Anya Schiffrin has spent much of her career at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs examining how journalism holds power to account. Her survey of 100 years of investigative journalism pulls together a century of groundbreaking work, asking what has changed, what has stayed stubbornly the same, and what lessons contemporary reporters can still draw from the first generation of muckrakers. The resulting body of work is a rare mix of historical sweep and practical urgency.
From muckrakers to data journalists
The investigative tradition Schiffrin traces begins in the early twentieth century with figures like Ida Tarbell, whose methodical dismantling of Standard Oil remains a template for holding corporations accountable. What strikes Schiffrin is the continuity of method across that century: the patient accumulation of documents, the cultivation of sources who know where bodies are buried, and the willingness to sit with a story long enough to get it right. Digital tools have accelerated many parts of that process, but they have not changed its essential logic.
Schiffrin is particularly sharp on the economics of accountability reporting. Long-form investigative work is expensive. It requires time, legal cover, and editors who will back reporters when powerful subjects push back. The twentieth century produced institutional homes for that kind of journalism, whether in major newspapers or in the tradition of independent muckraking magazines. Today those homes are fewer and more fragile, a concern that runs through her analysis like a recurring chord. The pressures facing independent reporters today echo broader debates about challenging corporate journalism and the structural forces that make accountability work so difficult to sustain.
What a century of sources teaches us
One of the most valuable threads in Schiffrin's work is her focus on what investigative journalists actually do when they leave their desks. She draws on interviews with reporters from across the decades to show how source cultivation has changed. The arrival of digital communication made some parts of source management easier and others far riskier, particularly for journalists in authoritarian contexts. The lesson from a hundred years of practice, she argues, is that no technology replaces the trust built through repeated, respectful contact with people who have something to lose by talking.
She also pays serious attention to the global dimension of investigative reporting, tracing how the form spread from its American and British centres to newsrooms in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Each region adapted the genre to local conditions, legal environments, and political risks. In some contexts, investigative journalism has meant genuine physical danger, something that threads of accountability reporting continue to navigate. This international scope gives Schiffrin's hundred-year survey a breadth that single-country histories often lack.
The role of institutional support
Schiffrin is careful to give credit to the editors, publishers, and funders who made landmark investigations possible. The Watergate reporting that brought down a presidency did not happen because two reporters worked alone in a garret. It happened inside a newspaper with the financial and legal resources to withstand enormous pressure. The same is true of virtually every major investigation she profiles across the century. This is not a romantic story about lone-wolf journalists; it is a structural argument about what institutions need to look like if accountability reporting is to survive.
That structural argument has obvious relevance now. Philanthropic funding has filled some of the gap left by collapsing advertising revenues, but Schiffrin is clear-eyed about the tensions that come with donor dependence. Grant-funded newsrooms face pressure to produce stories that satisfy funders, even when the most important stories are the least grant-friendly. She sees this as one of the defining challenges of the current moment, one that the next hundred years of investigative journalism will have to resolve.
Digital threats to the investigative tradition
The final sections of Schiffrin's work deal with the ways digital disruption has both empowered and endangered the investigative tradition. On one hand, data journalism has opened up entire categories of story that were impossible to tell before. On the other hand, the collapse of local newsrooms has removed the reporters who once watched city hall, the school board, and the local police department. These are the beats where corruption most often festers, and where its absence is most keenly felt by ordinary people.
The suppression of journalistic access is a live issue in this space. Moves to cut reporters off from public records, whether through bureaucratic resistance or outright orders, directly undermine the investigative tradition Schiffrin documents. Recent reporting on how the NYPD ordered precincts to deny journalists access to crime reports is exactly the kind of access battle that recurs across the hundred years she surveys. Every generation of investigative reporters has faced some version of it.
Schiffrin's conclusion is neither triumphalist nor despairing. A century of investigative journalism is also a century of obstacles overcome, of documents obtained against the odds, of sources persuaded to speak, and of stories published despite sustained attempts to suppress them. The tradition is under pressure, but it has been under pressure before. What has kept it alive, she argues, is a combination of institutional commitment, individual stubbornness, and a public that still, somewhere, wants to know the truth. That combination remains the best bet for the next hundred years.