Looking forward to the future of journalism

Watchdog blog roundup for 1-2-10

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

Reporter's notebook

  • FishbowlNY: The public is hungry for investigative journalism — and willing to donate money to nonprofit journalism start-ups. “It truly is journalism for the people. And if traditional orgs don’t have the resources to give the people what they want to read, we’ll have to pay for it to be produced elsewhere.”
  • Poynter: Mallary Jean Tenore interviews Bristol Herald Courier court reporter Daniel Gilbert about how he managed to find the time at a small newspaper to investigate a complicated but important topic in his community: “A David versus Goliath legal conflict that pits landowners against private energy corporations.” The project took 13 months of painstaking research.
  • BoomTown: Kara Swisher posted a video interview of ProPublica’s Paul Steiger about the future of investigative journalism. “It’s definitely a crisis. Because there’s less of it, and we don”t need less, we need more. But it’s not going to come from one source. … If you think of the great old metro newspapers as department stores, there are going to be more and more boutiques. And we’re in that category. Or maybe we’re a category killer.”