Slashdot Mirror
Investigative Journalism Being Reborn Through the Web?
Combating the stigma that investigative journalism is dead or dying, the Huffington Post has just launched a new venture to bankroll a group of investigative journalists to take a look into stories about the nation's economy. "The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said. The Huffington Post Web site is a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news. It has seven staff reporters. Huffington said she and the donors were concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time the nation's institutions need to be watched closely. She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists for the venture."
I believe the big question here is whether the journalists will be provided the protection that the big newspapers could always provide. It is fine to believe in the letter of the constitution but without the backing of a major media conglomerate with deep pockets to go to bat for you when you are sued in indispensible. You may want to say something publicly against corporate America but the fear of repercussions is usually what limits individuals from doing so. So...how would they propose to protect the whistleblowers?
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I mean apart from in the US where the media appears to have become scared of actually questioning politicians or holding them to account. Journalism in the UK still seems to find the dirt on politicians and companies and deep investigative exercises are still carried out in lots of different areas.
The basic issue in the US is the partisan nature of both politics and the media, why bother to investigate when its all basically just monkeys throwing shit at a wall. Blogs and the internet are unlikely to change that as its just going to be the same partisan stuff with slightly different shit.
When the likes of Jon Stewart are the finest investigative political journalists that your country has then you know you are in trouble.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Disconnect. Bad plan, darlings. Journalism is undergoing a paradigm shift right now in the same way graphics design underwent it. Before the 1990s, we had separate jobs for typesetting, graphic artist, layout, etc. All that went out the window when the PC came along and suddenly anyone could make a newsletter using PageMaker. The demand for all that graphic design footwork -- needing to hire a team of people to design it, imploded. What came out of it was the versatile graphic designer -- a jack of all trades. Journalism until recently had many different career paths. With the collapse of the printed media and an entire generation growing up used to the idea of instant access to everything, cross-referenced and streaming on demand -- deadlines have gone from a day to a few minutes. How long does it take to get indexed into google so people can search for your article? That time difference is the new deadline. And audiences aren't local anymore -- they are global.
Reconnect. Our collective knowledge is also heavily slanted to the global and national level now. For example, up here in Minnesota, a recent "local" story has been the flooding near Fargo, ND and Moorhead, MN along the Red river. When I asked my friends who would be willing to car pool up with me to help sandbagging efforts last friday (the story had been out for a good week) -- only one of my friends had any knowledge of the event, out of about 15 people I asked. Local news doesn't exist anymore for our generation. Strange, but true. Of course, they ALL knew about major national and global events. Our communities really are losing their geographical ties.
I see the future of journalism being somewhat akin to blogging. Journalists simply pick their own interest and self-direct their energies towards it. Interested parties will, via word of mouth and advertisement, come to know that particular journalist. A one-to-many relationship. The sources for these stories will be the readers of those stories. Slashdot is a decent example of what journalism will come to resemble -- open, online forums that are dedicated to particular communities. But I highly doubt that in the journalism to come that people will simply visit one website for their needs. It'll probably look more like Google news -- RSS feeds that we select and create lists of journalists who are involved in fields we have a mutual interest in.
Journalism will become, much like graphic design, at least half or more self-employed or contract/temp work in the next ten years. And we'll come to know journalists by name, instead of by what network or paper they represent.
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HuffPo is an extreme left-wing wannabe news outlet. By investigate, what they really mean is "smear machine."
I think that whether you like the Huffington Post is beside the point: they're going to pay investigative reporters. For a little while now, lots of people have been concerned about the fact that newspapers are dying off and have asked the question, "How will get get our news now?"
The reason lots of people have said that sites like the Huffington Post can't be considered "replacements" for newspapers is that they don't have investigative reporters that actually find and generate news stories. What they do is more like aggregate news and op-ed pieces, so if newspapers die, they'll have nothing to aggregate. And that's a valid complaint.
However, if these sites start getting big enough to employ their own reporters and they start actually doing their own investigations, then the death of newspapers becomes less of a scary prospect. Right now, the Huffington Post is just one example of people trying to find a business model that allows for real journalism without the need of an actual printed newspaper. If some successful business models are found, then we might just be ok.
But you're pointing out that the Huffington Post has a slant, and that's a fair thing to note. However, print newspapers also each have their own slant, so it's not really anything new.
And slashdot is a pro-tech, pro-netneutrality, pro-science blog. Fox news has investigative journalists. No reason the left shouldn't. No reason Slashdot shouldn't. No reason why anyone with an agenda shouldn't be generating content. And at least you understand the bias when you read huffington post. It doesn't attempt to hide behind any veil like a certain other news organization.
The problem isn't whether or not there is bias it's whether or not the reader knows the bias and filters appropriately.
Thank you. The idea of journalistic neutrality is bullshit. Go back 100 years, when each city had a dozen newspapers. All of them were wildly biased and when you picked up a newspaper, you knew what you were getting - heck, it often stated its bias or philosophy in the mast head! Go look in Europe in the pre-War years - many of the newspapers were organs of the political parties.
Pretending to be unbiased is nonsense - I'd rather have a couple papers that report ferociously with an in-the-open bias then the subtle, stupid bias (towards sensationalism) that we have in the modern, neutered American press.
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