Can newspaper muckraking carry on in nonprofits?

GETTING THE SCOOP

NEW YORK (AP) — Nonprofit groups that specialize in investigative reporting have had some big scoops, cracking the front page of such newspapers as The Washington Post and forcing officials out of their jobs. Now the question is whether these organizations can stay afloat on donations.

As financially strapped newspapers have scaled back, charitable foundations have poured tens of millions of dollars into nonprofit watchdogs in hopes of keeping politicians and businesses in check. These groups figure to do a bigger share of the investigative legwork in the coming years.

But philanthropy probably can’t maintain all of these groups forever. And some are still struggling to come up with a financially sustainable plan — just as old-school media are.

Consider the Center for Investigative Reporting, or CIR, which launched a new venture last year called California Watch with $3.7 million in donations from foundations and wealthy individuals. California Watch aims to cover such issues as education, immigration, public safety and the environment, filling holes left by newspapers.

The way California Watch operates is typical for the investigative nonprofits. Its correspondents dig up information and look for a newspaper, TV station or other outlet to get it published. Often they work closely with traditional news outfits during the reporting and editing, though arrangements vary by group and story. The group usually gets paid for its articles, though others give out material for free; the publisher gets a story and the nonprofit gets a venue for its work.

CIR has been around since 1977 but its funding for California Watch, mainly from foundation grants, is meant to last about two more years. It is still experimenting with how to bring in revenue after that, says CIR’s executive director, Robert Rosenthal.

Everything is up for discussion, including asking readers for donations as public broadcasting does. Rosenthal, a former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, said he spends as much as three-quarters of his time on the phone, drumming up donations.

In the meantime, the pressure is on nonprofit muckrakers to establish themselves. That will mean they need more stories like California Watch’s first one. Its expose of wasteful state spending of homeland security dollars was published on front pages throughout the state in September, including the San Jose Mercury News, The Sacramento Bee and The Orange County Register.

ProPublica, a year-old group supported mainly by the Sandler Foundation, landed on the front page of The Washington Post three times last summer. An investigation by ProPublica and The Los Angeles Times published last July found that the California board in charge of overseeing the state’s nurses often waits years to act on cases of drug abuse, mistreatment of patients and other misconduct. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired three of the nine board members a few days after the story ran, and the board’s executive director for more than 15 years resigned shortly after.

ProPublica has an annual newsroom budget of about $10 million and about 36 editors and reporters. Most of it comes from the Sandler Foundation, founded by Herbert and Marion Sandler after they sold the mortgage lender Golden West Financial Corp. to Wachovia Corp. in 2006 for $24 billion. The foundation has pledged to support the group indefinitely, for now.

But other groups’ prospects are shakier.

In Seattle, InvestigateWest is still in the early stages of building support, running on a little more than $80,000 in foundation grants. It has a five-person newsroom made up of former investigative reporters and editors from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shut down its printed edition nearly a year ago and operates as a much smaller Web-only outfit.

For now, InvestigateWest is paying its reporters on a contract basis rather than offering full-time paychecks.

“This is a transitional point right now in this industry,” says Rita Hibbard, the group’s executive editor. “Part of what we need to do ... is make it through that transition and make sure we preserve the skills of investigative journalism.”