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By Jackie Spinner, CJR
Editor's Note:
This article first ran on July 15, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review's website.
In the years since officials in Chicago began to demolishthe city’s troubled public housing projects, people in the region have become accustomed to hearing stories about where the former residents of Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes, and other developments ended up. They all moved to the suburbs south of the city, the stories went, or even relocated to places as seemingly random as West Lafayette, Indiana. Often, the word-of-mouth tales blamed crime or other problems on an influx of public housing residents.
But those narratives were never grounded in clear data or backed by rigorous accounting. A recent investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times andBetter Government Association investigation published on June 25 attempts to provide a clearer picture.
After acquiring extensive records from the Chicago Housing Authority and analyzing them along with data from the US Housing and Urban Development Authority and the US Census Bureau, the outlets set out to map where the former residents of the projects are living today and how the footprint of public and subsidized housing has changed.
“For the last 16 years, as I’ve been reporting around Chicago, you’ve heard people talk about what happened when the projects came down,” said Mick Dumke, the lead Sun-Times reporter on the investigation. “Most of it is speculation and some mythology. I wanted to take a closer look at the actual data and track this beyond the speculation.”
It’s not the first time journalists have done something like this. Perceptions about where Chicago’s public-housing residents ended up were so pervasive that in 2014, the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, Indiana—124 miles to the south—published a multi-part investigationdebunking what it called “the great Chicago migration myth.”
The Sun-Times/BGA project, while similar in spirit, was both broader in scope and focused more directly on Chicago itself. The reporters accounted for the whereabouts of thousands of families who were living in Chicago public housing when the changes began. (Many others have died, violated lease terms, or could not be traced.) They also examined the change over time in subsidized households in census tracts in and around the city.
What they found: The “Plan for Transformation,” begun in 2000, has had effects across the region, and the number of subsidized households in suburbs around Chicago—to the south, and also to the north—has in fact grown. That’s consistent with policies designed to open up opportunities in places that traditionally had little subsidized housing. It’s also part of a big increase in the total number of families in the region receiving some kind of housing assistance.
But thousands of families who were living in public housing when the changes began remain in mixed-income or traditional public housing within the city. And among thousand of others who took vouchers to pay for new apartments in private buildings, “few moved far.” Most stayed in the city, ending up in South Shore—“the new subsidized-housing capital of Chicago,” the reporters call it—and a handful of other neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides. All 13 neighborhoods that saw the largest growth in use of housing vouchers are predominantly African-American.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods near the Loop, the city’s center, that were home to former public housing projects have seen rapid gentrification. Despite the construction of some new mixed-income developments, those areas have seen the greatest reduction in subsidized households.
“There’s a very public narrative about a cause and effect as the public housing units have gone down,” said Andrew J. Greenlee, an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is quoted in the Sun-Times/BGA investigation. The new reporting, he said, “helps us take a more concrete look at where people actually are. It helps us to understand that many people are remaining closer to their initial homes. It also helps to underscore the struggle people face in trying to live in communities of their choice.”
The recent package, the latest installment in the Sun-Times/BGA “Beyond the Rubble” series, is understated in its language and presentation. But it offers a valuable look at how the city has and hasn’t changed, along with insights into the choices public-housing residents made and how they feel about them today. It also points the way to future reporting opportunities, for example, into the persistence of housing segregation, how neighborhoods respond to change, or where resources are needed.
“Understanding the community and the resources available is important,” said Samantha Tuttle, director of policy and advocacy for the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. “It really does help us paint a picture and make positive change.”
The BGA is a watchdog and advocacy group that also produces investigative journalism. Brett Chase, the group’s director of investigations, said that to report on the migration patterns, the journalists first filed a Freedom of Information request with the Chicago Housing Authority, which provided an extensive amount of information, including the address of every resident living in public housing or using a voucher for private housing. Because private landlords often enter into long-term contracts with the federal government, the reporters had to look at federal housing data as well. “This became so complex,” Chase said.
Although the Sun-Times and the BGA have often worked together in the past, as CJR noted in a 2014 story, this is the first project of its type that the two have collaborated on.
Jim Kirk, editor and publisher of the Sun-Times, said the partnership was born out of discussions last year. “The BGA over the past couple of years has beefed up its investigative reporting… and we have this great staff, too, so the question I posed to the BGA and our guys is can we do something major that is significant to the community at large, extending our reach,” he said.
The first story in the collaboration, a March look at people using vouchers to live in pricey areas, didn’t land especially well, prompting criticism from housing writers and researchers.
But one of those critics, Daniel Kay Hertz of City Observatory, praised what he’s seen of the series since then, including stories about former public housing tenants living in private buildings with a history of code violations and the wait list for vouchers.
The latest story was particularly informative, he said. “There have been people in places like South Shore and Chatham and Grand Crossing who have been saying for a long time that there are all these CHA people moving into our neighborhood and they were not happy about it,” Hertz said. “That part was confirmed in some way. But certainly it also debunked some of the public narrative.”
Prisons have long posed a challenge for investigative journalists. And when you’re trying to report on a private prison – one owned by a company, not the government – the situation becomes even more challenging. On this episode, we’re talking to three reporters who managed to pull back the curtain on the for-profit prison system. Shane Bauer describes his risky decision to go undercover as a prison guard on assignment for Mother Jones. Then Marshall Project reporters Eli Hager and Alysia Santo take us through their less extreme but equally powerful investigation into the dangerous and deadly world of prisoner transportation companies.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Brett Murphy produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
MUSIC
Cylinder Six - Chris Zabriskie
Denise Malan is joining IRE full-time as a member of our training team in August.
By Jackie Spinner, CJR
Editor's Note:
This article first ran on June 28, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review's website.
A pair of investigations that arrived just days apart last week—one from a small nonprofit, the other by a leading daily—brought new scrutiny to the way the city of Chicago handles allegations of police misconduct. The reports, each based on an analysis of hundreds of lawsuits, highlight the soaring cost of alleged misconduct to taxpayers, the city’s failure to track patterns of abuse, and the extent to which officials try to keep crucial information under wraps.
One of the investigations, a remarkable effort by The Chicago Reporter, found that the city spent more than $210 million for settlements or judgments stemming from police misconduct lawsuits between 2012 and 2015, borrowing money to pay the tab at a time when the city already is struggling with crippling debt. The nonprofit newsroom’s report also emphasized that the city does not analyze the lawsuits for trends, something other major cities do in order to address police misconduct and curb legal costs.
“I have no doubt that they do see these patterns,” said Jonah Newman, who led the 18-month investigation for the Reporter. “Of course they see them. You can’t work on a lot of these and not see them. It’s a failure what they’re not doing systemically and with the data tools that exist these days.
Just days after the Reporter published its story and an accompanying interactive database, the Chicago Tribune rolled out its own significant investigation into the city’s handling of police lawsuits. Reporters Stacy St. Clair, Jeff Coen, and Jennifer Smith Richards reviewed 445 federal civil rights suits filed since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011. In nearly one in five of the cases, they found, a federal judge ordered the city to turn over information or records that it had tried to keep from plaintiffs. In five cases, a judge took the unusual step of sanctioning the city for withholding evidence. (The Trib also got an extended interview with a top city lawyer, who “rejected any implication of wrongdoing” by the legal department, the paper reported.)
The Tribune’s story focused on the city’s approach to private litigation—but it underscores how difficult it can be for the press and public to get information from the city, especially about police conduct, in any context.
“The Tribune and other news organizations have had a lot of problems getting the city to give us information that we feel we are owed under the Freedom of Information Act,” said Mark Jacob, the paper’s associate managing editor for metro news. “We are really only seeking to get the city to follow the law.”
The recent reporting is the latest in a wave of scrutiny for the police department, which continues as the city grapples with the fallout from the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Dash-cam video of the 2014 shooting was itself the subject of a FOIA dispute, which the city lost in court late last year. The video’s release brought renewed attention to the issue of police accountability.
“Laquan McDonald kind of broke everything open,” said Jacob, theTribune editor, who added that Chicago is facing a “take-stock moment.”
That’s not to say, of course, that there had been no aggressive reporting of police abuses before now. The Reporter’s database of lawsuit settlements calls to mind a separate database of police misconduct complaints, launched last year with records obtained by the Invisible Institute following years of litigation.
Newman began working on the project as soon as he was hired at theReporter in October 2014. The first step was to review the list of all legal settlements and judgments the city pays each year, which is available online. The online information includes the name of person who received money, the value of the settlement or judgment, the department involved, and the kind of case.
“We started from there,” Newman said. “Everything else”—like the details of allegations and the officers involved—“we had to get through state and federal court records.”
It wasn’t long before patterns started to emerge, Newman said. “A lot of these cases were about false arrest, people stopped without probable cause. It took one round of entering data on these cases to read through and to comb through to see that.”
One thing that Newman found surprising—and disturbing, given the nature of many of the allegations against police—was how small most of the settlements were. Half paid out $36,000 or less. “It’s not like you’re getting a free ride or access to upper mobility with the amounts,” he said.
Still, the cases add up to a substantial cost for the city. Susan Smith Richardson, editor and publisher of the Reporter, said she had been interested for a while in making the connection between police misconduct allegations, which disproportionately affect black and Hispanic residents, and the fiscal impact for the entire city.
At times, Richardson said, “We don’t see how racial issues connect back to larger government accountability issues. Nothing provides a stronger link than looking at these settlements.”
The Reporter’s investigation was supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundation. The funding was used to pay the Institute for Nonprofit News to build the database of 655 settlements, which allows users to filter lawsuits by neighborhood and officer involved. The collaboration was a first for the two organizations.
“We thought the neighborhood piece was really important to make the data more accessible or more personable for people actually living in Chicago,” said Julia Smith, the INN lead design developer on the project. “It was a nice way to let it out. And also the ability to search by officer that was important as well because you’re able to identify the officers who show up in multiple cases.”
The ability to filter the cases should also make it easier to identify trends in the data. If a small news organization like the Reporter—with seven full-time staffers—can create a database to track patterns in allegations of police misconduct, the city ought to be able to do the same, Richardson said.
“For them,” she said, “it’s a question of vision and accountability.”
Join us Monday, July 11 at 6 p.m. for the IRE Bay Area Investigators with Drinks! Invite your friends and get them to RSVP here so we have enough snacks to go around.
Share what you learned at the IRE Conference and catch up with colleagues at the tropical-themed Natoma Cabana. The bar is just a 5-minute walk from the Montgomery BART station. Freelancers are welcome.
Please join IRE Bay Area Meetup Group if you haven't already!
By Kaitlin Washburn
Journalists from the Sunlight Foundation, National Institute on Money in State Politics, and Voice of OC discussed strategies for following the money in state and local elections.
Melissa Yeager, a senior staff writer for the Sunlight Foundation, started by giving specific reasons why state and local coverage is so important:
There’s more gridlock at the federal level.
When it comes to officials, there’s a bigger impact for less money.
Legislation moves faster and better, partly because people aren’t as involved with their local and state representatives.
When it comes to campaign finances, Yeager suggested journalists find out:
How much money has been raised?
For any significant contribution: Who made it and where are they from?
Who has the campaign paid and why?
Who has been issued a refund, why, and for how much?
Don’t forget to look into who is getting paid. You can do that by looking at:
Payroll documents
Spending on advertising
Spending on consultants
Research on their opposition: “FOIA their FOIAs”
Denise Roth Barber of the National Institute on Money in State Politics then explained how to track down financial information on candidates using the National Institute on Money in State Politics website.
She demonstrated the “Ask Anything” feature, which allows the user to identify key characteristics of both donors and candidates. There’s also a “Score Card” feature that allows users to get more in-depth information on a state and to find out disclosure rules.
From there, David Washburn, editor of Voice of OC, deconstructed three stories about how money greases the political machinery of Orange County politics.
Washburn started with four “need to knows” about how to navigate political money:
You need to know:
State and local laws
Disclosure forms
The custodians of records
All offices candidates hold
He detailed how Voice of OC reporter Adam Elmahrek discovered that some members of the Anaheim City Council were receiving large donations from Disneyland in the form of independent expenditures.
Another Voice of OC reporter, Thy Anh Vo, discovered that Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen had received many donations from unemployed Vietnamese residents and that many of her donations came from a series of people and businesses all at one home address.
Washburn’s final example was the story of Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer. Voice of OC reporters Nick Gerda and Tracy Wood reported how Spitzer used an obscure Republican Central Committee campaign account as a slush fund for his political activities.
Kaitlin Washburn is an investigative journalism student at the University of Missouri. She is currently a news intern for Voice of OC.
At the 2016 IRE Conference in New Orleans, Knight Scholar Will Fuller sat down with Vanessa Araiza, a weekend anchor and reporter at WBRC in Birmingham, Alabama.
Fuller: Why journalism?
Araiza: I was never a news junkie. I wanted to be an attorney [when I was younger] because they made a lot of money, and they got to argue for a living. During my senior year in high school, I started on the drill team. We were going to New York for a St. Patrick’s Day parade and a news crew came out and said they needed someone to interview. I said I would do it. I was interviewed by a local news reporter and said, that’s what I want to do – I want to do that.
Fuller: How did you start off in the journalism industry?
Araiza: I went to college in Pensacola, a mid-size market. When I was in college, I told myself I was going to get a job at my local TV station. I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I said I was going to do it. I got a job at my local TV station as a production assistant. I think I got paid $6/hour part time. I would run camera scripts – whatever they needed me to do. But on my free time, I would follow a reporter. One semester, I was taking a full load of courses, serving tables to pay bills, working at the TV station to gain experience and also interning at the same TV station to learn.
Fuller: Was it hard to juggle all of those responsibilities?
Araiza: It was difficult; I was exhausted and so tired. But I thought, “it’s not going to last long.” You have to do this if you want to make it in the business. I got a great tape. I made tons of connections, and they helped me get a job.
Fuller: Was it difficult for you to get a job?
Araiza: For me it was. People have different stories. A friend of mine got a job immediately. I sent out 60 resume tapes and I remember getting rejection letters in the mail. I remember sitting on my living room floor crying because I thought, I am not going to get a job. But I did eventually, and it was through word of mouth – that’s how I’ve gotten every job. It’s because I knew somebody who knew somebody – the industry is so small.
Fuller: What challenges have you faced in the industry?
Araiza: Money – you start off not making a lot of money and you’re overworked. You have to tweet; you have to Periscope and Facebook, maybe Snapchat. If you’re just starting out, you may be thinking, I’m new to this and what am I doing?’ On top of that you’re making $10/hour before taxes. How am I going to pay my rent? I asked myself, how am I going to have a social life when I can’t afford it and I’m tired? But it’s worth it.
Fuller: Why is journalism still worth it despite the difficulties you’ve faced?
Araiza: You get to help people, which is amazing. I once did a story about a community with constant flooding problems. So, I went out there and did a story, and as a result, the city fixed the flooding problem. The community president came to me and said, “Thank you so much, you got this done for us.” So, you have this platform that not a lot of people have to help these people, and it’s amazing.
By Soo Rin Kim
There’s nothing more boring and unappealing than seeing a story full of numbers. “But it’s a data story,” you say. “I can’t help it!” Put aside your excuses. Data stories can be and always have been human stories.
Mc Nelly Torres of NBC6 Miami, Andrew Lehren of the New York Times and Kendall Taggart of Buzzfeed News, got together for the Humanizing Numbers panel to discuss how they brought human faces to data-driven stories. Here are three tips from the session.
1. Chicken v. Egg
What comes first, human characters or data? You might find anecdotal stories first and then try to find data to help see the bigger picture. Or maybe you find interesting numbers in a dataset and then try to add human faces to those numbers. Either can be a frustrating journey.
Taggart began the session by emphasizing the importance of starting the reporting process with human characters, or at least finding them around the same you’re analyzing data. When working on a BuzzFeed News story about how Texas was sending poor teens to adult jails for skipping schools, Taggart and her team hit the road to talk to people as soon as they identified some names and addresses from an inmate database.
2. Casting
Telling a good data story is all about finding relatable faces that best demonstrate the emotions, conflicts and core of the story.
When looking for characters to represent stories, we often focus on the worst cases, but that might not be the most relatable story for the audience. For his New York Times story, “Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black,” Lehren chose to focus on Greensboro, North Carolina, which was the most representative town, but not the worst town. Then, he compared Greensboro and Fayetteville to show how different policies can bring different results.
Sometimes, you’ll have to be creative to find individuals involved in the story. For his story, “Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq,” Lehren looked through LinkedIn resumes to find private contractors relevant to the story.
3. Don’t use numbers
So, now that we have numbers and characters, how do we use numbers effectively? The answer is: Don’t use them. All three speakers stressed the importance of cutting numbers.
“We don’t tell data,” Lehren said. “We tell stories.”
Torres told the audience to find the three most astounding facts or pieces of data as opposed to the other 5,000. When working on a long-term story, we often don’t want to give up on numbers we’ve been battling with for a long time. Think about other ways to use those numbers, like an infographic.
In a NBC6 Miami investigation on charges at area trauma centers, most of the numbers were kept out of the main story and shown as visuals or infographics.
By Soo Rin Kim
Journalists who worked on the Panama Papers came together at the IRE Conference to discuss what it take to pull off the world’s largest collaborative investigation. Chrys Wu of The New York Times moderated the panel, which included Michael Hudson, Mar Cabra and Joachim Dyfvermark. Here are some of the most important factors that made the Panama Papers possible.
1. Networking
Headquartered in Washington D.C., the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists works on global investigations with hundreds of new outlets around the world. While ICIJ provides the data and analysis tools, local media partners are responsible for their own reporting for their own audience. Michael Hudson, a senior editor at ICIJ, said this model allows a tight network of journalists to do reporting without the huge financial burden of such a project. Mar Cabra, who heads ICIJ's data and research unit, said this is not only a good reporting model, but also a good business model.
2. Sharing
Journalism can be quite secretive and exclusive, but Cabra said sharing was the key to success for the Panama Papers.
“Radical sharing,” was the guiding principle for the Panama Papers. This means, if you’re on the team, you have access to every single thing. Cabra said ICIJ did not censor any documents or data shared with its partners. Joachim Dyfvermark, a Swedish investigative reporter an ICIJ member, also pointed out that journalists not only shared leaked documents, but also data analysis, story drafts and infographics. Hudson said sharing and swapping findings and story drafts also worked as a multi-step accuracy check.
3. Technology
Cabra also emphasized the importance of cutting-edge technology. Because this project started with leaked documents, it was important for all of the 270 journalists working on the investigation to use a highly secured platform. Panama Papers journalists used multiple passcodes to access to the data and highly encrypted emails to protect sources and information.
To share their findings and story drafts, the Panama Papers team used “Global I-Hub,” a high-security, open source software that allows journalists to share and comment on files, links and story ideas.
Using Neo4J and LinkUrious, news outlets that lacked data teams could still visually explore relationships in the huge database.
4. Multiplatform
Panama Papers was a multiplatform project in a literal sense – it was published by hundreds of news outlets around the world. But the role of the interactive story on ICIJ's website cannot be ignored. Different elements of the story, including complex topics like tax evasion, were told in audience-friendly ways, including videos, photos, interactive infographics and even a game.
By Emma Henderson
“The truth may never be known.”
That quote from an article in the Boston Globe is what motivated Marty Baron to get the paper’s Spotlight team to investigate the Archdiocese of Boston. The team’s reporting uncovered an unprecedented and elaborate cover-up of clergy sexual abuse of children.
Now, more than a decade later, their story has become an Oscar-winning movie that has shined a light on the careers of investigative journalists. In New Orleans, a standing-room-only crowd of journalists listened to the team discuss the experience of having their work turned into a film.
ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg moderated the conversation with journalists Sacha Pfeiffer, Mike Rezendes, Walter Robinson and Marty Baron, as well as film producer Blye Faust and screenwriter Josh Singer.
Attendees laughed at the “magic” of the movie scene showing the team creating lengthy spreadsheets, a moment likely overlooked by an average viewer.
“It was my first spreadsheet,” confessed Robinson, the Globe's Editor At Large. The entire team agreed that the movie stayed true to real life and simply cut out some of the tedium of the reporting process.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the panel was how much the field of journalism has changed since the Globe broke the story in 2002.
The panel discussed how large newsroom staffs have shrunk in size and beat reporters have had to take on more responsibilities.
Baron, Robinson and Pfeiffer all expressed concern when asked if things would be different had the allegations of sexual abuse come to light in today’s media environment.
“It’s scary,” Robinson said about the cutbacks. The Globe can no longer afford to have a beat reporter at the courthouse, a position that provided pivotal documents in the Catholic Church investigation.
Pfeiffer said that despite all of the great publicity the paper has received since the movie came out, it hasn’t improved the Globe’s financial situation.
“We’re in this climate where we have to work more and more on collaborating and less on competing,” Pfeiffer said.
The movie did provide one huge contribution to the investigative reporting community – a $100,000 grant for two journalists to work with the current Spotlight team on a long-term investigative report.
Emma Henderson is a recent graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism with a Broadcast and Investigative Reporting emphasis. This is her first IRE Conference. She is originally from Westerville, Ohio.
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