Huffington Post Investigative Fund will be funded by the HuffPo and The Atlantic Philanthropies with The American News Project folded into the initiative.
The fund will also involve City University of New York journalism students in investigative work.
Wall Street Journal reporters Sue Schmidt and Glenn Simpson are leaving the title to set up a new firm, where they’ll conduct investigative work for private clients. A sign of the times?
The Washington Times has announced plans for a new syndicated radio show featuring the paper’s investigative reporting and accountability journalism.
The three-hour show will be carried by Talk Radio Network.
Citing examples such as Talking Points Memo and Voice of San Diego, Mike Masnick argues that investigative journalism is being done better, faster and cheaper online than it ever was in newspapers.
“Newspapers never spent that much on investigative reporting, and they rarely did a particularly good job of it, other than an occasional big story in an attempt to win a Pulitzer. People can pine about that mythical genie and bottle, or they can start focusing on all the opportunity out there that will be coming out of some of these (or other) experiments,” he writes.
This week, Roger Cook was the latest journalist to publicly bemoan the state of television investigations in the UK.
Speaking at Coventry University on Thursday, as part of the ‘Coventry Conversations’ line-up, Cook expressed anxiety for the future of investigative journalism, the craft which made his name.
“Many investigative programmes can’t afford it now, the management and the commissioners seem to think that it is too much like hard work, and that it takes a lot of backing up.”
Asked about current investigative reporters, and the approach they commonly use, Cook answered “I think audiences aren’t stupid, and they very quickly recognise who a programme is being done for.”
“ Is it for the people in it, or the man presenting it?” he asked.
“We are going up into the ether where there are no regulations, so you will have to believe less and less of what you see,” he said, in relation to potential issues arising from making internet-based documentaries.
Cook also expressed his disapproval at this week’s cost-cuts and recent editorial direction at ITV. “In my view they are doing the wrong thing” he stated. ”Take money out of programmes and fewer people watch it, compounding the downward cycle.”
Cook, who has been a journalist for over forty years, remembers a time when ITV would invest vast amounts of money into factual programmes, such as his very own Cook Report.
“It was once a great institution,” he said. ”There was very high quality production in every area, but factual just about disappeared; the last remaining regular factual programme was mine.”
ITV should ‘spend more money on programmes and less on personalities,’ he said.
“ How many programmes could you make if you didn’t employ Simon Cowell or Ant and Dec?” he asked.
The Toronto Star’s John Honderich looks at five options for funding investigative stories in Canada. These are already relatively well-known examples among journalist/media commentators and bloggers, but Honderich’s post is an interesting read.
As part of its ‘Doing More With Less’ series, the Editors Weblog interviews some of the team behind not-for-profit investigative journalism site, VoiceOfSanDiego.org, set up to fill the emerging gap in local analytical and accountability journalism.
The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) has been busy creating some new resources for journalists working in the field.
For starters you can subscribe to the centre’s delicious links, which can be viewed by date using the following format http://delicious.com/cijournalism/19_Jan_09 or subscribed to via RSS. Anyone who wants to subscribe through email should contact cij@city.ac.uk.
Links and occasional posts will also be published at the new CIJ blog.
This is all part of the CIJ’s current awareness policy – outlined by CIJ’s Murray Dick in this blog post, in which he says:
“At the CIJ, we need to keep up-to-speed on examples of excellence in investigative journalism, for a number of reasons.” These include:
- “The need to reach out to investigative researchers (and other interested parties, like whistle blowers and journalism students) wherever they are, to offer our help and services.
- “The need to develop our current contacts.
- “The need to keep track on journalists who are new to the field, to supplement our speakers.
- “The need to keep track on trends in investigative research, FOI, Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR), and new fields as they arise, which will help CIJ policy as it applies to our training and events.
“Relying on our own reading in the field is fine, but there is a whole world of new – and old – media out there which we could do with keeping on top of, not to mention people we haven’t heard of yet. A comprehensive approach is needed to make sure we don’t fall behind in the field.”
Dave Winer: “One of the common complaints from people in journalism about bloggers is that we just comment on reports in the news, we don’t do original reporting. It’s so often repeated it’s become a cliche, but it’s simply not true and I can prove it.” Full story…
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.”