Even though we aren’t a traditional media organization, I pitch and edit my stories with my editor, not some boardroom backer. As long as these organizations choose strong, independent editors to work on the ground with reporters, I think it is a useful new model.

There are plenty of ethical issues to sort out, but I think these smaller outfits will necessarily have to exist in an economy where most newspapers can’t support a fully staffed investigative unit.

At the same time, I work for a family-owned newspaper company (The Bakersfield Californian) that has always been and continues to be dedicated to the truth and is always supportive of new ways of doing things. Our publisher Ginger Moorhouse even once authorized an investigative story that included her own brother, the former publisher (see http://ww2.bakersfield.com/2003/lords/)

I also know that some publicly owned companies have people at the top have axes to grind. And shareholders at publicly owned companies can also sometimes exert pressure.

I also know plenty of really bad family-owned newspapers where the families interfere in the news on a regular basis, usually motivated by appeasing certain advertisers.

My point is that you can’t really make a blanket statement about how ALL privately-funded journalism is tainted or not, just as you can’t say that about journalism from publicly owned companies. It depends on which family, who’s in that family abd what their values are, which company, what are their financial interests, etc.

But I do agree with you that journalists shouldn’t be waiting for some rich individual or trust to come save them.

At City University, we’ve just started an MA in Investigative Journalism to equip grads with some of those skills, and to create a community of journalists interested in championing this kind of journalism through their careers.

What I’d prefer is a grant-based system where existing journalists could get additional support for investigative projects, but the reality is that investigations also need to build communities/audiences around the issues they’re uncovering. Those communities/audiences used to come ready-built in the form of newspapers and magazines.

Now traditional media is unbundling are we going to find that investigative journalism was just something journalists admired as the supreme example of their professional virtue, but that the public really weren’t prepared to pay for?

Most of the time those who are best equipped to do investigative reporting are beat reporters with good sources who really know their subject matter.

Also, there’s a disconnect between what journalists and readers see as investigative. For journalists investigative tends to mean a page one gotcha piece whereas for readers it means new relevant information.

At the very least, it allows the people or organizations he investigates to blow a lot of smoke about hidden agendas. It doesn’t really matter whether they exist or not.

And why would explicitly paid journalism be any different?

> How would outsourcing investigative journalism pollute what is supposed to be a pristine and reliable news source?

We’d know who was pissing in the barrels of toxic waste.

The “silo” organization of news organizations is what got them in trouble of the first place. Instead of having all reporters become multi-skilled, able to take on all the different tasks of doing the work–from covering a press conference, to writing analysis, to investigaing–news organizations pidgeon-holed reporters by content area (read: beat) and by function (read: investigation, or something else). It’s an organizational structure that used to guide the assembly line in auto factories, and one that’s not holding up well in the information age.

I think Steiger is clinging to some sad nostalgia for the good-old-days….days that never really were.