More and more corporate owned media have sacrificed service in favor of profits. Newsrooms are sparse and budgets are more sparse and investigative reporting has all but disappeared within the confines of the establishment press. In a truly market driven industry this wouldn’t happen because the public need for information is just as high as it ever was but somehow media for profit has been co-opted as a propaganda tool for the powerful.

Suddenly unemployed investigative journalists, however, kept investigating and writing this time without corporate constraints for non-profit news sources established for the public good. The success of these endeavors is proof enough the public believes there is something missing from corporate media.

The Knight Foundation, journalism’s biggest funder of digital innovation, announced it was giving $390,000 to the Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, MinnPost and ChiTown Daily News. All are non-profits, and the first three represent some of the most ambitious efforts to marshal community news reporting solely on the Web.

By relying on major gifts and foundation money, the sites are trying to create large enough audiences to sustain themselves – through advertising and/or continued philanthropy – when the initial funding peels away. Other, mostly smaller, online news startups are trying to build businesses from the ground up by relying on advertising alone.

OJR took fresh looks at the Voice of San Diego, Minn Post and ChiTown Daily News early this fall, and the New York Times followed suit last month with a front-page story on the muckraking San Diego site. “There hasn’t been a day go by since then that I haven’t had some follow-up from that story,” said co-executive editor Scott Lewis. Many inquiries have come from job-seekers or news entrepreneurs hoping to replicate the “Voice” in their own hometowns, he said.

Anonymous, an online community has taken up the call to action with a series of campaigns to encourage citizen activism on a global scale in the form of ‘crowd journalism’, reading and disseminating the information from the leaked embassy cables. Websites and blogs have sprung up around the world in dozens of languages so that efforts to silence whistle blowers becomes pointless.

Jason Stverak, President of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, recognizes difficulties inherent with working with citizen journalists but believes the future of news is online and may throw traditional news a lifeline. Practicing a sort of guerrilla journalism, freelance journalists working with citizen journalists have broken some heavy duty stories.

Just recently, a series of state-based watchdog groups proved online news websites can churn out investigative pieces and breaking news stories. The effects of their reporting has impacted the entire nation.

* An online journalist broke the “Phantom Congressional District” story about the chaos in tracking American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. On November 16, 2009, Jim Scarantino, the investigative reporter for New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation, discovered that the recovery.gov website listing federal stimulus money was riddled with ludicrous errors. His online story prompted other citizen journalists he had networked with through the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to look into their own state’s recovery.gov data. When all was said and done, these online journalists found that $6.4 billion in stimulus funds had been awarded to 440 non-existent Congressional districts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four American territories.
* It was an online journalist in New Hampshire who broke the news when Newt Gingrich admitted during an interview he made an endorsement mistake in a highly contested congressional race.
* A Watchdog in Texas recently discovered that the Department of Homeland Security lost nearly 1,000 computers in 2008.
* An online reporter in Minnesota got the attention of the state government when his organization, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, released a report proving that Minnesotans were leaving the state due to high taxes.
* And it was a reporter in Hawaii who delved into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pricey holiday trip, which included an astonishing $10,000 nightly expense and more than $21,000 in security cost to Hawaii’s taxpayers.

In addition to quality news coverage, many of these non-profit online news organization offer a “steal our stuff” policy that provides newspapers with free news. This is an obvious cost advantage over the traditional news wires that charge for content.

As more non-profit journalism organizations develop, and more online journalists emerge in cities around the nation, the traditional wire services will have stiff competition unless they deal with reality and start picking up the best work these journalists produce. Non-profit journalism organizations as well as citizen journalists are producing news that too often is overlooked by traditional media. Not all those who write online stories are journalists – yet – but the ones who are should get the same access and treatment as those few still employed by newspapers, television and radio.

The corporate media benefits from the hard work of guerrilla journalists and could benefit from the data provided by Wikileaks if informing the public was really their aim. El Pais, one of the newspapers that agreed to work with Wikileaks to publish up to 250,000 US embassy cables has detected some collaboration between conservative establishment media and the latest bureaucratic spin out of Washington.

Javier Moreno explaining his paper’s decision to publish the State Department cables describes, “…a barrage of public and private admonishment, with grave warnings emanating from Washington about irresponsibility and illegality”. When claims of grave danger to lives and national security turned out not to be true the began a new tack.

I don’t have the details at hand right now, but it seems clear that the US Administration soon concluded that its initial strategy of condemning the publication of confidential information and predicting diplomatic apocalypse, was not having the desired result. So a new, very different strategy was crafted that soon found its way into countless editorials and opinion pieces in major newspapers, magazines and television networks in the US and elsewhere.

This new spin, endorsed mainly by conservative media outlets, showed that rather than being duplicitous, US diplomats are unafraid to criticize the governments of the countries they are based in, and highly skilled at dealing with wily foreign leaders.

Revealing the truth is what journalism is really all about, not just reporting facts, and every functioning democracy depends upon it. Moreno rightly states that revealing the truth empowers the people “…newspapers have many obligations in a democratic society: responsibility, truthfulness, balance and a commitment to citizens. Our obligations definitely do not, however, include protecting governments and the powerful in general from embarrassing revelations”.