Officials and executives who are under intense scrutiny often dodge interviews with journalists. Here, four veteran investigative reporters share tips on how to land and ‘nail’ tough accountability interviews, based on experiences from their recent investigative projects.
Toxic negative partisanship between Democrats and Republicans is causing media audiences to selectively discount or exaggerate facts presented by reporters ahead of America’s November 3 election. From interviews with audience engagement editors and a survey of research, GIJN identified a dozen techniques that journalists can use to increase the chances that audiences across the divide will at least “hear” the facts they unearth.
Instead of writing an entire behind-the-scenes article to explain how you carried out an investigation, consider instead incorporating this information in the investigation itself in the form of “trust nuggets” to reach more readers, writes Trusting News’ Joy Mayer.
Press self-censorship in Hong Kong has been deteriorating as businessmen behind media organisations increasingly use the press as their business tool rather than for public service. After seeing the public’s disillusionment and distrust of the media grow, investigative journalist Don Ng decided to kickstart FactWire, a back-to-basics news service that focuses on long-term investigations.
There’s a new funding strategy in the works, built around the idea that quite a few reporters have loyal followings and their readers just might be willing to chip in a few bucks to keep them in the news business. But as more organizations turn to reader support for revenue — whether framed as memberships or as subscriptions — they might face stiff competition for their individual crowdfunding model.
The recently published paper, Bridging the Gap, Rebuilding Citizen Trust in Media, probably offers the most complete list of the current projects around media and trust. But those interviewed for the project viewed trust — and the way publications can gain and sustain it — differently. However, all initiatives seem to rely on two principles to optimize trust: transparency and participation.
The Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016. It is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This attitude of readers choosing their own beliefs over facts has been a huge problem that beset journalism in the past year, with media outlets trying to regain readers’ trusts and debunking false news from dubious digital sites. Here is a list of initiatives to combat fake news that have popped up in response to this challenge.
