Investigative reporters were the elite in post-Watergate newsrooms. Dedication to investigative reporting and interest in its computer-savvy sidekick, computer assisted reporting, peaked in the last decade of the past century. But in this era of dot coms, with its emphasis on constant deadlines and sound byte news takes, long form, in-depth investigative reporting has been seemingly sidelined.
Last year, Poynter convened a group of computer assisted reporting experts to talk about why the promise of CAR has not been realized in most newsrooms. Issues such as techno-angst, uninitiated editors, and a lack of training were explored.
This year, Poynter and the Investigative Reporters and Editors convened another great group of journalists, most with years of experience in print or broadcast journalism, many of whom now work at news web sites. Some of them are not affiliated with a “traditional” media outlet. We wanted to determine why long-form enterprise pieces seem to have gotten short shrift in the world of online journalism. We wanted to get a take on how this seemingly ideal environment for computer assisted reporting, with it’s bottomless news hole and great potential for interactivity, has not been embraced.
We came quickly to consensus that the issues fell into four specific areas:
- Business: How to make investigative reporting a part of a successful online business plan.
- Ethics: How to ensure that the standards and ethical practices of journalism are upheld in the increasingly merged editorial-advertising space of online.
- Infrastructure: How to create a foundation of people, processes, and practices that can operate and cooperate in all media.
- Content: How to take advantage of the 3D, interactive, multimedia space of online journalism.
The group split into these issues areas and, in an afternoon of brainstorming and arm waving, came up with reports on the current state of affairs for that issue and recommendations for what to do.
This day and half session and the reports generated from it provide, we hope, a starting point for further exploration of the potential of enterprise reporting in the online environment. In an industry that needs to show the marketplace what they can uniquely provide, original and innovative investigative reporting is surely a key.
