Seen from certain angles, it seems like it’s never been easier to catch people’s eyes with non-fiction. The market for big, dense books on politics and society is booming. Streaming has turned serialised documentaries into blockbusters and podcasting has done the same for long-form reporting, on platforms where lurid true crime whodunnits rub shoulders with wonkish exposés on everything from corporate malfeasance to governmental corruption. On the other hand, print newspapers, the traditional home of investigative journalism, have seen their territory shrink faster than the Arctic ice sheet, with vast sections of its once-solid glacier caving into oblivion in the past two decades. At least 270 local newspapers have closed in the uksince 2005. The figure for America in the same period tops 2,500. As organs are bought, sold and minced through ever-finer sieves of productivity, their surviving sleuths are left to compete with ever-decreasing resources, against ever-increasing competitors, for attention spans of ever-reducing width.
Boris Johnson’s premiership was eventually brought down over his handling of the misdeeds of Chris Pincher, having been bloodied by the months-long reveals of Partygate. And yet, equally well-documented scandals relating to covid policy, VIPlane contracts for Tory donors, extrajudicial overreach and even funnelling cash to his American mistress made little or no impact at all.
Some stories, it seems, have just enough currency to survive the ever-tightening gyre of the 24-hour news cycle, while others barely scratch the sides as they reach escape velocity and pass out the other end, unremarked upon.
We asked three highly esteemed investigative journalists what hope years-long investigations have in a landscape where a single tweet or tv appearance can dominate a weekend’s press, and asked: what happens when their hard-earned scoop lands not with a bang, but with a thud?
John Lanchester
Journalist, author and contributing editor at the London Review of Books
I wrote about Facebook in 2016. Everyone who’s ever had any dealings with Facebook knows how pernicious their mechanisms are; an ad-tech company that didn’t exactly invent surveillance capitalism but perfected it, and that it will do anything to increase its reach and revenue. And nobody gave a shit.
You could write that story, and indeed I did, and it goes viral and becomes a huge hit among people who already know about it and who already agree but it doesn’t get any kind of traction in the wider conversation – or with regulators. Until Carol Cadwalladr tells that story about [the predatory analytics practices of political consulting firm] Cambridge Analytica, and suddenly there’s this completely different level of cut-through. The Trump campaign said Cambridge Analytica was completely irrelevant. Facebook embedded managers at the Republican and Democratic campaigns, and then advised them on how to use our targeting tools. The Trump campaign say ‘we just did what they said’ they were running 100 different versions of the same ad in one day in some markets, seeing which cut through, and using that. And the difference with the Democrats is they had a senior Facebook person embedded, and they didn’t listen.
Ian Urbina
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and founder of journalism non-profit The Outlaw Ocean
Two years ago, we produced a collaboration with a satellite firm which revealed the largest ever illegal fishing fleet ever discovered. It’s a great superlative – you can’t top that! These were Chinese squid vessels in North Korean waters, it was a slam dunk; a black-and-white case of illegality because there were sanctions that said no foreign vessels, five nations on the security council signed those and China was one of them. It was 900-1,000 vessels, almost a third of the entire fishing fleet, so this was not one bad apple, it was a massive thing.
The other aspect that made it a huge story is that there were dead bodies. This wasn’t like ‘fish, sanctions; who cares?’ this was real-world repercussion in the order of hundreds of rickety North Korean boats washing up on Japanese shores with dead bodies. And we were able to connect the Chinese to these victims.
