PR professionals...gird up your loins. Old school investigative journalism may be near death from shrinking newsrooms. Yet, as I write, the fresh shoots of a second birth are jutting from the soil. From what I've been reading, a number of new non-profit news producing organizations have been created in the last few years, hiring "top talent" reporters who've been laid off. Muckraking journalism is their focus.
Leaders from 20 of these new entities held a meeting in New York last year. All 20 inked a document that declared participants members of the first ever "Investigative News Network of nonprofit news publishers throughout the United States of America."
Calling this a "tectonic shift," Charles Lewis comments in the Columbia Journalism Review, that an "ecosystem is emerging in which an increasing percentage of the most ambitious reporting projects will emanate from the public realm, not from private commercial outlets."
This leaves us with a lot to think about, doesn't it?
- Reporters may find new work.
- PR professionals may tremble.
- The little guy could have a new and powerful advocate.
Recent Comments