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Projects investigating criminal justice and child welfare issues have been awarded IRE Freelance Fellowships this year. The winners of the 2016 competition are:
Due to the generosity of an anonymous donor, this fellowship program has allowed IRE to award fellowships for the last nine years, giving freelance journalists a much-needed boost in the pursuit of their investigative work. Visit our online library of Freelance Fellowship winners to see some of the work they’ve produced.
We are building the endowment that makes this fellowship possible, so please consider supporting the fund. If you're a current member, click here to make a secure credit card donation through our site. Please put "Freelance Fellowship" in the message line. If you're not a current member or if you prefer to donate via PayPal, click here.
About the award:
These fellowships are for journalists who make their living primarily as freelance/independent journalists. Applications are scrutinized by three experienced freelance journalists; they are ineligible for the award while serving on the committee. Proposals are judged in part on the breadth, significance and potential impact of the investigative project. At the request of the donor, proposals dealing with whistleblowers, business ethics and/or privacy issues will receive priority; projects involving other topics will be given serious consideration by the committee as well. The freelance projects must be published or aired primarily in US outlets.
As a veteran investigative reporting working in Mississippi, Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger has won delayed justice for many black Americans who were murdered in the civil rights era. The extraordinary results of his work have been recognized in multiple ways, including the film "Ghosts of Mississippi," which told of his investigation of the murder of Medgar Evers, which resulted in the trial and conviction of a KKK member.
Get some Sunday-morning inspiration and a window into what it takes to investigate decades-old cold cases.
By Stella Roque, OCCRP
Editor's Note:
This article first ran on May 25, 2016 on the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project's website.
Journalist Khadija Ismayilova was set free after her final appeal hearing today at the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan two days before her 40th birthday.
Ismayilova, an award-winning reporter who exposed the corruption of the ruling Aliyev family, has been in prison in Baku since her arrest on Dec. 5, 2014. Many say that her arrest was politically motivated as a consequence of her reporting.
The court ordered Ismayilova’s release and suspended her sentence, acquitting her of the charges of misappropriation and abuse of power, but upholding the charges of illegal entrepreneurship and tax evasion, for which she still faces 3 years and 6 months. That sentence was commuted to probation.
Surrounded by TV cameras, reporters and admirers as she left prison, she remained defiant.
“There was no crime,” Ismayilova told the press upon her release. “President Aliyev and his clique decided to get rid of any criticism against them. It was part of the oppressive action against human rights activists, journalists and NGO leaders.
“I will go further to the European Court and I will fight until I am proven [innocent] on all charges and I will hold the Azerbaijani government responsible for keeping me a year and a half in prison, keeping me away from my work, my family and my students. The government will be held responsible for doing all this.”
She was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison last September by the Baku Court of Grave Crimes on charges relating to large-scale misappropriation and embezzlement, illegal entrepreneurship, tax evasion and abuse of power. She has denied the charges against her.
“Khadija's release corrects a grave injustice that she and the people of Azerbaijan have suffered. We feel very happy for Khadija and her family who have been so strong during this ordeal,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) editor Drew Sullivan said, “OCCRP will continue to report on the first family of Azerbaijan and any corruption in that country we find. There is much work to do.”
Ismayilova’s colleagues at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty celebrated her release. "This is a great day for Khadija, and for independent journalists everywhere,” said Nenad Pejic, RFE/RL editor-in-chief. “We are overjoyed for Khadija, for her family, and for her colleagues, and can't wait for her to get back to work."
Her lawyers filed the appeal after the Baku Court of Appeal upheld her original sentencing on Nov. 25, 2015. Her lawyer Fakhraddin Mehdiyev said Ismayilova asked to be released from prison in the appeal petition. The panel of judges was chaired by Ali Seyfaliyev, Radio Azadliq reported.
Ismayilova previously said she expected further appeals to be rejected by her final recourse, the country’s Supreme Court, according to Amnesty International. However, the court accepted her petition and ruled for her release.
“It’s the most amazing news we could ever hope for!” OCCRP regional editor and investigative reporter Miranda Patrucic exclaimed at the news, “We worked really hard in the past year and half on stories that she would be doing and it helped show the government there’s no real point in keeping her in prison anymore.”
Patrucic has been a reporter, editor and one of the coordinators for OCCRP’s Khadija Project, The Khadija Project was started by colleagues and friends of Ismayilova to continue the work she started. Journalists and volunteers from the US and Europe joined with others in Turkey and the Caucasus to carry on her work after she was jailed.
Emin Milli, managing director at the independent Azerbaijani Meydan TV hailed Ismayilova’s release. "This is a great day for freedom of expression not only in Azerbaijan, but also for the rest of the world,” he said. “Khadija has remained free in spirit during her one and a half years in jail, and during that time she has gained international recognition for her bravery and talent.
“I hope her release means that the Azerbaijani government is beginning to realise the importance of a free and independent civil society."
Ismayilova was named the recipient of the 2016 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. In a speech read by her mother at the awards ceremony, Ismayilova said that “humanity suffers when journalists are silenced.” She urged those present to not laud her work or courage, but to “dedicate yourself to the work each one of you can do on behalf of press freedom and justice,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
She will celebrate her 40th birthday on May 27.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, in collaboration with Radio Free Europe, Meydan TV, Sveriges Television, TT News Agency, Investigative Reporting Center of Italy, Bellingcat and other journalists, won a prestigious IRE Medal for their work on The Khadija Project.
Get an inside look at how the mammoth collaboration for the Panama Papers came together. You'll hear about the technical details of giving a group of journalists throughout the world protected access to a trove of leaked documents. You'll hear from journalists whose work led to the downfall of a prime minister.
We also have several sessions on international investigations.
Look for them on the schedule:
Go behind the scenes to learn how a team of AP reporters launched an investigation that helped free more than 2,000 enslaved workers. Martha Mendoza and Mary Rajkumar of The Associated Press will offer insights into how journalists can use documents, data and sourcing to uncover similar abuses.
And in a separate session, you'll learn how to track product supply chains to determine when goods made in illegal or dangerous conditions are being sold in stores in your community.
Look for it on the schedule:
By Deron Lee, CJR
Editor's Note:
This article first ran on May 13, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review's website.
One day in late January 2015, Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle was at a Mexican restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, when he received an email forwarded from a source. He immediately knew he was onto something big.
“I said, ‘Wow, this is a story,’” says Lowry, the Eagle’s statehouse correspondent.
He was right: Lowry’s article, published by the Eagle the following day, revealed that the state’s budget director had used his personal email account to send two lobbyists a preview of Gov. Sam Brownback’s controversial budget in December of 2014, weeks before the legislature or the public had a chance to see it. The story shed light on the decision-making behind the budget battles that have rocked the state ever since Brownback’s massive tax cuts went into effect in 2013.
But the story also did something else, which Lowry couldn’t have anticipated at the time: It set off a debate in the capitol over a public-records loophole that would extend for two legislative sessions, finally resulting in a major reform that was signed into law by Brownback himself this week. The bill makes clear that private e-mails sent by public officials are subject to disclosure under the open-records law if they pertain to public business.
“We owe him a debt of gratitude for digging into this story,” Doug Anstaett, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, says of Lowry.
Lowry’s original story wasn’t just about a transparency crusade. The fact that lobbyists were involved at an early state in the budget process was pretty newsworthy in its own right.
But the budget director’s use of a private account pointed to a loophole in the state open-records act and opened up a fruitful line of inquiry. The scoops kept coming in the 2015 session, as Lowry debunked the budget director’s claim that he hadn’t had access to his state email account when he sent the private email, and revealed that Brownback himself had used private email to conduct public business for years.
State lawmakers, meanwhile, began calling for a legislative fix to the private-email loophole—a push that gained bipartisan momentum that March when Hillary Clinton’s email scandal broke. In May 2015, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt put forth a proposal to close the loophole. Legislation was introduced a week later, at the tail end of the session, and in June, Senate leadership asked the Kansas Judicial Council, a state agency that advises the legislature and judiciary on legal matters, to study the issue. The resulting advisory committee report, released in December, provided much of the basis for the bill that was ultimately passed in this year’s session.
“Whether it’s smoke signals or a smartphone”
The thrust of the reform is to shift the focus from the location of a record to its content and purpose.
While the previous open-records law applied to records made or maintained by a public agency, the act will now apply, according to the bill summary, to “any recorded information that is made, maintained, kept by, or in the possession of any officer or employee of a public agency pursuant to the officer’s or employee’s official duties, and is related to the functions, activities, programs, or operations of any public agency.” And it will apply “regardless of the location of the information.”
Adam Marshall, a legal fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language was well crafted. Removing any potential location-based exemption, he said, is “not something that’s common in public-records statutes, but it’s terrific.” Other states have codified that distinction only after court battles, Marshall added.
Anstaett of the Kansas Press Association, who served on the advisory committee that made recommendations for the legislation, said the location issue was “the key” to the group’s deliberations.
“Whether it’s smoke signals or a smartphone,” he said, the committee determined that “location is not the issue as much as, does the record involve the public business?”
The reform, of course, doesn’t mean that all is well on the transparency front. The loophole revealed by Lowry’s reporting was just one of many reasons cited by the Center for Public Integrity last year for the failing grade it gave Kansas for public access to information. Anstaett says he remains concerned about the high costs that state agencies sometimes charge for access to records. Marshall points out that mechanisms must be put in place to make sure public business conducted on private accounts is stored and searchable. And Lowry says there are still seemingly “a million exemptions in KORA,” the open-records law. In the very same bill that closed the email loophole, the legislature also moved to block media and general-public access to police body-cam footage.
Even as Anstaett’s organization continues to lobby the state on these other fronts, he says, at least for now the new reform “sends a message that you have to do the public business in the light of day, and not try to hide.”
As for Lowry, his reporting over the last 18 months has drawn awards and recognition. But, he said on Wednesday night, hours after Brownback signed the new bill: “Today was really when it hit me hard. Because you think, ‘Something I wrote actually changed the law in Kansas.’”
A series of sessions at the IRE Conference in New Orleans will dig into one of the biggest stories of our time.
Sessions will include "After Ferguson: What's next for reporting on policing in America?" with panelists including DeRay Mckesson, a leader of the post-Ferguson police protest movement, and reporters from The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Associated Press.
We will also have a track of panels sponsored by Criminal Justice Journalists, a session on developing stories from the law enforcement beat, investigating campus policing, and more.
Look for it on the schedule:
By Jennifer Lu
When writing about a topic as pervasive and complex as heroin addiction, the last thing you want to do is to get it wrong.
At the 2016 CAR Conference, Stephen Stirling and Jacquee Petchel, who have reported extensively on this subject, shared their experiences and advice on reporting, quantifying and telling the story of one of America’s fastest growing addictions through data and crowdsourcing.
Their panel,”Addicted: Revealing hidden communities,” included tips for how to accurately depict the heroin epidemic in a way that engages readers and reflects their local communities and states.
Stirling, a data reporter at the Star-Ledger/NJ.com, told us how he got the idea to represent New Jersey’s heroin problem as a fictional town populated entirely by heroin addicts.
He set up a Google survey asking for personal stories and was overwhelmed by the response. These became the basis for the interactive piece of reader stories.
Petchel, executive editor of the Carnegie-Knight News21 multimedia investigative reporting initiative and a professor at Arizona State University, used the Public Insight Network to hear from listeners and sent student reporters to rehabilitation facilities to find sources for their documentary.
Both reporters stressed the importance of avoiding stereotypes. Here’s Stirling:
In fact, it was not uncommon for Petchel’s young reporters to know someone who was struggling with heroin addiction.
While Stirling and Petchel used statistics to quantify the heroin epidemic in their communities, Stirling reminded attendees that every piece of data represents someone’s life, and ultimately, those stories are what readers connect with.
Get the tools and inspiration you need to successfully fight for records at the IRE Conference in June. Jason Leopold, a self-described FOIA terrorist and a winner of this year's IRE FOI Medal, will share his strategies and advice on how to wrangle information from recalcitrant officials. He'll be joined by Brandon Smith, the journalist who sued the city of Chicago to release the Laquan McDonald police shooting video, and Matt Topic, the attorney who worked with Smith.
Look for it on the schedule: "David 1, Goliath 0, Fighting and Winning Open Records Battles," on Friday, June 17.
The follow is an abbreviated transcript of Daniela Vidal’s interview with Daniel Guazo for the IRE Radio Podcast. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Daniela Vidal (IRE): Could you tell me a little bit about what this project is about, The Disappeared?
Daniela Guazo (El Universal): The objective of this project was to show the stories behind the high numbers of people who have disappeared in Mexico. This is a big problem in Mexico and all of Latin America. We wanted to show all the stories behind that.
DV: If someone isn’t familiar with the word “disappeared,” how would you explain it to them.
DG: Disappearing is a term that in Mexico is difficult to explain, but we found a simple explanation: It’s a person who is not with his or her family, and the family is looking, but you don’t know where he or she is. It’s important because in Mexico there are maybe five different terms to describe disappearing people, and in only two of them the person is considered a victim and the government is investigating. With the others terms, the family does the investigation, not the government.
DV: When you were looking at these numbers, what was going through your mind?
DG: When we found the data and we found a big number - about 26,000 missing - we thought, how can we show that they are not only numbers, they are not only statistics. They are people and they have families. They had a job, a son, a daughter. And we thought, we have the data, the statistics, and we have to find different stories to show the different methods of disappearing a person. Maybe one person just goes to work and disappears. Another person goes to a movie and disappears. We have 31 states and 1 city (in Mexico), so we have 32 stories that we have to find.
DV: So how did you find those stories and people who would be willing to talk to you?
DG: We talked with correspondents at El Universal and they would go to the different states and find stories about missing people. As a team, we did stories about Mexico City, the state of Mexico, and the state of Queretaro. And the others, the correspondents at El Universal did those.
DV: Were some of the correspondents you worked with kind of afraid to go into some of these states, just because of how dangerous it could be?
DG: Yes. They don’t go to states like Tamaulipas or Coahuila or Veracruz. It was very difficult. In fact, in Veracruz it was very difficult to find a story. They called us and said, ‘Maybe in Veracruz there are no missing people.’ But really, there are.
DV: It’s just nobody really wanted to talk about it.
DG: Yeah, nobody wanted to talk about it. They said, ‘I can’t find a story. Nobody wants to tell me a story about missing people.’
DV: So when these families finally did see the story in El Universal, what was their reaction to it?
DG: The families are very grateful to us. They are afraid, but they want someone, anyone to talk to them and hear their stories and to show that they have a big problem with disappearing people. They are afraid at first, but then they are very grateful to see that the media want to hear their stories.
DV: To the people of Mexico, I imagine it’s not a surprise that 26,000 people have been disappeared.
DG: Yeah, sadly it’s not a surprise.
DV: So for them to see, here are individual stories…
DG: The number 26,000 wasn’t a surprise because everybody knows this number. But the stories, yes, those were a surprise. Because when you read the stories, it seems to be something that can happen to anyone.
DV: So is the perception sometimes that the people who are disappeared were involved in criminal activity and so it made sense that they had been taken?
DG: Maybe when people are murdered, maybe they think that they were involved in criminal activity. But when somebody is disappeared, it’s very difficult to find the real reason. And this is why maybe it seems to be something that happens to anyone. A lot of people disappear and have no connection to criminal activity.
DV: Data journalism is really new in Mexico, so was it hard to prove that, hey, this thing we’re doing is really valuable for reporting in this country?
DG: Yeah, it’s very difficult in Mexico because, like you said, in Mexico data journalism is new. Maybe just three or four years old. But with this project, we showed what kind of project we can do. We worked with a programmer, a designer, photographers and correspondents. It was a big team. But with this project, we showed what kinds of stories and products we can create.
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