Who pays for investigative journalism?

The Huffington Post recently announced a US$1.75million fund to support  investigative journalism in the US.

The pieces developed by the Fund will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media, including text, audio and video. And, in the open source spirit of the Web, all of the content the Fund produces will be free for anyone to publish.

Picture a large pool of reporters — some on staff, and many freelancers — proposing stories and also receiving assignments from Investigative Fund editors.

This investigative initiative is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Fund.

Judith Townend has written a good piece on journalism.co.uk looking at the fund and the wider issue of public funding for journalism.

She found largely positive support for the Huffington Post fund and others like it, but an interesting thread running through the piece is a wariness of expecting one income model – whether a philanthropic lump sum or advertising – to be the solution for the news media’s financial problems.

“I have reservations about every lump of money,” [Jay] Rosen tells Journalism.co.uk. “If I had one wish in this whole business model discussion, it would be that everybody would drop the idea that there is a single solution.”

“All models of journalism have weakenesses, have downsides, have strengths. The ‘one’ model [idea] is stupid. How do we know there will be this money in three years? We don’t.”

That’s a philosophy echoed by ProPublica’s managing editor Stephen Engelberg, even though his non-profit organisation – a well-resourced and respected investigative team which supplies investigations to other media bodies – does rely on one substantial funder – the Sandler Foundation.

“I frankly think [large foundation donations are] not the answer because it seems to me you really need a hybrid of revenue streams,” he tells Journalism.co.uk during an interview at the ProPublica headquarters in New York.

“We’re very fortunate to have it [foundation funding] in the short-run. We see this not as a long, long-term thing – I think over time we’re going to have to evolve too, but in the short-term you have foundations – people who can pay for this.”

He cites the MinnPost as an example of how journalism can use a pool of resources: “They try and take some of the Obama model and say, well, you can get 10,000 people to give you $5 – that’s money, and $50 – that’s real money.

“So you have large and small donors. You have some advertising. Web advertising is selling very cheaply right now, but it’s something. You try and figure out if there’s any kind of merchandise you can sell. Anything at all you can create revenue from.

“People talk about non-profit journalism and they say ‘well isn’t it great? You take that profit thing out and we’re all going to be fine’. Well, no, non-profit journalism doesn’t mean you can spend more than you have. It just means that when you’re done not spending more than you have, you don’t then have to create an additional percentage which has to go to Rupert Murdoch.”

There are still expenses that have to be met, Engelberg says. ProPublica, he says, is not about proving a business model, but about proving a journalism model. That’s a ‘luxury’ of which he is well aware, he says, and one he intends to make the most of while he can.

ProPublica is a frequently cited example of successful non-profit investigative journalism, and sustainability of such an enterprise is the key question, raised by all the interviewees consulted for this feature.

“ProPublica is funded almost exclusively by the Sandlers, and God bless for them for committing to that project for as many years as they have,” says Aron Pilhofer, editor of newsroom interactive technologies at the New York Times.

“But ProPublica, I think, would be the first ones to tell you, don’t really know how successful non-profit journalism is going to be.”

“The non-profit model could be part of it but no-one knows. I still think there’s a viable, commercial model,” Pilhofer adds, explaining his view that there are new ways of earning revenue from advertising and other projects, a model which is currently ‘maturing’, as traditional advertising models shift along with changing patterns of news.

Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider has a very different take on the value of the Huffington Post fund and suggests that the impetus for investigative journalism doesn’t so much come from journalists looking for stories as it does from whistle blowers looking for a big audience.

From where we’re sitting, the Fund looks like a very smart PR play — and not much else.

The PR benefits are obvious:

• The fund will help to put handwringing about journalism to rest and make the NYT’s “mission from God” rhetoric even more ridiculous.
• The fund also counters the grumbling that the HuffPo is just a leech sucking remaining life out of real news orgs.

But will the Huffington Post Investigative Fund actually make a big difference in investigative journalism? Not necessarily.

Investigative journalism requires resources, sure, but it’s fueled mostly by whistle-blowing sources looking for the media outlet with the loudest megaphone — not reporters looking for sources.

Remember, “Deep Throat,” a.k.a William Mark Felt, came to Woodward and Bernstein, not the other way around. It’s also worth remembering he did so not entirely out of altruism. The guy was very upset with Nixon because he politicized the FBI.

Source like Felt — people with axes to grind and ulterior motives against the powers that be — aren’t going to go away just because newspapers are. These people have a self-interest to talk to whomever they need to get their story out and thereby gratify their own political or commercial ambitions.

Investigative reporters — like most kinds of reporters — are valuable because they’re willing to listen to these people, fact-check their stories, and then tell the whole world about it.

If the Huffpo begins breaking big stories someday, it won’t be because it’s spending $1.75 million on investigative journalism. It will be because the HuffPo’s audience is so big, ax-grinding sources will go to it with their stories first. The Huffington Post will have a commercial interest in checking the stories out and running them.

The US has a number of news initiatives funded by philanthropic endowments. The Knight Foundation funds innovative community-based digital news projects among other things. ProPublica, mentioned above, is a non-profit that runs an investigative news team which supplies content to a range of publications, and the Poynter Institute is a financially independent journalism educator and publisher.

I haven’t seen anything like these organisations in New Zealand, but I’d like to hear about them if they exist. Certainly the idea’s kicking around. I know I’ve had conversations with several people about the merits or otherwise of using public or private funds to support either investigative journalism or innovative projects that explore newsgathering and news delivery online.

In a recent NZ Herald editorial Alan Cocker, Head of the School of Communications at AUT, called for a publicly-funded mainstream news organisation as a backstop against privately owned companies failing.

Meanwhile, his colleague Martin Hirst has established a research group which is kicking off tonight with a talk by Australian academic David Cameron about what journalists can learn from video gamers (a big growth sector).  5.30pm Room WT302, AUT Tower corner Rutland and Wakefield sts, Auckland (opposite Aotea Square, off Queen st).