In the olden days (before 1970 perhaps?) the terms “investigative reporting” or “investigative journalism” were not widely used. Newspapers employed “reporters”, who attempted on a daily basis to turn events into stories. “Journalism” as distinguished from “reporting” (despite its derivation from the French word for “daily”) was a term used primarily in academe, as the title for departments and schools in universities, disdained by hard-bitten news reporters.
Beginning reporters for dailies used to be told that their first paragraph should answer the questions Who, What, When, Where and Why. But increasingly the Why is getting lost in “investigative” stories produced for multiple media outlets by teams at non-profit centers. Investigative journalism can be a powerful tool, so it's important that it tell the complete story. That's why we're publishing in this issue a lengthy criticism of a recent investigative report.
These days in dailies you’re more likely to see puffish journalistic feature stories with lengthy descriptive lead paragraphs in prominent positions on the front page (“Venture Capital: Y Combinator Evolving with New Leadership”). The space devoted to straightforward reporting of local news by in-house staff—planning commission meetings, burglaries and the like—has shrunk dramatically, relegated to second sections and back pages.
For the small number of long factual stories still being published, the focus, in newspapers, magazines, broadcast and online media, has shifted to the investigative model. Increasingly, this kind of journalism is practiced at non-profit independent centers funded by big money interests which exist outside the multiple kinds of news outlets which disseminate their products.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition: “Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing.”
Many investigative organizations now rely heavily on some version of data mining: deep reading and interpretation of publicly available information. The technique was perfected by I.F. Stone, who was able to penetrate the secrets of the federal government by his exhaustive study of the documents it produced. (The other kind of reporting which was the product of carefully cultivated relationships between beat reporters and insider sources,à la the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate story, has become less common.)
The greatly expanded availability of online data makes the information-dense strategy even more effective than it used to be. But Izzy Stone’s great strength was adding the Why to his carefully researched facts, and it’s a skill which is often neglected in contemporary investigative reporting.
For many years I’ve been threatening to write a journalism textbook which consists of templates for reliably generic horror stories, which could be used in a fill-in-the-blanks manner by investigative journalists for the kinds of bad situations which never seem to go away: “Nursing Homes Filthy, Unsafe, Neglect Patients,” “Pesticides Traces Found in Applesauce” etc. etc. Stories like this are easy to do: just plug in local names and numbers and you’re home free.
But relying solely on government documents has its perils. In this issue we’re reprinting a lengthy critique of a purported expose of problems with public housing in Richmond which was produced by Berkeley’s Center for Investigative Reporting and featured by the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. The man-bites-dog critic is Tom Butt, a prize-winning architect and long-time progressive councilmember in Richmond. He’s an indefatigable communicator, writing frequent lengthy reports to his constituents and publishing them online as the Tom Butt E-Forum.
The long-and-short of his complaint is that the CIR team ignored facts on the ground in their zeal for mining sensational but dated HUD complaints from online facts in obsolete public records. Here’s the short version of his beef about the housing story, from his site:
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