These are desperate times for traditional journalism in the US. From east coast to west, media proprietors are competing to see who can panic the most and cut the deepest.
McClatchy, the No. 3 newspaper chain in the US, and even the New York Times and Newsweek have announced redundancies. Sam Zell, the irascible chairman of the Tribune Company that owns the Los Angeles Times, has come up with the original idea of cutting pagination from his newspapers until news and advertising share equal space.
Within a landscape scarred by slash and burn, a few buds of hope are appearing. One of the most unusual is blossoming on the 23rd floor of an office block in downtown Manhattan.
ProPublica aims to make up some of the ground lost to journalism by the current crisis of advertising revenues bleeding to the Internet. In particular, it seeks to preserve the skills and value of investigative reporting — one of the first casualties of cuts by dint of its relative costliness.
It burst on to the US media scene last week with its first major investigation — an expose of how the US-backed Arabic language TV network Al Hurra is counter-productive to US interests, poorly watched and a waste of US$500 million in public money. The investigation was produced as a documentary and aired on the prestigious TV magazine 60 Minutes, causing ripples through Congress and shaking up the government-backed network.
To appear on something as hallowed as 60 Minutes is astonishing for so new a venture, but then ProPublica is not an ordinary start-up. By the time it is fully up and running next month it will have a staff of 27, mostly reporters, including some of the most experienced and eminent names in US journalism. It will be the largest dedicated investigative team in the US, and one of the largest in the world.
It is not just size that makes ProPublica stand out. The manner of its inception is also striking. It was the brainchild of a self-made billionaire, Herb Sandler, and his wife, Marion, who decided to donate US$10 million a year from their philanthropic foundation to give intensive care to the ailing art of investigative reporting.
“I have a problem with abuse of power, no matter where it takes place — whether in business, or government or unions,” Sandler said. “If you look back historically to the days when muckraking took place, shedding light on corruption or abuse is one of the best ways to get things cleaned up.”
In 2006 Sandler invited several prominent people to suggest how the money could be spent. The proposal that appealed to him most came from Paul Steiger, a towering figure in US newspapers who had edited the pre-Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal for 16 years and at 65 was approaching mandatory retirement.
The model Steiger put forward, out of which ProPublica has emerged, is a largely Web-based product that will seek both to promote the traditional skills and responsibilities of investigative journalism — encouraging it wherever it is found — and to conduct its own investigations in areas of significant public interest, or what Steiger calls subjects that carry “moral force.”
Steiger knows that coming from nowhere, with no track record, ProPublica will have to work hard to convince the doubters.
“I tell my colleagues that if we are dull or wrong we are dead,” he said.
He has put together a formidable team. His No. 2 is Stephen Engelberg, a former investigative editor of the New York Times. The Web site’s advisory board reads like a who’s who of US journalism and the directors include Harvard dons Henry Louis Gates Jr and James Leach.
For a start-up Internet venture its staff are unusual in being drawn almost exclusively from traditional, largely print, media, with the exception of a few impressive Web hirings such as Paul Kiel, the deputy editor of Talking Points Memo and a blogger for Muckraker.com. Engelberg says they are actively looking to bring more Web expertise on board.
The Web site will link to investigations by other news organizations, and ProPublica will have no shame — unlike most editors — in following up the exclusives of others. Its own in-depth investigations — what Steiger calls “deep-dive stuff” — will be disseminated for free on a temporary exclusive basis to broadcasters and newspapers, as was last week’s 60 Minutes piece.
The investigation of Al Hurra is a model of how things might go. The first blast of the story on 60 Minutes was sufficiently powerful to catch the attention of Congress, where it was raised in the foreign relations committee. ProPublica then kept the story running through the week with a series of follow-up articles on its site. The editors can even claim their first scalp — forcing the resignation of a journalist who a year ago had reported for Al Hurra from a Holocaust deniers’ conference in Tehran and had himself questioned on camera on the existence of the Holocaust. Al Hurra managers had told Congress that he had been dismissed a year ago, but ProPublica tracked him down to its US-funded sister radio channel, where he was still working.
Almost all its resources will go directly into journalism, compared with a mere 10 percent of the budgets of the average paper. There will be no editorial pressure from the Sandlers, and no commercial pressure either as all the income will be philanthropic.
“There will be no ads on our Web site as we are trying to establish a brand of trustworthy investigative reporting, not to create revenue,” Engelberg says. “If there were a media equivalent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, then this would be the golden ticket.”
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