August 24, 2010
InvestigateWest: Lessons from the first year
By Rita Hibbard: Doing good work isn’t enough to save journalism. Fighting to preserve the legacy isn’t the place you want to be. I knew that going into the launch of InvestigateWest just over a year ago, hard lessons learned living through the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper with a long history of strong local coverage and investigative journalism. So it was a new thing - a nonprofit, regional, investigative news center. Multi-platform, aimed at filling some of the void left by heavy regional layoffs and newspaper closures in the West.
Skills required: risk-taking, business strategy and planning, knowing the importance of collaborations, social media savvy, finding ways to get exposure to the brightest minds in the industry, being willing to put yourself out there. Grant writing. Leadership. Sales. Admitting what you don’t know, and being prepared to learn how to do it quickly, or find someone else who does. Finding people who want to help you, for free.
Basic mindset required: be willing to change it up all the time. Don’t look back. You’re not recreating the newsroom. It’s not the good old days. You’re not preserving the legacy, or even the best of journalism. You’re helping create the future. That’s what matters. And that makes it exciting. And worth doing. So at InvestigateWest we’re about taking the best of what we did - real public service journalism that made a difference in people’s lives - and taking it to new audiences.
Our goal is to find new ways to tell investigative stories that find new audiences, bring them into the process in exciting ways, and hold their attention - making the work an essential part of their life - in ways that investigative reporting hasn’t always done in the past. An executive of a major news organization told me that while investigative content is truly valued at this organization, advertisers want to be next to the “top 10 health tips” or consumer tips stories. I get it, but shouldn’t investigative reporting be recognized as being as or more essential by readers? It’s up to us - not news consumers - to make it so.
Major lesson learned this year: the value of collaboration. It meets so many goals. It doesn’t re-create the wheel. It preserves and expands resources. It gets the important work to broader audiences. It allows regional projects with broader impact to be done. Examples - the campus sexual assault story that was done by five regional investigative centers, including InvestigateWest, in addition to the Center for Public Integrity and NPR. InvestigateWest currently has been funded for a collaborative project with KCTS 9, which will be our second documentary with this PBS-affiliate, on an urban neighborhood health issue. We currently have a proposal to do an environmental story with two other investigative centers that would have broad regional and national impact.
How are those collaborations made? Through the quality of our work, and through personal contact. In my previous life, I was a newsroom editor, pretty focused on running the newsroom and not looking beyond it. I didn’t put myself out there much. I have certainly learned to do that! I will talk to anyone about anything that might be a collaborative fit for IWest, and I’m always prepared to spread the good word about my organization. If one particular conversation doesn’t lead to something, I believe good information is exchanged that might lead to something interesting in the future.
I had done two collaborative projects in my previous life as a newspaper editor - working collaboratively on a daily basis with a local TV station and leading a Hearst-wide investigative project . Knowing what I now know, I would have sought opportunities for more. I love seeing how much good energy and openness there is in news organizations toward these kinds of collaborations. I get energized by seeing the opportunities for good work expand.
The goal is to get the good work out there in front of as many eyes and ears as possible. That means finding ways to work with as many news organizations as possible right now, and looking for ways to get our work on new platforms and finding new ways of reaching nontraditional audiences as well.
Our most recent project on cruise ship pollution went out to 12 media partners in August, including five newspapers, one hyperlocal site, four metro online only sites, and three specialty interest online sites. Our previous project, a story on health care workers exposed to workplace chemotherapy, was released in July to three exclusive partners in its first release - MSNBC.com, The Seattle Times and as a public TV half hour documentary co-produced with KCTS 9 in Seattle. Other regional and national media partners used the story as a secondary release. These are paid-content placements, which provides a revenue stream for InvestigateWest in addition to foundation, individual donor and membership support.
What didn’t I have a clue about: how much risk is involved in an enterprise like this; working without the support of a larger organization, you are tech support, the development team, the business planner. Working in a start up takes all hands on deck all the time in a way that requires all your focus. There’s no corporate structure to absorb a little down time at the office. So everyone on the team has to have the entrepreneurial mindset, and not come with the expectation that “someone else” will pick up some part of the job they don’t want to do. There is no someone else.
I didn’t have a clue that I would become so focused on development and marketing. InvestigateWest has two sets of customers - direct consumers of news and news organizations that we partner with. When I was in the newspaper business, I saw what happens when customers “don’t have time” for your product. That means they don’t find your work essential to their lives. So that’s a hard question I have in front of myself every day. How do I make InvestigateWest essential to my customers?
Development is key. We have achieved stability in our first year because we have brought a mix of foundation funding —issue -focused funding from The Bullitt Foundation and The Russell Family Foundation, both based in the Seattle area, and broader funding for regional investigative reporting from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation. We have secured story coverage funding from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through a partnership with Seattle University, from RealNetworks Foundation, and from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Warning: Extreme creativity required! - Don’t do things the ways they’ve always been done just because that’s the way they’ve always been done.
Change it up - we launched with seven people, and have shrunk to a more financially feasible size of three core staff with freelance support. Our focus was originally broader - the West. We’re now more regionally focused. Bottom line: if it’s not working, change it. This was a lesson drilled into me by the entrepreneurs at the Knight Digital Media Center’s inaugural news entrepreneur boot camp at USC, and it has turned out to be so true. If it isn’t working, change it. We’re not a big organization. It’s easy.
It’s important to find ways to sustain investigative and public service coverage and push it to new audiences. That’s what InvestigateWest is doing. We’re looking hard at investigative journalism, and asking, “are there new ways to do this?”
I keep in mind a recent Pew survey that showed 71 percent of people are online news consumers, and 65 percent of those have no favorite site! That’s opportunity for InvestigateWest. That means we have to be out there on all channels if we’re going to truly be public service reporters. We have to find news consumers where they are, and not expect them to come to us.
Rita Hibbard is executive director and editor of InvestigateWest, a non-profit investigative news organization covering the environment, health and social justice. Hibbard was participant in the inaugural Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at USC/Annenberg, funded by the Knight Foundation, in 2009 and returned to camp as a faculty member in 2010.
Comments (1) • Permalink • Tell-a-Friend
Tags: knight foundation, investigative journalism, nonprofit, start up, investigatewest, kdmc news entrepreneur boot camp, rita hibbard
Comments
Thanks, Rita. this is really valuable and another example of why InvestigateNY.org looks to you and others like InvestigateWest for leadership as we re-re-invent journalism.
By polly, 08/25/10 at 11:58 am
Page 1 of 1 pages
Commenting is not available in this section entry.
Exploring innovation, transformation and leadership in a new ecosystem of news, by journalist and change advocate 
RSS Feed