CIMA-Investigative Journalism - Dave Kaplan

CIMA Research Report: Global Investigative Journalism
Why Open Data Isn’t Enough
Hacks and hackers meetups. Open government initiatives. Hackathons and datafests.
The media development world has discovered big data, and it is embracing it big time. Internews
is sponsoring hackfests while the International Center for Journalists has turned its Knight
International Journalism Fellowships into technology grants that emphasize “mobile services,
data mining, storytelling and social media.” Donors like the Knight and Omidyar foundations are
focused almost exclusively on tech fixes to what ails the media. As one prominent donor told a
nonprofit newsroom executive, “We no longer fund content.”
There is a feeling afoot among some enthusiasts that digital technology can do it all, that the
information and communication revolutions have so fundamentally altered how people gather
and consume information that in-depth research and reporting are no longer necessary.
“Journalism itself is becoming obsolete,” wrote prominent software developer and blogger Dave
Winer. “Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks.” 1 Somehow,
the belief goes, open data, citizen journalism, and crowd-sourcing will enforce a kind of high-tech
accountability on the corrupt and powerful. Veteran investigative reporters, who were among the
first to embrace digital tools and computer analysis, believe that couldn’t be further from the truth.
As a group, investigative reporters are hardly a bunch of technophobes. “Investigative
journalism serves as the research and development department of the profession,” noted Brant
Houston, whose Computer-Assisted Reporting book has helped train two generations of
journalists. 2 “They brought data analysis and visualization into journalism long before the recent
open government movement, and they are the reporters who demonstrate how these new
techniques can be used most effectively.” 3
But Houston and others are uneasy over programs that focus solely on spreadsheets and code
writing at the expense of reporting. The explosion in data around the world is indeed a windfall
for investigative reporters, and techniques such as crowd-sourcing can be useful. But they alone
cannot do the kind of detective work that quality investigative journalism requires. The core skills
of investigative reporters are similar to those of skilled prosecutors and police detectives, of field
anthropologists and private investigators: the use of primary sources, the marshaling of evidence,
interviewing first-hand witnesses, and following trails–trails of people, documents, and money.
Those skills have not markedly changed since the days of the great muckrakers over a century ago.
Nellie Bly, whose classic Ten Days in a Madhouse exposed medieval conditions in a New York
mental asylum in 1887, would have been helped by digital tools, but the fundamentals of her
undercover investigation would not be different today. Indeed, her exposé was essentially
repeated in 2009 by Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who went undercover in an Accra
mental institution and revealed outrageous conditions. 4
Consider the stories that have won Pulitzer Prizes in investigative journalism from 2010-12: an
Associated Press10-part series digging into the New York Police Department’s secret program that
spied on more than 250 mosques; a year-long investigation by the Sarasota, FL, a Herald-Tribune
that exposed the weakness of property insurers in the state, tracing the ownership of more than
70 companies through shell corporations; and a Philadelphia Daily News exposé of a rogue
police narcotics squad, reported by doing face-to-face interviews with scared victims in
poor neighborhoods. 5
40 Center for International Media Assistance