ProPublica

InvestigateWest added its reporting muscle to ProPublica, the investigative reporting organization based in New York, for a report detailing which members of Congress benefited from their status as high-ranking public officials to obtain sought-after tickets to yesterday's Super Bowl.

As ProPublica found, with the help of InvestigateWest, many other media organizations and citizen journalists around the country, interest cooled, perhaps after it became known that media attention was focused on this sometime perk of public office. Or perhaps a record snowstorm had something to do with it.

Was it the two feet of snow that blanketed Washington during the days leading up to the Super Bowl? Or was it the unintended consequence of our Super Bowl Blitz [1], a two-week telephone survey that ProPublica conducted with the help of its readers, trying to find out which members of Congress would be attending this year’s big game?

In any case, at least two Super Bowl fundraising events scheduled by members of Congress were scrubbed at the last minute or moved to undisclosed locations. Invitations to those parties, which had been circulated two or more weeks before the game, promised Super Bowl tickets to contributors who gave either of the lawmakers $5,000.

InvestigateWest's mission is to make sure investigative journalism continues, despite a cratering news industry that has seen massive layoffs among newspapers and other news organizations and budget cutbacks that have seriously curtailed the depth of coverage among remaining staff.

And we continue to get recognized as among a small vanguard of media organizations leading the way toward an evolving future.

When national Associated Press business writer Andrew Vanacore wrote recently about whether investigative journalism can continue in nonprofit organizations as cutbacks occur in the for-profit model, he interviewed the big players in the independent scene - ProPublica based in New York, the Center for Investigative Reporting in California and the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., and InvestigateWest in Seattle. The difference is that ProPublica has a newsroom budget of $10 million, most of it coming from the Sandler Foundation, backed by financiers Herbert and Marion Sandler. CPI and CIR are veterans of the nonprofit, investigative world, having done their good work for 20 years or more. InvestigateWest is an upstart, six months old, scrappy and working hard to earn its keep.

Andrew and I talked a few days before InvestigateWest reporter Robert McClure had a story featured on msnbc.com, which drew 400,000 pageviews during its time in the lead position on Jan. 12.

I spent the weekend at the Journalism and Women Symposium at Snowbird, Utah, and it was a tremendous experience. I was on a panel speaking on entrepreneurial journalism Saturday, along with Susan White, senior editor of ProPublica, Marcia Parker, launch manager for California Watch at the Center for Investigative Reporting, Linda Jue, director and executive editor of the G. W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, and Mary Darcy, editor of alloveralbany.com.  Cindy Richards, freelance journalist and operator of travelingmom.com, moderated the discussion. What a talented group of women, who are coming at the issue of creating sustainable journalism from a huge range of experiences, including a hyper-local community news site (a0a) to a national and international deep-dive investigative site  largely funded by one deep-pockets supporter (ProPublica) to the Williams Center, which supports investigative reporting by journalists of color, women and youth, to  InvestigateWest - a nonprofit newbie with some funding but looking to become sustainable with support from individual donors, foundations and content sales.