The answer to one of the questions tormenting everyone concerned with the future of journalism may be Pro Publica.

This non-profit newsroom, based in Manhattan, is be filled with 26 proven editors and reporters focused solely on investigative journalism. It is registered as a non-profit and will be funded by philanthropies.

Pro Publica launched 10 June. It’s 20-odd journalists from some of the top newspapers in the United States have been hired to work for former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. The website, which has been creating much buzz in industry circles, promises stories are soon to come.

Non-profit journalism is not new. But what’s new is how many groups are organising for this pursuit. It is perhaps the fastest-growing arena for investigative work that is beneficial for citizens. In his paper, The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism, Charles Lewis writes:

“…If commercial journalism had been functioning well with great independence, courage and enterprise, man years ago, none of the investigative reporting centers discussed here would have even been necessary or created. They began expressly to respond to a perceived need for more and higher quality reportage. And they have been fulfilling that need, with limited capacity and sometimes difficult financial circumstances with unflinching courage, creativity and perseverance.”

Steiger and Pro Public will have the benefit of learning from the non-profit centres that preceded them. Lewis, for example, founded the Center for Public Integrity, perhaps the most successful non-profit outlets for investigative journalism in the US.

Similar centres exist in Asia – like the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism - and around the European neighbourhood, with the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism.

While European media – broadcast media specifically – have diversified to include more and more commercial actors in the past 40 years or so, it seems that state-funded or non-profit media outlets are the few still able to produce the best quality journalism. Commercialisation has not, by and large, given rise to serious reporting. This is particularly true today, as info-tainment is steamrolling through periodicals everywhere.

Journalists across Europe and the United States are in droves being laid off, bought out and stuck filing extra stories because of hiring freezes. In the spring of 2008, French journalists went on strike to protest the layoff of 130 employees at Le Monde.

In early June, British journalists protested a restructuring of BBC World Service which would send the work for various programmes overseas.

The endless parade of such stories makes a reread of a 2006 report from Arizona State University all the more unsurprising:

“Newspapers care about investigative stories, but they frequently don’t back that up with resources that reporters say they need to do in-depth work.”

These and other disturbing statistics (Stateside, at least) were analysed in-depth in the Pew Center’s report.

These conditions make the adventure of non-profit journalism seem all the more enticing.

Before Lewis began with the Center for Public Integrity, his question was:

“Is there a way to create a modest attempt at a journalist utopia, an organization in which no one would tell me what or who not to investigate, the final story or report unfettered by time and space limitations? I was not out to change the world; I did not have an agenda, except to conduct major, thorough, responsible journalistic investigations about apparent abuses of power and the public trust.”

Pro Public is simply the lastest attempt to answer that question via the nonprofit route – rather than the citizen journalism route, the way of the blogging revolution, the way of the Google mashup or aggregator.

Certainly, investigative reporting and writing can encompass these techniques. But it seems without investigative reporting, there is less news for citizens and bloggers (which are of course one of the same) to mashup and comment about.

Pro Public will no doubt be the last attempt of its kind.

Published: June 9, 2008