The New
Watchdogs - Can the Web drive investigative journalism in a post-newspaper era?
By Conor Friedersdorf is an associate editor at The Atlantic.
He can be reached at conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com.
4 August 2011
Are newspaper reporters
still necessary? When the Los Angeles Times
broke the story of corruption in Bell,
California, where the city
manager was collecting $1.5 million in annual compensation, it felt like
vindication for the institutional press and its traditional role. Before Jeff
Gottlieb and Ruben Vives filed their stories,
officials in the small, working-class city had long misbehaved with impunity.
Wouldn’t Bell’s taxpayers be wasting more
millions per annum if not for metro L.A.’s
newspaper of record? Sure, the Times’s
overextended staff had missed the story for years, and its editors had closed
the bureau nearest Bell.
But didn’t that just highlight the civic costs exacted by falling ad revenue
and successive rounds of layoffs? In this telling, it’s vital that a competent
beat reporter serve every city to guard against the graft and corruption that
would go unnoticed in his or her absence.
But a closer look at the Bell fiasco complicates this narrative. Years
before the Times made national news with the story, an anonymous blogger writing under the pseudonym Pedro Parramo alleged corruption in Bell on WatchOurCity.com, a
muckraking website that once received an award from the California First
Amendment Coalition for uncovering official malfeasance in another
municipality. Parramo tried to obtain paperwork
proving that Bell’s
leaders were outlandishly compensated. But despite California’s strong public-records laws,
officials stymied his requests. In its postmortem on the controversy, NPR
reported that other residents suspicious of municipal leaders had made their
own inquiries. “They keep giving you the runaround, they keep telling you,
‘We’ll call back,’” a 33-year-old educator named Miguel Sanchez told NPR. “No
one could ever help us. No one was ever around.”
The pattern is familiar to observers of South
Los Angeles. Back in 2004, Times reporter Richard Marosi broke a corruption scandal in Lynwood, California,
reporting that “a majority of the City Council enjoy six-figure incomes, lavish
foreign travel, and the generous use of city credit cards for meals and
entertainment, including steakhouse dinners, a New York musical and a dance
show in Rio de Janeiro.” Lynwood residents, meanwhile, earned an average of
$9,500 per year, and the city faced a $1.3 million budget gap. As in Bell,
public documents detailed the damning behavior; an alert resident spent two
years alleging corruption to no avail; and the records needed to prove
malfeasance were obtained only after the overextended Marosi,
having been tipped off to the story, finally started pursuing it zealously.
In these instances, as in many others, the Los Angeles
Times wasn’t needed to discover corruption: citizen journalists
could sniff it out as capably as any watchdog. Once on the scent, however, the
amateurs couldn’t dig as deep or growl as menacingly as newspaper reporters
backed by a powerful regional publication. The biggest villain in Bell, city manager Robert
Rizzo, knew that he could hold off local residents nosing around for salary and
benefits information. Going after the same records, the Times reporter
made insistent phone calls to the city clerk every day, and having been denied,
said (as she later recounted to NPR): “Listen, are we getting the documents? I
really don’t want to sue you, but we will, and when we go to court and we win,
because we will, we’ll ask the judge to make you pay our legal bills, because
that’s what the public-records statute says.”
That’s effective growling, and it was enough to make the city
relent. The Times reporters soon began digging through the documents,
which showed salaries every bit as jaw-dropping as the most suspicious citizens
expected. The result: not allegations materializing on a low-traffic blog, but hard numbers appearing in a newspaper with a paid
Sunday circulation of 1,019,388. It has since emerged that a former member of Bell’s city council,
Victor Bello, tipped off the Los Angeles County
District Attorney about graft in the city over a year before the Times
broke its story. No one did much to put a stop to it until the newspaper
stories started running.
The insight here isn’t that newspapers are irreplaceable.
Whether or not that’s true, the fact is that cities like Ann Arbor, Michigan,
have already seen their dailies shut down. The American Society of Newspaper
Editors reports that in the last decade, “American newsrooms have lost more
than 25 percent of their full-time staffers, bringing the total of full-time
journalists working in daily newsrooms to 41,500, a level not seen since the
mid-1970s.” Among the 19,429 municipal governments in the United States,
many will go without a capable journalistic watchdog. In short, the age of the
newspaper is already over in enough places that the question is not whether
they can be replaced, but how to replace them.
Many of the most
interesting efforts to compensate for the decline of newspapers are taking
place far from the hub of American journalism—New York,
the rare U.S.
municipality where the old model of watchdog journalism remains relatively
healthy. The MinnPost is a nonprofit that publishes
stories of interest to civic-minded Minnesota
residents six days a week. The Florida-based Knight Foundation provides grants
that support innovative experiments in community journalism. The Harvard-based Niemen Foundation sponsors a
journalism ideas lab that highlights promising projects. The New England Center
for Investigative Reporting acts as a regional watchdog.
So far, however, the most fertile ground for innovation is California. The Golden State’s
long-suffering newspaper industry has left many public officials unwatched and
provided plenty of laid-off journalists eager to watch them. The state’s
cosmopolitanism appeals to the creative professionals who tend to staff
journalism startups. Efforts like Cal Watchdog—edited by Steven Greenhut, who writes regularly for City Journal—are
motivated in part by alarm at dysfunction in California’s state government. And the Silicon Valley culture complements journalistic efforts:
who better to spawn a new breed of watchdogs than idealistic entrepreneurs with
access to money, exceptional coding skills, a libertarian political streak, and
a mind-set that prizes innovation and transparency?
Every startup is trying to reinvent the newspaper in its own
way. The effort that most closely resembles a traditional broadsheet is the
online-only Voice of San Diego, founded when a local businessman became
frustrated by the San Diego Union-Tribune and its inadequate coverage of
municipal scandals. The Voice of San Diego’s website could easily be
mistaken for that of a daily newspaper, except that it has no national
headlines, human-interest pieces, or crossword puzzles. As the organization
puts it, “There are other publications in San
Diego doing work that we don’t need to chase after or
replicate.” The result is an online newspaper stripped of everything save
watchdog coverage—a model that requires fewer people and a smaller budget than
a traditional publication would need to produce the same number of important
scoops. The downside: many people subscribe to traditional newspapers largely
for the crossword puzzle or the sports page. Can watchdog reporting, unbundled
from box scores and supermarket coupons, attract enough readers to make an
impact?
Another promising new outfit is California Watch, a
creation of the country’s oldest nonprofit investigative-news organization, the
Center for Investigative Reporting. When California Watch launched in
2009, it immediately counted more investigative journalists than any newspaper
in the state. Its staffers sniff around for stories, do the heavy digging to
unearth them, and write them up, but they often leave distribution to
established newspapers with larger readerships. The focus is statewide rather
than local. True, reporters recently broke a classic metro story in San Francisco: five
municipal employees were running a profitable contracting business on city
time. But California Watch’s ideal scoop is a regional story with local
implications. For example, in the autumn of 2010, the organization broke a
story about maternity wards at California
hospitals. “For-profit hospitals across the state are performing cesarean
sections at higher rates than nonprofit hospitals,” the California Watch
analysis found. “A database compiled from state
birthing records revealed that, all factors considered, women are at least 17
percent more likely to have a cesarean section at a for-profit hospital than at
one that operates as a non-profit.”
Having found a scoop, dug into its details, and assembled a
database with figures for hospitals all over the state, California Watch
handed local newspapers an easy story to localize. An enterprising reporter at
a small broadsheet in Fresno or a
citizen-journalist in Eureka
could look up the rates at nearby hospitals, discover how many C-sections they
were performing, and determine whether digging at the local level was
warranted. Of course, in a town lacking its own reporter, that local piece
might never appear.
A third California-based startup worth watching is Spot.us. Like many media enterprises, it relies on
freelancers to find good stories. The organization solicits pitches from
journalists and tips from readers and everyday citizens, and then it provides
funding to the most worthy projects. Its innovative strategy is to make this
process transparent—allowing the public to fund the stories they find most
important by chipping in a few dollars each. In just over two years, Spot.us has funded more than 160 stories, garnering
contributions from roughly 5,000 people—an impressive record for a two-person
operation. “Because we’re not an editorial site, our overhead is low,” says
David Cohn, its founder. “We’re just a platform. People and organizations use
us to fund-raise.” One of those people was Karen Hollish,
a freelance journalist then living in Minnesota.
She regularly wrote for the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a small online
publication with a maxed-out budget that paid $100 at most for a reported
piece. One day, her editor tipped her off to a promising story: the sheriff in Ramsey County, Minnesota,
had claimed in a budget report that he was investigating 22 domestic and 11
international terrorist groups. Were there really so many terrorists in the St. Paul area? If so,
what a story—or else, what a lot of unaccounted-for money was
flowing into the sheriff’s department. Either way, editor and reporter agreed
that it warranted an investigation.
Requiring more than $100 to undertake such time-intensive
reporting, Hollis wrote a pitch for Spot.us,
explaining the story idea, how she’d report it, and the specific public-record
requests that she would need to make. It worked. In all, 57 individuals raised
$575, making contributions as big as $50 and as small as $2.86. Organizational
sponsors kicked in money too, including $132.16 from Hewlett-Packard and $73.11
from the AARP.
It took three months, countless hours of pestering, and a
change of management in the sheriff’s department, but Hollis finally got her
story: a department spokesman confirmed that its recently departed head had
been falsifying his budget reports. Where was the money going if not to
investigate terrorists? Had Hollis stayed in the Twin Cities, she could have
found out. But she received a full-time job offer with a newspaper in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
That’s one downside to the Spot.us model: it relies
on individuals, as opposed to building or preserving traditional journalistic
institutions. Unlike a freelancer or a citizen-journalist, a metro desk at a
well-run newspaper can maintain an institutional memory, allowing it to follow
up on promising stories even as individual reporters come and go.
In one way, the old
watchdog model survives almost intact: the driving force remains journalists,
whether they’re supported by a newspaper, a nonprofit publication, or a
freelance platform. The problem is that few professional reporters exist
relative to the number of government bodies warranting scrutiny. What are the
odds that journalists, left to their own devices, can adequately cover every
instance of official corruption—especially in an era when advertising revenue
subsidizes less journalism?
Might it be possible to change the old model—disaggregating
investigation from journalism, and tapping as watchdogs
folks who behave more like detectives or auditors than like reporters? As yet,
I know of no nonprofit that has undertaken this approach. But a system of civic
watchdogs regularly performing checks on every government entity—rather than
doing spot-checks based on tips and intuition—certainly sounds appealing, at
least in theory. And funding it privately might be less costly than it at first
seems, at least in states like California,
where the public is empowered to request most public documents.
Imagine, then, a how-to guide setting forth the basic steps
that any interested watchdog should take to scrutinize a municipality, a school
district, or a redevelopment agency. It could be posted on a website that
included pages for every government entity in a state. Did someone just upload
the campaign-finance disclosure forms for every member of the Santa Barbara City Council? Check that box.
Is there a city in South Los Angeles where
public officials’ salaries have gone uninvestigated for three years? Send a
roving volunteer there. Whenever nonprofit investigators or auditors uncovered
corruption, eager journalists would still be just a phone call away. Call it
watchdog by wiki.
Such an effort could be all-volunteer or run by a professional
staff. It could fund training sessions in which investigative reporters would
teach citizen-journalists how to act as watchdogs. It could partner with
collegiate public-policy programs to build out the online databases of
uncovered information. A higher-end version might even include an algorithm
that automatically prioritized the tasks deserving immediate attention. Only
one thing would be nonnegotiable: the lawyers. The nonprofit would need to
acquire a reputation for suing any city that didn’t comply with its volunteers’
lawful requests.
We need journalistic watchdogs. Various nonprofits are
trying to figure out how best to subsidize their work, and more power to them.
But it’s worth considering that not all privately initiated government scrutiny
need be conducted as journalism.
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0804cf.html