Voices: Schock case a reminder of why reporting matters

As a guy who both practices and teaches journalism, I find this week's resignation announcement by Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., a comforting reminder of the value of Actual Journalism.

Schock, the attention-getting four-term congressman from Peoria, said Tuesday he will resign this month because of a constant stream of stories that detailed his curious, then dubious, then possibly illegal office and campaign spending.

His problems, as these things often do, started with what could have been an innocuous story. Washington Post reporter Ben Terris saw Schock's newly redecorated office and wrote a hilarious tale about the spokesman's efforts to kill the piece. Two journalism lessons emerge here: 1) a large part of the job is just showing up and 2) whenever someone says there's no story here, there is almost certainly a story.

That became the story that launched a thousand ships. I'll claim a little bit of credit here – I dug into Schock's office spending and discovered he had paid for marble counter tops, hardwood floors and a bunch of questionable private flights on the taxpayer's dime – but there was plenty of good work going on elsewhere, too. Politico, the Chicago Sun-Times, a liberal political blog called Blue Nation Review dug out nugget after nugget of questionable financial dealings: a taxpayer-funded flight on a private plane to a Chicago Bears game; thousands of dollars of mileage reimbursements, covering far more mileage than Schock could have possibly driven; suspiciously profitable real estate transactions conducted with campaign donors.

And one of my favorites: The Associated Press scraped "metadata" off of Schock's prodigious Instagram output and was able to connect specific trips to specific improper flights.

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All of these stories required actual reporters to dig up actual public records and to sort out what was just weird from what was potentially corrupt. It was not enough to aggregate some already public news or be first to tweet a quote from a press conference.

The payoff was impressive. The stories attracted a lot of traffic online, generated a lot of conversation and fueled more stories.

And ultimately the congressman quit. The articles, he said, had become a distraction. "The constant questions over the last six weeks have proven a great distraction that has made it too difficult for me to serve the people of the 18th District with the high standards that they deserve and which I have set for myself," he said.

The switch to digital journalism has created an enormous appetite for more content, which frequently is in direct competition with our pursuit of better content. News organizations, including ours, have increased emphasis on aggregating stories that are trending in social media and producing "related content" like photo galleries and brief videos that require no new fact-gathering.

That's fine; these elements offer readers new ways to engage with the news and are very popular with our audience. But the Schock stories prove that real impact happens when news organizations commit the time and energy necessary to dig up critical information that is not readily available and requires more than an hour to get on the website. That's what we call "reporting," and the resignation of Aaron Schock proves that "reporting" still has value.

Singer is USA TODAY's Washington correspondent and is teaching "Covering Capitol Hill" to a group of Georgetown journalism students this semester