Web gives newspapers added credibility
By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jun 8th, 2007 • Category: Journalism, online newsThe value of the web in providing evidence to back-up stories is being demonstrated by the Guardian this week. Yesterday and today lead stories by David Leigh and Rob Evans on secret payments to secure arms deals with Saudi Arabia, have been accompanied by panels pointing readers to the web site for source documents and other material.
The Baefiles section of the web site has original government documents and much more of the evidence on which the stories are based. In the past such the reader would not have had access to the source documents. Now they have and that makes the investigative journalism all the more powerful.
Yesterday, on an entirely different kind of story, I commented that including an audio clip of an interview with England cricket captain Michael Vaughan enabled the paper refute his claim that he had been misquoted.
The ability to give almost unlimited space to a story and use other media on the web is giving journalism a route to greater credibility.
Andrew Grant-Adamson is Andrew Grant-Adamson is a journalist who now teaches a new generation of writers, subs and editors at the University of Westminster.
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Last week I wrote to the Press Gazettte welcoming its redesign and reinvigoration. In the letter, which was published, I commented on the difficulty of buying copies and said I would be prepared to… Web gives newspapers added credibility The value of the web in providing evidence to back-up stories is being demonstrated by the Guardian this week. Yesterday and today lead stories by David Leigh and Rob Evans on secret payments to se…