Center for Investigative Reporting

By Andrew Hart

InvestigateWest

As InvestigateWest’s new online community manager,  I consider myself a journalist at heart. Although my prior work in social media was for a marketing organization, I bring experience and a mindset of a digital journalist to this new role for InvestigateWest. Some hold that social media is antithetical to journalism, but I disagree. My goal is to share and promote quality reporting through the powerful tools of new media, including social media. Though social media is not as iconic as whirring printing presses and ink smudges, it is connecting journalists with audiences in unprecedented ways.

I came to INVW prepared to plead the case of social media for a non-profit to those who view social media as a new-age marketing tool. Why should professional reporters be concerned with what Joe Anybody has to say about the cost of cereal from his supermarket? I also anticipated that social media activity on behalf of a non-profit reporting organization would need to be conservative and closely scrutinized so as to not embroil the organization in any controversy.

To investigate these assumptions, I called my counterpart at the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting for some answers. Meghann Farnsworth is the Online Community Manager of the CenterforInvestigativeReporting(CIR) and its subsidiary CaliforniaWatch(CW). What I learned about Farnsworth’s role at CIR and the role of social media in investigative reporting is an exciting glimpse into what new media technology offers to reporters and audiences.

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.