By NYU Staff

In newsrooms across the country, the discussion these days centers around the next revenue model and the new audience, but rarely about the people in the profession. The digital age and the failure of the advertising revenue model online has rendered many of them dispensable.

In this era, investigative reporters seem the most vulnerable. They’re the ones who spent time devouring information for months at a time. Can the new ecosystem absorb such journalists?

Nearly 15,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in 2009 alone according to Papercuts, an online blog that tracks job losses in the newspaper industry. It is difficult to quantify how many were in investigative reporting. For a long time, all journalists were classified as investigators. Eventually, many newspapers had designated investigative teams.

“The number of job losses has been unprecedented in the history of American journalism. It is tragic from a social stand point,” says Charles Lewis, veteran investigative journalist who has founded or co-founded three nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Public Integrity.

But some remain positive. Those who do predict the dawn of computational journalism where computer assisted reporting merges with Philip Meyer’s precision journalism. The concept of precision journalism is the application of social and behavioral science research methods to the practice of journalism. It involves using a scientific approach and technology to analyze data.  It is expected that investigative reporters traditionally at ease with vast swathes of data will mine information in the digital age with the help of new open source tools. They will be the people best suited for new-age journalism.

“There is enough that is on paper in the world even today, the system will still need the paper trail people who are going to look through paper and compile data. Investigative reporting as we know it will disappear, but we will have better options and tools to do it,” Derek Willis, who runs The Scoop, a website on computer-assisted reporting said.

Willis was the Research Database Editor at the Washington Post and since November 2007 he is part of the Web development group at The New York Times. He says, “There will be more, not lesser numbers of investigative reporters in the future. Previously, investigative reporters were treated as priesthood within priesthood. That is now changing.” These reporters are now spread out over newspapers, nonprofits and teams within universities.

The ability to process, organize and internalize, large and complex information will be faster than ever before thanks to open source software. One need not depend on expensive commercial software with licensing fees. There are select journalists and those interested in both technology and journalism that are designing and writing such software.

Willis recalls that in the past government data came in 9 track tapes that could only be used on a mainframe computer. Limits like those are now falling away. The tools should be made in such a way that it lowers the barrier of entry, into the widest possible set of people and should be relatively easy to use by a reporter with moderate skills, he says. Tools are changing and journalists who use them must change too.

“The lesson from traditional media is that investigative journalism is quite expensive. We have to pay people to do meticulous work,” says Lorie Hearn, executive director of the Watchdog Institute. Typically, salaries for newsroom staff account for about 70% of the total budget.

“The most important asset you possess is the human capital regardless of the size of the budget. It is bound to be a large part of the overhead. It is hard to change. Computers can never replace journalists. I hope it never gets automated. The day it does, it will be a different world,” Lewis says.