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By David Brauer | Published Sun, Mar 29 2009 8:30 pm
Don't get me wrong — a $1.75 million fund for investigative journalism is a good thing, though I can't shake the feeling this is window dressing for a site that could be sued for oversharing others' work. And Arianna Huffington isn't even putting up all the dough!
AP reporter David Bauder notes that the venture's capital "represents far less than what a newspaper would spend to thoroughly cover a community."
Some local perspective on that: Pending inevitable labor cuts, the Star Tribune spends a bit north of $20 million on its newsroom. So the HuffPo-wrangled dough represents less than one-tenth of the cost of one Midwestern newspaper's news budget.
Internet seer Jeff Jarvis — writing for HuffPo! — makes the sensible point that not all of newsroom spending goes toward investigations. He's surely right.
But will HuffPo's 10 staffers "who primarily coordinate stories with freelancers" produce more quality investigations than the Strib in a year? Whatever you think of the local paper's quality, I won't bet on it.
The fund — which will concentrate on economic stories — could surprise me, though. As HuffPo showed with its "Off the Bus" campaign experiment, staffers combined with networked writers (in the "Bus" case, amateurs) can be impressively synergistic.
Quality investigations are a tougher test than overhearing Barack Obama diss hillbillies, but presumably the freelance writers will be more savvy. Any chance they'll be compensated accordingly?
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