Did online biz reporters become watchdogs?

David Dayen of The American Prospect reviews Dean Starkman‘s book “The Watchdog that Didn’t Bark” about business news coverage during the financial crisis and wonders whether online journalists acted as watchdogs when the mainstream media didn’t.

Dayen writes, “It’s for this reason that Starkman disappoints when talking about online journalism. While he praises blogs like Naked Capitalism and the reporting at places like the Huffington Post, he believes such outlets have not filled the gap created by mass layoffs at the major dailies. In fact, Starkman mostly views digital media as a tool for corporate raiders to downsize traditional outlets, and he does not believe the business models of independent digital media support investigative journalism.

“This ignores a fairly rich body of work, including reporting on the financial crisis and its aftermath, that came directly from the online world. For example, those individuals who broke the story of foreclosure fraud—the mass use of forged and fabricated documents to rush homeowners through the eviction process—did not work at traditional media outlets but were foreclosure victims, who uncovered discrepancies with their own documents and started their own websites, like Foreclosure Hamlet and 4closurefraud.org, to get the word out when the media wouldn’t return their calls. In another era, these people would be either investigative sources or invisible, depending on the discretion of the media, but Internet publishing tools allowed them to tell their story anyway.

“While the Internet ‘presents severe structural barriers to accountability reporting,’ as Starkman writes, it also presents potential breakthroughs. Instead of long-form journalism that bundles months of reporting into one shot, there’s value in incremental, iterative reporting that releases each detail as it’s gathered, breaks down complex material into digestible chunks and furthers the narrative for months, even years. This is the tradition I come out of, and I think it does an able job, even if it’s not the Great Story, which Starkman holds up as the epitome of investigative journalism. There’s nothing inherent in word count that confers superiority.

“If we want to know what happened in the aftermath of a crash, the elites of the media universe can perform that task well. But if we’re going to catch the next instance of financial malfeasance in real time, the warning may come from someone sitting at their laptop. Starkman makes the argument that people rely on traditional media, and he’s right. But his entire book identifies the dangers of that reliance.”

Read more here.