investigative
Last week a new endeavour to support UK investigative journalism was announced. Here, in an article originally published on the Investigations Fund website, journalists Stephen Grey and Nick Fielding outline their grave concerns about the news industry.

The news business is in crisis. In radio, television and newspapers, jobs are being slashed, budgets cut, and all forms of serious investigation by the media are under threat.

The trend is global: in the last year, thousands of jobs of in the media industry have been lost.

Less Investigation
While news is delivered ever faster, increasingly fewer resources are devoted by the media to the process of both gathering new information and making sense of it.

Television, both public or private, provides little opportunity for serious journalism - world-beating programs like Granada TV's World in Action, Yorkshire TV’s First Tuesday no longer exist at all; only a handful of programs, like the BBC's Panorama, or Channel 4's Dispatches, have survived, but under tough budget pressures.

Newspapers, with declining circulations and revenues, are able to devote less and less resources to the basic business of 'finding stuff out'; some often seem ever more dominated by the recycling of celebrity and personality-driven stories, and a dumbed-down agenda based more on cheaply - harvest comment rather than discovery of facts. The void in new and in-depth material is in some quarters filled by cheap-to-produce trivia, the repetition of well-known 'facts' and manipulation by public relations - information provided in the service of a particular corporate, political or paid-for sectional interest.

Depressing trends [i]:
  •  60 local papers in Britain have closed in the last 12 months, and over 4,000 jobs in the UK media went from July 2008 to January 2009, including the jobs of at least 1,000 journalists.
  • The average Fleet Street journalist now fills three times as much editorial space as he or she did in 1985.
  • According to research commissioned for Nick Davies' book Flat Earth News, only 12 per cent of stories in Britain’s quality newspapers show evidence that they have been thoroughly checked.
  • 54 per cent of stories in Britain’s quality newspapers are wholly or mainly constructed from PR material.
More Complexity
Even as the practice of investigative journalism - the pro-active search for facts and explanations in the public interest - is squeezed and endangered by ever-greater commercial pressure, global trends make world events themselves ever more complex. The 'story' itself has got beyond what any individual investigator - be they a newspaper or media organisation or official agency - can investigate with their own resources. In the regulation of the corporate sphere, investigation is increasingly privatised under the guise of 'self-regulation' or 'due diligence'.

In both television and newspapers, as the cause of economic and political events that affect us all are increasingly decided at a global level, foreign news coverage has declined inexorably.

A pressing need for information - and for innovation
There is a crying need for good journalism.

The need for good information - and holding those in power to account - is more pressing and as obvious as ever.
  • The invasion of Iraq - which has cost US$694 billion so far and nearly 100,000 civilian lives - was launched based on poor information [ii].
  • The collapse of Britain's banking system followed a failure by both the authorities  and the media to investigate what was happening.
  • Across the nation, we're affected by crime and by poor public services ; and yet the press benches in our town halls and courtrooms across the country are largely empty.
In a globalised world we need reliable information that cannot be collected by any one individual. You can no longer form an intelligent view of the world and the threats to your own way of life  just by looking around you. You need a media working in your interest.

  • Why did no-one tell us that US bankers were boosting their profits and their bonuses by selling millions of mortgages to people who couldn't pay them, thus triggering a collapse in the US sub-prime market?
  • If a Vietnamese chicken farmer catches flu from one of his chickens and that flu mutates so that it can pass from human to human, I now need to know about that because planes fly every day from Vietnam to the rest of the world.
And yet just as our need for reliable information increases, the primary potential source of that reliable flow, i.e the news media, shrinks.

Meanwhile, a spreading fog of official secrecy protects us from knowing such basic questions as:
  • Who owns our towns and cities?
  • Exactly how does the government spends its money?
  • Who is creating the pollution that threatens our planet with global warming?
  • What decisions are being made about our neighbourhood?
There is a vast accountability gap emerging where - particularly at a local level - public officials and corporations are subject to less and less scrutiny. Local newspaper offices are shutting down, one after another, to be replaced by  'freesheets'. And while the Internet can encourage a global view, it is often at the expense of the local.

There is also a technology gap between corporations and governments and the media that scrutinise them. Technology is rarely used to full capacity by those who gather information for the public, namely journalists, and by the public themselves. We know from experience that journalists are typically far too busy on deadline to learn the possibilities of the computers they have under their desks; most use their computers as little more than electronic typewriters or, at best, as Google portals. All this reflects a vast excess capacity of technology we own and could exploit.

A search for new ways of gathering news - and funding it
No-one has yet worked out yet - in the current economic circumstances and changes to the media industry - how to pay for and manage good journalism in the public interest.

But there are many committed to working co-operatively to finding a solution, including many of the leading investigative journalists in Europe and the United States.

In the USA, a number of projects are underway that aim not only to keep journalism alive and finance vital investigations, but also to experiment with durable ways of making that journalism pay for itself.

While good journalism is highly prized by its consumers, the challenge is to find a way to make those consumers pay for it.

Among the biggest American projects are:
  • Huffington Post Investigative Fund - aiming to bankroll investigative journalists with a budget of US$1.75m and staff of 10 journalists, directing attention initially at the US economy.
  • ProPublica - a not-for-profit investigative news organisation founded in 2008 and led by Paul Steiger, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, and with an US$10m annual operating budget underwritten by the Sandler Foundation.
  • Centre for Public Integrity, founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis, as an independent watchdog of public institutions and corporate power.
  • Centre for Investigative Reporting, founded in 1977, is the oldest non-profit news organisation in the US. It funds print, broadcast and web reporting, and was co-founded by Lowell Bergmann.
Until now, nothing similar as been created in Europe, but the time is ripe for such an enterprise, particularly when the crisis of journalism in Britain is so acute.

A fund for investigative reporting in Britain
A coalition of both leading journalists and concerned private individuals is emerging to support the creation a new Fund for Investigative Reporting that will not only promote and support the finest investigative journalism in this country, but will research by experiment new ways of financing such reporting in the public interest.

Steered by a board of advisers from among the most respected and successful in the profession of investigative reporting in Britain and internationally, the Fund will seek the widest possible dissemination of the results of its investigations by working in partnership with existing and emerging media platforms. Initially at least, it will function as a production house, rather than a publisher, although it will maintain a strong web presence to highlight the stories that it has uncovered, as well as promote the work of investigative journalism more widely.

Given the global nature of many topics of interest, the enterprise will engage in significant cooperation with partner institutions and individual journalists across the globe.

The enterprise will seek, as far as possible, to maximise its resources and ability to finance investigations by selling material to media outlets but also by experimenting with a wide variety of other innovative fundraising techniques.

You can pledge your support at this link.

[i] Sources: Closure of local newspapers is from BBC’s Nick Higham; job losses from UK Press Gazette and NUJ; other figures from research conducted for Flat Earth News by Nick Davies by Cardiff University.

[ii] Cost of war from LA Times (11/4/09); civilian deaths from Iraq body count, which bases its conservative estimate on actual reported cases of lives lost.

Stephen Grey, journalist and author of 'Operation Snakebite' is editor of the Investigations Fund. Nick Fielding, journalist and author of 'Masterminds of Terror,' blogs at Circling the Lion's Den and is a founding member of the Investigations Fund.

Related links on Journalism.co.uk:


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