I’m deeply impressed (and inspired by) all the cases of creative journalism put on display this week. In a profession that sometimes feels tired and rigid, it’s really cool to see imaginative work being done and I have many questions. How do you reconstruct stories after the fact, reliably? How do you counter other (malicious) media narratives? How does AI help (and, I assume, complicate) open-source reporting? With an abundance of information that you can dig into, how do you even begin knowing where to start? With everything that we are able to access, what is still lost to us? 

I found it really interesting that the documentary emphasized organization to such an extent. The internet is disorganized and seeing the process of investigation rather than archival is powerful. Thinking about how documentation is only powerful when accurately narrativized, I felt like many of our readings this week pointed to equally sinister uses of information. Living in an age of hyper surveillance, it’s nice to imagine that we can utilize technological paper trails as citizen-journalists, but it also feels like a scary affirmation of the ways all documentation (and much of journalism) contributes to state databases. Data can always be twisted, and Russia claiming the hospital they bombed was uninhabited (despite the videos showing the opposite) is an obvious example of how fact can easily be denied or manipulated. And as there begins to be more and more content on the internet, propaganda and misinformation spread so quickly. Sometimes it feels like we spend more time fighting misinformation than creating new positive information. Still worth it.

All these readings were unfortunately framed for me by another recent article I read, which talked about the abundance of documentation that we have available about Assad’s crimes in Syria. Nothing has happened as a result of that documentation. While continually amazed by the investigations that are possible, issues of accountability immediately come up. In Bellingcat’s case, the character that is given attention in the documentary is al-Werfalli. With outstanding arrest warrants and an abundance of evidence, he died in 2021 without having ever been to court. My generation is already distrustful of a failing ICC – Sinwar, Netanyahu, Putin, we aren’t seeing arrests at any significant level. It’s incredibly meaningful to transmit information, but the question then becomes how we translate that into action (which is a recurring theme and issue in journalism). I’m really impressed by the Ukrainian Government’s effort to document the war through civilian crowdsourcing – this seemingly will give a very comprehensive picture of human rights abuses, a database of information that can be mined for criminal evidence. But how do we get that evidence to mean anything?