Interview Transcripts

Bill Buzenberg
Gordon Witkin Center for Public Integrity

Buzenberg retired early this year after eight years as executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. Witkin is executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity.

DL: Describe your ideal employee for me.

Buzenberg: We are in a digital world, and they are in a digital world, and they want to work in a digital world, period. Everything is around that. They don’t subscribe to newspapers. They aren’t watching the evening news. They are getting BuzzFeed and they’re looking at the stuff that’s coming from their friends on social media. They see that as a way to stay informed, and that’s how they want to work.

Witkin: The guy that won the Pulitzer Prize four years ago was an intern, but he had data skills. He came out of Columbia. Boy, we want those data skills in all of all our reporters because now it’s about big data. Sometimes it’s data we create ourselves by getting information, digitizing it and doing it.

DL: What do you mean when you say “data skills”?

Buzenberg: It’s multimedia and multiplatform. They have the idea that they can shoot pictures, write stories, post those stories, and write their headlines. To manipulate data is to gather these 255 conflicts-of-interest-statement forms from the appellate court judges and then go through them and then show how they are violating their own rules. That’s the data analysis that they are comfortable doing.

Witkin: I think what that speaks to, in terms of general education, is that you are asking for and hopeful of getting a much broader, more disparate group of skills than we were asked for when we came out of journalism school. It’s multimedia, being able to work on the Web as Bill said, do video, shoot pictures, do podcasts, create interactive graphics, code maybe, data visualization is huge, things like interactive graphics, interactive games even, and I think when Bill refers to what we do with data is computer-assisted reporting [CAR]. It’s taking big vats of data and being able to work with, massage, manipulate and analyze that data to come up with strong, unshakable, journalistic conclusions. If you think about all that, it’s a whole group of skills, but I guess, having come from a different generation, my big asterisk is that’s a lot, and you’re asking all of that. However, particularly for a place like this, or for any place, you’re still expecting for them to have the basic who, what, where, when, why reporting skills.

DL: They still have to be reporters.

Buzenberg: And care about the facts.

Witkin: And be able to do the basic reporting, do the basic writing. … I would say some of the interns have more skills than others because they have been exposed to all this. They can do data visualization, they can report, they can write. They can do video. They can post to the Web.

DL: Should journalism students know how to code? What should a journalism grad know how to do?

Witkin: I think it means to be able to build an app, do basic Web-related work that has to do with value added for the actual website as opposed to crafting a news story.

Buzenberg: They should be close to the computer sciences department for some of this stuff and be really familiar with that. Yes, they should know how to write and report, but they would work in those areas and have that experience.

Witkin: And maybe some art and design. We get some of our best traffic from interactive graphics. We’ll run a story, and the story is good, and then they run an interactive graphic with it and that gets all the traffic.

Buzenberg: And that’s what goes viral. … We don’t just want the data. We also want the narrative that connects the dots that goes with it. It’s the combination that we want.

Witkin: I think that’s a mixed bag. We have worked [to recruit] our interns and fellows mostly with a household name group of schools, and in the six years I’ve been here I’ve been stunned with our great track record with interns and fellows.

Buzenberg: We have 350 applicants for six slots. They have skill, and they’ve worked.

Witkin: We’re getting good numbers from good schools. I think we are also attracting a certain type of kid that is familiar with the center and wants to do this type of work.

DL: Is aptitude or experience with social media now a key job requirement?

Buzenberg: Of course, and increasingly. Twitter and Facebook are the two biggest drivers of our traffic that we’ve seen, and Reddit when it goes. So social media is a lure. We are also on NBC.com, and Slate and Salon, and Gordon can go down the list …

Witkin: I think the point is well taken. I don’t think you can be a journalist in the current world without having a minimum level of social skills way more than I have. We both have Twitter. I’m not on Facebook, but I need to be.

Buzenberg: I use it as a promo. We have a full-time engagement person for two years.

Witkin: It’s a two-year fellowship from American … it’s a highfalutin title, and it’s a two-year fellowship of a Ph.D. whose focus is on social media and engagement. He’s going to try to improve our engagement because we have a long way to go there. Our digital team, every day in our morning meeting, we are asking for metrics. What was the traffic? How long did they stay on the site?

Buzenberg: How many signed up for newsletters, which is increasingly a lot, and how many contributed?

Witkin: And the bounce rate.

Buzenberg: And where did they come from?

DL: And all of that, that’s what you do all the time, you collect the data and then say what’s going to happen because of that? When someone says to you, we got this many hits on this story, does someone then say that’s because we did this?

Witkin: That’s a pretty constant conversation. There are about three to four people who are heavily invested in the engagement part of it. I won’t say that every reporter is an expert on engagement, but for general journalism education, there needs to be a minimum of understanding. I would be interested in anyone coming from a journalism program that had some portion of a course on social media and media engagement.

DL: And that ties to analytics and measurements, which is some of the things that you were just talking about.

So you partner on stories with your own organizations, like ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists], but do you partner with other news organizations the way [Robert] Rosenthal [at the Center for Investigative Reporting] does?

Buzenberg: There’s distribution—like we are doing this together like with ABC—and we do stuff and release it at the same time.

Witkin: That’s bifurcation. There are reporting partnerships where I go to another organization early and ask if they want to report this with me. We do that quite a bit. It’s not easy.

DL: That’s a longstanding practice, isn’t it?

Witkin: Easier for us are what we call distribution partners. We have a group of partners who will simply take and reprint our materials. One of our priorities for doing that—and not all of them can do this with our content management system—we ask that they include on our story printed on their site some tracking code for us so we can count the eyeballs on their site and our site.

DL: That’s why I asked. If you’re talking about metrics and measurements and impact and audience, if you do those kinds of partnerships …

Witkin: Everyone wants to do that these days.

Buzenberg: Every editor wants to know that, and not just the metrics. They want to know the impact.

DL: Right. The kind of work you guys are doing has real impact.

Buzenberg: We think about that, and we talk about that. That’s one of the criteria. There’s a problem. No one else has done it. If we do it, it could lead to fixing this problem. We want to know whether there’s a systemic problem that our reporting could highlight, and that there would be something that happens to solve the problem as a result of our reporting. We don’t do the fix-it ourselves, but other people will because we can make it compelling enough to see that it is a systemic problem that needs to be fixed.

DL: Do you teach your staff that? Reporters historically walk away from a story. You did it, you hoped to win an award for it, and then you were done with it when the story was done.

Buzenberg: There are two things going on with it now. We did the campus assault project when you were here last time.

DL: Yes, I remember.

Buzenberg: Our story was on the front page of the NY Times. So of course we are putting it up again and re-linking to it and showing it again. That story is coming around and around and around. Often, our reporters are going back and looking at something and re-linking to it and to another audience—for them, it’s a fresh story.

DL: So will your reporters go back and ask what happened as a result of that story?

Witkin: An adjunct to what Bill is saying is that you can’t just drop the story and go on to the next one. With the help of our communications and engagement people, we have made some progress, but we still have a ways to go. You have to get on Twitter every day. You have to have some add-ons to that story that could keep it alive for the next three or four days.

Today, we have a very nice story that’s an investigative piece on the IRS. It’s counterintuitive, but here are the problems with the IRS. As part of that, which was pushed through by our engagement team, they said that was the Tuesday story, but the next day we have to run a graphic piece about the problems with the IRS by the numbers that will be little charts about budgets and staffing that will be kind of cute, everyone will Tweet that out and then that will push everyone back to the story. And for some projects, again with the engagement team pushing back on old-fashioned journalism, we knew we had to have a following and an interactive graphic. Instead of running that 10,000-word piece on one day, we are going to split that up to 2,500 words over four days.

We are also seeing that sidebars don’t do very well on the website because you can’t see them and people don’t click on them. So we’re saying, “Don’t run a big act and three sidebars on Monday, but run the big act on Monday and the sidebar on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and an interactive graphic on Friday.” With all that work, in the new world, we need to keep that story alive.

But you also still need to do all the things you would traditionally do. Go to the Hill and ask them what they are going to do. See if you can get people to react. If there’s even a little impact, do a fresh story on that. We did a big package on the waste in the Medicare system. Last week, in the agate type somewhere, which our reporters were following, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced an intention to do something different to chase overpayments. It was real impact. So we did another story on that. Meanwhile, our communications person is trying to get the reporters on radio or TV into it, not just in D.C. but all over the country. You’re trying to take the project and stretch it in every way.

DL: Do you find that the story builds over time, depending on what it is?

Buzenberg: Yes. The greatest example we have is the Explainer, which explains what Citizens United actually does and why it is important. The Explainer continues to be in the top five or ten, and it’s three years old.

DL: It’s because people say what does that do, and someone says, oh, I’ll send you this.

Buzenberg: They see it and use it.

Witkin: This is a somewhat different point, but if you think about, if you are an investigative reporter, you don’t like explainers. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to do some explainer.” But people need that and love it. Here’s another thing we are doing. For a while we were in the video business, and then we had cutbacks and had to lose that. More recently, we have gotten some grants that allowed us to hire a professional videographer; she just arrived a couple of months ago. That’s another thing we do now. With our Medicare Advantage story, she does a video Q&A with the reporter and then she will work to get that out there and get some attention.

DL: Do you use or create interactives on the site?

Witkin: I have a little tougher time with this aspect of it, but there is no doubt that if you went to 20-somethings in this business, they will tell you they think games is a really effective form of journalism right now. It will draw people in and be interactive. One of the often-cited examples is that someone did a big story on the difficulties of the deficit, and they paired that with something called The Budget Game, which said, “What are you going to do, raise taxes here or cut this program?” It went viral. It made people understand at a level the narrative did not. We were just at an IRE [Investigative Reporters and Editors] meeting, and there were a lot people talking about games and design.

Buzenberg: It’s a good way to move information.

DL: Is that kind of coding or game design part of the skill set you’re looking for?

Witkin: Everyone is going to be better at something and everyone is going to have a preference. Part of what I’m saying is you can no longer walk in with only one skill. We are looking for a few other things.

Buzenberg: I want them to be able to work with others and talk the [tech] language even if they are not doing that part.

Witkin: But at the same time, if we get an old-fashioned, straight, talented reporter, but that young man or woman says “I’ve also taken at least a couple CAR courses,” that’s great for us. Then they can do at least some basic analysis.

DL: Talk to me a little bit about how you see the landscape of journalism changing and how you fit into that landscape.

Buzenberg: It’s so much more collaborative today, and with aggregating and distributing, our stuff can go everywhere. The number of people using our stuff all over the world now has just exploded on our big international projects.

DL: And that didn’t used to happen?

Buzenberg: Never. We’ve been working on the biggest collaboration I’ve ever heard of, there were 78 journalists in 56 countries working on the same set of encrypted data, and they all came out at the same time. And increasingly it’s television and newsprint. We started this in Europe really big, and now the Germans are saying for the first time they have started to investigate with others, too. In the investigative field in particular, it’s now understood that these are shared issues and shared problems and shared data, and how do we all do it and do it well.

DL: Is this unique to being the kind of nonprofit news organization you are?

Buzenberg: It is. Our international part no one else has so far. And it’s a different way of working, and we’re doing that. Domestically, we are working on a 50-states project. We are working with people we’ve hired as part-timers to look at data from all 50 state capitols, and then we aggregate that. Now we are creating another hub of data about the money—our new big project is about the money in state politics. It’s pouring in from the outside in every state. I’m sitting in X capitol, and I can’t understand my state, and if I don’t know that it is actually Chamber of Commerce money or whatever and how much it is and what it’s for, I don’t really understand what’s going on. So we give them that information, and then they can do the reporting there. The landscape is so different.

Witkin: We are fortunate to be one of a trio of groups that do this kind of work and have been lucky enough to have serious funding and personnel. There’s us, ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The other thing going on is there has been a dramatic proliferation of mini-centers for investigative reporting in a wide variety of states and cities. There’s something that Bill was part of founding called the Investigative News Network [INN] that is the umbrella over these. There are 100 members now.

That said, I don’t think all of them are going to make it because the amount of money available to do this is finite. But some of them are working really well, like the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, the St. Louis Beacon, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network and so forth. There are so many now that I personally don’t think they can all survive. The purpose of INN is to help them with funding, revenue streams, libel insurance, business skills, back-office stuff, building the website.

DL: Talk to me about this for a minute.

Buzenberg: That’s INN. That’s Kevin Davis in LA and is probably someone you should talk to. He just got a patent for Impact Me, which is a way that if someone shares our stuff, we get $1. I’ve been talking to funders about that.

DL: That leads me to a relevant question: What’s the business model here? Is there such a thing as too many of these freestanding nonprofit organizations? When New England or Wisconsin has a story, wouldn’t it be better for it to be your story, and they are your people on the ground in terms of funding?

Buzenberg: It’s about the time frame here. We work on a project and spend six or nine months before it comes out. The successful ones have all partnered with their public radio and television stations and are feeding them, which is really good.

Witkin: I think the functional difference there is they are doing state-centric stories that can assist a variety of folks and will be reprinted, redone and repurposed by a variety of folks in that state. They do really good enterprise stuff, it’s not six-month stuff, but they research for a couple weeks. They have agreements with a lot of papers in Wisconsin that are small or medium that can’t do this work, and with that, there will be small contracts and payments. And what Bill just alluded to was a big thing at the last IRE meeting; there are several of these centers that have formalized relationships with either public radio or television or both.

Public television is saying they want to do investigative stuff, but they have no capacity to do that. They are doing some barter, like the TV station will say they don’t have a lot of money but we have some extra offices here. You guys move in here for free, you guys give us your investigative reporting for free, and we will turn it into television. You’re still not talking big dollars here.

DL: What’s the business model here for this kind of organization?

Buzenberg: It’s foundations and individuals. The individual one is growing. Last year was about 27 percent individuals with some big gifts. The foundations are still 75 percent, which is the foundation world. It’s 40 to 50 foundations right now. It’s a terrible business model, but we are working to get institutional members, especially internationally, who love this work and want to join and get this work on a more formal basis. We just hired a business manager. She’s coming in to figure out how to get more international members.

Witkin: Sometimes you can get some of these partners to give you a few pennies, but that is a real struggle.

DL: You have all of this talent, the time, the energy and you are giving it away to news organizations that have revenue and make a profit. Is that a sustainable model?

Buzenberg: ABC loves the content and will use it—and why wouldn’t they? We can see their traffic because we can see the code, but they don’t pay for it.

Witkin: Their argument is, with some justification, that they are giving our stuff massive exposure that it wouldn’t get otherwise. That’s their contribution. They are, it’s true, and we appreciate it, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It’s a real struggle. There are a few outlets that have money, and there are many that don’t. We do a lot with Slate; they are a fabulous partner with great traffic. They can pay us $100 occasionally.

Occasionally, you will find some outlet, sometimes out of the blue, that will pay more, but again, we are trying to get not only big, raw numbers of eyeballs, but important eyeballs, opinion-leader eyeballs, policy-leader eyeballs. You have to pick your spots. There’s something called takeapart.com, and they have paid us $5,000 for one piece. But the traffic wasn’t great.

We are making progress, and the other thing about individuals that Bill mentioned is that you can grow that and for some of them, their contributions are less likely to be restricted to particular subject areas.

Buzenberg: And also small online contributions are growing, direct mail contributions are growing, and there are the major contributions of $10,000 or above that are growing. We have a full-time person working, and one person on the Web, and two people on the foundations. It’s also increasingly international.

DL: That’s good news.

Witkin: It’s progress, but it’s hard-earned. As I’m sure you’ve heard, you have people constantly telling you it has to be sustainable. I think sometimes, the young man who won the Pulitzer, that story took him every minute of every day for a year. It took a data visualization person who spent probably four months and an editor who spent the equivalent of four months. I don’t even want to estimate what it cost us to produce but it has to be over $100,000. Who is going to pay for that?

DL: There has to be a business model that supports this kind of distribution of news and information, but there isn’t one yet.

Buzenberg: No, I thought I was going to come here and put it in place, and I’m going to leave with it not being done yet. No one has done it yet.

Witkin: Part of what you are saying is part of the answer, which is the relative benevolence of big-money individuals who you are hoping have a belief in journalism with a capital J. I think everyone at the [Washington] Post, and I know people there and I’m sure you do, too, will tell you that the whole mood has changed. Six months ago, Bezos came in and said eventually we will have to run numbers but just cutting people isn’t a business model so we’re hiring. They’ve hired 40 people in the last six months and the whole mood is different, but he has a lot of money.

Witkin: There is progress, but it’s very slow.

Buzenberg: As an aside, [foundations] don’t want to fund content. OK, fine. We’re all about content. But then help fund our digital team, our communications team, our engagement team, help fund the ways that will get our work out. We can fund the content. Foundations are willing to do that. We have a deficit on the unrestricted side of the center. It’s all project money now, all the time, and we still have to pay for the lights and the floor and the office rent. Oh, and by the way, the development team that raises that money. That’s all unrestricted and that’s a problem. What [a foundation] could do is give us some unrestricted support, or put it into the digital part, and that helps us. Put it into the distribution part, and that helps. Put it into the communication and engagement part. That would really help us.

Witkin: I think we’re at a point, particularly with the 2013 we had, we believe the product, investigative journalism, is stronger than ever. Where we need to make the progress, particularly with more unrestricted money, is getting it out. Getting it out digitally and improving our website. Getting more ways to do the outreach and engagement. That’s a big need, and there’s not a lot of money out there specifically for that.

… I want to quickly get back to one thing I said. In doing all the things we’ve talked about, we need to be sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water. We still need reporting skills, and even with all the things we’ve talked about, when I look at a resume I’m still looking for a couple of years of either newspaper or wire experience. That tells me they have the basics. Can they think on their feet? Can they get the basics right? Can they write a news story on deadline, because that’s the bedrock you need for any of this other stuff.

Buzenberg: It isn’t like the old newspaper world at all but [journalism students today] like to look at it and talk about it.

Witkin: I think they realize you have to think outside the box. You have to think data, you have to think graphics, visualization and outreach. It’s just the way it is. When we went into the newspapers, it was a lot of “we’ve never done it that way. Just tell us the brief outline of what happened on the interstate.”

DL: Three sources and you’re done.

Witkin: There’s a lot more willingness at all levels now to try new things because you have to.

DL: I don’t know that I think for a kid, that that’s out of the box.

Witkin: Right. This is their world. They want to know that some dinosaur isn’t going to tell them just to write that article. They want the games and interactive graphics.

One of the biggest shockers to me? [WisconsinWatch.org’s] latest project is looking at waste runoff. Their artist did a massive mockup of the back end of a cow. The artist also did a mockup, to scale, of the actual weight and size of the pile of manure that every cow produces every day. They put the narrative on storyboards on the sides of the cow. They are taking that around to fairs, conventions …

DL: It’s installation art.

Witkin: No. It’s a life sculpture of a back end of a cow and a pile of manure. They are taking this cow around. [Andy Hall from WisconsinWatch] talked about it for a half hour. He said people loved it. They’re eating it up. We are getting huge crowds talking about waste runoff. People are talking about it.

DL: Three-dimensional journalism. When you talk about journalistic models, I will forever think of that.