Crikey has stuck its nose into plenty of interesting troughs over its 18-year history. Some savory, some smelly, hopefully most of them relevant and revealing.
Now we’ve just added a whole lot more noses in the trough.
In two weeks, Crikey launches Inq, our biggest single investment in journalism in the almost two decades since Stephen Mayne conceived the idea of an outlier email newsletter to scrutinise Australian politics, money and power.
Inq comprises a team of a dozen reporters and editors pursuing what we’re calling “inquiry journalism”. Their remit is to unearth issues that need to be exposed, interrogated, investigated, explained or deconstructed. Then dig, prod, probe, sniff around, analyse, sort the data, follow the money, connect the dots and never stop asking questions.
The result, we hope, will be a steady stream of stories and investigations that, individually and collectively, shine light on what’s happening under Australia’s hood and behind the veil of power, influence, money and cosy networks.
This is a big deal for Crikey. We’re a small, fiercely independent publisher compared with the likes of the ABC, News Corp and Nine Entertainment. Inq is our attempt to play in the bigger sandpit of Australian investigative journalism. And, we hope, to do it in a distinctive way that is unconstrained by establishment preferences or ideological frameworks.
Inq will sit within the Crikey website and Inq stories will arrive in the daily Crikey newsletter. All Inq stories will part of a Crikey subscription. You can read more about Inq here, and meet the Inq team here.
As our media falls into fewer hands — much of it controlled from boardrooms in New York and London, much of it part of entertainment conglomerates for whom journalism is a peripheral activity — we believe there’s a worthwhile, dare we say important, place for a locally-owned independent voice that puts inquiry journalism at its epicentre.
Inq launches on Monday week. Please join us for the ride. We hope plenty of people will need seatbelts.
About bloody time someone did it. Give ‘em hell, folks. I await your first reports with interest.
Some real investigative journalism. How good is Crikey!
Expose the bastards!
Well Eric construct a beachhead and draw a line in the sand for Press Freedom that the government is not to cross. The sun has been cloud over and it has been cold for many media lines as journalists battle for the story since the AFP raided the ABC offices and ABC Chair Ita Buttrose is now to talk to the PM Scott Morrison, or is it that Scott Morrison will talk to Ita Buttrose. This Press Freedom story is a story that has caused discomfort and unrest without glory for either side.
A journalist home has been raided and rooms have been searched, wardrobes examined and draws looked into. This is not a comfortable thing for a democratic country to sit through without a shifting in our seats. By crikey it is not.
Go, you guys! Cannot wait. Australia certainly needs it!
Hoping your initiative will be as indispensable as The Saturday Paper is and the National Times was.
DF – Don’t forget as Guardian Australia usually is, and Pearls and Irritations always is, and New Matilda – the truth is out there but it needs to be free and widespread. The ABC is where the free truth should rightfully come from, but Auntie needs a lot of damage repair.
Your mention of the National Times brought on a wave of nostalgia..!!
Nevertheless, a great initiative and if the performance is there, my subscription renewal is guaranteed.
Fairmind – indeed. I subscribe to those that require it. I’m getting old – was it the National Times or Nation Review or did one become the other. I remember Nation Review very fondly, with John Hepworth in particular. Was it Gordon Barton of IPEC fame who funded it?
There’ll never be another Nation Review so we’ll have to make do with this.
What a fine old ferret it was.