The Help Me Investigate blog

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

Jon Walker is the political correspondent of the Birmingham Mail and Post, and Coventry Telegraph. Here he explains how to look for leads and useful information in written questions and answers, committees, consultations and other sources.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates and Radio WM talks about how some investigations simply come down to doing the hard slog of a repetitive task - in this example, ringing round garages asking a simple question.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

The Stirrer was an independent news website in Birmingham that investigated a number of local issues in collaboration with local people. One investigation in particular - into the employment of CCTV cameras in largely muslim areas of the city without consultation - was picked up by The Guardian's Paul Lewis, who discovered its roots in anti-terrorism funds.

The coverage led to an investigation into claims of police misleading councillors, and the eventual halting of the scheme.

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, founder Adrian Goldberg - who now presents '5 live Investigates' and a daily show on BBC Radio WM - talks about his experiences of running the site and how the story evolved from a user's tip-off.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates and Radio WM talks about how to work with sources and the options available when they're not prepared to talk on-camera or on radio.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates talks about an investigation into misleading leasing agreements that had left many schools with large debts and only overpriced, unserviced equipment to show for it - a situation that seems to be happening beyond the education sector too.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

Here's a part by part guide to how you can follow different 'streams' of information as a journalist to understand what's going on in a particular field, and how they can inform your real-world digging. Most of them involve using an RSS reader like Google Reader to follow feeds to keep in touch with developments.

1. Prepackaged news

While much is made of the ‘exclusive’ in journalism, and students will be harangued for recycling work done by other journalists, the truth is that the first thing most journalists do every day is check out their competitors, and get a feel for the current news agenda. A journalist has to balance being ‘on top’ of developments that others are covering (“Why don’t we have something on this story?”), while also reporting information that others don’t have.

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