As media companies continue selling off their newspapers to cut losses and news organizations succomb to the revenue tease of infotainment, it’s refreshing to see at least one positive trend in journalism moving forward.

With a nod to my friend Craig Carroll, who is doing his own innovative work at University of North Carolina in measuring new media and associating business value with PR, I point you to this timely piece in Miller-McCune’s December issue: “Deep Throat Meets Data Mining."

Author and Editor-in-chief John Mecklin turns the data-mining-equals-big-brother rock over for a look underneath at the lush, maybe microscopic life flourishing where the sun don’t shine. Sure, he agrees, data mining in the wrong hands can threaten privacy, but that’s what the constitution and laws are for. In the right hands – in this case, the treasured digits of the investigative journalist – data mining may be no less than the savior of democracy.

Here’s a world where money man and motor mouth Sam Zell explains away his strangulation of the Chicago Trib by observing, "I haven't figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize." But with investigative journalism responsible for revealing everything from Nixon’s election shenanigans to warrantless wiretapping and dereliction of moral duty at Walter Reed, we need to get creative to save the free press that defines the real real America.

Mecklin reminds us that data mining is simply a fast and highly efficient way to filter through impossible piles of data and find associations, trends and outliers that surface important insights. One that might save our intrepid investigators countless (paid or unpaid) weeks and months of paper (or digital) shuffling.

It's not just that data mining is SAS' sweet spot. Duke University is dedicating an endowed chair to the cause of computational journalism. Looks like a trend well worth investigating.