Read this and become an investigative journalist

It got rusty, but I didn’t forget it. Now that I read it I can’t believe it took me more than a year to look into it. I’m talking about „Story-based inquiry: a manual for investigative journalists“. Mark Lee Hunter is one of the best-known investigative reporters of the world. He published this 80-pages-long guide with funding of the UNESCO in 2011 [Update, 10.05 am: A first version was actually published back in 2009, thanks for the hint]. It’s the best thing I read about investigative journalism up to now. Read it, if you want to do serious journalism.

The manual presents a hypothesis-driven-method to investigate stories. It shows how to build a hypothesis, how to follow it, how to gather material (from open and human sources) and how to write and publish investigative stories. It’s great written with a lot of short examples. Some things will be familiar to investigative reporters, others offer a new perception on a problem. I recognize a lot of problems of my daily work in the manual. I strongly recommend this manual to every journalist. I try to follow it’s instructions from now on. I should have since 2011. That would have saved me working hours.

You can download the manual here.

[Err, yes, it’s my first English blog post. I hope this will happen more often from now on. May be that I will change this website into a bilingual site, like I did with fussballdoping.de/footballdrugs.com. Time will tell.]

Header Photo: CC-BY-SA via olarte.ollie at flickr.com