Condensation trails are mainly water-based by-products of aircraft engines, painting long, cloud-like shapes in the sky. Adding toxic chemicalsâones that have devastating consequences for our healthâallows weather modification, mind control and human population control, just to name a few options of geoengineering. This theory of so-called chemtrails isâof courseâa hoax. While this might appear as a ludicrous conspiracy theory, it is a widespread belief. In 2016, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a national study conducted by Harvard University, found that between â~ 30 and ~ 40% of the general US public appear to subscribe to versions of the conspiracy theoryâ (Tingley and Wagner 2017, p. 5). The study also shows that the biggest part of conversations about chemtrails is conspirative and can predominantly be found on Twitter .
This episode showcases how emerging disruptive technologies such as the Internet and particularly social networks channel disinformation and misinformation into the public discourse and influence the public perception of the world around us. Oftentimes, certain digital spheres areâjust like their inherent messagesâdriven by partisan allegiance or propagandistic tendencies. Facilitated through an increasingly fractured post-digital society, such messages can be deliberately and precisely shared among communities of interest and injected into public communication. An investigation by Albright (2017), research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, has revealed Cambridge Analyticaâs effort to geolocate American voters and combine this information with real-time emotional sentiment analyses for targeting citizens via social media . Using that approach, it appears easy to feed relevant information to conspirators or everyone else, either consolidating their beliefs or shaking their faith. Such logics of a new ecosystem of information dissemination and consumption require new kinds of tools and new profiles of journalists.
Also, the ontology of journalism has changed: New formats and methods have changed journalistsâ everyday work routines that both emerging professional as well as more experienced reporters have to cope with. These innovations are accompanied by various challenges: masses of information provided online and in social media oftentimes leave audiences overnewsed but underinformed. As every piece of information gets digitised, journalists need to incorporate new practices to access digital sources, encode new information configurations and extract meaning of novel information types. Each kind of information requires specific approaches; digital formats can be highly distinct, contain accurate and detailed information and metadata . Specialists with distinguished skillsets have always been on the verge of breaking new ground for journalism innovation. A binary distinction between digital and analogue journalism is becoming extinct. New emerging technologies of communication are now an essential part of journalism and expand persistent aspects of a journalistâs repertoire such as face-to-face communication with sources and eye-witnesses.
Investigative Journalism is heavily affected by the digital transformation. As the fourth estate, journalists are âquasi-constitutional watchdogs acting on behalf of a societyâs citizensâ (Harcup 2014, p. 109). It is arguable whether journalists and affiliated news outlets manage to fulfil this role, acting as lapdogs not watchdogs (Benjamin 2014). Certainly, investigative journalism demands a lot from journalists: In order to uncover corruption, mismanagement, abuse of power or shady money operations and fraud , journalists are likely to stir up a hornetâs nest bearing risks for their career, their whole profession and their own safety. By its very nature, investigative reporters encounter resistance as they are trying to reinstate transparency and balance for the public good and according to democratic values. This is by no means desirable by those who are investigated. As a result, journalists face obstacles and forces they have to fiercely overcome. Powers that normally fight those who try to unmask them, may be hiding behind institutions, creeping in governmental bodies, exploiting loopholes and sailing close to the wind, or running sophisticated cons. Hence, citizens are in dire need of advocates who call out these wrongdoings. Accordingly, sources holding incriminating evidence are hard to access. Only few organisations may be willing to publish or to provide such evidence; usually, such information is well kept behind closed doors.
The digitisation of informationâbe it proceedings, contracts, annual reports, demographic statistics , economic indicators or audiovisual materialâbears enormous implications for investigative journalism . On the one hand, journalists are now equipped with new tools that allow them to run analyses of high computational efforts, work statistical analyses and present their findings with a high visual appeal to broad audiences via the Internet. On the other hand, digital information is encryptable, decentralised and extremely prone to manipulation and tampering . To keep up with these challenges, journalists from both legacy media as well as independent activist platforms developed software, techniques and mindsets to prolong investigative shoe-leather reporting in the digital era.
In 2010, The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel reported on the Afghan War documents leak unveiling unknown facts hidden in numbers. The publication of these reports can be regarded as the ascent of data journalism or, at least, as its inauguration into the repertoires of reputable media outlets. Until then, data journalism had been a niche phenomenon we could scarcely observe in mainstream media. However, evolving internet technologies initiated the emergence of easy-to-use and mostly free tools to refine, analyse and visualise statistical data, whichâdue to the ongoing digitalisation of information in the past decadesâwould provide a new and seemingly inexhaustible source for journalists.
An online survey by Garrison (2001) revealed that internet technologies such as search engines and database services made their way into US newsrooms, showing that the Internet has been becoming a dominant source for news collection since the late 1990s. Later, Holovaty (2006) published a manifesto for database journalism. He calls on newspapers âto stop the story-centric worldviewâ and to embrace data in their stories postulating news stories built around data-driven interfaces with regard for a combination of both text and data.
Today, data journalism can very well be considered as incorporated into the editorial structures of legacy news outlets such as The Guardian or The New York Times and we see more and more small data units on a local and regional level. Furthermore, thanks to the mere existence of stand-alone data-driven explanatory and analytical data journalism sites such as Vox , FiveThirtyEight or Quartz , and thanks to the inclusion of data journalism within journalism education and the growing consideration by the scientific community, data journalism is no more on the fringes but a well-known and widely discussed journalistic phenomenon.
Data journalism is symptomatic for the data age: Journalists need tools to report information that is now saved in digital forms. But not only words and statements are abstracted and are turned into spreadsheets, and not only demographic or economic statistics are stored as intelligible datasets. Audiovisual materials such as photographs and videos are other information mediums that challenge digital journalism . It is particularly difficult to authenticate visual and audiovisual material and to identify the originators of those contents. How can journalists retrieve data, pictures and voices that can enlighten stories, provide background information or will result in exclusive scoops? Data-driven journalism and its techniques of analysing and visualising statistical big data and new visual-analytical tools are cutting-edge approaches to uncover the truth and tell the story behind the story; whereas the former has found its way into most newsrooms, visual analytics techniques are predominantly applied by independent specialists, experts working for independent platforms or institutions affiliated with academia. This edited volume displays various approaches, technologies and projects that employ innovative practices within their investigations. By no means does this outset imply that new technologies and practices for investigative newsgathering replace traditional techniques and make investigations exclusively desk-bound; however, new approaches certainly do enhance access to a variety of unique sources and voices.
This book compiles chapters by both practitioners and academics. Contributions range from engaging anecdotes or authoritative instructions to contextualised discussions. As a result, chapters differ regarding their format and intent. If you are a practitioner yourself, some chapters hopefully prove to be useful hands-on manuals while other chapters provide additional insights at a meta-level. At the same time, we hope to give our academic readers exclusive insights into applications of modern techniques while embedding these cases in the broader context of journalism innovation. When structuring this volume, we had in mind that some of our readers will find certain chapters more personally valuable than others. Therefore, we arranged the contributions in three parts, focusing on three central pillars of ...
