As a group, reporters are necessarily obsessed with newness, and have always been stalked by The Next Story. There's a fine line, the thinking went, between amplification of a story and advocacy of it; the don't-shoot-the-messenger rhetoric of institutional newsgathering holds up only so long as the messengers in question maintain the appropriate distance from the news they're delivering. And one way to maintain that distance was a structured separation from stories via a framework of narrative containment. Produce, publish, move on. The web, though is changing all that. Digital platforms -- blogs, most explicitly, but also digital journalism vehicles as a collective -- have introduced a more iterative form of storytelling that subtly challenges print and broadcast assumptions of conceptual confinement. For journalists like Josh Marshall and Glenn Greenwald and other modern-day muckrakers, to be a journalist is also, implicitly, to be an advocate. And, so, focusing on the follow-up aspect of journalism -- not just starting fires, but keeping them alive -- has been foundational to their work. Increasingly, in the digital media economy, good journalists find stories. The better ones keep them going. The best keep them burning.
What if we had an outlet dedicated to continuity journalism -- a news organization whose sole purpose was to follow up on stories whose sheer magnitude precludes them from ongoing treatment by our existing media outlets? What if we took the PolitiFact model -- a niche outfit dedicated not to a particular topic or region, but to a particular practice -- and applied it to following up on facts, rather than checking them? What if we had an outlet dedicated to reporting, aggregating, and analyzing stories that deserve our sustained attention -- a team of reporters and researchers and analysts and engagement experts whose entire professional existence is focused on keeping those deserving stories alive in the world?
