The Good Kind of Investigation

Good news for those "seasoned journalists" who have been laid off or forced into early retirement. [Goodness, that's such a cliched broadcast lead]

Ariana Huffington today announced The HuffingtonPost Investigative Fund. Both staff reporters and freelance writers will work on the project, which currently has a $1.75 million budget.

Writes Huffington,

This investigative initiative is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Fund.

HuffPo will also be working with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and NYU's Jay Rosen. So McDonalds and GE aren't funding or participating. Good.

It's like ProPublica - for free! Huffington writes:

And, in the open source spirit of the Web, all of the content the Fund produces will be free for anyone to publish.

That's huge. Free content for news sources and the public. But will any big outlets pick up the stories? They might need to, if cash gets tight enough. Huffignton wrote of the decline of newspapers and their funding for investigative journalism:

For too long, whether it's coverage of the war in Iraq or the economic meltdown, we've had too many autopsies and not enough biopsies. The HuffFund is our attempt to change this.

I like the image. We are only learning about the financial crisis through the corpse of America's financial system (well, it's on life support, anyway). A biopsy to extract problems early on keeps us protected. Even better might be vivisection (playing Big Brother on Big Brother) to prevent problems before they occur. Of course, it can be hard to see the woods for all the trees. But the more independents we have checking vitals, the better.