Good news this morning. Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post have secured $15 million in investment capital to expand their operations. (The fact that they did it in this recessionary environment shows the degree of their success over just a few short years -- I am in awe). But the best part of the news is this:
The money will finance the expansion of HuffPo, as it is known, into the provision of local news across the United States and into more investigative journalism. And it will ensure that Ms Huffington's influence continues to spread across the US political scene.
Newspapers, as we all know, are dying. And while we can gain some satisfaction in seeing the last days of the ossified news operations that failed to report on the Bush administration from 2000 to 2005, those operations still finance one important societal function that you can't find anywhere else -- relentless, principled investigative journalism that is dedicated to ferreting out government and corporate corruption. Great investigative journalists (think Seymour Hersh), afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. We need them and can't afford to lose them.
And that is why I am cautiously optimistic that Ms. Huffington, who now has a multi-year track record of financing a blog operation prosperous enough to pay salaries to dozens of people, will go "all in" on investigative journalism, and pay the journalists who are losing their jobs in the dying newspaper industry. She has already gotten started down that road (Sam Stein and Nico Pitney do great work), but it would be great if she could do more.
And, when I say investigative journalism, I don't mean politico-style, where getting a gossip morsel from a White House aide counts as an investigation (although Politico definitely deserves credit for its exposure of the Sarah Palin Neiman Marcus extravaganza). I mean paying reporters to spend years cultivating sources deep within the federal government and within other powerful entities, and who spend years studying and learning the subject matters on which they report. If that's the kind of investigative reportage that Ms. Huffington will finance, then I will be a very happy man indeed. And if not, I'll ask her now through this blog medium: Ms. Huffington, please go "all in" on serious investigative journalism. We need it. You need it. The country needs it. Thank you.