The digital revolution could help halt the decline in investigative journalism, thanks to a “new academic and professional discipline” known as ‘computational journalism’, writes John Mecklin in Miller-McCune.

“On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not pay anything like the whole freight for investigative reporting. But [James] Hamilton [director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University] thinks advances in computing can alter the economic equation, supplementing and, in some cases, even substituting for the slow, expensive and eccentric humans required to produce in-depth journalism as we’ve known it.”