Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse

"In Watergate’s Legacy and the Press Jon Marshall shows that the investigative impulse, the impulse to hold institutions accountable, has been present in every era of journalism. The type of outlet that tells the story can change over time. Sometimes we think of investigative reporting in America as starting with a big burst in the Progressive Era. Marshall tells about McClure’s , the muckraking magazine that published exposés of Standard Oil. He traces how from that time through the fifties, sixties and seventies up until when the Washington Post broke news of the Watergate scandal, there’s always been this investigative impulse. “Another way to nurture investigative journalism is through the evolution of the field of computational journalism.” Investigative reporting usually has three characteristics: it’s original, it’s substantive and somebody wants to keep it secret, usually the government. Those three things are all related to economic principles. Original means you have to expend resources to create the story. Substantive issues of interest to the community means that, when you tell the story, the benefits can spill over to many other people and that makes it difficult to capture the value created by the work. Then the secret part: people try to throw obstacles in your way; government officials don’t like to be held accountable, even in the current administration. They’ve done a great job with open data policies in the United States. They make data available to help build a business; they call it DC to VC. They do a great job of crowd-sourcing, asking for your ideas and information. But still, if you look at Freedom of Information Act requests, government agencies don’t rush to reveal data that will help us hold them accountable. There are five incentives that get a story told. One is pay me; that is the subscription model. One is, I’m going to sell your attention to someone else; that’s advertising. One is I want to change the world by changing what you think about; that’s the nonprofit model. One is I want your vote; that’s the partisan model. And one is ‘I like to talk;’ that’s the expression model. Across time you see a variation in the relative instance and importance of those incentives. When people ask, ‘What’s the business model that will support investigative journalism?’ I answer ‘I don’t think there is one model.’ I think that we will see relative changes in the importance of each of those incentives. I agree with Jon Marshall that nonprofits are potentially going to play a greater role in provision of investigative reporting. In my book, one of the things I talk about is that nonprofits, like the Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego, are sustained, in part, by the same people who contribute to federal election campaigns, people who have an interest in the political life of the community. Nonprofits tend to do things that are a byproduct, in the private market, of public affairs: things that are having an impact by changing people’s understanding of a public policy issue. That becomes the direct measure of how the nonprofit is functioning. If you look at ProPublica or Chalkbeat or the Center for Investigative Reporting, all three of those groups have devised ways that try to measure the public impact of the stories that they tell."