There’s too much bad news permeating the world of journalism and its tenuous business models. But now we can report some genuinely good news.
Crikey is embarking on a serious editorial expansion. Over coming months we will be assembling a team of around a dozen full-time reporters with a challenging brief: dig, probe, uncover, explain, expose, deconstruct, connect the dots, lift the veils and help our readers better understand the back-stories, the side-stories and the stories someone somewhere doesn’t want you to read.
We’re calling this “inquiry journalism”. We have now started recruiting reporters and an editor with journalistic nous; dedication to facts and accuracy; determination, grit and persistence; a distaste for spin and managed news; a passion for independent journalism untainted by corporate influence and ideological agendas; a mind open to original and unconventional ideas; and, above all, a fierce, unrelenting curiosity — and we’re looking for them here.
This initiative, which aims to launch by April, is the culmination of a long-running collaborative project between our company Private Media (owner of Crikey) and two of our bigger investors, John B Fairfax and Cameron O’Reilly.
John B Fairfax’s family has a storied history at the centre of Australia quality journalism. It started 177 years ago when his namesake acquired The Sydney Morning Herald, and ended two months ago when Fairfax Media was taken over by the Nine television network and, in the process, the Fairfax name was jettisoned.
Cameron O’Reilly’s family controlled the global media company Independent News and Media — which included a stable of Australian regional newspapers, The Independent in London, the Irish Independent and the New Zealand Herald — for more than 35 years.
Now the Fairfax and O’Reilly families have returned to journalism in a different way, as investors in an ambitious venture within Crikey, which has 18 years of digital independent journalism under its belt.
You can read their comments here, and you can start reading the work of Crikey’s team of inquiry journalists in a month or two.
Eric Beecher is the chairman and editor-in-chief of Private Media.
Michael West is already doing this. Take a look at his website.
Such excellent news.
I’ll drink to that Paddy.
Cheers
Venise
“inquiry journalists” isn’t that just a new ‘spin’on a investigative journalists?
I too have “…a distaste for spin…”and bullishittery.
Good luck all the same, I will be interested to see some results.
This is good news – Crickey has been given some good tips to investigate in the past but there has been a deafening silence – this is probably to two factors first the lack of resources secondly the lack of intelligent forensic journalists . Now the first problem has been resourced see if the second can be overcome.
The present Crikey requires the journos to publish more controversial topics – to titillate the readers so they will come back tomorrow. Thus the articles are usually – “agin the guvment” – or the – “this queer idea should be adopted as the modern fashionable trend” – not having yellow vests in Australia we have to rely on Climatism v Denialism [at least it is better than Communism v Fascism, but it seems just as emotional. Don’t forget the usual more money for mental health mantras – shows we are a nation of nutters.
Good luck – or good management- in your editorial expansion and the revival of the pamphleteers which ignited the original French Revolution.
” not having yellow vests in Australia we have to rely on Climatism v Denialism ”
Not so. That’s the same old dictum as Left verse Right. What we need is the TRUTH, regardless of it’s origin. There is truth in the Left and there is truth in the Right and there is truth in climate change and truth in denialism. That’s what Beecher means and that is the definition of lifting the veil.
It does actually sound very exciting.
This is good news. Would you please investigate Family Court?