Rosenthal is executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco.

DL: You have understood for a long time that creating and distributing content is about creating partnerships.

Rosenthal: I think the first thing is, you can never lose sight of the story or the information, and how you’re going to make people care about what you’re doing—whether it’s investigative reporting or a good recipe, it’s about how you tell the story. As much as information and technology and innovation and new ways of getting information are being created, it’s really about the story and how it’s being created. That’s really the first thing. We can’t lose sight of that with the technology and getting stuff out.

The other thing that is really important with journalism is about the credibility of the information, especially a time when there is so much ability to create and disseminate bad information, malicious information, propaganda and disinformation. The abuses created by the speed of information distribution have accelerated, and I think you really have to explain to society—because they don’t understand it—that history shows that information is manipulated to create power, to destroy someone or something. And historically, the people who have been initially targeted by those who want to control information are the journalists, the truth tellers. That has to be an important lesson in every journalism school. You have to think about cases like Rwanda. They tried to use the radio, but the whole culture had been trained to recognize the uses of misinformation and propaganda.

Kids sort of know it intuitively, but they don’t understand history at all. They don’t think about the abuse or manipulate of information.

DL: What else should journalism schools be teaching?

Rosenthal: As a journalism school, you can’t assume the student can do everything well. They’re going to have a range of skills, including how to produce radio, video, online. One of the things that we’ve done here is to honor and understand the value of the different skill sets. Not everyone is going to be a great reporter, or a data analyst, or a great storyteller. So how do you create an organization where there is collaboration around the creation of great content? And how do you create external collaboration with other media companies for distribution? And how do collaborate with the audience for distribution?

I am not a technologist, but I instinctively understood that the technology offers us this colossal opportunity. Before I even got to CIR, I wrote that the key linkages of the future or the key model of the future was how do you take the content creation process, the creative process, meld that with the technology, and figure out the business model? That’s really the model.

The best journalism schools are going to be integrated into the other knowledge bases [disciplines] within the university culture. The technology or innovations centers, those people don’t have to be journalists but they have to see what journalist are doing so they can accelerate the distribution impact and revenue of what they’re doing.

When we started CIR, we went first to proof of product, the credibility of the journalism. But no one is really going to fund that. It’s that balancing act of trying to raise money so we can create great content, but we don’t have the product yet, we’re producing it. I don’t think our niche doing investigative reporting is necessarily going to be profitable—that’s why even in newsrooms they call investigative “service journalism”—but we certainly can generate more revenue to support the philanthropy that we are getting.

We’re generating more revenue on consulting than on almost anything we’ve ever done. [Tells a story about a CIR project on systematic rape and abuse at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama.]

We came in to consult on the editorial but really on the engagement of the community. Michelle Holmes [of Alabama Media Group, a partner] was here, we met the engagement people, they brought me in, and I did it because it was a great story. I said I’ll come out, but there is one thing that you have to do: You have to bring in the public media people there, and they did that, and they are now in partnership with them.

In terms of internal and cultural collaborations that have to be created, I went to Birmingham, and they brought in people from their three newspapers in the region. They had never met before. We sat in this room together, and they were hearing things from each other that they had never talked about before. I said, “Don’t you guys talk to each other?” And they said they had never met. I was there to tell them how we partner with public media here, and how it works and how you can do that if you want to.

Culturally, I think journalism schools have to think about collaboration and partnership as a huge value; the concept of exclusivity no longer exists. If you really want to leverage your work for impact and reach, especially in an investigative nonprofit space, it’s about distribution, traditional and nontraditional unique storytelling, and creating a culture where impact is thought about and valued.

DL: Does increased distribution have a positive impact on revenue stream?

Rosenthal: It doesn’t impact our revenue streams directly, but increased distribution and impact has a positive effect on our funders, when I tell a story about that, it helps.

The model we have for charging for content is really hard and completely unfair. We’ll literally spend $300,000 or $400,000 doing a piece with CNN, and they’ll pay us $15,000. They don’t want to pay, they cry poverty. It’s really unfair. But what we’re getting out of it is a really big audience.

We have a project now called Reveal. It’s one of the things we did in the last year with PRX [Public Radio Exchange], which is distributor for content for public media. They understand the distribution and business model for public radio. They came to us and asked us to start a pilot, a one-hour show on investigative reporting.

The first show was a slam-dunk. The first story or major piece was on opium addiction. The core concept in terms of what I call “acceleration” or being catalytic with content is to create data on a national level, all kinds of data sets and maps, and then have it customized or available on the local level. So with this story, we looked at 10 years of data on opium prescriptions at the VA hospitals around the country, which showed that there’s been a 300 percent increase in 10 years. And you can click on individual hospitals around the country and localize it.

So it was all platforms in, an internal collaboration, and core reporting by a guy who understands print but also radio and video. We did the radio piece, and the tech stories and interactive map were distributed across the country. It went everywhere; we were on talk shows around the country. That happened during the period when the government was shut down, and even though it was, the House Veterans Affairs Committee announced the day after the story came out that they were going to hold hearings, and when they sent the press release, they embedded our stories and our map. That was huge. And that story won a Peabody [award].

The radio and viewing audience is going down, and the digital audience is going up. We’re delivering content they can put on their website, as well as used on radio and broadcast. So it’s audio, with podcasts as a secondary market, and we’re enabling them by doing webinars. And they can create local content on a macro database; it’s a national problem, but they can make it relevant where they live.

So that was the first show, the pilot. The second was also picked up by 150 stations. We’re partnering with WBZ because the whole concept here is that we want to elevate and bring content in from other stations, which means their brand is elevated, too—it’s a curated thing. We went to CPI [the Center for Public Integrity] and they have an arsenic story they’ve been working on, so we brought them in. We brokered it and then produced it, we went to Michigan Public Radio. It’ll be a national story. The catalytic piece is that Michigan Public Radio is doing a five-part piece because of it, they’re setting up events around the state. That’s Reveal.

DL: So all of that has a lot of impact and is the kind of reporting that is really all about journalism in the public interest. How do you pay for that?

Rosenthal: That’s a continuing evolution. It’s really important because these major commercial news organizations say, “We’ll take anything you want to offer us, but we won’t pay you for it.” We decided last year that we’re going to start charging.

DL: So your business model is partnerships with other nonprofit and donors?

Rosenthal: One of the first things I did when I got here was go to KQED, I knew we needed radio. That whole partnership has just exploded, it’s been great. But we haven’t been able to translate that into more funding.

DL: Have you looked at finding one major funder?

Rosenthal: That would be really fun and easier. But it’s been really hard. We just got $1 million a year for three years from one family. But this has really been just like a startup, and we’re still figuring the business model out.

DL: So, in additional to entrepreneurship, what do journalists today and in 2025 need to know?

Rosenthal: If you’re coming out of J-school, I would look for less an investigative reporter than for somebody who understands data apps or storytelling or who can hear information and transform it into an animation or video, stuff that has to do with technology but they also have to understand fact-based storytelling. If someone is coming here just as a reporter—not sure we’d hire somebody right out of J-school—we’d be teaming those people up with a team of people. You have to create a culture where a 23-year-old can say to you, “What about this? What about that?” The thing I enjoy the most is the teaching, and I don’t have enough time to do it.

DL: So what you have going on is another version of a learning environment?

Rosenthal: We have a poet and playwright who works with the kids. I went to a poetry slam in LA, and I came out of it thinking, “How do we get these kids to tell stories for us?” There were like 2,000 people in this room. And then this woman stands up, she was from Detroit, she was an Arab American, and then she starts in on this thing about Syria and human rights, and in 30 seconds, everybody was on their feet in the audience cheering … and I thought, seriously, these kids all know what’s going on in Syria? So we’ve got some funding for that and it’s experimental, we video it, we distribute it, we’re learning from these kids. ….

We’re doing more with CUNY than we are with Berkeley. We were involved in helping shape the CUNY master’s degree program. [Dean] Sarah Bartlett was out here for days. They’re open to that kind of partnership. Part of collaboration, a key to partnering, is that I don’t have to try to explain why it’s valuable to you. We have a culture of wanting to make it work. It’s not that everything’s a slam-dunk, and it’s complicated, but when there’s a willingness to do it, and there’s an openness to it, that’s when it works. It’s really about the leadership. There are organizations that talk about doing it, but you get inside and it isn’t going to happen.

A lot of it for me is seeing what happened with the collapse of the newspaper model. The Chauncey Bailey project was such an example of that … I said it’s coming out simultaneously on everybody’s website, it’s going to be on the broadcast at night, it’ll be in the morning papers … they finally all agreed. When we started California Watch, it was about the fact that everybody wanted the story, but everybody had to give up their egos.

I think for a young person, we’d be looking for what I’d call the storytelling skills on other platforms, someone who understands social media, distribution, chunking up stories for distribution. They’d be coming here to be part of a team. There are specialists here: We have people who are distribution specialists who figure out how do you create audiences when a story comes out, and then afterward. I read the New York Times report, I understood it all because we’re doing all of that. I understand how hard it was to create culture.

I was there in 1997 when we did Black Hawk Down. I am not a technologist, I just met with the Web guys and said, “What can we do?” and they said, “We can do anything. We can do audio, we can do video, we can do a chat. …” And I said, “What’s a chat?” I remember when Mark [Bowden] reported it, we sat down, when he did the reporting, he asked if people had audio or video, they got all that stuff. And we said, let’s play with this thing.

When I was a reporter, you did your story because it was a great story and you hoped something might happen. If you wrote a story, you were really glad if you got four letters … or you did a story about a dog and you got 30 phone calls. But you weren’t really thinking that way. But now, we’re a niche, we’re an investigative site. If we were a news site, we’d have different strategies. But we’re in a niche, it’s expensive, it takes time, you don’t just go in and do it. It takes knowledge and sourcing, it’s much harder than being a Web-based thing.