Centerpieces

The Washington Post's Len Downie has been involved in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting from Watergate to Walter Reed -- investigations that targeted major institutions, conducted by a news organization with uncommon resources.

But to Poynter's Leadership Academy, which is meeting at the Institute this week, he emphasized accountability reporting that stems from beat coverage and targets everyone "who has power and influence over the rest of us" -- government bodies, charities, professional sports teams, museums.
 
"Have accountability be part of your approach to all of your coverage," he said in an interview later. "If the Little League is run fine, fine. But if someone's screwing up the Little League, the newspaper has a responsibility to see that it be fixed."

Downie, who just retired as executive editor of the Post, said he is interested in new ways of funding accountability reporting in the face of staff and budget cutbacks at news organizations nationwide.

Photo by Bill Mitchell/Poynter Retired Washington Post editor Len Downie

Downie started to specialize in investigative reporting almost from the beginning of his career at the Post, looking into corruption and mismanagement of the Washington, D.C., Court of General Sessions. It turned out that the U.S. Justice Department was looking into the same problems, and after Downie wrote his stories, officials approached him for advice about reforming the court system.

The "accountability" approach wasn't common then, but it took root at the Post under his guidance. Now, he said, that type of journalism is well-represented in national contests -- much of it done by local newspapers and TV and radio stations, in addition to big players like the Post.

Yet "this is expensive work, this takes a lot of person-power, it takes a lot of time, it takes sophistication in terms of reporting and editing to do it right," he said. "The question is, what is going to happen to investigative reporting?"

Photo by Bill Mitchell/Poynter Len Downie and Jim Naughton

Take the Walter Reed investigation, for example. Two of the Post's top reporters worked for about a year and a half on those stories. Their work spurred immediate change and won many awards, including a Pulitzer. "Five years from now, will The Washington Post still have resources to do that, is a worry for us."

Considering those challenges, Downie said he will use his post-retirement role -- he is now the Post's vice president at large -- to encourage the practice, funding and consumption of accountability reporting.

"One of the things that's really interesting in academia right now," he said, "is this question of whether or not the nonprofit sector will come to the rescue of the for-profit sector in the area of accountability journalism."

There are several initiatives, he said:

• Columbia University's Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism offers a specialized curriculum for students.
• American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop, run by Chuck Lewis, aims to conduct investigations and serve as an incubator for new economic models and techniques for such work.
• The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, headed by Florence Graves, enables experienced journalists to work on major projects.
• The Knight Foundation is interested in finding new ways to support investigative work.
• The nonprofit ProPublica is now reporting stories and partnering with other news organizations.

"There are academics who are trying to encourage really large foundations like Ford and others in getting involved in perhaps buying news organizations or paying for accountability parts of news organizations," Downie said.

The new approaches include bloggers. "I'm a big believer in the First Amendment ... and that gives everybody the opportunity to be a journalist," he said. "I see accountability journalism as something that we're all engaged in, and I welcome the number of bloggers who see that as a mission of their own."

Yet these new initiatives pose some challenges.
 
"So much of the best accountability journalism grows out of normal journalism, out of your beats," Downie said. "If you're in isolation, if you're some project outside a news organization, I don't know that you're going to come across the same opportunities for really good accountability journalism you would have within a news organization that has daily responsibilities."

And he worries about the pitfalls of outsourcing this kind of work. "If you haven't worked with them from the beginning, how do you know about their sources, how do you know about the methods they went about to report this story?"

Downie offered some advice for smaller news operations trying to maintain their investigative work.

• Local first. Serve your community with your investigations, just as with all of your coverage. Leave broad, national projects to the major news organizations.

• Don't fixate on the big, blowout series. "More often than not, it's more effective if you chip away at a story," he said. Such an approach also engages readers better, allowing the story to develop before them and enabling them to offer feedback and tips that can push the reporting further.

• Avoid false choices. Don't get locked into an either/or mentality between investigative reporting and daily coverage. Instead, work the approach into all of your coverage.
  

• Set priorities. This has always been a key part of managing news coverage; news organizations never had infinite space and money. "Now the choices are just harder."