DarrenBarefoot.com

Journalism doesn’t equate with ‘investigative journalism’.

Take any mainstream periodical or television network or radio station and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything remotely resembling ‘investigative journalism’.

It is, and has always been, a pretty rare commodity.

For one thing, it’s expensive to do . Mostly this is because it takes time. And it often takes really good lawyers - read - the best lawyers - if you want to publish. It takes a lot of fact checking and deep sources and an intimate understanding of the story. It also takes a reporter with a lot of tenacity.

A zillion years ago when I was a reporter in Calgary, then CBC investigative journalist (now film maker) Jerry Thompson spent weeks living on the Calgary equivalent of our Downtown East Side to produce one of the first stories I ever saw about ‘homelessness’ in oil rich Alberta. This was in 1985. To hide the wireless mic he was wearing, he had it embedded in a cast on his supposedly ‘broken’ arm. Today, this kind of work is only done by indie doc film makers and dare I say it, activists. And, unfortunately for all of us, it’s done rarely.

The challenge here is that real investigative journalism isn’t something you can do on a fly-by. People who uncover REAL stories at city hall or the legislature do so because they’ve spent years hanging out at meetings there - most of which are boring as bat doo. It’s bloody hard work, not very rewarding, and usually means everybody’s pissed at you.

I hope you’re right that we actually will see ‘investigative citizen journalists’. We’re going to need some organizations to support them though. In 1985 in Calgary, no one believed there was a homeless problem - just ‘problem people’. The fact that Jerry’s investigative piece was broadcast on the supper time news show made it difficult to discount as the ramblings of some ‘activist’ just trying to cause trouble.

=Robert

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Not that I’m actually knowledgeable about this, but it seems that “journalism” (investigative or otherwise) died long before the online social networks took off. Newspapers (and journalism) killed themselves by giving up on expressing a point of view, and simply spewing fast facts first… could be totally wrong. All I now is, I can’t watch TV reporting, nor follow anything published on a daily basis. It’s all too lifeless.

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One really excellent example of modern-day, Internet-fuelled investigative journalism is Pro Publica (http://www.propublica.org/about/) The site draws heavily on a blogging format, and while its writers are heavily from a journalistic background, I would argue that any dogged, don’t-care-whose-toes-I-step on, smart and honest writer would be able to do that kind of work. They just need the right contacts and enough money to be persistent.

In that case, that persistence is fuelled by the very deep pockets of the Sandler Foundation. So maybe figuring out the money model of how the Internet/investigative relationship works is the key.

Also, I love this idea:

“…divide the work of one journalist among 15 citizen journalists, and have each of them attend four town hall meetings a year. Collaborative tools make this approach possible if challenging.”

I’d definitely volunteer to pass on my overpriced j-school training and reporting experience if it meant the quality of news (and subsequently democracy) in the country might improve.

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Again, I’ll point out that purportedly objective, neutral-point-of-view journalism is a relatively recent (and now perhaps short-lived) phenomenon.

Very useful, true, but as this post and its comments have come to point out, not something that is required to exist by any law of nature.

Many have also argued that while such journalism attempts to be (or likes to make itself out to be) objective, it never really can be, because at some point someone has to decide what stories are worth covering, at the very least. And many times that is a subjective decision.

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Excellent post. The distinction between covering and uncovering the news is especially prescient.

I am not sure that journalism has died, print or otherwise; however investigative journalism certainly receded from mainstream distribution (the classic ’70s film NETWORK was amazingly prescient in predicting the rise of reality television and soft news talk shows over hard news), and the perception that journalism died definitively gave rise to the first citizen-driven online journalism platform, Indymedia. And Indymedia, as the hybrid of (traditional) alternative media (radio, zines, underground newspapers etc), investigative journalism, and activism, strove toward “fact” based reporting (by providing on-the-ground reportage of events) yet from the “opinion” of a position that mainstream corporate media rarely bothered with (being on-the-ground, and within the event itself: by embracing its subject position, it questioned the mainstream media’s production of “objectivity” when such a position was deeply compromised by corporate interests).

Social media, however, enters into a territory far more complex and compromised by way of the corporate product that is the social network itself, constrained by technological limitations, as well as a mindset more open, it appears, to a blurring of the boundaries between journalism and public relations.

I’ve been thinking about this in light of social media at the Olympicon (see below), and as Darren brought me here by leaving a comment on a post I’ve writ analysing social media at the 2010 games, I will do the same — readers of this post might be interested in it and the discussion there as well:

http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/?p=340

Thx for the discussion and great comments above.

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An interesting post Darren. From my perspective, the future of investigative journalism is very much at risk.

In my case, digging up stories about the provincial government requires a substantial and ongoing time investment. And, to date, there have been very few citizen journalists who have stepped up to do that kind of grunt work - even at the most basic level.

Filing freedom of information requests, for example, is really easy. But the only bloggers I can think of who have submitted such requests are the folks over at CityCaucus.com.

Meanwhile, mainstream media companies seems increasingly unwilling to pay for investigative journalism. And it’s difficult to get readers to fill that pay gap.

After several months of pitching a contribution plan where readers donate $10 million in return for a monthly newsletter, I’ve only got just over 40 subscribers. I feel grateful to those 40. And it’s better than a kick in the pants. But not enough to live on, certainly.

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So, after reading Sean’s comment above, I have to ask, where does that leave us?

The private sector won’t underwrite investigative journalism. Government won’t subsidize it. And the general public won’t pay for it.

Well, citizen reporters can’t do it for free indefinitely. Is it inevitable that our institutions be gradually corrupted like rust eating away at an old abandoned car?

The only realistic solution I read here is the Sandler Foundation-supported ProPublica.org. Underwritten by a generous, arms-length private benefactor. This allows a non-profit investigative news outlet that acts purely in the public interest to grow and prosper.

And it avoids the self-censuring trap that donation or sponsored journalism breeds. Even the NPR or PBS-type networks could one day become addicted to “corporate sponsorship” and “shy away” from stories that may raise hackles amongst generous benefactors.

The CBC and BBC government-subsidized model may also play a role. Maybe a hybrid supported model of public/private subsidy at arms length is the right mix.

Thanks for this post Darren.

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