Reconstructing investigative journalism at emerging organisations

Abstract

While academic research has mainly focused on how legacy media organisations conduct their general news production work, fewer studies have focused on specialised practices such as investigative journalism in relation to innovation and technology. Scholars, however, have observed that news production is increasingly taking place outside the newsroom. In this context, the present article explores the ways in which emerging media organisations innovate and adapt practices of watchdog journalism within their staffs and facilities. Its case studies include a co-op that seeks to engage ordinary citizens in production; a collaborative data desk that aims to professionalise a variety of actors, including local journalists, citizen journalists, activists, hackers, developers and media organisers; and a global tech company that seeks to produce investigative journalism with national but also global resonance.

Innovation in Legacy Media Institutions: the Case of the Al Jazeera Media Network

“…(Creswell, 2007, p.74) This study uses multiple sources of evidence (Punch, 2014), including secondary resources such as industry reports and documents about the case at hand, but also primary resources---more specifically, semi-structured interviews with experts in the media and digital-media industry. The interviews serve here as a source of information; "Case study research is a qualitative approach in which the investigator explores a bounded system (a case 1 ) (…) through in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information 2 (e.g., observations, interviews, audiovisual material, and documents and reports), and reports a case description and case-based themes. " (Creswell, 2007, p.73) The case study gives insights into the question researched and enables a better understanding of the issue (Punch, 2014).…”

“…The practice of journalism's perspective deals with issues including innovation in the newsroom and journalism-editing transformations (Mare, 2014;Porcu, 2020), publishing content, and finding business models that enable return on investments (Myllylahti, 2019;O'Brien et al, 2020), as well as issues pertaining to innovation in the organization of the journalistic work (Koivula et al, 2020). Scholars in organizational communication study innovative business models in journalistic work (Koivula et al, 2020), or more broadly in different media types, including legacy (Kueng, 2017) and non-legacy media institutions (Konow-Lund, 2020). Increasingly, to study innovation, researchers involved in media studies from an organizational communication perspective call for a multidisciplinary approach (Storsul & Krumsvik, 2013), which considers the environment or ecosystem capabilities as important as inner-firm capabilities.…”

Anatomy of a precarious newsroom: precarity and agency in Syrian exiled journalism in Turkey

“…Secondly, and consequently, we suggest these need to be clearly identified as examples of emerging media responding to the same disruptions and challenges facing the news industry at large including increased precarisation (e.g. Deuze and Witschge, 2020; Konow-Lund, 2020). Finally, we believe an investigation of how this precarity is experienced and negotiated within newsrooms outside the global North, often in combination with other local layers of precarity, can contribute to a more complete understanding of how the journalistic field is developing globally.…”

Between Structures and Identities: Newsroom Policies, Division of Labor and Journalists’ Commitment to Investigative Reporting

“…Few studies, however, have focused on how legacy news desks are adapting their newsroom policies with regard to investigative journalism. Even fewer have addressed this issue from the perspective of organization and innovation theory (e.g., Konow-Lund 2020;, even though "media companies currently face competitive market environments characterized by immense structural transformations that challenge them to develop innovative organizational strategies" (Baumann 2013, 77). According to Shoemaker and Reese (2014, 7), organizational settings and routines influence reporters' investigative practices and news content as much as an individual "media worker's socialization and attitudes".…”