By Katharine Mieszkowski: In between ferreting out corruption and scouring public documents, the nation's investigative reporters and editors held their annual conference this weekend in Baltimore. Salon's own Mark Benjamin was there, tweeting: "It is all about nonprofit journalism at the annual IRE conference."

Two pieces of news came out of the event: The Associated Press announced that it will soon begin distributing the work of four nonprofit news organizations to the 1,500 newspapers that are its members, and the Knight Foundation announced that it's investing millions in investigative reporting.

Starting in July on a six-month trial basis, the AP will begin syndicating the works of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. The Knight Foundation is investing $15 million in investigative reporting, with some of those monies going to those same organizations, namely the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.

"Communities are harmed by what they do not know. A community can't clean up a toxic dump, or remove a corrupt official or right any other wrong if its citizens do not know about it," said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation's vice president for journalism in a statement announces the funding. "We're awash in information, yet it seems to be getting harder to find good investigative reporting." Newton noted that newspapers today employ some 10,000 fewer journalists than they did a decade ago. 

As newspapers scale back and sometimes go under, investigative reporting has been hard hit. The hope is that the new funding and distribution for these nonprofits will help fill the gap. But as David Weir, a former Salon editor and one of the founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting back in 1977, blogged, the good old days for newspapers weren't that great for investigative reporting either: "When they were flush, original investigative stories were being scaled back at many media operations. Why? Because by the early '80s, the typical media executive was schooled in not 'rocking the boat,' i.e., not to upset the advertisers, who were providing most of that precious cash."