David Carr has a great piece in the Monday NYT looking at the cost and value of investigative journalism. He makes (better) some of the same points I've been hitting on for years -- that there is a huge value in great investigative reporting, that this gap is not natively going to be filled via bloggers or citizen journalists, and that while things look grim, they are probably better than they appear. A couple of key points, negatives first:

Investigative reporting can expose corruption, create accountability and occasionally save lives, but it will never be a business unto itself. Reporters frequently spend months on various lines of inquiry, some of which do not pan out, and even when one does, it is not the kind of coverage that draws advertisers.

Serious reporting used to be baked into the business, but under pressure from the public markets or their private equity owners, newsrooms have been cutting foreign bureaus, Washington reporters and investigative capacity. Under this model, the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead.

And then:

The smartest Web robot in the world is going to come back dumb if there is nothing out there to crawl across. Thousands of bloggers could type for a millennium and not come up with the kind of deeply reported story that freed innocent men — an effort that takes years of inquiry, deep sources and a touch for making unholy secrets knowable.

Then an absolute howler, just to make sure his readers were paying attention:

In part, it is the triumph of the spinners, top to bottom. Since the media reached the height of its powers in the 1970s, there has been a pervasive effort to gain custody of public information in both the public and private sector. A working reporter cannot walk into a Gap store in a mall, let alone a police station, and ask a question without being swarmed by bureaucracy.

That's right, us PR folks are the cause of many problems, far too many to count here, so we'll just accept the slam and move on. Okay, here's the positive:

If the watchdog role is threatened by immediate financial pressures, I’m beginning to think that in the long run it can still flourish. Last week, this paper reported that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of detainees that some believe constitutes torture.

And lest you think that I’m just waving around the pompoms to keep my team in the game, keep in mind that later this week, Rupert Murdoch, the most successful of the modern media titans, is taking over The Wall Street Journal. He has made it clear that he will invest in the business newspaper to turn it into a source of general news. If the future of news were really so grim, would Mr. Murdoch be interested?

Here in Seattle, the local paper, home to some incredibly creative pop up ad technology that almost always manages to get past my myriad pop up blockers, has been doing some very good work in the area of investigative journalism. In particular, the series on huge medical fraud being perpetrated by a fugitive living in Hungary led yesterday to action by the FDA to forbid the import of the machines.

Maybe we should just start calling it "Journalism 3.0." How's that for a blast of optimism?

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