Journalism: data journalism
he believed that the future of journalism is ‘going
to be about poring over data’ and employing ‘the
tools to analyse it’, with a view to ‘seeing where it
all fi ts together, and what’s going on in the coun-
try’. In 2011 London’s City University launched
an MA course in interactive journalism, part of
its curriculum being data journalism.
▶www.city.ac.uk/study/courses/arts/interactive-
journalism-ma.html.
Journalism: investigative journalism Of all
journalistic forms, investigative journalism is the
one most at risk, even though the best investiga-
tive journalism is the jewel in the crown of media
communication. Today we have 24-hour news
demanding not better, more thorough, more
penetrating work from journalists, but more and
faster. Time is money, and more and more media
organizations are cutting back on the time-
consuming practices of investigating a story.
Th e November-December issue of the UK Free
Press carried an article entitled Public Interest
Journalism: Who’ll pay the price? by Adrian
White, General Secretary of the International
Federation of Journalists, who laments that
‘commercial news publishers are less and less
willing to spend the money needed for the
proper in-depth reporting that citizens need in
a democracy’. White writes, ‘Th e media obses-
sion with celebrity and entertainment at the
expense of analysis and scrutiny of public aff airs
has created an information vacuum,’ raising the
question, ‘if commercial media no longer want
this kind of story, who will provide them in
future – and who will pay?’
Is the internet the answer? White is not
optimistic, stating that ‘it is increasingly clear
that no amount of tweeting and social network-
ing will fill the void caused by the decline of
thorough investigative journalism’. One possibil-
ity which White addresses is public funding,
quoting Dan Hind, who in his Th e Return of the
Public (Verso, 2010) proposes public trusts to
share out funds to worthy investigative causes.
Models of support of this kind would seem to
raise new problems, particularly of journalistic
independence, but White believes ‘they deserve
consideration because without fresh thinking
about the institutional framwework for the
independent and democratic dispersal of public
money, the initiative will rest with governments
alone’ – representing the biggest threat of all
to independence. See journalism: citizen
journalism; news elements: breaking,
explanatory, deep background.
Journalism: participatory journalism See
genre.unreliability of images published from unso-
licited, unchecked sources, as well as issues of
privacy.
Of particular interest to researchers is how
professional journalists react to ‘competition’
from citizen journalists. Reporting her research
findings in ‘The Internet, mobile phones and
blogging’, published in Journalism Practice 2
(2008), Rena Kim Bivens records that the profes-
sionals are increasingly ready to make space for
citizen contributions which supplement their
own work, and that they themselves operate
in the blogosphere. Says Bivens, ‘the readily
accessible blogosphere greatly expands potential
sources and knowledge of a wider range of
discourses, and journalist blogging increases
engagement with audiences while amplifying
and extending the production process’.
Th ere remain ‘credibility concerns, followed by
antagonistic attitudes towards citizen-produced
content and occasionally a lack of technological
knowledge’. Citizen journalism is largely event-
driven rather than institution-driven, and Bivens
points out that ‘despite all these developments,
news organization remains firmly embedded
within traditional power structures, with owner-
ship control and elite political power restricting
the limits of permissible debate and preserv-
ing narrow news agenda’. See patch; yaros’
‘pick’ model for multimedia news, 2009;
youtube.
Journalism: data journalism That which
focuses on delving into statistical data to
produce news stories, and with a view to holding
governments, organizations, institutions and
local authorities to account. An outstanding
example of this was the revelation over months,
in 2009–10, by the UK Daily Telegraph of the
widespread exploitation by members of parlia-
ment (and of the House of Lords) of the system
of parliamentary allowances. Offenders were
named from all parties and included government
ministers (the minister responsible for immigra-
tion was found to have claimed for nappies,
women’s clothes and panty liners).
The Telegraph’s team of data diggers also
found that more than a hundred peers claimed
in excess of 50,000 each for their work in the
Lords. Th e revelations seriously damaged the
reputation of the UK parliament, and indeed of
Britain itself. Transparency International, the
leading global index of corruption, placed the
UK 20th in their annual league-table of ‘clean
countries’, a drop of six places from 2006.
In a speech in November 2010, Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, said