Center for Investigative Reporting

Investigative reporting is expensive. If Google's new Fast Flip service can help the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting rake in the bucks—or at least some bucks—they're all for it, says executive director Robert Rosenthal on CIR's Muckraker Blog.

"We want to be as innovative with revenue opportunities as we plan to be with our journalism," Rosenthal writes.

Google launched Fast Flip on Monday at the TechCrunch50 conference. It offers readers a new way to consume news. Readers can create "magazines" centered around a topic of interest to them. Fast Flip then "builds" the magazine by pulling in all related content from participating publications. The interface lets the reader "flip" through the stories, much the same way they'd flip through a hard-copy magazine.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is one of three dozen publications that are participating. Investigative non-profit ProPulica is another, as are as diverse publications as the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, and Slate.

Unlike Google News, Fast Flip shares advertising revenue with the publications.

"[I]nvestigative reporting is time consuming and expensive," Rosenthal writes. "We will be exploring many ways to bring in revenue in the months and years ahead, to help pay for our work and hopefully, down the road, create opportunities to hire more journalists."

"Developing the strategies to fund the work is as challenging and crucial as the work itself. New models of sustainability must be tested."

In an example of how investigative reporting may be produced in the future, as individual organizations continue to decimate their reporting staffs, the Center for Investigative Reporting's new California unit published its first report in 26 California news outlets today, including: the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times, the Orange County Register, the Sacramento Bee, the Los Angeles Daily News, La Opinión, and the Bakersfield Californian.

The story, intentionally slated for Sept. 11, looked at waste and mismanagment in the state's homeland security grant program and found examples of "questionable expenditures" and a "lack of oversight."

CIR charged each outlet a "small fee," California Watch editorial director Mark Katches writes on the CIR blog, "far less than we probably could have charged."

"We were more eager to reach a larger audience than raise revenue on our first big story," he writes. CIR expects the story to reach over 1 million readers.

To get the story into as many news outlets as possible, Katches says he and reporter G.W. Schultz (formerly of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a contributor to the Chauncey Bailey Project) edited the story three different ways, including a full-length 100-inch version and two shorter takes at 45 and 30 inches respectively.

And, in a step familiar to any freelancer who's had to adapt a story for different publications, they added local information to customized versions of the story for at least seven of the state's larger newspapers.

The Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch project has a new logo:

CIR's blog included a post by Mark Luckie, the former LA Times multimedia producer and new California Watch team member who designed the logo. Luckie walked us through the process of choosing the logo, which we thought was very cool in its new-media transparent-y-ness.

But then we realized this was unusual. CIR doesn't usually use its blog to take us behind the scenes on its projects, by which we mean its investigative reporting. So maybe they can take a cue from their multimedia guy and start showing us the blow-by-blow in how they do their journalism?

The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching what might be the new face of investigative reporting in an era when newspaper investigative staffs are being decimated. California Watch is an 11-member team that will report on the state of public schools and colleges, the impact of budget cuts on health and welfare, and the influence of money on politics.

The team includes the San Francisco Chronicle's former ace Lance Williams and the Los Angeles Times' Robert Salladay, who took a buyout in 2007.

Also on the team: Former San Diego Union-Tribune database specialist Agustin Armendariz, Christina Jewitt of ProPublica, former LA Times multimedia producer Mark S. Luckie, and UC Berkeley grad and 2009 Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellow Lisa Pickoff-White.

CIR says over 700 people applied for the jobs.

Full press release, after the jump.

Related Stories:

The first half of the Chronicle's two-man team that broke the Barry Bonds-BALCO story left when Mark Fainaru-Wada joined ESPN in 2007. Now, they're both gone.

Lance Williams is the latest addition to the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch project, which has hired him as an investigative reporter covering money and politics.

Born in Ohio, Williams has spent 34 years as a reporter in California; prior to the Chronicle he worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the Hayward Daily Review.

At one point, he and Fainaru-Wada faced 18 months in prison for contempt-of-court charges after refusing to divulge their sources on the BALCO case; charges were later dropped. The pair's work became the book Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports.

Read CIR's release here.