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Mother Jones posits that the blogosphere is creating little more than a new digital elite that is as prone to the corruptions of power as so many before them.

On his blog, PressThink, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen responded mockingly, asking whether the “printing press progressives at Mother Jones have any kind of grip. ‘They saw the Internet and freaked: this can’t be real. Recovering their bravery, they decided to debunk it.’?”

It’s not unusual for the San Francisco–based magazine with a circulation of 230,000 to ignite controversy; what is unusual is how the magazine chose to respond. It initiated a dialogue with critics, not just on its own blog, but on other blogs as well. “It just became this fascinating, multi-tentacled conversation,” says Mother Jones co-editor Monika Bauerlein (M.A. ’91), who, along with co-editor Clara Jeffery (a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota) and their staff, spent untold hours online conversing with critics. It was a very 21st-century response for a magazine with a very 20th-century reputation as a lofty, lefty, muckraking print publication.

A native of Bonn, Germany, Bauerlein came to the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright scholarship and enrolled in the master’s program at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It was a tumultuous time in the newspaper industry: Technology and the Internet were beginning to change how news was gathered and produced, competing daily newspapers around the United States were folding and consolidating, and media critics were bemoaning the softening of the White House press corps during the Reagan administration.

As a freelance writer in New York and Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s, Bauerlein covered the 1988 presidential campaign and negotiations to end the first Gulf War. While attending the University, she worked as a reporter at the Minnesota Daily and as a stringer for the Associated Press and later as an investigative reporter and then managing editor of the Twin Cities alternative weekly City Pages. She joined the staff of Mother Jones as features editor in 2000, helping to burnish the magazine’s 30-year reputation for investigative journalism, overseeing the stories on the war in Iraq, the privatization of America’s highways, and the death of the oceans and beefing up its online and East Coast presence.

At a time when many print media are cutting back news coverage and staff, Mother Jones formally opened its Washington, D.C., investigative bureau in July. “It’s needed now more than ever,” Bauerlein says of the expansion. “Honest-to-goodness news and investigative and political coverage is shrinking everywhere.”

Bauerlein expanded on the future of investigative journalism for Minnesota magazine.

There is a lot of hand wringing these days about the fate of journalism in the United States. From your perspective, how much of it is deserved?

I think the hand wringing right now is almost more acute about the likelihood of a continued existence of journalism, because that to me seems to be the difference in the conversation we were having in the ’80s and ’90s about how good journalism is and how much the standards have fallen apart.

There was the USA Today–ification of journalism—shorter stories, “news you can use,” fluff. At the same time, the commercial pressures were becoming much greater and more papers and TV stations were being bought by [large corporations], and generally it got to where the media started to be seen as an investment and investors began to treat media companies accordingly.

Now it seems like we’re literally just looking over a cliff, realizing that the economic model that has financed journalism—where we used to subsidize the reporting by putting lipstick ads on the same pages that the stories were on—is just going away and there is not the equivalent of that online. So I think at this point, beyond the question of standards and how good is the work that we’re doing, we are literally just wondering how will it be done and who will pay for it.

A lot of people are blaming the Internet for the demise of journalism but isn’t it also about people’s news consumption habits?

Are we as a population getting out of the habit of consuming news? Well, the jury is still out on that. We did a piece couple of issues ago about the future of newspapers in particular. We especially took a close look at the Tribune Company because of the way it’s taken the wrecking ball to the Los Angeles Times by cutting staff into oblivion and by treating it as if the only thing that matters is what it costs you to produce this amount of copy on dead trees every day when in fact it’s not that you print the newspaper that matters, it’s what you put in it.

It used to be that newspaper owners were basically content to run a decent newspaper and make enough money to meet payroll and take home a profit. Over a period of time people got a sense that you could practically print money in the newspaper business, and shareholders came to dominate the economic imperative. It wasn’t good enough to bring home a 15 percent profit; you had to show another 10 percent growth year after year, and if you miss the 10 percent growth target they would ax people. And the more people you got rid of, the less of the great content you produced that would bring people to your product and the more you are in trouble financially.

But the fact is, the content that’s being produced, people are reading the stories, they’re just not necessarily reading them on paper. When you look at online and print news consumption together—and I think it’s the same for magazines—people are still reading this stuff, but they’re not paying for it. And advertisers are not paying for it online. So it goes back to how do we either trick people or convince them to pay for what they’re getting?

My theory is ultimately we have to look at some sort of public-radio model where it’s basically reader-supported journalism.

Isn’t that similar to the Mother Jones model?

Yes, that is very much the Mother Jones model, except that we don’t have pledge drives. Mother Jones [published by the nonprofit Foundation for National Progress] is one of the very few print publications that has a substantial, small donor base.

The message of the public-radio pledge drives, when you strip away all the mugs and the tote bags is, “You are getting a free ride on this fantastic radio broadcast. You know, it’s not actually free to produce, so why don’t you step up and do your part?” And I think that’s essentially the appeal somehow that we have to make—all of us.

Mother Jones has had this long history of muckraking and tough investigative journalism, is the magazine still as tough as its reputation? Oh, possibly more so. The magazine struggles with a reputation of being a counterculture product from another era, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

But, ultimately, the mandate has always been the same, which is to speak truth to power and to do muckraking about abuses of power, both in politics and in corporate America, and when I say “in politics,” that means on the left and the right. Our cover package on how technology is changing politics includes a piece that is critical about the ways in which already there are elements of the blogosphere that are turning into kind of a new machine. Power corrupts, and as people in that universe gain power, they exhibit some of the same bully qualities that powerful people always have.

What kinds of stories are you seeing out there that aren’t being reported?

We’re seeing a lot more about the Bush administration, but there is an enormous amount more to be told. And in particular it seems to me that there’s more to be uncovered about things that were done by the administration in collusion with corporate America.

The state of pensions and retirement insurance is an enormous story where the surface hasn’t been scratched; the Medicare drug plan and the fact that it is essentially an enormous corporate giveaway; the degree to which natural resources have been handed over to the private sector without much public attention; the extent to which every crisis of the last few years, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, has been used to create another honey pot for contractors is still not fully understood. Those are the kinds of things I’m talking about.

We just did a big piece earlier this year about the privatization of highways question [“The Highwaymen,” January–February 2007], about the operation of U.S. toll roads being sold to foreign consortiums] that had completely gone under the radar but is a really major public policy issue.

What are some of the stories that Mother Jones has done in the past year that have broken new ground?

Something I thought that was pretty cool was the Iraq War timeline, which was basically a compilation of who knew what and when they knew it about weapons of mass destruction and the war itself.

The genesis of this was during that period of the run up to the war, for instance at the 2003 State of the Union speech and the infamous 16 words involving the Nigerian uranium yellowcake deal. It just seemed to us last year that what we hadn’t accomplished in the public debate was a sense of what was known and when it was known—to people in the administration, to people in the media, and to the rest of us.

So, we put together this timeline in a very sustained and very definitively sourced format that pulled together when the claims were made, what was known at the time, which documents had already been exposed showing the claim was false, and when it finally unraveled. And we did this for the period up to the start of the war, and then we did another installment for the first few months after the beginning of the war.

That was an exciting project because it also experimented with journalistic form. It didn’t have a huge narrative that was hard to slog through. This was done in a very extensive but bite-sized format that allowed you to browse and read it in sequence or just scan it for the highlights.

And then we made it an interactive online database and that gave it a completely different dimension where you could search for things that you are interested in, you could pull together your own mini-timeline for Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or the aluminum tubes. I think it was a way to pull together the best of what journalism can be—really as a resource for the public conscience—and the best of what print and online can do.

As governments from the federal level down to local city councils are cracking down on what information is made public, how is that playing out in investigative journalism?

That has been an enormous problem post 9/11 in particular. There was some of that going on before, but the war on terror has provided a very easy way to sell those kinds of restrictions, even if most of them have nothing to do with keeping information from terrorists.

In fact, it’s most likely the opposite. Danger grows in the shadows and it’s only by exposing things to public scrutiny that you get safety improvements and security improvements. But it’s a gigantic problem with everything from records of toxic storage to things like evacuation routes—which people should really be able to know about—being locked down.

I have sort of a hunch that, as following Watergate there was a raft of Sunshine Laws, we will come to some kind of moment like that again. But I certainly don’t think it’s automatic, and I certainly don’t automatically assume that Democrats by their nature are somehow more likely to be honest and open on those issues.

So where is the pressure for transparency in government going to come from?

I think it still needs to come from journalism. It’s always come from journalists and activists of various descriptions. One of the things that is happening now is that we have this sort of hybrid between the journalism and the activism universes, the blogosphere, and that’s a pretty big force in pushing for transparency.

J. Trout Lowen (B.A. ’89) is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.