What public interest journalism protects
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Public interest journalism investigates and reports on matters genuinely significant to the public, including corruption, misuse of public funds and institutional failure, often requiring considerable time, resources and legal support that a single freedom of information request or a passing news item simply cannot provide on its own.
This kind of journalism frequently relies on sources willing to share information confidentially, which is why legal protections for journalists' sources exist in many jurisdictions, recognising that without confidentiality, valuable information about genuine wrongdoing would often never reach a journalist, or the public, in the first place.
Sustaining public interest journalism has become genuinely harder as traditional funding models for news organisations have weakened considerably in recent decades, prompting growing interest in alternative funding approaches specifically intended to protect the kind of slow, resource intensive investigative work that shorter, more immediate news coverage simply cannot replace, particularly where the people affected have limited power to object.