Birnbauer, a Public Interest Journalism Foundation board member and Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, also shared some of his other methdology, including:

• Audio recording everything and doing his own transcribing “because it is easy to miss things the first time and you can listen for hesitations that may signify lies. Often what seems irrelevant at the time of recording later becomes significant.”

• Collecting as many documents from as many places as possible using Freedom of Information, annual reports, transcripts, court records, emails, reports etc. “They are all parts of a jigsaw,” he says.

• Building a detailed chronology.

• Establishing who are the friends and enemies of the person/ group under investigation is crucial. He says: “Friends may convince them to talk to you or give you some information; enemies have their own motivations. Knowing who both are and differentiating them makes it possible to play one off against the other.”

You can read the full article here.

This is your chance to pitch an idea for such a publication. The Public Interest Journalism Foundation is calling for ideas for new online health publications – and one will be chosen for development during a session at the New News conference, which will be held as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 24 and 25.

Your publication may be wide-ranging in focus – it may, for example, investigate the health implications of urban planning – or focus on a specific area or a particular health issue – such as investigating access to fresh, affordable food in a disadvantaged area of Melbourne.

One concept will be developed during the New News public health workshop on Saturday, August 25, with guidance provided by a panel comprising:

• a content/community expert – someone who can give an overview of the community and why it might benefit from an online publication

• a business development expert – someone with expertise in launching online publications. How to make the business case, whether for a not for profit or commercial enterprise

• a social media expert – how to use social media to develop publication, community, stories

• a journalistic perspective – how to identify, investigate related stories.

The aim is to produce the bare bones of a concept that interested parties may then choose to take further.

Workshop participants will be asked to develop:

• Publication name, identity

• Strategy for community development

• The business case for this publication

• Story list

All of the suggestions will be published at the Croakey health blog – so if your idea is not chosen for the session, there may be other opportunities for developing it further.

Due to our tight deadline, your suggestions are needed by Thursday, May 10.

Please provide a few sentences:

1. Describing the area of focus for the publication.

2. Explaining why this is an area of need and why it might benefit from having an online focus.

3. Outlining the publication’s main audience.

And if you can make the session (stay tuned for details about the program), all the better.

(Please post your suggestions below, or via Croakey.)

Join in an informal gathering organised by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation
as part of the New News conference public events program.

At: Tilly’s Pub, corner of Brigalow and Wattle Sts, Lyneham, Canberra
From: 7pm
On: Tuesday, May 29

Discuss your ideas and questions about public interest journalism in the digital age with:

• Well known blogger and media analyst, Mr Denmore, of the blog, The Failed Estate: rejuvenating journalism in a jaded age. Mr Denmore was a journalist for 26 years. He has worked in radio, television, newspapers and online media. He now works in the corporate sector. His blog is a finalist in the Best Australian Blogs 2012 competition. Follow him on Twitter: @MrDenmore

• Professor Matthew Ricketson, who assisted Ray Finkelstein QC with his inquiry into media regulation, and is a journalist and the inaugural Professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra. His PhD was titled “Ethical Issues in the Practice of Book-length Journalism”. Follow him on Twitter: @MRicketson

• Craig Thomler, Managing Director of digital democracy company Delib Australia, and a Gov 2.0 advocate who spent five years in the APS leading and supporting online initiatives. An author and former freelance journalist, he was awarded the Individual Gov 2.0 Innovator Award by the Gov 2.0 Taskforce and was awarded as one of the ‘Top ten changing the face of the Internet and Politics’ by PoliticsOnline and the World eDemocracy Forum in Paris. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigThomler

Please register via: http://www.meetup.com/Public-Interest-Journalism/
Or leave your details below

Bill Birnbauer, a member of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation board and a senior lecturer in journalism at Monash University, has been investigating the future of non-profit investigative journalism in the United States.

In the article below, first published at The Conversation, he suggests that it is time in Australia for a wider debate about the funding of public interest journalism.

And he urges Australian philanthropists to note the words of the US Federal Communications Commission report on “The Information Needs of Communities” that “without strong reporting, the issues that philanthropists care about – whether health, environment, children, fiscal responsibility – are all shortchanged.”

***

What is the future for philanthropic journalism?

Bill Birnbauer writes:

Despite rapid growth in the number of non-profit investigative centres in the United States and many fine examples of quality journalism by such centres, uncertainty remains over the longer-term sustainability of philanthropically-funded journalism.

There is a well-founded concern among senior non-profit centre editors that the next few years will see a consolidation in the number of centres, that foundations will shift their funding to other areas, and that there are limited alternative sources of revenue available despite significant and increasing income generation by several non-profits.

These concerns stem from a growing recognition that paid advertising will be much more limited than once thought and the long and unexplained delay by the Internal Revenue Service in granting tax deductibility status to several start-ups.

The closure in 2011 of the Capitol News Connection, the recent management upheavals at The Bay Citizen and the suspension of operations due to funding issues at the Chicago News Cooperative have sent cold shivers through the sector.

Despite this, US non-profit investigative centres continue to produce award-winning projects and have energised a watchdog vibe in sections of the media. Indeed, some of the lengthy investigations conducted by the bigger centres look similar to the work of muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell and others in the early 1900s.

But while their publications were financed by advertising and circulation jumps, many non-profits today rely totally on foundations. And the foundations are telling them they need to develop alternative revenue streams.

The Knight Foundation’s John Bracken: “Building your fiscal model on the vagaries of foundations is precarious at best. Foundations have new interests, they move on … it’s not a long-term sustainable thing to expect MacArthur Foundation to write you a cheque every year for perpetuity …”

MacArthur Foundation’s Elspeth Revere envisages supporting centres in the longer term but adds: “Sometimes we do say to them, “look, we’ll support you for a while but foundations may eventually change their priorities.””

The McCormick Foundation’s Clark Bell warns there isn’t a mandate that says foundations have to support non-profit journalism outlets. “Funding isn’t a black and white issue; you do it from your heart, you do it from your gut. Many of these organisations are new – you have to sometimes be a little more patient but other times you say “this group just isn’t going anywhere, has no future.””

In several interviews with foundations that support investigative reporting, grant-makers referred to the National Public Radio (NPR) model of public funding and fund drives as the next step in the evolution of investigative journalism from the commercial to the philanthropic and finally to a natural audience of true believers in accountability and democracy.

Foundation grants, they said, could only do so much to fill the reporting gap created by legacy media’s woes but who would fund public interest journalism in places like New Mexico, Montana or Mississippi?

Clark Bell believes that ultimately non-profits will need support from people who care about quality content and are willing to subscribe to it, much like happens with public radio and television.

Investigative Reporting Workshop’s Chuck Lewis points out that 17 non-profit centres are now based at American universities – in 2005, there were only one or two. He notes that when NPR merged with public radio stations in the late 1970s, it found that almost three-quarters of them were based at colleges and universities. Similarly, non-profit investigative centres were now following the same path, locating at universities and using existing infrastructure.

The immediate questions confronting the 75 US non-profit news centres and websites include:

• Whether the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will continue to grant tax deductibility to non-profits. The IRS has delayed approving non-profit status to several applicants and the head of the Investigative News Network, Kevin Davis, warns that, “If it turns out that the IRS effectively shut down creating new non-profits, we’re going to see massive consolidation’’.

• Is there a dollar in advertising? Attempts by several of the bigger investigative centres to diversify their revenue by attracting advertisements have raised only meagre amounts. At one point, The Centre for Public Integrity anticipated pulling in $500,000 from advertising in 2011 but made only $10,000-$20,000. The centre’s Bill Buzenberg admits: “… we were overly optimistic. We have really pulled back and are looking for other ways to monetise our content.”

Asking traditional media to pay for stories through syndication deals or for individual projects seems like an obvious revenue source but has succeeded in only a few places, notably the Centre for Investigative Reporting/ California Watch. To an outsider such as myself, some of the nonprofits’ give-ways look loony.

Buzenberg recounts that the Centre for Public Integrity, which is one of the biggest and best funded non-profits, hired a Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporter from The Washington Post recently and that the Post now publishes most of the stories he writes for the centre – without paying a cent, at least for now.

Let me get this right: The Post previously paid this guy, presumably at the upper level for an expert, award-winning reporter, but now gets his stories for free, riding on back of tax deductible donations?

Buzenberg says the Centre is in process of asking The Post and other publications to make annual contributions to the Center in exchange for using work that is not free to produce, and is looking at other ways to monetise stories. For now, however, CPI and other centres and investigative websites remain dependent on big foundations and individual contributors.

INN’s Kevin Davis worries that many non-profits are undervaluing their stories to clinch distribution and other deals with legacy media. But it’s tough in a buyers’ market “to get people to pay anything right now.”

So it looks like non-profits may be stuck in a pincer-like clutch: foundations and wealthy donors want them to be entrepreneurial in developing funding options but the IRS apparently wants nonprofits to differentiate from commercial outlets.

Lewis believes that legacy media “have no idea what they are doing” when it comes to trying to restore their financial sustainability so it is unsurprising that the newer, more fragile nonprofits still depend on foundation support. However, he says, such funding is notoriously fickle and that some foundations inevitably will move to other areas.

If that occurs, there will probably be a greater need to get legacy media to pay non-profit publishers for their stories.

Before 2006 there were a handful of US non-profits – Lewis’s research shows about 75 centres are now doing investigative and accountability reporting and the competition for foundation funding is intense.

The centres have had a profound yet little reported impact on traditional media and media ethics. Quality newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post that several years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of running serious investigative journalism from outside sources now regularly carry projects by non-profits such as ProPublica, The Centre for Public Integrity and The Centre for Investigative Reporting.

Collaborations on major investigations are almost routine. It sometimes looks as if mainstream media has outsourced long-form, time-consuming and risky journalism to non-profit centres, many of which are staffed and edited by former senior colleagues.

The 60 non-profit members of the Investigative News Network have between 600 and 1000 publication, distribution and collaboration deals with external partners, according to Davis and he expects the trend to grow over the next few years.

Something else has changed: in my experience reporters always craved assurance that the editorial content of their newspaper was not influenced by the business side of the operation. That there was a “Chinese wall” between the two. This may have been an ideal rather than reality but it was an article of faith nevertheless.

Today, the top editorial guy in a non-profit spends most of his or her time chasing foundations and wealthy funders and watching over projects. The only question I heard a senior non-profit executive ask when he was told about a journalism conference was: will there be funders there?

The last seven years have been traumatic for US investigative journalism and could have been fatal. It is more than gratifying that philanthropic foundations have put their money where their concerns are for accountability and having a robust watchdog media.

However, it seems the public has been largely mute on the matter. We know they don’t much care for journalists, but they do care about the same issues of accountability, scrutiny of the powerful, and having quality information that journalists and foundations sweat over. The question is do they care enough to pay for it? Ultimately, do they care about democracy? The same question needs to be asked in Australia.

Mainstream journalism in Australia has not been as hard hit as in the United States. The ABC, Fairfax and News Limited continue to do robust investigative reporting. But it would be naive to believe this can continue indefinitely.

Local publishers are cutting costs and we know that investigative journalism is relatively expensive, making it vulnerable to managers who are looking at the bottom line. The Global Mail’s Monica Attard, in a submission to the Finkelstein inquiry into media and media regulation, warned that “though the Australian experience lags behind that of the United States in time, it is no less severe.’’ So one must ask who will be doing in-depth reporting in 10 years time?

The philanthropic scene in Australia, for a variety of reasons, generally is not as concerned as its US counterpart about the vital role media play in a democracy. However, the good news is that developments in the past few years may signal a richer, more diverse quality media in future.

Not that long ago we didn’t have Crikey, The Global Mail, The Conversation, Inside Story, or New Matilda. Furthermore, an increasing number of university journalism schools are recognising that student assignments, with careful supervision, can be published online as well as in traditional outlets.

While not widely reported in the media, it also is encouraging that the Finkelstein inquiry recommended that tax deductibility in future might be introduced to encourage philanthropists to donate to news ventures and that a centre for investigative journalism could be established at a tertiary institution or a collective of such institutions. Wotif.com founder Graeme Wood’s multi-million support for The Global Mail so far is unprecedented in Australia but other models such as The Conversation are bound to emerge.

I believe these trends will grow and urge Australian philanthropists to note the words of the US Federal Communications Commission report on “The Information Needs of Communities” that “without strong reporting, the issues that philanthropists care about – whether health, environment, children, fiscal responsibility – are all shortchanged.”

• This article was first published at The Conversation.

Bill Birnbauer moved to an academic role as senior lecturer in journalism at Monash University in December 2008 after a three-decade career as an editor and senior reporter at The Age, The Sunday Age and The Herald. He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a committee member of the Melbourne Press Club and on the board of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation. He has won numerous journalism awards and co-produced documentaries for SBS and the ABC.

Dr Margaret Simons, the chair of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation and director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne, recently gave the keynote address to the Walkley Foundation’s freelance conference in Melbourne.

You can watch her talk here.

Her points included:

• Much good work is being done by freelancers, and there seems to be a growth in niche freelancing, including in the areas of science, NGO policy, and government policy. Freelancing is booming both in participation and quality.

• Trade publishing is a growth area for the future.

• Trade skills, including being able to ask the tough questions, find out things, and write to newsroom standards, would remain vital for freelancers. Multimedia skills are increasingly important.

• The definition of who is a journalist is changing. Many people who don’t define themselves as journalists commit acts of journalism.

• Engaging in social media is a must for freelancers. It is no longer an option. “When you approach someone for an interview these days the first thing they do is google you.”

• Increasingly the most successful freelancers are brands are to themselves.

• We are constantly at risk of under-estimating the change we’re living through. It is not only changing our ideas about journalism but about who is “the public”.

• As mass media declines, niche markets and audiences will rise. Small niche markets expect interaction and “something they can’t get anywhere else.” In future it will be possible for journalists to make a modest living from a community of 10,000, whether we’re talking subscriptions or advertising supported. The key thing is the intensity of the relationship with that audience – a once week bulletin won’t be enough. You could do it in higher education now – there is an audience there of 30,000- 40,000 and you could probably make a living because that’s an audience worth advertising to.

• In the future a career path for journalists will be to find or assemble an audience around an issue or interest, for example a locality. “Local journalism will become increasingly important, especially in regional areas where mainstream media has dropped the ball.”

• Boundaries that have defined where journalism is done and by whom are changing.  For example, shield laws in the US have been extended to NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Rather than thinking about journalistic independence (no-one is independent of everything, anyway), we should be thinking about journalistic integrity. Then we can be more open minded about who we align ourselves with and where we publish.

• The media will increasingly be relying upon freelancers. If you’ve got the trade skills and a good story, the future is very bright but it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve. Opinion, however, is cheap and it’s very hard to make money from opinion unless you have some special claim to expertise. The core trade skill of the journalist is finding things out and that’s where money will be made.

• One of the things that freelancers might do as part of their portfolio is to do some training and teaching, to help upskill writers. There is a gap in the market for that, you could do it almost exclusively online.

Swinburne’s Public Interest Journalism Foundation partnered with the Melbourne Writers Festival to present the New News conference, which asked the question: “What’s next for journalism?”

You can watch a videocast of his speech, Why Political Coverage is Broken, here and read the transcript here.

Swinburne’s Public Interest Journalism Foundation partnered with the Melbourne Writers Festival to present the New News conference, which asked the question: “What’s next for journalism?”

Photo: WayneKLin/ Flickr

Funded through the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s innovative crowd-sourcing site, YouCommNews, journalist Margaret Simons set out to find out exactly how much ABCNews24 is costing the ABC. Her report is online now at YouCommNews…