What is Investigative journalism?

There are different types of journalism, according to (Fenton, 2010), ‘Journalism comes in many forms-from entertainment driven and celebrity-laden to the more serious and politically focused’, news journalism focuses on reporting a news story of maybe concert that took place or recent celebrity gossip, however, investigative journalism emphases more on finding out what is underneath the surface, in other words, uncovering what the truth really is, regardless of has been said. ‘An investigative journalist is a man or a woman whose profession is to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available’ (Hugo, 2008).

In most cases, investigative journalists try to scrutinise when they believe something doesn’t make sense or they believe there is more to what has been put out there, which makes them bring attention to violated law and regulations. This requires a lot of research which is up to the journalist themselves and depends on how much personal interest they have on the issue. The research isn’t as simple as news journalism, and often takes journalists a long time to collect perhaps years. For an investigative reporter, they are usually required to concentrate on a topic which is of public interest, for example something which the public has been a part of but doesn’t know the full information about it. In order to develop the investigative story, journalists need to start by compiling evidence by analysing or witnessing answers for themselves. This type of research and reporting is seen in documentaries & majority criminal TV programmes/series. 

A relevant example of investigative journalism in a documentary would be ‘The disappearance of Madeleine McCann’ which shares with the public all the research and investigations carried out trying to find this little British girl who went missing on holiday with her family, in Portugal back in 2007. Since this was “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history” according to an article from Express & Star (C Hoare, 2019), the public were eager to learn what happened, what new information was discovered and whether all the conspiracy stories were true or false, therefore this became a topic of public interest. 


 New information was revealed and information which was previously available is looked at in a different way. 



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