This guest commentary was written by Robert McClure, whose stories on the dangers of rat poison in the environment are being published Tuesday and Wednesday on msnbc.com:

By Robert McClure

Today’s msnbc.com story on how a super-toxic second generation of rat poisons is mysteriously seeping into the environment might have remained a buried and unnoticed piece of history if not for a new movement sweeping America: nonprofit journalism. It’s an important force that is likely to become a key part of what folks are calling an evolving “news ecosystem” in this country. Today’s pairing of the efforts of two nonprofit journalism entities with the for-profit msnbc.com is an example of the kind of experimentation that’s becoming common.

I wrote the rat-poisons story for InvestigateWest, a nonprofit investigative journalism center focused on the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia that I helped to found in 2009. The story idea and the assignment came from Marla Cone, editor at Environmental Health News, another nonprofit journalism center, whose mission is to advance public understanding about environmental health issues. Cone won many accolades as a longtime environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times before joining EHN in 2008. (Her book “Silent Snow” documents the shockingly high levels of toxic contamination in the Arctic.)

 Both entities are part of a new wave of journalism born of the chaotic decline we’ve seen in our nation’s newspapers and broadcast newsrooms. Nonprofit journalism centers are popping up all over the place. One of the best-known is ProPublica, which has its newsroom in a New York City office building, employs more than 30 top-notch journalists and enjoys substantial funding from large foundations.

 More common are smaller groups such as InvestigateWest. We have three full-time staffers and a modest office in Seattle. Our financial support comes from small and medium-sized foundations. Importantly, we are also beginning to gather support from a growing number of individuals who want to see in-depth journalism survive the business-model crisis that saw American newspapers shed more than 35,000 jobs since 2007. We are helping take up the slack, and we aim to do more.

InvestigateWest, unlike some journalism nonprofits, requires payment for our work. We charge prices on a sliding scale that make it affordable for news outlets big and small to purchase our stories. This helps spread news to a wider audience than would be typical of any given newspaper, website or broadcast outlet.

(In the case of today’s rat poison story, Environmental Health News paid InvestigateWest and photographer Paul Joseph Brown a fee. Because of this, the story was distributed to msnbc.com at no charge. InvestigateWest contributed substantial extra time to reporting the story, which was possible because of our financial supporters. By drawing support from a large number of donors, as well as earning income, we are able to ensure editorial independence.)

Environmental Health News publishes its own work, such as a story this week on the toxic dangers of ski wax, and also provides a daily roundup of stories from around the globe. Both EHN and InvestigateWest meet high journalistic standards of non-advocacy.

 Nonprofit journalism is far from new. In fact, one of the biggest news purveyors in the world, whose stories and broadcast copy you likely take in every day, is the Associated Press, a cooperative serving for-profit and nonprofit news outlets. The AP was launched in 1848. A few other examples emerged in the century that followed, with perhaps the most noteworthy being the Christian Science Monitor. The tumult of the 1960s and '70s helped spawn a mini-wave of such centers, including Mother Jones, High Country News, the Center for Investigative Reporting and, in the 1980s, the Center for Public Integrity. 

 About 50 nonprofit journalism centers have banded together into the Investigative News Network. Together we are trying to eke out a living while figuring out how to recreate a business model that supports the journalism that is oxygen to our democracy. That’s really what it’s all about: preserving editorial voices that can inform Americans and keep the powers-that-be honest. On InvestigateWest’s office wall we have a bumper sticker: “Democracy depends on journalism.” And our motto is: “Journalism for the common good.”

 That’s really what this new nonprofit journalism is all about: preserving and modernizing the system that has allowed journalists to shine a light into dark corners that many in government and private industry would rather keep hidden. It offers the citizenry in-depth treatment of important public-policy stories that would otherwise be overlooked entirely or dealt with in less detail. I would be the last to hope that the days of for-profit news are gone; I worked in for-profit newsrooms for nearly three decades and I’m definitely rooting for the news outlets that remain. But I’m looking forward to a new era in which those voices are supplemented by a lot of non-profit journalism ventures as well. It’s what’s best for all of us.

Longtime NBC News producer Bob Windrem explores what's known and unknown about North Korea's development of nuclear weapons. This is a companion piece to his article published today on msnbc.com, "Deciphering clues to North Korea's mysteries," in which he analyzes possible reasons behind recent North Korean belligerence.

By Robert Windrem

While the U.S. says it believes North Korea is far more advanced in the development of nuclear weapons than Iran, it does not know how many weapons the North has, precisely how big of a stockpile of plutonium the country has and even whether the purported nuclear tests earlier this decade were real.

U.S. concerns were significantly heightened after a Nov. 12 visit by Sig Hecker, the retired director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to a new and highly sophisticated uranium centrifuge facility in the North. It was the first time the North had shown any westerner its uranium enrichment capabilities. Hecker saw what he estimated were 2,000 centrifuges, a number just short of what’s needed to enrich enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb. None was running.

Hecker told a South Korean audience he was particularly impressed by the sophistication of the control room, indicating the North had mastered not just the enrichment process but management of a large-scale program. However many nuclear weapons North Korea has, they were created using plutonium reprocessed at its now shuttered Yongbyon reactor complex.

Three U.S. officials questioned about the North’s program said information remains sketchy on virtually all aspects of the program, starting with the number of weapons, which officials had placed at about a dozen a few years back.

“We just don’t know,” said a senior U.S. official, when asked about the size of the stockpile. He said the new disclosures of a uranium enrichment program will make such estimates even more difficult. “It’s not a wild assumption they may have mastered this technology, and that is one step closer to enriched uranium, and that gets you that much closer to real trouble.”

Another official said the U.S. believes the technology and possibly even some centrifuges came from Pakistan. “I have seen nothing to suggest the technology didn’t come from Pakistan.”

The biggest problem with estimating any country’s nuclear weaponry is how much fissile material — enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium — the nation had to begin with. While the U.S. has an estimate, which is highly classified, officials admit they do not know precisely how much is used for the weapons’ cores or how much was used in what were purported to be nuclear tests in October 2006 and May 2009.

“There remain questions on how efficient the nuclear tests were. They could have used more than you would normally use,” said the first official.

There are even lingering doubts about whether the tests were real and not a hoax in which a large amount of high-energy conventional  explosives were  detonated to mimic a nuclear test. Officials have long pointed out that the North has experience in such high-explosive tests. 

“We’ve had two what we think are nuclear tests so far,” said the official. “You’re looking at this from a long way, and the point is although you do a variety of testing afterwards, there is always an element of doubt.  Our scientists are fairly confident about it, but won’t give you a 100 percent guarantee that that is what happened.”

Could there be more if the North doesn’t get the kind of attention it has been seeking?

 “There’s a risk we are going to have more testing,” said one official, adding that it could be tied to the transition from Kim Jong-Il to his son Kim Jong-On.

One reason why the North is so focused on nuclear weaponry is that its conventional forces have grown less capable as the nation has dealt with famine and other societal ills.

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You can hear more from scientist Sig Hecker assessing the North Korean nuclear program in this interview with NBC's Richard Lui, and in the accompanying story.

By Bill Dedman
msnbc.com

Msnbc.com has a legal roundtable discussion online now, exploring the prospects of a prosecution of WikiLeaks and its leader, Julian Assange, under the Espionage Act of 1917 and other laws. Thank you to the readers who suggested questions for the panelists, who were: Abbe D. Lowell, the noted defense attorney; Paul Rosenzweig, a former policy official at the Department of Homeland Security; and Prof. Stephen I. Vladeck at American University.

The traditional way to handle this sort of thing is to write a story, a summary, but there are so many issues in play that I thought this was one where it's best to have you hear directly from specialists in the field. We have three distinguished participants, and there's a great deal of subtlety in their answers. Selecting a couple of quotes, or a tally of their "votes" on an issue, wouldn't depict that complexity.

The discussion roamed from WikiLeaks itself to the First Amendment implications of such a case, to the weaknesses of a prosecution and a defense, to the changes needed in the Espionage Act and other laws.

It's not the most important legal point, but it's notable that the three panelists all offered similar answers to the question, what is a weakness for the defense. The answer: the defendant. His statements and demeanor will hurt him with a judge and jury.

Lowell: "Neither Assange nor the type of large disclosure he did (as well as his public statements) will inspire sympathy from a judge ruling on the case or a trial jury deciding whether they like his conduct or him. He stands a serious risk that a court or jury will want to find ways to convict him."

Vladeck: "If the prosecution boils down to whether Assange acted in bad faith, and whether he reasonably should have known that these disclosures would harm U.S. national security, he may have hurt his own cause by being so publicly forthright throughout this controversy, especially with regard to the effects of future leaks. If Assange’s publicly stated goal is to bring down incumbent administrations, banks, and the like, it may be hard for the defense to portray him as someone who didn’t appreciate the harm that might result from the disclosures."

Rosenzweig: "If he ever comes to trial, the jury will not like him. The obvious way to overcome it is to make him act more likeably — I wonder if that would be possible."

Read the full discussion, and let us know what you think. You can offer comments on that page,  where the question for readers is, If WikiLeaks is a news organization, should it still be prosecuted?

Update: The New York Times has a new story on a U.S. effort to charge WikiLeaks and Assange with conspiracy, sidestepping uncertainties with the Espionage Act.

Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader from Nevada, is pushing ahead with his efforts to legalize Internet poker before Congress adjourns this year, despite new criticism from state lottery officials, including a former Democratic National Committee chairman, that Reid's plan was an “outrageous” reward for big Las Vegas casino interests that heavily backed his campaign for re-election.

After declining to comment for nearly a week, Reid’s office released his first public statement on the matter late Thursday, saying his proposal would bring in new tax revenue and “protect U.S. consumers” by allowing “reputable operators with proven track records” to offer poker over the Internet to American card players.

But in the last few days, Reid’s efforts have triggered a storm of criticism from state lottery directors, Indians tribes and others who say the Senate majority leader’s last minute effort would freeze them out of the action, while benefitting big Las Vegas casino operators — such as Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International — that heavily backed Reid in his recent successful campaign for re-election.

“This appears to be designed to give an advantage to established gambling interests — many of them in Harry Reid’s home state,” said Steven Grossman, the treasurer elect of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee between 1997 and 1999, in an interview with NBC News. “For him to deal us out of the action is outrageous.”

Grossman said he is only one of many state lottery officials who this week have strongly objected to Reid’s bill, especially a section that would guarantee that, for the first two years after it passed, initial licenses for online poker could go only to well-established gambling operators. This would effectively cut out state lotteries from offering their own online games, and drain revenues away from competitive products, such as instant games and keno, Grossman wrote in a letter to Reid this week.

“We could lose $100 million from this,” Grossman said. When you consider the 40 or more other states that would be similarly disadvantaged, the revenue loss for state governments would be in the billions, he added. “There’s been a lot of e-mail traffic in the last few days in which lottery directors all over the country are expressing their deep concerns.”

Reid had first circulated his proposal last week in an effort to attach it to the massive bill that would extend Bush era tax cuts. (See the earlier story from NBC: Reid's 'Net betting bill would benefit his casino backers.) But objections from senior Republicans appears to have made that move impossible. A Reid spokesman noted there other vehicles still before this year’s Congress — such as a continuing resolution to fund the government and the Dream Act. “Sen. Reid will continue working to find a way to get it done,” said the senator’s press secretary Tom Brede.

There has been a legal cloud over setting up online gambling sites inside the United States ever since 2006 when Congress, at the behest of anti-gambling conservatives, passed a law called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which banned the processing of credit card transactions for Internet gambling transactions. At the time, Reid and some gambling companies supported the measure because of concerns that Internet gambling would compete with big Las Vegas casinos.

But in recent years, a booming offshore Internet gambling industry has popped up and many casino operators — and now Reid — have concluded that it is preferable for U.S. operators to get in on the action. In his statement Thursday, Reid noted that “Internet poker is played by millions of American every day in an essentially unregulated environment” and “neither federal nor State governments collect a dime of revenue from this multibillion dollar Internet poker industry.”

As for the idea that Reid was acting to benefit big casino operators that backed his campaign, his press secretary Brede responded: “Sen. Reid has a long track record of fighting for the largest industry in the state, and he will continue to do so. Look at what the top industry in the state is. Would anyone criticize a Senator from Michigan for fighting for the auto industry?”

As noted by NBC News and others in recent days, two of the biggest potential beneficiaries of the Reid proposal would be MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment (formerly Harrah’s.) Both firms heavily backed Reid’s re-election, spending more than $650,000, including $300,000 that was pumped into Patriot Majority PAC, a so-called “super PAC” set up by a former Reid communications director that ran attack ads against Sharron Angle, Reid’s Republican opponent. Caesars/Harrahs, according to critics, would be particularly well advantaged to move into the online Poker market because the casino already hosts the “World Series of Poker.”

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Related: American University's Invesstigative Reporting Workshop reported on msnbc.com about Reid's support of a Chinese wind farm project seeking $450 million in U.S. stimulus money.

The New York Times reports that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) pressured Tableau, a Seattle company that allows Web users to post charts, to remove several charts describing the release of WikiLeaks material. The company removed the charts on Thursday, following the lead of Amazon, which had taken down the WikiLeaks documents themselves.

The twist: The charts were not produced by WikiLeaks, but by a freelance journalist. And they contained no classified or secret material. The charts merely depicted how many times each country, or topic, was discussed in the cables.

In other words, the charts were journalism. (There's a vigorous debate whether or not the WikiLeaks releases themselves are journalism, as WikiLeaks casts them. These charts seem to be within anyone's definition.)

You can see a cached copy of one of the charts here.

Commentator Glenn Greenwald issues a take-down notice to Lieberman on Salon: "Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to 'all companies' that is causing suppression of political information."

Update: Amazon posted a note on Thursday saying it had not taken down the WikiLeaks documents because of Lieberman's plea, but because WikiLeaks was violating the terms of service.

R. Bowen Loftin

The Texas A&M University System has set a policy forbidding faculty from assigning students (even journalism students) to submit requests for public records to the university. Faculty who make such assignments can be disciplined or fired.

Apparently the university is upset that a professor's previous request disclosed that there was more campus crime than the university was reporting. After last year's class published the documents it received, the university was fined for under-reporting campus crime.

The Austin American-Statesman has the full story here. And more from Texas Watchdog,  the Associated Press, and the Stephenville Empire-Tribune

You may have information you'd like to request from Texas A&M, and we're making it easy for you. Here's a fill-in-the-blanks letter you can use to request information from the office of the chancellor of the university system, Mike McKinney, or the president of one of the universities in the system, Texas A&M, R. Bowen Loftin (pictured here).

Here's the letter in a Word document. We created the letter using the "Fully Automated, Fill-in-the-Blanks State Open Records Law Request Letter Generator" from the Student Press Law Center.

You can submit your letter by regular mail, by fax, or by e-mail, using the information on the letter.

Do you have information or an experience that sheds light on this story, or a story we should investigate? Use the form below to send us information. And send a copy of your documents and requests, please. 

Today's reading from the world of investigative reporting:

(links open in a new window)

• Sun Foundation: New searchable data on earmarks is added to the database of lobbying, grants, contracts and campaign contributions.
• Technolog on msnbc.com: Attack on WikiLeaks gathers strength
• Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., studies what happens to the savings of elderly incapacitated people
• Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: New Jersey throws a cloak over environmental documents
• Texas Observer: Texas could foot bill for radioactive waste dump
• McClatchy Newspapers: Pentagon sends reporters into a closet to read Don't Ask Don't Tell report
• In Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden tells a fascinating tale of the hunt for a rapist. It reveals a lot about cold cases, DNA databases, the omnipresence of security cameras, and the doggedness of a single investigator. Also watch the video.
• Center for Public Integrity: Big polluters freed from environmental oversight by stimulus
• KHOU-Houston: Bars are let off the hook for serving drunks who kill
• In Boston, an investigation of state pension shenanigans by public officials ends in a suicide of a sheriff. Here's the original report, a report on the suicide, an obituary and timeline. It's notable how gentle the original article was, focusing on the sheriff's decision not to take the money to which he was legally entitled, through a loophole in the law.
• The Wall Street Journal has created an online database of loans made by the Federal Reserve to stabilize the financial system.
• Rocky Mountain News Investigative News Network: What we learned from our e-waste project
• Pro Publica: Documents reveal one bank's plan to squeeze customers for more overdrafts
• This New York Times piece on Sunday was a great read, describing the ways that a shoddy online company takes advantage of Google's ranking system, in which even bad publicity is good for business.
• Red Tape Chronicles on msnbc.com: Courts say using another Social Security Number isn't a crime
• The Oklahoman: Romance, contract link Oklahoma state senator with lobbyist
• The Oklahoman: Washington machine death of infant was preceded by warnings to state agency
• MinnPost.com: Kardashians call it quits on prepaid card with high fees
• WCVB TV, Boston: Massachusetts education chief gets free travel around the world
• U.S. Senate: How did your senator vote on the earmarks ban?
• Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: several reports on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean
• Legal Leaks: Toolkit for journalists and members of the public requesting public records in various countries
• Pro Publica: Ex-admissions officer at for-profit college testifies about school's tactics
• Washington Examiner: The Great 2010 Cashout: Where are the departing senators headed?
• California Watch: Surgery centers operate without oversight
• The background on WikiLeaks: Wired's Threat Level blog has been covering the story well for months. Its archive of WikiLeaks postings provides a good primer.
• Texas Watchdog: Open records show how attendance tallies for boxing, other events can be juiced
• Center for Public Integrity: Chamber seeks cash from insurers, financial firms for new effort
• Center for Public Integrity: Congress ponders ethanol tax credit as production of plant waste ethanol lags

Keep up on the latest investigative reporting with the Twitter feed of the same name.

Let us know if your group or organization should be listed there.