“This is the core struggle of my human existence right now,” Andrew Donohue, editor of the nonprofit website Voice of San Diego, says of journalism’s digital age.
Donohue told me his site had been having a lot of success with quick-hit rolling investigations. “But all of a sudden we realized we’re not really having the impact we wanted to be having. So we’ve really taken the foot off the gas over the last month or so and put out a couple of big-project pieces.”
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Quick-hit coverage is the stock-in-trade of TV muckrakers on strict quotas to deliver a whiz-bang scandal at least once a week. There’s always a garbage truck crew to be tailed whose senior crewman idles while the junior toils—and both stumble blearily out of the bar after a two-hour lunch. These are not the stories the muckrakers signed on for, the ones they’d like mentioned in their obits. But they’re easy and fill air space while allowing anchors to shake their fist indignantly.
All journalists with online responsibilities are familiar with the following multiple choice test:
Publications like the Reader that depend on ad revenues the print edition alone cannot sustain see no choice but to maintain websites that repay repeated visits with fresh material. “Nonprofits don’t have the same level of burden or expectation,” says Kevin Davis, who’s executive director of the Investigative News Network, a consortium of more than 50 “nonprofit newsrooms” focused on investigative and public interest journalism.
“It’s addictive,” says ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg. “You put a story up and thousands of people read it. ‘Somebody loves us! Thousands of people love us!’”
What about the funders? I asked him. Do they ever suggest he’d better get a move on—that ProPublica hasn’t broken a big one in a month? “No one’s ever done that,” Engelberg said. But if one of them did, “my sense of it is that if we were to come back [at them] and say ‘Look at our traffic!’ nobody who’s a funder at ProPublica would be terribly impressed.”
