Contacts:
James V. Grimaldi, chairman, Contest Committee, 202-334-6000, grimaldij@washpost.com
David Boardman, President, IRE, (206) 464-2200, dboardman@seattletimes.com
Brant Houston, Executive Director, 573-882-2042, brant@ire.org

March 28, 2006

Toxic dumping, public corruption investigations among winners of 2005 IRE Awards

See full list of winners, finalists and judges' comments.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Investigative stories about deceit in Cleveland’s public school district and an environmental disaster in New Jersey won the top prizes in the 2005 IRE awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors announced today.

Those were among 15 prizes awarded by IRE, a 4,500-member professional and educational organization based at the Missouri School of Journalism. The contest, which began in 1979, recognizes outstanding investigative work each year and this year received 563 entries.

IRE also honored a 17-year body of crime reporting that unmasked the killer in the 1963 murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers, investigations into fraud and abuse in two federal agencies and stories documenting troubles with the pharmaceutical industry.

In addition, IRE recognized one of the youngest journalists it has honored for work done primarily while in high school and, for the first time, gave a broadcasting award to a network not based in North America. The Korean Broadcasting System won a certificate for a report that prompted the South Korean government to ban ocean dumping.

IRE Medals, the top honor bestowed by the organization, were given to:

• Reporter Tom Merriman and journalists Mark DeMarino, Greg Easterly, Dave Hollis, Matt Rafferty and Chuck Rigdon at WJW-Cleveland for exposing millions of dollars in waste, gross mismanagement and cover-up in the Cleveland Municipal School District. WJW found hundreds of bus drivers were being paid millions of dollars to spend their days playing billiards. Reporters then revealed that the district inflated rider numbers to get more money from the state. The reports led to the resignation of the district’s CEO and to major reforms.
• Reporters Jan Barry, Mary Jo Layton, Alex Nussbaum, Clint Riley, Tom Troncone, Barbara Williams, Lindy Washburn and senior photographer Thomas Franklin at The Record in Bergen County, N.J., for documenting the lethal legacy of the Ford Motor Co.’s dumping of toxic sludge into a vast area populated largely by low-income people. A community of hundreds of families is plagued by asthma, rashes and cancer at elevated rates. “This work stood out not only for its exhaustive reporting and clear writing,” the judges said, “but for its riveting multimedia presentation.”

IRE judges awarded the Tom Renner Medal for Outstanding Crime Reporting to Jerry Mitchell, a crusading investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., who has doggedly pursued justice in Civil Rights era-killings for 17 years. Since 1989, Mitchell's beat has been "crimes of the past," in a state that was reluctant to prosecute or convict at the time.

Mitchell’s first investigation resulted in the reopening of the killing of Medgar Evers. In 2005, his work resulted in a conviction of a Klan leader in the notorious "Mississippi Burning" case that involved the Freedom Summer slaying of three civil rights workers. The prosecutions in the case are the result of Mitchell’s brave and relentless reporting in the face of threats and personal attacks. The Renner award is given for a single story or a lifetime body of work.

The Freedom of Information award was given to Small Newspaper Group statehouse reporter Scott Reeder, who filed 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests with almost 900 government agencies in Illinois to report his series, “The Hidden Costs of Tenure.” He spent months compiling the documents that ultimately showed the failure of the state's 20-year-old law aimed at making it easier to fire bad teachers.

The IRE awards, called certificates, are divided into 15 categories based on market or circulation size, most for print, broadcast and online media.The IRE Certificate winners were:

• Scott Higham and Robert O’Harrow Jr. of The Washington Post for "High Price of Homeland Security.” Despite the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to block the release of public documents, the reporters found evidence that the agency built on the ashes of 9/11 has misspent billions of dollars because of lax financial controls, outmoded technologies, inexperienced contractors and political influence.
• Sally Kestin, Megan O’Matz, John Maines and Jon Burstein of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for “FEMA: A Legacy of Waste.” Analyzing applications for federal disaster aid filed by 4 million individuals in 20 national disasters, the Sun-Sentinel found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to people who were unscathed by storms, wildfires or earthquakes. The reporters found fraud and waste costing more than $530 million.
• Scott Finn of The Charleston Gazette for “Brother’s Keeper: West Virginia’s Mental Health Crisis.” This ambitious investigation documented the devastating effects of budget cuts, bureaucratic bungling and outright fraud on some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable residents – the mentally ill. Compelling reading that also produced impressive results: The state passed reform laws and restored funding for mental-health services.
• Nigel Jaquiss of Willamette Week for “PGE Investigation.” First-class dogged reporting put the brakes on secret plans by a Texas buyout firm to strip down Oregon’s largest public utility and sell the leavings for a huge profit. Jaquiss revealed that the Texas Pacific Group tried to use local politicians and others to purchase Portland General Electric only to lay off workers, slash customer service and profit hugely by reselling the stripped-down power company.
• Kim Myung Seop, Han Seung Bok, Lee Seung Ik and Yoon Hee Jin of the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) for “Special Report: 17 years of Ocean Dumping.” Going undercover and underwater, KBS revealed that ships routinely dump toxic sewage sludge and industrial waste into the sea. After this thorough investigation, the Korean government banned ocean dumping and plans to compensate fishermen whose livelihoods were harmed by the dumping.
• Craig Cheatham of KMOV-St. Louis for “La Oroya.” Investing significant time, resources and commitment, reporters raised serious ethical questions regarding Doe Run, the billionaire-owned company running a lead smelter in Peru that has poisoned a community. Judges said, “It is the type of story that is rarely, if ever, seen on local television.”
• David Evans, Michael Smith and Liz Willen of Bloomberg Markets magazine for “Big Pharma’s Shameful Secret.” The Bloomberg News reporters found for-profit companies conducting clinical trials employing immigrants and the impoverished who are ill-informed before wagering their health on experimental drugs.
• David Kirby for Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic — A Medical Controversy. Autism, rare in the past, is exploding in the United States, and Kirby investigates whether one of the causes is thimerisol, a vaccine preservative that contains mercury, a neurotoxin. Through careful and meticulous reporting, Kirby tells the story of stonewalling, denial and cover-up by federal regulators, medical groups and the pharmaceutical industry.
• Jack Hamann, author of On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II. The book reaches back more than six decades to expose a hidden travesty of justice by the U.S. military in World War II, in which the Army charged 43 soldiers, all of them African-American, with rioting that resulted in the death of an Italian prisoner of war. Hamann, with researcher Leslie Hamann, uncovers a web of lies in a book that holds lessons for today on the tensions between national security and individual rights.
• Sandra Bartlett, Bob Carty, Pauline Dakin, Mike Gordon, David McKie, Paddy Moore and Susanne Reber of Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio for “Seniors and Drugs: Prescribed to Death.” The CBC found that doctors had prescribed to more than a million seniors a variety of drugs that have been found to be potentially harmful to older people who have difficulty metabolizing drugs.
• J. David McSwane of Arvada, Colo. for “An Army of Anyone,” which was a collection of three stories. Working for his high school newspaper, Westwind, when he began his investigation, McSwane went undercover to expose how recruiters desperate to meet their quotas ignored fictional flaws in his personal background. The stories forced the U.S. Army to convene a national stand-down to review recruiting tactics. The third story was published in Westword, a Denver, Colo. weekly.

Contest entries are screened and judged by IRE members who are working journalists. The IRE Awards program is unique in its efforts to avoid conflicts of interest. Work that includes any significant role by a member of the IRE Board of Directors or an IRE contest judge may not be entered in the contest.

This represents a significant sacrifice on the part of the individual — and often an entire newsroom — who may have done outstanding investigative work. For example, this year, board members who work for The Washington Post, The Orange County Register, The Seattle Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Wisconsin State Journal, KUSA-Denver and WEWS-Cleveland were unable to enter the contest.

IRE, founded in 1975, is a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to training and supporting journalists who pursue investigative stories and operates the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism.

The IRE Awards will be presented during the Saturday, June 17, luncheon at the 2006 IRE Annual Conference in Fort Worth. The conference, scheduled for June 15-18 at the Renaissance Worthington Hotel, will feature many of the winners speaking about the techniques, methods and resources they used to develop their stories. To register, please go to www.ire.org/training/dallasfortworth06/.

Copies of all contest entries are available to IRE members from the IRE Resource Center, which has more than 22,000 investigative stories submitted over the past 27 years. The center can be reached via e-mail at rescntr@ire.org or by calling 573-882-3364.

See full list of winners, finalists and judges' comments.