One day in the spring of 1995, staff members of Investigative Reporters & Editors realized that they were looking at a kind of ecological crisis. They were used to rainwater splashing into their basement offices on the University of Missouri's Columbia campus every couple of weeks or so, but this time water came rising through the god-awmighty floor, toward the computers that in the past two years had become the most crucial and profitable tools of a historically cash-starved nonprofit organization.

 Convinced by this and other signs that Missouri was taking it for granted, IRE began looking for a new home. And as in any divorce, the details -- like, who gets to keep the car, or rather, NICAR, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, co-founded and co-owned by IRE and MU -- masked subtler, heavier issues. Besieged and flattered by glittering new opportunities, the premier investigative reporters' organization in the world had forgotten to ask the basic questions, like how changing home base is related to what it is becoming, and what it wants to be.

 So now there was a debate within IRE, and its foreground was deceptively simple: Should it accept an offer from the University of Maryland and move to within driving distance from the powerhouses (of journalism, foundations, and power, period) of Washington, D.C., or stay in the heartland backwater of the University of Missouri, which came back with a "please don't go" offer? The argument was a hot one, replete with "a high level of suspicion and backbiting," sighs IRE executive director Rosemary Armao. In Maryland's favor, board chair Deborah Nelson of The Seattle Times cited a more convenient and attractive location for staff, conferences, and visitors, "an excellent high-tech environment," and, above all, a hunger that contrasts sharply with "the complacent attitude that has permeated many of our dealings with the Missouri bureaucracy." Missouri loyalists argued that MU runs a top-ranked journalism program that provides IRE with terrific student help, that Missouri was offering better space, and that leaving Missouri would knock out the crucial NICAR program for at least six months, possibly cripple it if Missouri were uncooperative (a possibility the Maryland side dismissed). Speaking for Missouri, faculty member George Kennedy conceded that the administration "got out of the habit of staying in close touch with IRE, but the current trauma has refocused our attention." Former IRE executive director Steve Weinberg (a cjr contributing editor) put it this way: "Has Missouri been a perfect host, day in and day out, for nineteen years? Has anyone, ever? This whole thing is blshit."

 But underneath were the intangibles, and the fact that, as in real estate, location affects not only how you are perceived, but how you perceive yourself. What's emerged is that while part of IRE loved the idea of the organization's becoming a Washington player, another part sensed in such a move the culmination of a long-building and unwanted shift in the organization's character. All those questions remained open as IRE headed into its twenty-first national conference in Providence on June 13-16, which promised to be one of the liveliest on record.

Some ambiguity about goals has been there since IRE was founded in 1975 by a platoon of muckrakers, teachers, and publishers meeting in Reston, Virginia. On the one hand, they agreed that they wanted to set standards and share experiences among the entire profession. Yet researcher James Aucoin, in a recent article for the University of Georgia-based quarterly American Journalism, shows that the founders vacillated between a wide-open shop -- "It's the guy in Kokomo who needs this," said one -- and the desire of heavyweights like Jack Anderson and Les Whitten to "accept only the experienced reporters" and "avoid some yo-yos." The open-door group won. "There aren't nearly as many full-time investigators as IRE members" -- 3,307 at last count -- says board member Bill Dedman, Director of CAR for The Associated Press and an advocate of moving to Maryland. Moreover, IRE's most experienced members continually explain to less experienced reporters "how they did it and what they do," as former executive director John Ullmann puts it -- at conferences, through the bi-monthly IRE Journal, and on IRE's Internet site.

 IRE first became widely known through the Arizona Project of 1976-77, when it replied to the murder of a founding member, Don Bolles, by sending a team of reporters into the state "to show you can't kill the story by killing the reporter," says Ullmann. Led by Bob Greene of Newsday, the project exposed a climate of corruption and proved that "the people who said lone wolves could never work together were wrong," says Armao. Yet it nearly shattered IRE, generating high-stakes lawsuits from story subjects and "massive confusion about our focus," says board secretary and IRE counsel Edward Delaney. To some, IRE became a symbol of Watergate-era adversarial macho; even now, "some people think IRE is elitist, or run by newsroom hotheads," says Brant Houston, IRE's computer guru.

Meanwhile, successive boards never quite resolved the question of who should pay for IRE's services, which have continually expanded. They now include publishing (a lot of reporters, including this one, learned how to file an FOIA request by reading The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques), a prestigious awards program, and an archive based on the contest entries (which now contains over 11,000 topflight stories and gets 50 requests a day from reporters backgrounding theirs). There has been one financial certainty, however, past and present: "We can't run an organization on dues, or they'd be too high," says board member Rose Ciotta, a computer-reporting editor at The Buffalo News.

Back in the beginning, small and scattered grants enabled IRE to take off, but the University of Missouri allowed it to fly. "Missouri underwrote The IRE Journal, printed it on The Missourian's press, paid the electricity and photocopies," says Ullmann. IRE staff members took part of their wages in exchange for teaching posts.

 Missouri's support made it possible for subsequent executive directors like Steve Weinberg (1983-90) to take a purist stance toward becoming dependent on outside money. "I thought going to journalism foundations was bad enough," says Weinberg, "but outside [the profession], I thought there were too many conflicts of interest."

But IRE's culture, in board member Jacquee Petchel's phrase, was "mutating." The shift crystalized in 1991, when "they voted Myrta out," says board member Penny Loeb -- a reference to Myrta Pulliam of The Indianapolis Star, who came up with the idea for IRE in 1975 and symbolized its founding spirit. A band of "young Turks," as Armao says, dominated the IRE board from then on.

They are epitomized by Dedman, thirty-five, and TV journalists like John Lindsay, vice president of Oregon Public Broadcasting. Amendments to the bylaws to set a limit on the number of editors on the board -- in an organization that historically "didn't like editors," says Dedman -- were attempted, but they failed.

 These leaders aptly symbolized an organization whose key constituency is not what many had assumed. Researcher Fred Blevens of Texas A&M University recently found that the bigger the newspaper, the more highly educated its editors, the more awards they won, and the closer they were to the coasts, the more likely its editors and reporters were to read the IRE Journal. The "guy in Kokomo" is still there, but his sway has diminished.

 The young Turks were boiling with ideas -- Weinberg remembers getting "absolutely brilliant" thirty-page memos from Dedman -- and they moved on them, like a program for minority journalists that provides scholarships to IRE conferences. But their major innovation, of historic importance to IRE and the profession, was NICAR.

It was started in 1989 (as MICAR) by the University of Missouri, a short but crucial step ahead of its time. By 1992, to save the program, the university agreed to share it with IRE. A grant from the Freedom Forum paid for laptops and staff to carry them into newsroom training sessions, and IRE suddenly found itself on the leading edge of an industry revolution. "How many newspapers want to devote resources just to investigative reporting?" comments Ciotta. "But papers are investing in these [computer] resources." Virtually from the day in 1993 when the grant came in, IRE's program revenues exploded -- from $153,309 in 1992 to $296,383 in 1993, according to nonprofit tax forms -- and staff grew from three to twelve, as newsrooms opened their doors to NICAR training sessions. That massive success gave the board "a growing confidence that we can build constituencies," says Dedman.

 Then IRE did the unthinkable, for old-timers: It hired a professional fundraiser, Marcie Setlow. The grants she brought in have underwritten admirable goals, but at the cost of a pointed debate over whether grants are chasing IRE, or vice versa. The crunch point was a grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation to launch a Mexican Reporting Institute, proposed by IRE after Setlow learned that the foundation was interested in Latin America. IRE had long dreamed about promoting investigative reporting abroad, but "we'd never discussed having an arm of IRE in Latin America," says Petchel. "It's putting the cart before the horse." Counters Dedman: "You don't get there by deciding it. You get there incrementally, as opportunities present themselves."

The opportunity presenting itself this spring was Washington, which some of the young Turks saw as "an exceptional launching pad," in Nelson's phrase, or for Dedman, a guarantee of higher "visibility" -- more chance to interact with "international journalism organizations, editors, the people who run foundations." Weinberg disagrees: "Visibility is always nice, but it's the last of IRE's problems. IRE is overwhelmed with requests for conferences and seminars that don't get done. What good is visibility, if you don't have enough money for that?" And for others in the organization, rubbing shoulders with the powerful is dangerous business for investigative reporters, and the Beltway is not a place that fosters independence. "Being located outside the Beltway, say, in Guam, is a positive thing," reads one of IRE member Bruce Selcraig's Internet postings on the move. "IRE has benefited greatly from this, perhaps in ways some of us have never considered before."

The idea of IRE in Washington has grated hardest on the ranking old-timer of the IRE board, Mike McGraw, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and projects reporter at The Kansas City Star, who lined up with Petchel and Ciotta against the move to Maryland early in the debate. He worries about a divide in IRE "between the geek-heads and the shoe-leather types" (guess which shoe fits him). When he goes to Washington, "I parachute in for a few days, look at records Washington reporters never look at, and get out before I start to feel like a Washington Reporter."

 An IRE member since 1978, McGraw was on the job when the glamour of Watergate soured under the steadily accumulating weight of public disaffection, adverse Supreme Court decisions, libel suits, and the Janet Cooke scandal. Other board members, like Lindsay, have the distinct feeling that McGraw believes that once again, investigative pride could goeth before a fall. And they think this may explain why McGraw is the strongest advocate on the board, not only of staying in Missouri, but of what he calls a "back to basics" philosophy of IRE's mission, concentrating on training journalists in in-depth interviews and reporting.

In short, this is a gut issue, in an organization founded on gut feelings. IRE was created to combat solitude. Its typical conference audience, board members agree, is made up of younger reporters who get no help from overdriven managers when they ask for time and advice on enterprise projects. Even at the top, a tenacious sense of isolation keeps surfacing -- for example, when Dedman warns that IRE's treasured autonomy can "cut [us] off from influencing the profession, from doing more than preaching to the choir." This, perhaps, is what led IRE's board to react so strongly to Missouri's perceived indifference: the deep-down sense that for all its success, IRE is still alone, still vulnerable.

At Providence, a Maryland delegation led by Dean Reese Cleghorn came armed with a last-minute offer -- a $75,000 grant and a promise of more space. But at 11 p.m. on June 14, as the exhausted board held a final discussion before the vote, the outcome became clear; Cleghorn crossed the room to shake the hand of Missouri's Kennedy, an elegant concession of defeat. The vote was 7Ð4 for Missouri. Dedman immediately moved that a committee be appointed to monitor the new deal with Missouri, which passed unanimously. The next day he announced he would not stand for reelection.

Just before the vote, the board had tried to open up a discussion of the organization's future, but it focused on means rather than ends. IRE has renewed its lease, confirmed its power and prestige, and returned to an image of unity. IRE is on a "rocket-ship ride," as NICAR's Houston put it. But it has not yet decided exactly where to aim the rocket.

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