Today I attended an all-day workshop in investigative journalism, sponsored by the Reynolds Center (BusinessJournalism.org) — held at the Turnbull Center in downtown Portland with additional sponsorship from the Society for Professional Journalists.
Bear with me, as I’m pretty worn out and this is going to be somewhat stream of consciousness.
I’m met some cool folks, generated new story ideas and leads and pushed myself to network a bit (I really suck at it — you have no idea), but I was also left scratching my head over how independent/freelance journalists can effectively do investigative work.
Most investigative pieces take months — sometimes a year or more — of research, digging, interviews, cajoling, travel, more digging before the final piece or series is made public. I don’t know too many — scratch that, I don’t know any — freelancers who have deep enough pockets to support themselves for the time it would take do justice to such a piece, not to mention having to cover travel expenses, research costs and more.
Some of the staff writers I spoke to at the conference today were similarly flummoxed, not knowing how they’d manage to convince their editors to cut them loose on such projects, even if these same writers were still putting in time to cover their regular beats while on the investigative work as well.
The desire to dig in is there. Everyone in that room had probably a half-dozen leads they’d love to really sink their teeth into, rather than glossing over in a standard 800-2500 word article. But resources are dwindling. Publications — the ones that have survived — have been cutting their budgets across the board in recent years, and investigative journalism has been hit hard.
Still, new organizations like Spot.us and ProPublica are taking up the cause, so all is not lost. Not yet, anyway.
Another writer today lamented how few readers even demand such in-depth pieces anymore, preferring news and infotainment “sound bites” they can skim online.
This scares me.
Without investigative journalism, Nixon might have served his full second term as president, and abuse of the mentally ill might still be running rampant. Instead, we have journalists like Nellie Bly, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who staked out a story and put themselves — not just their reputations, but their safety — on the line to bring forth the truth.
Quite frankly, the idea of doing investigative journalism has long intimidated me, but today’s workshop opened my eyes to some of the more mundane realities of the work and demystified much of the process. I’m still not sure how to make it work as a freelancer, but our industry is changing daily, so I imagine there is a solution waiting to be pioneered.
Right now, however, I’m too tired to think any more about it.
