To most of us, the journalism world looks to be in a state of more or less permanent upheaval (and not the good kind, generally speaking). But Brant Houston, the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, has a more tempered view. While not sanguine about the staff and budget cuts roiling newspapers and TV news, he notes that those are only parts of the much broader canvas of “the media.”

The day I spoke with him about the state of reporting, open sourcing and other issues, he was talking to a conference of New America Media, a national group for ethnic news organizations founded by Pacific News Service. “I’m seeing an incredible amount of passion and incredibly well-sourced people in communities where there is deep concern over injustice,” he said. “I’m worried about the TV networks and newspapers, but at the same time I’m seeing tremendous growth in smaller community newspapers. They’re ready to go. They want to know more investigative techniques. They want to get networked. They want to know where documents are. So it’s hard to talk about one big storm cloud coming across the horizon.” His excerpted remarks follow.

Still, there’s no denying storm clouds are hovering over important segments of the media. Really, we’ve got thunder, lightning, hail and tornadoes. How is investigative journalism holding up?

At least twice a year I get asked, “is investigative journalism dying or dead?” The executive director of IRE has traditionally been asked that, as far as I know, since the `80s. I was told to be prepared for those interviews every year. There are cyclical parts of it. I think broadcast is having the most difficult time it’s had in years right now. You’ve got entertainment pressure on the news divisions. NBC’s Dateline, which was doing a lot of interesting things, has changed a great deal – I don’t even know if they’ll survive. … So there’s no question you can see weaknesses within investigative journalism right now, we’ve got some real challenges.

On the print side, because we’ve got larger numbers in newsrooms, and because investigative journalism often requires personal commitment, we’re still seeing lots of good stories. Do you see as many I-teams? I don’t think so. They’ve been hit by some cutbacks. So you’re much more to individual beat reporters now, or one or two investigative reporters.

When I asked about the open source idea and NewAssignment.net, Houston likened the concept to computer-assisted reporting. Now, the use of CAR - databases, mapping, and other digital tools - is routine at almost any media outlet, and an entire support infrastructure exists at places like IRE to educate journalists on its uses. But, of course, it didn’t exist before the advent of desktop computers. Now there is an ocean of datapoints. Secretive government officials can’t do much about it. Open sourcing will generate still more.

I think journalists surviving in the 21st century are going to have to get even better at dealing with tremendous amounts of information, and I think a whole set of journalists have been preparing for this for some time. There were only a few practitioners of database analysis in the 1970s and early `80s. Then there were probably a hundred by the late `80s, and then a few hundred more, and now you’ve got easily more than a thousand. And you’ve got thousands of people with some variation of those skills. Journalists have always had to deal with finding the real signal in the noise. Now we have to be more skilled to screen out the noise and find out what’s really going on.

Data and databases are like water. Information’s like water. It’s sort of like having a roof leak in a house. It’s very hard to keep water from coming in once you’ve got a roof leak, and we’ve had – our society has had – millions of roof leaks. They try to stop it up one place, water’s going to get in another place.

Still, he says, it took a while before CAR became widely accepted. Sometimes it’s still not seamlessly integrated with other forms of journalism. Some see CAR as an end in itself, others as an arcane sidelight. This is a lesson for NewAssignment, which will attempt some new forms and techniques, but still rely on the principles of Journalism 101.

Just because we’ve got a new way to do it, doesn’t mean that’s the only way we do it. That’s one of the things I ran into when I started pushing CAR. Either one, they were so devoted they thought it was the only way to go, or two, they were so against it that they would say, ‘you’re leaving out shoe leather reporting’ or whatever. I never left those out. I think the approach to journalism is, you work in the lab and you work in the field. The field work, you take back, you reflect on the lab work, and the lab work reflects on the field work, and you become a much stronger journalist. It’s just another tool.

I think the open source idea is fantastic. The mainstream media, through cutbacks and corporate ownership and migration of staff, has lost some of its community sourcing and the open source concept, where you rely on citizens to provide information, is very exciting, There’s tremendous impact on our ability to accumulate information, collate information. And citizens want to be journalists, really learn some of the standards, skills and techniques. I think the issue will be, as it always is in journalism, accuracy and credibility. When it comes to Wikipedia, you’re getting what happens progressively in a new medium, which is an enthusiasm and romance with that new medium, and then a realization that you’re getting a lot of inaccuracies and credibility’s being cut down. So I think you’ve got to figure out how to check things for inaccuracy and correct them.

If you are a fledgling news organization, errors can seriously damage you before you’re out of the gate. NewAssignment is developing open-source tools to sort the bad information; unlike Wikipedia, the idea is not pure open source, but to to combine professional expertise with amateur input. And there’s some experience that shows that online communities can themselves police for this sort of thing. We’ll see.

Houston also says the idea of journalistic objectivity revered by the mainstream media has become a kind of prison, and that new, well-grounded ventures have an opportunity to start fresh.

“Objectivity” was probably well-meant, but it’s been distorted, become so thin – sometimes meaning: Opinionless. Mediocre. Without a point of view. Disingenuous. Cowardly. I don’t want to discuss objectivity. I want to discuss credibility, accuracy. Is something as thorough about a subject as it can possibly be? I think objectivity has been held up as a model and it became straw person, to be beaten on. It ended up being used in a number of cases as pure self-deception. Everybody’s got a point of view. The idea is to know what your point of view is, to be open to other points of view, and to be open to your hypothesis being proved wrong by your findings.

Now, what to cover? And how?

I think anything that the government’s doing that’s secret, that affects a lot of people, and they won’t release data on it, could be a tremendous story. For example, take something like baggage handling. More people are traveling right now. It’s not the end of the world, but it does affect a lot of people, how baggage is handled by the airlines. Right now, we’re relying mostly on government stats, self-reported stats, which are pretty bad. What if, with open sourcing, suddenly, you were able to collate 50,000 passengers’ experiences in the past year in some kind of format? Well now, the journalist or the citizen who wants to report on it, suddenly has a powerful tool. When the airline says, we don’t know how much of a problem it is, or whatever, what if each of those people supplies four or five paragraphs on their experience. You could pull up a form and say, did you have a bag lost last year by the airline? Which airline? Did you get it back? Then you could say, tell us your experience. I could see transportation reporters, travel reporters, and just travelers – they couldn’t wait to get into something like this.

Given that the Internet form is quite different from dead trees, Houston urges writers to embrace the convergence of moving images and text.

I’m pushing journalists to read books about writing screenplays. In a screenplay, you get some dialogue and you’ve got to think about what you’re seeing at that point. The web gives you that ability. You don’t have to describe. When the Los Angeles Times did its harrier jets series, you didn’t have to describe the jet. The website opened up with the harrier jet rising on the page. That took care of 20 graphs of description.

Note to the LA Times: I remember this cool graphic. But I can’t find this much-lauded series on your website. (It’s on the Pulitzer site, sans graphic.)

I was struck, as with a couple of other conversations on the topic, by the heady mix of promise and peril in all this. Can we take advantage of it? Just speaking temperamentally, can we stand it?

I continue to be pretty optimistic about it, and that’s at the root of investigative journalism. Investigative journalists are a bunch of optimists. They’ll find what’s going on, believe things can change for the better, that people care.

Really? I thought we were a bunch of geeky cynics, eternally griping about stuff, especially our own future.

If you’re only studying the old industry, then you will see nothing but decline. It’s strange. Journalists seem to be advocates of change quite often. But on a personal level, they’re often locked in the past. And the discussion has centered so much on how to save newspapers, when the discussion should have been, how do newspapers and newsrooms become part of a vibrant future? When you talk to journalists, almost always they tell you everything’s going to hell. And yet they get up every day and do these stories and get outraged about things.