---- Dana Priest is my hero and role model. The lead reporter on "Top Secret America," she also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for her investigation into the Walter Reed hospital debacle, as well as a 2006 Pulitzer for her beat reporting on CIA secret prisons. To paraphrase someone on Twitter, Dana Priest does the kind of journalism that 90% of journalists think they do. We need this kind of work, all of us. We need this precedent. Her work is evidence of what is lost when we don't invest in the reporting that we value; this kind of project is not cheap of course. And for every story like this that makes it to the front pages, others are never uncovered -- because there is no one there to do the uncovering.
---- And this reminds me: consider joining me in donating to The Investigative Fund, which provides support for journalists to dig deep. This is important. And it works.
---- I appreciate that The Washington Post didn't release "Top Secret America" until it was ready to do it right -- not just in sourcing, fact-checking, and comprehensiveness (though there is that), but also in approaching the report in a multiplicity of ways, using the unique advantages of both print and digital mediums. There are interactive maps, long-form stories, Twitter updates, social networking, live discussions (and transcripts of the discussions), a blog, photos, video, references, searchable data, crowdsourcing, company/bureau profiles, and a great deal of images and graphics that trace the secretive web that connects so many public and private agencies. (All of this information is still unfolding).
---- Information is delivered over time -- three parts in three days -- allowing readers to ease into the vast amount of knowledge acquired over the two-year investigation, rather than invite skimming and surging. (Though it does, appropriately, also offer bullet-pointed highlights of the investigation.) This is an expansive project of an all-too-expansive subject, and the Post has made right choices in how to deliver the information.---- Building on this wise distribution of information the Post is, rather boldly, not hoarding its information: it is partnering with other media outlets. PBS Frontline is doing a televised feature by the same name that covers this investigation. The three-day publication spread opens space for other media outlets to turn attention to this -- and for reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, as well as a host of experts, sources, editors, and others on the investigative team to be interviewed elsewhere, and relay this story to audiences beyond the Post's circulation. Arkin, for example, was on Democracy Now! -- which, I suspect, has an audience that doesn't neatly overlay with that of the Post's.
---- As well, the Post team has approached meta-coverage graciously -- on Twitter, it thanked The New York Times, its prime competitor, for profiling "Top Secret America." Coverage elsewhere is cited on the "Top Secret America" frontpage, as are the live Twitter updates that use the #topsecretamerica hashtag. Altogether, this invites transparency in the coverage of this story that is valuable, I feel, as a general rule, but garners special meaning for this particular story.---- All of this inspires me to pay for a subscription to The Washington Post to support this astounding good work (and to ensure I have access to it). Now's not the time for me to invest, as I'll be leaving the country in six months and I'm letting all my subscriptions lapse until I return. But I'll be back.
Related:
- "ProPublica's Engelberg: WaPo's 'Top Secret America' an 'Extraordinary Commitment'"
- "Time to Rethink the Implicit Secrecy Bargain"
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