Advertising: For Journalists Who Seek Out Hidden Things, a More Visible Brand

For Journalists Who Seek Out Hidden Things, a More Visible Brand

A leading nonprofit organization in the field of investigative journalism is getting a free branding and advertising campaign, courtesy of a leading creative agency.

An ad by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners promoting the Center for Investigative Reporting includes a logo that mimics a censored document.

How did the organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting, manage to woo the agency - Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group - into producing the campaign? It took only a bit of investigative reporting to learn that the principals of the center and the agency share a connection that dates back almost three decades.

Phil Bronstein, executive chairman of the center, which is based in Berkeley, Calif., knew Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, the co-chairmen of Goodby, Silverstein, from the days when the agency handled the account of the newspaper for which Mr. Bronstein was a reporter, The San Francisco Examiner.

The cheeky, innovative campaign created in the 1980s by the agency - then known as Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein - was acclaimed for its casting of the publisher, William Randolph Hearst III, in a leading role that invoked his grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, and “Citizen Kane.”

Mr. Bronstein, in a phone interview this week, recalled ruefully an ad in the campaign that promoted his reporting from the Philippines on the fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, which included his “getting into the presidential palace soon after the Marcoses had left.”

“The ad said, ‘While other reporters were going to press conferences, Phil Bronstein was going through Imelda's drawers,' ” Mr. Bronstein said. At the time, he added, he believed the ad was “trivializing my work,” but he eventually came to consider the campaign to be “very effective.”

Fast forward to about a year ago, after the center had merged with The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. The center's leaders began considering ways to raise the organization's profile.

“Within the world of journalism, it's pretty reasonable to say people know what we do,” Mr. Bronstein said. But “as investigative reporting becomes more of an endangered species, it struck us that people, audiences, we want to reach should know us.”

That was reinforced in May, when The Bay Citizen and California Watch, which the center started as a separate entity in 2009, were both placed under the center's umbrella.

“We had a number of identities,” Mr. Bronstein said, adding, “None of us were brand experts, but even as journalists we came to the conclusion it was confusing.”

The center needs a strong brand personality, Mr. Bronstein said, as it continues working with commercial media outlets like CNN.

“Anderson Cooper was mentioning ‘the C.I.R.' 18 times” during a recent report, he added, “and who knows what the C.I.R. is?”

That goal is also important as the center pursues ventures that include The I Files, a channel on YouTube, and a pilot for a series for public radio stations in partnership with Public Radio Exchange, known as PRX, Mr. Bronstein said, adding, “We're exploring every opportunity we get to expand what we do.”

The idea for the campaign was suggested by “Broken Shield,” a series by California Watch that investigated problems at centers for the developmentally disabled. When reporters received documents they had requested from state officials, “the documents were entirely redacted,” Mr. Bronstein said, “not just the words but the margins.”

“Rich took that redaction notion,” he added, “to deliver the message that we are the antidote to redaction.”

The center's new logo looks like a redacted document, with everything unreadable except for five words: “the,” “center for,” “investigative” and “reporting.” The logo will appear in numerous places like the center's Web site, video clips and movie-style posters that promote the center's reporting.

For instance, a poster for “Broken Shield,” showing a hospital X-ray, reads: “In the disabled ward, no one can hear you scream. Certainly not the police. A CIR special report.”

The logo is meant to symbolize that “you have to go beyond that blacked-out material to find the truth,” Mr. Silverstein said in a separate phone interview.

“Newspapers and investigative reporting just can't go away,” he added. “They do so much, keeping society in check. What would we do without sources of real information?”

The work for the center marks a “return to our roots,” Mr. Silverstein said of himself and Mr. Goodby, for another reason in addition to the connection to The Examiner.

“Jeff was a reporter at The Boston Herald and I was an art director at Rolling Stone,” Mr. Silverstein said. “I remember watching the Watergate hearings live while pasting up Rolling Stone.”

The agency's work on the campaign was “a labor of love,” he added. “You can say hundreds of hours.”

“It's so nice to give something back,” Mr. Silverstein said. Moments later, he added, in a characteristic Groucho Marx-like aside, “I still want to sell potato chips and cars, by the way.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 10, 2013

Because of incorrect information provided by the Center for Investigative Reporting, an earlier version of this column referred incorrectly to the center's partner on a pilot for a radio series. Although the series is for public radio stations, it is not an NPR production; for distribution and production on the project, the center is working with Public Radio Exchange, known as PRX.

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists Who Seek Out Hidden Things, a More Visible Brand.