Is the Reading Eagle outsourcing its investigative reporting?

Who is Jacob Klinger?

The “correspondent” wrote a long, investigative article for the Reading Eagle about Andrew Haines, co-owner of indoor football and soccer teams that play in Reading’s downtown arena.

The subheadline: “Co-owner of indoor soccer and football teams has a history of running short-lived franchises that leave legal troubles, unpaid debts in their wake."

[The story was the big Sunday-morning front-page eye-ball grabber, but on the Eagle website, it’s oddly 20 stories down in the “Berks” section, just below the week’s PennDOT projects, and nowhere on the homepage. Either somebody has no clue how to manage the site, or the paper’s trying to bury the story!?!?]

I can’t remember the last time the major Berks County newspaper ran a story putting somebody in a less-than-favorable-light, other than people charged with crimes.

Did Klinger pitch his story to the Eagle? Is the Eagle accepting story ideas from non-staffers?

Or did the Eagle hire him to write the story? Is the local newspaper outsourcing its reporting?

I know on-staff reporters like Mike Urban, Dan Kelly and Jason Brudereck have the chops to dig into stories like the one about the indoor-team owner. Dan had agood one about electricity customers getting screwed by variable pricing.

I bet they'd love to write juicier stories than they do, and the Berks paper of record has a duty to keep a stable of well-trained, experienced reporters.

This is another example of how the newspaper is opaque about how it covers our community.

I bet most papers would have added a little sidebar about who the heck Klinger is and how they got the story.