Here at CIR we are as concerned about a sustainable future for investigative reporting as we are about producing high-impact journalism that is important to you. For more than three decades, CIR has relied largely on foundations to support our reporting. We are hard at work now to identify more diverse funding sources, including building our individual donor base. We know that our readers, viewers and listeners are a diverse group and that, if you chose to support our work financially, you will have equally diverse goals for your giving.

Some of you may be able to contribute $100, $500, or even $1,000 a year to support our hard hitting investigative work (you can do that over here. Others may be interested in supporting a specific investigation, like the Civil Rights Cold Case Project or The Price of Sex. Still others of you may want one simple way to support a variety of sites you like and depend on.

Introducing Kachingle, one of the first crowdsourcing services that you can use to support your favorite online news sites and blogs. Kachingle is simple, user-centric and user-controlled alternative to cumbersome subscriptions, paywalls, and pay-per-article plans some media outlets are considering. It requires virtually no effort on your part - you just become a Kachingler, giving $5 a month through PayPal, and then click the Kachingle medallion on the sites you want to support. No credit cards, no passwords. Kachingle will keep track of your visits to each of the sites you've selected and at the end of each month, your monthly pay-in to Kachingle (minus small service fees) will be distributed proportionally among your chosen sites based on your visits.

We hope you will become a Kachingler, helping to support journalism's future online, including the time and resource intensive investigative reporting that CIR produces. Your support alone won't save investigative reporting but if enough people decide to start supporting the journalism they care about, collectively we have the power to help ensure that this kind of reporting thrives in the future. Once you become a Kachingler, you can share which sites you support with colleagues, friends, and family (and soon Twitter followers and others), and turn them on to the sites you visit.

Consider signing up and beginning to support CIR and the other sites you like today.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Craig Pyes will speak about prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy on Tuesday, February 2, from 4-6 p.m. More info here:

More than 160 detainees have died in American military custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, many classified as homicides. But were these deaths properly investigated? Craig Pyes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting launched an Army probe into two detainee deaths and their cover-up by a U.S. Special Forces team in Afghanistan, will argue that cases of homicide where abuse is suspected should be re-examined because the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) did not vigorously pursue suspected war crimes. Pyes will discuss his own multi-year investigation of a rogue Special Forces detachment in Afghanistan that adapted harsh interrogation techniques promoted by the Pentagon, that were later judged responsible for the vast majority of prisoner abuse. Ten detainees held at the base said they had been tortured, yet questions remain unanswered about the culpability of the Special Forces team six years later, despite the decision by the U.S. Army to close the criminal investigation - not once, but three times.

Craig Pyes is a human rights investigator and an award-winning investigative reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. As a special investigator for the non-profit Crimes of War Project, Pyes looked into possible breaches of U.S. and International law in the armed conflict in Afghanistan. While working as an investigative reporter for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, he wrote about the looming threat of the al Qaeda terrorism network both before and after the September 11th attacks on America, and profiled the corrosive and national security effects of drug corruption in Mexico. During the civil war in El Salvador, he and a colleague were the only reporters to reveal the inner workings of Salvadoran death squads that had killed more than 40,000 people with impunity. Pyes has received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Los Angeles Times, and the Latin American Studies Association. In 2002, he was a finalist for Harvard's Shorenstein Center's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Currently based in Los Angeles, he investigates human rights abuses for lawyers and non-profits, and is a court-appointed death penalty mitigation specialist.

An important new report sheds light on a common challenge faced by journalists around the world: fear of British libel laws. The UK's laws are far more friendly to litigants than those in the United States (and most other developed countries), and global figures and businesses--recently, in Iceland, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Ukraine--have increasingly sought to have their libel cases heard there, according to the report published last week by the Center for International Media Assistance. The report's author, Drew Sullivan, a founder of the Sarajevo-based Bosnia-Herzegovina Center for Investigative Reporting identifies a disturbing trend: Publications around the world, including those in the United States, must increasingly vet their stories according to British libel laws due to the potential for global distribution made possible on the internet.

Many thanks to Drew, who's work with the Balkan CIR we've highlighted in the past. He's pulled together the growing body of evidence that British libel laws--as well as those of Ireland, France and Australia--have created a form of "libel tourism", in which litigants search for venues most likely to gain a positive verdict, often irregardless of the truth of allegations in a story. One hopeful sign he's also identified: The state of New York recently passed a law ("Rachel's Law," prompted by the case of U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld, who refused to accept a UK judgment against her favoring a Saudi financier she'd investigated) which blocks state courts from enforcing civil damages from a UK libel suit if the judgment falls short of ensuring authors the same free speech rights they have in the United States. A similar bill passed the US House of Representatives last year, and is now making its way through the Senate--which would establish an important principle protecting US journalists (at least) from the far reach of British libel laws.

Download the report here.

About twenty percent of women who attend college will become victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate, according to a new report funded by the Department of Justice. A nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that a culture of silence at many universities prevents many victims from reporting incidents.

The first and second articles in a series were published this week on CPI's website, along with audio slideshows—interviews with women who reflect on their own experiences. From CPI:

Many victims don’t report at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault; one national study found that more than 95 percent of students who are sexually victimized do not report to police or campus officials. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That frequently leaves students to deal with campus judiciary processes so shrouded in secrecy that they can remain mysterious even to their participants.

Critics question whether faculty, staff, and students should even adjudicate what amounts to a felony crime. But these internal proceedings actually grow from two federal laws, known as Title IX and the Clery Act, which require schools to respond to allegations of sexual assault on campus and to offer key rights to victims.

Institutional barriers compound the problem of silence, and few victims in fact make it to a campus hearing. Those who do come forward can encounter secret disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations. At times, school policies and practices can lead students to drop complaints, or submit to gag orders—a practice deemed illegal. College administrators generally believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with highly sensitive allegations, but the Center’s investigation has found that these processes have little transparency or accountability, and regularly result in little or no punishment for alleged assailants.

>> See the full project here: "Sexual Assault on Campus"

Long Island University is seeking nominees and submissions for The George Polk Awards, which are given for investigative work in print, radio, photojournalism, TV, and web. Entries must include two original clips or recordings (with two copies of printed text plus URLs for digital submissions). They should come with an explanatory letter and be postmarked no later than January 8, 2010.

The address for submissions is:
John Darnton, Curator
The George Polk Awards
Long Island University
The Brooklyn Campus
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201-5372

Visit the website for more information.

At least 142 journalists have been killed in the field in the last three years, according to data collected by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Most of those killed were reporting in conflict zones—notably Iraq, Somalia, and Pakistan.

A new project from FRONTLINE/World seeks to address the challenges journalists face while reporting from countries gripped by civil wars and violent conflicts:

This fall, FRONTLINE/World gathered a small panel of journalists and media representatives in New York to share experiences and discuss the challenges of covering conflict zones and repressive regimes.... With more journalists becoming the target of kidnappings and murders, and as video and images spread with lightening speed, the conversation centered on the question of how to protect reporters, fixers and sources, as well as the urgent need to develop a set of security protocols.

Visit the web portal, "Covering Conflict Zones," to watch highlights from the discussion and join the conversation online.

CIR board member Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, is making waves with a new report on the numerous challenges facing journalism in the United States: "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." Downie coauthored the report with sociologist Michael Schudson, who has joint appointments at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and UC San Diego. They make a powerful case for  more "accountability news reporting" of the kind that CIR has been doing for several decades.

Downie and Schudson put forward a number of recommendations, including urging universities to assume a more central role in doing reporting that traditionally newspapers have undertaken, and making information collected by local, state and federal governments more accessible to promote more informed citizen journalism. 

Their most controversial proposal—by far—is that the federal government subsidize local news coverage. The FCC, they argue, "should direct some of the money from the telephone bill surcharge—or from fees paid by radio and television licensees, or proceeds from auctions of telecommunications spectrum, or new fees imposed on Internet service providers—to finance a Fund for Local News that would make grants for advances in local news reporting and innovative ways to support it."

This is a variation on arguments made over the years by various observers, including a compelling article by John Nichols and Robert McChesney in The Nation earlier this year.     

If the United Kingdom can do it by underwriting the BBC with television license fees, why shouldn't we do something similar in the United States? The idea is not as outlandish as it may seem, as Nichols and McChesney write. It is one that dates back to the nation's founding. 

According to Nichols and McChesney:

Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.

A Fund for Local News is a terrific idea. Whether it should—or could—be underwritten by the United States government is another question altogether. Let the debate begin.

I first learned about the Pentagon Papers while xeroxing copies of documents stamped TOP SECRET and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. I was 22 years old, less than a year out of college. The Vietnam War was raging, the country was in turmoil, and I was a copy boy at The New York Times. 

One evening in early 1971, I got a phone call while at a friend's house. The caller asked for me and my friend handed me the phone. "Who's this?" I wondered, and how had they found me? "Robert?" someone whose voice I did not recognize, asked. "Yes?" I replied. "Come to Room 1111 at the Hilton Hotel tomorrow, bring enough clothes for a few weeks, and don't tell anyone where you're going." "What? Who the hell is this and what are you talking about?" I demanded.

It turned out the caller was a Times editor. I went to the Hilton, where a team of Times editors and reporters were secretly working on the Pentagon Papers project. I had been chosen as an editorial assistant for the project and within a few hours, after the publisher's office was closed for the day, I was xeroxing the Pentagon Papers, keeping track of them in two five-foot tall metallic green filing cabinets in a Manhattan hotel room.

Nearly thirty-seven years later, after working at The Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and San Francisco Chronicle I joined the Center for Investigative Reporting as its Executive Director in January of 2008. Since then, I've met Daniel Ellsberg, and the time we've spent swapping stories about those days has helped me realized that my early exposure to those documents, that historic story, and the reporting team of which I was a small part, helped frame my journalistic values. 

Individuals like Dan Ellsberg who, from inside government or corporations, come forward to help expose wrongdoing can make all the difference. They do so at potentially huge personal risk, because they believe that the truth must be told. When sources like Ellsberg are willing to come to journalists, their actions can lead to important and powerful change. 

The Most Dangerous Man in America is a reminder of a tumultuous time. The facts have changed but the issues the film raises certainly exist in today's even more complicated world. On a personal level, the film is a stirrer of emotion and memory. It made clear to me that I had a ringside seat to a unique moment in our history and was a reminder of how life's journeys and often fragile strands are interwoven in unexpected webs.  On a journalistic level, the film is a powerful reminder of the crucial role watchdog reporting plays in our democracy.

If you're in the Bay Area, I hope you will join us for the Mill Valley Film Festival screenings of The Most Dangerous Man in America on Sat. October 17, 6:45PM at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, or Sun. October 18, 3:15PM at CinéArts @ Sequoia 2. Click here for more information.

This inspiring documentary thriller traces its protagonist's journey from US Marine to upper-echelon Defense Department and Rand Corporation analyst to Vietnam War whistle-blower, while reminding us how democracy relies on our potentially “dangerous” men and women in and out of government.

Sat. October 17, 6:45PM, Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center 1
Sun. October 18, 3:15PM, CinéArts @ Sequoia 2

For tickets and more information, visit the Mill Valley Film Festival website.

tel: 877.874.6333

Check out CIR Executive Director Robert Rosenthal's blog post about his time working on the Pentagon Papers project at The New York Times.

The announcement that Warren Hellman is funding a new San Francisco-based nonprofit news organization is a huge shot in the arm for journalism and for the Bay Area. At the core of this new endeavor, according to key Hellman advisor Susan Hirsch, will be collaboration with news organizations large and small.  

This could not be happening in a better place or at a better time. The Bay Area historically has been a breeding ground for innovation, risk taking and creativity. There is great opportunity here to put those qualities to work to develop new, sustainable journalism models.

As Hellman recognizes, the future of journalism will rely on collaborations, something we are championing here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and especially with our new California Watch project. We look forward to working with the new group and its partners (and longtime CIR collaborators) KQED and the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

The business model for  journalism has fallen apart in the last decade, a decline heightened by the recession. There are journalists throughout the country struggling to create new models that will fill the void created by downsized legacy media. Whether blogging or deploying reporting teams focused on specific communities or regions, they all need financial help.

Hellman, a substantial donor to CIR, joins other philanthropists who believe in the essential role that journalism plays in our democracy, including Buzz Wooley with the Voice of San Diego, Herb and Marion Sandler with Pro Publica, and John Thornton with the Texas Tribune.

The last decade has been brutal for those of us who have spent our careers working in traditional newsrooms, but there is now an excitement, energy and passion in these new models that reflects the start of a great new adventure. It is clear now that the Bay Area will play a big part in this.