Investigative Journalism Needs to be Well Funded

Just imagine, one day your boss coming to you and saying, "Hey, you're not going to get paid anymore because people prefer not to pay for things." Of course people prefer free stuff. It's free!

Journalists work and therefore they need to get paid. I'm not just saying this because I'm majoring in journalism and have worked/interned in different news outlets but because I really do think that it's one of the most important pillars in a democracy.

Journalism is not about just sitting and waiting for a press release to appear and then rewrite it. There are so many journalists that go out and conduct shoe-leather reporting, get the story, sometimes endangering their lives, and all to keep us informed and to keep those in positions of power accountable.  That's what journalism is for me. It's such an important part of a democratic society that we cannot write of journalists' work as something less than.


So are journalists going to become just contributors like Chris Anderson says in "Free! Why Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"? No, absolutely not. Journalists need resources, training and tools to do their work. And they also have to eat.

In  "Dear Malcolm: Why so Threatened?" Chris Anderson brings up his parenting blog and how he started to need contributors because of how big the audience got. I can see how his "non-monetary rewards" might work for blogs but how can they successfully work in journalism. If people are going to become contributors then where will all the journalists who know the ins and outs of their field go?

Anderson is basically saying that because people are less likely to pay for information journalists shouldn't get paid either. He says "There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing."


Just think about the information we have gotten out of the Panama Papers leak. This is the biggest leak in history with over a 11 million documents. The Süddeutsche Zeitung received the leak and then handed the information to The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. More than 370 journalists from about 80 countries around the world worked and investigated the information for a year. Those journalists had to have funds, resources and tools to investigate.

In a piece titled "The best job in the world: Gabriel Garcia Marquez on journalism," Marquez says that with the "arrival of technology" that the newsrooms became more like "laboratories." It is important, he says, to have "A well-informed writer" that can "piece the fragments together, adding background and other relevant details as if reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single vertebra."

And if those are not enough reasons to why journalism and journalists should be well funded, here are the words of Mark Ruffalo, who portrayed one of the reporters in the film Spotlight investigating the systemic child sex abuse by many Catholic priest in Boston.

"Why journalism is so important and why it's important to fund it and to have long-lead journalists [sic] stories, is that they can trace down the facts and the truth to a point where it's just inconceivable that can be anything else in what they come upon."