House of Lords launches investigative journalism inquiry

The House of Lords communications committee has launched a new inquiry into the future of investigative journalism.

According to a call for evidence from the committee, the inquiry seeks to complement the current parliamentary and judge-led inquiry into phone hacking, privacy and injunctions.

The committee says the recent phone-hacking scandal, along with ongoing threats to traditional news business models, have "raised urgent questions about the potential to harness the power of new technologies to complement traditional media".

"Even before the current scandal started to unfold, the economic climate was threatening original journalism: declining newspaper readership, fragmenting TV audiences and the migration of print advertising to online were exacerbated by the impact of the worst economic recession since the war," the call for entries adds.

"As a result, local newspapers have been forced to close and many journalists lost their jobs, long before the closure of the News of the World.

"While the events of the last few weeks clearly reflect very badly on some areas of the British press, they are also a reminder of the importance of investigative journalism."

As part of the inquiry, the committee is inviting written evidence on a series of related-issues, including the current consumption of news, how to assess the merits of a story and crucially, a look at the potential business models for this specific area of the industry.

"Our inquiry is focused very much on what the future of investigative journalism will look like," committee chairman Lord Inglewood said in the announcement.

"How is the industry going to respond to likely technological and regulatory change? How will this impact on the stories we read? And how will society's relationship with the media develop?

"We want to examine the changes that investigative journalism now faces, and how the culture surrounding it will progress going forward."

In a blog post today BBC director general Mark Thompson says newspapers should not necessarily be held to the same level of regulatory supervision and constraint as the broadcasters. "Plurality of regulation is itself an important safeguard of media freedom," he states.

"The BBC is paid for by the public. Because of that, we would never have paid for the stolen information that helped the Daily Telegraph to uncover the MPs' expenses scandal. The privately owned Telegraph took a different view and was able to publish a series of stories that, taken as a whole, were clearly in the public interest. It is not obvious to me that newspapers that people can choose to buy or ignore - and which, should they break the law, can always be prosecuted after the fact - should be held to the same level of continuous supervision and accountability as broadcasters who reach out into every household in the land."

Summarising his views he adds: "I believe that what the public want, what this moment demands, is not another round of self-serving hypocrisy or internecine strife from Britain's journalists, but a serious discussion about the difference between good and bad investigative journalism and a complex but necessary debate about where the boundary of acceptable journalistic practice lies and how it should be enforced."

Evidence can be submitted to the committee until 12 September.

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