A few months back I wrote a fairly scathing post on Debora Patta and the shoddy job she did in a 3rd Degree interview with a megalomaniac on eTv. Having returned from a PR Net event she hosted this evening I now write with a slightly different perspective on her. Besides the insight she provided on her show, it seems her in-person persona (excuse the possible redundancy) is a whole lot easier to digest than her on-screen presence.

Am I getting soft? Nah ... I still maintain that she did a shoddy job. Hearing her speak outside of the blood-thirsty investigative journalism mode is slightly refreshing and has done some work in shifting my perspective on her.

Before you write this post off as a pseudo-apology and quit reading, know that I'm going somewhere with this and that there is some backbone and relevance around narrative to be explored below. Patta spoke this evening of how her team choose which current affairs stories to investigate. They get many leads via email and seem to tie up the frequency of an email lead with its relevant prevalence in the media at the time.

I'm reminded of the response I got to my post on Patta a little while back. In particular, I received a string of comments from people notifying me of, and requesting investigation, on issues that they felt were worthy of a 3rd Degree episode. It seems they thought I was Patta, or part of her investigative team!

*he shakes his head in despair*

I didn't publish them all, but the comments - parading as leads - ranged from complaints about car dealerships ripping people off to bribes immigration officials were garnering at border posts. By the sounds of things, Patta and her team have to sift through a mountain of leads like this every week. I was tempted to ask a Knowledge Management-type question regarding how they manage the information they get from leads and monitor the relevance of leads, but chose not to as the conversation thread weaved its way off this topic. It does however seem that they rely on their own memory of leads and some simple database of leads raised. It also seems that this has had its measure of success for the team as they have investigated stories relevant to the narrative pulse of our nation.

The nature of the comments I received on this blog in response to my post took the form of stories as people told of how they had been wronged by people and of stories of other people and their shenanigans. And so, Patta's job revolves around stories and she gets her hands on loads of stories every week.

Receiving stories in this fashion is not all that unique, but it's context is. Let me explain ...

One of the unique contributions that Dave Snowden has made to our world is a methodology of capturing and using stories people tell as a way of making sense of a complex issue - that when dealing with an intractable problem, capturing as many stories as possible on the issue in a meaningful format aids sense-making. Let me provide an example.

In conjunction with Snowden, the Singapore government developed a technology assisted risk assessment and horizon scanning tool (RAHS) to aid in the prediction of terrorist threats. Through the gathering of many anecdotes on the issue, on a continual basis, some rather clever software allows decision makers to see a dramatical representation of the anecdotes as a landscape (yes, sounds far-fetched, but you've probably got to see it in action to believe it). By monitoring shifts in this diagram (the shifts occur due to subtle changes in the narratives gathered around terrorism), the Singapore Government is better able to predict possible threats.

What relevance does this have to current affairs and investigative journalism? The one problem I see in what Patta had to say this evening revolves around how the team decides to pursue one lead, and not another? It seems that it is quite a subjective decision that requires a good feel for the pulse of the nation. But what if we could make it a whole lot more predictable without losing its relevance?

Well, if people like Patta were able to see how one "lead email" fits on a horizon of issues brewing in the narrative pulse of our nation, they might be able to track shifts in this issue and be able to predict the breaking of the story far enough in advance to ensure really good coverage. Or, in a breaking news reporting environment, predict the breaking of stories before they occur. That's just a couple of uses in the journalism space.

Another use of such a system would be the ability to pull all the stories that relate to an issue at a touch of a button and probably have all their research done for them already by virtue of the stories told my people supplying the leads.

How might this work in reality? Well, as most of the leads are submitted by email and sorted as such, the system Snowden has developed involves a shift from sending a mail with the story to submitting the story on a web-page that captures the story. The software then allows tagging and indexing of the stories in a unique way and hey presto, you have an organised, relevant database.

Because the stories are tagged and indexed in such a simple way, it makes the management of all these stories really simple. The researches then work with the tags and indexes and the shifts that take place in them as a way of staying in touch with the stories. This also leads to a more robust reporting and investigation process, and need I say it, a more relevant programme that truly hits the nail on the head of the issues it reports on. It might also be good to suggest that such a process would also impact directly on ratings - something Patta seemed quite partial to this evening.

Right, I'm not sure I've made any sense in this post? My mind is now fading and I need to synthesise (over some sleep) a meaningful coherence on the issue for when I hopefully meet with Patta over a cuppa to discuss further.