HuffPost to Fund Investigative Reporting

One of the more intriguing indications of how new media is supplanting old media is a posting by Robert MacMillan on the Reuters Blog MediaFile last night.

He said he had just returned from the media power restaurant Michael’s in Manhattan, where Arianna Huffington had announced that her Huffington Post will begin funding investigative reports next year.

The Post emerged as a big winner from the recent Presidential campaign, as it has established itself as one of the leading political news destinations on the web.

About six months ago, in this space, we explored the critical role some non-profit organizations (like Mother Jones, The Nation Institute, and the Center for Investigative Reporting) play in keeping investigative journalism alive at a time when most mainstream media organizations are cutting reporters and budgets to the point where they can no longer afford to fund in-depth work.

For example, CIR and National Public Radio, another non-profit, combined on a series of ground-breaking campaign finance reports during the recent election cycle, including one of the best looks into the GOP’s attack on ACORN, the grassroots community organizing effort that works hard to increase voter turnout in elections.

MacMillan notes that there is beginning to be a trend toward support investigative work online. The controversial Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, is financing several such ventures himself, including    sharesleuth.com and  bailoutsleuth.com, which focus on financial wrongdoings and wrong-headed bailout plans during the ongoing financial crisis. Cuban, who was charged by the SEC with insider trading two days ago, also funds long-time CBS newsman Dan Rather’s independent reports.

And, then there is Pro-Publica, which we reviewed here several months back, the latest non-profit effort by displaced East Coast investigative journalists to carry on a tradition their former employers now largely eschew.

All of this activity, under a diversity of business models, is creating a new ecology for investigative reporting. Increasingly based online, with searchable databases, links to other reports, and in some cases comment threads and other community activity, it represents a ray of hope through the gloom surrounding the demise of the old media world.

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(Note: David Weir co-founded CIR in 1977 and still sits on its board; he also is on the editorial board of The Nation, and worked at Mother Jones in the early 1990s. He also is a former executive vice-president of NPR member station KQED.)