As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates and Radio WM talks about how to work with sources and the options available when they’re not prepared to talk on-camera or on radio.
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates talks about an investigation into misleading leasing agreements that had left many schools with large debts and only overpriced, unserviced equipment to show for it – a situation that seems to be happening beyond the education sector too.
By Ian Silvera (www.iansilvera.co.uk, @ianjsilvera)
First, click on the ‘view history’ tab at the top right of the Wikipedia entry you are interested in. You should then be directed to a page that lists all the edits that have occurred on that entry. It looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bradshaw_(journalist)&action=history
Second, to identify if someone has been deleting unhelpful criticisms of an organisation or person on their Wikipedia entry, you could read through each edit, but with large Wikipedia entries this exercise would be too time-consuming. Instead, look for large redactions.
To do this scan through the red coloured numbers in brackets. Low numbers such as (-700) mean that a reasonable amount of information has been deleted from the Wikipedia entry. Also, the date the Wikipedia entry was edited is located on the left-hand side of the page. Continue reading
Here’s a part by part guide to how you can follow different ‘streams’ of information as a journalist to understand what’s going on in a particular field, and how they can inform your real-world digging. Most of them involve using an RSS reader like Google Reader to follow feeds to keep in touch with developments.
While much is made of the ‘exclusive’ in journalism, and students will be harangued for recycling work done by other journalists, the truth is that the first thing most journalists do every day is check out their competitors, and get a feel for the current news agenda. A journalist has to balance being ‘on top’ of developments that others are covering (“Why don’t we have something on this story?”), while also reporting information that others don’t have. Continue reading
George Monbiot’s piece in The Guardian about Britain’s ‘shadow government‘ is a perfect illustration of the importance of looking at the groups of people that are supposed to monitor, regulate and otherwise exert power in the public interest. Not only does Monbiot highlight the potential conflicts of interest – a process which always suffers from the problem of proving any effects of that conflict – but he outlines how the makeup of these groups contradicts what they are supposed to be there for. In other words, how it illustrates “The gulf between what a government claims to be and what it is”.
This, for me, has a stronger impact. And Monbiot does it at length. If you’re investigating any area which is supposed to be held accountable to the public through a board, council or committee, this demonstrates how you might look at its makeup along the way:
MHRA, the medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency, is the body that has been criticised for failing adequately to regulate breast and hip implants, with grim consequences for some patients. While the board contains retired senior executives from AstraZeneca and Merck Sharp & Dohme, it includes no one from a patient group, or any other body representing people whose health could be damaged by its decisions.
The Medical Research Council, which disburses research funds for the preservation of life, is chaired by a man who runs a company specialising in weapons technology. Sir John Chisholm was the civil servant in charge of privatising the government’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. While doing so, he bought a £129,000 stake in the company. The value of this stake rose to £26m when the new defence firm, QinetiQ, was floated. This was described as “obscene” by the former defence minister Lord Gilbert and “greed of the highest order” by the agency’s former managing director.
The other council members include executives or directors from Pfizer, Kardia Therapeutics and Microgen Ltd, but no one who makes their primary living working for a medical charity or any other public interest group. It seems to me that the direction of publicly funded medical research is being set by a weird and unbalanced board.
You can see something similar across government. The Office of Rail Regulation, for instance, is supposed to ensure that the railways are safe, efficient and “meet the needs of passengers and freight customers”. Yet its board contains no members from passenger groups, unions or transport campaigns. The government did, however, find room for current or former executives of National Express, BAA, Rolls Royce, National Grid and Thames Water.
Soon after this government took office it set up a Farming Regulation Task Force. It was chaired by the ex-director general of the National Farmers Union. His deputy was another NFU official. Other members consisted of two more farmers, three corporate executives, one county council official and someone from the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, which claims to defend wildlife but gives advice on setting snares and spring traps. There was no one representing groups protecting the environment, landscape or animal welfare.
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on challenging official versions of events and statistics
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on finding information through online and offline sources
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Iain Overton gives his tips on some of the personal qualities to develop as an investigator
One of the barriers that student journalists often come up against is their lack of contacts in a particular field. Here is a guide to building that contacts book:
1. Directories
Directories are the most obvious place to start looking for contacts. If you need a plumber, you look in the Yellow Pages, for example.
But general directories like the Yellow Pages don’t give you any indication of an individual’s expertise or likelihood of contributing to your investigation.
A better approach is to use specialist directories, such as the experts’ directories maintained by many universities. These give you more detail on a person’s specific interests, qualification, and what they’ve published.
Other specialist directories include Ask An Expert and Find A TV Expert sites (hit and miss – remember that many directories require people to describe themselves), OpenlyLocal’s directory of hyperlocal blogs, See if you can find directories in your own field, ideally maintained by a third party with an interest in maintaining quality and accuracy.
2. Publications
If someone is an expert in a particular field, chances are that they will have published something about it. That might be a book, a research paper, an opinion column, or a well respected blog.
If you are a member of a library you can use their journal search facility to find out who has written about your particular area of interest (the more specific, the better). There’s also Google Scholar.
For books, try Google Books or LibraryThing (which also allows you to find contacts who are interested in those books)
There are various blog search tools including Technorati, IceRocket, and Google Blog Search, as well as individual platform search tools like WordPress’s or Tumblr’s.
And you can find out who’s written in newspapers by using archives and databases in your library (ask a librarian – there will be plenty of them), the British Newspaper Archive or The Paperboy to include newspapers around the world. You can also use your library ID with KnowUK.
Make a note of names but also other details such as usernames, web addresses, location, and so on. This will increase your chances of finding contact details. Once you have those you can try some of the directories mentioned above – or professional social networking sites like LinkedIn or look for profession-specific networks (this page lists a bunch for teachers, for example) and search within those.
This guide (PDF) and this post from Murray Dick gives more detail on using advanced search techniques to find individuals. And here Joanna Geary explains how she tracked down an entire family from one tweet. Neil Smith’s favourites list includes a bunch of sites for searching for people.
3. Newspaper reports
You’re likely to be reading a lot of background material as part of your investigation – make a note of any names mentioned in those articles – people who have been quoted or mentioned – and again, any contextual information.
If you can’t find those people by other means you can always try to speak to the reporter who wrote the piece. They might also be interested in reporting a potential new angle on an old story.
4. Formal reports and events
If someone is an expert in an area, or has had an interesting experience, then it’s not just journalists who will want to speak to them. Often commercial and governmental organisations will interview that person as part of a report – or they will volunteer their expertise as part of a consultation.
Look to see who has made responses to government consultations within your field (here’s an example); who gives evidence to select committees (here is a list of evidence given to one committee on education); who is mentioned in any commercial reports you read.
Also search Hansard for mentions of specific issues you’re looking into (you can also receive regular alerts). Is there a particular politician that seems very interested in the issue? Do they have constituents that are affected by it? These are all potential contacts.
And see who is submitting FOIs on your subject too.
Another useful source is events – either attending them yourself, or looking to see who did attend it. Now many events are organised online, you can search for them and find out who’s going before it even happens.
5. Social media
If you’re using social media to find contacts you need to know how to refine your searches so that you only find those who have authority in their field, or specific experiences.
For the former, stick to those who have a large following on Twitter, for example, by using FollowerWonk, or use curated directories such as Twellow and Wefollow. Search for large Facebook groups or forums and contact the admins. Use Technorati to look for the most popular blogs.
If you want to find people with experiences, imagine the page you will find and search for that. So, for example, if you want to find twins, don’t search for “twin” but search for “my twin brother” (include quotes) or “my twin”, because those are phrases which will only be written by twins themselves, and not people talking about twins.
Also try specialist search engines for forums, blogs and other social media so your results don’t include general information pages. Or use advanced search techniques to restrict your search to particular domains, such as specialist forums in your field.
Making contact
Of course having a list of names is not the same as having contacts. And here is where you need to have some empathy and emotional literacy.
Ask yourself: if you were in their position, what would you be most likely to respond to? An email out of the blue is not likely to be productive – it’s easy to put off responding to, and then forgetting about.
A phonecall allows the other person to get a sense of your personality, and it’s also something they can’t put off particularly easily.
If they’re in a position where you can arrange to meet them in person (and buy them a coffee or a drink) – for example they deal with customers, or are at an open event – even better.
But what technology you use is perhaps less important than how you use it. Here are some tips on approaching contacts:
Do you have any advice on finding or making contacts?