It strikes me as a shame that work done in that arena is often looked upon as being a bit of an intellectual graveyard. For all its stylistic differences, I find the work I do for women’s mags can often be just as -if not more - adventurous and critically challenging as the work I do more serious media.

There’s nothing in Mark Scott’s statements that suggests that this will be the case at the ABC - indeed, the opposite appears to be true, since it seems that initiatives like ABC Open will create jobs rather than kill them off. Commentators in commercial news organisations who suspect the opposite tell us more about the climate in their own companies than they provide insights about what’s happening at the ABC, I think.

Well done on following the ABC’s new social media engagement guidelines with your disclosure statement, by the way. Would love to hear more from you about ABC Open as it evolves…

Indeed, as the world that media organisations seek to investigate becomes more complex it is less likely that the people working for those media organisations will have *all* the skills needed to uncover and understand the facts in a story. I’m thinking about forensic accounting and data mining, but there are doubtless other areas. Don’t mistake that for suggesting that media organisation will not need to spend money on programs of work to investigate a story. What I am suggesting is that well-paid professionals who work for media organisations could play a role in organising people who aren’t in the employ of the media organisation, and verifying the work that they do.

This is only partially new - investigative programs and units have employed specialist analysts in the past - but the internet enables more connections, and perhaps network effects.
- Some people have speculated that huge amounts of documents tabled in a court case might be filtered by a well organised crowd, with potentially significant sections referred to professionals.
- Another application might be asking large numbers of people to record rainfall, or other observed phenomena, to be centrally collated, analysed and, if warranted, investigated.

At the moment this isn’t happening on any big scale that I know of, but there are opportunities for imaginative applications of investigative participation.

Disclosure: I work for the ABC, partially on ABC Open, but these are my views, not the ABC’s.