One Year Ago: Shutting Down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

My phone rang as I walked into the empty newsroom before 9 a.m. on March 16, 2009. It was a New York Times reporter fishing for confirmation -- about something he wouldn't reveal. That is never good news.

My heart pounding, I ran to the managing editor's office but stopped short. The publisher was already there. I tracked down an assistant managing editor. The look on her face said it all: We were finished. Tuesday, March 17th would be the feisty, 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer's final edition.

What I remember most that day is feeling numb. It had been two roller coaster months since Hearst put the P-I up for sale. Yet I still could not believe this was happening. Condolence emails and calls poured in as I cleared out my desk and packed up three boxes of documents and unfinished work. 

 Reporters from other news outlets gathered in our lobby, clamoring for comment. A TV reporter couldn't resist asking, "Are you scared?" I stared into the camera. 

Damn right I was scared. Not just of losing my job -- but of losing journalism's heart and soul. Of the erosion of a profession that is paid to question authority and tell the truth. Of being left with reporters who do little more than wield microphones and ask "How does it feel?"

The dismantling of the newsroom went fast. Recycling bins filled to overflowing with stories that would never be told. Desks were swept clean for the first time in years. Everything about it looked wrong. 

The year since then has been a blur of survival strategies and piecing some kind of life back together. I got lucky and found work for a good cause. 

But it is not journalism. I still miss the newsroom like a lost friend. I miss uncovering and telling stories that matter. I worry about talented former colleagues who have still not found work.

Journalism is struggling mightily to remake itself. I'm cheering each new development. Getting rid of jobs is one thing. Getting rid of journalists--not so easy.

In my basement, the three boxes I packed on my last day at the P-I are stacked up on a chair, unopened. Waiting.

Spot.Us: The future of investigative journalism?

A creative, trendy experiment in citizen journalism called Spot.Us grabbed headlines last week. The latest buzz came from the Knight Foundation's decision to lavish $340,000 on the Bay-area start-up to help it expand to L. A. in partnership with USC-Annenberg's School of Journalism.

The way Spot.Us works is that anyone can pitch an idea for an investigative story on the website and seek donations. When enough pledges come in (the site averages $40 per donation) the project is a go. Stories can be sold to mainstream media or run on the website. Spot.us has produced some lively coverage of flaws in police oversight, recycling and city budget problems. 

Lord knows we need new ideas in journalism these days. Anything is worth a try, including crowd-funded stories. But the truth is that this model isn't the magic cure for what ails us. The numbers just don't add up.

Spot.us raised just $40,000 from 800 people in its first 10 months of operation, enough money to pay for 30 stories, according to its website.

Thirty stories? That works out to be $1333 per project. And that equals a) slave labor or b) an investigation at warp speed.

When I worked as an investigative reporter at the Seattle P-I, we shelled out $1333-plus just to get key state documents copied. Or to do our own testing of tainted products. Or to hire sign language interpreters to help interview rape victims. Or to pay an attorney to review a story so we didn't get sued.

In the end, my newspaper went under because the advertising (read: money) that subsidized great journalism vanished -- not because we ran out of ideas. Sustainable investigative journalism is expensive.

So the next time an academic or Web guru touts Spot.Us as the future of investigative journalism, I hope someone will remind them: The emperor has no clothes -- and certainly won't be able to afford any in the near future.

(Photo: by stringer_bel/Flickr)

Watchdog journalism: Where are we headed?

The first time I went to an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 1998 I knew I'd found a Reporter's Paradise. What could be better than spending a weekend soaking up ideas and advice from the best investigative journalists in the country? I could hardly wait to get back to my newsroom and try out what I'd learned.

So much has changed since then. The feisty, beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone. Newspapers are melting down all over. This year alone, thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. Watchdog reporting has taken a body blow.

That made for a strange mix of anxiety, exhiliration and angst among the 700 journalists at last weekend's IRE conference in Baltimore. Great work is still getting done -- just a lot less of it.

I was inspired by two journalists who spoke on a panel that I moderated about Covering Invisible Populations. Mimi Chakarova is a photojournalist producing remarkable work on sex trafficking of women in Eastern Europe, rapes of Iraqui women and other tough topics. Karyn Spencer, a reporter with the Omaha World-Herald, looked into how Nebraska's shoddy death-investigation system is letting people get away with murder. She found rural coroners who admitted they just wrote down "heart attack" if they didn't know what killed someone. I kid you not.

What ran through my head like a sad tune all weekend was, "This is what we're losing."

Sure there was buzz about the new non-profit investigative centers popping up all over. But those ventures, however exciting, can't replace the sheer exodus of talent from our profession. Journalists who used to spend their days prying documents from the hands of government officials are now writing press releases.

That can't be good for democracy.

(Photo: by Roger Blackwell)