Monthly Archives: August 2011

Has investigative journalism found its feet online? (part 3)

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Previously this serialised chapter for the forthcoming book Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive? looked at new business models surrounding investigative journalism and online investigative journalism as a genre. This third and final part looks at how changing supplies of information change the context within which investigative journalism operates.

What next for investigative journalism in a world of information overload?

But this identity crisis does highlight a final, important, question to be asked: in a world where users have direct access to a wealth of information themselves, what is investigative journalism for? I would argue that it comes down to the concept of “uncovering the hidden”, and in exploring this it is useful to draw an analogy with the general journalistic idea of “reporting the new”.

Trainee journalists sometimes see “new” in limited terms – as simply what is happening today. But what is “new” is not limited to that. It can also be what is happening tomorrow, or what happened 30 years ago. It can be something that someone has said about an “old story” days later, or an emerging anger about something that was never seen as “newsworthy” to begin with. The talent of the journalist is to be able to spot that “newness”, and communicate it effectively.

Journalism typically becomes investigative when that newness involves uncovering the hidden – and that can be anything that our audience couldn’t see before – it could be a victim’s story, a buried report, 250,000 cables accessible to 2.5 million people, or even information that is publicly available but has not been connected before (“the hidden” – like “the new” is, of course, a subjective quality, dependent on the talent of a particular journalist for finding something in it – or a way of seeing it – that is newsworthy). Continue reading →

Has investigative journalism found its feet online? (part 2)

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The first part of this serialised chapter for the forthcoming book Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive? looked at new business models surrounding investigative journalism. This second part looks at how new ways of gathering, producing and distributing investigative journalism are emerging online.

Online investigative journalism as a genre

Over many decades print and broadcast investigative journalism have developed their own languages: the spectacular scoop; the damning document; the reporter-goes-undercover; the doorstep confrontation, and so on. Does online investigative journalism have such a language? Not quite. Like online journalism as a whole, it is still finding its own voice. But this does not mean that it lacks its own voice.

For some the internet appears too fleeting for serious journalism. How can you do justice to a complex issue in 140 characters? How can you penetrate the fog of comment thread flame wars, or the “echo chambers” of users talking to themselves? For others, the internet offers something new: unlimited space for expansion beyond the 1,000 word article or 30-minute broadcast; a place where you might take some knowledge, at least, for granted, instead of having to start from a base of zero. A more cooperative and engaged medium where you can answer questions directly, where your former audience is now also your distributor, your sub-editor, your source.

The difference in perception is largely a result of people mistaking parts for the whole. The internet is not Twitter, or comment threads, or blogs. It is a collection of linked objects and people – in other words: all of the above, operating together, each used, ideally, to their strengths, and also, often in relationship to offline media. Continue reading →

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

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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.
Continue reading →

SFTW: 9 data journalism tools

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There have been quite a few tools springing up over the past few months that I’ve not had time to blog about, so here’s a roundup post on all of them – a bumper Something For The Weekend (let me know how you find these).

1. Junar – for scraping websites and sharing data

Junar presents a much easier way to scrape data from online tables with its ‘Collect Data‘ tool – and the team behind it tell me they have plans to build functionality allowing users to scrape linked pages, as well as the ability to scrape PDFs. Continue reading →

When will we stop saying “Pictures from Twitter” and “Video from YouTube”?

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Image from YouTube

Image from YouTube

Over the weekend the BBC had to deal with the embarrassing ignorance of someone in their complaints department who appeared to believe that images shared on Twitter were “public domain” and “therefore … not subject to the same copyright laws” as material outside social networks.

A blog post, from online communities adviser Andy Mabbett, gathered thousands of pageviews in a matter of hours before the BBC’s Social Media Editor Chris Hamilton quickly responded:

“We make every effort to contact people, as copyright holders, who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage.

“In exceptional situations, ie a major news story, where there is a strong public interest in making a photo available to a wide audience, we may seek clearance after we’ve first used it.”

(Chris also published a blog post yesterday expanding on some of the issues, the comments on which are also worth reading)

The copyright issue – and the existence of a member of BBC staff who hadn’t read the Corporation’s own guidelines on the matter – was a distraction. What really rumbled through the 170+ comments – and indeed Andy’s original complaint – was the issue of attribution.

Continue reading →

A quick note to Louise Mensch: sunlight is the best disinfectant

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Plenty of others have given their own opinion on MP Louise Mensch’s suggestion that authorities should be able to shut down social media during civil unrest, so I just want to add a couple of experiences:

Here’s the first: when rumours spread about children being kidnapped in supermarket toilets, they first spread by text message (not social media). When they spread via the semi-public Facebook, it was easier for others to raise questions or debunk them. On Twitter – a much more public medium – it seems even harder for rumour to get a foothold.

I’ve written before about similar rumours and how journalists can and do play a role in debunking them.

I’ve also written about the potential for automated debunking. The less ‘social’ a medium, the harder it is to create these automated services, and the harder it is to distribute facts.

Finally, I’ve written about how journalists can use the qualities of social media itself to more easily separate rumour from fact.

Gossip and rumour don’t need social media to spread. Removing social media – in my experience (and that of the police, apparently) – just makes it harder to spot, and debunk.

How to: convert easting/northing into lat/long for an interactive map

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A map generated in Google Fusion Tables from a geocoded dataset
A map generated in Google Fusion Tables from a dataset cleaned using these methods

Google Fusion Tables is great for creating interactive maps from a spreadsheet – but it isn’t too keen on easting and northing. That can be a problem as many government and local authority datasets use easting and northing to describe the geographical position of things – for example, speed cameras.

So you’ll need a way to convert easting and northing into something that Fusion Tables does like – such as latitude and longitude.

Here’s how I did it – quickly. Continue reading →

Why we need open courts data – and newspapers need to improve too

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Justice

Justice photo by mira66

Few things sum up the division of the UK around the riots like the sentencing of those involved. Some think courts are too lenient, while others gape at six month sentences for people who stole a bottle of water.

These judgments are often made on the basis of a single case, rather than any overall view. And you might think, in such a situation, that a journalist’s role would be to find out just how harsh or lenient sentencing has been – not just across the 1,600 or more people who have been arrested during the riots, but also in comparison to previous civil disturbances – or indeed, to similar crimes outside of a riot situation.

As Martin Belam argues:

“Really good data journalism will help us untangle the truth from those prejudiced assumptions. But this is data journalism that needs to stay the course, and seems like an ideal opportunity to do “long-form data journalism”. How long will these looters serve? What is the ethnic make-up and age range of those convicted? How many other criminals will get an early release because our jails are newly full of looters? How many people convicted this week will go on to re-offend?”

And yet, amazingly, we cannot reliably answer these questions – because it is still not possible to get raw data on sentencing in UK courts, not even through FOI. Continue reading →

INFOGRAPHIC: UK riots – Gauging the Columnists Blame Game

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Here’s a quick experiment in data visualisation to provide an instant insight into a story on how the blame game is being played by columnists.

The data is taken from a Liberal Conspiracy blog post – I’ve transferred that into a spreadsheet with limited categories and used the Gauges gadget to visualise the totals.

A screengrab is below – but there is also an embed code that provides a gauge that will be updated whenever a new columnist is added. See the spreadsheet for both the gauge and the raw data.

Columnist Blame Game Gauge - UK Riots

Columnist Blame Game Gauge