I-NEWS PROJECT IS JOURNALIST’S MISSION

Journalist Laura Frank is on a mission. A veteran of several daily newspapers, she lost her newsroom connection when the Rocky Mountain News, where she had been working, folded last year.

Her mission comes from her belief that careful, accurate investigative reporting is essential to the health of the body politic, and she is determined to find new ways to provide it.

"The bad news is that the condition of journalism in 2010 is worse than people are saying," she told Boulder Rotary this month. "The good news is that there is a national movement of not-for-profit news organizations dedicated to researching, confirming and reporting the news."

Frank holds a Scripps Foundation Fellowship at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and leads a local organization that will provide investigative reporting on issues of local and statewide importance. The project, Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, has as sponsoring partners not only CU-Boulder, but also Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting and Colorado Public Radio.

One example of unreported news Frank gave: As many as 35 million homes in the United States may have asbestos in their attic insulation – fibers that, if disturbed, can circulate throughout a house and settle in residents’ lungs, where they can fester and eventually produce cancerous lesions.

Until now, investigative journalism has been funded by newspapers that saw it as a way to encourage readership, resulting in desirability as an advertising medium. That financial model is currently failing as readership moves from newspapers to electronic media. I-News’s business plan seeks financial support from sponsor organizations that will use its work, underwriters interested in seeing investigative journalism thrive, and non-journalism work from its professional staff, including statistical analyses, presentations and sponsored research.

"No government money," said Frank. "Investigative journalism is a check on power and cannot be supported by power."

I-News has raised more than a third of its Phase I budget from in-kind, pro bono and grant donations. Other grant applications are in the works.

In its first six months, I-News hopes to publish and distribute at least four major journalistic reports, and in three years to have a staff of five and begin to reach sustainability. Special emphasis during that time will be on analyzing the 2010 Census data as it begins to be released in April 2011.

The I-News board of directors includes John Temple, former editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News; Brant Houston, Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois; and Paul Voakes, Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at CU.

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