Oh, cool: very interesting story on NPR about investigative reporters & working for Kerry

[beachmom]

This article is about investigative journalists who are moving on from newspapers (which aren't doing that well). But we get some good tidbits about Frantz, who is now an investigator for the SFRC:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106168383

"The issue for me has always been ... Can I find a job where I can look myself in the mirror every morning before I go to work and say, 'I'm going to do good?' " says Frantz, a former L.A. Times reporter and managing editor.

Frantz is now chief investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

...

In reality, a successful investigative reporter is dedicated, focused and patient — someone who can get sources to reveal things they didn't want public; who can apply computer analyses to endless public records; who can spend months tracking down every loose end to stitch together a coherent narrative.

Doug Frantz fits that bill. He has a pretty astonishing history as an investigative reporter and editor at the St. Petersburg Times, the L.A. Times and The New York Times. At one point, he did a series on nuclear proliferation and the Pakistani nuclear program — and wrote it without a single American source.

"U.S. intelligence's reputation was in tatters because of the inability to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Frantz says. "I wanted to do this story without any sort of taint."

After brief stints at the Wall Street Journal and then Portfolio magazine, Frantz said he looked around and didn't see a lot of appealing opportunities in journalism.

Instead, Frantz agreed to work for Sen. John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Frantz says he had been impressed by Kerry, a Democrat, in the early 1990s, when Kerry helped lead a Senate inquiry into banking wrongdoings that involved other influential Democrats.

Frantz is no longer gunning to appear on the front page of the nation's big dailies, but to have a direct impact on national policy. His first report, published in May, is on Iran's nuclear program, and is surprisingly readable for a finding by a Senate committee.

"My first and highest responsibility there was to produce something that would inform Sen. John Kerry, my boss," Frantz says. "In a sense, everything I do and write is for an audience of one."

Go to the link for more. Very interesting article (I haven't listened to the audio yet).