Can in-depth journalism survive the changes now engulfing newspapers, TV and other “old media” – the demands of Wall Street, the public’s fragmenting attention in a world of expanding digital choices, the media’s own flat-footedness in dealing with all this flux? And how can you harness that flux by using the unique properties of the Internet – wired social networks, digital technologies, do-it-yourself reporting and blogging – to do in-depth journalism, as we’re trying to do with NewAssignment.net? I sat down recently and chatted about those questions with Charles Lewis, the founder and longtime director of the Center for Public Integrity, one of the nation’s premier independent, non-profit journalism organizations. Lewis left CPI in 2004 and is now Journalist in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C. – one among several hats that he wears. I excerpt his remarks below.

Lewis has been studying large-scale trends in the journalism industry – audience, readership, the future. To him (as to many of us) the current journalism landscape is a mixture of the appalling, the unknown, and the tantalizing – so much that our conversation induced a case of whiplash. At one point, he was describing the present moment as “a very, very deeply worrying time.” A few minutes later, he was saying, “I see this is as an absolutely, beyond words, thrilling time.”

NewAssignment has a particular interest in Chuck Lewis because he’s a pioneer in the nonprofit journalism model, and doing ambitious investigative journalism that touches people’s daily lives. He also thinks – as we’re hoping – that readers can dig up a lot of interesting stuff. During the 1990s, for instance, CPI put out a how-to book titled Citizen Muckraking. On a related project, Lewis and his colleagues became fascinated by the intense interest and involvement of people – some individually, some as members of local environmental groups – battling polluting industries near their homes.

We noticed that the first seeds of interest by ordinary folks who noticed their neighbors dying of cancer and they started asking questions, going to meetings and talking to public officials, are the exact same first things that journalists do. … Based on my limited experience I am pretty certain that there’s an immense world out there that is waiting to speak and has an incredible amount of knowledge.

But first, back to the appalling.

Lewis is distressed at the rounds of restructuring, layoffs and buyouts hitting newspapers and TV news operations. Investigations (and more generally, in-depth journalism) aren’t valued much by the business models employed by newspapers and TV executives, he says – quite the opposite. Meanwhile, Internet-based media ventures have yet to sink much money into original journalism, let alone ambitious reporting projects.

As newspaper editorial staffs shrink – or, put differently, as owners harvest their investments in order to keep their profits above 20 percent, which is double the S&P 500 level (they call it harvesting – we can maybe call it pillaging) – the industry is adapting to its uncertain future, which is obviously going to be entirely virtual. Newspapers will cease to exist on paper over time. The question’s not, is it going to happen – it’s when.

You’ll notice international reporting and investigative reporting are the most expensive reporting, they’re the riskiest reporting, for either litigation or journalist safety or both, and they’re the ones that have been diminishing over time. There’s been a hollowing-out of that kind of coverage. There just is.

So far, big papers – the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in particular – have remained more or less intact, and still produce ambitious investigative pieces. Their public-private ownership structures have protected them to some degree, but Lewis doesn’t think that can last.

It’s pretty clear they will not be able to continue. All three of those papers have had to cut back, had some reductions. The one that will probably be the first to go, conventional wisdom is the Wall Street Journal, because the pattern with families is, they break up. They begin to sell off for the money in descending generations.

That brings us to the unknown. With the paper disappearing, whither the quaint craft of newspapering?

There’s a widespread hope that newspapering – the thoughtful, careful process of editorial information-gathering – that that will go on and continue into the future and be part of journalism. The disconcerting signs of the new journalism are that most readers of news sites stay at the home page, think they’ve read the paper by reading one story, don’t dip down in. The current earliest adult generation is consuming news at far less of a level than preceding generations – there is evidence to suggest that. News as a value in our society is under some substantial challenge – at least ‘news’ as we have heretofore come to define it.

So, we have more news outlets than we ever had, but we actually have less substance in the news. Most [Internet-only news sites] are headline packaging services. When the Googles and the Yahoos express interest in the news, they’re not talking about generating original reporting. Google’s principal mission is to set up automated systems that don’t require human beings over time. So, when you look at that and when you look at issues about outsourcing reporting itself – which has already begun, and has been going on for a few years – that will only increase along with artificial intelligence and other technologies. In that sense, it is a very, very deeply worrying time.

Depressing? Yes. But then we started talking about the possibilities. If the traditional bastions of investigative journalism see their capacities erode, it will leave that much more muck to rake.

There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of important investigative stories that are desperately crying out for coverage all over the world, every day. So it’s a little bit ludicrous on its face to suggest that those two to three papers can handle the load editorially. The fact is it’s humanly and otherwise impossible to do. What does it mean? It means there are huge openings you could drive a fleet of trucks through.

Maybe you can reduce it, in green eyeshade terms for Wall Street, to a niche market, but there will always be people in the world who will require this kind of information on various subjects. I don’t have any doubt that investigative reporting will always live on.

Finally, the thrilling. Technologies are emerging so rapidly, and driving not just changes in reading or viewing habits, but all kinds of social behavior, that Lewis sees a kind of rolling revolution.

I don’t see this as a despairing time. I see this is as an absolutely, beyond words, thrilling time, because this is where television news was in the late 1940s. Except this is larger than television – that was just one medium. So I actually think this is far larger and far more relentless than that. And that was huge. It opened up an entire new world to the masses, a mass audience around the world.

Lewis doesn’t quite know what to make of the whole social networking/smart crowd phenomenon as a journalism tool, but thinks the NewAssignment.Net concept has tremendous potential. He saw some of that in 2003 when CPI posted the 120-page, full text of the Bush administration’s proposed Patriot Act revisions on its website, against the wishes of the Justice Department. Within days, it racked up millions of hits.

That thing moved around the world in minutes. It was astonishing. The Justice Department had to issue a statement within 40 minutes of our posting. The power of this thing is enormous – if it’s still not fully understood.”

This is a special time. We have a very large global independent laboratory right now and everyone should be testing models, testing ideas, and testing means of distribution and ways to create more substantive journalism in the online context, because there’s clearly a need for it and it will evolve. It’s not a question, it’s an inevitability. The question is, what model will live on and endure.

When you say social networking, there’s good news and bad news. … The good news is you have a global reach, potentially, in breathtaking ways, and you will be able to gain access to expertise that most journalists do not gain expertise to no matter how hard they try. The other side of it, one that I worry about in social networking, is all investigative reporting is potentially actionable. … the quality control, vetting, chain of custody. The internal kind of sausage making by which newsroom assumptions are made by editors and reporters – there is no model that I’m aware of yet for social networking. That maybe is what’s going to happen here [with NewAssignment.Net], and it will emerge. But the challenge is you still have to have an internal quality control mechanism in a centralized way at some place before you publish.

That idea is, indeed, central to the concept of NewAssignment.net. We aim to combine the talents of citizen journalists, volunteer experts and journalists, professional staffers, and fact checkers. How it will all come together is, of course, a work in progress. A central question is “sorting and sifting” – if people across a city, or state, or the United States and beyond, are sending in tips, photos, data, personal stories – how do you efficiently cull the interesting from the irrelevant, and the truly dynamite from the merely interesting? As it happens, Lewis recalled, CPI once did a project called Harmful Error, run by Steve Weinberg (now at IRE). The Center used its home page to appeal for information on prosecutors across the country.

One novelty was simply coming right out at the beginning and laying out the aim of the investigation.

It was a very gutsy thing to say and to do as you’re starting. For most investigative reporters who have squirrel like tendencies, it’s exceedingly unusual, for me at least, to do that. I thought it was a brilliant idea, though so I said let’s do it. We also knew that we would get every inmate in America writing us. Poor Steve Weinberg – he had thousands of ‘innocent’ inmates. They’re all ‘innocent,’ of course. We had to sort through each letter and respond to each letter.

I don’t mean to say that there won’t be fantastic information that comes in … and information that you would not usually get – I don’t doubt that for a second. And the expertise levels – journalists have this ridiculous conceit that they know more than anyone else, when in fact they’re clueless for the most part. So of course there’s going to be thousands of people with infinite levels of expertise and knowledge, and they’re going to emerge, and that’s the genius of this. The question is more of an infrastructure issue, a management issue, the legal and corporate aspects, even in a nonprofit, of the responsibility for what is published, for that sorting and sifting. There would be a bit of a logjam there internally to sort and sift – it’s going to be more elaborate than heretofore seen.

I think technology makes a difference here. It’s easier to communicate more or less instantaneously, organize people and obtain digitized information than ever in the past. Look at some of the things the Sunlight Foundation has been doing already. People can, to some degree, also self-organize if they belong to a pre-existing social network. So I think – and hope – it will be a less significant a challenge as Lewis describes.

What about the stories? I asked Lewis specifically about covering Washington – Congress and the federal government, and their interlocking relationships with interest groups.

I think that most Americans outside those elites don’t think anyone talks to them. No one gathers information relevant to them, the political class doesn’t speak to them – that’s why 100 million Americans, half the electorate, routinely don’t vote even in presidential elections, and it’s much worse than that, 60 or 70 percent, in other elections – It’s because the political and media elites don’t address anything remotely similar to what they care about.

He reeled off a few: airline safety, pesticide safety, food safety, air pollution, water rights. Pensions. All those cell phone surcharges and taxes above the base rate.

We also talked about a central issue of the moment: government outsourcing. The basic nature of government is changing. From military functions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, to the Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans levees, more and more traditional government functions are being outsourced to private firms. This raises all kinds of questions, starting with basic accountability, political influence, etc., and, of course, voting machines.

The fact that the biggest symbol of small-d democracy that we have is when we allow our leadership to change hands voluntarily and peacefully periodically with these things called elections and that we would outsource that to some private company with their own secret codes and technologies that no one inside government understands, is, I find, utterly peculiar. Forget the controversy this company or that company, there is a legitimate question about governance. There’s actually a very large discussion here about what is government anymore. What does it do? Pretty soon it’s not going to fight wars. Some years ago it stopped delivering mail. It doesn’t hold elections anymore. Tell me, exactly, what do they do?

There’s also the nexus between universities and the government.

Colleges and universities, while their students were protesting the war in Iraq, were all getting contracts. This has not been done by anyone, the billions and billions and billions of dollars that have been moved to universities, in black budget military defense and other kinds of contracts throughout the nation, basically either assisting the Pentagon directly or indirectly in its policies and its efforts. It’s not unlike the anti-apartheid movement in the early 80s, when those universities were investing in South Africa. There’s a lot of neat stuff like that, and that’s every community in America – how many of them get federal money for their universities?

Finally, there are a lot of obscure, yet very interesting collections of data out there. Many are online. Those that aren’t are still much more likely than ever before to be in digital form.

There’s a lot of datasets that most people don’t know about. I was excited to hear a few years ago, that the USDA has a database of all the bad meat in America that’s been recalled. Who knew? I had no idea. I don’t know if it’s online or if it’s there internally – but there are hundreds and hundreds of databases with massive amounts of data that nobody knows about or ever looks at. You could dine off the databases.