overcome these hurdles, the field may sustain both public-interest reporting and government accountability.

it and Watchdog Journalism

In the popular view, investigative reporting looks like the movie version of Watergate: secret meetings with sources, interviews, leaks, and cloak-and-dagger work. Due in large part to IT and statistical methods in the news-room, it has long been more mundane and systematic.

visualiZaitoN by Jer thorp

A half-century ago, photocopying
machines quietly revolutionized ac-
countability journalism. The ability
to copy documents worked in tandem
with new freedom-of-information
laws to make possible more sophisti-
cated investigations. The machines let
whistleblowers share agency records
(such as correspondence and memo-
randa, inspection forms, and audits).
Previously, investigations would often
depend on undercover reporting, an
ethically dicey practice. But the copy
machine turned reporters’ attention
to documents and with them, to a new
level of ethical clarity and accuracy.

In the 1970s, reporters began to deploy the relatively novel methods of relational databases in their investigations. Using a portable nine-track tape reader and his newspaper’s mainframe computer, Elliot Jaspin of the Providence Journal matched databases he acquired through government-in-sun-shine laws. He found convicted drug dealers driving public school buses and local officials giving themselves discounts on their property-tax bills. By the late 1980s, he had shown that relational database technology and the Structured Query Language could be used to cross-reference systems to find news. He began traveling the U. S. showing reporters how to use these tools and founded an organization that later became the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (http://data. nicar.org/), an arm of the 4,500-mem- ber association Investigative Reporters and Editors ( http://www.ire.org/).