*Tickets include lunch

If you are unsure how to start and finish ambitious projects, or just want to make your work more efficient, this seminar with the creators of Story-Based Inquiry is right for you. This workshop is interactive, using the SBI tools to help participants organise their research material and create an efficient workflow in order to achieve a long-form narrative that will have an impact. Whether you’re working on an investigative story, a documentary or an NGO report, the SBI framework will also help you discover how to build an audience and a market for your work.

Story-Based Inquiry (SBI) is the global benchmark method for researching and writing long form stories or reports. It starts with the question, “What do you hope to reveal?” The answer becomes a hypothesis. From there, a few key techniques pinpoint what to look for and where to find it, and how to organise the material. The result is not only a story, but also assets that can serve for future projects, such as a reusable database and a network of allies.

SBI is adopted by Unesco and adapted by journalism centres and schools all over the world. It has been hailed as a major contribution for its effectiveness and simplicity.

Advance reading: Participants are advised to visit www.storybasedinquiry.com and to download the free books (in PDF), “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” (UNESCO 2009) and “Power is Everywhere: How stakeholder-driven media build the future of watchdog news” (Stakeholder Media Project 2017).

About the trainers:

Story-Based Inquiry (SBI) is the global benchmark method for researching and writing long form stories or reports. It starts with the question, “What do you hope to reveal?” The answer becomes a hypothesis. From there, a few key techniques pinpoint what to look for and where to find it, and how to organise the material. The result is not only a story, but also assets that can serve for future projects, such as a reusable database and a network of allies.

SBI is adopted by Unesco and adapted by journalism centres and schools all over the world. It has been hailed as “a major contribution” for its effectiveness and simplicity. If you are unsure of how to start and finish ambitious projects, or just want to make your work more efficient, this seminar with the creators of Story-Based Inquiry is right for you.

The seminar is interactive, using the SBI tools on participants’ projects. Participants will also discover how to use SBI tools to build an audience and a market for their work.

Advance reading: Participants are advised to visit www.storybasedinquiry.com and to download the free books (in PDF), “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” (UNESCO 2009) and “Power is Everywhere: How stakeholder-driven media build the future of watchdog news” (Stakeholder Media Project 2017).

About the trainers:

Mark Lee Hunter is the principal author of “Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists” (UNESCO 2009), the most widely-distributed reference work in the history of the profession. He and Luuk Sengers are the founding members of Story-Based Inquiry Associates. At INSEAD, a global business school where he is an adjunct professor, he co-founded The Stakeholder Media Project, which investigates the emergence of new forms of watchdog media. He is the author of over 100 investigative reports and nine books, including (with Luuk Sengers) The Hidden Scenario and The Story Tells the Facts. His scholarly research on media development is published in leading academic journals.

Hunter has won awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. for both his investigative reports and his research on journalism. He has also won the H.L. Mencken, Clarion, National Headliners, Society of Professional Journalists and EFMD awards for features and research. He earned his doctorate in Sciences de l’information from the Université de Paris II-Panthéon-Assas.

Luuk Sengers is an investigative journalist, researcher and educator. Together with Mark Lee Hunter he developed the internationally acclaimed Story-Based Inquiry method, a systematic and efficient way of doing investigations. Sengers is also a world-class data journalism instructor. He is a visiting lecturer at several journalism schools and universities. Previously, he worked sixteen years as an economy reporter at major Dutch newspapers and magazines, like NRC Handelsblad, Quote and Intermediair. He is a former board member of the association of investigative journalists in The Netherlands and Belgium, the VVOJ.

Thirteen years on from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US by Al Qaeda, how has the organisation evolved around the world and what are its links with developing groups such a ISIS and al-Shabaab?

With sophisticated social media strategies and professional promotional videos, we will be looking at the tactics being deployed, both on the ground and online, and how they differ from what we have seen from Al Qaeda.

A panel of experts will be joining us to examine the tactics and strategies these affiliated groups have developed and what is being done to combat them.

Chaired by foreign affairs editor of Sky News, Sam Kiley.

The panel:

Peter Neumann is professor of security studies at the department of war studies, King’s College London, and serves as director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), which he founded in early 2008.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum. He focuses on developments in Syria and Iraq, particularly jihadist militant groups.

Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for The Independent. He has covered the conflict in Syria extensively since protests began in 2011. He is author of several books including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq and most recently The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

Dr Alia Brahimi is a visiting research fellow at the Oxford University Changing Character of War Programme at Pembroke College, Oxford. She was previously a research fellow at LSE and a research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror, as well as a number of academic and press articles on al-Qaeda’s evolving ideology and strategy.

The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."

Day One was a few days back now and they’re already up to Day Five.

On today’s agenda we have:

– A key note from Nik Gowing on the ‘new tyranny of shifting information power in crises‘.

– A discussion between General Sir Mike Jackson, Ed Mortimer and Alastair Campbell setting the military and political background. 

– A panel on the current problems and opportunities in the field of strategic communications.

– An address and Q&A with Alastair Campbell.

– A panel on information ecologies and grass roots campaigns.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to put up another blog post (or two) later in the day. But I’ll have to see what the wireless/power situation is like at the event before I make any rash promises…