This year Helen Garner wrote a Walkley-award winning piece of journalism about a 35-year-old South Sudanese woman who drove into a dam and killed three of her children. If you just read news reports of tragedy it might elicit little more than a gasp, a wave of anger of sympathy, then a flick of the page. But Garner wanted to know more. Her story on Akon Goude was a vital piece of public interest journalism, but it won’t change a single government policy. It doesn’t right a wrong and it doesn’t expose corruption.

I’m mentioning this story because others of this type, let’s call them curiosity journalism, were once much more common in the media. Now media companies rarely have the money to pay for this sort of work. It’s often seen as an indulgence, and a risk.

Why does it matter? Because so much of the shrill and often partisan political debate we see in the media can be linked to an increasing lack of nuance in the way evidence, and stories, are presented to us. Stories stripped of context, without a clear explanation of the background, without a clear understanding of the key characters.

Clean information is as important to democracy as clean water is to health. But clean information is not just facts. Facts are apt to mislead and clean information requires journalists who are committed to providing a full picture. This is where The Conversation makes a significant, and not terribly well understood, contribution.

We don’t try to duplicate the big investigations or the work of literary journalists. But we do try to add to the media ecosystem and deepen understanding. We do this by working with academics to provide reliable information that reports on new research and explains and informs beyond the headlines.

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