Benchmark Investigation Manual (Free!)
Published in the fall of 2009 but already a best-freeseller: Listed on over two hundred websites and used in journalism schools and centres from the US to Africa, Europe to China!
‘Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists’, by Mark Lee Hunter and others, is the first text that treats investigative journalism as an integrated process focused on producing an original story.
This little book (about 80 pages in A4 format) guides you or your class through the basics of conceiving, structuring, researching, composing and publishing an investigation. It’s based on doctoral-level research and an aggregate 100 years of professional practice, with experts from the Global Investigative Journalism Network like Luuk Sengers, Drew Sullivan, Nils Hanson, Pia Thordsen and Rana Sabbagh. Our thanks to UNESCO, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and International Media Support for supporting this project.
The Story-Based Inquiry method helps journalists and researchers managing investigations, and producing original and powerful stories.
Over the years we have trained reporters, newsrooms, researchers and professionals of businesses and NGO’s to improve their research skills. Story-Based Inquiry is not just a summary of anecdotal experiences or tips – it is a method, based on doctoral-level research and an aggregate 100 years of professional practice. It offers a systematic approach to the key issues of an investigation with a firm focus on the final result, the story. Hence the name “Story-Based Inquiry”.
Less effort, more impact
The method increases effectiveness and efficiency. It enables reporters, editors and researchers to make quick decissions based on brainstorming techniques and checklists and to communicate productively about the working process with a collective idiom. We also teach them to collect, sort and share the data for their stories in a simple database, a “Masterfile”.
You could call this ‘workflow management’ or ‘project management’. We call it: becoming conscious of the way you work, so you can do it better. This is what an integrated method is about: enabling you to master every step of a given process, so that you can repair errors and capitalise on opportunities quickly and efficiently.
The first true method
Story-Based Inquiry is the first such method, to our knowledge, in the history of investigative reporting. Certainly there were reporters who worked methodically. But no one had set down these methods, or pulled the separate elements that could build a method into a coherent framework. In 2009, Mark Lee Hunter and Luuk Sengers, together with other experts in the Global Investigative Journalism Network joint forces to present the method in a manual.
Manuals, courses and consultancy
Translated into six languages and funded by Unesco, “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” rapidly became the most widely distributed handbook in the history of investigative reporting. A follow-up casebook with more than 20 investigative stories from all over the world was published in the fall of 2011. And a series of specialized handbooks will be published in 2012.
Hunter and Sengers now teach story-based inquiry at international conferences and summer schools, at journalism schools, in newsrooms and in research departments, to acclaim from participants. They also continue to conduct research to improve the method.
Story-Based Inquiry in action:
Story-Based Inquiry on twitter:
