As the newspaper business goes south, many of us are wondering what will happen to investigative journalists, the standard-bearers of the third fourth estate and a crucial check to unfettered power. The Associated Press has moved to address this problem in announcing it will begin distributing stories from four prominent not-for-profit reporting organizations.
The sad fact is that many newspapers can no long pay for their own reporting from the revenues of advertising and circulation sales. The four organizations, however, operate on a different donor model. The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, The Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University are already AP members, which no doubt made the decision to add their work to the wire offerings easier.
In the spectrum that starts with writers for national newspapers whose content is vetted continually by the public, and ends at a lunatic in his one-room apartment hammering his venom in a blog comment, these four organizations are slightly shy of the former. When a reporter's job is directly tied to the financial well being of the paper, the incentive to be right, interesting and timely is its impact on paper sales. A reporter working for a foundation, on the other hand, may work to fulfill different goals. If public demand is not the determinate of a reporter's assignment, he may not fill the role that newspapers have abandoned.
As a slippery slope, I don't see this as a dire change. I also don't see it as a long-term solution. If the public won't fund investigative journalism by buying subscriptions, why would it do so through charitable contributions? And foundation money can all too easily come with a bias attached.
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