Channel 4 agrees to Help Me Investigate

Posted by Christie Silk on June 2, 2009 at 10:54 AM

Channel 4's Innovation for the Public fund, 4ip, has joined forces with Screen West Midlands to finance a new collaborative investigative journalism website. The project welcomes public participation to clarify issues of local concern.

The project, Help Me Investigate, is primarily focused on the community; participants will be invited to pose and answer questions online relating to regional practicalities and politics, such as the cost of hospital parking for example. Its creator, Paul Bradshaw, online journalism lecturer at Birmingham City University, believes Help Me Investigate will be an instrument for residents to obtain answers, furthering the current fashion of holding public authorities and agencies more accountable through methods such as crowdsourcing. The concept of public participation and communication with the causes of accountability and influence in mind has already proved popular with sites such as ProPublica, My Street and They Work for You.

Interestingly, the founders hope that the site will also serve the cause of professional journalists, providing them with a reservoir of local knowledge. Talks between the site's management and media organisations in the UK and abroad which are interested in using the site are currently taking place.

Bradshaw said: "People can contribute their expertise to answer specific questions, and journalists with no resources could use the site to call on the community for help."

Mutual profitability of the project for citizens and journalists, based on the free sharing of information, is an interesting vision in a time when citizen journalist ventures are often looked upon with condescension by career reporters. The project was inspired by the resurging concern to salvage old style investigative journalism, a backlash against the arguably facile and safe reporting style which has dominated the press in the past few years. Its creation comes as part of the 'slow journalism' campaign, which aims to make government data and processes more transparent to the public. That this project pertains to be a serious forum for accountability and accessibility is underlined by the participation of Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke.

Moreover, innovators in the industry see such projects as potentially viable alternative business model. In an interview with the Guardian, Bradshaw expressed his own convictions about the future of the news industries:

"Companies need to find the next business model and it's not enough just to throw money at possible solutions," he said. "While its competitors dwindle and cut costs, if Channel 4 strikes lucky it could find itself extremely well-positioned."

The project is currently in its developmental stages and in an interview with the Press Gazette, Bradshaw emphasised that the process will be tested thoroughly before the actual launch:

"We didn't want go to in all guns blazing and mess it up. We want to build the culture around the website first and give users a chance to play with it first."

Source: Press Gazette