ABSTRACT
A distinctive new form of investigative journalism has emerged in the age of the read/write web that has become famous for its leverage of material that is already in the public domain. Technological and infrastructural advances in the latter half of the 20th century transformed the creation, storage, transmission and computation of data, giving rise to a digital and networked age where the virtual has become “an essential dimension of our reality”. One of the most advantageous and overlooked aspects of the new environment are its digital verification affordances. Online and visual investigation is truly an effort to use “whatever media may be available” to dispel lies and establish the truth. In the finest traditions of investigative journalism, it has incorporated “sources and techniques that contemporaries thought reprehensible” and its pioneers include “rascals and rebels” acting “deliberately outside the mainstream”.
