FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 9, 2008
Contact:
- Mark Horvit, IRE executive director, 573-882-2042 or mhorvit@ire.org
- Steve Doig, Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University
480-965-0798 or steve.doig@asu.edu
Investigations into cheating, the death penalty and insurance fraud receive top honors in Meyer Awards
Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods as key parts of their probes were named today as winners of the 2007 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.
The Dallas Morning News took top honors for its “Faking the Grade” investigation. Analyzing standardized test scores from around the state of Texas, reporters Holly Hacker and Joshua Benton found patterns in students’ answers that pointed to widespread cheating on high-stakes exams.
In second place, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that Georgia has failed to correct “arbitrary and capricious” application of the death penalty, despite a U.S. Supreme Court warning more than 30 years ago.
The Kansas City Star took third place for showing how much insurance claims and responses vary on a national scale, with an investigation that covered more than 35 million records.
The Meyer Awards recognize the best uses of social science methods in journalism. The awards will be presented on Feb. 29 at the 2008 CAR Conference in Houston, sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors. The first-place winner will receive $500; second and third will receive $300 and $200.
The awards are administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (a joint program of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Missouri School of Journalism), and the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
The Meyer Awards are in honor of Philip Meyer, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of Precision Journalism, the seminal 1973 book (and subsequent editions) that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism. As a reporter, he also pioneered using survey research for Knight-Ridder newspapers while exploring the causes of race riots in the 1960s.
Here are details on the winners of the 2007 Meyer Awards:
First Place: The Dallas Morning News for "Faking the Grade," a three-day series that uncovered strong evidence of cheating on standardized tests by more than 50,000 students in Texas public and charter schools. Reporters Joshua Benton and Holly Hacker followed up on the paper’s groundbreaking 2004 investigation of cheating at the district and school level by analyzing a huge public records database of the scores and answers of hundreds of thousands of individual students taking the tests over a two-year period. The series prompted the state to announce stricter controls over test-taking conditions in Texas schools and to adopt the cheat-detection statistical methods used by the paper.
Second Place: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for “A Matter of Life and Death,” a four-day package of stories that documented how Georgia has failed to follow through on capital punishment reforms promised after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the state’s application of the death penalty was “arbitrary and capricious.” Reporters Bill Rankin, Heather Vogell, Sonji Jacobs and database specialist Megan Clarke led a team that hand-built a database of more than 2,300 murder convictions since 1995 by traveling to more than 100 of the state’s 159 county courthouses and researcher Alice Wertheim created a database of all Georgia Supreme Court death penalty decisions since 1982. They analyzed this data with multiple regression analysis to demonstrate wide variations in application of the death penalty by demographics and geography, prompting the Legislature to consider changes in the capital punishment laws and the state’s chief justice to take steps to improve its review of such cases.
Third Place: The Kansas City Star for "Insurance: Service or Shenanigans," a three-day series of stories and follow-ups that used a national consumer complaints database of nearly 35 million records to rate more than 2,400 insurance companies by complaint ratios. Reporters Mike Casey, Mark Morris and David Klepper spent nearly a year gathering and analyzing the national data along with more than 10,000 pages of records to demonstrate how responsiveness to consumer concerns varied widely by company, geography and type of coverage. Since the project ran, state and national legislators have called for a number of measures to address problems documented in the paper’s analysis.
The contest included work published or broadcast between October 2006 and October 2007. Entries were submitted from across the U.S., and represented work that utilized a variety of social science methods and data analysis. All entries will be archived in the IRE Resource Center.
“I am struck by how much important material is here,” said contest judge Cynthia Taeuber. “Thank God for newspapers…These people deserve many, many awards and much recognition for their work."
The contest drew numerous interesting and innovative entries this year. Aside from the winners, other notable entries included:
- An investigation by The Baltimore Sun into how a small group of investors have taken advantage of an archaic law allowing so-called "ground rent" to take the homes of hundreds of Baltimore residents.
- A statistical review by the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune of individual votes cast in 1,500 voting machines that demonstrated how bad ballot design kept more than 18,000 votes from being counted in an extremely close November 2006 Florida congressional election.
- An analysis by The Chicago Reporter of how reliance on local property taxes leads to funding inequities for public education in Chicago schools.
- A study by Gannett News Service of a national database of housing discrimination complaints that showed that complaint rates were highest in counties with less racial and ethnic diversity.
The contest judges included journalism professors who have extensive experience with computer-assisted reporting techniques and social scientists who are experienced in working with reporters. The judges were:
- Ira Chinoy, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and former director of computer-assisted reporting for The Washington Post
- Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Computer-Assisted Reporting at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism, and formerly associate editor for research at The Miami Herald
- William Frey, one of the nation's leading demographers, member of the faculty of the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution
- Brant Houston, the Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and former the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.
- Cindy Taeuber, a retired demographic researcher for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Philip Meyer Journalism Award follows the rules of the IRE Awards in its efforts to avoid conflicts of interest. Work that included any significant role by a member of the IRE Board of Directors or Meyer Award contest judge may not be entered in the contest. This often represents a significant sacrifice on the part of the individual — and sometimes an entire newsroom. The IRE membership appreciates this devotion to the values of the organization.
IRE works to foster excellence in investigative journalism, which is essential to a free society. Founded in 1975, IRE has more than 4,000 members. Headquartered at the Missouri School of Journalism, IRE provides training, resources and a community of support to investigative journalists; promotes high professional standards; and protects the rights of investigative journalists. The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting was founded by the Missouri School of Journalism in 1989 and became a collaboration of the School and IRE in 1994.
