Image of

I’VE been invited to speak about the future of investigative reporting next week at Wit’s University’s Power Reporting Conference organised by that institution’s journalism department.

It’s a great conference with plenty of big names from around South Africa and the world offering their thoughts on the investigative reporting business. The Dispatch will be well represented, having done pretty well recently with some reporting in this field.

I believe the Dispatch has found its own voice in investigative reporting which is relatively unique in the world. Other journalists often ask how we executed certain recent projects and I always say that what we have done is not rocket science – just a lot of hard work.

We are doing what journalists have always done.

A significant ingredient in our investigative reporting recipe is the age-old journalistic practice of going to the source of the story. When we decided to find out why Somalis where being murdered in the Eastern Cape it was obvious who we had to speak to – the people killing Somalis and the Somalis themselves.

Of course, finding and getting access to a killer is not easy, so that’s where the real work comes in but, as our journalist Thanduxolo Jika showed, it can be done. When reporter Gcina Ntsaluba set out to discover why thousands of houses were standing empty in the Eastern Cape despite massive delivery backlogs it was also obvious what he needed to do: visit these homes and speak to the people who should have been living in them.

A lot of old-fashioned gumshoe journalism went into producing these powerful stories and we were able to tell them more intricately using online, which is a new medium for us.

Video of a woman talking about her life living in a sodden cardboard box home is a lot more riveting than words in print can offer. At its heart, though, all of these story elements go back to the basics of journalism. We have learned in our special investigations to do the basics meticulously, to invest time to understand the textures contributing to the truth, and to live in the lives of our story subjects.

New media and its new story-telling tools amplify traditional methods of journalism although they are also beginning to create entire new fields of reporting – but that’s a column for another day.

So, if you asked me: “What is the future of investigative reporting? ” I would have to ask you to look to the past.