That's a hard thing to disentangle, because investigative reporting isn't just done by people with "investigative reporter" in their titles.

If you want a random waypoint Propublica's staff costs for 2011 were around 5mil$ for a small but very investigative focused news org: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142... (granted they're also not a typical news org).

I recently spoke to a reporter from one of three major newspaper in Israel. I asked her how much investigative journalism they do? She said almost none. The smallest of the 3 papers does a little. The other two do basically none. A little means a lot less than they do of everything else, of course.

So maybe 5% of the combined expenditure for the newspaper industry is probably a generous estimate. It could be <1% I guess.

Most of what journalism does is reporting, commentary, discussion and analysis. Primary, investigative journalism is a relatively small thing.

How much money goes into creating a corporate culture that encourages hardcore investigative journalism?