Watchdog journalism was the topic of the day -- or more like three days -- when the group Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. held its annual conference this past weekend in Baltimore. My boss, Trent Seibert, and I were in attendance.

IRE always puts on an awesome conference, but this year's gathering held special interest for us because it allowed us to meet people from all around the country who are doing the same thing we're doing, nonprofit journalism. We were able to put faces to names of people we'd exchanged e-mails and phone calls with for months who are trying to start nonprofit newspapers and investigative reporting centers in a handful of other states. We also made new friends of people whose nonprofit efforts were news to us, who haven't yet gone public with or gotten a lot of publicity about their plans.

The Knight Foundation also made an important announcement at the conference, saying it would put $15 million into funding national and local nonprofit journalism efforts. That's a great vote of confidence in this still-developing field.

And Trent and I met lots of great people, and really enjoyed making new friends, including getting to meet several folks from Texas whose work we had seen and read for months now, including Nanci Wilson of Austin and Brian Collister of San Antonio. Trent also enjoyed meeting Wayne Dolcefino of KTRK-Channel 13 here in Houston, whose reporting on former Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas' destruction of e-mails earned the IRE FOI Award.

IRE had great conference sessions, as always, including a very good panel about anonymous sourcing on national security issues with Seymour Hersh and James Bamford, whose books on the National Security Agency have been on my got-to-read-soon list (his latest, The Shadow Factory, was honored with an IRE award at the conference). A tidbit: Hersh meets with his sources in private, nearly always at their homes; Bamford meets with his sources in public, usually at nice restaurants. Neither man discusses any substantive issues with sources via telephone.

Being as close as we were to DC, it wasn't surprising that one of the special events was a talk by Bob Woodward and his former Washington Post boss, Leonard Downie. My favorite point from that session: Twitter, Facebook and other social media aren't reporting in and of themselves. They're tools for journalists to distribute their reporting, but they don't take the place of it. Also: Woodward disclosed that in one three-hour interview he did with President George W. Bush -- I think for his latest book -- he asked Bush 500 questions. Sounds like most of them got one-word answers. (That's like more than two questions per minute, by my math.)

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