Transparent Journalism

I'm not a journalist, and I don't know what you mean by "be more open about their process". Elaborate please.

Hi Asta, The question comes in the context of an update from Public Eyes about to go out via email. (If you're on the mailing list as a Public Eyes supporter, you should see that soon.) Here's the relevant bit from the newsletter, which I hope helps explain:

Given our focus on educating New Zealanders about society, government and independent journalism in an open society, we'd really welcome ideas not just about things that need investigating, but about how the process of investigative journalism can be opened up a little and shared.

Besides helping ensure good practice, it would be a great means of fulfilling at least part of our educational role.

Please Discuss...

In the post-Dirty Politics era (if there is such a thing), it seems important to think about ways of increasing transparency not just in government and business, but in journalism itself. We've posted a question along these lines on the discussion site Loomio: Should journalists be more open about their process, and if so how?

One of the things I've been wondering about is how mainstream journalists would have handled being given a tip off from the PM's office that an OIA request would deliver dirt on the leader of the opposition. How many if any of the press gallery would have written up the offer as a story and how many would have put in the OIA and done pretty much what Whaleoil did? The problem with writing up tip-offs of course is you'll never receive another one.

Yup, I think the answer to that question is a no-brainer right? So the real lesson for the journalist from all this isn't to avoid using, say, the OIA tip-off, but to avoid getting caught? "Luckily" it's in the interest of both the OIA tip-off provider and the journalist that they not get caught, so it rarely happens.
For the rest-of-us, the problem is similar to the one surrounding "anonymous sources": We, the readers, only have part of the story. We don't have the part of the story tells us about the motivation of the leaker/tip-off giver/anonymous source. That information would either put the entire story in a very different light or would be a completely different story.

Anyway, to segue onto ways of opening up the process. One idea I had was that if/when Public Eyes has a journalism project to fund (and we plan to talk about that at a meeting of trustees on Monday), thought be given to how not just the end result (story, doco whatever) be shared with the public, but also the process. Does anyone know of this being done? How might it work? Off the top of my head: blog/web site/social media where progress in the news gathering (within reason, obviously) could be shared? Do-able? Useful?

Definitely useful.

Clearly with limitations to prevent the disclosure underminnig the process (warning investigation targets you are going after them is generally poor craft). But even if those needed to be quite significant it would still be possible to do a "the making of" piece to accompany the final output I guess. I note though that sometimes this is done in the actual article - i.e. the path to the story is part of the story.

Back to your original question it originally had me a bit stumped. I think the truth is that most of us do things our own way. Take the example of working with sources. Some people have a group of sources who they maintain. Others go looking for sources for specifc stories. Some journos (e.g. business journos) use sources for quotes and identify them routinely. Some have sources for background and others for quoting. And some journos do all of the above.

As for finding scoops. Some journos work sources regularly on the phone (less common these days). Others mine publicly released information keeping track of court judgments, OIA dumps, court hearing lists, Parlt. written questions etc. Others use press releases or simply identify news-makers who are likely to know what is going on in relation to something topical and then use interviews guided by intuition and experience to ask pointed questions and find out what is really going on.

One of the odd things about journalism is that there is no manual of how to do it. Nor a description of what "is" a story. While there are certainly methods employed I suspect that most journos develop techniques on the job, learn things from colleagues and at times make it up as they are going along.

My 2c worth.

Yes, there's huge variety and lots of projects wouldn't be conducive to having the process shared. There's an interesting Q + A in the NYT with Sarah Koenig who's making a podcast series of her investigation of a cold case. Called "Serial" it's apparently become hugely popular. (I haven't listened yet). She is sharing the process, apparently, as this bit of the Q+ A explains:
Q. Typically, when you work on stories like this, readers never get to see your sloppiness, they never get to hear your dumb questions and they never get to see that you weren’t sure of everything.
A. Oh, so you think I’m sloppy and dumb?
Q. No, I think that —
A. I’m just kidding. But that may be the difference between working in print and radio. I’m just so used to everything being recorded, you kind of get over it.
Q. You’re working on this story as you release it, and you don’t know how it ends. Do you think you’re taking a big risk by making this show without knowing for sure whether Adnan Syed, the man convicted of killing his former high-school girlfriend in 1999, is guilty?
A. I’m not being fake-naïve or something, but I really don’t — the end was never the thing of it for me. It does not keep me up at night. It may keep up my producers more. ....etc.

When people talk about things being "open" these days, I tend to assume they are trying to make some kind of analogy with "open source" models of software development. These can be lame, but if the thought experiment is done carefully can also produce useful insights.

So, firstly, it seems that the journalistic equivalent of the free code that open source development produces is the published story that the journalist produces. Keep in mind that the "source code" of software includes all the information we need to understand what the software does, and how it does it, including the code the software actually runs, and the programmers comments which describe that code. The journalistic equivalent could be some documentation of the methods the journalist used, and the notes they took as they went along (obviously stripped of anything that would compromise anyone's privacy, confidential sources etc).

Open source software development can be a solo project, or a group project, and it can involve realtime collaboration, or throwing finished versions "over the wall". Most journalism currently seems to be solo projects throwing finished stories over the wall. When I was involved in Indymedia we sometimes experimented with a more open, collaborative process, using our wiki to take notes, or store early drafts of stories. Sometimes two or three editors (every Indymedia volunteer with admin rights was an 'editor' ;) would work on a story together this way. I'd love to see Public Eyes supporting experiments with this kind of collaborative journalism; a small team following a story, documenting their progress, and inviting contributions (ideas, sources, contact info etc).

I'm also imagining someone following Nicky Hagar (as a random example) around with a camera as he writes his next book, showing him researching and writing up his work, along the lines of Sarah Koenig's experiment with "showing her workings" (as mentioned by @alisonmcculloch ). This would definitely educate people about how good investigative research is done, and how different it is from the sloppy, biased processes behind a lot of the fringe writing ("conspiracy theory") that Nicky gets lumped in with by mass media channels.