Dean Starkman is editor of The Audit, a Columbia Journalism Review blog that covers and critiques the business press. It focuses on big outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, Forbes and the other most-watched sources for business news. Starkman and his writers act as both media watchdogs and public advocates, scanning for inaccuracy and bias and calling the business media to answer first to the public, rather than Wall Street.

Starkman is a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, as is his colleague Ryan Chittum. Chittum writes the Audit’s daily content, critiquing business news on accuracy and detail. Starkman meanwhile focuses on long-form journalism about the business press.

The blog was started by Herbert Winokur, Jr., a former member of the Enron board of directors. Winokur wanted to make sure the media didn’t miss a future conspiracy like Enron, and he created the Audit to be an advocate for better business reporting.

Starkman was hired in 2007 to head the Audit, after having spent eight years at the Wall Street Journal as an investigative business reporter. From 1996 to 2004, he saw the Journal go through cuts that hurt their financial reporting. He wrote in a 2009 Mother Jones piece that the Journal’s reporters were hit with “low morale, lost expertise, and constant cutbacks..[which] do not produce an appetite for confrontation and muckraking.”

Yet Starkman saw issues that demanded confrontation. After leaving the journal, Starkman spent a year researching how the insurance industry responded to the claims of Hurricane Katrina victims. He found that $100,000 claims were sometimes getting back just cents of compensation from insurers, and regulators were turning a blind eye. Starkman was appalled, and he soon began to see the Katrina debacle along with predatory lenders as part of a growing corrosion of America’s financial services.

But he didn’t see the mainstream media covering this. Outlets like CNBC were focusing on stories easy to sell to Wall Street: deals and mergers and acquisitions. They were treating the audience as “investors rather than citizens,” Starkman said.

“M&As were sucking the oxygen out of the business press coverage, and I wanted to push back against that,” he added.

The Audit was the perfect vehicle to do that, a business press watchdog hosted by a respected non-profit read by journalists all around the country.

However, Starkman underestimated the need to feed the blog daily. As an investigative reporter, he wasn’t used to putting out daily posts. So he hired Ryan Chittum, a former colleague of his at the Journal, to be the daily blogger.

In his daily work, Chittum critiques business news reports in the outlets that he and Starkman think are the most read and watched, like the Journal, the New York Times, magazines like Fortune and CNBC. The writing mostly is a fact-check with occasional snark thrown in. In one piece, he slammed a WSJ op-ed as “one of the more disappointing pieces I’ve read in this crisis — and that’s saying something.”

Becoming a critic has been a challenge for Chittum, after years as a news reporter writing in a neutral voice. It’s also been awkward to write about the work of ex-colleagues.

“Some people in the business…get ticked that I don’t call them before writing something. But that’s not my job,” he said. “Does A.O. Scott [NY Times movie review] call up Wes Anderson to ask why the forty minutes of The Darjeeling Limited are ponderous and self-indulgent? No. He reviews as a moviegoer who happens to know a lot about the business. That’s how I think of what we do at the Audit, only we review business journalism.”

At the same time, Chittum says it’s not right to blame individual reporters for bad journalism.

“Many of the journalists I criticize are better reporters than I ever will be,” he said. “There’s a whole ecosystem responsible for how a story comes out.”

With editors, corporate bosses, advertisers, newsrooms and audiences all having an influence on the product, there’s plenty of ways good business reporting can go bad.

“It’s not about an individual’s shortcomings in a piece so much as it is about the institutions and what kind of sausage they’re squirting out,” Starkman said.

These days, Chittum writes two or three posts a week, and he’s established a rapport with his readers. With about 4-5 comments a story, he has time to e-mail them and often get helpful tips. Chittum says he appreciates every comment, whether harsh or approving.

“Every journalist can sometimes feel like they’re working in the middle of nowhere, especially in the field of criticism,” Starkman said. “Every love or hate letter helps you to know where you stand.”

Chittum says that dialogue is only possible because CJR readership is more select, which is exactly what they wanted.

“We never wanted it to get a million hits a day,” Chittum said. “We wanted to hit an influential readership.”

Chittum came to the business beat from an impoverished youth in Tulsa, OK, which offered him a unique perspective on the mortgage crisis in 2008. In Oct. 2008, he wrote a piece called “My Foreclosure” about his family’s experience of losing their home when he was a teenager.

“I’ll bet that very few, if any, business reporters working today at major media outlets have personally been through a foreclosure,” he wrote. “I’d go as far as to bet that, unfortunately, a surprisingly small number of working business reporters have even interviewed anyone going through a foreclosure. Sometimes I wonder if we had been in better touch with regular people outside our circles, we might have been more attuned to the perilous state of the American middle class and what the effects of the lending boom might be, and thus might have provided better warnings.”

“My Foreclosure” got Chittum the most responses of any piece he’s ever written for the Audit, and some of them were furious. One woman called Chittum an elitist, writing “Poor is a tarpaper shack and starvation, not renting.”

The Audit crew has also received criticism for ignoring blogs in its focus on mainstream business media. In a 2009 letter to Starkman, financial blogger Barry Ritholtz wrote that his blog, The Big Picture, along with Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism were reporting the meltdown but were not getting heeded by the mainstream. He wrote to Starkman, “The story you missed was that the smart reporting and commentary was not being done by MSM [mainstream media], it was being done by others… Traditional reporting left a vacuum, one that was quickly filled.”

Starkman said he and Chittum would like to give more time for blogs, but besides lacking the resources, it’s also not their main concern.

“LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week — for better or worse, they set the financial agenda for the country,” Starkman said. “They need to be reckoned with and by concentrating on them, we can have the most influence on the agenda.”

March 2009 brought the Audit its highest audience ever, with 73,000 page views. Starkman hopes to add more original reports and an archive of business articles from over the last few years, for students and others who might want to investigate the origins of the financial crisis. In that spirit, Starkman is working on a review of financial journalism from 2000 to 2007 that Columbia Journalism Review will publish later this year.