‘Imagine a Julian Assange in every state and major city in the US’

Despite newsroom layoffs in 2010 and economic forecasts that this may be a tough year for media companies, several top investigative journalists say 2011 could be a turning point for their craft. The group — which represents print, broadcast and online; national and local; profit and nonprofit organizations — predicts we may be entering a new era of investigative reporting. They expect to see:

* an increase in nonprofit investigative journalism organizations that partner with legacy newsrooms to produce meaningful work;
* investigative and enterprise reporting grow as a key distinguishing feature of newsrooms that prosper in 2011;
* a wider range of “investigative” work that can be delivered on many platforms, including mobile, social media and through micro-local Web networks;
* the hottest investigative stories of 2011 will be about federal spending;
* a need for all journalists to learn new skills in social media and database reporting;
* fallout from the WikiLeaks controversy that they say will make it harder to get information, including public records.

We asked top investigative journalists these questions:

* How have layoffs and buyouts affected investigative/enterprise work this year? Do we end 2010 any better or worse where investigative reporting is concerned?
* What are the big emerging trends that you see for investigative reporting in 2011 and beyond? What role will nonprofit investigative centers have?
* What worries you most about the future of investigative reporting?
* What are the essential skills that every journalist will need in 2011 to do investigative work?
* What are the topics that will produce the most important stories in 2011?

Below we highlight answers from these five journalists:

* Joe Bergantino, Director/Senior Investigative Reporter for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting
* Alison Young, USA Today Investigative Reporter and President of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Board of Directors
* David Raziq, KHOU-TV (Houston) Executive Producer for Investigations. In the last decade his team has won every major broadcast journalism award, including duPonts, Peabodys and IRE medals.
* Polly Kreisman, Emmy award-winning reporter, started a micro-local community website and now heads InvestigateNY.org, a nonprofit center for investigative reporting that launches in January 2011.
* Cheryl Phillips, Data Enterprise Editor at The Seattle Times and Chairman, IRE Board of Directors; Pulitzer finalist and one of the editors involved in breaking news coverage last year which received a Pulitzer Prize.

Here’s what they told us.

Layoffs take a toll, but investigative reporting thrives

Cheryl Phillips: 2010 was marked by a slowdown in the number of layoffs and buyouts and a bit more stabilization. What’s more, many longtime investigative journalists who had taken buyouts a year or so ago re-emerged at new journalism homes. Some moved to nonprofit shops. California Watch, for example, expanded. Other journalists married academia and the real-world by working with students to do strong investigative work. The key thing is that many folks with strong investigative and watchdog chops didn’t just go away. They recreated themselves but still kept that focus in investigative/watchdog journalism.

Joe Bergantino: The most promising news is that many of the investigative reporters who’ve left mainstream newsrooms have decided to start their own nonprofit investigative reporting centers to continue their work. The number of centers is growing rapidly nationwide. Those centers, in some cases, now offer readers, viewers and listeners more in-depth investigative stories than their local newspapers or TV stations.

Another major development this past year was the rapid expansion of The Center for Public Integrity (CPI). The Huffington Post’s investigative unit merged with CPI to form the largest nonprofit investigative reporting center in the country. CPI, along with ProPublica, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010, are producing a constant flow of top-notch investigative reports.

David Raziq: From the standpoint of my own company and station, not only have we not reduced our investigative reporting efforts, but we now have an additional group of newsroom reporters selected to focus on generally shorter-turn investigations. Those efforts — in conjunction with the Unit I have been a part of for the past 13 years (where we tend to focus on long-term, large scope investigations) — has definitely increased the enterprise/investigative output of our station.

Alison Young: Many legacy newsrooms, after staff reductions, are seeking to do more watchdog reporting in response to reader and viewer interest. They’re coming to groups like IRE to invest in staff training and when they’re making hiring decisions, they are often looking for reporters with watchdog and investigative skills. (USA TODAY, for example, just reorganized its newsroom and created a five-person investigative team, with four reporters and an editor.)

Trend: Nonprofit newsrooms will continue to grow

Joe Bergantino: Nonprofit investigative centers are now a major force. Some of the best investigative reporting in the country is flowing out of local centers, as well as the big national centers in Washington, New York and San Francisco.

Polly Kreisman: The idea is to have enough of these organizations working successfully around the country (about 40 so far are members of the Investigative News Network) so traditional media will come to rely on this model and support it, even mainstreaming it.

Cheryl Phillips: Nonprofit sites and academic institutions will continue to try to fill the hole left by the decrease in investment in investigative journalism at many newspapers. And those organizations will partner with the newspapers to expand the reach and, therefore, the power of the work being produced.

For their part, the newspapers will engage in these collaborations for the same reason. I think most editors shrunk investigative staffs reluctantly. Good local investigations that help serve the public are the bread and butter of what we do. Plus, they get results and readership. Partnering just makes sense.

Joe Bergantino: Three things worry me most:

* Will nonprofit centers be able to come up with a sustainable business model that ensures their long-term survival or will they, one by one, shut down because of lack of funding?
* As more mainstream media outlets use investigative reporting as a way to boost readership and ratings, will the reporting be worth reading or watching?
* Will the WikiLeaks controversy result in a backlash that leads to less access to government documents?

Investigative reporting requires data, search, social media skills

Joe Bergantino: Investigative reporters in 2011 not only need to know all the basics, including how to crunch data, they also need to know how to tap into the crowd for information, funding and access to public and private sector documents. Imagine a Julian Assange in every state and major city in the US.

David Raziq: I think they are going to have to be multimedia journalists, and that also includes the various methods of making their audience aware of an upcoming story. And they’ll have to keep up with it too, be consistent at it, because the competition for readers/viewers is just getting fierce.

Cheryl Phillips: They should learn some basic data skills. They should learn some basic social media skills. They need to use Twitter — and not just to tweet their stories, but to follow what other people are doing and to watch for trends.

They need to know how to do more than just a basic Google search — how to search for specific types of documents, how to search scholarly databases and repositories of business information.

They need to understand how to use Facebook. They need to follow their area of expertise with social media.

They should check out Storify and GeoCommons and they should not be afraid to adopt new methods of collecting and sharing information. An example would be using DocumentCloud to parse through large PDFs and then make some of that information public.

Historically, investigative journalists have collected reams of information and then in writing their story, left much of that raw information in their desks and in their minds. They become the expert on the topic. They should still be the expert on that topic — but the investigative journalist of today also needs to share much more information, allowing the reader to explore the story in even more depth and drive that exploration themselves.

A recent collaboration The Seattle Times did with ProPublica involved the collection and analysis of foreclosure data. Upon publication, that data — which otherwise might have sat dormant — was provided to anyone else who wanted it, which might help extend the story.

Alison Young: Journalists today have more tools than ever before to help them investigate important stories. The availability of data, electronic access to information and new technologies that allow for analysis, visualization and publication have created amazing opportunities for investigating and telling stories. …

Learning how to use spreadsheets is critical. It’s the foundation for doing so many kinds of investigative stories, whether you’re importing data or building your own data set. Twitter and other social networking tools can be helpful. But spreadsheets and databases are critical.

A great example is Daniel Gilbert’s Pulitzer-winning investigation of mineral rights royalties. It shows the power of data journalism, even if you’re just one reporter in a small newsroom.

Learning effective time management — how to manage and juggle daily responsibilities with long-term investigations — is also important for anyone wanting to carve out more time for in-depth reporting.

Polly Kreisman: Every reporter should know how to:

* set up a WordPress site;
* understand SEO;
* be able to mine the deep Web;
* edit video;
* embed digital photographs;
* know how to leverage the impact of information via social media;
* understand the limits of social media.

…all while continuing to hone excellent writing and reporting skills and constantly monitoring the changing landscape of media and emerging technologies and platforms.

Trends: More local, socially distributed investigations

David Raziq: …what I see are young, tech-friendly reporters doing more and more sophisticated investigations and information analyses with CAR. Add in our continually improving information technology and I think we could see some amazing stories.

Cheryl Phillips: I have a multi-part answer.

The continued marrying of data and investigative/in-depth journalism. Data is the underlying information beneath a story. Inside data on any topic are the stories of people and how their lives are changing, or how well the public is being served. The big shift will be the increasing use of this data in interactive ways that tell a story along with the traditional narrative.

I think there will continue to be more use of information collected from readers that will then be used tell broader-stroke stories. However, I think along with this trend, journalists will also have to continue to fight to obtain public data for use in investigative reporting.

There are troubling efforts to shut down public data. And in this era of cost-cutting, it is imperative that journalists don’t fall down in their responsibility to fight for access to information on behalf of the public.

Without public employee information, we might never have been able to report in Seattle on school coaches who preyed on student-athletes. Without fighting the improper sealing of court records, we would not have been able to report on flawed medical devices or a flawed court guardianship system. Keeping public records public is an imperative.

Mobile. More and more news will move onto a mobile platform and I think that investigative work will end up being split into different forms depending on the platform. Just as now news organizations tweet the news of their latest investigations with links to the full stories, a mobile platform may provide an opportunity for a synopsis of a project with links to other versions.

The difference is that some of this mobile platform will include more video and more visualization. I think data visualization will increasingly be built on platforms that will accommodate mobile.

A continued migration of investigative journalists to Web-only sites and the increasing use of social media by investigative journalists. For example, much more Twitter-investigative source work. Investigative journalists may truly discover how to mine the best of Twitter for source development and trends.

Quick-hit daily investigative work at a micro-local level. Think Patch. Think local bloggers. In Seattle, for example, we have a partnership with multiple local blog news sites and have worked with those sites already for many daily stories, as well as a project on homelessness in our community. The journalists at these local sites can develop strong sources and can be on the scene of a breaking news event quickly. A good number of these reporters have journalism experience already and those who don’t are seeking out training.

Government spending, environmental issues will be big stories in 2011

Joe Bergantino: We only have begun to scratch the surface of the $700 billion in stimulus spending over the past two years. Follow the money and dig; there’s much more to uncover. Same holds true for the budget-cutting process ahead on the national, state and local levels. It deserves close scrutiny.

Health care costs and cutbacks, Wall Street’s “creativity,” money and politics, and the ongoing domestic human toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are topic areas that every investigative reporter needs to explore.

David Raziq: think the failing infrastructure of the U.S. is something we just need to keep reporting on, and on a local basis there is just so much going on. And that also includes your public drinking water purification and delivery system, something my team has been reporting on for months now.

I think a real analysis needs to be done on the FDA because we have products coming into this country and also being made in this country that instead of regulating, the FDA is just allowing the American public to be guinea pigs for them, not catching problems until, as Richard Clarke said, “there are bodies on the ground.”

I also think the effect of the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate political contributions will definitely need to be investigated.

Cheryl Phillips: Follow the money and the story will follow. I think good investigative stories can be found almost anywhere. I would suggest parsing just how government money is being spent — especially in this era of budget-cutting. Whose budget is not being cut and what loopholes are out there that ensure certain businesses or certain individuals continue to collect larger sums of money?

…Find out the action — get the story tip, then dig into it to see what’s there — through people and through data that represent them.

Al Tompkins
Via poynter.org

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Pentagon Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg: Julian Assange is Not a Terrorist

After WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London, an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials released a statement in support of his work. We speak to one of the signatories, Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971. "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me," Ellsberg says. "I would be called not only a traitor—which I was then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."

AMY GOODMAN: In December, Julian Assange was arrested in London on an international warrant to face sex crimes allegations in Sweden. While he was in jail in solitary confinement in London, Democracy Now! went to Cancún, Mexico, to cover the U.N. climate talks. While there, Dan Ellsberg joined us in our New York studio. Ellsberg is perhaps this country’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971 he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He’s been speaking out in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He spoke about the targeting of Julian Assange.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, as I listened to Attorney General Holder on your program just now, I realize that he’s in the same position of that Attorney General Mitchell was in 40 years ago with the Pentagon Papers when they came out. We have an act of free speech, of free press, of informing the public, an act in search of a crime, in search of a law that would call it criminal. No one had ever been prosecuted for what I had done then, revealing top secrets. There had been many leaks in the past, then as now, and no one had ever been prosecuted. I was the first. The act they found was the Espionage Act, which was passed in 1917, was never intended to work as an Official Secrets Act, as in England, which would criminalize any release of classified information. But they tried it on me. I was faced with a possible 115 years in prison, which is the kind of sentence they would love to hang on Bradley Manning, who is accused of being the leaker in this case. We don’t know if he was, but I’m going to give him credit for it, since I regard it as a very admirable act, for which I thank him at this time. And if he’s—if the credit is not due, it’s due to the source, whoever that was.

So, I think, actually, what this is about, to a large extent, is trying to, once again, to instate the Espionage Act as if it were an Official Secrets Act, use it to cut down, close off unauthorized disclosures to the American public from inside the government, and also to accompany that with a legislative move to supplement it with an act that is explicitly an Official Secrets Act, one that clearly Congress intends to criminalize any release of classified information, such as the one you were just quoting to—in Cancún. I was interested that the recent release—Amy, you must have been reading it, actually, unlike most people, and found something of note in the cables that were released by the New York Times, given to them by WikiLeaks, and eventually by the source, about what Bradley Manning is reported to have said, the U.S. throwing its weight around against the poor countries of the world to exploit their resources, something that he said he was determined to expose to the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: In the letter that you’ve joined with others, very significantly among them Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, you are fiercely critical of the media. Talk about the role that it has played.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, in this case, as in the Pentagon Papers, I do give the New York Times credit for working with these materials and presenting material to their readers. And in fact, there really—if they find a crime, or if they invent a crime or pass a crime—criminal law that would cover WikiLeaks, it will cover the New York Times, and you, Democracy Now!, and anyone who presents news that in part reflects leaks, unauthorized disclosures from within the government.

Actually, the wording of the Espionage Act, which, as I say, was not intended for this purpose, but the wording of it is so broad that it applies to readers of this classified information. If they are unauthorized possessors, which they are from the point of view of the government, then they can’t discuss it. They can’t join chat logs, let’s say, discussing it, and they have to, quote, "return" it, which is quite challenging with digital material like this. But they’d have to return their copy of the New York Times, I guess, to the Justice Department. That actually is in line with what the government has been saying right now, directing its employees that they cannot download WikiLeaks or the New York Times sites that reports the WikiLeaks onto their computers at work or at home—just where that leaves their family members, for instance. Is it possible that it could be discussed around the family table, if someone else has downloaded it?

We’re in an absurd position here with a close down of public discussion of official matters, very similar to that of China. In fact, I even wonder whether there’s a rule that absurd in China. And that’s the kind of information system, I think, that our leaders aspire to, and have for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange has been the target of assassination and arrest calls from a number of U.S. politicians and commentators since the release of the diplomatic cables. This week, a Democratic Party consultant, Fox Business commentator Bob Beckel, called for illegally shooting Assange. This is what he said.

BOB BECKEL: We’ve got special ops forces. I mean, a dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, a treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be—and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty, there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a [bleep].

AMY GOODMAN: OK, now, that’s Bob Beckel. That’s Bob Beckel, Dan Ellsberg, on Fox, right? Bob Beckel, who was what? What was he? The campaign manager for Walter Mondale in 1984, in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, it’s appalling. I didn’t remember that, but it’s appalling. You are reminding us that it’s not only Republicans like Sarah Palin and others, and Peter King, who will be a high—have high position in the House in the next term, who are calling for this kind of thing. In my case—I’m sure, by the way, that if I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me at this time, the same material, same instigations. I would be called not only a traitor, which I was then, which was false and slanderous, but I would be called a terrorist, as a matter of fact. Now, that’s the word today for someone who is beyond the pale of any rights, of any rights of citizenship or any human rights, someone who can be just dealt with summarily like that. The reason for calling for illegal shooting, which is an odd and unusual call, is, as I said at the beginning, because our legal system, with its glorious First Amendment, we don’t have a law that makes it clearly illegal to do what—the truth telling that WikiLeaks and New York Times and Julian Assange has done. Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am, and I’m not.

And that is a—it’s appalling that our conversation after 9/11, in the last ten years, has reached a point where what Nixon did to me covertly can now be called for and actually done openly and very specifically. Nixon brought a dozen Cuban American émigrés, Bay of Pigs veterans, up from Miami to at least beat me up. The words were "incapacitate Ellsberg totally," which covers the word "kill," which, as their prosecutor said to me at the time, these guys, who were CIA assets, they don’t use the word "kill." They avoid it. They use words like "neutralize" and "eliminate" and "with extreme prejudice," "terminate," that sort of thing. They avoided the word "kill." I notice that the change now is that not only is that, which was a covert action, which actually was critical in bringing Nixon down because it was recognized as not only illegal, but really against American values in a fundamental sense, that has now become something you can talk about quite openly. And even the President can refer to special operations teams worldwide whose work is to capture or kill. The word "kill" is no longer avoided in these circles.

AMY GOODMAN: Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg. And that does it for our show, but certainly not for our coverage of WikiLeaks.

Via democracynow.org

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Facing WikiLeaks Threat, Bank Plays Defense

By the time the conference call ended, it was nearly midnight at Bank of America’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., but the bank’s counterespionage work was only just beginning.

A day earlier, on Nov. 29, the director of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said in an interview that he intended to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. With Bank of America’s share price falling on the widely held suspicion that the hard drive was theirs, the executives on the call concluded it was time to take action.

Since then, a team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation — scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised.

In addition to the internal team drawn from departments like finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, to help manage the review. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.

The company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, receives regular updates on the team’s progress, according to one Bank of America executive familiar with the team’s work, who, like other bank officials, was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential inquiry.

Whether Mr. Assange is bluffing, or indeed has Bank of America in its sights at all, the bank’s defense strategy represents the latest twist in the controversy over WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.

The United States government has been examining whether Mr. Assange, an Australian, could be charged criminally for the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department diplomatic cables that became the subject of articles in The New York Times and other publications last month.

The Swedish government is also seeking to question Mr. Assange about rape accusations against him. As he fights extradition from Britain in that case, he remains under house arrest in an English mansion. Mr. Assange has said the timing of the rape accusations was not coincidental, and that he was the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States government.

Despite his legal troubles, Mr. Assange’s threats have grown more credible with every release of secret documents, including those concerning the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, the treatment of prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most recently, the trove of diplomatic cables.

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.

“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”

Last month, the bank bought up Web addresses that could prove embarrassing to the company or its top executives in the event of a large-scale public assault, but a spokesman for the bank said the move was unrelated to any possible leak.

Then, on Dec. 18, Bank of America may have antagonized Mr. Assange further when it said it would join other companies like MasterCard and PayPal in halting the processing of payments intended for WikiLeaks, citing the possibility the organization’s activities might be illegal.

Mr. Assange has never said explicitly that the data he possesses comes from Bank of America, which is the nation’s largest bank, though he did say that the disclosure would take place sometime early this year.

The bank has emerged as the most likely target because a year before the latest threat, Mr. Assange said in an interview that his group had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive containing five gigabytes of data — enough to hold more than 200,000 pages of text — and was evaluating how to present it. It was this connection that set the wheels in motion on Nov. 30.

The financial markets took the threat seriously. Bank of America shares fell 3 percent in trading the day after Mr. Assange made his threat against a nameless bank, and while the stock has since recovered, the prospect of a Bank of America data dump from WikiLeaks remains a concern, said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst with Credit Suisse.

“The fears have calmed down somewhat, but if there is something out there that is revealed, the market reaction will be negative,” he said.

Bank of America’s internal review has turned up no evidence that would substantiate Mr. Assange’s claim that he has a hard drive, according to interviews with executives there. The company declined to otherwise comment on the case. A WikiLeaks representative also declined to comment.

With the data trail cold, one working theory both inside and outside the bank is that internal documents in Mr. Assange’s possession, if any, probably came from the mountains of material turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congressional investigators and the New York attorney general’s office during separate investigations in 2009 and 2010 into the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

As it happens, Mr. Assange’s first mention of the Bank of America hard drive, in October 2009, coincided with hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the Merrill merger, and with wide-ranging requests for information by the committee.

The bank’s investigative team is trying to reconstruct the handover of materials to public agencies for a variety of inquiries, in pursuit of previously undisclosed documents that could embarrass the company, bank officials said.

In addition to the Merrill documents, the team is reviewing material on Bank of America’s disastrous acquisition in 2008 of Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage specialist, the officials said. The criticism of Bank of America’s foreclosure procedures centers mostly on loans it acquired in the Countrywide deal, and one possibility is that the documents could show unscrupulous or fraudulent lending practices by Countrywide.

If that is the case, it would not only reignite political pressure on Bank of America and other top mortgage servicers, but it could also strengthen the case of investors pressuring the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgages.

“If something happens, we want to be ready,” one bank official said. “You want to know what your options are before it comes out, rather than have to decide on the spot.” Bank of America’s efforts are complicated by the fact that it has made several huge acquisitions in recent years, and those once-independent companies had different computer systems and security procedures.

WikiLeaks has taken on private companies in the past, including leaking documents from Barclays of Britain and Bank Julius Baer of Switzerland, but neither disclosure drew nearly as much attention.

Officials at the S.E.C., the House oversight committee and the New York attorney general’s office insist the information they received had been turned over in the form of papers and discs, never a hard drive, and deny they are the source of the WikiLeaks cache.

At the same time, Mr. Assange’s own statements would seem to undermine the government-as-source theory, hinting instead that resignations might follow as evidence emerges of corruption among top executives, something the public investigations never found.

“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said in the November 2010 interview with Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”

NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Via BlueRidgeNow.com

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