But investigative journalism is rarely any of those things, instead reflecting the messiness of real life.
But we also associate messiness with creativity - and successful business leaders usually need plenty of that.
You are diving into the data, dealing with the dirtiness and the messiness of the data and teasing out signals.
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Other startups have also seen opportunity in the messiness of gift cards, notably card-swapping sites Cardpool, CouponTrade, and Plastic Jungle.
Yet it would be a mistake to treat this as a sort of facade beneath which psychoanalytic probing might reveal deep messiness.
They do not like the messiness of democracy intruding on their project.
The huge country may be able to take a great deal more messiness, so long as it keeps moving in a prosperous direction.
Earlier philanthropists have tried to get charity to run like a business, only to see the idea dissolve in the messiness of human problems.
"The complexity and messiness of human communication gets shortchanged, " Turkle says.
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What matters is the messiness the squabbling and self-obsessiveness and removal of dignity that makes a person feel comfortable wrestling their sister on her wedding day.
If there were a commitment to speaking the truth, in all its messiness, we could tackle issues in their entirety rather than pushing politically expedient Band-Aid solutions.
Given the reluctance of western governments to face the messiness of ground warfare in mountainous terrain, military aid to Montenegro would presumably take the form of air support.
Doesn't that make it even more important to educate people about the common challenges they will face, so that they're better armed to deal with the remaining messiness?
Messiness is in the nature of the evolving technology marketplace.
World messiness is increasing and the future is less predictable.
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Yes, we are all ultimately messy inside, but the truly interesting fact is that Jobs had tamed the messiness in ways that allowed him to act like a force of nature: simple, elemental and inexorable.
But perhaps in a relative sense British qualms should be seen as nugatory - in that if banking union helps to keep the eurozone from imploding, maybe a bit of single-market messiness is a price worth paying.
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