Scan-N-Land

Who will fill the investigative void online?

Charles Lewis, founder and longtime director of the Center for Public Integrity, is an old hand at the sort of nonprofit investigative journalism that online outfits such as NewAssignment.net (see Jason’s earlier post) and the Sunlight Foundation are promoting/producing. (He’s also currently Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at American University.) CPI was promoting a form of "citizen journalism" before it became a buzz-concept (see the Center's 2000 book, "Citizen Muckrakers").

Lewis spoke with NewAssignment.net about his mixed feelings about the future of investigative journalism.

As an avowed muckraker, he’s worried about what will become of the practice as the big news orgs like the New York Times and the Washington Post face staff reductions (earlier post) and other challenges. “Newspapers will cease to exist on paper over time,” he says. “The question’s not, is it going to happen – it’s when.”

News investigations are time-consuming and costly, which makes them less appealing to corporate owners looking to reap fat profits from newspapers. Meanwhile, online sources such as Google News and Yahoo mostly serve as headline aggregators with little original journalism.

The good news is, the flagging focus on in-depth projects leaves plenty of engaging and important stories for enterprising online journalists to uncover, he says.

We have a very large global independent laboratory right now and everyone should be testing models, testing ideas, and testing means of distribution and ways to create more substantive journalism in the online context, because there’s clearly a need for it and it will evolve.

Lots of interesting stuff here.

--Jeremy Egner

posted by Mark H. @ 11/22/2006 12:20:00 PM