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

Abstract

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.