Although I’ve never been a hands-on investigative reporter no other dilettante could possible have more respect for what you do than I.

I’ve dedicated my career to advancing and promoting quality journalism… the stuff that matters. Which makes YOU in this room my heroes — in your smarts, diligence, patience, impatience, and single-minded dedication to uncovering wrongdoing, and setting the facts straight. YOU are more than any other reason why I’m in this profession.

So I want to start by saying THANK YOU.

Against the background noise of a lot of garbage on TV, radio, online and print, IRE represents the real deal — probing, bullet proof reporting, quality journalism that the public relies to form opinions and participate in our democracy.

And while the work is fulfilling, your rewards are likely more psychic than financial. The unbundling of news has taken the revenue legs out from under us. And yet, serous investigative reporting is just as expensive as ever — risky, time consuming and not very attractive to advertisers. That growing imbalance is a big part of the story of what’s happening in the news business today. 1.6 billion dollars worth of reporting and editing capacity (that’s a euphemism for jobs) LOST in the last ten years.

But while I’m as despondent as you are at this newsroom carnage, I’m feeling very hopeful and even excited about what the diaspora of immensely talented journalists has given rise to… dozens (soon to be hundreds!) of new news orgs. Many of them are turning to a new way, the nonprofit way and in doing so are inventing something completely different — a hybrid of past and future, of old media and new.

You go by the name of Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, Chicago News Cooperative, The Watchdog Institute, Bay citizen, and the many members of the INN (Investigative News Network), plus of course the big three in NATIONAL investigative reporting: ProPublica, Center for Investigate Reporting and Center for Public Integrity. Together, all of you are having impact well beyond your too-modest headcount.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that journalism pundit Alan Mutter jokingly lamented the short-sightedness of the newspapers who fired so many reporters “turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

Well here we are… alive and very well, thank you.

Even that old fogy NPR has not only embraced the digital revolution in news…but in many ways is helping to lead it. And it’s working. Our audience is growing both online — while it continues to grow on-air. We’ll come back to NPR later.

I do want to offer a small disclaimer. Most of what I’m talking about today is the not-for-profit model. That’s not to say that others are not doing extraordinary work — like my alma mater The New York Times which continues to be one of the world’s leading sources of investigative reporting. And another alma mater CNN where as head of long form and documentary program I had the privilege to commission or executive produce many award winning investigative documentary hours. Great work is still being done at newspapers and on TV. We saw a lot of that work just now.

But the fact is, the business model for investigative reporting in commercial media is, well, a little murky.

Non-profits with our multiple sources of revenue are in many ways simply better adapted to the current economy. And perhaps a bit more nimble. Maybe it’s because we’ve never enjoyed those years of double digits margins that print and broadcast had — so we have no legacy to protect, or pine for. We can take more risks and try new ways of doing things. And its TWO new ways of doing things that I want to focus on today: partnership and innovation.

 
PARTNERSHIP

Partnership does not come easily to most news operations. When I got to NPR I heard “we don’t partner well”. It was said with a little bit of apology…and a healthy dose of pride. And that has certainly been the case at most news organizations. But to increase our impact we at NPR have had to learn to get over ourselves, and to approach collaborations in a new way.

Sure, it’s easy to argue why NOT to collaborate. The naysayer’s says “we can’t share sources and reporting with news organizations. Don’t you know that investigative reporters are loan wolves, deeply suspicious of others – not to mention VERY antisocial?!”

While there certainly are a few of the unsociable types among you…and it’s not wrong to question how exactly collaborative reporting will work. We’ve been working through these issues ourselves. In a recent note to me, NPR’s Danny Zwerdling mused: “how much do we research and interview everybody together, like bobsy twins vs. how much do we go in separate directions, each researching our own thing, and then compare notes. Advantage of bobsy twins is we get two sets of ears and eyes and brains on everything, so we feel extra confident about our reactions/conclusions. Disadvantage is we’re not covering as much ground as we would if we were more separate. Maybe this is something we evolve as we learn to trust and understand each other’s skills and reactions”.

Those are the right questions, the right approach. But if as experienced reporter as Danny can embrace partnership with another news organization and find it rewarding, that says to me these issues are solvable.

Bill Buzenberg recently said this about collaborative reporting: “Its new, it’s different, it’s exciting…it’s a lot of work”. It is a lot of work, but there’s no question the juice is worth the squeeze.

The second thing naysayer says when it comes to partnership is this: “We compete for funding. If we collaborate we give up the chance of getting big grants.”

This is simply NOT true. I’ve had to become something of an expert on raising money this last year and a half, and one thing I’ve learned is you gain new and much more powerful leverage when you partner. We are not Coke and Pepsi. Our audiences are not taking sides, and neither is the philanthropic community. I hear it again and again “Show me how you can work with others to increase your IMPACT and I’ll fund you both MORE!” The word of the decade in philanthropic circles is LEVERAGE.

And there’s another related reason to partner. Perhaps the single biggest risk factor investigative start ups face is audience, what The Times’ David Carr recently called the “tyranny of small numbers”. No monetization scheme — whether advertising or even philanthropy – will work or last without a path to significant audience growth. Thinking quality content will simply be FOUND is nonsense. It doesn’t work that way anymore. Partnership is a remedy to building audience.

The good news is there are some very promising collaborations we can turn to for learning:

• CPI with NPR and five regional non-profits on campus sexual assault

• The Texas Tribune with Austin public radio station KUT, and with the Houston Chronicl

• KPBS and The Watchdog Institute

• Public radio, public TV and the Beacon in St Louis

• The New York Times and Chicago News Cooperative, and with Bay Newser

• And the energizer of bunny of collaborators: ProPublica and everyone. 225 stories with 50 (!) different partners in last two years, and a Pulitzer Prize to show for it.

 
Each of these collaborations is a bit different. There’s a lot of wonderful and wild experimentation going on. Embrace the uncertainty of how this will work. And try every model you can think of. We’ll benefit as journalists, and the audience will benefit from our sustaining good work.

Before I leave this subject…let me just say a word about what we’re collaborating for. Partnerships will succeed only if it results in good, serious, enduring work. And not if it’s about next news flavor of the month. And certainly not solely because it’s a cheaper model.

Without seriousness of purpose, all these new potential partnerships, all the diaspora, is at risk of smallness, or worse, irrelevance. Television, local and national, has largely abandoned investigative reporting – with some great and gutsy exceptions. What’s left are consumer stings, gotcha undercover camera reporters, “To Catch a Predator.” It doesn’t work. Maybe some ratings targets were met, but it undermines the credibility of the news media. It’s just not worth it.

But perhaps the most powerful form of collaboration is the potential impact when we network with each other and the audience. And that gets me to the subject of innovation…

 
INNOVATE

It’s a fascinating paradox that investigative reporting, often the most painstaking, labor intensive and sometime solo form of journalism, has also been at the very forefront of experimentation and innovation.

NPR’s Executive Editor Dick Meyer, a very digitally savvy guy told me the very first contact he ever had with the weird new thing called the Internet was at IRE conference in the early 90′s.

At that early conference, he says he learned about “user groups” to find sources and witnesses in disaster areas where phone and cell service might be out — what we now call crowdsourcing. IRE invented computer-assisted reporting and database reporting. You’ve been using social networks before they were called social networks — there were ‘gophers’, list serves, more user groups. Technology allowed reporters to use objective methods to develop and analyze empirical data — of campaign contributions and spending, of budgets, of pollution. Reporting about institutions could in this way move beyond the anecdotal, beyond personalities and even beyond conventional scandal. You — the people in this room — invented much of that.

But just as IRE led the way to a new genre of news gathering in the 80s and 90s, you must NOW lead the way in new methods of distribution and presentation.

We need to harness the power digital technology to create open platforms for our work. We need to create a true NETWORK. Not in the TV network way — there is no single entity that pulls the strings — but rather we need to come together as a network of reporters, data miners, and analysts via open platform technology where all types of media can be searched, combined, sorted. And made accessible to publishers, educators and especially motivated software developers who will invent ways to elevate our work beyond our wildest imagination.

At NPR we made our content available in an open API almost three years ago and it enabled us to do things like build an iPad app in just in three weeks. It also gave those outside NPR to extend our impact and audience in wonderful new ways. Like Michael Frederic, a Google developer who used his 20% time to build an NPR Android app using our API. We’ve now made that code available to others to build upon it. We’re opening up our API to stations and soon to other public media entities who will both input and extract reporting and other forms of information. We’re just scratching the surface of the possibilities here. But we purse this because our single minded mission at NPR — like it is for many of you — is to inform and enlighten the audience in every way we can. And technology is a big part of doing that.

 
NPR Investigations

That very same mission has also driven NPR’s commitment to investigative journalism. We’ve done some terrific investigative work in the past (from Danny Zwerdling, Laura Sullivan, Dina Temple Raston and others). But then earlier this year, our head of News Ellen Weiss along with Dick Meyer set about to create our first dedicated unit. And they hired arguably the best investigative editor in radio — or in any media — who we lured across the border from the CBC: Susanne Reber. Best I can tell from the chatter in these hallways, Susanne knows everyone of you here and vice versa!

With Susanne on board, that unit has hit the ground running! In just few short months, they produced stories like:

• Robert Benincasa computer assisted reporting into unintended acceleration through the auto industry

• Frank Langfitt and Howard Berkes on potential wrongdoing around the Massey Mine explosion

• John Burnett’s recent work on the Mexican government and drug cartels.

• Danny Zwerdling on evidence that Nidal Hassan’s trouble began at Walter Reid

• Richard Harris who reported on evidence that triple the volume of oil and gas was flowing from the BP leak. That was week’s before this recent government announcement of…the same.

• And just this last week Danny again and T. Christian Miller of ProPublica on traumatic brain injury and returning vets

 
We are looking to report on areas that matter, where our work can be affective, where others in government or in journalism are not dedicating the time or the trouble. We’re partnering like crazy with many of you. And also continue to do some work solo — like our reporters who are still in the hollows of West Virginia looking into what happened at the Upper Big Branch mines — without a partner and, as far as we can tell, without much competition.

But best of all, all this great work is beginning to change the culture of our newsroom. The very formation of the unit — and Susanne’s special touch — has inspired a renewed energy to dig and break stories. It’s an exciting time.

The next step in our ambition is to help our member stations do better investigative work at the local level where so much reporting has simply gone away. And we know to do that we must partner. We must employ digital media in both gathering and distributing the news. And we must adhere to a seriousness of purpose — we’re aiming high and not just for high ratings.

And finally just a word about philanthropic funding for the non-profits among you. Investigative work is catnip for funders. These are people who care, they get it. They know how important this is. They get how our democracy is at risk if our kind of reporting goes away. Many funders — both individuals and institutions — are stepping up. And that’s good think because until the “destruction” part of this “creative destruction” stops, our business models will continue to be shaky. And so this philanthropic support is vital to get us to the place where earned income and audience support can largely sustain us. But that’s for another speech or perhaps a few of your questions which we’ll get to now.

 
CLOSING

So in closing, hang in there…congratulations on this spectacular work and mostly…THANK YOU.

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