As news content and news readership move from print to online media, many have worried about the fate of investigative journalism. The current model for online content monetization is driven by advertising, promoting higher volume of content creation at the price of content quality. Investigative reports could take as long as a few weeks or months to write, tying up one or more reporters for that time, so in a volume-driven environment investigative reporting is not financially viable. Furthermore, because information flows so freely on the internet, investigative journalism has become much less lucrative. Because investigative reports can be picked up and republished quickly by other news outlets, online publishers have very little exclusivity, making it more difficult for them to drive readers to their site and increase revenue.
Investigative journalism is necessary as a check on the government, corporations, and public figures. Investigative journalists expose corruption, crime, and unethical practices by these people/entities, and by doing so prevent them from getting away with what they've done. But most importantly, the very presence of investigative journalism prevents people from taking part in unethical practices in fear of being exposed. Without investigative journalism, who would investigate the practices of government officials? The government itself? There are too many conflicts of interest there. Without investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, its likely that Richard Nixon would have gotten away with the crimes he committed. Investigative journalists have also been fairly successful in exposing corporate wrongdoing; even though the government is supposed to fulfill this role on its own, investigative journalists have discovered many crimes that the government has missed.
Although some people say that the movement to online content will be the death of investigative journalism, a few different models for online investigative journalism have been proposed and I think one or more of them will probably be successful. The two most viable of these, in my opinion, are a non-profit model and a crowd-funded model, which I will explore below.
A non-profit model for investigative journalism would involve multiple, independently run non-profit companies employing journalists to create investigative reports. These companies would be privately funded, possibly endowed, and could also get revenue from advertising or subscriptions. By being created for the sole purpose of investigative reporting, and being funded independently (and not by governments), these groups should be able to fulfill the need for investigative journalism. One company, ProPublica, has already been operating successfully using the model I described since 2008. And another group, The Center for Public Integrity, has been operating with this model since 1989! My guess is that these sites' revenue and newsrooms will grow greatly in coming years.
The other model for investigative journalism which I believe is highly viable, albeit less developed, is crowd-funded journalism. In a crowd-funded model, journalists would do some digging to find out about a story on their own, then briefly summarize their findings on a site like Spot.us in a pitch to possible funders. Then, if a story meets the journalists funding goal, he or she would complete their investigation and publish an article about it. With a highly decentralized model like this, freelance reporters could find things to investigate and be paid for their work independently of one another and of any employer, meaning that they would have no conflicts of interest. However, for some investigative reports, posting a pitch publicly could compromise the reporter's ability to investigate further, and could also release enough information for other reporters to investigate the same thing and beat the original reporter to publishing.
The internet will not kill investigative journalism; investigative reporting will always continue in some form due to peoples' innate curiosity. But hopefully through a non-profit or crowd-funded model, we can sustain or even increase the level of investigative journalism we're all accustomed to today.
Sources: Crowdfunding: Bringing Journalism Back to Life, New Sources of Funding, New Sources of Reporting
A large percentage of today's international population relies on Internet sources for news reports. Online news databases must choose how to arrange their home pages to deliver news faster than other sites, constantly changing the primary articles featured for their online readers. Because of this new, fast-paced style of delivering news, less urgent stories tend to fall beneath the surface more easily than if they were simply on the latter pages of a printed newspaper. I see the same trend with investigative journalism. As news sources rapidly increase the speed with which they deliver news, long-term reports such as those of investigative journalism can be easily forgotten.
ReplyDeleteI personally do not think the proposed non-profit solution solves this problem. Although it focuses certain companies on investigative reports, this proposal does not solve the problem that investigative reporters cannot complete their traditional work quickly enough to keep up with the fast-moving media of modern journalism. The crowd-funded model does a better job of compromising this issue by allowing online readers to choose the stories most worthy of more long-term investigation. This will help investigative reporters to ensure that their work is appreciated by even Internet audiences in its completion. - Lauryn