At an estimated $400,000 it may be the most expensive cover story ever. Investigative journalism, as newspapers are forever trying to remind others, cannot come cheap.

But this expensive?

Nieman Lab reports:

In this case, [writer Sheri] Fink was paid $33,000 plus $10,000 in expenses for her Kaiser fellowship, according to Steve Engelberg, her editor at ProPublica, where she’s been for 14 months. Engelberg, who was kind enough to go through these figures with me, said, “Fourteen months of salary plus benefits for us easily gets you north of 100 plus, 100, 150 or something.” He threw in another $20,000 to $30,000 for travel expenses, in addition to three months of editing and lawyering at ProPublica and the Times, which also spent $25,000 to $30,000 on photographs, he said.

The end result was a cover-story for this weekend’s New York Times Magazine – a 13,000-word investigation of the New Orleans hospital where patients were euthanized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The NY Times investigation is here.

The article reports on:

how more patients than was previously known were injected; how some were not on their deathbed at the time of the injections; exactly what was injected into some of the patients; [and] which doctors were involved and how they came to their decisions…

And even though The Times didn’t pay the full price for the feature, it still is an amazing piece of journalism which would be difficult to replicate in most media organisations around the world.

· About the author: Sunny Hundal is editor of Liberal Conspiracy. He works full time as a journalist, commentator, blogger, activist and general layabout. He was voted Guardian blogger of the year in 2006. Also at: Pickled Politics, on Twitter and Comment is free.

· Other posts by Sunny H

· Filed under: news

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