The word “painstaking” stuck out to me from the Bellingcat article we read this week for how well it fit the work performed by open source journalists. The problem they face is not necessarily a lack of data, but an abundance of data in raw and scattered forms that must all be gathered and cross-referenced to piece together a coherent narrative. The details involved in this process can be as small as the size of the floor tiles in a Syrian prison or as large as an area of desert and farmland that can be seen from space. Refining these data requires a very particular type of patience, diligence, and even obsession that I’m not sure many people possess. Most importantly, though, it takes time – HRW’s piece on the Ukrainian train station strike was released no less than 10 months after the strike happened. This time allowed HRW to put together a seemingly bulletproof account of the strike, not only describing what happened but also directly making the case that what happened was a war crime—and doing so in a forceful piece of writing. Here, as with any other piece of long-term reporting, time augments the force of the argument but also leads one to imagine what the reporters could have done with that time instead. Not everything can be analyzed with such scrutiny as the bombing of the train station, which leads me to wonder how HRW decided on this case over others. What about this case made them feel it was worth studying? Was it the severity of the crime? The availability of information? If not all war crimes can be fully examined and entered into evidence for legal cases, why do some get studied and others don’t?
Many of the pieces on open source reporting were bullish on the method. In particular, they enthused about the way that “citizen journalists and lone investigators” were leading the charge in developing open source reporting, because the tools required to do this reporting are accessible to anyone, anywhere—and because governments and mainstream outlets were slow to pick up the techniques that lay users were developing at “light speed” (Bellingcat). Yet there is definitely a darker side to this dynamic that other pieces this week mentioned: citizen journalists are doing the work because no one else is able to. Bellingcat, one of the principal open source journalism outlets, relies on volunteer labor, with reporters squeezing hours of research into a day already occupied by a full-time job and even childrearing in some cases. It didn’t seem to be able to pay these diligent journalists for their time. Meanwhile, commentators in the documentary and other sources lamented in the inability for mainstream outlets to fund this kind of work, as they face shrinking budgets and dwindling subscriber bases. Therefore, although this is a story of intrepid and plucky researchers, it’s also a story of a media landscape that only allows this research to be done by those individuals. Open source reporting in this model relies on agility and precarity at the same time. How long until unpaid volunteers lose interest or capacity, and stop working for Bellingcat? Is the solution to find more people to take their place?
