My former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi is the lead reporter in a series on how college and university administrators respond to allegations of sexual assault. Published by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative-reporting project, the series is the product of months of work and scores of interviews.
Lombardi reports that when law enforcement declines to step in because of insufficient evidence, conflicting stories and the like, colleges are mandated under federal law to investigate. Yet victims and alleged victims encounter a frustrating atmosphere of secrecy and of administrators who don’t always take them seriously. Lombardi writes:
College administrators bristle at the idea they’re shielding rapes. But they admit they’ve wrestled with confidentiality in campus assault proceedings because of FERPA and the Clery Act [federal laws that mandate privacy]. Confusion over the laws has reinforced what critics see as a culture of silence that casts doubt on the credibility of the process. “People will think we’re running star chambers,” says Don Gehring, founder of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, referring to secret, arbitrary courts in old England. “And that’s what’s happening now.”
The series, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice,” is a vivid example of investigative journalism’s migration to online, non-profit organizations. And, as is more and more often the case with such projects, it comes complete with multimedia, additional resources and an extensive “Reporter’s Toolkit” to help news organizations follow up on the work produced by Lombardi and her fellow journalists.
Last week, Lombardi discussed her report on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”
What should we think about a partnership the New York Times has announced with a Chicago non-profit news organization that will supply two pages of news each week for the Times’ new Chicago edition?
On the one hand, the Times, a for-profit enterprise, is using material from a non-profit in order to take business away from two other for-profit enterprises, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. (Earlier, a similar arrangement was announced for a San Francisco edition of the Times.)
I’m a huge fan of non-profit journalism, but this strikes me as raising the specter of unfair competition. The non-profit, after all, enjoys certain tax advantages not available to a for-profit.
On the other hand, no one objects when for-profit newspapers run material from non-profit news organizations such as the Christian Science Monitor. My gut tells me this is different, but I can’t explain why.
We’re all debating whether for-profit newspapers can or should take the non-profit route. At least in a small way, the Times is now doing exactly that through the back door.
Len Downie
Len Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson of Columbia University will release a report tomorrow that calls, among other things, for direct government funding of local journalism. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute says such funding could amount to $500 million a year.
Despite Downie’s sterling credentials — and he’s looking better every day — I suspect this isn’t going anywhere, nor should it. True, Downie and Schudson try to draw parallels to existing models such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in order to make their proposed Fund for Local Journalism seem less exotic. But it still amounts to a direct government bailout for the news business, which would severely compromise journalism’s ability to act as a watchdog on government.
Indirect government subsidies in the form of non-profit status and the tax incentives that go with that status make much more sense. Not that every news organization should go non-profit. But many non-profit news organizations are already doing good work, including public radio and television (which, alas, do receive some direct government funding) and community Web sites such as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and the New Haven Independent.
If legislation is needed to bring non-profit news more into the mainstream, that might not be a bad idea. But when government starts writing checks, it will, inevitably, demand to have some say in what it’s paying for.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that concerns about the independence of non-profit news organizations are overblown — unless you believe that for-profit news orgs are fully independent of their advertisers.
If you looked closely, you may have noticed that the cover story of the New York Times Magazine yesterday — a long, harrowing examination of accusations that the staff of a New Orleans hospital euthanized several patients following Hurricane Katrina — was a collaboration with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative-reporting foundation.
According to Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab, the 13,000-word story may have cost as much as $400,000 (perhaps a bit of an exaggeration) to produce — a huge chunk for the Times, but in this case the paper spent nothing: a grant from the Kaiser Foundation paid for much of the reporting. It’s the sort of alternative funding model that may help to ensure the future of investigative journalism.
The story, by ProPublica’s Sheri Fink, is available not only on the Times’ Web site, but also at ProPublica.org. And starting Sept. 29, anyone can run it for free as long as proper attribution is provided.
Fink’s investigation centers on Dr. Anna Pou, a cancer specialist who may have killed several patients who, in her judgment, were near the end of their lives and could not be rescued. As with much good investigative reporting, the story is inconclusive, yet absolutely riveting in describing the despair that had settled over Memorial Medical Center — sweltering, without power and all but abandoned.
Implicit is that regardless of Pou’s actions, the real blame should be laid at the feet of incompetent government officials who abandoned New Orleans to its fate for days on end.
Media | Dan Kennedy | 
December 7, 2009 8:55 am | 
Comments (9) 
