American University to address the high cost and near-extinction of investigative journalism
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Washington state’s oldest newspaper, was put up for sale on the 11th and will close if no one buys it in the next 58 days. This is the extreme of what has been happening in the newspaper business as budgets are condensed, readership goes online and even interns, paid a minimum living wage or nothing at all, are shown the door.
It is a vicious cycle, because the in-depth stories that might draw readers are the ones newspapers can no longer afford. Top reporters are being let go and investigative reporting is increasingly being tabled. Newspapers are pushing story quotas – all of the j-jobs I’m searching for specify weekly numbers the reporter is expected to fill – which leaves little time to chase a tip that might require months of digging only to hit a dead end.
I can’t speak with any authority, as I am only a few months out of journalism school, but I fear the cable news-ification of newspapers: a focus on event- and people-driven stories; thin, short, flat pieces that lack challenging depth; a focus on the argumentative rather than the informative and a tendency to beat a dead horse. Online news is a phenomenal monolith with endless possibilities, but it drives a tendency to hyper-focus on events and over-report them (due to ease, accessibility or for competition’s sake). This was never more clear than during the election season. All of the energy devoted to blogging ten times per day – whenever Sen. Hillary Clinton changed her clothing – could have been put toward an in-depth piece on something else. Anything else.
American University in Washington, D.C., (my alma mater), and a former professor of mine who is deeply involved in the dwindling investigative journalism community, is trying to find a solution with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. The introduction on the program’s Web site reminds us that the demise of news has been poorly timed, as “the forces of technology and globalization are combining to make government and powerful private institutions less transparent, and thus, less subject to public scrutiny and oversight.”
The workshop will involve reporters, professors and students producing investigative pieces while trying to ascertain the most efficient, technologically advanced and economical way to conduct in-depth reporting. They seek to create an entirely new model, so that the reason all of us went to J-school in the first place doesn’t die out before we get our first big jobs.
