The Foundation dedicated to Reva and David Logan organizes every year in the United States a conference on investigative reporting, a journalism category that everyone considers in its death throes. Instead, seeing the glass half full, the news is good: NBC and ABC have increased their resources allocated to this area and Bloomberg has done the same."Washington Post", "New York Times" and "Los Angeles Times ” do not envisage new investments, but recognize that reducing the number of journalists committed to this “watchdog” role would be a serious mistake.
The conference revealed that in the US there are currently 200 reporters assigned to investigative journalism, one for every 1,5 million inhabitants. Too few to really worry the big political and economic institutions that should be subject to scrutiny in the name of the public interest.
In the newspapers there is a lot of discussion about how to deal with Apple, Facebook and Amazon and about which is the most acceptable payment model to receive news online, but there is very little talk about how important the new economic models that will need to be identified in the future are for democracy . “Whether and how the new models will work – wrote the new media scholar Ken Doctor – is not an arcane question: it is central to the future of all of us. The value of good, thorough reporting is priceless. "
NBC senior executive producer David Corvo rightly pointed out that investigative journalism is the "differentiator", the element that will make it possible to distinguish journalistic brands in the digital age. But not all publishers seem convinced of this, and many American regional newspapers have lost their appeal and power precisely because they have cut funding for investigative reports.
The Logan family, without much fanfare, uses some of his wealth to fund investigative journalism, and another private institution, the Knight Foundation, has earmarked $20 million to support investigative efforts in the public interest. But newspapers cannot be dependent on the benevolence of some patron, like a dying industry. They have to raise their heads and go back to doing what they were born to do, which is to use their power in representation and in the interest of those who pay to read them.
