Abstract
Investigative journalism is such a public good that surely we can work out how to fund it, says an experienced reporter
The fall-out from the revelations about the harvesting and use in election campaigning of Facebook data by the London-based Cambridge Analytica has been extraordinary. Brilliant reporting by Carole Cadwalladr demonstrated the importance of investigative journalism. Yet over the past decade this type of expensive, time-consuming work has been under intense pressure to prove its worth in depleted newsrooms.
Any discussion about investigative journalism begins with a search for a definition that provides a means of setting it apart from “other” journalism. For practitioners, it tends to be the journalism that happens outside the flow of the news cycle. It is less concerned with reporting a true and accurate reflection of important events of the day than with the long-term scrutiny of people, companies and governments that wield power – and thus ultimately holds those who shape our world accountable.
Under this broad understanding of investigative journalism lies a crucial point: that critical, questioning and evidence-based reporting serves a public good. But in the rapidly changing online landscape, the media industry, trying to provide 24-hour news while struggling to make the financial model work as advertisers and paying readers disappear, has had to take tough decisions. The resources required to build the necessary evidence that enables the reporter to turn a tip into the undisputed truth may provide a societal good, but what is its value in a newsroom with shrinking resources?
Ironically, the very time that the cost of producing deep dive investigative reporting has come under the spotlight is also the very moment at which society has needed it most. Over the past two decades we have seen the march of an industry bent on spin, hype, misinformation and opacity with the sole purpose of protecting those in power. Across the board, from the giant multinational to the small local authority, a legion of public relations staff, lawyers and accountants have been hired to “protect” the reputations of those in power, to hide spending, cover up mistakes, disguise wrongdoing and resist all efforts at scrutiny.
One only needs to look at the most notable pieces of investigative journalism over the past couple of years to see how this is playing out. Revelations made by The Times about Oxfam staff exploiting their positions in Haiti were even more shocking told through the lens of the cover-up that had gone on at the top of the charity to prevent the exploits ever coming to light. Equally, the work by Cadwalladr revealed not only that Facebook data had been amassed by third parties and used for electioneering purposes, but that the social media giant had known about the problem for years and tried to cover it up – even threatening to take expensive legal action against The Guardian to stop the exposé. The revelations that came out of the Panama Paper leaks, another massive reporting effort that has had enormous impact, revealed how corrupt money could be hidden offshore with the help of a vast global web of companies and advisers.
Each of these stories was deeply important and has had a substantial impact for good. The question is, can a stretched news industry continue to pay for them? And if not, can we translate this societal good into a value that somebody would be prepared to dig into their pocket to support?
This has been the driving force behind a new not-for-profit media model, where journalists have turned to philanthropists and foundations to support the type of work they consider vitally important. This not-for-profit model has particularly taken off in the US, where there are more than 150 such organisations, including enterprises such as ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism – the group behind the Panama Papers exposés. In the UK, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism launched in 2010 with the same mission.
Now newspaper editors are starting to realise that if they put a value on the public good their journalism provides, there could be a way to turn journalism that seemed a huge strain into a means of survival.
The Boston Globe has become famous way beyond its Massachusetts hinterland thanks to the Hollywood film Spotlight, which told the story of the paper's investigation into sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. The work was undertaken by the paper's Spotlight team. According to one of its members, Mike Rezendes, a back-of-the-envelope calculation by the paper's then editor Martin Baron suggested the investigation had cost the paper about a million dollars. But this investment proved more than just an investment in good journalism.
The Globe's reporting coincided with the paper's move to a strong digital presence. Thanks to analytics, the habits of online readers can be tracked. Rezendes – played by Mark Ruffalo in the film – explains that when reporters were first told that online readers of their stories could be counted, he was terrified. What if nobody was reading this stuff? Actually, people were. The paper discovered that the Spotlight team's reporting was often the last item readers were on before they clicked through to subscribe.
True Impact is Relatively Rare
The Guardian's editor Kath Viner is seeing a similar pattern. It was the Guardian group, despite struggling to stem enormous losses, that invested in the months of reporting that produced the Cambridge Analytica stories. The investment, says Viner, has paid off not only in terms of its exceptional story, but also financially. Viner says that Cadwalladr's reporting triggered a huge wave of digital reader revenue. More money poured into the digital paper in the weeks the paper told the Cambridge Analytica story than had been donated following the Donald Trump election – a period that saw a vast uptake in digital newspaper subscriptions across most American outlets including The Guardian, which has a strong US web presence.
But if media organisations and journalists are to rely increasingly on their perceived sense of performing a public good to pay their way, then the industry must also get a lot better at understanding the mechanics by which journalism provides this good.
The philanthropists who support the not-for-profit ventures and the public who are starting to pour money into papers like The Guardian need to see a return. Whilst not interested in profit, they are clearly interested in transformation. Perhaps The Guardian experienced such a surge in revenue following its Cambridge Analytica exposé not only because it was a great story, but because it had an extraordinary impact.
Richard Tofel, president of ProPublica, wrote a seminal paper Non-Profit Journalism – Issues Around Impact – in which he discussed the need for journalists to understand and measure how their work brings about change. He explains that impact is something of anathema to most journalists, and also how hard it is to achieve. “True impact – in a real world change sense…. is relatively rare,” he writes.
Earlier this year the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a lengthy piece of research by the long-term investigative journalist and documentary producer Christopher Hird. His report Investigative Journalism Works, The Mechanism of Impact, analyses how journalism can lead to change through four long-term pieces of work which unquestionably had an impact – the Washington Post's Watergate investigation, The Sunday Times’ revelations about Thalidomide, the Bureau's work on targeted killings and drone warfare, and Channel 4's Sri Lanka films.
Hird found that journalism didn't necessarily result in change on its own. There needs, he says, to be a societal desire for change: campaigners and change-makers ready to take the story on. He shows in his case studies that it was only through sustained, long-term reporting that change occurred, and it was ultimately only when lawyers, politicians, NGOs and the public started to engage properly with the journalistic findings that things started to happen. This could, and often did, occur years after the reporting started.
Hird concludes that journalists can't just talk about changing the world. They must also think about the change they want to make and how they can collaborate more with those who can bring about this impact. At the heart of their mission has to be not just revelatory journalism holding power to account but also an active desire to deliver change. It is something that The Globe's Rezendes has also become passionate about. He believes that when we prove to the public that independent, critical, investigative journalism is a force for good, there is a very good chance that the public will help us figure out how to pay for it. The Guardian's experience with its Cambridge Analytica investigation suggests this optimism may not be misplaced.
