Investigative Reporting
Do you look at the news headlines with skepticism, convinced you are only seeing part of the story?
Are you prepared to sift through official reports and company documents for a nugget of information? And learn where to look for the gleam of gold among the mass of data?
Do you want to discover how to talk to people, win their trust, and persuade them to help you find the answers you need?
If the answer to these questions is yes, you might make a good investigative reporter.
“Investigative journalism,” according to a recent survey, “should call the powerful to account, and expose corruption.” It sounds glamorous, but most investigations need many hours of work gathering lots and lots of small details. It also requires perseverance in the face of hard-pressed editors and, more often than not, a determination by those at the centre of a story to refuse to help with, or to attempt to hinder, your work.
With an increasingly attention deficient media heavily reliant on “churning” emailed press releases and gossip “unearthed” on Twitter, this course will provide an introduction to a more in-depth form of reporting.
We will consider how to use the overload of information available on the internet alongside more traditional techniques of developing and maintaining contacts, interviewing sources and analysing documents to develop original, ground breaking stories. Plus tips on how to get your hard work published.
Guest speakers will include leading investigative reporters who will discuss their work and the methods they have adopted.
Tutor: Jason Lewis worked for 20 years on staff of national newspapers. He was investigations editor of the Sunday Telegraph and security editor, Whitehall editor and chief investigative reporter of the Mail on Sunday. He is currently managing director of K2 Intelligence, where he advises companies and individuals at the centre of international disputes and litigation.
Political Reporting
The course is intended to be a highly practical examination of the way political reporters cover the increasingly unpredictable UK political scene, with an emphasis on Westminster but also including the European parliament and Commission, the devolved parliaments and local government including the London assembly. It will look at the way the reporters in the press gallery in Westminster go about their daily duties and how they interact with politicians, spin doctors and special advisers as well as Whitehall departments and the political parties, pressure
groups, think tanks, lobbyists and pollsters. There will be a close examination of the history and development of political reporting, specifically the lobby system and its pros and cons, as well as spin and media manipulation and the way journalists deal with these central elements of reporting politics. It will look closely at the way the media influences, or otherwise, policy making and sets the day-to-day political agenda. It will also examine the changes made to political reporting and the practice of politics by the ongoing digital revolution, particularly online reporting, Twitter and other social media. The course will include a visit to the parliamentary press gallery and Commons committees and guest speakers including senior political correspondents, spin doctors and bloggers.
Tutor: Nick Assinder
Nick Assinder has been a journalist for 35 years, starting on local newspapers before moving to the Daily Mail as political reporter in the mid 1980s and then the Daily Express as deputy political editor and diplomatic editor until 1996.
He joined BBC Online as its political correspondent at its startup in 1998 before leaving a decade later to help launch the PoliticsHome website.
He specialised in covering British politics and saw the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and, most recently Ed Miliband, up close and in all their bloody detail.
As well as hard news writing, Assinder later specialised in writing analysis, commentary and sketches and attempting to get under the skin and make sense of British politics. He currently contributes to the innovative Byline website as well as teaching at City.