Interview: Paul Bradshaw, of UK Crowdsourced Journalism Project Help Me Investigate

Recently we interviewed David Cohn, a Bay Area entrepreneur who is experimenting with crowdfunded investigative journalism (journalism funded by small donations from a wide base of people) with his website Spot.us. Back over this side of the pond is Birmingham City University senior lecturer Paul Bradshaw, who is approaching the current difficulties in investigative journalism in a similar but crucially different way with his site Help Me Investigate. Rather than crowdfunding, he’s crowdsourcing investigative stories – pooling the efforts of ordinary people to look into issues which affect them, and helping resource-strapped journalists to research time-consuming and complex stories. It comes at a time when investigative journalism is highly valued by the British public – witness the reaction to the MP’s expenses scandal, broken by Heather Brooke, who is part of the Help Me Investigate Team – but struggling to find funding amid a time of great media upheaval. We recently spoke to Paul about the project.

Bad Idea: What inspired you to start Help Me Investigate?

Paul Bradshaw, Help Me Investigate: There were two main inspirations. One was the News Press crowdsourced investigation into utility collection charges in southwest Florida. The key thing for me was how popular that story became on the website – a story that would traditionally not be particularly popular in print, became their most popular story on the site ever, apart from hurricanes, mainly because people were engaged with the story themselves, because it was crowdsourced. So I wanted to provide a platform for that kind of engagement to happen on a more routine basis.

The other inspiration was a story on poisoned pet food in America. The official figures which were being reported in the media were that about 15 pets were affected, so a number of bloggers collaborated to investigate this. They found all sorts of useful things, about which pet foods were affected and so on, and collated a database of I think about 5000 dead pets and 15,000 that were affected. That was about handing the editorial agenda over to a wider section of people than traditionally happens in mainstream media.

BI: Is there a danger in using ordinary people to gather information, people without journalistic grounding? Is the quality of their work always good enough?

PB: There are more non-journalists than journalists using the site, but it’s been harder to train journalists to use it than it has been to train non-journalists. Having said that, journalists are increasingly understanding how it works and contributing some really useful information.

As for the ability of non-journalists to pursue investigations, the key idea behind the site is that it breaks down investigations into different elements, which are called challenges. There are certain things that journalists will be good at, like writing up the story, or getting an official response, or finding particularly hard to find information, like company information or regulations. But there is a lot of specialist knowledge on the site. One particularly big user of the site works in a financial firm, analysing things forensically, so he’s got tremendously valuable data analysis skills which few journalists have, and he’s able to bring that to figures that we get from freedom of information requests. Then there are people who use the site who are particularly knowledgeable about property, or about law. We had an investigation into clamping, and we had a retired law lecturer who added a legal interpretation of the law surrounding clamping and what to do, so that’s been tremendously useful. It’s really about playing to people’s strengths.

BI: So when the data has been collated, is it a case of then finding a journalist to write up and sell the story?

PB: We don’t sell stories, and we don’t write stories for that matter – the site is there to collect evidence. But quite often the investigation gets to a stage where you have to nudge a journalist and say by the way, you might want to get involved at this point. That’s been the case so far. As the site grows in numbers and reputation, and as journalists get more and more used to it, they’ll be more and more involved in the earlier stages.

I think it’ll work in a number of ways. In some instances you’ll get journalists who write a broad story and put all of their raw data onto the site, and ask people help get into the detail of that. We had a national story about hospital parking – we were specifically investigating one particular hospital, and their own figures, compared to some very broad figures obtained by a political party. So it allows you to drill down into that specific detail.

And it works the other way too – you might do a local investigation and then repeat that investigation nationally. You find out the figures in Birmingham, and then you do that for all the councils doing that particular thing.

BI: Is there any potential remuneration for any of your amateur investigators?

PB: There’s a slim chance, a long way down the line, but I’m not banking on that. Really the main reason that people do it is that it affects them personally, so really there shouldn’t be any financial motivation anyway. It’s about having a different editorial agenda, so rather than an editor making a decision that this is a story worth investigating, because it will get us x amount of readers and x amount of advertising, it’s about someone saying this might only affect two people, but we’re really angry about it, and we just need to find other people who are angry about it.

BI: How will the site itself subsist financially?

PB: The original idea was basically around third-party services. A good analogy would be WordPress – WordPress is free, but their business model is based on the spam filter they developed, and also for enterprise versions, so that would be an obvious business model we could work to. It’s quite likely that we’ll also look at some sort of public funding.

But certainly it doesn’t involve advertising, and it’s unlikely that it’ll involve white labelling with news organisations. It’s more likely to be something around: this is what the site does, and because of what we learnt through doing that and the data that’s produced doing that, we can use other things to support it indirectly.

BI: Would you consider a crowdfunding model?

PB: I think it could be one revenue stream, but I don’t imagine it would be big enough to support the whole operation. There would be investigations that require money to progress individually, and we would probably crowdfund for a specific investigation, but for the site as a whole I think it would be very difficult.

BI: Is there a crisis in funding investigative journalism stories in the local press?

PB: Certainly it’s less and less the case that there’s money for it. It’s always been a peripheral activity anyway, it’s never been a core activity; it’s been hard for people to fight for support within an organisation to do it, because quite often it would come to a dead end, and there would be nothing to publish, so that’s been squeezed out increasingly.

Help Me Investigate isn’t necessarily intended to be a replacement. It’s so that journalists who have a lead that they don’t have the time to explore or they don’t think is strong enough to justify spending time on, they could put that on the site, and others who might be passionate about it, or who might owe that journalist something from other investigations, they might do a bit of digging and help them out.

BI: Is investigative journalism antithetical to getting advertising spend? I’d imagine that it’s harder to persuade advertisers to advertise alongside an aggressively investigative story, than it is alongside “softer” content like culture or sport.

PB: I think that’s one of the challenges of news on the web – it gets atomised and broken up. So whereas before your travel supplement might subsidise your foreign news, you’re more likely to split the two apart and just have a travel website. Investigative journalism is always cross-subsidised, so that’s difficult now.

BI: While the high visibility of a crowdsourced investigation is its greatest asset when trying to collate and sort a lot of information, an investigation requiring even the smallest amount of subterfuge could be seriously hampered by crowdsourcing.

PB: Yes, and some investigations wouldn’t be suitable for that reason. Almost all investigations are pre-moderated, and if there was something like that, we’d probably put the person who requested it in touch with an investigative journalist, or point them to some kind of whistleblowing resource.

What Help Me Investigate is useful for is creating a common resource of knowledge, and a community interested in it. For instance, someone has been investigating a company that’s been taking money out of their account without permission; basically they’ve been conned. They found out various information about this company, but they don’t know what to do to get their money back. That information is public, so I recommended they write a blog post so other people who have invested in the same company can easily come across that information.

If I’m investigating the police in one city, then someone can follow what I’ve been doing and repeat that process in another city. It’s about sharing knowledge, but where subterfuge is needed, that is a problem. And we may have private investigations, invited investigations, to make it easier to keep it secret from the subject of that investigation.

BI: Looking at a more nationwide level, is there a serious funding crisis for investigative journalism?

PB: I’m not sure. Some news organisations are looking at paywalls – they’re going to be more driven by readers paying for content, so they’re going to have to get more unique content, which means more investigative journalism. So there may be that commercial pressure in that direction. And if the government changes regulations to make it easier for people to donate towards investigative journalism in order to claim back taxes, then that will link to some news organisations.

There’s certainly pressure on the government in the UK and US. There’s a whole move towards saying if we’re going to subsidise news organisations, then they need to pass the public interest test. Because it could be that it’s not just the BBC who’s receiving licence fee. Ultimately it depends on how the markets develops, and how the government treats regulation and laws and investments.

I think investigative journalism will always exist, but what shape that takes depends on the market. An increasing amount of investigative journalism has been done by organisations, like environmental organisations, animal charities, children’s charities – a lot of these organisations have done undercover reporting or research to find out information that was kept hidden. All those kinds of trends will be important in shaping change. But certainly people should look more broadly than news organisations for investigative journalism in the future.

Photo: John Welsh’s These Digital Times

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Tomorrow People | January 21, 2010 3:07PM |