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Winners of and finalists for Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting punctuated their comments with pessimism about American papers' general commitment to in-depth reporting.
New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau took the $25,000 award for revelations that the government tapped into international phone calls and e-mail traffic without court warrants.
Apologizing for being "very opaque" in his remarks -- because of the Justice Department's efforts to identify who leaked classified information used in the stories -- Risen called the series "very defensible from a national security standpoint. The only secret that we revealed is that (the government) was avoiding the law."
He suggested that the stories helped the Times overcome two headaches: Jayson Blair's source inventions and Judith Miller's testimony, after 85 days in jail, relating to the leak of the identity of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson.
Lichtblau said that as a family-owned paper, the Times is "more insulated" from the industry's financial problems. "Circulation is steady and we're hiring."
Mike Wilkinson, one of a six-person Toledo (Ohio) Blade team that uncovered "Coingate," deplored the fact that his roughly 150,000-circulation paper had a commitment to investigative reporting unmatched by many much larger dailies. (The Blade, owned by a local family, won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for a 2000 award.) "The press is the only institution to play the watchdog role," added colleague James Drew.
Before the Blade's series uncovered a national scandal, which led to the convictions of Ohio's governor and others and prompted sweeping campaign reform in Ohio, the reporters praised their publisher's continuing support in face of the governor's charges of a vendetta.
How long will the Blade's in-depth reporting ardor continue? In these "perilous" financial times, said Wilkinson, "maybe three years from now we won't be in this position."
Copley News Service reporters Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer also stressed the press's "watchdog" role. Their reporting led to California Congressman Randy Cunningham's resignation, and later conviction, for taking bribes.
Stern, who is also the news editor of Copley's Washington bureau, said that, because he and his colleagues report from Washington, "We have a lot of freedom and don't have to feed the beast (of daily filings) so much." In his role as news editor, he said, he's found that sometimes reporters get caught up in routine coverage, like press conferences, instead of focusing on major projects. "A lot of papers could be more effective if they used their resources differently. They're on a treadmill. They can do a better job if they slow down."
Evelyn Larrubia, a member of the Los Angeles Times team that exposed how some guardians of the elderly victimized and robbed their clients, had to sift through thousands of case files to discover how unscrupulous entrepreneurs loot assets.
"Through the drudgery, we kept our fire in the belly, (which) reminded us of how important it is to speak for people who can't speak for themselves," she said.
Larrubia and her colleagues said they were never asked to rush stories into the paper. "We had the chance to do it right," she said.
Her colleague, Jack Leonard, said that although Times reporters had an "enormous sense of distrust of the parent company" (Tribune Co.) because of recent newsroom cutbacks, the paper hasn't strayed from its investigative reporting mission.
"If papers are going to survive, we must provide readers with these services," he said.
Dana Priest's Washington Post series revealing a C.I.A. network of secret prisons outside the U.S., presented her with a new dilemma: "What not to publish. It's a challenging issue for our business. We have to think about this, which we're not trained to do. I hope that as more reporters understand the crucial role of intelligence, they will educate themselves (about these issues)."
While Priest noted some "newsroom angst" over editorial budget cuts, she and Post colleague Susan Schmidt stressed the paper's continued commitment to investigative reporting.
Schmidt, one of a three-person team that broke the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, said the paper sees in-depth reporting as the way to compete with new media. "We can do it. Bloggers can't. That's our franchise."
And her Post colleague, Jeffrey Smith, predicted "more and more papers will come around to investigative reporting, as consumers can get their breaking news from other sources.
"If we concentrate on investigative reporting, we can make a difference and distinguish ourselves from everything available on the Web. We're very slow as an institution to realize that we can't just write what happened. We have to tell them what they can't get in any other media."
