4iP To Fund Crowdsourced Journalism Project “Help Me Investigate”
4iP, or 4 Innovation for the Public to give its full title, is Channel 4’s fund for “publicly valuable content” that it set up last year. It’s just announced its next round of funding, and among the projects is Help Me Investigate, a platform for collaborative investigative journalism set up by Paul Bradshaw, a lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University.
He told Press Gazette: “People can contribute their expertise to answer specific questions, and journalists with no resources could use the site to call on the community for help”. Crowdsourced journalism – it’s a nice idea. A big coup for the project is the involvement of Heather Brooke, flushed with cred after her exposing of the expenses scandal – she’ll be on hand to advise the participants chasing stories.
They’re the latest gang to try and maintain investigative reporting in the digital age. Recently there’s been the announcement of the Huffington Post’s investigative fund, headed up by triple-Pulitzer-winning Lawrence Roberts; the launch last year of ProPublica, the not-for-profit online newsroom; a call for national endowments for investigative journalism in America from Bruce Ackerman on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free pages; and the launch of Spot.us, a crowdfunding model for local investigative reporting.
There are worries about all of these models. First of all, crowdfunding – while harnessing the desire of lots of individuals to see something investigated can be massively powerful, to announce a pitch to do so rather scuppers the investigation. The conflicts of interest with both public and private endowments are clear, with an expectation to cover certain kinds of issues inevitably a condition of the funding. Ackerman says in his proposal that the internet is “no substitute for serious investigative reporting that requires weeks of intelligent inquiry to get to the heart of the problem”, rather insultingly equating internet users and writers as being intellectually subpar. So there’s clearly still a gulf between practitioners of “proper” investigative reporting – in print, working in a small team – and the new crowdsourcing school.
The ProPublica non-profit model also has its detractors. Speaking at a panel debate on journalism in San Francisco a fortnight ago, former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll said that the very profitability of newspapers was part of their investigative arsenal, citing: “The imperviousness of the business model to even direct pressure by the federal government and threats of I.R.S. audits”. They could “withstand any pressure” thanks to their financial might.
It’ll be interesting to see the small print of Help Me Investigate’s business model over the coming months. WIll it be tapping people who are passionate and willing to go unpaid, but who are untrained as writers or investigators? Will there be financial reward for ongoing investigation? Can this content be effectively syndicated? And will the Channel 4 connection, for all its news generation synergies, end up creating friction? We’ll see, but for now it’s at least encouraging to have people eager to keep investigative journalism alive, and to have people with money willing to fund it.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | June 1, 2009 1:02PM |
