Investigative journalism
Academic research into the effectiveness of donor and foundation-supported investigative journalism.
Last updated
Academic research into the effectiveness of donor and foundation-supported investigative journalism.
Last updated
This resource page is a work in progress. Please get in touch to let us know what is missing using this form.
For non-academic research, reports and articles on the impact and effectiveness of investigative journalism go to:
Chapter 12 of R. Krøvel & M. Thowsen (Eds.), Making Transparency Possible. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (pp. 137–158).
Journalists around the world now use big data and data visualization to report and write powerful stories about the effects of resource extraction. They use mobile and social media platforms to disseminate their work. Much of this coverage was driven by foundations and Google who believed in data journalism and funded training and tools to promote it. It’s not clear, however, whether the journalism has an impact and if it can develop an enthusiastic audience and help generate revenue for the outlets that report and publish data-driven journalism.
Democracy’s Detectives puts investigative journalism under a magnifying glass to clarify the challenges and opportunities facing news organizations today.
Drawing on a painstakingly assembled data set of thousands of investigations by U.S. journalists, James T. Hamilton deploys economic theories of markets and incentives to reach conclusions about the types of investigative stories that get prioritized and funded.
Hamilton chronicles a remarkable record of investigative journalism’s real-world impact, showing how a single dollar invested in a story can generate hundreds of dollars in social benefits.
Although not focussed primarily on the role of foundations, this research into investigative journalism in Africa does highlight some of the challenges of a reliance on foundation funding. It shows, for example, that, ‘most donor organization prefer to award organizations grants on yearly basis. What this means is that every year organizations are supposed to submit proposals for funding. This is a timeconsuming exercise that also brings about uncertainty and has a potential of destabilizing the organizations’. (Humanitarian Journalism)
This book examines the rapid growth, impact and sustainability of not-forprofit investigative reporting and its impact on US democracy and mainstream journalism. It includes chapters focussed specifically on the sustainability of foundation funding, the agendas of foundations and the ethical issues that arise from philanthropically funded journalism. (Humanitarian Journalism)
For non-academic research, reports and articles on investigative journalism go to
This resource page is a work in progress. Please get in touch to let us know what is missing using this form.
