Creative Independent Investigative Documentary Storytellers in the Streaming Age: Toward a Community of Practice Framework

ABSTRACT

This study articulates the motives, craft, practice, and urgent needs of creative independent investigative documentary as a distinct field of practice that utilizes both the subjective expression of artistic cinema with the objectivity-based legacy practices of watchdog journalism. Leveraging community of practice theory, based on in-depth interviews and a two-year investigation of ten of the inaugural films supported by the International Documentary Association (IDA) Enterprise Documentary Fund award—launched in 2016 as the first contemporary institutional recognition of creative investigative documentary as a distinct sub-genre—this study demonstrates how recognizing the unique experiences of this distinct dual journalistic and artistic practice is vital in order for scholars to more widely appreciate the potentiality and significance of this journalistic practice, and to more widely engage with the unique security challenges and needs that it faces, largely overlooked in prevailing conversations in journalism today.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• communities of practice
• investigative journalism
• digital security
• nonfiction storytelling
• independent documentary
• investigative documentary‌

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Carrie Lozano (formerly of the International Documentary Association, now at the Sundance Institute) for furnishing interviewee introductions and creative ideation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Center for Media & Social Impact received a small gift from the International Documentary Association to partially support graduate student research time and transcripts; IDA had no decision-making in this article.