A strength like no other

In a post today on the Poynter Institute website, Northeastern University prof Bill Kirtz interviews winners of Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. The gist of his interviews is that award winners are all dedicated to the proposition that newspapers are best situated to succeed in the niche arena of investigative reporting. "If papers are going to survive, we must provide readers with these services," says Jack Leonard of the Los Angeles Times.

At papers where this year's winners work, reporters are encouraged and supported as they undertake the time-consuming (and therefore expensive) grunt work necessary to ferret out information we need to function as a civil and free society. As Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post remarks: We can do it. Bloggers can't. That's our franchise." Her colleague, Jeffrey Smith adds, "If we concentrate on investigative reporting, we can make a difference and distinguish ourselves from everything available on the Web. We're very slow as an institution to realize that we can't just write what happened. We have to tell them what they can't get in any other media."