Collaboration: The Future of Investigative Journalism

Written for Editors Weblog

The second day of the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley had a panel devoted to the future of investigative journalism, considering "recently it has not been a high priority for editors and publishers," due to the time, money and energy that goes into it.

The discussions involved different leaders in the field such as, Robert Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Buzz Woolley, chairman of the board and primary funder of Voice of San Diego. The air was relatively optimistic as the speakers focused on collaboration as the key to the future of investigative journalism.

Bill Keller, of the New York Times said, "I don't think investigative journalism will go away, and there is emerging media that will be partly profit, partly non-profit, partly collaborative, partly competitive, mainly online". Robert Rosenthal, of CIR said, "Last year I said the business model for newspapers was toast. Now I believe that collaboration is going to be very important for profit and nonprofit journalism". Esther Kaplan, of The Nation Institute Investigative Fund says that partnerships in the field "are in their infancy" and they take a lot of work to happen. "We should consider a lot more, like joint investigation sites, shared technology for micro-financing," she added.

While talking about non-profit being new to investigative journalism, Chuck Lewis, of American University mentioned several non-profits that are growing; "there's the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica which started recently. New non-profits are springing up all over the U.S. -- the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and others are forming as we speak, in Boston, in Texas and Colorado and other places and they're all looking for advice."

Recent non-profits talked about are ProPublica and VoiceOfSanDiego.org. ProPublica commenced in January 2008 as "an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." The company uses its funding to support 28 staff, who produce investigative reporting which is then given, not sold, to news outlets. VoiceOfSanDiego.org started early this year as a non-profit, online-only publication focusing on quality investigative reporting for the San Diego area. Other recent projects pertaining to the field are the HuffPost's investigative journalism fund and the efforts of two former Wall Street Journal reporters to start an investigative company. And then there are the older organizations like CIR, which was founded in 1977 and is currently developing its newsroom to adapt to the 21st century and lead investigative journalism through the transformations.

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Source: journalism.co.uk, PBS.org