This past weekend, while at a San Francisco journalism conference, a colleague took me aside to show me the website of the mysterious Franklin Center, which describes itself as “a non-profit group dedicated to providing investigative reporters and non-profit organizations at the state and local level with the training, expertise and technical support necessary to pursue journalistic endeavors.” Pretty innocuous, right? Wrong.

In fact, digging a little deeper, the origins of the site become a bit clearer. (Or murkier depending on how you look it.) The Franklin Center is supported by the Sam Adams Alliance, a free-market communications and advocacy group. I was intrigued and put it on my list of “things to look into more.” In a happy and lucky coincidence, The Washington Monthly published a piece today by Laura McGann that profiles this new group and related conservative media endeavors.

The article is appropriately and succinctly titled, “Partisan Hacks.” Here’s the crux:

But with Democrats back in power and the fourth estate in shambles, conservatives are starting to discover the virtues of shoe-leather reporting, and are throwing their organizational savvy and financial clout behind sustained investigative ventures. The Franklin Center, which is run by a Republican political consultant with no journalism background, supports ten state-level investigative news sites under the moniker Watchdog.org. Meanwhile, free-market state-based think tanks have begun hiring reporters to work in-house, focusing on local and state spending—in the last six months alone, they have brought at least eighteen reporters on board.

Conservatives are investing (key word: investing) in “reporters” on a local level to influence local/statewide politics and move stories to the national level. This is a warning for all funders and donors of non-profit journalism and progressive causes. Conservatives are building the next evolution of its noise machine. If we don’t invest in quality journalism AND strategies for operating in a networked media environment, we’re going to lose any foothold we’ve gained in the media and political space. McGann gives a perfect example of how this conservative strategy works:

In at least one case, the Watchdogs have also broken a major national news story. Last November, the New Mexico site reported that millions of stimulus dollars allocated to the state were disappearing into nonexistent congressional districts, a fact editor Jim Scarantino unearthed by poring over data on Recovery.gov, the federal government’s stimulus-tracking Web site. The national Watchdog site followed Scarantino’s lead, reporting that nationwide more than $6.4 billion was going to such “phantom congressional districts.” The story spread from conservative blogs to regional newspapers, and eventually TV news; ABC claimed the scoop was a network “exclusive.” By the first week in December, the story had gotten so big that it inspired a satirical segment on the Colbert Report. At a moment when local newspapers across the country were cutting newsroom budgets or folding altogether, the story offered a flicker of hope: perhaps even a small, online-only news operation could hold the federal government accountable.

The only problem: the story was, at best, misleading. In a “fact check” feature on Watchdog’s scoop, the Associated Press’s Matt Apuzzo took the step that the Watchdog reporters had not: he checked to see what was happening to the money. As it turns out, the funds were going exactly where they were supposed to go, not vanishing into black holes as the Watchdog sites had implied.

The right knows that it doesn’t always take big operations and a large readership to influence the increasingly under-resourced traditional news shops. Slap the brand “investigative reporting” on it, connect it to a smart communications strategy and these stories will start influencing more traditional reporting and punditry on a local level. Push the stories out to conservative bloggers, and you have a national meme.

The left has grown a great network of local and statewide blogs. But quality local and statewide news sites are few and far between. The American Independent News Network has websites and reporters in states including Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico and a few more. My home state, has the excellent Progress Illinois. (By the way, Progress Illinois is extremely transparent that it’s major source of funding comes from SEIU. More on why that is important below.) But if there are other examples of progressive local news sites, let me know, because I can’t think of any.

To succeed in this new media environment, we’re going to have to get more strategic on both the reporting that needs to be done on the local level and how to connect the dots of these local stories on a national level through established progressive media organizations.

On a more journalism specific note, McGann also reports that The Franklin Center won’t discloses its sources of funding and support. Jason Stverak, director of The Franklin Center told McGann that the center’s credibility speaks for itself. Um, what? As a non-profit news organization, if you are not transparent about who gave you the money that funds your reporting, you shouldn’t have that credibility. For example, if Haliburton is giving your organization money and suddenly you’re churning out a lot of pro-Haliburton and government contract stories, that might be important for your audiences AND other media outlets to know. Just sayin’.

I’d go on, but I think McGann has the perfect wrap up for the story.

But in reality, Stverak appears to be banking on exactly the opposite being true—that in the age of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, cash-strapped news outlets will eagerly latch on to the scoops his team delivers and won’t spend too much time questioning the underlying reporting or the bona fides of his organization, which looks more like a political attack machine than a traditional news operation. That kind of ideologically motivated, willfully misleading muckraking may be a well-worn strategy among partisan operatives. But it isn’t journalism.

I highly recommend you read the whole piece.