ABSTRACT
In February 2012, the House of Lords Select Committees on communications published its third report on the future of investigative journalism. Many celebrities, and especially those who were phone-hacked by News of the World journalists, were blithely unaware they had become informants at all, and it is probably reasonable to assume that they wished the sort of personal information gleaned from hacking to remain private. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) provided a series of ethical standards journalists were expected to meet, especially in stories concerning privacy, harassment, children in sex cases, hospitals, reporting of crime and payment to criminals. According to the committee of concerned journalists, a group of practitioners worried about the future of the profession. For the investigative journalist, crowd sourcing provides a unique way of managing and categorising the huge amounts of data that are being retrieved from Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.
