hankyoreh

By Kwon O-sung

As director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, Joshua Benton is at the forefront of research into the future of journalism. The Hankyoreh sat down with him after his talk on long-form investigative journalism at the Online News Association conference in Boston on Oct. 3 to ask about investigative reporting in the digital environment.

Benton said that the main role of the media in a democratic society is to uncover abuses of power and look out for social injustice. Investigative reporting is the epitome of this and requires large investments of time and resources by specialized journalists. “It is not something an individual blogger can do,” he explained.

Until 2007, Benton worked as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, a major daily based in Texas. He made a major impact in 2004 with a scoop on organized testing irregularities at public high schools in the state. As a result, Texas Gov. Rick Perry closed down the most problematic schools and fired the head of the state‘s education bureau.

But Benton was forced to say goodbye to reporting when the newspaper restructured in 2008. The rise of the Internet and changes in the media environment have dealt a major blow to newspaper operations and the Dallas Morning News, with a circulation of 400 thousand, is no exception. The situation now is an crisis for investigative journalists, Benton said. Newspapers are unable to support investigative reporting as ad revenues and readership are dropping. “A lot of journalists are worried about their jobs going away,” he said.

In The Hamster Wheel, the cover story of the fall edition of the US media journal the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman wrote that pressures to produce in a short period of time have had reporters at most media working like figurative hamsters on a wheel. In the process, they are moving farther and farther away from the kind of investigative reporting that is needed.

The rise of non-profit investigative media is one element in efforts to save reporting from extinction and an example of this is ProPublica. Launched in New York in 2007, the online news organization has won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative journalism the past two years running.

Speaking to the Hankyoreh on Oct. 24 in ProPublica’s New York office, director of communications Mike Webb said it would deal a severe blow to the functioning of democracy if news articles lose their investigative dimension. ProPublica was formed to resist this trend. As a non-profit organization, its reason for being is to do the kind of reporting where nothing is sacred. It is currently staffed by 34 veteran reporters with experience at traditional news outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

Non-profit organizations along these lines represent one way for traditional news organizations to get high-quality journalism at a low cost. The Washington Post and fourteen other traditional news outlets have formed collaborative relationships with ProPublica, working with it to investigate stories for printing. Last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative journalism, a story about euthanasia at a New Orleans hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, is a representative example of this, with ProPublica working in collaboration with the New York Times. Gerald Marzorati, the Times’ assistant managing editor, alluded to the cost-cutting effects of this successful collaboration, saying it would have cost his newspaper $400,000 do the story by itself.

The arrangement represents a win-win situation: ProPublica can get its stories to a wider audience, while the traditional news outlets can get hard-hitting reports at a fraction of the cost.

Last year, the International Press Institute released a report titled Brave New Worlds in which it gauged the changes that have taken place in the media environment. In it, Columbia University journalism school professor Sheila Coronel is quoted as saying that as news organizations deal with increasingly scarce resources, they will be forced to opt for collaboration over competition. The future of investigative news, she said, is in cooperation among commercial media, non-profit media, specialized reporters and the public.

Benton was not entirely pessimistic about the current situation in investigative reporting. Crisis, he said, comes with opportunities. “What is being lost is a very profitable business model,” he explained. But investigative reporting, he added, “now has more tools at its disposal than ever before”. So while investigative journalists are facing challenges, the tools available, Benton said, are “going to help someone who’s not a hardcore investigative reporter do investigative work.”

ProPublica director of online engagement Amanda Michel said information provided by the public through social media was helpful in determining the use of government stimulus money in over 500 places around the country. “We couldn‘t do that on our own,” she said.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), a London-based online organization launched in April 2010, has been highly active in the past year and a half, winning the digital media prize at the 2011 Amnesty Awards for its reporting with WikiLeaks on Iraq War-related intelligence documents from the US. The non-profit, formed through a fund of $3.06 million (about 3.6 billion won) from the foundation of David Potter, an IT multimillionaire, and his journalist wife Elaine, has established a cooperative partnership with the private UK broadcaster Channel 4.

Other US non-profit news organizations that emerged in the years from 2005 to 2009 out of concerns about the disappearance of investigative journalism include the Voice of San Diego and California Watch in California, the Minn Post in Minnesota, and the Texas Tribune in Texas. All of them are web-based organizations with staffs of around 20 reporters working to produce investigative journalism from a nonpartisan perspective.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]