New Journalism Ecosystem Thrives B Y C H a R L E S L E W I S
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HOME ABOUT STAFF INVESTIGATIONS ILAB BLOGS WORKSHOP NEWS New journalism ecosystem thrives B Y C H A R L E S L E W I S Oct. 29, 2010 ShareThis In the immortal words of Sir Isaac Newton more than three centuries ago, “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” It is perhaps peculiar and maybe even ill-advised to apply Newton’s immortal Laws of Motion to the quirky, peculiar world of journalism. But this much we know: As news consumption in America began to decline decades ago, as advertising revenue and commercial newsgathering began to contract, the bean counters increasing their brutal, cost-cutting efficiencies, the out-of-town owners harvesting their mature (i.e. no longer growing) investments, newsrooms becoming quieter and less enterprising, many serious reporters and editors necessarily went elsewhere. They were desperately seeking a different, more hospitable milieu in which to work, a non-commercial, nonprofit environment more conducive to investigative and other public-service journalism. And over time a new journalism ecosystem has begun to emerge, which we have attempted to define and describe here. Before doing so, what has happened to traditional newspaper journalism as we have known it for generations ORGANIZATIONS BY NAME must be put in context. Not only has the human impact of this seismic transformation been devastating, as Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson found last year in “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” but the number ORGANIZATIONS BY STATE of commercial newspaper editorial employees also has dropped by 33 percent — from more than 60,000 in 1992 to about 40,000 in 2009. As we know too well, venerable See all of the organizations American newspapers, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun and others, have struggled financially, with some in bankruptcy protection. Others, such as the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, no longer exist. More than 100 daily papers have stopped print publication on Saturdays or other days of the week. According to the Project on Excellence in Journalism, the number of reporters covering state capitals full time dropped from 524 in 2003 to 355 in early 2009. The impact of newsroom contraction is obviously that certain public and private activities by those in power are simply no longer being covered. As PEJ found, and this is the case in city after city, between 1980 and 2005, the number of newspapers reporters covering the local metropolitan Philadelphia area fell from 500 to 220. At the same time, it is also well understood that by far the most extensive, substantive, public-service journalism in America the past century has been initiated, supported and published by the nation’s newspapers. And so the specific impact of the current and continuing newsroom carnage on the capacity to actually do investigative reporting — one of the most time-consuming (i.e. expensive), difficult and unpredictable genres of journalism —has been and continues to be dire. Investigative reporting teams, “I-teams,” have been dismantled, and numerous overseas and domestic bureau staffs have contracted or disappeared altogether. Only a few newspapers still employ full-time foreign correspondents; investigative and international reporting increasingly have come to be regarded by management as high-risk, high-maintenance, high-priced impracticalities. The obvious, net result of this hollowing out process: There are fewer people today to report, write and edit original news stories about our infinitely more complex, dynamic world, fewer journalists to hold those in power accountable. And to put this in very sobering perspective, at the same time as the historic shrinking of newspaper, radio and television newsrooms across America over three decades starting in 1980, the number of public relations specialists and managers doubled from approximately 45,000 to 90,000 people. As Robert McChesney and John Nichols have written in their recent book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, “Even as journalism shrinks, the “news” will still exist. It will increasingly be provided by tens of thousands of well-paid and skilled PR specialists ready and determined to explain the world to the citizenry, in a manner that suits their corporate and government employers.” The serious news and information void is also being filled increasingly by major non- government organizations and think tanks, specializing and implicitly or explicitly advocating in certain subject areas, such as the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch and the Natural Resources Defense Council. And while the traditional, elite news organizations have pondered whether and how to adapt to the new information age exigencies and effronteries to their traditional “gatekeeper” role, deciding for the public what news is fit to print, the non-journalism, global, online marketplace of ideas and information has become utterly massive and is perpetually expanding, the quality and credibility of content widely varying, to put it charitably. It is against this complex and noisy backdrop that a new flowering of nonprofit news organizations has arisen. This report, The New Journalism Ecosystem, is an ambitious, inevitably imperfect attempt to systematically track an exciting, dynamic phenomenon and maybe even provoke a public conversation. What we are releasing today is intended to be a “living resource,” continually updated on the Investigative Reporting Workshop's iLab site, an expanding roster profiling the most interesting and credible nonprofit, online publishers in the United States, and in 2011, around the world. DETERMINING THE LIST Before revealing some of the most compelling findings from this compilation and analysis, it is important to address our methodology here. Indeed, how do we, how can anyone, attempt to define “credible” in this brave new world? By using the frames and sensibilities of the traditional newsgathering process that produces authoritative, original reporting so vital to an informed citizenry and democracy itself. For this report, we have examined 60 new and not-so-new nonprofit journalism sites/organizations, providing citizens with vital information at the local community, regional, national and even international level, sometimes investigative, sometimes more explanatory, but all of it serious, public-service journalism. With humility, we emphatically are not suggesting this initial report is complete. There are several other organizations that also could be included here, and the subjective judgments made about what enterprises to include are the exclusive responsibility of the author. For example, the great journalist Lowell Bergman has been a pioneer as co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, and his award-winning, multimedia collaborations the past decade with The New York Times, the PBS documentary program Frontline and others from the Investigative Reporting program at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. On the other side of the continent, in recent years, Walter Robinson, distinguished professor of journalism at Northeastern University, has helped his students there report, write and see published 16 front-page investigative stories in The Boston Globe. Additionally, with funding from the Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence Foundation in July, he is beginning an important new Initiative for Investigative Journalism there. Executive Editor Chuck Lewis talks about the Workshop’s groundbreaking iLab report on the emerging world of non-profit journalism. But neither of these exciting, impressive programs is included in this initial ecosystem report because of their non-institutional nature to date. Similarly, university, student-run news services are now in the ascendant nationwide, as statehouse and Washington bureau coverage has severely contracted, and their nonprofit journalism must be considered closely as part of the ecosystem in the near future. We have described the activities of 14 nonprofit journalism organizations at or near a university, which is 23 percent of the total. Eight Centers are part of universities, and six are legally and financially separate, 501 (c)(3) organizations located at universities. This number is likely to increase over time. In all cases, undergraduate and graduate students are learning the craft of investigative reporting, working with experienced, veteran journalists. Nearly all of them are dependent on obtaining external funding. To shine a brighter light on the new nonprofit landscape, for purposes relating to sanity, we have not included any public broadcasting entities in this compilation, such as National Public Radio, or its various award-winning programs or any of its hundreds of local stations. Or PBS programs such as Frontline. That great, important public-service journalism is published through these outlets is quite evident, and somehow, in future iterations of the ecosystem, this must be chronicled. Conversely, some veteran journalists may be startled to see included here some nonprofit news organizations that publish primarily investigative research on their websites. Groups such as the Center for Responsive Politics with its money and politics information, the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (part of Investigative Reporters and Editors), the National Security Archive and the Transactional Records and Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) have all produced