Hired news: will P.R. pros take the baton of investigative journalism?

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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WHO WILL DO investigative reporting once the daily newspapers go out of business? This seems like a rhetorical question. Without a large journalistic institution paying the substantial costs, how could anybody out there have the guts, the moxie, the chutzpah to wear out the shoe leather, ask the hard questions, chase the story wherever it leads, and expose the skullduggery of the powerful in an exclusive article for the bulldog edition?

The prospect of a world without snooping reporters should be troubling even if you're not the type who can say "Fourth Estate" with a straight face. Sure, reporters on lengthy investigative junkets produce their share of multi-part snoozers that wouldn't see print if not for the sunk costs of the investigations--Pulitzer bait informing the reader, for example, that U-Haul trailers may flip if you turn your car too sharply. But the daily newspaper, specifically the daily newspaper with a full or near monopoly in its local market, can still afford to concentrate reporting resources with a degree of intelligence that blogs and news aggregators have not yet matched.

Like many self-evident truths of the media collapse, however, this one has a rubber/road challenge. The experience of the average news consumer is vastly richer than it was 10 years ago. (And considering that whole new categories of news consumers--such as the 23 million Americans who now receive their journalism via mobile phone--have been created in just the last few years, we should use the term average with caution.) News sources, documentation, and opinion have never been more abundant or more easily accessible. If you want to learn about the scandal-laced competition between Boeing and EADS/Northrop Grumman for the next Air Force tanker contract, or the collapse of the Schenectady, New York, police department, you've never been in a better position to do so.

How is this possible? Everybody you talk to says there are fewer investigative reporters out there. Everybody you talk to who is honest admits that bloggers and other holy fools have failed to fill the gaps on a sustained basis. "The amount of investigative reporting going on in Sacramento has definitely declined over the last decade," says Jon Fleischman, whose California politics roundup flashreport.com itself offers the kind of inventive, idea-driven, aggressively researched journalism you would normally associate with traditional investigative reporting.

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