ProPublica editor Paul Steiger is fairly optimistic on behalf of investigative journalism in the web era:

Last year, a 20-something, self-taught Internet genius named Amanda Michel mobilized hundreds of politically active citizens to supply info for her “Off the Bus” report on the Huffington Post Web site. When Candidate Obama voiced the notion that some folks who were losing out in the global economy were clinging to such things as religion and guns to compensate, Michel’s network captured it and we soon all heard about it. Without that network, we might never have known, because reporters weren’t invited into the area where Mr. Obama spoke. Michel now works for ProPublica and has put together a team of more than 2,200 volunteers who will do similar reporting for us. This army permits us, for instance, to track progress on 500 representative federal stimulus projects in real time, even though our own news staff numbers just 32.

We will still need journalists’ special skills:

The process of finding and communicating what we used to call news may no longer require newspapers-at least not as we have known them, as seven-day-a-week, ink-on-paper compendiums of new information on a broad range of subjects. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.