We regularly get sent questions by people researching or writing about crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, and investigative journalism. This page collects links to research, posts, book chapters, interviews, case studies and other material that we and others have produced in documenting the process of running Help Me Investigate.
- Crowdsourcing investigative journalism: a case study is a book chapter which was serialised into seven parts on the Online Journalism Blog. This includes background literature on investigative journalism and crowdsourcing, an exploration of the decisions in building the site (including agile development), and a case study of successful collaborative investigation. There’s also an attempt to identify qualities of successful crowdsourcing.
- I also previously blogged in a little more detail about that case study here.
- My colleague at Birmingham City University Jon Hickman also conducted ethnographic research into the collaborative networks of the site: Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism
- Has investigative journalism found its feet online? is a book chapter I wrote and serialised on OJB, which looks at emerging funding options for the form, online investigative journalism as a genre; and future developments.
- What is investigative journalism (for)? expands on some of those ideas.
- A style guide for collaborative journalism: what I’ve learned from the first weeks of Help Me Investigate: Networks addresses “how you should write when your intention is to make it easy for others to get involved – a different approach to traditional newswriting, but not too different to good blogging practice. “
- On a similar note I’ve written about collaborative journalism structures and teams here, and published a free ebook on those methods here.
- A case study in online journalism: investigating the Olympic torch relay is a 3-part article which reflects on what has probably been HMI’s biggest and most successful investigation. As I write in the introduction: “From its beginnings in data journalism, through collaboration, community management and SEO to ‘passive-aggressive’ newsgathering, verification and ebook publishing, it’s been a fascinating case study.”
- Early in the life of Help Me Investigate I was interviewed about the idea by Bad Idea. The Columbia Journalism Review asked similar questions in their interview here. Journalismfund.eu wrote a piece about it too. More recently, Nicole Froio interviewed me about HMI for Wannabe Hacks.
- MediaShift conducted a video interview before the project was launched, while another brief interview was conducted months later by SCIP.
- Journalism.co.uk asked contributing journalist Tom Scotney to write about HMI early in the project too, which provides a different perspective.
- The FAQ category on the Online Journalism Blog often includes responses to questions involving similar issues. At the time of writing these include FAQ: Data journalism, scraping and Help Me Investigate; and FAQ: What do you see in the future for investigative journalism?.
- More broadly any posts on OJB relating to Help Me Investigate, including tutorials and contemporary updates about its development from the first unsuccessful bid to the Knight News Challenge to its construction and successes, can be found at OnlineJournalismBlog.com/tag/help-me-investigate.
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