This is a little off-topic, but after weeks of the sweet candy of American politics, a little savory won't hurt.

You've probably heard whispers about Propublica, the new nonprofit investigative news service, that is staffing up with some of the country's best investigative journalists to develop great stories and deliver them to the biggest news outlets in the country. They'll do the digging, and the writing, and the newspapers and television shows will put them on for free. Its a fantastic model.

Drew Sullivan created a similar model in Bosnia a few years ago (The Center for Investigative Journalism--click on the union jack to read in English), and his 10-person staff of journalists has already written stories that led to the Minister of Health resigning, two judges being replaced, a high ranking investigator being prosecuted, the food inspection process being changed--and more. All the stories are placed in traditional news outlets, but also put on the CIN website.

Now Drew and his cohorts have started a project networking the investigative journalism centers around the region. The web home of the project is here:

http://www.reportingproject.net/

Its goal is to become a one stop site for organized crime and corruption stories and resources for journalists in the region--networking is especially important because so many of the bad actors move across national lines, and in order to understand tobacco trafficking in one country, it helps to understand it in another.

Its an aggregated set of stories from CIN and the Romanian Center for Investigative Reporting, the Bulgarian Investigative Journalism Center, the Caucasus Media Investigative Center, Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, Media Focus in Serbia and reporters and news outlets in another half dozen countries.

I think its brilliant. If organized crime is global and networked, investigative journalism ought to be, too.