In answer to your question (“Why would a news informatics company, which would lack that institutional commitment, use its profit to subsidize investigative journalism that isn’t itself profitable?”)… I truly believe that adding an informatics component to journalism would not only improve reporting, but would generate more reporting of the investigative variety. Can’t prove it, just believe it.

And as I’ve written somewhere else, the notion that investigative reporting is a major function of most news organizations isn’t founded in fact. Weeks and months will go by without a true investigative story, and now even boring old beat reporting (which to my mind is generally more valuable and important) is dying.

And in a sense, the reason for this is what you supposed: The advertising model doesn’t support quality journalism. It just wants eyeballs. If junk and cheap controversy attract eyeballs more cost-efficiently than quality reporting (and yes, this happens to be true), then quality reporting is “idealistic stuff” that “doesn’t pay the bills.”

When I came up “in the business,” there was an idea called “the paper of record.” It meant there were things we wrote about just to make those things public, or else they would never be known and recorded. This idea survives only rarely now, 20 years later. So if you’re trying to imagine where my informatics idea comes from, that’s it.

Journalism and advertising aren’t likely to be severed, and attracting attention will always have a value. I adding a revenue stream, not cutting all the others.

Anyway, thanks for the link.