Help Me Investigate.com blog

This week Gawker reported on a piece of investigative journalism in the New York Times which was estimated to have cost $400,000

“That $400,000 number comes straight fromTimes Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati estimating what it would’ve cost…had the Times paid for it in its entirety. But the bill for it was heavily footed by ProPublica, a independent non-profit “newsroom” doing investigative journalism.”

Journalists are used to dealing with inflated numbers and this certainly looks high. Other than the reporter working for 2 years on the story I’m not sure what other costs are included, but I’m open to suggestions.

Meanwhile, in June Monday Note estimated another piece of investigative journalism - this time in Sweden - at $50,000. This one took less time, but appeared to involve more people, and the figures are more useful to go through.

Both stories talk about the high cost of investigative journalism as some sort of defence: ”What’s going to happen to investigative journalism because of blogs?” asks Gawker.

But both start from a flawed assumption: that an organisation always needs large amounts of money to pursue investigative journalism.

Money, of course, is shorthand for everything it pays for: journalists’ time; overheads; expenses; experts; legal advice; and so on.

Go beyond the headline figure, then, and you can ask a different question: “How can we do investigative journalism cheaper?”

Or indeed: “Who can do investigative journalism cheaper?”

When that becomes the question, you think in a very different way. And that’s why the likes of Talking Points Memo have demonstrated there are ways to do investigative journalism much more efficiently.

But the key point for me is not just the cost, but the end result. As Gawker puts it:

“Just as important, however, are the number of readers who are going to click through to Fink’s story. Bringing into question a $400,000 story’s costs misses the larger point of how much the actual information contained within the story’s worth to readers, and who’s going to capitalize on it.”

And there’s the rub. Gawker points out that for all the money spent on that story, most news organisations will sum it up in a bullet point - and most readers will go no further than that. But when the likes of Talking Points Memo make an investigation a social act, engagement (and readership) increase accordingly.