Introduction

In this chapter, I focus on how non-profits are expanding the remit of crime ‘newsworthiness’. The chapter begins by exploring definitions of crime and ‘social harm’. It then draws upon the considerable body of news media criminology that has developed in the United Kingdom since the 1990s (Greer, 2010a), to give a brief overview of how stories about crime and justice are constructed according to particular cultural assumptions and ideologies (Chibnall, 1977; Jewkes, 2004). I then explore how specific working practices, particularly the giving of ‘preferred readings to the ideological messages of particular source organizations’ (Ericson et al, 1987, p 9), mean that other voices are often excluded or given less status. I also explore how these practices largely precludes any meaningful discussion of causes or effects of crime in crime news reporting. By contrast, I suggest that the innovative working practices and production processes of the new non-profits, as described in Chapter 6, have helped to ‘repair’ (Konieczna, 2018) the field of crime and investigative journalism in three key ways: the reporting of crime as ‘social harm’ (Hillyard and Tombs, 2005); the reporting of causes and effects of crime; and a conscious attempt to diminish representational harm to stigmatised and marginalised communities through more inclusive forms of reporting.

What is crime and what is social harm?

Before embarking on a discussion of differences between the content of crime stories and investigative narratives published in legacy media outlets and in the non-profits in this study, it may be helpful briefly to discuss the evolution of the concept of social harm within the discipline of criminology as a way of widening the ways in which crime is visualised and constructed.

Muncie argues that the most common and frequently applied definition of crime is an act that ‘violates the prevailing legal code of the jurisdiction in which it occurs’ (Muncie, 2001, p 10). However, as Zedner (2004) argues, crime may be both a criminal and a civil wrong simultaneously. She argues that ‘[t] o think about crime, as some criminal law textbooks still do, as comprising discrete, autonomous legal categories remote from the social world, is to engage in an absorbing but esoteric intellectual activity’ (Zedner, 2004, p 61).