IRE and the Institutionalization of Investigative Journalism

Abstract

Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has been a leading actor in the establishment of investigative reporting as an institutional asset in American and worldwide journalism. The organization has upheld standards of the practice and provided training while serving as a primary force in creating collaboration as a standard for investigative projects with national and worldwide impacts and supporting the creation of other nonprofit investigative journalism organizations. This essay looks at the long, rich history of investigative reporting in the United States and how this practice continues to influence journalism across the globe.

Notes

1 Andrea Carson, Investigative Journalism, Democracy, and the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2019); Maria Konow-Lund, Amanda Gearing, and Peter Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019; Richard Sambrook, Global Teamwork: The Rise of Collaboration in Investigative Journalism (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2018); Andrea Carson and Kate Farhall, “Understanding Collaborative Investigative Journalism in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age,” Journalism Studies 19, no. 13 (2018); Stefan Baack, “Global, Networked, and Collaborative: How the Normalization of Leaking Shaped the Identity and Practice of Investigative Journalism,” selected papers of the twentieth annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (Brisbane, Australia, 2019); Sheila Coronel, “A Golden Age of Global Muckraking at Hand,” Global Investigative Journalism Network, 2016, https://gijn.org/2016/06/20/a-golden-age-of-global-muckraking/.

2 Konow-Lund, Gearing and Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism.”

3 Paul Williams, Investigative Reporting and Editing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978), xi.

4 James L. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 132.

5 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 132.

6 James L. Aucoin, “Journalistic Moral Engagement: Narrative Strategies in American Muckraking,” Journalism 8, no. 5 (2007): 559–572.

7 Andrea Carson, Journalism, Democracy, and the Digital Age.

8 Charles E. Clark, “The Newspapers of Provincial America” in Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper, ed. John B. Hench (Worchester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1991), 367–389.

9 Thomas C. Leonard, Power of the Press (New York: Oxford University, 1986), 42.

10 Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 218–219.

11 Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 22–23, 44-46.

12 Leonard, Power of the Press, 177; Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 62; Aucoin, The Evolution of American Journalism, 29.

13 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 138–142.

14 Lori Amber Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, eds., Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).

15 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 31; Richard Digby-Junger, The Journalist as Reformer: Henry Demarest Lloyd and Wealth Against Commonwealth (Westport, CT.: Westport Press, 1996).

16 Denitsa Yotova, “Antebellum Urban Reporting as Literary Journalism and Muckraking: George G. Foster’s City Sketches in the New York Press,” Journalism History 44, no. 4 (2019): 221–231.

17 Silas Bent, Newspaper Crusaders: A Neglected Story (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1939, reprinted 1970), 18.

18 Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 4.

19 Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 138.

20 Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 171.

21 Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 14.

22 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 31–37; Mark Feldstein, “A Muckraking Model: Investigative Reporting Cycles in American History,” Press/Politics 11, no. 7 (2006): 109.

23 Ann Bausum, Muckrakers: How Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens Helped Expose Scandal, Inspire Reform, and Invent Investigative Journalism (Washington: National Geographic, 2007); Steve Weinberg, “Did Tarbell Invent Investigative Journalism?” IRE Journal (January/February 2008): 13.

24 Feldstein, “A Muckraking Model,” 110.

25 Feldstein, “A Muckraking Model.” Feldstein maintains that investigative journalism occurs during periods of two “disparate historical forces: public demand, created by some combination of political, economic, and social turmoil; and media supply” that is fueled by new technologies and competition among media companies, 116. It is true that such forces led to a revival of widespread investigative journalism during the 1960s and earlier during the muckraking era. See Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 33–38, 42–83.

26 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 38–39.

27 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 38–39.

28 Chad Raphael, Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television Documentary (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

29 “Book Award Interview: Chad Raphael,” Historiography in Mass Communication, 4, no. 3 (2018): 46.

30 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 119. Aucoin quotes Bierce’s letter, dated February 6, 1975, stored in the IRE files at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

31 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 122–23.

32 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 122–23.

33 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 171–202.

34 Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 196-197. Mark Tatge, “Taking CAR for a Spin: Conventional New Gathering Goes High-Tech,” in The Big Chill: Investigative Reporting in the Current Media Environment, ed. Marilyn Greenwald and Joseph Bernt (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 2000), 211–227.

35 Jack Shafer, “Where Did All the Investigative Journalism Go?,” Reason (April 2017), 64; Mary Walton, “Investigative Shortfall,” American Journalism Review (Fall 2010), 19–30.

36 Konow-Lund, Gearing, and Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism”; and Michael Wendland, The Arizona Project (Mesa, AZ: Blue Sky Press, 1988).

37 ProPublica, https://www.propublica.org/.

38 Global Investigative Journalism Network, retrieved from https://gijn.org/investigative-journalism-organizations/ on July 30, 2022.

39 Mark Feldstein, “Muckraking Goes Global,” American Journalism Review (Spring 2012), 44–49.

40 Peter Berglez and Amanda Gearing, “The Panama and Paradise Papers: The Rise of a Global Fourth Estate,” International Journal of Communication 12 (2018), 4573–92.

41 Carson, Investigative Journalism, Democracy, and the Digital Age. Carson argues there is reason to believe a new heyday of watchdog journalism began in 2019.

42 Ureta, Ainara Larrondo, and Eva Maria Ferreras Rodriguez, “The Potential of Investigative Data Journalism to Reshape Professional Culture and Values: A Study of Bellwether Transnational Projects,” Communication & Society 34, no. 1 (2021), 48.

43 Konow-Lund, Gearing, and Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism.”

44 Konow-Lund, Gearing, and Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism.”

45 Konow-Lund, Gearing, and Berglez, “Transnational Cooperation in Journalism.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James L. Aucoin

James L. Aucoin taught at the University of South Alabama at Mobile for twenty-four years, including seven years as chair of the Department of Communication, before retiring at the rank of professor in 2018. He previously taught part time at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he received his Ph.D. in 1993. He is author of The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, published by the University of Missouri Press in 2005. He was invited to contribute this essay to update an article he published in American Journalism in 1995 on the early years of Investigative Reporters and Editors.