Dan Gillmor’s short piece about the value professional journalism brings to the table has elicited a variety of responses. Gillmor points to a New York Times investigation that required a commitment of resources—personnel, money, and time—resulting in an expose. Gillmor doubts any individual blogger would be able to make the same kind of commitment in pursuit of a story.

Pete Shinbach agrees. Andy Lark is skeptical, noting he found the story on the blog Sploid (although it’s just a link to the NYT piece).

Thinking about the resources newspapers and other “big journalism” (to quote Gillmor) are willing to dedicate to a story made me nostaligic. In 1974, halfway through journalism school, I took an internship at a small daily newspaper in Ventura County. I worked close to full time as a general assignment reporter on the city desk of the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle, which has since been absorbed into the Ventura County Star. One day, an elderly man walked into the newsroom. I saw him spend a few minutes talking to the news editor, who then walked him over to me. The news editor introduced the gentleman and asked me to talk with him about his belief that the county was cheating him. I could read the editor’s look: “This crank wants to complain about the government and you’re the intern. You deal with him.”

The crank, as it turned out, had brought documentation with him. He had received notification from the county that the weeds growing on his property presented a fire hazard and needed to be cleared. If he didn’t take care of it by the dates indicated on the notice, the county would do it and bill him their cost. He had let it slide so, true to their word, the county send a contractor to clear the weeds and billed him. The amount of the bill was the source of his anger.

I was 20 years old and had no idea what it would cost to clear weeds off a parcel of land. So I took copies of the documents, shook the guy’s hand, and said I’d look into it. Then I called a random contractor selected from the Yellow Pages and asked how much it would cost to clear the amount of land the county had cleared. The cost was about half the amount the county had billed.

I talked with the news and city editors, who agreed it was worth a little digging into. As it turned out, I did a lot of digging, including several days at the county’s hall of records with a ruler, going line-by-line over the bills sent to hundreds of county residents over the years whose weeds had been cleared by the county, which subsequently invoiced the residents. It was all part of a fire hazard reduction effort called the Weed Abatement Program.

In addition to poring over records, I interviewed perhaps 30 people. Some of the hemming and hawing got me even more suspicious, leading to more calls and the studying of more documentation. In the end, it turned out that a fire official was sending all the contract work to a single relative in the landscape business. It turned into a full-blown scandal, one of those abuse-of-power stories that populated the News-Chronicle’s pages for weeks. I even got a death threat from the contractor, who called me at home and threatened to blow up my apartment. “Over weed abatement?” I remember asking him. The story wrapped up with hearings held by the county board of supervisors, who made dramatic changes to the way such contracts are awarded.

I don’t remember many of the details; foolishly, I didn’t keep clips, and my nostalgia isn’t strong enough to send me into the archives of a defunct community newspaper. I do remember that it was one of the reasons I was happy to move into corporate communications. All the congratulations I got from the newspaper editors were great, especially for a 20-year-old who’d been dreaming of being an investigative reporter ever since I saw Jimmy Stewart in “Call Northside 777” when I was 9 or 10 years old. But I kept thinking, “It’s just about weeds. Tomorrow nobody will remember.” Not every investigative story is Watergate. The same will be true of the New York Times’ story that Gillmor pointed to. The story about stores selling salmon labeled “wild” that tests prove to be farm-raised will be used to wrap salmon in a day or two.

But thinking about the story got me thinking again about the role of “big journalism” in an era of increasing citizen journalism. And I think Gillmor is exactly right. A story about weed abatement abuses isn’t nearly sexy enough to attract the attention of the bloggers who love to break stories (like Rathergate), nor would many of those bloggers be willing to commit solid weeks to the nuts-and-bolts fact-gathering that went into the story. Yet there was a story to be told, an abuse of power to be uncovered, the rip-off of county residents by representatives of their government to be exposed. As a reporter, I didn’t shrug off the story because weeds weren’t exciting. My job was to follow the lead and see where it led. Bloggers (among whom I count myself) have no such obligation, and will only report on what interests them.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s another reason to recognize that blogs and newspapers (and other mainstream media) are part of a larger communication ecosphere in which they co-exist and why, as Gillmor puts it, “I don’t want to see Big Journalism disappear. It’s too important.”