Journalist Glenn Greenwald testifies before a Brazilian congressional committee on NSA surveillance, Brasilia, Aug. 6, 2013. Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters/Corbis
January 25, 2015
It was
February 2009 when veteran investigative journalist Laura Frank lost her job
with the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that had served
Denver for 150 years. The paper had a stellar reputation, winning four Pulitzer
prizes in just the previous decade. Frank had received plaudits for a recent
series, “Deadly Denial,” on how former nuclear industry workers were getting
turned down for compensation for medical illnesses they contracted while
building nuclear weapons. None of that mattered to the parent firm, E. W.
Scripps Company. Citing $16 million in losses in the past year, it shut the
paper down.
Economic
decline triggered by the 2008 recession also led to the closure of the print
edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and other papers entered
bankruptcy proceedings. The financial crisis was accelerating the decline of a
prime responsibility of the newspaper industry—investigative reporting.
Already, and for some time, investigative reporters had experienced layoffs;
some also resigned when their organizations closed investigative units and
reassigned reporters to other beats. Newsrooms with reputations for
award-winning investigations, in Philadelphia, San Jose, Miami, and Los Angeles
as well as other metropolitan areas, saw staffs decimated. Consolidation and
cutbacks in Washington news bureaus threatened watchdog reporting on the
federal government; coverage of state houses across the country was sharply
reduced.
A survey that I conducted in 2008 of twenty large to
medium size newspapers, as part of my research on the state of investigative
journalism, found that half had eliminated or reduced their staffs. Recent
surveys by the American Society of News Editors and the Pew Research Center
estimated that about 20,000 daily newspaper editorial jobs have been lost—a 36
percent decline since the peak of 56,900 newsroom jobs in 1989. Membership in
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a professional association, dropped
from nearly 5,400 in 2003 to 3,700 in 2009.
At the same time, Newsweek and TIME, venerable
magazines known for their investigative work, had begun their slide in
circulation and reduced their investment in investigative journalism. The
situation was not any better in broadcast where many investigative teams were
cut and entertainment was substituted for news, both nationally and locally. NBC Dateline’s work became diluted and CBS’s 60 Minutes delivered fewer hard-hitting
investigations.
After the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, Frank did some investigative
reporting on the newspaper industry itself for the Exposé series produced by the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS). “The Withering Watchdog” found that many newspapers
were still actually profitable but were cutting staff and failing to reinvest
in operations and training because of pressure from Wall Street to retain high
profits.
Nonprofits and Networks
Some
investigative journalists took up jobs as investigators for other private and
public institutions outside the journalism field. Others like Laura Frank,
however, decided to create their own newsrooms, this time as nonprofit
businesses that would rely on donations, payments for content from mainstream
media, and fundraising events.
One celebrated example is ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom established in
2007 through a three-year $10 million annual grant from the Sandler banking
family. ProPublica’s editorial
team is led by the former editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former New York Times investigative editor. In 2010, it
became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, in the category of
investigative reporting for an article on a hospital’s operations during
Hurricane Katrina. Besides being published at propublica.org, the piece was
published by the New York
Times Magazine—one of the numerous media organizations with which ProPublica has established collaborations.
Besides the funding from the Sandlers, it also receives grants from major foundations
that promote civic responsibility.
Leading
the way well before ProPublica entered the scene were two
established nonprofit investigative newsrooms, the Center for Investigative
Reporting in San Francisco, founded in 1977, and the Center for Public
Integrity in Washington, which began work in 1989. They were launched and are
sustained primarily with foundation and individual donors although they have
earned income from deals with commercial and nonprofit broadcasters. Both have
produced investigations that received wide distribution through those
partnerships. Journalists such as Frank hoped they could replicate this
successful model at the regional and local level.
Frank
formed her own nonprofit company, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network.
She raised money from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the largest
journalism foundation in the United States, and from the smaller Ethics and
Excellence in Journalism Foundation in Oklahoma City. Both foundations would
play key roles in the assisting of many new investigative reporting start-ups.
With those funds, Frank hired two of her former colleagues while arranging free
office space at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain PBS station in exchange for giving
the station the results of their investigative work.
In
Seattle, journalists from the Post-Intelligencer started Investigate West and also
secured offices in the local PBS station. In San Diego, the former editor and
metropolitan editor of the San Diego Union Tribune launched The Watchdog Institute,
now an online media outlet called inewsource. It found offices in the local
PBS station and at San Diego State University.
In
Wisconsin, Illinois, and Massachusetts, journalists began investigative
newsrooms at universities, either as a part of journalism departments or under
memorandums of understanding. The newsrooms received free space and access to
student reporters, while the universities got newsrooms where students could
receive professional training and publish their work. Overall, the start-up
funding varied from a few thousand dollars to millions a year.
In July
2009, journalists from the Center for Public Integrity and Center for
Investigative Reporting plus some of the newer start-ups met at the Pocantico
Center near New York City. They agreed on a declaration of intent to create the
Investigative News Network (INN), a North American organization to share
business functions, attract funding, and encourage collaborations. Some one
hundred organizations are now members of INN. Most produce investigative
stories that are shared with hundreds of news organizations. Many of the
stories arise out of collaborations between INN members or INN members and
mainstream media.
Because
of the collaborations and distribution, the investigative projects can achieve
considerable reach. A 2010 project on sexual assault on college campuses was
guided by the Center for Public Integrity and included National Public Radio
and five of the smaller organizations. The series was carried by forty-nine
newspapers and magazines, fifty-six nonprofit and commercial broadcast outlets,
seventy-seven online newsrooms, sixty student newspapers and college-related
outlets, and forty-two non-government organizations. The spotlight on the issue
eventually resulted in congressional legislation, and spawned dozens of
follow-up stories.
By 2011,
the nonprofits were routinely providing investigative stories and other content
not only on their web sites, but also to hundreds of other outlets, including
newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, and other online news sites. And new
nonprofits continued to spring up. The Pew Research Center reported in 2013
that at least 172 nonprofits had been created since 1987.
One of the latest to launch is the Marshall
Project, a
newsroom devoted to investigating justice issues and financed by a hedge fund
owner and philanthropist, with Bill Keller, a former New
York Times executive
editor, serving as editor in chief.
Since
2009, many for-profit newsroom editors—some possibly spurred by the determined
work of the nonprofit newsrooms—began talking again about investigative
reporting being their franchise. Rather than cutting
back on their teams they expanded and focused on that work. The Dallas
Morning News, Minneapolis
Tribune, and the Milwaukee
Journal Tribune were
among metropolitan newspapers that maintained or increased the number of their
investigative reporters.
Magazines
such as the Atlantic and New
Yorker are
publishing cutting edge investigative pieces while managing to maintain
circulation. Online magazines have also entered the business: BuzzFeed has created an investigative desk
and Quartz is publishing investigations.
In
television and video, Vice News started in December 2013 with
provocative short video pieces and documentaries. Mother
Jones, which
broke one of the major stories of the 2012 U.S. presidential election—a video
that caught Republican candidate Mitt Romney expressing disdain for Democrats
as voters who pay no taxes and think government must take care of them—may
provide a model for the future of investigative reporting. It is a nonprofit
publication still in business after nearly forty years. It survives by
receiving donations from individuals, foundation grants for special projects,
and from selling advertising in its magazine.
Investigating the World
During
the first decade of the twenty-first century another transformation began in
Europe and spread to other continents. In 2001, American and Danish journalists
held the first ever Global Investigative Journalism Conference, in Copenhagen
(I was one of the two creators of the conference). The conference, modeled on
the IRE annual conference, allowed journalists to share practical methods and
tips on investigative and computer-assisted reporting for four days.
Exceeding
organizers’ expectations, more than 400 journalists from forty countries
attended. One reason was that international journalists were seeking ideas on
how to create independent investigative newsrooms because they had few
opportunities to do investigations due to limited resources or corrupt
owners.
At the
next global conference in 2003, the concept of a network of nonprofit newsrooms
that would share information and collaborate on cross-border stories had
emerged and the Global Investigative Journalism Network was created. The
network has held conferences every two years. It now numbers ninety member
organizations—some of which also have membership in the Investigative News
Network—and held the first Asian investigative reporting conference last
November. The global network has spawned numerous collaborations, especially
into corruption in eastern Europe. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project in Serbia has overseen cross-border investigations with other groups
into human trafficking, money laundering, and the drug trade. Connectas in
Latin America is another collaboration of nonprofit newsrooms that is tracking
corruption across borders.
Both in
the United States and internationally, a parallel movement in the use of data
for investigations is spurring the creation of small online newsrooms and
investigations. The movement had begun in earnest in the 1980s in the United
States and reached wide acceptance there by the late 1990s. Known as
computer-assisted reporting or later, data-driven journalism, the methodology
produced more credible stories that simply could not have been done before
because of the enormous amount of records that could be examined.
It also meant a small team could have much higher impact
using the data and working with others. And the use of data analysis in
journalism also has drawn a new generation of reporters from the computer
sciences. The data greatly aided cross-border investigations because data and
data analysis can be easily shared. Traditional journalists are still slow to
use digital techniques, but much progress has been made; more than a thousand
journalists attended an annual computer-assisted reporting conference in the
United States last year, nearly double the highest previous number. A decade of
training of European journalists by data journalism specialists from the United
States has borne fruit, with papers like the Guardian producing exemplary investigative
work that routinely includes data analysis and data visualization. An early
high point was the Guardian’s reporting
and analysis of race riots in cities in the United Kingdom. The Guardian not only did traditional reporting
but used social science methods to examine the use of social media by rioters
and their economic and ethnic status.
The WikiLeaks organization, meanwhile, capitalized on
the “data dump” to obtain U.S. government secrets—in the form of classified
military and diplomatic reports and cables—and disseminate them via its own
website and partner news organizations around the world. Initially, WikiLeaks
believed the general public would review its data, discover wrongdoing, and
report on it. But it quickly became apparent that linking up with journalists
practiced in the ways of investigative reporting—interviewing, on the ground
reporting, fact-checking, etc.—was critical to producing credible stories.
A second
data dump of documents on off-shore companies that hide money and avoid taxes
was obtained by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, a
part of the Center for Public Integrity. Known as “Offshore Secrets,” the
project used the leak of millions of confidential bank records to write stories
that involved reporters in fifty-eight countries.
Another well-known data dump came from National Security
Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden, whose leaks of NSA documents indicated
widespread illegal domestic spying. He went to documentary filmmaker Laura
Poitras and Guardian columnist
Glenn Greenwald as well as Washington
Post reporter Barton Gellman. The work of Poitras and Greenwald attracted the
notice of Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, whose interest in public accountability
had already prompted him to launch a digital media outlet in Hawaii. Omidyar
decided to finance the creation of an international online news organization, First
Look Media. In its initial months of operation, First Look has focused on
abuses by intelligence and national security agencies, invasion of digital
privacy by governments, and surveillance of the Muslim community in the United
States. It also has produced social justice stories—such as analysis of the
shooting of black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the racism in
that city—and criticism of mainstream media coverage of national security
issues.
Paying for Public Accountability
Despite the rise in nonprofit journalism and the
resurgence of investigative reporting in some mainstream newsrooms, the
conundrum of paying for it remains. In his 2006 book, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market
Transforms Information into News, economist James Hamilton pointed out
that the public at large has never been willing to directly pay for public
interest journalism. Instead, advertising generally paid for it over the years.
Given that losses in advertising range into the billions of dollars—down 49
percent at American newspapers from 2003 to 2013—and donations to nonprofits
remain in the hundreds of millions, the challenges are large.
Currently,
most funding for nonprofit news in the United States comes from foundations and
private donors, and internationally it comes from foundations and governments,
particularly from Scandinavian countries and the U.S. Agency for International
Development. Successes with earned income from training, events, and
syndication are spotty although the Texas
Tribune has been
a leader in creating new revenue streams through sponsored public engagement
events, individual donations, and data sales. Thus, in just a few short years
it now relies on foundations for only a third of its funding. But the Pew
Research Center continues to report a heavy reliance by nonprofits on
foundations, which appear to be shifting their focus on how to improve
democracy in the United States. The foundations also have pushed for the
nonprofits to become more independent, more business-oriented, and less reliant
on their continued funding. Internationally, funding remains a deep problem
although the Open Society Foundations, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, and
Adessium Foundation are still strong supporters of investigative centers and
conferences.
As Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project wrote in a paper in 2013, “Investigative Reporting in Emerging
Democracies: Models, Challenges, and Lessons Learned,” the obstacles to
investigative reporting include not only safety and professionalism issues, but
also poor financial support and a culture gap between journalists and funders.
David Kaplan, the executive director of the Global Investigative Journalism
Network, has written extensively about the lack of sufficient funding for investigative
reporting throughout the world. In a recent global network project supported by
Google Ideas, “Investigative Impact: The Case for Global Muckraking,” he cites
ten case studies, several done by nonprofits. In one of them,
“YanukovychLeaks,” reporters used divers to retrieve documents thrown into a
lake next to the Ukraine presidential palace; the dried documents provided a
look into billions of dollars of looted wealth.
He also
cited investigations into the killing of disabled children in Ghana, the
corruption of a Philippine president, how 70 percent of Pakistan’s
parliamentary members do not pay taxes, and hundreds of needless neo-natal
deaths at a city hospital in South Africa.
But, as
Kaplan noted in a previous 2012 report, “despite its frontline role in
fostering accountability, battling corruption, and raising media standards,
investigative reporting receives relatively little support—about 2 percent of
global media development funding by major donors.” He also has found, as has
the Pew Research Center, that “few nonprofit investigative journalism
organizations, particularly reporting centers, have adequate sustainability
plans. To survive in a competitive and poorly funded environment, many will
need to diversify and become more entrepreneurial, drawing revenue from various
sources and activities.”
The work
of Laura Frank, meanwhile, reflects the evolution of nonprofit newsrooms. In
2013, she merged her I-News group with Rocky Mountain PBS and a public radio
station, and entered into collaborative agreements with several other radio
newsrooms and a commercial TV station. Within a year, she became president and
general manager of news for the PBS station. With additional funding from the
station and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, she expanded the editing
and reporting staff and produced such stories as “Losing Ground,” which
examined the deep disparity in economic and living conditions between Hispanics
and whites in Colorado.
By
partnering with PBS, Frank won a major increase in her audience—the station’s
65,000 contributing members. She also acquired an experienced fundraising team.
In an interview in 2013 with the American
Journalism Review,
Frank said: “The greatest value is being able to sustain in-depth public
service journalism, because we have the infrastructure to do that.
Investigative reporting is expensive and risky. Being able to merge with an
organization that has the infrastructure in place, and you bring in the
journalism and an injection of energy, and it’s sort of a perfect marriage.”
Brant Houston is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. He oversees CU-CitizenAccess.org, a community online news and information project. From
1997 to 2007, he served as executive director of Investigative Reporters and
Editors, Inc. He is the author of Computer-Assisted
Reporting: A Practical Guide. On Twitter:
@branthouston.