Master of Arts - Investigative Journalism

MA Investigative Journalism trains long-form accountability reporting: research and source development, data analysis and freedom-of-information technique, media law and ethics, verification and digital investigation methods, and the practice of building a publishable investigation.

At £14,600 the course is among the cheapest in this batch, which matters for a specialism whose employment market is small, and the year is structured around producing a substantial investigative project of professional standard rather than a conventional dissertation.

Skills taught here have migrated well beyond journalism: open-source investigation, document analysis and verification now underpin corporate due diligence, compliance and risk work, where graduates are recruited actively and paid considerably more than newsrooms offer.

Two facts make this course more practical than its subject suggests. The £14,600 fee is among the lowest in the batch, and the skills taught — open-source investigation, document analysis, verification, data work — are being hired for aggressively outside journalism, particularly by corporate intelligence, due-diligence and compliance firms that pay multiples of newsroom salaries. Students should therefore build the investigation project with both markets in mind and treat the corporate route as a legitimate primary destination. September entries run across all three recorded cycles, and prior journalism experience strengthens applications considerably. Applicants should bring a proposed investigation topic to interview where possible, as candidates who arrive with a defined line of enquiry make the most of a single year.

Destinations therefore span investigative newsrooms, non-profit journalism, research roles and corporate intelligence. The master’s qualifies for the Graduate Route’s 18-month allowance under post-2026 rules, with dependants excluded on taught postgraduate study throughout.