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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is the oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the United States and is located in Berkeley, Calif. It also includes the nonprofit news sites formerly known as The Bay Citizen and California Watch.

The center was founded in 1977 by Lowell Bergman, Dan Noyes, and David Weir as a place dedicated to in-depth reporting through funding and distributing investigative journalism. The center distributes its work by partnering with newspapers, TV networks and online news organizations, and has collaborated with the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Frontline, and Salon.com. The center receives its funding from the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Open Society, among others.

In 2009 CIR founded California Watch, an organization focused on public affairs reporting in California. Similar to CIR, California Watch relies on foundation funding for its operating budget. The organization is part of CIR’s larger plan to find sustainable revenue streams for the nonprofit reporting, starting with California Watch’s news service, which charges a small fee to news outlets for using their reports.

In March 2012, the Center merged with the nonprofit Bay Area news site The Bay Citizen, with CIR acting as a parent organization for The Bay Citizen. The combined organization had a staff of about 70 and a budget of $10.5 million in 2012. In 2013, CIR announced that both California Watch and The Bay Citizen’s brands would be discontinued, with their work continued under the CIR banner. The organization announced a renewed focus on a blend of local, state, and national investigative projects. Most of the new organization’s funding came from individual donations in 2012.

CIR has received the Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a George Polk Award, a National Magazine Award for Reporting Excellence, and an Emmy. The center’s current executive chair is Phil Bronstein, previously the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2012, CIR launched an investigative news channel on YouTube called The I Files through an $800,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. The channel features investigative work from numerous CIR partners, including the Investigative News Network. In 2013, CIR began partnering with Public Radio Exchange to produce a show on the process of investigative reporting. The show, Reveal, won a Peabody award for its first episode and landed $3.5 million in grants from the Reva and David Logan Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

CIR used Kickstarter in 2013 to raise money for FOIA Machine, a site to help people make Freedom of Information Act requests.

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
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The story of InterNation, (maybe) the world’s first investigative journalism network — “You Americans, you’re so obsessed with those mountains of facts,” was the response I recall during the early days of our efforts to establish an international investigative network, back in the days be...
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Reveal will fuel local, collaborative investigative reporting by helping newsrooms get the awkward conversations out of the way — Reveal, the multiplatform publishing arm of the Center for Investigative Reporting, has long experimented with different ways of bringing its journalism to the most people possible. It’s distributed its reporting t...
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54 newsrooms, 9 countries, and 9 core ideas: Here’s what two researchers found in a yearlong quest for journalism innovation — The news media most successful at creating and maintaining ties with their readers, users, listeners and viewers will increasingly be media that dare challenge some of the journalist dogmas of the last century: the dogma...
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A look at how foundations are helping the journalism industry stand up straight — Foundations across the U.S. are helping journalists watchdog the powerful — but who’s watching the foundations? The state of the journalism industry might be much more tattered right now if not for philanthropic ...
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The News Integrity Initiative gives $1.8 million to 10 projects focused on increasing trust in news — More community involvement in investigative reporting. New messaging tools to increase contact between journalists and readers. Better comments. More diverse hires. The News Integrity Initiative (NII), the $14 million ne...

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Primary author: Justin Ellis. Main text last updated: July 31, 2014.
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