A Quote by Heather Brooke
There's a lot of hand-wringing going on about the death of journalism and particularly the death of investigative journalism. What I see is that there is more need than ever to have experienced information processors - people who can look through this mass of data.
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Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on.
Investigative journalism is never mass-based; it's very focused, and you want people who are passionate about it to take it.
Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.
Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more examples to which one could point, and there were at last some activist photographers who understood that getting information into the public sphere in spite of military censorship was a right and obligation within democracy. That strain in war journalism did nearly vanish during that time.
A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.
Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.
If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism.
I respect journalism. I was always very aware of journalism from a very broad point of view, but I'd say my baptism by fire was doing the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still. That for me was a real education because I spent a lot of time with some incredible journalists, war reporters particularly - Bob Woodruff, Dexter Filkins - people who were very helpful in painting the picture for me and reading the accounts of people and what they experienced, a lot of PTSD.
Given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important.
I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.
In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.
As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past.
I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.
I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding one's subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically 'objective' to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.
I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding ones subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically objective to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.
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