In a blog entitled ‘The Web, the future of Investigative journalism?’, my fellow online journalism student David Kearns comments on the steady decline investigative journalism has found itself in in recent decades and looks to a future where the internet may arrest this slide.
He points to a Guardian article that declares ‘Arianna Huffington is saving journalism’. In it, Jeff Jarvis praises the Huffington Post founder for creating a not-for-profit arm of her organisation dedicated to the task of investigation. The initial fund coming from both the public and the foundation starts at $1.7million. Aside from the financial aid, Huffington hopes to tap into other resources, such as the crowd-sourcing (contributions of effort rather than money) Wikipedia has successfully employed, availing of generous contributors to provide content and information.
Huffington feels investigative journalism dropped the ball when it came to rigorous coverage (or the decidedly lacking coverage in these cases) of the Iraq war and the financial crisis and this situation can not continue. She has started by setting her sights on covering the continuing economic recession the way that it should be covered, comprehensively.
In conversation with Charlie Rose, Huffington talks about 8 years of republican right-wing government in the US and how the media did not hold them to account sufficiently.
