ProPublica is a new non-profit newsroom about to launch with a $10 million donation from California billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler. Its mission is to produce investigative journalism in the public interest.
Journalists everywhere hold up watchdog journalism as our most sacred work. It keeps the democracy strong and holds the powerful accountable. In these economically unstable times, many journalists gaze upon the likes of ProPublica and other non-traditional newsrooms like the older Center for Public Integrity with varying degrees of hope and skepticism.
Hope – because we all want to believe in a future where good reporters can earn a paycheck in exchange for hard-hitting investigative work. Skepticism – because journalists, of all people, know that independence has everything to do with who signs your paycheck. Slate’s Jack Schafer questions the Sandlers’ motives.
Paul Steiger, former Wall Street Journal managing editor, will lead this new newsroom, set to open shop in New York in early 2008. He’s certain to gather a bevy of proven journalists with sufficient chops. It seems likely that with enough money, experience and resources in the newsroom, ProPublica will produce substantive journalism that will make a difference in the world.
But a non-profit newsroom won’t entirely meet the needs of the for-profit world of journalism. ProPublica will naturally focus on stories with a national impact – federal government, pressing social issues and big corporations. Who will keep the local sheriff in check? Who will hold the local school board accountable? Who will reveal the safety problems at the local factory or coal mine?
For a democracy to be strong, it has to work on every level. That means journalism has to work on a variety of scales, throughout every market.
It’s not even clear how much investigative power we’ve lost through the recent and unending economic upheaval. We’ve never really had a good a measure of how much watchdog work we do. We don’t count the number of investigative reporters in professional newsrooms, or even the number of reporters on staff with a proven track record of investigative work.
Over at IRE, membership numbers have held steady over the last five years, said acting Director Brant Houston. Contest entries have declined slightly, he said. But that could mean fewer newsrooms are entering contests as easily as it could mean that fewer newsrooms are actually doing investigative work.
Houston, who is also the Knight Chair for Investigative Journalism at the University of Illinois, is optimistic that watchdog journalism will survive and even thrive in the new era. He points to the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University as evidence. There seem to be plenty of young journalists eager to learn the necessary skills.
And where professional journalism fails, citizens will fill the gaps, Houston says. Just look at the Sunlight Foundation.
While we wait for that exciting future to unfold, is there a way to monitor the investigative health of professional newsrooms? Let’s start with a bank of anecdotes. How has your newsroom’s investigative capacity changed over the past five years? You can a post your response here. Or if you need to be more discreet, email me at kmcbride@poynter.org with watchdog in the subject line.
