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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."
You can't take the Huff seriously. IT's a political shill site.
This is my sig.
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?
Stay tuned for new sig...
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
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323944/
Shattered Glass is a film about how an investigative journalist, Adam Peneberg, working for Forbes.com in 1996, exposed journalist Stephen Glass for plagiarizing nearly every article he wrote for The New Republic, a well trusted and highly respected journalistic publication.
This was considered one of the first major breakthroughs for online journalism and it happened in 1996. Online news has been filled with investigative journalism for a while.
Even wikileaks can be seen as legitimate investigative reporting and whistle blowing. http://www.wikileaks.org/
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Is it left-biased, or reality biased? It seems a lot of people that smear the current American left, have been living in the right wing bubble for the last few decades, and can't fess up to the reality bias that reality has.
Only in American can I consider myself, a centrist progressive. The state of politics here is severely depressing, so anything that pulls us out of the childish, conservative, backward looking rut we've been in, is a plus in my book.
http://www.unfocus.com/
The Huffington Post is to journalism what an Asian Nike sweatshop is to day care.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
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.
I'm sure many right wing type people will dismiss your remark out of hand without considering it for a moment, but consider:
1) Which nation did this huge economic disaster start? America, a country that had been under complete Republican rule for 6 of the last 8 years and had undergone many deregulations over the past three decades which directly contributed to this crisis.
2) Which European countries have most felt the economic fallout of this? Iceland and Ireland, the two most free-wheeling democracies in Europe. For years Republicans would use Ireland as an example for us to follow since they had the lowest commercial tax rates in the world. Since Ireland's economy has been in free-fall I haven't heard Republicans mention them at all (I wonder why?).
3) Which European countries have been effected least? Spain and France due to their more conservative banking regulations and greater safety net for people living there.
So take a serious look at the mirror and consider the possibility that Touvan is actually correct--reality really does, in fact, have a left-wing bias (at least in terms of economic policy). The first top economic adviser to Bush 43 resigned shortly into Bush's first term because he was simply ignored and believed their economic policy would be disastrous (paying for wars with tax cuts was an extremely bad idea). It's hard to argue that he was wrong now (it really was even then...).
That reality thinks that universal health care is good?
Umm. That's correct. Or is the rest of the world not proof enough for you? You know, the world in which everyone else spends less, per capita, on healthcare than the US while covering more people?
That taxing is generally the best solution instead of cutting programs?
When did that become an either-or decision?
Can someone explain this to me?
Okay, let's see, examples:
1) Evolution is real and happens, creationism is bollocks.
2) Sex education is good, abstinence-only education does not, and has never, worked.
3) Government involvement in industry (regulations for safety, to avoid systemic risk, etc) is, in fact, sometimes a good thing.
4) Government *can* provide useful services that private industry cannot, or cannot offer cheaply and effectively (healthcare and related social safety nets, various infrastructure development, etc).
That's just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure you can come up with others if you just think about it for a few moments.
So why did Obama keep on so many of Bush's economic team? Geithner for example got a promotion from Goldman-Sachs to Bush's TARP administrator to Obama's Treasury Secretary. I'd suggest that there are not quite as many differences between the two parties as many on both sides like to pretend there are. Both are in favor of crony capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism Your (and since you're just repeating the party line here your party's) attempts to place blame on a fantasy deregulation straw man are... unconvincing to those who do more than accept your play on class warfare chords. Both sides are to blame for allowing so many unproductive ventures to survive for so long on the backs of the productive members of society. One of my favorite pieces on the framework for the current crisis (over last 30 years) is this one: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Parent is not flamebait as the Huffington Post actively works to censor comments it doesn't like and then outright bans the user.
So yes, the Huffington Post does appear to be be a shill site and this attempt at investigative journalism should not be taken seriously.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Seems to me this new investment directly addresses your problem with them. Hiring investigative reporters is the best way to become more fact-based.
That depends on what they choose to investigate and the angle they take. They might take the angle that the Bush twins are party-girl lushes and with a straight face, claim that Biden's daughter "has an addiction problem" with cocaine.
OK, here's a better example: Did the recession start under Bush's watch or did it start when Democrats took over congress? Both are true. How do you report it? Looking at Huff-Po's record of distortion and hatred, I don't have high hopes for honest, non-biased reporting.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I don't have a source, but I always assumed the line "reality has a liberal bias" was a satirical reference to the phrase "reality-based community", which entered the popular lexicon via a Ron Suskind article entitled Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The relevant grafs:
Whenever someone tells me that they think the phrase "reality-based community" is an example of the smug and snide attitude of liberals, I direct them to that article.
We are all biased - I'm biased, you are biased, he's biased. In and of itself, that doesn't have to be a bad thing - bias can be a hell of a motivator.
If $Journalist investigates $Politician because $Politician is a member of $Party and $Journalist thinks $Party are a bunch of crooks, and $Journalist's bias makes him keep digging until he finds something out and reports it, that is GOOD.
However, it is a question of reputation: If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, I can weight what $Journalist write accordingly. If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party and lets that bias color his reporting, I can take that into account. If, on the other hand, I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, and as a result is especially scrupulous on his checking of his facts, I can take that into account as well.
If $Biased_as_Hell_website hires investigative reporters, but is careful not to spike stories from them just because it goes against their bias, then I might read them even if their bias goes against my own. But $Biased_as_Hell_website is going to have to PROVE to me, every day, that they are trying to keep their facts separate from their opinions. And if I get a whiff that they aren't, then I will ignore them from that moment onward.
And if $Journalist gets a reputation for ignoring "inconvenient facts", for going soft on his friends and hard on his foes, then I will blow him off as well.
And THAT is what is important - that these "New Media" types establish reputations I can use to judge their reporting. Be up-front with your bias - at least with DailyKos and Rush I know their biases, and can at least begin to apply a correction factor. But when somebody tries to pretend "Oh, me? I'm not biased, trust me" - I know they are lying to me, I just don't know in which direction to correct for it.
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