Story-Based Inquiry Associates

The Story-Based Inquiry method helps journalists and researchers managing (complex) investigations, and producing powerful stories. Over the years we have trained reporters, newsrooms, researchers and professionals of businesses and NGO’s to improve their research skills. Story-Based Inquiry is not just a summary of anecdotal experiences or tips – it is a method, based on doctoral-level research and an aggregate 100 years of professional practice. The method increases effectiveness and efficiency. It enables reporters, editors and researchers to make quick decissions based on brainstorming techniques and checklists and to communicate productively about the working process with a collective idiom. We also teach them to collect, sort and share the data for their stories in a simple database, a “Masterfile”. Story-Based Inquiry is the first such method, to our knowledge, in the history of investigative reporting. In 2009, Mark Lee Hunter and Luuk Sengers, together with other experts in the Global Investigative Journalism Network joint forces to present the method in a manual. Translated into six languages and funded by Unesco, “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” rapidly became the most widely distributed handbook in the history of investigative reporting. A follow-up casebook with investigative stories from all over the world is expected to published in 2011. And a series of specialized handbooks will be published in 2012.