“Kaiser Prevost: I have a theory about this town, this place, about the way it works: it operates best when people go beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour. You reach a position, a course of action suggests itself, and you say, ‘This makes me morally uncomfortable’, or ‘This will constitute a betrayal of friendship’. In any other walk of life you withdraw, you rethink. But my theory instead goes like this: make it your working maxim. When you find yourself in a position of normative doubt then that is the sign to commit. My variation on this theory is that the really successful people go one step further. They find themselves in this moral grey area, they move right on into the black.”

From The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ by William Boyd

Courtesy of City University Investigative Journalism MA graduate James Ball (blog, twitter), here is a general reading list from the course that I personally think would be suitable for anyone interested in journalism. If you buy second hand, you can get the entire list from Amazon for around £65 including postage too! Comments by James.

-Any of David Leigh’s back catalogue (there are all hugely out of date, and out of print, but he’s a great writer and amazon has them cheap second-hand). Try High Time, The Wilson Plot, The Liar: Fall of Jonathan Aitken, and Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament.

-Ghost Plane, Stephen Gray. Heavy read, but the network analysis stuff Grey did on the planespotters’ records is frankly brilliant

-Smartest Guys in the Room, Elkind and McLean - great book on unravelling enron

-Tell Me No Lies - Pilger; best anthology of 20th century investigative journalism going.

-All The President’s Men - the one that started it off

On a more practical note:

How To Lie With Statistics - best stats primer I’ve ever come across, written in the 1950s, less than 150 pages long, bit of a page turner, and still in print

Your Right To Know, Heather Brooke - getting a bit dated (new version coming next year), but really handy for Freedom of Information. Though lots of the useful stuff is online at www.yrtk.org

Investigative Reporting: a study in technique, David Spark (online preview here) - a good basic primer.

Flat Earth News, Nick Davies

Bad Science, Ben Goldacre

Also interesting, this list of Journalism books that every journalism student should supposedly read.

UPDATE: here’s the official reading list from City University for the Investigative Journalism 1 and 2 modules.

The ones marked with an asterix are highly recommended.

Heather Brooke, Your Right to Know: A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, Pluto Press (2007)*

Hugo de Burgh, Investigative Journalism, Routledge (2008)*

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: Abu Ghraib and America in Iraq,

Nick Davies, Flat Earth News, Chatto and Windus (2008)*

Harold Evans, Good Times Bad Times, Phoenix Press (1994)

Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The Untold Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme. Scribe Publications (2007)*

David Leigh and David Pallister, The Liar:The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, Second Edition, Guardian Books*

David Leigh and Ed Vulliamy, Sleaze, The Corruption of Parliament Fourth Estate 1997

David Northmore, Lifting the Lid, a Guide to Investigative Research (Cassell)

John Pilger, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs Vintage (2005)*

Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar

David Spark, Investigative Reporting: A Study in Technique

Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold, Little Brown 2009 *

Martin Walker, Dirty Medicine

Woodward and Bernstein, All The president’s Men*

And the general investigative journalism reading list.

News & Production

Anna McKane   Newswriting (Sage, 2006)*

David Randall   The Universal Journalist (Pluto Press)

Features & Research

Angela Phillips  Good Writing for Journalists (Sage, 2007)*

Brendan Hennessy  Writing Feature Articles  (Focal Press)

Sally Adams   Interviewing for Journalists (Routledge)*

David Northmore  Lifting the Lid: A Guide to Investigative Research      (Cassell)

Writing & English

Hicks, Gilbert & Adams Writing for Journalists (Routledge)*

Wynford Hicks  English for Journalists (Routledge)*

Harold Evans   Essential English (Pimlico)*

General

Richard Keeble  Ethics for Journalists

Anna McKane   Journalism: A Career Handbook (A& C Black)

Nick Davies                            Flat Earth News (Chatto and Windus) 2008*

Dawn Johnstone                     Teeline for Journalists*

Structure of Government

You will receive a comprehensive reading list for the Structure of Government module at the start of term, but in the meantime

you could look at:

Bill Jones et al. (ed). Politics UK. (Pearson 2007)

Media Law

McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists by Tom Welsh, Walter Greenwood and David Banks  (2007) *

Law for Journalists by Frances Quinn (2007)

In light of the release of this month’s ABCes, two updates on The Guardian’s website.

1) The Guardian’s poor linking practices (which I’ve blogged about previously) continue to hamper the www.guardian.co.uk’s usefulness. At time of writing, the story featured above on the NHS Swine Flu advice website did not feature a link to that website.

This is bad bad bad. People come to the news to be informed, and this is basic information that The Guardian is needlessly omitting. I’d say that it arguably undermines their whole product: it’s great that most of The Guardian’s excellent team of bloggers links out, but this effort is somewhat defeated if the number one story on the whole site doesn’t!

In this specific case it also opens them up to criticism, since that same story featured two links to internal Guardian links. Those are fine, but you can’t omit the core link to the story while linking to yourself!

I hope to God that this is just crappy CMS syndrome. Really, there is absolutely no point talking about the future of newspapers (nor the prospect of The Guardian turning off its presses) if linking remains a secondary thought.

(NB: I recognise the irony of this being a story about a website going down — where a link from The Guardian might not necessarily help things. However, it’s really not The Guardian’s job to help keep Government websites up.)

2) Good news: The Guardian has slightly improved its Brightcove video solution. Videos are now viewable in full screen, although they’re not embeddable yet. They should really be cross posting all of their copyright-owned content to YouTube, but I’ll take this small victory for now!

All in all, frustratingly small steps from my favourite and most trusted news source.