Q&A: Ted Conover on mastering the art of immersion journalism

By Kevin Deutsch

During a career that’s spanned three and a half decades, Ted Conover has guarded hardened criminals in Sing Sing, snuck across the US border with Mexican immigrants, inspected poultry as a USDA employee, and roamed the nation as a railroad hobo — all in pursuit of his next big story.

Along the way, he’s become one of the prominent practitioners of immersion writing, steeping himself in other worlds that are typically off-limits to reporters and the public.

For some books and articles, Conover’s gone undercover. For others, he’s left home to live among disenfranchised subjects. In his new book Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep, Conover distills decades of hard-won knowledge into a how-to guide for journalists.

Among his topics: how to gain access to new communities, how to behave ethically once inside, and how to craft a powerful story when it’s all over.  The following interview was conducted over email during November 2016, and has been edited for length and clarity.

 

You write that Immersion is the book you wish you’d had with you when you were 22 years old, immersing yourself in the world of railroad tramps. At the time, you were researching your college thesis, which later morphed into your first book, Rolling Nowhere:  Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes. What inspired you to finally commit these techniques and advice to paper? What was the spark? And how long had the idea for Immersion been gestating?

Immersion is just one of the ways I’ve researched stories. All of my books before this one are based on it, but I’ve never thought of it as a separate class of research. I know that other people have, though. One of them was an editor at the University of Chicago Press (Jenny Gavacs) who suggested to me that I write this book.

 

With the nation bitterly divided following Donald Trump’s election—and lots of hand wringing in the mainstream press over having misread the mood of the electorate—what role, if any, do you think immersion writing can play in bridging the cultural divides in this country? And how might immersive projects help address those aforementioned reportorial blind spots?

I think that immersion research makes it harder to think of any group of people simplistically. No part of the electorate is merely “angry.” “Less educated” also seems like an unhelpful descriptor, unless maybe it’s paired with some words and phrases that haven’t commonly been used to describe Trump supporters, such as “disadvantaged” or “at risk of going broke.” I write that “immersion implies leaving home—or at least spending significant amounts of time outside it—engaged in daily exposure to your subjects and the problems they face. Writing that proceeds from this can answer complaints about the superficiality of journalism. It offers cures on several levels, one of which is the level of commitment. Immersion tells the reader: This is no drive-by. I did more than get a quote. I lingered and I listened. I got to know them as multidimensional.”

 

In your experience, what part of the immersion process do young writers and journalists struggle most with? Is there a common point at which newer practitioners of the craft hit a wall? What’s the hardest part of the process for you, personally?

I’d say that access is often the hardest for younger journalists—it can be a real challenge getting people to “let you in,” particularly if you’re not on assignment from some recognizable news source and don’t yet have a track record. Next hardest may be what I call reporting for story: learning what to look for, the kind of notes your research needs to generate (i.e., characters, conflicts, the passage of time, and other elements of narrative).

Access is a perpetual problem for me as well, particularly since I’m interested in setting a high bar, in trying to do things that haven’t been done before.

 

Technology is transforming the way we gather information and tell stories. How is it affecting immersive writing, specifically? Has it changed the way you and your peers and/or students working in the genre operate?

Well, I don’t think the essential tools have changed: you need a pen and a notebook. You need to be able to listen and you need to be able to explain yourself. You need to notice.

But technology definitely has expanded the number of possibilities for telling these stories, in ways which really haven’t been fully explored yet. Back when only wealthier, tech-savvy people had smart phones, you had to worry about taking out your smart phone in certain settings. Now, though, it seems practically everybody in the US has one—I was in a Starbucks in Denver last week where two homeless men were charging their phones. A third had taken his laptop from his cart and was using the store’s Wifi. This is great, because adding video and still photography to our reports can expand the audience, the options for telling a story, and the richness of the story itself. And, of course, it can help empower people who previously were only the subjects of our stories to tell stories of themselves.

 

You write of students sometimes wanting to dive directly into immersion writing, without first mastering the tenets of traditional journalism or third-person nonfiction storytelling. What is the ideal training for a writer before they embark on an immersive project?

I do think it’s helpful to know the basics of journalism before you set out—conventions around quotation, using anecdotes to help illustrate a larger theme, the importance of topicality, that sort of thing. Immersion research can take a long time, and experience in turning reporting into story can help insure that time won’t be wasted.

 

If there’s one book of immersive writing you could recommend to a young journalist, what would it be and why?

I think the most important book or article is one you love, the one that speaks to you. Such a book for me is Stanley Booth’s brilliant Dance with the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times. (I wrote an appreciation of itin CJR in 2006.) It’s full of joyful literary risk-taking. But it’s also a cautionary tale about what can happen when you get too close to the flame, when you go too deep.

Finding models is super-important in this endeavor, which is one reason I assembled a detailed bibliography at the end of Immersion. Each of those books and articles, to me, is a possible inspiration.

 

The time commitment for immersive projects can be huge. How can a writer know they’ve found a worthwhile story?

I guess it’s like the commitment a writer makes to any big story. It needs to be about something that matters, a topic you might be able to make readers care about, and one you’re likely to care about for the time it takes. You need a fairly good prospect of ongoing access; having a Plan B in place should that access fall apart is not a bad idea. It can help to have friends who don’t think the idea is crazy, and even better is to have an agent or editor who’s intrigued.

 

In the paperback afterword to Newjack, you wrote of having nightmares related to your experience working as a correction officer at Sing Sing—dreams a psychiatrist suggested were the result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Full disclosure: I received a diagnosis of PTSD after reporting my book on a Bloods/Crips gang war in New York, and your mention of PTSD in the afterword was one of the things that encouraged me to seek treatment in the first place.) Do you consider dealing with mental health issues to be an unavoidable hazard of immersion work?

I’m glad you raised the possibility that research can take a toll on the researcher. PTSD among journalists is real, and not just for war reporters and photographers. Immersion is probably not the best approach for a journalist who is not feeling pretty centered and stable to begin with. The trick then becomes how to maintain your equilibrium should conditions become stressful. Having a wife I love, who believed in my project, really helped me endure the months I spent working as a CO. And having little kids at home, though they at times contributed to my exhaustion, I’m sure ultimately helped keep me steady. With projects that are less emotionally fraught, like my stint as a USDA meat inspector, the main challenge can simply be managing feelings of isolation and loneliness. Again, having somebody waiting for you at home can be indispensable.

You write that immersion writing has “huge potential for sowing empathy in the world,” and that an immersion writer “cannot help but come to appreciate the other’s point of view, hopefully in a way that is both visceral and nuanced.” Newjack sowed empathy for both corrections officers and prisoners. What lessons/insights from that book would you want to impart on journalists covering the American corrections system today, and the ongoing efforts to reform it?

Acknowledge the pain on both sides. Don’t demonize the civil servants. All of us are actors in systems that make us behave in certain ways. The challenge is to reform the system.

 

The amount of media available to American consumers has grown exponentially in recent years. But immersion writing seems to always find its audience. What can immersion writing do that other forms of storytelling can’t? Why does it endure?

I think its power comes from how quickly it can lead a reader to the emotional core of a story. Immersion writing is almost never dry. It’s also as personal as its creators, which is to say every good project seems to invent its own trajectory. As a genre it has been with us for a long time, at least as far back as Sir Richard Burton’s excursions to Arabia in the mid-19th century; and yet every season seems to bring us another example of somebody adventurous opening a window into a world we realize we’ve never seen before.

 

Can you point out some of the best immersion journalism you’ve seen recently?

I admire Jennifer Percy’s Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, an up-close, lyrical depiction of PTSD; Suki Kim’s Without You, There Is No Us, about teaching English in North Korea; Matthew Desmond’s Evicted; and Shane Bauer’s undercover account of working in a private prison in Mother Jones.

 

Here are some other significant works of immersion writing Conover highlights in his book:

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Holy Days by Lis Harris

Collision Low Crossers by Nicholas Dawidoff

Methland by Nick Reding

Mississippi Drift by Matthew Power

My Enemy, My Self by Yoram Binur

By Steve Weinberg

One of the most important individuals to IRE’s history never published an investigative project. Nor was she a newsroom editor, or a big-money donor.

Jan Colbert died Nov. 5, 2016, after struggling for two decades with cancer.

From 1983-1990, Jan served as IRE’s associate director, then briefly as executive director before shifting over to the magazine faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Here is the (truncated) saga of how Jan became so vital to IRE:

I attended the initial IRE conference in 1976, while employed as an investigative reporter at the Des Moines Register. As IRE grew and in 1978 became located at the University of Missouri School of Journalism (my alma mater), I became increasingly involved as a volunteer. During 1983, I departed my life in Washington, D.C., to relocate to Columbia, Missouri. John Ullmann, who had never planned to serve as IRE’s first executive director, was moving on. I agreed to replace him.

During Ullmann’s tenure — while simultaneously trying to earn a Ph.D. in journalism — he had planned an IRE conference about investigating agriculture. Ullmann had received assistance from the University of Missouri College of Agriculture, where Jan Colbert was employed. Jan had earned journalism degrees from MU, had labored on a small daily newspaper, then had settled into a public relations job at MU’s agriculture college. She had enjoyed collaborating with the brainy, charismatic Ullmann on the agriculture conference.

As I undertook the task of directing IRE day to day, I received help from volunteer members around the U.S., but had no professional staff, and often little clue how to accomplish some of the tasks before me. So imagine my pleasure when Jan, who I had never met, ambled over to the IRE office, introduced herself, and asked if I needed assistance. She proposed taking a year’s leave from the agriculture college to work at IRE; she wanted a change of pace, a change of scenery.

We liked each other immediately. Naturally, I accepted Jan’s offer.

When her leave of absence expired, she never returned to the agriculture college.

What a break for me — and for thousands of IRE members. In a generation preceding the Internet and even affordable fax machines, I spent much of my time every day answering phone calls from IRE members wanting advice on their projects, lining up content for The IRE Journal, inviting speakers to appear at IRE conferences, and often traveling to distant newsrooms to conduct workshops.

Jan, on the other hand, undertook tasks that covered my glaring shortcomings — handling the production details for The IRE Journal and all other print publications, dealing with the regulations of the journalism school, training staff when we finally accumulated enough money in the budget to hire help, dealing with distant hotel personnel as we planned conferences in various cities, and so much more.

Jan and I sometimes disagreed about details, but we never fought. She was easy to like — love — with countless “best” friends inside and outside of IRE. Perhaps I should not single out anyone, but I will here: Jan’s friendship with IRE founder Myrta Pulliam qualified as truly special (and might have helped keep the exacting Myrta at bay when I would screw up). Jan and I developed a friendship transcending the workplace — I swear we sometimes finished each other’s sentences. When she decided to switch from renter to homeowner, she purchased a house about 100 yards away from where I resided with my wife and children. I could walk page proofs of The IRE Journal to her front door on weekends, and she could deliver work materials to me at home just as conveniently.

Those of you who knew Jan through IRE could surely sense her innate goodness. The eldest of five children in a close-knit Catholic family, Jan was a “mother hen” in all the positive ways. She cared about everone sincerely — not just talk, but plenty of actions. Color her selfless. Outside of IRE, Jan served as a foster parent for the state’s child-welfare agency, accepting emergency placements, sometimes at midnight. One of those emergency placements, an infant girl, eventually became Jan’s adopted daughter Emily. Jan, who never married and never gave birth, became a caring mother.

Self-effacing to a fault, Jan rarely accepted credit for her accomplishments at IRE or in the broader world. Maybe she will accept praise posthumously.

 

Steve Weinberg served as IRE executive director from 1983-1990. Now he writes books, magazine articles and newspaper features as a full-time freelancer.

As a reporter who covered multiple beats, from night cops to politics, IRE’s tip sheets were a great source of ideas and inspiration. As an editor, whether working the city desk or managing an investigative team, IRE’s conference panels on conceiving the project and bulletproofing for accuracy were vital roadmaps.

What I didn’t understand was the organization’s amazing reach and impact. As with any group or workplace, you can’t really understand what goes on unless you get a chance to glimpse behind the scenes.

For almost nine years, I’ve had the tremendous honor of working for IRE. I was plenty nervous when I took this job, and it turns out those nerves were thoroughly justified. My entire background was in newsrooms, and running a nonprofit brings with it a whole host of requirements that have nothing to do with covering the news. Luckily I’ve had a ton of help through the years: an always supportive and hard-working board of directors, a dedicated membership base always willing to volunteer, and an amazing staff that, as anyone who’s attended a conference or workshop knows, really run this place. I’ll miss all of it when I step down as executive director next month. 

For all of you who will never have the chance to get the view I’ve had of this organization, I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts.

The impact that IRE has on individual journalists, newsrooms and the entire industry is much greater than you realize.

If this organization has ever helped you do a story that made a difference, something that stopped wrongdoing, curbed misspending or helped someone in need, then you’ve seen a glimpse of what IRE can do. But when you see that impact magnified across thousands of members, scores of newsrooms and international boundaries, you realize just how broad this organization’s scope really is. 

IRE isn’t just about journalism.

That seems like an odd thing to say because this organization is all about teaching practical skills to journalists. From finding documents to crunching data to conducting the toughest interviews with grace and purpose, IRE’s focus is on hands-on, make-you-better training.

But to me, that’s not the biggest impact that we have.  By helping you do stories that drive change and hold the powerful accountable, we have a direct role in improving societies and changing lives every single day. Great journalism is one of the most important forces in society for driving change, and IRE has given each of us the power to do just that, in communities large and small, all around the world. 

IRE needs you.

I arrived at IRE in 2008, a really tough time for our industry. Jobs were being cut, budgets were being slashed, and our organization, like many others, felt the impact. We weathered that storm, and today we’re bigger than we’ve ever been. But that doesn’t mean that we can relax. 

Pretty much every day I’ve worked here, a part of me has worried about tomorrow. Will we have the funding and resources we need to do the crucial work that we do? As each of us knows, the foundation that our industry is built on is dangerously susceptible to seismic shifts in society, from changes in technology to the ever-evolving ways that people consume news. 

That means that there will never be a day that IRE doesn’t need your support. Your help is an intrinsic part of our organization, whether it’s your time as a volunteer or your generous donations. We absolutely can’t do this without you. 

Now that I get to shift back to being a regular member again, I’ll have a new appreciation for IRE, its impact in the world and its importance to society. I’ve seen IRE change lives. I know it’s changed mine.

By Martin Fackler

It seemed like compelling journalism: a major investigative story published by The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest daily newspaper, about workers fleeing the Fukushima nuclear plant against orders.

It was the work of a special investigative section that had been launched with much fanfare to regain readers’ trust after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011, when the Asahiand other media were criticized for initially repeating the official line that the government had everything safely under control.

The team had been producing award winning journalism for three years, but the story on the workers would be the last for some of its ace reporters. And its publication in May 2014 would come to mark the demise of one of the most serious efforts in recent memory by a major Japanese news organization to embrace a more independent approach to journalism.

The hastiness of the Asahi’s retreat raised fresh doubts about whether such watchdog journalism — an inherently risky enterprise that seeks to expose and debunk, and challenge the powerful — is even possible in Japan’s big national media, which are deeply tied to the nation’s political establishment.

The editors at Asahi, considered the “quality paper” favored by intellectuals, knew the culture they were facing, but they saw the public disillusionment in Japan that followed the nuclear plant disaster as the opportunity launch a bold experiment to reframe journalism. 

No more pooches

On the sixth floor of its hulking headquarters overlooking Tokyo’s celebrated fish market, the newspaper in October 2011 hand-picked 30 journalists to create a desk dedicated to investigative reporting, something relatively rare in a country whose big national media favor cozy ties with officials via so-called press clubs. The clubs are exclusive groups of journalists, usually restricted to those from major newspapers and broadcasters, who are stationed within government ministries and agencies, ostensibly to keep a close eye on authority. In reality, the clubs end up doing the opposite, turning the journalists into uncritical conduits for information and narratives put forth by government officials, whose mindset the journalists often end up sharing.

The choice to head of the new section was unusual: Takaaki Yorimitsu, a gruff, gravelly-voiced outsider who was not a career employee of the elitist Asahi, and had been head-hunted from a smaller regional newspaper for his investigative prowess. Yorimitsu set an iconoclastic tone by taping a sign to the newsroom door declaring “Datsu Pochi Sengen,” or “No More Pooches Proclamation”—a vow that his reporters would no longer be kept pets of the press clubs, but true journalistic watchdogs.

The new section gave reporters a broad mandate to range across the Asahi’s rigid internal silos in search of topics, while also holding to higher journalistic standards, such as requiring using the names of people quoted in stories instead of the pseudonyms common in Japanese journalism.

The Investigative Reporting Section proved an instant success, winning Japan’s top journalism award two years in a row for its exposure of official coverups and shoddy decontamination work around the nuclear plant, which was crippled when a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems. The section’s feistier journalism offered hope of attracting younger readers at a time when the 7 million-reader Asahi and Japan’s other national dailies, the world’s largest newspapers by circulation, were starting to feel the pinch from declining sales.

“The Asahi Shimbun believes such investigative reporting is indispensable,” the newspaper’s president at the time, Tadakazu Kimura, declared in an annual report in 2012. The new investigative section “does not rely on information obtained from press clubs, but rather conducts its own steadfast investigations that require real determination.”

That is why it was all the more jarring when, just two years later, the Asahi abruptly retreated from this foray into watchdog reporting. In September 2014, the newspaper retracted the story it had published in May about workers fleeing the Fukushima plant against orders, punishing reporters and editors responsible for the story, slashing the size of the new section’s staff and forcing the resignation of Kimura, who had supported the investigative push.

A newspaper-appointed committee of outside experts later declared that the article, which the Asahi had trumpeted as a historic scoop, was flawed because journalists had demonstrated “an excessive sense of mission that they ‘must monitor authority.’”

While the section was not closed down altogether, its output of major investigative articles dropped sharply as the remaining journalists were barred from writing about Fukushima.

Emasculating the Asahi

The abrupt about-face by the Asahi, a 137-year-old newspaper with 2,400 journalists that has been postwar Japan’s liberal media flagship, was was an early victory for the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which had sought to silence critical voices as it moved to roll back Japan’s postwar pacifism, and restart its nuclear industry.

“In Japanese journalism, scoops usually just mean learning from the ministry officials today what they intend to do tomorrow,” said Makoto Watanabe, a former reporter in the section who quit the Asahi in March because he felt blocked from doing investigative reporting. “We came up with different scoops that were unwelcome in the Prime Minister’s Office.”

Abe and his supporters on the nationalistic right seized on missteps by the Asahi in its coverage of Fukushima and sensitive issues of World War II-era history to launch a withering barrage of criticism that the paper seemed unable to withstand. The taming of the Asahi set off a domino-like series of moves by major newspapers and television networks to remove outspoken commentators and newscasters.

Political interference in the media was one reason cited by Reporters Without Borders in lowering Japan from 11th in 2010 to 72nd out of 180 nations in this year’s annual ranking of global press freedoms, released on April 20, 2016.

“Emasculating the Asahi allowed Abe to impose a grim new conformity on the media world,” said Koichi Nakano, a professor of politics at Sophia University in Tokyo and a leading critic of the administration on press freedom issues. “Other media know that once Asahi gave in, they were exposed and could be next. So they gagged themselves.”

But government pressure fails to fully explain the Asahi’s retreat. Some Asahi reporters and media scholars say the government was able to exploit weaknesses within Japanese journalism itself, particularly its lack of professional solidarity and its emphasis on access-driven reporting. At the Asahi’s weakest moment, other big national newspapers lined up to bash it, essentially doing the administration’s dirty work, while also making blatant efforts to poach readers to shore up their declining circulations.

 The knockout blow, however, came from within the Asahi itself, as reporters in other, more established sections turned against the upstart investigative journalists. The new section’s more adversarial approach to journalism had earned it wide resentment for threatening the exclusive access—enjoyed by the Asahi as part of the mainstream media—to the administration and the powerful central ministries that govern Japan.

Media scholars say reporters in elite national newspapers like the Asahi have a weak sense of professional identity; most did not attend journalism school and spend their entire careers within the same company. Until recently, a job at a national daily was seen as a safe career bet rather than a calling, as the Asahi and its competitors offered salaries and lifetime job guarantees similar to banks and automakers.

This result is that many Japanese journalists are unable to resist pressures that officials can put on them via the press clubs. Journalists who are deemed overly critical or who write about unapproved topics can find themselves barred from briefings given to other club members. This is a potent sanction when careers can be broken for missing a scoop that appeared in rival newspapers. This is what some Asahi journalists in the press clubs say happened to them as the Investigative Section angered government officials with its critical stories.

“When the chips were down, they saw themselves as elite company employees, not journalists,” said Yorimitsu, who after the Fukushima article’s retraction was reassigned to a Saturday supplement where he writes entertainment features.

Unable to weather the storm

It was a bitter reversal for a section that had been launched with high expectations just three years before. Yorimitsu described the new section as the newspaper’s first venture into what he called true investigative journalism. He said that while the Asahi had assembled teams in the past that it called “investigative,” this usually meant being freed from the demands of daily reporting to take deeper dives into scandals and social issues. He said the new section was different because his journalists not only gathered facts, they used them to build counter narratives that challenged versions of events put forward by authorities.

“Until 2014, the newspaper was very enthusiastic about giving us the time and freedom to expose the misdeeds in Fukushima, and tell our own stories about what had happened,” recalled Yorimitsu. “We were telling the stories that the authorities didn’t want us to tell.”

Yorimitsu had been hired in 2008 in to take charge of a smaller investigative team that the Asahi had created in 2006, when it was first starting to feel the pinch from the Internet. From a peak of 8.4 million copies sold daily in 1997, the Asahi’s circulation had slipped below 8 million by 2006, according to the Japan Audit Bureau of Circulations. (By late 2015, it had dropped to 6.6 million.) The team of 10 reporters was an experimental effort to win readers. “We realized that in the Net era, independent, investigative journalism was the only way for a newspaper to survive,” said Hidetoshi Sotooka, a former managing editor who created the original team.

However, it was not until Fukushima, Japan’s biggest national trauma since its World War II defeat in 1945, that the newspaper wholeheartedly embraced the effort, tripling the number of journalists and elevating it to a full-fledged section, putting it on par organizationally with other, more established parts of the paper.

Under Yorimitsu, the section’s crowning achievement was an investigative series called “The Promethean Trap,” a play on the atomic industry’s early promise of becoming a second fire from heaven like the one stolen by Prometheus in Greek mythology. The series, which appeared daily beginning in October 2011, won The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Prize, Japan’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, in 2012 for its reporting on such provocative topics as a gag-order placed on scientists after the nuclear accident, and the government’s failure to release information about radiation to evacuating residents. The series spawned some larger investigative spin-offs, including an exposé of corner-cutting in Japan’s multi-billion dollar radiation cleanup, which won the prize in 2013.

These were promising accomplishments for a new section, but they also led to resentment in other parts of the newspaper, where the investigative team was increasingly viewed as prima donnas, and Yorimitsu’s “no more pooches” proclamation as an arrogant dismissal of other sections’ work.

At the same time, the Investigative Section also was making powerful enemies outside the newspaper by exposing problems at Fukushima. This became particularly apparent after the pro-nuclear Abe administration took office in December 2012, when other media started to cut back on articles about the nuclear accident.

“We were being told that the Prime Minister’s Office disliked our stories and wanted them stopped,” Watanabe recalled, “but we thought we could weather the storm.”

They may have been able to if the new section had not given its opponents an opening to strike. But on May 20, 2014, running under the banner headline “Violating Plant Manager Orders, 90 Percent of Workers Evacuated Fukushima Daiichi,” the front-page article made the explosive claim that at the peak of the crisis, workers had fled the nuclear plant in violation of orders to remain from plant manager, Masao Yoshida. The article challenged the dominant narrative of the manager leading a heroic battle to contain the meltdowns and thus save Japan.

The reporters behind the story, Hideaki Kimura and Tomomi Miyazaki, had obtained a transcript of testimony that Yoshida gave to government investigators before his death from cancer in 2013. The 400-plus-page document, drawn from 28 hours of spoken testimony by Yoshida, had been kept secret from the public in the Prime Minister’s Office. Unearthing the testimony was an investigative coup, which the Asahiunabashedly played up in ad campaigns. It might have stayed that way, had not the Asahi opened up the floodgates of public criticism by clumsily setting off a completely unrelated controversy about its past coverage of one of East Asia’s most emotional issues.

That uproar began on Aug. 5, 2014  when the Asahi suddenly announced in a front-page article that it was retracting more than a dozen stories published in the 1980s and early 1990s about “comfort women” forced to work in wartime Japanese military brothels. The newspaper was belatedly admitting what historians knew: that a Japanese war veteran quoted in the articles, Seiji Yoshida, had fabricated his claims of having forcibly rounded up more than 1,000 Korean women.

The comfort women retractions appeared to be an attempt by the Asahito preempt critics in the administration by coming clean about a decades-old problem. Instead, the move backfired, giving the revisionist right ammunition to attack the Asahi. The public pillorying, led by Abe himself, who said the reporting “has caused great damage to Japan’s image,” grew so intense that the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan ran a cover story: “Sink the Asahi!”

It was at the peak of this maelstrom, when the Asahi was on the ropes, that criticism of its Fukushima scoop erupted. In late August, the Sankei Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun, both pro-Abe newspapers on the right, obtained copies of Yoshida’s secret testimony, and wrote reports challenging the version of events put forth by the Asahi. “Asahi Report of ‘Evacuating Against Orders’ At Odds With Yoshida Testimony,” the Yomiuri, the world’s largest newspaper with 9 million readers, declared in a front-page headline Aug. 30. Other media, including the liberal Mainichi Shimbun, followed with similar efforts to discredit the Asahi.

According to these stories, the Asahi’s epic scoop had gotten it wrong by implying that the plant workers had knowingly ignored Yoshida’s orders. The newly obtained copies of his testimony showed that his orders had failed to reach the workers in the confusion. The other newspapers accused the Asahi of again sullying Japan’s reputation, by inaccurately portraying the brave Fukushima workers as cowards. (Whether the Asahigot the story wrong is debatable, since its article never actually stated that workers knowingly violated Yoshida’s orders; however, it did fail to include the manager’s statement that his orders had not been properly relayed—an omission that could lead readers to draw the wrong conclusion.)

The fact that two pro-Abe newspapers had suddenly and in quick succession obtained copies of the Yoshida transcript led to widespread suspicions, never proven, that the Prime Minister’s Office leaked the documents to use against the Asahi. True or not, the newspapers seemed willing to serve the purposes of the administration, perhaps to improve their access to information, or to avoid suffering a similar fate as the Asahi.

The other papers also saw the Asahi’s woes as a chance to steal readers. The Yomiuri stuffed glossy brochures in the mailboxes of Asahisubscribers, blasting it for tarnishing Japan’s honor, while praising the Yomiuri’s coverage of the comfort women. This attempt to poach readers ultimately backfired as both newspapers lost circulation.

“Rather than stand together to resist government pressure, they allowed themselves to be used as instruments of political pressure,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Hosei University.

Despite peer pressure, Asahi journalists say the newspaper initially intended to defend its Fukushima scoop, going so far as to draw up a lengthy rebuttal that was to have run on page one in early September. As late as Sept. 1, Seiichi  Ichikawa, the head of the Investigative Section at the time, told his reporters that the newspaper was ready to fight back. “The government is coming after the Special Investigative Section,” Ichikawa said in a pep talk to his team, according to Watanabe and others who were present. “The Asahi will not give in.”

The rebuttal was never published. Instead, President Kimura surprised many of his own reporters with a sudden about face, announcing at a press conference on Sept. 11 that he was retracting the Fukushima-Yoshida article. Reporters say the newspaper’s resolve to defend the piece crumbled when journalists within the newspaper began an internal revolt against the article and the section that produced it.

This was compounded by a sense of panic that gripped the newspaper, as declines in readership and advertising accelerated markedly after the scandals. Fearing for the Asahi’s survival, many reporters chose to sacrifice investigative journalism as a means to mollify detractors, say media scholars and some Asahi journalists, including Yorimitsu.

The Asahi’s official line is that the story was too flawed to defend. The paper’s new president, Masataka Watanabe, continues to talk about the importance of investigative journalism, and some current and former Asahi journalists say investigative reporting will make a comeback.

However, scholars and former section reporters say the setback was too severe. They say the Asahi’s decision to punish its own journalists will discourage others from taking the same risks inherent in investigative reporting. Worse, they said the Asahi seemed to lapse back into the old, access-driven ways of Japan’s mainstream journalism. “The Asahiretreated from its experiment in risky, high-quality journalism, back into the safety of the press clubs,” said Tatsuro Hanada, a professor of journalism at Waseda University in Tokyo. Hanada was so dismayed by the Asahi’s retreat that he established Japan’s first university-based center for investigative journalism at Waseda this year. “It makes me think that the days of Japan’s huge national newspapers may be numbered.”

 

Martin Fackler is a Research Fellow at the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a Tokyo-based think tank. Prior to joining RJIF in 2015, he worked for two decades as a correspondent in Asia, including as Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times from 2009 to 2015.

From the staff of the The Centre for Investigative Journalism:

We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light. Gavin died of lung cancer surrounded by loved ones in London on Saturday 22nd Oct 2016.

Over his lifetime Gavin was a fierce defender of justice and human rights around the world. He was a warm, caring, larger-than-life person who, as many will attest, engendered love and respect from all who met him. His life and how he lived it were completely in sync with the principles that he held dear and practiced as a journalist and educator – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. 

Gavin founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism in 2003 to address the worsening media climate for in-depth, sceptical and adversarial reporting. Over the next 13 years he helped train thousands of reporters from over 35 countries, many of which are places where journalism is under attack and those who speak out are at enormous risk.  His students have gone on to great things in their careers and can point to Gavin as a mentor and inspiration. He has touched countless lives; his steadfast support for whistleblowers and journalists working in difficult environments has saved and given succor to some of the globe’s most threatened individuals and groups. He was the model of what a journalist should be.

Gavin was one of life’s bravest, most passionate and courageous souls. Prior to CIJ, as an investigative journalist, Gavin produced and directed more than 50 investigative documentaries, many for Granada Television’s World In Action. They covered countries as diverse as Britain, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Guyana, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Thailand, the US, Sweden, India and Turkey. He was banned from Apartheid South Africa, the Soviet Union, and attacked by British Neo-Nazis because of his films. The volume and quality of his body of work is unparalleled.

His loyalty to those under attack from powerful forces, particularly whistleblowers and journalistic groups like Wikileaks, will remain a beacon for years to come. 

His commitment to exposing the true nature of power was his life force. He spearheaded the creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for ethical and hard-hitting reporting. Gavin worked tirelessly to hold power to account. He once said “Good journalism is always political journalism.”

We want to catalogue all the memories and stories that people have about Gavin on our website. Please email GavinTributes@tcij.org with your thoughts, stories, anecdotes, photos, videos, interviews, and anything else about Gavin that you want to share. You can view the tribute page here. Help us celebrate this wonderful, unique, and inspirational human being.

On behalf of our family and many friends,

Susan Benn

The Board and staff of the CIJ

By Jackie Spinner, CJR

After five mystifying (and let’s be honest, pretty wretched) years under the ownership of wannabe journalism mogul and investor Michael Ferro, the city’s No. 2 newspaper signaled a fresh start and a new direction late last month with the promotion of two award-winning investigative journalists to top spots in the newsroom. 

Chris Fusco was named managing editor, a position that had been vacant since Craig Newman was dismissed in August 2015. Steve Warmbir, former assistant managing editor for metro news, was named director of digital and editorial innovation, a new post created to focus on growing the paper’s digital brand and overseeing its social media strategy. 

“I’ve got two of the best people from a journalism standpoint in really key positions,” says Jim Kirk, Sun-Times publisher and editor in chief. 

Both Fusco and Warmbir are Chicago area natives whose careers are deeply rooted in investigative reporting. Fusco, along with Tim Novak and Carol Marin, won a prestigious George Polk Award for Local Reporting last year for an investigation of a 10-year-old homicide caseinvolving a nephew of former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. In 2004, Warmbir and Novak exposed a corrupt program that used private trucks for city work. The scandal ensnared some of the city’s top officials and led to a sweeping federal investigation.

The Sun-Times is the younger of Chicago’s two dailies, a fast, scrappy paper that has relished its role as the underdog, with a smaller staff and fewer resources than the Chicago Tribune. If the Tribune is the choir boy with his shirt neatly tucked in, the Sun-Times is the little rascal with his hair sticking straight up. 

In recent years, both papers have felt the strain of an outdated business model that has walloped the newspaper industry, forcing them to cut staff while trying to grow their digital presence. The company that owned the Sun-Times filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009, the start of a series of ups and downs that defined the paper for the next few years. Later that same year, Chicago financier James C. Tyree and a team of investors bought the paper. After Tyree died suddenly in March 2011, the Sun-Times was sold again, this time to Chicago investment group Wrapports, which supplied the paper with an infusion of cash but little else. The Sun-Times website became a running joke around town. 

The paper is still owned by Wrapports, of which Ferro is a majority owner. Ferro put his shares of Sun-Times stock in a trust when he made a surprise move earlier this year to buy a majority stake in Tribune Publishing, now Tronc, which owns the Chicago Tribune. The effect was immediate for the Sun-Times. The editorial board began to “follow its conscience” again and not Ferro’s, one former employee told me. Reporters reclaimed their beats and focused once again on the core of what has always been the heart of the Sun-Times: city government, Chicago sports, and watchdog reporting.  

The choice to promote two investigative reporters was purposeful, Kirk says, and reflects where he wants the Sun-Times to focus. “This news organization has had a long history of great investigative work,” he says, noting that this kind of watchdog reporting is what “our audience wants from us and expects from us.”

Fusco, who has been at the Sun-Times for 16 years, says investigative reporting will be the bedrock of the paper’s coverage going forward. “We can apply what we’ve learned filing FOIA and going through court records and unearthing files to the kind of things we do in our everyday reporting,” he says. “This is the kind of paper where everybody is an investigative reporter. We want to continue that tradition.”

Abdon M. Pallasch, a former Sun-Times political reporter, says Fusco is well thought of in the newsroom. “Everyone respects his work ethic,” says Pallasch, who left the paper four years ago and is now director of public affairs for the Cook County Sheriff. “I think he’s a calm, level-headed voice people enjoy working with.”

Fusco and Kirk pointed to a story the paper published this week as an example of the kind of journalism that the Sun-Times wants to make its signature. Veteran reporter Frank Main wrote a gripping account of a public suicide in Chicago that he witnessed, taking readers along as he tracked down the woman’s mother and tried to figure out why she had jumped from a downtown building.

The piece, with an accompanying editor’s note explaining why the paper decided to print the name of a 44-year-old Chicago woman who committed suicide and why Main wrote the story in the first-person, was a richly-reported account not only of one woman’s life of recovery from drug addiction and her estrangement from her family but also of its public ending, which impacted everyone who witnessed it.

“We want to do deeper, more powerful stories that can engage an audience,” Kirk says. “That story was it.”

Deborah Douglas, a former Sun-Times editorial board member and columnist, called Fusco and Warmbir experienced journalists who care deeply about the city and their craft.” But the appointment of two white men to top jobs, along with the paper’s recent hire of veteran Daily Southtown columnist Phil Kadner, who is also white, raises questions about the Sun-Times’ commitment to diversity.

“The Sun-Times over the years has lost a lot of diverse voices,” says Douglas, now a lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.  Such voices are “critical in telling the stories that they need to  tell in the region. I would hope that they have a commitment to truly reflecting Chicago.”

To that end, the Sun-Times also announced last week that veteran urban affairs reporter Maudlyne Ihejirika will shift into a new role writing about  the city’s Hispanic and African-American communities.

Kirk tells me that the Sun-Times will be a smaller player, more focused on local news. “We believe we are the city’s paper,” he says. “We are focused on those beats that are important to us. We aren’t going to be all things to all people.”

His words were another indication that the Sun-Times has moved beyond Ferro, who wanted the paper to go big, even as it was reducing staff. When we talked last week, Kirk was careful not to mention Ferro by name.

“I bet you’re having fun again,” I told Kirk. “Can I say that?”

He laughed.

“Yes, I am. It’s refreshing. Morale is up. Everyone is working toward the same thing.”

Editor's Note: This article first ran on the California Civic Data Coalition's website on Oct. 8. Ben spoke at our San Diego Data Watchdog Workshop, a program funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

By Ben Welsh

Last weekend, I traveled to the campus of San Diego State University to join a journalism workshop put on by Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Dozens of students and journalists gathered from across Southern California — and even as far as Mexicali, Mexico — to learn advanced online research techniques, receive Microsoft Excel instruction and develop other skills during two days of training.

One of the offerings was a new class created by our team titled “First Python Notebook: Scripting your way to the story.”

Over three hours I walked about 20 students through the fundamentals of the Python programming language by using the Jupyter Notebook programming environment to interrogate data and develop a story.

Our subject: Contributions to campaigns for and again Proposition 64, a ballot measure asking California voters to decide if recreational marijuana should be legalized.

The data: Drawn from this site’s bulk download service that repackages CAL-ACCESS, the jumbled, dirty and difficult database that tracks money in California politics.

The complete script for the class is now available online on GitHub for anyone to take at home or teach elsewhere. We’re aiming to expand and improve it for future events, so if you give it a try I’d love to hear your feedback. Email me any time at ben.welsh@gmail.com.

Investigative Reporters & Editors, a worldwide organization representing more than 5,500 journalists, has named Doug Haddix as its new executive director.

Haddix, director of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, previously worked as a training director for IRE and as an investigative editor at The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.

"The entire IRE Board of Directors is excited to name Doug Haddix as Executive Director. His management skills and extensive experience in journalism, training, education and fundraising are the perfect fit to lead IRE into the future,” IRE Board President Matt Goldberg said.

Haddix will oversee all of IRE's programs, including the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and DocumentCloud. IRE has an annual budget of about $2.2 million, which includes professional training programs, online training tools, a resource center and data library.

"I'm thrilled and honored to lead IRE during such a pivotal time in our news industry and society as a whole," Haddix said. "The need for high-impact watchdog reporting has never been greater. IRE is positioned well to strengthen its global role in training and equipping journalists with the knowledge, strategy and tools to hold those in power accountable for their actions."

Haddix has run the Kiplinger program, based at Ohio State University, since October 2011. He has a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University, and is married to Margaret, a best-selling author of novels for teens and children.

IRE conducted a national search for the executive director position.

"I would truly like to thank everyone involved in the process. The IRE search committee dedicated their time and expertise to conduct thorough interviews and identify outstanding candidates for the job,” Goldberg said.

Haddix will take over the job on Oct. 24 from Mark Horvit, who served as executive director for almost nine years and who is leaving to head the state government reporting program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

By Philip Eil, CJR

I filed my first Freedom of Information Act request on February 1, 2012. I was 26 years old, and chasing a story about my father’s med-school classmate, Dr. Paul Volkman, who had been convicted of a massive prescription drug dealing scheme the previous year. The aim of the request was simple: I wanted to see the evidence the jury saw during Volkman’s eight-week trial in Cincinnati for a book I’m writing about the case. But everyone I asked—the US district court clerk, the appellate court clerk, the prosecutor, and the judge who presided over the case—declined to give me the documents. It was time to make an official request to the Department of Justice.

To make a very long story short, in March of 2015, that FOIA request turned into my first FOIA lawsuit. And, earlier this month, I received my first FOIA judgment, which, I’m happy to report, is also my first FOIA-lawsuit victory. In a 17-page decision, US District Court Judge Jack McConnell cited Serial and Making A Murderer, wrote “Public scrutiny of judicial proceedings produces a myriad of social benefits,” and ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to fork over the requested documents within 60 days.

It took more than four and half years to receive that judgment. And, during that time I began joking that I had attended “FOIA University.” Today, the prospect of postgraduate study looms; if the government appeals, it could extend this ordeal by months, if not years. But, with Judge McConnell’s decision in hand, I’d like to share a few of the things I’ve learned.  What follows is the cheat-sheet I wish someone had handed me five years ago.

1. Know your rights. Everyone knows about the Bill of Rights. But people have rights under the Freedom of Information Act, too—and journalists have an obligation to learn them.

Consider a few things I was surprised to learn during my FOIA adventure. One, anyone in the world can file a FOIA request; there is no US Citizenship requirement. Two, all requesters are legally entitled to an estimated completion date. (See the second-to-last paragraph of this DOJ memo.) Three, journalists are entitled to special fee-waiver privileges under FOIA. Four, requesters can file a second FOIA request for the processing notes from a previous FOIA request. In my case, “FOIAing my FOIA” yielded some interesting, if depressing, behind-the-scenes info. One released email showed that, at one point, my request was forwarded to the wrong DEA field office, where it was accidentally deleted.

2. The world of FOIA. Everyone who files a FOIA enters a vibrant and endearingly nerdy subculture. There are FOIA newsletters, FOIA meet-ups, FOIA comedy shows, and FOIA awards. There are FOIA-friendly organizations, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the National Security Archive. And there are FOIA folk heroes, like Vice’s Jason Leopold, and Brandon Smith, the Chicago-based freelancer who turned the city upside-down with two public records requests.

In short, there are lots of people with your same mix of curiosity, gallows humor, and righteous anger. And you can meet them by following the #FOIA hashtag on Twitter.

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) August 13, 2016

3. The media’s FOIA blind spot. You would think that reporters and editors care more about FOIA than anyone else. And many do. (See previous item.) But as my “FOIA nightmare” dragged on, I realized that many are uninterested, or unwilling, to cover the bleak reality of records requesting .

One editor at a national outlet told me, “Unfortunately, I think the FOIA stuff is a little inside media baseball for our site.” A national-outlet reporter said, “It’s an interesting case, but we wouldn’t normally cover FOIA litigation.” Another national-outlet reporter told me, “our lawyer does think it’s an important, interesting example of government transparency issues” but coverage “doesn’t quite work for us.” Another told me, “we’ve all got FOIA horror stories to share…what’s so special about yours?” Many reporters simply never responded to my emails.

These rejections compelled me to write an op-ed reminding journalists that “We are the transparency police. And if we don’t fight for this stuff, nobody will.” Here, I’ll simply urge reporters and editors to ask yourself, “What would I do if a reporter approached me with a stonewalling story?” And, “What kind of support would I want from reporters if I were being stonewalled on a major story?” I know you’re all busy—that was another reason reporters declined to write about my case—but take a minute to sincerely think about your answer.

I’ll also say this: it wasn’t until I was stonewalled by the government and ignored by fellow journalists that I understood the activists’ axiom, “Silence is compliance.” Silence about FOIA cases almost always benefits the agencies withholding documents. So when you ignore a story about bad FOIA behavior, you’re not being neutral; you’re helping the government keep taxpayers in the dark.

Editors: sometimes there isn't a sexy ending or doc-dump or news-hook to a transparency-failure story. Which is exactly the point. #FOIA

— Philip Eil (@phileil) August 6, 2015

Definitely going as a Sexy FOIA Request for Halloween.

— Lindsay Goldwert (@lindsaygoldwert) September 29, 2015

 

4. FOIA is money. FOIA fights aren’t just about documents, they’re also about money. There are few simple reasons for this.

First, FOIA battles gobble up a reporter’s precious time and labor. And sometimes the process involves actual payments, like the bogus $154 “review fee” I paid to an agency that held my request for nine months before transferring it to the DEA.  I haven’t sat down and calculated the total financial loss from my significant outlay of time calling FOIA offices, filing formal complaints with the “FOIA Ombudsman,” writing letters to Congress, preparing my lawsuit, and helping my lawyers craft legal arguments, but I know this: it was all time I could have spent pitching and writing other stories.

Second, FOIA fights often require legal representation (more on that in a moment), and lawyers cost money. Even if you receive pro bonorepresentation, like I did—shout out to the Rhode Island ACLU and Neal McNamara and Jessica Jewell, from the Providence office of Nixon/Peabody—it’s because a firm has consciously decided to donate its highly-billable time and labor to your cause.

Third, as Jason Leopold explained in congressional testimony in 2015, news is a perishable commodity. “Information about a candidate is less newsworthy after the election is over, and information about a war is less newsworthy after the conflict is over,” he said. Quite simply, delays diminish the value of documents being sought. 

The lesson here? You should be clear-eyed about the financial effects of FOIA battles before you begin. And you should also be aware that, generally speaking, these effects are not equally distributed. Freelancers and news organizations are much more financially vulnerable than federal agencies with virtually unlimited time, money, and legal resources. Plan accordingly.

Just filing a public records request with #Alabama Department of Corrections will cost you $25 https://t.co/W3ANMVZHAy #FOIA

— MuckRock (@MuckRock) September 15, 2016

 

5. Prepare to sue. It’s not a coincidence that many of the biggest FOIA scoops, from news of the Obama administration’s behind-the-scenes lobbying against FOIA reform to revelations about Edward Snowden’s pre-whistleblowing activities, are the fruits of litigation. FOIA denials are at an all-time high, and so, too, are FOIA lawsuits. As Associated Press General Counsel Karen Kaiser said in 2015 Senate testimony, “The reflex of most agencies is to withhold information, not to release, and often there is no recourse for a requester other than pursuing costly litigation.”

So, if you’re filing a FOIA, and you actually care about getting results, start thinking about the eventual lawsuit. Talk to your local ACLU. Read the RCFP’s how-to guide to FOIA litigation. Ask your editor if you have a legal budget. Whatever you do, don’t think of litigation as a far-off, slim-chance possibility. Think of it as a likely step to getting the documents you’re requesting.

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 17, 2016

6. Final words of inspiration. I’ve read a lot about FOIA by now, fromLBJ’s signing statement from July 4, 1966, to President Obama’s FOIA memo from his first day in office, to the House Oversight Committee’s “FOIA Is Broken” report from January (in which I’m featured), to MuckRock’s FOIA-unlocked complaints from the CIA cafeteria. But few passages have inspired me like one I found in Jon Weiner’s account of his 14-year FOIA-battle over the release of John Lennon’s FBI file.

In the introduction to Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, Weiner writes, “The basic issue here was not simply John Lennon”: 

The basic issue was that government officials everywhere like secrecy. By keeping the public from learning what they have done, they hope to avoid criticism, hinder the opposition, and maintain power over citizens and their elected representatives. Classified files and official secrets lie at the heart of the modern government bureaucracy and permit the undemocratic use of power to go unrecognized and unchallenged by citizens.
 

Democracy, however, is not powerless before this practice. In the fight against government secrecy, America has led the world. In 1966 Congress passed the FOIA, which requires that officials make public the information in their files to “any person” who requests it, unless it falls into a small number of exempted categories, including “national security.” The act was substantially expanded in 1974 in the wake of revelations of White House abuse of power during the Watergate scandal. The FOIA, in effect, created a notable challenge to the history of government secrecy; it provided a set of rules and procedures, officials and offices dedicated not to the collection and maintenance of secrets but rather to their release to the public. Journalists, scholars and activists, have used the FOIA to scrutinize the operations of government agencies and expose official misconduct and lying, including the FBI’s illegal efforts to harass, intimidate, disrupt, and otherwise interfere with lawful political actions. The John Lennon FBI files provide an example.

Now get out there and request some documents.

Investigative Reporters and Editors is looking for someone with data analysis skills who enjoys tackling a variety of projects, leading workshops, working with smart and motivated students, and helping shape the future of data journalism.

We're seeking a new director of data services for IRE and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting(NICAR), a worldwide leader in computer-assisted reporting.

As data director, you will have a direct impact on newsrooms nationally and internationally. You will:

• Oversee data analysis jobs for news organizations large and small
• Lead our signature boot camps and other training sessions
• Plan hands-on classes for the annual NICAR conference
• Train graduate students
• Maintain and expand our library of federal data sets 
• Take a leading role in our mission of expanding data journalism 
• Join an organization that has been dedicated to improving journalism for more than 40 years

Applicants should have journalism experience and strong data analysis skills. The desire to continue expanding your skills -- and to help others do the same -- is essential. Preferred skills include experience with at least one programming language, web scraping and data management. 

This position is based at IRE/NICAR headquarters in Columbia, Mo., but could require occasional travel to conduct training.

If you're interested in the position or want to learn more, please send an email to datadirector@ire.org.