This week Topicmarks’s  CEO Roland Siebelink  gave a presentation at the San Francisco Interactive Media Summit on the tools available to 21st century investigative journalist.  In the 40 years since Woodward and Berstein published the leaked information provided by the whistle blower Deep Throat, journalism and investigation have changed considerably.

Although the core idea remain the same, using documents and sources to build a narrative for a story of public interest requires a new skill set in the digital age.  The increase in record keeping and documentation in government and private business (the result of greater organizational size and complexity) have shifted the emphasis of investigation.

Interviews are sill important (and often still the smoking gun) but obtaining a foundation to pursue sources requires understanding and fact gleaming from a mountains of documents. Getting to Deep Throat now is as much an analytical job as beating the phones and pavement.

As an experiment we ran through documents from a historic leak, the Pentagon Papers, to see where facts and summarization can bring meaning to an absurdly large report.  Topicmarks pulls facts and summarizes text that normally would take a team of researchers months.  When a story requires reading 40,000 pages it means persistence but reading 400,000 in a reasonable time is beyond the ability on any human.  With Topicmarks a single journalist can find the “smoking gun” buried in any amount of text.