People-Powered Investigations: How the Bureau Local is Trying to Spark Change through Collaboration

The first article in a series exploring the power of audiences to support, inform and shape innovative journalism discusses how the UK based The Bureau Local investigates for and with citizens - all while empowering local newsrooms.

Jelena Prtoric shows how the members of the Bureau Local, a team created by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a non-profit organization that “holds power to account through in-depth, fact-based reporting” wanted to find a way to collaborate with newsrooms and journalists from across the country, by sharing datasets, resources and coordinated publications. “If the goal of journalism is to reveal the information and get it out to the public so that it can better people’s lives, the story should not exist in only one outlet,” explains Megan Lucero, head of the Bureau Local. They hoped that resource-sharing could foster better investigative and in-depth journalism in local newsrooms, struggling with declining revenues and limited resources.

The article is part of the Journalism Breakthroughs project.