Both Nieman Journalism Lab and Mother Jones have looked at the cost of the New York Times Magazine article on the situation at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, produced in conjunction with ProPublica. The 13,000 word piece was estimated by NYTM editor Gerald Marzorati to have cost $400,000 to create, ten times as much as an average NYT Magazine cover.

Clara Jeffery at Mother Jones and Zachary Seward at Nieman Lab came up with somewhat different totals of the actual cost of the story. Jeffrey, having corresponded with Marzorati, put the cost at $394,000 and Seward, who spoke to Steve Engelberg, a ProPublica editor, lists costs totalling between $188,000 and $253,000, plus editing and legal costs. It must also be noted that reporter Sheri Fink did produce some other stories during this period, therefore her salary, which is included in the totals, was not entirely expended on this story.

Regardless, it is a huge amount of money.

And the story meets all the criteria of good investigative journalism. As Jeffrey points out, "it reveals facts that many other news stories as well as a grand jury investigation failed to unearth," and it "could result in criminal prosecutions and should result in a national conversation among doctors and hospitals around their triage and emergency procedures."

Even if the story is a great work that has the potential to make a difference, is it a reasonable amount of money to spend on one piece - could more have been done with it for that cost? Or is that simply the price of good investigative journalism? Jeffrey believes it is: "reading the piece, the price tag didn't surprise me," she writes. And besides, it is not just text, ProPublica offers extra multimedia features on its site, such as an interactive timeline, an interactive floorplan of Memorial, and an interview with Sheri Fink.

Seward offers some other figures for comparison:

"The New York Times' Baghdad bureau costs $3 million a year, while The Washington Post's drains $1 million; The Miami Herald's audit of the 2000 presidential election results in Florida put the paper out $850,000; The St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact project has been estimated in the high six figures."

The Memorial story may be unusually expensive, but these figures show that journalism is a costly enterprise, and this is the point that Jeffrey and her co-editor Monika Bauerlein make in their article "The Price of Truth." They attack theories that journalism will survive without its institutions, stressing that reporting itself costs money. As yet, nonprofits do not have any where close to the resources that major newspapers have, and those who want to fund journalism are hard to find.

So what is the solution? Jeffrey and Bauerlein assert that nobody actually knows what to do. They admit that the US might well end up without "the quantity and quality of journalism we've enjoyed." But this, few would deny, would be disastrous. The one option they suggest is the strategy employed by Mother Jones: ask readers for donations. This is a far from ideal solution as income is not guaranteed. However, it is working for Mother Jones, and while waiting for a more permanent solution to be found, it could be worth a try.

Source: Mother Jones (1), (2), Nieman Journalism Lab