FAIR publishes investigative journalism manual online

Submitted by globadmin on Tue, 2010-01-26 18:12

A series of Investigative Journalism Manuals, conceptualised and produced by FAIR in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, have been placed online at the FAIR website www.fairreporters.org/home. The ‘IJ Manuals’ are tailor-made to assist investigative journalists who operate in Africa or in similar difficult, resource- and transparency-poor environments.

The Investigative Journalism Manuals consist of eight basic PDF chapters that are easily downloadable and designed for practical use as self-study guides. They are structured around practical questions such as ‘how do I find topics to investigate’, ‘how to I deal with sources’ and ‘how do I deal with numbers and statistics’.

The Manuals have been put together with the help of the world’s foremost investigative journalism experts and are filled with real-life case studies contributed by renowned African investigative journalists such as Eric Mwamba, Edem Djokotoe, Joyce Mulama and Charles Rukuni. They have been assembled and edited by South African journalism trainer and author Gwen Ansell and designed by Rhodes University design lecturer Brian Garman.

They have been helped along by the expert input of Investigative Journalism Knight Chair Brant Houston in the US, Gavin Macfadyen of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in the UK and Margaret Renn of the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand. They were financially sponsored by our funding partners in this project: the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The eight Manuals chapters each deal with an aspect of investigative journalism practice. There is ‘Sources and spin-doctors’; there is ‘Forensic interviewing’; there is a chapter on planning and there’s one on ethics. Each chapter can be downloaded and studied separately, depending on the terrain the user needs some advice on.