actually re-edited from the original uploads on my own YouTube account – adding simple titles and re-publishing on the Help Me Investigate YouTube channel using the YouTube editor).
Sunny Hundal is the publisher of the UK political blog Liberal Conspiracy. Two weeks ago I hosted a 30 minute Q&A session between Hundal and students at City University, and also interviewed him briefly myself.
3 video clips of the interview (1-2 minutes each) and one of the Q&A (around 30 minutes) are embedded below. These are also published under a Creative Commons licence so you can remix them if you wish (please let me know if you do).
For this content I chose to write text accompanied by some images and video, published on a blog at a particular moment, for the objective of saving time and gaining feedback.
Something interesting happened to journalism when it moved from print and broadcast to the web. Aspects of the process that we barely thought about started to be questioned: the ‘story’ itself seemed less than fundamental. Decisions that you didn’t need to make as a journalist – such as what medium you would use – were becoming part of the job.
In fact, a whole raft of new decisions now needed to be made.
For those launching a new online journalism project, these questions are now increasingly tackled with a content strategy, a phrase and approach which, it seems to me, began outside of the news industry (where the content strategy had been settled on so long ago that it became largely implicit) and has steadily been rediscovered by journalists and publishers.
Below, I’ve tried to boil down these new decisions into 4 different types – and one overarching factor influencing them all. These are decisions that often have to be made quickly in the face of changing circumstances – I hope that fleshing them out in this way will help in making those decisions quicker and more effectively. Continue reading →
Twi weeks ago I interviewed the journalist Neal Mann following a Q&A session with MA students at City University. Video of both the interview (3 clips of 1-2 minutes each) and the Q&A (around 25 minutes) are embedded below. These are also published under a Creative Commons licence so you can remix them if you wish (please let me know if you do).
