I taught an investigative journalism subject last semester at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. As usual, I learned as much as I taught.
Throughout the semester students pursued real stories, while I gave lectures on using public records, how to develop contacts, how to interview people and, perhaps hardest of all, how to distil complex facts into a concise, readable narrative.
As the students laboured, Twitter was full of people expressing disappointment in the media - particularly the reporting of Victoria’s long, weary crisis of Covid lockdown. I shared many of those feelings of disappointment. I have written about that in an earlier column for inkl.
There were even people suggesting that the mainstream media was so sick and corrupted that we would be better off without it. On a bad day I understand that frustration, but at sixty years old it is too late for me to turn my back on my vocation.
And in the last few days we have seen the kind of events that recharge the batteries of tired old hacks. Investigative reporting on war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan has been vindicated by the Brereton Inquiry.
This has been a long, hard road for the journalists involved. Whistleblowers have been prosecuted, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation raided by federal police and the Nine newspapers are still facing defamation action.
The journalists and their sources put their careers and even their liberty at risk. The cost, at an individual level, is impossible to convey. This kind of work ages you before your time. Awards are nice, but hardly a compensation for what is lost.
If you want to know more about this, this week’s Media Watch included a good summary.
So what about my students? One of them, Petra Stock, completed a story which was published in Nine newspapers, as well as in the Centre for Advancing Journalism’s outlet, The Citizen. In one way it was a simple enough story, resting on documents released, at her request, under Freedom of Information legislation.
The story reported how in the scramble to move to online learning, Victoria’s Education Department took more than two weeks to warn schools not to use Zoom because the digital platform carried significant privacy and security risks. This potentially exposed children to fraud, grooming and identity theft.
It was a strong story, yet also in one way simple – a serious allegation verified by the documents.
So I was struck when, in a week when I had been feeling particularly disappointed in the media, Stock told me the main thing she had learned is just how hard it is to do journalism.
First, she had lodged the FoI request – and waited. And waited.
Then she got the release, and read redacted documents carefully, checking that she had understood their meaning.
Before this she had sought, and got, an interview with the Victorian Information Commissioner, Sven Bluemmel, whose comments greatly strengthened her story.
Now usually when students seek interviews with government officials, they have trouble. I advise them to prepare for up to fifty approaches and rejections for every successful interview. Often they don’t even get a rejection. The bureaucracies concerned can’t be bothered to reply.
It takes fibre to put up with that. For many, that is the point where they decide that journalism is not the career for them.
Another typical scenario is for a student to report on a topic they are passionate about – environmental issues are common. Some baulk when told they must put their key allegations to “the other side” – whoever that might be. Sometimes this involves having to seek an interview with a person or institution whom they have been thinking of as the enemy, the baddy.
They are taught that because of their own opinions, they must take particular care to do a thorough job of the interview and report the response fairly and accurately.
And, of course, when made to do this they discover that most stories are more complex than any one side would have you believe.
Back to Stock’s story. She had to approach the Department of Education to give them the chance to respond to what she was planning to write. Typically, this involves sending questions by email, and waiting a long time for a response that does not address the question but puts a spin on the facts.
You can make your own judgement about whether this was such a case by reading the Department’s quotes in Stock’s story.
Stock also interviewed the relevant teachers’ union and sought comment from Zoom and Google – both of which ignored her, although Zoom’s spin doctors did get in touch after publication and eventually provided an anodyne comment.
Finally, Stock had the stress of all this – the careful checking to make sure her facts were correct, the worry about the response and the heat that might follow publication.
All that for an important, but relatively simple story of just 647 words.
It’s worth reflecting on the effort involved.
Citizen journalism – people using social media to report the news and offer commentary – is mostly a good thing, and with us for keeps.
But few citizens would engage regularly in the kind of slog that I have just described – let alone the high stakes, deeply distressing work involved in reporting war crimes allegations.
None of this is to suggest people are wrong about the media’s shortcomings. But the debate would be healthier if this kind of work, the heart of the journalistic process, was better understood.
Without this kind of work, we would be deprived of knowledge, power and agency.
That is why we have to find ways of ensuring a healthy future for a better news media.
You can read more of the students’ work at The Citizen. Petra’s story is just one example of their courage, persistence and initiative.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
Support quality journalism.
As an inkl member you can directly support the work of journalists like Margaret Simons, while also getting access to 100+ publications like Foreign Affairs, The Independent, The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg.
As part of our commitment to building a sustainable future for journalism, a portion of your monthly inkl membership fee will go directly to Margaret for as long as you remain a subscriber.
BECOME A MEMBER
