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BERKELEY — We are midway through the first day at the conference, “Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?” One thing that struck me here is that we have some serious bigwigs and executives at major media companies, like the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CBS and of course PBS. Are these the people who will really see the future of what will happen in investigative journalism? Maybe Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who is also here, would know more. Or someone who is a digital native, someone doing a one-person blog. Where are these people? It rankles me sometimes when conferences go for the “big names” instead of the person on the ground doing the legwork.

I will try to bring up that point when I am a questioner on the web panel.

The first two panels, newspapers and broadcast, are now doing a Q&A with the audience. I jumped in with the first question: How much are you willing to do crowdsourcing and involve the audience in your investigative work?

Bill Keller, NY Times: We have done some of that and I’m sure we’ll do more. When Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with cancer, we had so many heartfelt, amazing comments online, that we did a story the next day based on their comments. Our story wouldn’t have been as good without those comments. I think we’re going to do more of that because we’re lucky, our audience is very smart.

Len Downie, Washington Post: We have done some polling on readers, and they sometimes allow us to contact them. It helps us decide on stories that are interesting to people, using that polling. I don’t know if you consider that crowdsourcing but we are doing some of that.

David Fanning, PBS Frontline: When we do a follow-up to the film, “Growing Up Online,” we are going to use the web to get lots of input for the follow-up to that. It makes sense for us to go online to get that input.

Q: Why do mainstream newsrooms not hire many minorities, I don’t see that many of them here.

Laurie Hays, WSJ: What do you suggest we do in order to get minorities?

Questioner: You could send minorities out to schools so that students see that minorities can get jobs. It would help break down the walls.

Brian Ross, ABC: We have hired some minorities into our investigative unit, and it has helped get us access to stories we wouldn’t have had previously. So it is a good thing to have minorities on our staff.

Q: Would you consider doing work with some non-profits who are doing investigative work? Partnering with them?

Bill Keller, NY Times: When I first heard about ProPublica, I was actually open to working with them. I think it depends if I can trust the person doing the work, and I could trust them, I know them. We would not want it to replace what we’re doing. But there are advantages to doing the work at big news organizations, because you are in touch with beat reporters who can help spark new stories, plus you have the backing and resources of a big organization and its legal help.

Jeff Fager, CBS: It works really well if you’re collaborating at an early stage. We had a great collaboration with the Washington Post in the fall, and it made all the difference.

Len Downie: I think the challenge for the non-profits is how can you get the partners involved at an early stage. We would ask, “Who are your sources? What is their credibility?” The challenge is seeing how those relationships are shaped that way.

Q: I am a lawyer, and I’m concerned about the Wall Street Journal’s direction and the recent takeover by Rupert Murdoch. I heard he doesn’t like stories that jump from page one. How will that square with long investigative reports?

Laurie Hays, WSJ: We do have a tradition of running fairly manageable, light stories that tell a great deal. We have run recently a very long investigative piece on Merrill Lynch on how they doubled down in this mortgage crisis and got themselves in trouble, and it was very well received. Not all great journalism has to be long. Another story broken that week was about manipulation by London banks, and it was a 1,000 word story and it had tremendous impact and led to investigative reports. Not all hard-hitting journalism has to be long or take forever to get done.

The Journal is in transition, so keep watching.

The Web Panel

Last panel for today (whew) is the web panel, where I will be questioning panelists and trying to live blog and Twitter. The panelists are: Paul Grabowicz (UC Berkeley and Idea Lab), Jonathan Landman (NY Times), Sharon Tiller (PBS Frontline/World), and Jeff Leen (Washington Post).

Steve Talbot of Frontline is the moderator.

Talbot anecdote: You are mid career journalists and probably worried about your future. The technology drives so much of this. Whether we like it or not, we are in a digital age. If there’s a future, it will be online. My dad went off to join a circus as a magician’s assistant, and he traveled doing tent shows in the ’20s. But they were driven out of business by the advent of movies.

Warner Brothers were desperate for actors who could talk, for the new medium. So then he had a long career there. But then when Hollywood had its own depression in the ’50s, he went into a new medium in television and had a long career in there. Later in life, he went into theater when there was a revival for the theater. But none of those mediums went away. The world is changing and you can’t get in the way of technology.

Q: What can you do online that you can’t do in other mediums.

Paul Grabowicz, UC Berkeley: I think the Internet is a brand new medium, and we’re not pushing it far enough or fast enough. We’re seeing decimation on the regional front. What we see online is someone taking the print story or broadcast story, and put that online, and put up an extra video with a boring narration. That’s what we view as multimedia.

On the Internet, we have to think about breaking the story up, because people want to have that choice. With investigative reports, they usually end, but online, they go on and should have context — with other stories, whatever. Communities, we need to do this ahead of time. You can get the community engaged beforehand even telling them just the general topic of the story. What we need to think of databases as a way to make sense of the data, and give them contexts.

We also need to think about games, you might think it’s heresy. But when I hear about how reporters come up with a story, we never tell that to readers. So we could construct that as a game, and let people follow along on how the story was made.

Jonathan Landman, NY Times: Things are going well online. There are lots of opportunities and places I’d like to see us go. We need to go beyond getting tips from people online. We can do it in a more focused way, get networks of people who know something about a subject. it mimics the way a beat reporter gets sources.

Sharon Tiller, Frontline: All of our experimentation is going onto the web. So everything becomes an experimental part of our series. It’s very hard to do investigative reporting, to have experience with it. So we realized we needed partners and are doing work with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jeff Leen, Washington Post: A brief history of investigative reporting at the Post on the web. I’m a dinosaur who wants to crash onto the web. Eight years ago we wanted to do a collaboration with NBC News. I called Lowell Bergman to find out about it, and he said, “Why are you worried about that? You’ll be broadcasting with Washington Post TV on the web in a few years.”

Another idea came to me about games. I was investigating a murder at Starbucks and it was an 18-month hunt for the killer, and I got tapes from the interrogations, and thought I could almost do a game with that material. But I pulled back from it by the editor who didn’t want to lose it from the magazine for the web.

When we were doing the Citizen K Street series, we wanted to do it on the web because we had unlimited space. We could do 260 parts! That is the opportunity and the challenge. Next time, we hope we get more hits. We also have an investigative blog, and are trying to have a conversation with the reader. What online lacks is its Woodward and Bernstein, a breakthrough project.

Q: What about Wikileaks?

Jeff Leen: It doesn’t compare. Josh Marshall, a lot of what he did was aggregation, just too many blog posts to get through it. Josh describes it as an omniscient way of looking at things. We are thinking about doing that at the Post, but everything requires tremendous resources. We added a blog without adding staff, which is very hard to do.

David Washburn: My question is so much of what works online, citizen journalists, crowdsourcing, runs counter to what our grizzled editors say. Keep your stories to yourself. Are we rushing too much to go on the web?

Jonathan Landman, NY Times: I’m all about thinking things through. If you do, you can mobilize your readers, and think about how you do it, but do it in a way that doesn’t just throw things out there. Wikileaks is a good example of that. Our job is to add value. I don’t think these are things to consider.

Jeff Leen: I think the jury is still out about crowdsourcing, I still don’t see the Pentagon Papers. If it was the be all end all, we would all be doing it. Everyone talks about the Ft. Myers sewer project, and I can see that, but I don’t know if that can be done on bigger projects.

Paul Grabowicz: An investigative piece can be broken into pieces, with links to more information online. You can do much more

Jonathan Landman: It’s easy to get carried away with these things. And I usually waggle my finger at everyone in the newsroom about digital things. If you are somewhere interviewing someone, and you have a videocamera, why not do that. It’s simple.

Steve Talbot: Yes, people complain about having to do video, photos, audio, but it’s very rare that someone can do a one-man band. It takes a special skill to do video, and there’s a lot of bad video online.

Sharon Tiller: Everyone coming out of Berkeley has at least two skills. They are video reporters, or most of our broadcast stories are done by two people — one reporter and one video producer.

Q: Can the web bring in money for your operations?

Jonathan Landman: Well yes, it’s making money for us, but you have to be careful with that because the costs are still going to the newspaper. And it’s not self-sustaining, it’s not even close.

Paul Grabowicz: It’s very troubling, looking at the way newspaper companies are not making as much money. The nationals are not looking as bad. But in the regional metros, they are getting killed. And E&P had a view of time spent on newspaper sites and they were largely flat or down.

Landman: I would caution about that metric, because if someone is searching and searching on a site, they might spend more time, but it’s not a good experience. So measurement is still in its very early stages, it is very primitive.

Steve Talbot: This has been a surprisingly good discussion. [audience laughs]

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I’ll be back online, hopefully, tomorrow live-blogging the conference for one last panel on non-profits. Come back and check it out.

BERKELEY, CA — I am blogging live from the conference, “Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting,” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It is perhaps the most beautiful day outside here, with glorious blue skies, but investigative journalists are like vampires, hiding out in dark spaces when it’s warm and sunny outside. So here we are in an auditorium talking about the very serious subject of what’s going to happen to investigative journalism with newspapers cutting so many jobs.

The first panel is about newspapers and print, and includes some heavyweights: Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor; Len Downie, Washington Post executive editor; Laurie Hays, deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal; David Boardman, executive editor at the Seattle Times; and Clara Jeffery, co-editor of Mother Jones. Here are some highlights from the panel:

Bill Keller: There aren’t that many people doing exclusive web stuff, there’s Josh Marshall and Smoking Gun, but you need lawyers to help you. There can be great reporting done by one great reporter on a mission. I don’t see it as a threat I see it as a good thing. We will treat them as partners.

Larie Hays, WSJ: Our new owners are intensely interested in beating the sites and doing investigative stories. The investigative things are great, because stories can go on the Internet and newspapers don’t have to wait for the presses to run.

Len Downie: We’re getting much better at linking to outside sources, including competitors as well.

Bill Keller: We’ve come to take journalism schools more seriously. [audience laughs] No, we used to hire people according to clips and the academic background isn’t as important. I didn’t go to journalism school, there used to be a grizzled editor who would help young reporters figure it out, but those grizzled editors are gone now so the schools are more important.

Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones: There used to be more beginning positions at newspapers and smaller magazines have scaled down their staff jobs. All these places that feed the Pulitzer winners at bigger papers — those sources are drying up, and I find that worrisome.

Q: How willing are people on the Internet to read long-form 7000 word pieces? How do we do these long features?

Len Downie: Pew found that people will follow to the end of stories online. The story has to be compelling enough to get people to keep going, and we found that was the case with Walter Reed. We did a 27-part series on washingtonpost.com about how a lobbying firm operates. It wasn’t our most read piece on the web, but in the community of lobbyists it was intensely read, and people argued about them in comments. We have another experiment like that coming that will be even more read.

You can do other things on the web, we did a series on IEDs, and it included video interviews with soldiers in Iraq, very dramatic, how you approach buildings and not get blown up.

David Boardroom, Seattle Times: I think longer stories actually are better in print. We want people to read the story in print and then to go online to the web to read more, to read the whole thing.

Len Downie: Getting people to go back and forth between the mediums is hard to do. We have a lot of print-only readers who resent it when we send them to the web. But we do have the opportunity to get web readers to start reading print again.

Q: Investigative reporters have to be very enterprising. What happens when they spend a lot of time on something that doesn’t pan out. Can that continue in this day and age?

Bill Keller: It is continuing. People who do this drill a lot of dry holes. The economic forces and dismissive attitudes about attention spans of American readers, and they hit you saying ‘Can we afford to have that staff?’

Len Downie: It is a problem now because you need to figure out whether to keep going on a story or not. This tension was always there. I remember as a young investigative reporter in the ’60s I had to convince my editor to keep going on something.

David Boardroom: It does require us as the leaders of newsrooms to impose more discipline. We have to pick our spots. We have a relatively small group of people who specialize in this and we make a discipline of picking the right stories.

Clara Jeffery: We wanted to do 24/7 coverage on the web, but you might go down rabbit holes and the story might not materialize, and that was a crucial decision for us adding more staff reporters.

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Interestingly, the big newspaper editors (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) didn’t seem to think there was much of a crisis in investigative journalism at newspapers — at least in their houses. I’m not going to make it a drinking game, but Keller did throw out the first comment about there not being very much investigative journalism online. He must have missed my post yesterday with the big honking list of what’s happened online.

Again, I’ll be one of the questioners for the web panel here, so if you have burning questions to ask, I will pass them on the panel. Drop the question in the comments below.

Broadcasting Panel

Up next: Broadcasting Panel, with Jeff Fager of “60 Minutes”; David Fanning of PBS Frontline; Brian Ross of ABC News; Daniel Zwerdling of NPR; and Anna Werner of KPIX in San Francisco.

Intro for David Fanning: He won 41 Emmys among other awards. Wow.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is in the house? Why? He was out in the hallway talking to Bill Keller of the New York Times, bad-mouthing Microsoft, from what I overheard (and Twittered as well). I wonder if Schmidt is hoping that by being friendly with investigative types they won’t go after Google? Hmmm.

Now the Broadcast Panel:

Q: We’ve all heard the woes of investigative reporting. What is the biggest hurdle? Financial? Political?

Jeff Fager, CBS: It’s amazing how many less people are doing this at other networks. There’s Brian Ross at ABC and I don’t know who’s doing it at NBC. It’s very expensive and very hard. It takes a long time and there’s not a lot of patience or money in TV news. It’s amazing how much celebrity and crime has become part of the news. We are doing less celebrity coverage now [at “60 Minutes”] because it’s being done everywhere else. A lot of broadcast investigative reporting, if it isn’t done well, it doesn’t keep the viewers. I think the risk involved is huge as well. Every network has been hit with a mistake.

It’s amazing what happened with Lowell Bergman at CBS [with the tobacco report being smothered]. I haven’t had that experience at CBS.

Brian Ross, ABC: The biggest obstacle for me is legal. The investigative reporting is what sets us apart and gives us value.

Daniel Zwerdling: Investigative reporting has not been a big part of NPR, but my bosses, I’m happy to say, now want to do more investigative reporting. So far it’s been the exception to the rule. I was often in my cubicle, going off doing my projects, but there’s been pressure for me to fill the airwaves. When I was gone for a month, there was pressure building for me. Then the VP of news said he was getting rid of my position about 5 years ago, and they wanted to become the CNN of radio.

There was a staff rebellion. They hired a new VP of news, and then he got fired, and finally, for the first time, my boss, Ellen Weiss, told me I could take off for five months. And when the stories came out, they used them to make money, it was a profit-making venture. Oh, I forgot! And then Joan Kroc gave us a quarter of a billion dollars. [audience laughs] We’re taking baby steps, but it’s an exciting time at NPR.

It was a cultural and financial problem at NPR.

David Fanning: The difficulty for us is we haven’t been as good of an investigative unit as we could be. The commitment to do the long haul reporting in TV is very hard to do. It’s financial, and we have a reportory company and they have to turn around and do more films, so we’ve been aware that we’re reaching a crisis point and the budget for individual films has dropping. So we set up an enterprise fund so we can go drill wells [go for deep stories], and we can partner with regional newspapers who can spend a few months digging then come back and do the film.

Jeff Fager: The tobacco story [by Lowell Bergman] was the lowest moment in the history of CBS, but I don’t see it happening now with the current ownership. No, it couldn’t happen now. We are incredibly independent. We don’t ever get a call about content. And we do tough stories about our own advertisers.

Brian Ross, ABC: If you tell a source you will keep them confidential, you can’t really back that up. We have confidential sources and you can make the promise to keep them confidential, but you won’t be able to keep them. The Federal Shield law, now John McCain and Obama and Clinton all say they would support it, and that would be a great day if it happened.

Q: More people get their news from local television. I looked at the top stories, and they were about UFOs, bank robberies and underaged stripper spurs national interest. [audience laughs] News directors around the country are hit with this kind of data. I know the issue is time. When you ratchet it down to 3 minutes, trying to tell a complex story, how do you get that up to 4 and a half minutes?

Anna Werner, KPIX: It’s a process of negotiation, and you have to show that you have the goods. Fortunately our news director was the former managing editor at the SF Chronicle, so he likes real news. He likes investigation and has kept the investigative unit despite the financial pressures. You have to have a good story told well. Some stories, follow-up stories, are 2 and a half minutes, even shorter if it doesn’t merit the time.

Q: NBC has a series called “To Catch a Predator.” What do you think about that?

Jeff Fager, CBS: It’s disturbing on many levels. There are legal issues, and there was a case involving a suicide. I think the problem is that they are doing police work, and it would be a problem for us.

David Fanning: It’s voyerism it’s not journalism. And they are using an outside group to do the work. The issue of predators turns out to be a tremendously exaggerated threat. The real threat to teenagers is among themselves, bullying and other things. The whole premise of the NBC show is built on a false assumption. Teenagers are the ones who say that they rarely pursue these [enticements].

Brian Ross, ABC: NBC could not sell it, the advertisers didn’t like that. They were so close with law enforcement. The correspondent had done some good work, but he doesn’t identify himself as a reporter, he waits 15 or 20 minutes. When we watched that, we thought our people could never do that, we would identify ourselves. It was the arrangements for the raid, and who was calling the shots, and it appeared to be the correspondents as much as the local police. And NBC wanted to get the arrest done quickly so they could get out of town and lower costs.