The austerity measures in public service broadcasting challenged the news units and led to a hiring freeze just when investigative reporting was beginning to be seen as a way to counter fake news and foster trust in the media. To accommodate the latter, the editor-in-chief of ZDF introduced a new investigative format, ZDF Zoom, and tried not to dismiss editorial staff. He also equipped the major news format of the television station heute.dewith fact-checkers from Correctiv and data journalists. Accordingly, a leading ZDF journalist is convinced that money alone is not the barrier to more investigative reporting:
The linchpin in journalism is staff. […] No better financial resources will help us there either. […] if I don’t have the people to […] research […] I can’t do anything with the money. Money only translates into value for us if we can either recruit additional staff or reform structures […] in such a way that the journalistic workforce is freed up again. That is the challenge for us at the moment […].
Instead, a clever composition of the editorial personnel serves investigative journalism. Also, in print journalism, manpower is the core prerequisite for investigative reporting, because it requires time. What it means in practice is illustrated by a representative of the weekly Die Zeit. In this newspaper, 15 investigative journalists conduct about 30–50 investigative research projects per year, which finally leads to about ten stories. Die Zeit operates with an anonymous post box, similar to Wikileaks, to protect the sources. The massive amount of data can sometimes only be handled by cross-media teams. A Zeit journalist also critically assesses that television does not do enough in terms of investigative reporting: “Our resources are sufficient. […] But if television were to use its financial power for investigation, democracy would be served. In terms of their potential, too little happens”.
The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung cooperates with the public service broadcaster NDR, and WDR if required. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, about eight to ten journalists work in the investigative unit. One example of a successful story concerning the watchdog function is the Panama Papers, where Der Spiegel was involved in editing the data. The important weekly news magazine, however, had been itself the subject of investigative research, as one of its journalists found out about his colleague’s years-long fake investigative reporting.
In a nutshell, investigative reporting is, as in 2011, still a question of prestige, but now also of a change in attitudes. After Wikileaks, the news media discovered that the public needed and demanded more in-depth reporting. The time and financial situation does not seem too bad for investigative reporting. Commercial and publicly funded news media implemented special units and formats to fulfil their function as watchdogs. The staff and organisational structure of investigative units are, however, more agile, compared with the findings in MDM 2011 (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), and cross-media cooperation seems the best way to tackle the lack of trained specialist personnel in the individual news media – at least for the moment.
