Aug 30, 2009 07:45 PM
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New York, 7:44 AM
Wed Feb 10
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The NYT Magazine's cover story about a euthanizing, beleaguered hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans dropped today. It's estimated to have cost around $400,000. What kind of reporting does that buy? The expensive, endangered type.
That $400,000 number comes straight from Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati estimating what it would've cost...had the Times paid for it in its entirety. But the bill for it was heavily footed by ProPublica, a independent non-profit "newsroom" doing investigative journalism.
The story's being published and can be read at both ProPublica and in The New York Times Magazine, and can be reprinted by anyone, anywhere beginning September 29th. Sheri Fink, the reporter, began working on the story in 2007, for four months, with her own money. ProPublica started picking up the tab, Fink stayed with the story full-time, and two years later, we have it in our hands. And what is it?
"The Deadly Choices at Memorial" details, in 13,000 words, the goings on at Memorial Medical center in New Orleans during and after Katrina's hit. Some of the major points:
And then there's the kicker: the shill for laws protecting health care workers in disasters from Pou. And the conversation about the lines of communication between patients and doctors, when obscured, becoming third-rail ordeals.
Much of the discussion that's going to dominate this article in the media, sadly, is that it maybe costs $400,000 to produce a piece of thorough, lengthy investigative journalism, the kind that sites like this one are going to maybe kill one bullet point at a time by summarizing them, as I did above. The fact that a non-profit had to foot the bill's only going to fan the flames even further.
What's going to happen to investigative journalism because of blogs? Important question with hard answers nobody's sure of yet (except for blogs doing their own investigative journalism, maybe). Just as important, however, are the number of readers who are going to click through to Fink's story. Bringing into question a $400,000 story's costs misses the larger point of how much the actual information contained within the story's worth to readers, and who's going to capitalize on it. Again: it took a non-profit to get a story of this size out there. Who's going to pay for the next Watergate? Or the next Torture Memos? And what kind of models are going to emerge from it?
Whoever foots the bill, if it comes out anything like this, good on 'em.
Send an email to Foster Kamer, the author of this post, at foster@gawker.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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