Charles Minshew joins IRE as data services director

Charles Minshew of the Orlando Sentinel will join IRE as director of data services on Jan. 23.

During the past three years, Charles has done impressive data and visual storytelling work at the Sentinel. He created and maintained data sets for daily and investigative stories; built interactive graphics, maps and charts; and trained reporters on using data. He secured a $35,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for the newspaper to build a legislative data tool, Tabs on Tallahassee.

As an interactive producer intern at the Denver Post in 2012, Charles shared in the staff Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Aurora theater shootings. His work that summer also was cited by the Pulitzer jurists in the newspaper's finalist designation in breaking news for "imaginative use of digital tools" in coverage of devastating Colorado wildfires. He helped build an interactive map with before-and-after imagery that helped displaced residents pinpoint the destruction and determine whether their homes had been destroyed or had survived the fires long before they were permitted to return.

As data services director, Charles will lead IRE's efforts on data analysis and training. He will supervise three University of Missouri journalism graduate students who work in the database library at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint project of IRE and the University of Missouri.

Charles is proficient in R (statistical/programming software), MySQL, QGIS (mapping software), Excel, Access, responsive web design and application development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and other tools. He earned a master's in journalism at the University of Missouri and a bachelor's in political science from Georgia Southern University.

He succeeds Liz Lucas, who served as IRE's database library director for four years. She now works as a correspondent for Kaiser Health News.

In celebration of the coming holidays, the IRE and NICAR offices will close Friday afternoon, Dec. 23, through Monday, Jan. 2. While staff will be checking in periodically, coverage will be sporadic.

We appreciate your patience and will see you in the new year.

IRE's longest-serving trainer, Jaimi Dowdell, will leave her position at the end of January to complete her Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship and pursue other career opportunities.

Since 2008, Dowdell has trained thousands of journalists in watchdog reporting and data analysis. "Jaimi is exceptionally gifted as a trainer. She's a dynamic presenter and runs amazingly effective hands-on data sessions," IRE Executive Director Doug Haddix said. "Her leadership also has been instrumental in the explosive growth and success of our annual computer-assisted reporting conference. We'll miss her energy, creative ideas and passion for investigative work."

Dowdell and freelance journalist Kelly Carr received the prestigious Spotlight fellowship earlier this year to pursue an in-depth investigative story that will be published in The Boston Globe. The fellowship was inspired by the Globe's investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church – portrayed in the movie "Spotlight." Before joining IRE, Dowdell worked as computer-assisted reporting editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

"IRE is a wonderful organization and I'm so happy to have spent more than eight years working with such great people," Dowdell said. "I plan to stay involved with IRE as a volunteer and member for many years to come."

With Dowdell's departure, IRE will hire a training director to help organize and conduct watchdog workshops and customized newsroom training; help plan national conferences; and develop innovative instructional materials in investigative and data journalism. While IRE is located at the University of Missouri, training directors can be based anywhere in the United States. The position requires strong data and watchdog skills, excellent public speaking ability, a passion for investigative reporting, frequent travel (including weekends), and the ability to work successfully from a remote office.

Full details and a job posting will be available soon. In the meantime, potential candidates should contact Haddix by email (doug@ire.org) or phone (614-205-5420).

An event to celebrate the legacy of David Donald will be held Jan. 12 at American University in Washington, D.C. All are welcome at the 6:30 p.m. remembrance and reception, hosted by the School of Communication in the McKinley Building.

Full details are available on the Celebrating David Donald event page on Facebook.

The evening will include tributes to David, an accomplished journalist and data journalism leader who died Dec. 10 after a yearlong battle with cancer. He served as IRE national training director for nearly five years. (Read IRE’s tribute to David.)

David’s wife, Joyce, is expected to attend the event at American University, where David served as data editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop and as data journalist in residence.

Mrs. Donald has asked that any donations in David’s memory go to IRE for the David Donald Fund for Data Journalism. The fund will be used for scholarships to journalism professors to attend an IRE data boot camp or the national Computer-Assisted Reporting conference. That way, journalism educators can learn and spread the gospel of CAR for years to come among their students -- preparing them early to be effective watchdogs.

Donations can be made online (note "David Donald Fund" as the specific fund) or by check to Investigative Reporters and Editors with "David Donald Fund" in the note line (141 Neff Annex, Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, Missouri 65211).

The Knight Foundation wants to know what you think about the state of access to public records at the federal and state/local levels. Anyone interested in FOI – journalists, access professionals, librarians and others – are invited to share their thoughts. The online survey takes about 15 minutes to complete and will be open until Jan. 1.

To take it, go to Knight FOI Survey.

For more information, contact researcher David Cuillier from the University of Arizona, cuillier@email.arizona.edu

By Susannah Nesmith, CJR

The Palm Beach Post made the bold decision to profile all 216 people who died of an opioid overdose in its coverage area last year, risking the wrath of victims’ families, some of whom were horrified to have their private pain publicized. The stark display of photos of each of the dead, accompanied by brief profiles, effectively served The Post’s goal—drawing attention to the magnitude of the crisis in a way statistics simply could not, while bringing addiction out of the shadows.

The “Generation Heroin” project, rolled out last month, was motivated by the reporters’ discovery that many people were overdosing inside controversial sober homes where they had gone to get better. When the reporters dug deeper, they realized the sheer scope of the problem was far worse than they had imagined: More people died in Palm Beach County from heroin, fentanyl, or illicit morphine overdoses in 2015 than in car accidents.

“We felt like we really wanted to make a major impact with this project,” says managing editor Nick Moschella. “We needed to go beyond what many outlets have done—and done well. We thought, how can we really wake up the state and the community to something that is killing a generation?”

The more standard story about the statistics behind the epidemic, with a few profiles of victims whose families agreed to participate to illustrate its toll, has been done before. The danger with those is its easy for readers to conclude that opioid addiction could never happen to a friend or loved one.

More and more local news outlets are waking up to the reality of the heroin epidemic in their backyards. Earlier this month, WXIA, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta, did an impressive five-part investigation into addiction in the city’s wealthy suburbs, for example. The stories are shocking; the lack of response frustrating. But The Post’s creative treatment of the problem is worth a look.

The Post reporters and editors—Pat Beall, Joe Capozzi, John Pacenti, Christine Stapleton, Lawrence Mower, Mike Stucka, Melanie Mena, and Joel Engelhardt—spent months gathering records on each case. Then Beall, Capozzi, Mower, and Engelhardt divided up the names and made the difficult calls to family members.

They started out dreading the reaction.

“I expected families to be very angry with me from the moment they picked up the phone,” Beall says. “We found this overwhelming support.”

In the end, family members of 98 of the victims supported the project, Engelhardt says. Another couple dozen were basically neutral. Ten asked The Post to pull their family members out of the project, with a few even threatening to sue. The Post was unable to reach family members of some 70 victims, but reconstructed their stories from police and autopsy reports.

The Post spent a good bit of time planning how to report the stories sensitively; reporters and Engelhardt, who is an editor, prepared a standard script before they started the calls. 

“We felt we had to get certain things across very carefully and clearly,” Beall says. “If we were leaving a message, we didn’t know who was going to hear it. We were telling them ‘it’s our intent to show these people as individuals and not statistics.’ We felt very deeply that we could be hurting people.”

They were not, however, calling for permission. The newspaper insisted on printing every name, and every photo it could find, even if family members opposed it.

“The Palm Beach Post did not casually decide to publish the pictures and personal stories of every person in Palm Beach County who died after taking heroin, fentanyl or illicit morphine in 2015,” wrote Publisher Timothy D. Burke in a column explaining the decision. “Though most families of those who died and who spoke with The Post expressed gratitude for the decision, it will bring some others pain. But we believe that the staggering toll this epidemic is taking has been largely hidden from public view, and as a result has not been aggressively addressed.”

I spoke with Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute. Tompkins has been teaching a series of seminars on how to cover the opioid addiction epidemic and he agrees with The Post’sexecution of the project.

“That’s a really wonderful project,” he says. “A large public interest, in my judgment, overwhelms a family’s request for privacy. We know we’re going to cause harm sometimes. The question is the potential good. I don’t know of any large social problem that has ever become better by not looking at it.”

Poynter’s Kelly McBride, the Institute’s ethics guru, wrote recently about the ethics of publishing photos of heroin addicts after a pair of photos released by police in Indiana and Ohio went viral because they showed passed out parents next to terrified children. McBride came up with a checklist of questions to ask when deciding whether to report  on pictures like those. If at least three were met, she deemed publication was ethical. One criteria was:

“Efforts to minimize harm. This would include cropping out or blurring faces of minors (there were no minor victims in Palm Beach County last year). It could also include not naming the adults or showing their faces. After all, the goal is to raise awareness, not shame people, right?”

But while the Post did name the victims, the paper also met several other criteria McBride laid out, including publishing an in-depth story looking at what other communities are doing to tackle opioid addiction, and what Palm Beach County and Florida could be doing.

In Huntington, (West Virginia) population 49,000, nearly every public official carries Narcan, the life-saving drug that reverses heroin overdoses. Police, firefighters, members of the mayor’s cabinet—even librarians carry it—and the health department gives it away to anyone willing to take a class. So when 27 people there overdosed in four hours in August, all but one were saved.

In Palm Beach County, a few police departments and fire departments use Narcan. But (Palm Beach County) Sheriff (Ric) Bradshaw has refused to let his deputies carry it, even when offered the medicine for free. He cited liability issues.

The failure goes beyond local officials in Palm Beach County. The story noted that Gov. Rick Scott dismantled the state’s Office of Drug Control in 2011, replacing it with a powerless advisory council, which has helpfully suggested that something needs to be done. On the other end of the spectrum, Massachusetts declared a public health emergency after seeing a 15 percent spike in overdose deaths in 2014. The same year, Florida saw ODs rise 111 percent, with no corresponding response. On the national level, Congress passed the first major addiction legislation in 40 years last year. The bill to pay for it failed 48 to 47; Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio skipped the vote.

“I remember saying ‘they’re doing so much and we’re doing so little by comparison,’” Beall says. “Joel said ‘They know them.’ That’s why we had to show their faces. So people here can know them like the people in West Virginia know them.”

In addition to looking for solutions for the community, The Post offeredsolutions for families and a story in which experts explain addiction. The newspaper also ran a story  attacking the stereotype of a junkie by pointing to the normal and sometimes even successful lives of many of the victims.

But the heart of the project is the collection of profiles.

The stories are heartbreaking and sometimes chilling, like the one about the addict who admitted to The Post that when a friend overdosed, he decided to use the rest of the friend’s heroin first, then call 911. The friend died. The youngest victim was 19, the oldest 65. Eighty percent were men and 95 percent were white.

Some family members weren’t ready to talk about their loved ones, but sent the Post moving written responses.

The Post team realized early on that doing all those interviews caused its own form of trauma. “It’s really important for reporters to understand that trauma is contagious,” Beall says. “My job description included crying every day.”

Capozzi said decades in journalism hadn’t prepared him for the emotional toll of the months of interviews with grieving family members.

“In the course of my career, there’s always a case when somebody dies and you know, you call the next of kin,” he says. “We were doing that five times a day, coming in on Saturdays to do it because we realized that was a better time to reach people. And for these families, it was like ripping open a scab again. They had already begun to process the death. There were a lot of tears, by me and the families.”

Capozzi traveled to South Carolina to meet with one of the first families he reached, producing a moving prequel to the project, a 180-inch story—about a mother’s failed effort to save her son—that ran in September.

That families’ story reflected one factor common to so many of the stories—the victim was from out of state and came to Palm Beach County to get help. Palm Beach County has become a hub of rehab facilities and sober homes. “They’re coming down here trying to get help, but they are coming down here to die,” Capozzi says.

The Post journalists I talked to say they have been encouraged by the reaction to the project, especially from overwhelmed medical examiners and the police and firefighters who often feel helpless in the face of the epidemic. The Sheriff’s Office in Martin County, just north of Palm Beach, urged its Facebook followers to read the package, calling it “incredible” and “sad, shocking and eye opening.”

Shortly after the project came out, a Palm Beach County commissionerpledged to push for reforms to slow the epidemic. The daughter of her chief aide fatally overdosed the week before.

The Post is hoping for a more robust reaction in the weeks and months ahead. “It’s still early in the game,” Capozzi said.

Journalism lost a talented data analyst, editor and trainer with the death Saturday of David Donald, a former IRE national training director. David passed away at Reston Hospital Center in Virginia after a yearlong battle with cancer. He was 64.

David leaves a remarkable legacy: award-winning investigations, plus thousands of journalists across the United States and around the world who benefited from his training, advice and friendship. IRE is gathering remembrances of David on the IRE and NICAR Facebook page.

“It’s impossible to overestimate the impact that David had on journalism, especially in the sweet spot of sophisticated data analysis and compelling storytelling,” IRE executive director Doug Haddix said. “With his gentle manner and wry humor, David quietly mentored so many of us who benefited from his wisdom and guidance.”

As IRE training director, David crisscrossed the country and ventured overseas regularly to help journalists, educators and students sharpen their watchdog reporting and computer-assisted reporting skills.

His wife, Joyce, thought of David during that era as a circuit preacher, spreading the gospel of CAR. “David loved his colleagues. I am so grateful he had so many beautiful friends. He loved you,” Joyce wrote in an email. “In humor, I have been telling my family… now, David is in heaven teaching!”

Brant Houston, a former IRE executive director who worked closely with David, remembered him as a talented trainer. “Not only of how to use data in journalism, but of how to conduct oneself with kindness, grace, humor, and civility in the often rough and irascible world of journalism.”

David’s patience and grace impressed former IRE executive director Mark Horvit, who credits David for teaching him much of what he knows today about data journalism. “David could put anyone at ease and make them believe that, no matter how complicated something seemed, they could handle it,” Horvit said.

“That was true well beyond the classroom. David was the calm in the storm,” Horvit said. “Not too long into my tenure at IRE, we started scheduling get-away meals during conferences, and those are some of the memories I'll cherish most. David, with a glass (or 2 or 3) of red wine, giving me that same calming, you-can-do-it feeling that he gave his students.” 

Most recently, David served as data editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop and as data journalist in residence at American University’s School of Communication. Previously, he worked as data editor at the Center for Public Integrity and as research and project editor at the Savannah Morning News.

David’s work in journalism tackled a wide range of topics, including subprime lending, campus sexual assault and Medicare payment irregularities. His many journalism awards include: the Philip Meyer Award for the best journalism using social-science methods; the James K. Batten Award; a Peabody Award; an IRE Award; the Dart Award; and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism Washington program and at Savannah State University in Georgia.

He earned a master’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and a bachelor’s degree in English from Miami University in Ohio.

Funeral services are not being planned. Instead, his far-flung family will gather in coming months to remember David.

Mrs. Donald asked that donations in David's memory should be sent to IRE, where a special fund will be established in his name to further data journalism. Donations can be made online (note "David Donald Fund" as the specific fund) or by check to Investigative Reporters and Editors with "David Donald Fund" in the note line (141 Neff Annex, Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, Missouri 65211).

David’s impact will endure, in the ongoing news stories made possible through the gift of his training and mentorship. David’s inspiration also will endure, in the hearts of journalists around the world who treasured his friendship.

Please join us on Thursday, December 15 at The Boathouse at Confluence Park, beginning at 5:30 pm to welcome new IRE Executive Director Doug Haddix. We're blessed to have such a great resource living in our backyard. You don't need to be a member to attend - only a journalist with a passion for watchdog reporting.  

RSVP online for the event and join the IRE Ohio Meetup group if you haven’t already.

IRE has member-organized Meetup groups in six cities. Learn more about them on our IRE Meetups page.

Help a friend, family member or colleague hone their journalism skills in 2017 with a 1-year IRE gift membership ($70).

Here’s how it works:

1. Fill out this form letting us know who you’re giving a membership to. If the recipient already has an IRE membership, your gift will renew their membership for one year beyond its original expiration.
2. Memberships will be processed within 1-2 business days of purchase. The recipient will receive an email letting them know they’ve received a gift membership and that it has been activated.
3. IRE is also offering optional certificates that can be wrapped as a gift or used as a stocking stuffer. If you’d like to receive one, please check the box on the form when you fill it out. A certificate will be emailed to you in 1-2 business days.

   Please note: Certificates are only available until Dec. 21. Choosing to receive a certificate will not delay membership activation; recipients will still receive an email within 1-2 business days of purchase letting them know that they have received a gift.

 

Have a student journalist on your shopping list? For $25 you can give them a 1-year membership through our Student Sponsorship program. Fill out this form to get started.

 

If you have any questions about gift memberships or student sponsorships, please contact Amy Johnston, IRE Membership Coordinator, at amy@ire.org.

By Amy Pyle

I was jolted awake, or rather I was jolted awake, by the Northridge Earthquake on January 17, 1994. I drove bleary-eyed down the 210 freeway to the 118, careening off expansion joints that had become steps. Less than a mile from the epicenter, the San Fernando Valley office of The Los Angeles Times already was surrounded with yellow police tape. Off limits. I was a newly minted editor, suddenly in charge of a mass disaster without access to the normal tools of our trade: phones, computers, police scanners.

We worked in the hot sun of the Times parking lot for most of the day, sneaking inside to grab a battery-operated TV, laptops, pens, and reporters’ notebooks. And from that day on, nothing was the same. For weeks, for months. Actually, for years.

The news was so big that we set aside all of our stories in progress and our future story pitches. Everything was dwarfed by the size and urgency of the quake, its aftershocks, and its aftermath:  the bodies sandwiched inside apartments, the jittery families camping in the median strips, the tearing down and rebuilding that ushered in corrupt contractors and quake ghost towns.

It was overwhelming at first. Then we learned to pace ourselves, to start small, to begin with what we knew, ask questions and follow them.

These are lessons I am reflecting on frequently these days, because on November 8 we were jolted awake again and now are bracing for aftershocks. So many of the stories we had in progress are eclipsed by the election of Donald Trump, so much of what we had planned now seems off topic. So much of what we can do feels inadequate.

From this day on, nothing will be the same.

Unlike the LA Times, a daily newspaper then relied on by 1 million people for their daily news, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reportinghas a special niche: uncovering wrongdoing and injustices, focusing our efforts on those stories with the greatest potential to drive change. That niche has never seemed more relevant.

We are a nonpartisan newsroom. So this pursuit is not about Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal. In recent years, we have not shied away from stories critical of the Obama administration, including several taking the president to task for not living up to his promises to veterans. (Those veterans chose Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 2-1 margin, by the way.) We are independent in every way; none of our donors hold sway over what we cover, no matter how generous.

And change can be good—at a minimum good for news. A new presidential administration, particularly one with a platform of disruption, offers unlimited fodder for investigative journalists.

So where do we start?

After I became editor in chief earlier this year, we defined three filters for our coverage: accountability, inequality, and sustainability. That provides a crucial and topical framework now as we re-evaluate our stories and our plans, guided by an additional filter: How is this new administration likely to shift the foundation, and the response? Who will be hurt and helped?

We have no preconceived notions of what will happen in these areas beyond what we all learned about Donald Trump and his plans during the campaign, much of it from the candidate himself. His post-election statements—such as telling Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that he will deport millions of undocumented people—persuade us he intends to follow through. That kind of change deserves close scrutiny.

Already we have many concerns and the tools to start to address them. Sexual harassment and assault are illegal, not paying contractors and mistreating workers are, too. We have a track record of using our accountability filter to expose these problems and we will continue to do so. Destroying our planet is unfathomable, just as we have begun to make some meager headway against climate change. That’s where our sustainability filter will come in handy. Intolerance is intolerable. The ugliness ignited by Trump’s campaign in terms of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism catches in our inequality filter.

But the bigger challenge for us as journalists is confronting another fault line of this election: that no one seems to care what we report, that no one trusts us. We don’t have 1 million subscribers like the LA Times did back in 1994, counting on us to help them recover. So we realize that rebuilding trust will be difficult—and essential. We’re just beginning to think about how to begin but we already know that our work convening local and regional media around the nation as investigative partners—through Reveal Labs and our public radio program and podcast with PRX, Reveal—will be another powerful tool in meeting that challenge.

In a trending post on Twitter two days after the election, a man called one current narrative backward. It’s the rural and exurbanites who need to listen more to the urbanites, he said, not vice versa. I think it’s both, I tweeted back at him: “We all need to assume less, listen more.”

So in the coming months, watch for us to redouble our efforts to uncover wrongdoing and injustice. That draws on our core values, our mission, which will persist no matter who is president. But help us, too, as we learn to assume less and listen more.

We’ll start small, beginning with what we know, asking questions and following them. We are not judge and jury. We’re just a small but ambitious nonprofit newsroom, jolted awake.

 

Amy Pyle is editor in chief of Reveal, which publishes, across multiple platforms, the work of the Center for Investigative Reporting. She can be reached via email at apyle@revealnews.org.