“Corporate timidity” is undermining investigative journalism as news outlets reduce spending on original reporting in favour of material that is cheaper to produce, Tina Brown has warned.
The former Vanity Fair editor said investors like the idea of winning prizes for original reporting, but that when they go into board meetings, “they look at the numbers and go, ‘Let’s just cut it.’” Her comments come as outlets such as BuzzFeed and Vice are slashing the size of their newsrooms despite winning plaudits for their work.
Brown was married to former Sunday Times editor Sir Harry Evans until his death in 2020. She is now running a foundation set up in Evans’ memory to encourage the next generation of investigative journalists, which is holding its inaugural event on Wednesday in London.
Evans is most famous for his work uncovering the thalidomide scandal, using years of reporting in the Sunday Times to expose how medicine given to mothers to treat morning sickness caused birth defects.
Brown said investigative journalism requires both deep pockets and stamina: “Harry was very good at sustaining outrage. That was one of his great talents. One of the things we battle now is how to keep attention in a time of attention famine.
“One of an editor’s most important challenges is not only to publish a story, but to keep people focused on that story and keep doing that story again and again. He always felt that just when your own staff are getting bored with a campaign is just when readers are beginning to notice it. That was his philosophy in the thalidomide scandal.”
She said that in many ways, the world is living through a “golden age” of investigative journalism – thanks to outlets such as South Africa’s Daily Maverick or Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation – but this is under threat from “digital disruption, corporate timidity, and the collapse of platforms”.
She said it can also be harder to make people read the investigative journalism that is being produced, due to the sheer number of competing outlets.
“Editors need to be really creative about how to make serious journalism exciting and creative and sustaining,” she said. “This stuff is very, very expensive. It’s not just news gathering. It’s also sustaining people over a long time to try to make sure that these stories land.”
When Evans was campaigning on behalf of the thalidomide victims in the 1960s and 1970s, he had to rely on building up public pressure through lengthy letter-writing campaigns. Brown suggests social media would have delivered justice for the sufferers much faster: “They could do one massive Twitter campaign and would have probably achieved that very, very fast. There is that upside to things.”
Following Evans’s death, she launched a fellowship to support new investigative journalism in conjunction with Durham University and Reuters. The inaugural Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism will also take place on Wednesday, featuring speakers such as Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; former New York Times editor Dean Baquet; and Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner.
Brown suggested that the future of investigative journalism may come from non-profit organisations funding investigations that would be unsustainable for a commercially minded publisher. But, she warned, this comes with its own risks: “You always see lots of people come in and say we’re going to support journalism. But when the going gets tough, where’s the Katharine Graham who’s going to stick with Woodward and Bernstein and Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post? That’s one of the questions for the non-profits.”
She also defended the commercial mindset of the British newspaper industry: “It’s fashionable in the United States to raise your eyebrows about the British media and tabloids. But the plurality of the British press is absolutely superior in that sense to the United States … just the lack of competition, I think, sort of slows the adrenaline of journalism.
“I know that Harry felt that the British press plurality was one of the great vibrant things about journalism and that it was still a massive plus for the UK that there were the choices of the different outlets and voices.”
She said Evans, who had a brief and acrimonious stint as editor of the Times after its takeover by Rupert Murdoch in the early 1980s, felt that the best newspaper proprietors backed their editors and did not interfere: “How do we encourage people to come into journalism understanding that it’s going to be tough and expensive and you’re going to be offending power? Are you going to stay the course?”
