It’s hard to say, but the International Federation of Journalists has 600k members, so maybe there exists 6M journalists worlwide, of which maybe 10% are investigative journalists (600k IJs). If they are paid like $50k/year, that’s $30B used for IJ.
Surely from browsing the internet and newspapers, it’s clear than less than 1% (<60k) of journalists are “investigative”. And I bet that half of the impact comes from an identifiable 200-2k of them, such as former Pulitzer Prize winners, Propublica, Bellingcat, and a few other venues.
It’d be interesting to look at some of these high profile journalists, and see if they are well supported to do impactful journalism or if they have to spend a lot of time on chasing trends to afford working on IJ pieces.
The annual budgets of Bellingcat and Propublica are in the single-digit millions. (The latter has had negative experiences with EA donations, but is still relevant for sizing up the space.)
Surely from browsing the internet and newspapers, it’s clear than less than 1% (<60k) of journalists are “investigative”. And I bet that half of the impact comes from an identifiable 200-2k of them, such as former Pulitzer Prize winners, Propublica, Bellingcat, and a few other venues.
Yeah in hindisght that is probably about right.
It’d be interesting to look at some of these high profile journalists, and see if they are well supported to do impactful journalism or if they have to spend a lot of time on chasing trends to afford working on IJ pieces.
The annual budgets of Bellingcat and Propublica are in the single-digit millions. (The latter has had negative experiences with EA donations, but is still relevant for sizing up the space.)