This new initiative in which Paul Steiger and a couple of wealthy journalists are "assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets" sounds to me like a wonderful idea. What's more, in echoes in some ways what my friend Brian Beutler is doing for the Media Consortium and what Mother Jones is doing with its new scaled-up seven person Washington Bureau.
The bad news about the changing landscape of the media business over the past few years has been a declining budget available for investigative projects. The good news, however, is that the internet makes it possible to disseminate a worthwhile piece of investigative journalism for a tiny fraction of the costs that you once would have seen. Basically, the non-journalism costs (paper, ink, trunks full of stacks of paper) of doing investigative journalism are falling in a way that I hope makes this kind of philanthropic investment in investigative work more viable.
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Heads in the Sand
There's still the problem of finding an audience. And to some extent, I imagine thats getting harder. I know people send me stuff - much of it probably worthwhile - that I simply don't have time to read. Pitching a story, even one they are willing to give away to media outlets, is only worth something if some of those media outlets pick it up. And in a world with as many blogs as there are now, it seems there are a lot of people willing to disseminate some types of information for free.
Posted by cactus | October 15, 2007 2:54 PM