IRE Preview: From investigation to movie, behind the scenes of Spotlight

Get an insider's view of the Oscar-winning movie that featured the Boston Globe's Spotlight team at our Friday showcase panel. Three members of the Globe staff who played key roles in the Catholic Church investigation – Spotlight editor Walter Robinson, reporters Michael Rezendes and Sacha Pfeiffer, and executive editor Martin Baron ­­– will be joined by screenwriter Josh Singer and film producer Blye Pagon Faust in a behind-the-scenes look at the movie and the investigation it portrays.

For a deeper look at the reporting behind “Spotlight”, listen to the IRE Radio Podcast episode “Bonus: Spotlight.”

Look for it on the schedule: “Showcase: From investigation to movie, behind the scenes of Spotlight,” on Friday, June 17 at 5 p.m.

By Deron Lee, CJR

About 500 subscribers over the course of eight months: If your reference point is Facebook-fueled pageviews, or even a typical newspaper’s print circulation, it might not sound like a lot.

But for the leaders of The Frontier, an investigative journalism startup in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that number is reason for encouragement—a sign that some people will spend real money on local news online, and that their unique business model may yet pay off.

The Frontier was founded a year ago by Robert Lorton, whose family had owned the daily Tulsa World for generations before selling the paper to Warren Buffett’s company in 2013. As he contemplated a return to the news business, Lorton says, he knew one thing for certain: “I didn’t want to sell advertising that was going to bring in pennies and that will be clunky and distracting to the reader.”

The target, instead, was a user-supported model—and even for a lean newsroom, support doesn’t come cheap. Frontier subscribers pay a monthly membership fee of $30 for access to paywalled stories, the kind of price that’s associated more with trade publications aimed at niche audiences than with local news. The for-profit site still has a long way to go to become self-sustaining, but it’s made some progress down that path.

“I preach all the time, content is not free,” says Lorton. “What we’re trying to sell is the value of having someone in your community being a watchdog.”

In the beginning, The Frontier almost didn’t get off the ground at all. Lorton’s first and only choice for editor in chief was Ziva Branstetter, a veteran investigative reporter at the World. But Branstetter wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the paper where she had worked for two decades, enjoyed latitude to pursue stories, and had colleagues who were “like family.”

“It sounded frightening,” Branstetter says. “It sounded like a risk.”

In the end, she said yes, drawn by Lorton’s pitch and the opportunity to grow professionally without leaving her hometown. And she reasoned that, for better or worse, “it’s no more a risk to do something like this these days than it is to work for a newspaper.”

Three other World staffers—Cary Aspinwall, Dylan Goforth, and Kevin Canfield—followed Branstetter to the nascent Frontier, rounding out the staff. They work out of a start-up incubator in downtown Tulsa filled with, in Branstetter’s words, “hipsters and vegan coffee and West Elm furniture.”

The hires immediately made the site stand out, says Andy Rieger, a former longtime executive editor of The Norman Transcript, and now an adjunct instructor in public affairs journalism at the University of Oklahoma.

“They were some of the best writers and editors the World had,” says Rieger. “That gave it credibility not only in Tulsa, but in Oklahoma.”

That credibility was bolstered by the fact that, on the same day the new venture was announced, Branstetter and Aspinwall were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for their reporting in the World on the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

At The Frontier, the new staff hit the ground running: Before there was a paywall, or even a website, Branstetter and Goforth followed up on a story they had broken just before leaving the World, in which they revealed that officials in the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department had pressured employees to falsify training records on behalf of a citizen “reserve deputy”—a wealthy local insurance executive—who accidentally shot and killed an unarmed black suspect when riding along on a gun-sting operation.

Since then, as more disturbing revelations have come to light, and the sheriff was forced to resign, The Frontier has remained “at the tip of the spear” on the story, Rieger says. The coverage is marked by both ambitious scope and irreverent tone: Late last month, with a criminal trial in the case approaching, the site rolled out an epic three-part series called “The Shit Sandwich,” after a phrase one officer used to describe the executive’s involvement with the department. The series contains a well-produced 11-minute video and, like all Frontier stories, is rich in links and embedded documents. All three installments were released simultaneously—as in a Netflix series—in an effort to keep users binge-reading.

Other deep dives from the past year include a report revealing that Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry intervened on behalf of a controversial Oklahoma surgeon who faced the loss of his medical license; that story was followed by an ethics complaintfiled against Fallin. And Branstetter’s reporting on the practice of “selling rank” in the Tulsa Police Department led to an investigation by the city auditor.

The “selling rank” story was one of several done in partnership with KOTV, the local CBS affiliate; the ongoing arrangement gives the TV station access to The Frontier’s investigative resources while giving the website some on-air publicity. The site also partners with The Marshall Project as part of the national “Next to Die” series, contributing storieson Oklahoma’s controversial death-penalty regime.

The stories produced via partnerships are available free on the Frontier site, as are the podcasts and staff blogs, which mix daily items and explainers into the investigative fare. Most of the rest are behind the paywall, accessible for the $30 monthly membership fee or individually for $5 or less.

So who’s buying? Lorton acknowledges that the paywall restricts readership, but he says the audience is loyal, influential, and, he insists, not exclusively affluent—akin to the slice of committed newspaper readers who might take action after reading a story. “I think every community has a percentage, say 10 percent, of people who are engaged in their community—the person who calls the mayor, who volunteers on their school board, who is willing to invest in finding that content.”

Big stories do reach beyond monthly subscribers: A well-read paywalled piece might reach 3,500 unique views, according to Lorton; free stories have gone as high as 10,000. Impact was a concern at first, he says, but “I think we’ve built up enough traction that people are paying attention to us.”

His goal is to reach 750 members at the end of 12 months with the paywall, which went up in August, a target that puts The Frontier more or less on pace. Ultimately, he says, the site needs least 1,000 members to be sustainable, a bit of a recalibration from the targets sketched out at the launch.

Though there are no ads, the Frontier does have 30 to 40 corporate sponsors, along with about a dozen “pioneer” members, who pay $1,000 to get additional perks. The annual budget currently runs to about $300,000, Lorton says. The goal is to add more staff eventually, says Branstetter, but “we’re just trying to stay lean for a couple of years.”

It’s too soon to tell, both she and Lorton acknowledge, whether The Frontier can maintain its growth and survive those first few crucial years, much less blaze a trail for other journalists to follow, as they hope it might. Even if they can make it work, the high-cost paywall approach may not replicate easily. As Michael Mason, editor of the Tulsa startupThis Land Press, says, “the model is tricky.”

Lorton says that if the for-profit approach doesn’t pan out, he might consider going the nonprofit route, as many other investigative startups have done. But he chafes at the idea.

“Does the industry really have to be nonprofit to survive?” he asks. Another possibility, he says, might be to establish a nonprofit solely for defraying the costs of obtaining public records.

Whatever the future holds, at a time when even the most prominent new-media businesses are facing financial obstacles, as Google and Facebook eat up a huge proportion of the digital-ad “pennies,” and readers increasingly revolt against web advertising, this experiment in ad-free, reader-supported local news is worth watching. The Frontier took a risk, and we should all learn something as a result.

By David Uberti, CJR

In 2014, The Center for Investigative Reporting found itself at a crossroads: Cut much of its staff or create a full-time radio show. That was the choice then-editorial director Mark Katches says the organization faced. “The burn rate can be a pretty scary thing to witness when there is very little revenue coming in to cover your costs,” he adds. “You can’t just sit still and watch everything go up in flames.”

The quandary wasn’t unique to the nation’s oldest nonprofit investigative journalism outfit, though the scale was unprecedented. For decades, its small staff fluctuated alongside project-by-project financial support, publishing hard-hitting exposés wherever it could: TV, magazines, books. During the late-2000s surge in nonprofit journalism funding, CIR was able to build a bona fide investigative newsroom that partnered largely with California newspapers and public media. The organization counted about 70 in its ranks by 2012. 

“We went into it with the idea that if you do great journalism, you would build something that would last,” says Katches, who came on in 2009. “The sad reality was that all of those awards and recognition, all the good journalism we did, wasn’t enough in the nonprofit world, where people write checks for two or three years and then move on to the next bright and shiny thing.”

The predicament left CIR searching for its next chapter. It formally began with a July 2014 press release trumpeting millions in new funding to jumpstart Reveal, an hourlong public radio show and podcast. The announcement commenced perhaps the most intense period of evolution in CIR’s long history. 

The organization’s goal is to carve out a home for investigative reporting on a medium without a long tradition of it. Its challenge has been to maintain the soul of the organization while carrying out massive internal change. The creation of a self-contained platform for CIR’s reporting is a fundamental shift for the nonprofit, which has traditionally relied on outside partners to distribute its work to a broader audience. Now, CIR aims to control its own means of publication—and nurture its own following—while creating a megaphone for partners’ work. So far it has been a selling point for fundraisers, as it gives CIR direct access to a national, mobile-friendly audience.

“To sustain any type of investigative reporting, it requires you to think differently,” CEO Joaquin Alvarado says. “We’re big enough to do that. That’s our responsibility.”

CIR’s current ambitions carry considerable risks. A weekly publishing schedule is a tight window for projects that take months of reporting, and keeping pace over the long run will require deft coordination with a sprawling web of radio and non-radio partners. The quality and quantity of this outside work will play a large part in determining Reveal’s fate. 

Some of CIR’s team has been skeptical of the wholesale shift in publishing strategies, fearful that managing so many moving parts would inevitably distract from their core work. Roughly 20 staffers have left since 2014, taking firepower to the likes of ProPublica, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, BuzzFeed, Google, Apple, The Guardian,Forbes, and even a few audio outlets. The organization has responded largely by hiring a slew of radio veterans, adding production know-how before Reveal moved to a weekly schedule in January.

“We’re taking a huge percentage of our nonprofit budget and making a huge gamble to make a platform for investigative journalism,” says Nathan Halverson, a reporter who joined CIR in 2014 after years in newspapers. “It might not work. Reveal might fail. But for me, in my soul, it feels better to be at a place that’s trying to do something really big.” 

Indeed, this is the latest iteration of something really big. A few current staffers joke that CIR has been in constant transition. Others who departed recently frame the ongoing transformation as a borderline identity crisis. “CIR has never been afraid of change in the way most newsrooms are,” says one former staffer, who requested anonymity out of deference to past colleagues. “But that also means that it won’t really stick to anything long enough to get really good at it—and to let people catch up. I feel like we often start these new initiatives and projects, and then we abandon them.”

The current proposition, Reveal, is at once risky and exciting, and in many ways that’s a refreshing combination. But it also raises a broader question that commercial media outlets have debated for much of the past decade: how to square an organization’s core mission with its need to evolve—and survive—in the digital age. Raising money to fund investigative journalism is a Sisyphean task, and CIR has bet that it can innovate its way to financial sustainability.

THE BURDEN WAS SMALLER with past versions of CIR, which, in the decades following its 1977 launch, typically employed less than a dozen. Nonprofit journalism was in its infancy, and funding was scarce. “Sometimes it’d get so tight that we’d have to go on unemployment for a while until some grants came in,” says David Weir, one of three co-founders. 

CIR partnered with outside organizations to produce stories for TV programs like Frontline and magazines like Mother Jones, turning some projects into books. “We always tried to adhere to the freelance mantra, which was Sell the same story as many different ways as you can,” adds Dan Noyes, another co-founder. The scrappy outfit produced periodic but massive investigations on topics such as the Black Panthers or the export of banned pesticides to the developing world. The objective was to radically alter readers’ or viewers’ understanding of an issue.

Still, convincing outside donors to support journalism in the 1980s and 1990s was a hard sell, and there have always been strings attached. Even now, outside money often focuses coverage on specific topics, such as criminal justice or the environment. 

In the mid-2000s, however, philanthropic response to the implosion of print advertising sparked something of a revolution. A spigot of cash opened onto fledgling nonprofits sprouting nationwide, while journalists jettisoned by legacy media provided a deep talent pool from which these new organizations could draw. Today, there are more than 100 of them across the United States.

Just a few giants emerged in this new environment, taking various approaches toward growth. The Texas Tribune has gradually built out its state-focused newsroom with the help of revenue from live events and corporate sponsorships. The Center for Public Integrity attempted to create a daily news operation called iWatch in 2011, though the experiment failed to attract an audience and keep foundations interested. The organization had to lay off about a third of its staff in response, and has since returned to stability with a balance of big projects and quick analysis. ProPublica, widely recognized as best in class, launched in 2008 with a $30 million commitment from the Sandler Foundation. That financial runway provided room to not only attract first-rate talent for the newsroom, but also to establish its brand and diversify funding sources.

“More sophisticated funders do understand that it’s necessary to keep the lights on,” ProPublica President Richard Tofel says.

CIR didn’t have such a financial cushion in place in 2009, when it began a period of intense growth. Reveal is a response to the early miscalculation that funders would fall in line quickly enough to sustain that growth. Departures aside, the product has so far succeeded in keeping a much larger version of CIR intact.

“What they’re doing is historically important and different,” says Charles Lewis, who founded CPI in 1989. “It also, like any new entrepreneurial thing, presents risks … . Starting something is the easy part. Sustaining it is the hard part.”

THE DOMINOES OF CHANGE that led to Reveal began to fall in 2008, as the bottom was dropping out of American newspapers and investigative reporting was collapsing around the country. Enter: Robert Rosenthal, former managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle and, before that, executive editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. CIR’s new executive director moved quickly to institutionalize a system in which the newsroom, which was just a handful of staffers at the time, would collaborate with partners across media to publish numerous versions of the same story concurrently, maximizing impact in various markets.

Rosenthal eventually gained traction with a few big funders, including the Knight and Hewlett Foundations, for a state-focused outfit essentially aimed to plug growing holes in California media’s collective enterprise efforts. He also hired Katches, then an investigative editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to lead the project.

California Watch’s first story, on waste in the homeland security grant system, was published in September 2009 across TV, radio, and digital outlets, not to mention front pages of roughly two-dozen newspapers that combined for 1.8 million subscribers. CIR developed a distribution network from this blueprint, working with partners to localize stories or adapt them for various formats, and charging meager content fees of usually a few hundred bucks per piece. 

Katches proved an intense and charismatic leader as he built a talent-rich, newspaper-style investigative team within CIR. Staff grew to more than 30 as the organization filled a trophy case full of awards. “We started to become a known quantity in California,” says Will Evans, who reported for CIR from 2005 to 2008, and then returned in 2011. “You’d call and people would actually know who you were.” 

Still, the financial reality of that success—CIR’s annual budget had ballooned to $4.6 million by 2011—wasn’t as bright. Key funders walked away, citing a desire for more national focus. “The model evolved to follow where the money was,” Rosenthal says. As CIR began exploring this shift in 2012, it merged with another local nonprofit, The Bay Citizen, which published Bay Area news and features in The New York Times. Rosenthal helped convince many of The Bay Citizen’s funders to support this larger, harder-edged organization. All together, the move essentially doubled CIR’s revenue and staff overnight, to more than $11 million and 70 employees, respectively. 

The organization set out on a yearlong strategic planning process, which led to the consolidation of The Bay Citizen and California Watch under the CIR name. It was during this period that Alvarado, hired in May 2012 as the organization’s first-ever chief strategy officer, began turning it into something of a laboratory for the delivery of journalism. Whereas ProPublica is The New York Times of nonprofits, the Alvarado-led CIR has become its Silicon Valley equivalent. “We’re in the Bay Area—crazy is OK sometimes,” he says.

Alvarado took more active control of the distribution and engagement team, which began experimenting with live events such as investigation-fueled theater productions. The team gradually turned attention away from California Watch’s distribution strategy. 

For Alvarado, relying on publishing partners to reach audiences was “an existential threat” both to CIR and investigative journalism broadly. “If you did not own and control your platform as an individual organization—or as a cohort with the resources and openness to collaborate—you were not going to survive.” He worked intensely on a YouTube channel that would curate investigative content from partners, an expensive project that “we learned an insane amount from,” he says. Along with Susanne Reber, who joined CIR in 2012 after two years heading NPR’s first-ever investigations unit, Alvarado began exploring a similar idea in audio.  

“There was this vacuum for investigative material on public radio,” Reber says. While NPR has seen early success with its nascent investigative effort, individual public radio stations don’t often have the resources for months-long projects. Podcasts, meanwhile, tend to veer toward explanatory storytelling. Reber and Alvarado believed a CIR-powered program could fulfill unmet demand for deeper reporting. “It sounded a little crazy, and it was,” Reber says. “But it was sitting right there as an obvious strategic play.”

CIR joined up with the Massachusetts-based PRX to produce a trio ofReveal pilot episodes. The first, released in September 2013, won a Peabody for a segment on how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing painkillers to vets. Two more the following year appeared to further validate the hypotheses. “We thought we would have 10 stations carry the pilots,” Alvarado says. “We actually had 150.” Perhaps more importantly, the prospect of a CIR-controlled publishing platform soon excited funders, including the Logan Foundation, to the tune of millions. 

Staffers were pleased with this early success, though most had been detached from the long phase of experimentation leading up to it. Some bristled at what they saw as new media evangelism—jazz hands—that distracted from the core mission. The sentiment was reinforced by confusion over the organization’s chain of command. In July 2014, Katches left to pursue his dream of running a regional newspaper, The Oregonian, rather than lead this new vision of CIR. Alvarado was soon after promoted to CEO as Rosenthal gradually moved away from many day-to-day operations.

“I left because I got a great job offer, but I didn’t know where [CIR] was headed,” says Ryan Gabrielson, who departed for ProPublica in 2014. He was one of about a dozen staffers who left that year. ”In the end,” Gabrielson adds, “CIR was about being experimental in the age of media disruption. It wasn’t what I signed up for.”

Any confusion regarding newsroom leadership was heightened by a formal vaccuum last year, when Katches’ replacement, Robert Salladay, joined a new project to create a Reveal-branded documentary series. Amy Pyle, who joined CIR in 2012 after a long career in newspapers, took over in the interim and was finally given the editor in chief title in March.

“The lengthy EIC hiring process was helpful for this organization, in that we all learned a lot about each other,” Pyle says. “But it also left us in limbo for quite some time.”

THROUGHOUT 2015, Reveal ran on a monthly schedule as CIR began building out the partnership network expected to supply most of the weekly show’s content. PRX expanded the program’s distribution to numerous new member stations. The newsroom honed more audio-friendly storytelling styles through bootcamps for reporters and editors. It also produced a handful of stories to bank in advance of the January 2016 move to one hour of programming a week.

“That year was really important for us because it gave us so much time to think about our workflow,” says Meghann Farnsworth, managing director for distribution and engagement. “But, as with anything, you don’t know how it’s going to be until you’re into it.”

While Reveal is not an NPR-quality listening experience so far, it’s a remarkably sharp radio program and podcast given CIR’s lightning transition. Host Al Letson, part navigator, part passenger, leads listeners through topically themed episodes generally broken down into a few segments apiece. CIR reporters have dropped illuminating stories on theAmerican trapping boom, discrimination in the temporary jobs sector, and religious day care centers, among other topics.

The new medium has forced staffers to rethink the way they tell stories at the most basic level. They still publish text investigations on CIR’sReveal-branded website and, occasionally, with outside partners. But the typically data- and document-heavy work must be adapted into more radio-friendly formats to travel over the airwaves. CIR producers sonified Oklahoma seismic data into a crescendoing melody that conveyed how hydraulic fracturing has been tied to a spate of earthquakes in the state.

Clip begins at 38:04

 

In a segment on abuse of foreign aid to humanitarian organizations, CIR reporters went to Malawi to question a key subject, capturing a damning interview on tape. 

Clip begins at 36:20

 

In March, each new episode of the podcast was downloaded about 100,000 times, while Reveal’s back catalog drew 150,000 additional downloads. More than 250 radio stations also carried the show each week, including in eight of the top 10 markets, and CIR brass say they expect to reach upward of 275 this summer. “For a show that is this challenging? Right out of the box that’s a really good number,” adds PRX’s John Barth, who leads distribution efforts. WBEZ’s This American Life, by comparison, claims more than 500 stations and 2.1 million listeners.

The partner network has also born early fruit. In late January, just as the Flint water crisis was drawing national headlines, CIR contracted an entire hour of programming from Michigan Public Radio. Other partners so far have ranged from American nonprofits like ProPublica, to international partners like the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to public radio outlets scattered across the United States.

The question going forward is whether CIR can manage enough partner stories to allow its staffers to continue drilling deep into their own pieces.Reveal’s content ratio—initially estimated at one-third CIR, two-thirds outside work—has hovered around 50-50 this year. “But we don’t want to stretch that too far,” says Reber, now Reveal’s executive editor, “because we want to make sure our investigations at CIR have pride of place on the show.”

The organization has five contracts for producing multiple Reveal stories annually, with The Center for Public Integrity, KQED, The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, The Texas Tribune, and Houston Chronicle. The latter two share a full-time staffer with CIR, which hopes to grow this core partner group to eight or 10 organizations. Reber, who is moving to Washington to manage CIR’s East Coast partnerships, also plays matchmaker with potential collaborators. “We have stuff on the books right now well into the summer and fall,” she said in March. “And we have stuff that we know will come in 2017.”  

Turning this mixture into a cohesive show will largely fall on the shoulders of Executive Producer Kevin Sullivan, poached from NPR and WBUR’s Here and Now in late 2014. “My original concept was to have shows done a month ahead of time,” Sullivan says. “What I’m finding is that is not happening. We are often finishing the show on the day we have to upload them … . But they’re in really good shape.”

The newsroom has set aside funds so it can acquire full hours of programming throughout the year. “We want to do something really major once a quarter, either by purchasing a full hour or doing something huge ourselves,” adds Sullivan. “That’s how we’ve set up our budget.” Of the first 16 episodes on the weekly schedule, one has been a rerun and another a decidedly non-investigative, though interesting,feature on Donald Trump supporters.

CIR’s investigative team remains huge—19 reporters by Pyle’s count. “My focus is to make sure what comes out of our core staff is the hardest investigations we are doing, because we know that the stories partners pitch are sometimes not as heavily investigative as CIR is accustomed to,” Pyle says. “A lot of it is coming out of radio [outlets], which often has a more exploratory approach. We juggle a lot, and we try to always have another show in the wings in case something falls through.”

She’d like each of her reporters, at minimum, to gather sound for two segments every year, enough for roughly 30 minutes of Reveal. “We also plan to seek out and nurture investigative skills in the radio producers we hire whenever possible,” she adds. 

While the audio-first mentality adds a new degree of difficulty to the CIR newsroom’s work, staffers say fears of sustaining an hour-long show each week haven’t materialized. “Ask me another year from now and I might give you a new perspective,” says Christina Jewett, a longtime reporter and self-described “radio superfan” who’s jumped into the new medium with vigor. “So far I haven’t felt pressure to produce more. But our metabolism is going to have to change again, to be a little bit more nimble.”

That will be especially necessary for CIR to also build out its digital presence on RevealNews.org, which internal metrics show averages about 260,000 pageviews each month (Tofel claims ProPublica draws more than 2 million). Jewett’s recent investigation into profiteering in California’s worker comp system ran as a 4,000-word piece on the site—aversion also appeared in The Sacramento Bee—and as a 16-minute segment on Reveal. Jewett penned a sidebar to the story as well, along with a follow-up the next week. 

“If you cross-reference the print and radio piece, there’s going to be a lot more facts in the print,” says Jewett, speaking generally about the formats. “That’s the nature of the media. But the emotion you can get with audio storytelling is far more than that of print.” 

That difference ties into a broader critique leveled by some former staffers, who argue that audio’s narrative-driven style makes it more difficult for stories to highlight systemic flaws. They have a point: Revealsegments typically zero in on a few characters, shaving off some context more easily conveyed visually or through text. Audiences who listen toReveal without reading CIR’s corresponding written stories, which typically reach fewer people online, lose some of that big-picture analysis.

But it’s also true that the trend toward more vivid, character-focused narratives extends across formats. “Everybody is aware that all the great documents and data in the world are not going to give you a very interesting piece for digital media,” Pyle says.

So CIR staffers will continue walking a familiar line to adhere to the old mantra: Sell the same story as many ways as you can. Only now the onus will be on them not only to package journalism for various forms of consumption, but also to connect audiences across media so they don’t lose anything in translation. CIR’s staff has upped efforts to lead listeners and readers between stories through in-show callouts, social media engagement, and a weekly newsletter, among other tactics. They will soon be doing so without Farnsworth, head of distribution and engagement, who will leave for Vox in May. 

Taken together, it’s no small task. But, already, CIR has begun looking toward its next platform. The new project of a small team that includes Salladay is exploring how to adapt CIR stories for the likes of Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix—fuller multimedia integration under the Reveal banner. It comes despite the departures of three video producers over the past six months, two of whom say they left largely because they didn’t want to pursue radio.

“We have to acknowledge that Reveal is helping with our survival,” Salladay says. “You have to adapt. You have to figure out what the next thing is.”

We hope you’re making plans to join us in New Orleans June 16-19 for the IRE Conference.

We’ve already published a list of expected sessions, and we are excited to announce that Sheila Coronel will deliver our keynote address.

Coronel is academic dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She is concurrently director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and Stabile professor of professional practice.

She began her reporting career in the Philippines, and in 1989, cofounded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism to promote investigative reporting on major social issues, including the military, poverty, and corruption.

Coronel is also the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Coups, Cults & Cannibals, The Rule-makers: How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress, and Pork and other Perks: Corruption and Governance in the Philippines. She has received numerous awards for her work, including Asia’s most prestigious prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, in 2003. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Teaching Award by Columbia University.

By Aidan White | Ethical Journalism Network

The relationship between journalists and their sources is complex and full of ethical pitfalls. In the provocative opening to her splendid 1983 book onthe subject, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm targets deceptive journalism:

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind ofconfidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

But not all journalists are confidence tricksters. Some journalists are flawed and occasionally incompetent, but most strive for journalism rooted intransparency, fair-dealing and humanity. Our work is morally defensible, but few will deny that if the measure of good journalism is how we treatsources, then we are not always up to the mark.

Establishing the Ground Rules

Journalists need to be as transparent as possible in their relations with sources. The news media have great power, and people can be flattered whenthey are approached by reporters without fully understanding the risks to themselves and to others when they come into the public eye. This isparticularly true of people affected by humanitarian disasters, war or other traumatic events.

Journalists have to assess the vulnerability of sources as well as their value as providers of information. They must explain the process of theirjournalism and why they are covering the story. They should not, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, use subterfuge.

Of paramount importance is the need for journalists to reassure sources that their identity will be protected. But often this is easier said than done.

Protection of sources is well recognized in international law as a key principle underpinning press freedom. It has been specifically recognized by theUnited Nations and the Council of Europe. In the U.S. there is no federal shield law. State shield laws vary in scope, but the best of them uphold theright of reporters to resist demands to reveal their source.

Over the years there have been hundreds of cases when courts and public authorities order journalists to hand over material or information that willreveal a source of information. In most cases, the ethical reporter will instinctively demur.

A good example is Jonathan Randal of The Washington Post who famously refused to answer a subpoena in 2002 ordering him to appear before theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was prosecuting war crimes. Randal, who had covered the war, fought the subpoenawith the backing of his paper and won. This action, which was supported by press freedom groups around the world, established some limited legalprotection for war correspondents against being forced to give testimony.

Cases like this highlight why journalists and news media need to establish guidelines and internal rules that help protect their sources. Reporters maybenefit from a clause in their contracts or their agreements that clearly state their duties and obligations in this area. NPR has a clause in its guidelinesthat spells it out:

“NPR journalists must not turn over any notes, audio or working materials from their stories or productions, nor provide information they haveobserved in the course of their production activities to government officials or parties involved in or considering litigation.”

Getting Too Close to the Source

Sometimes journalists make the mistake of getting too close to their source. They create cozy, ambiguous relations that undermine the ethical base oftheir work. Powerful sources have their own agendas, and when reporters accept what they say without question, they cross an ethical line. They alsorun the risk of being used as convenient vessels for the leaking of information. 

Source Review of Content

Sean Penn’s interview with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Mexican narcotics gangster, on the run and accused of murder, was a world exclusive,but some journalists questioned why Rolling Stone allowed Guzmán to approve what would ultimately be published.

Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told The New York Times he was concerned by the decision to giveGuzmán access to the article. But ultimately, he said, “scoring an exclusive interview with a wanted criminal is legitimate journalism no matter who thereporter is.”

An interview with one of the world’s most wanted men is certainly a scoop, but can it ever justify abandoning editorial control over a journalist’s work?

The issue of who controls the story — the source or the reporter — comes up whenever copy approval is demanded by high profile and powerfulfigures.

Anonymous Sources

Anonymity is a right that should be enjoyed by those who need it: people who may lose their job for whistleblowing or others at risk from exposure. It isnot a privilege to be enjoyed by people who are self-seeking and who directly benefit from anonymity.

Social Media and User-Generated Content

In today’s digital environment, rumor and speculation circulate freely, and knowing what is real and how to verify news and information is essential.Digital age sourcing is a major challenge, particularly in breaking coverage where rumor and falsehood can add to tension and uncertainty surroundingtraumatic events.

But help is at hand. Craig Silverman, editor of Regret the Error at the Poynter Institute, has collaborated with the European Journalism Centre toproduce the useful “Verification Handbook” (verificationhandbook.com).

And in all of this, there is a final but essential question. When using other people’s words, images or content, make sure to give credit where it is due.

The failure to assign the ownership and origin of the information we use is a common failing of students in the age of copy-and-paste, but it’sunforgiveable for journalists to plagiarize the work of others. Failing to do so is not just a moral question, it can also lead to legal problems.

 

Aidan White is director of the Ethical Journalism Network. Many of the questions and tips set out here were compiled by him and his fellow panelists atlast year’s IRE Conference in Philadelphia: David Boardman, Dean, School of Media and Communication, Temple University; Margaret Sullivan,Public Editor, The New York Times; and Wendy Ruderman, Reporter, Philadelphia Daily News.

By Miranda S. Spivack

KEVIN HEMSTOCK, THE LONGTIME editor of the Kent County News, took his paper’s watchdog role literally. From his office in downtown Chestertown, Maryland, he had a sweeping view of High Street, the main thoroughfare. One February day in 2010, he looked out his window, saw the three council members from the nearby town of Millington entering a lawyer’s office, and immediately sensed trouble. Why, he wondered, was the entire Millington Town Council arriving for what looked like a closed-door meeting in the middle of the day? Hemstock, who long ago had memorized the Maryland Open Meetings Act and regularly scanned the council’s schedule, knew the meeting had not been announced in advance and believed that it violated Maryland law.

Hemstock’s office sat only a few blocks from the Chester River, site of the annual reenactment of the 1774 Chestertown Tea Party, when local residents followed Boston’s lead and dumped tea into the river to press for free speech and protest taxation without representation. Hemstock is a history buff, proud to carry on the more than 300-year-old community’s tradition of standing up to government. So he didn’t hesitate to assign a story about the council gathering and had a reporter file a complaint on the newspaper’s behalf with the Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board. A year later, prodded by the complaint and the newspaper’s coverage, the compliance board ruled against Millington for convening in secret without prior notice to discuss what turned out to be leaky water pipes.

In Hemstock’s view, even though the plumbing issue hardly rose to the level of scandal, the compliance board’s ruling, and others sought by the weekly paper, put the community on notice: The Kent County News was watching. The paper not only covered the county fair and printed school-lunch menus, but also monitored the officials who hold the county’s purse strings and make decisions that can have major influence on people’s lives.

But what happens when the paper stops paying close attention? Kent County residents are finding out. More than three years ago, while the erstwhile watchdogs were otherwise occupied, Apex Clean Energy, an out-of-state company, moved in, quietly planning to build a massive wind farm with turbines as tall as the Washington Monument.

“Nobody knew anything about this,” says William Graham, who in March 2015 founded Keep Kent Scenic, an anti-turbine group that eventually, without much help from the local government and media, pieced the puzzle together. Were it not for the efforts of Graham and a handful of other activists—all volunteers learning on the job—residents might not have known about the Apex project until it was a done deal. The activists also discovered that, despite a county law that seemed to ensure that wind turbines could be no taller than 120 feet, the state could, if it wanted to, approve the project and simply override the local height limit.

After first agreeing to an interview with CJR, Apex officials canceled and declined to provide details of the company’s plans, leases, and timetable. Kevin Chandler, a company spokesperson, emailed a statement: “We always strive to provide accurate, up to date, digestible information to local stakeholders.”

ESTABLISHED IN 1793 in a community that has grown to include massive dairy farms, rolling fields of corn and soybeans, and watermen fishing for crabs—as well as elegant second homes for urbanites—the Kent County News has a long history as a community watchdog. During Hemstock’s 12 years as editor, he and his staff filed about a dozen complaints with the state compliance board alleging open meetings violations and wrote many stories about failures to adhere to Maryland’s open-government laws—far more than any nearby competitor, state records and newspaper archives show. “They hated us at the Open Meetings Compliance Board,” Hemstock says with a chuckle.

Many residents read the paper closely and took it seriously, according to several elected officials and community members. Hemstock left in 2012 after refusing to lay off staffers for a second time in three years. Instead, he says, “I laid myself off.”

For Kent County residents, the newspaper’s constant vigilance had paid off time and again, often affecting officials’ behavior and methods of governing. While larger media organizations stood by, the paper filed a complaint in 2012 protesting secret meetings held by the University of Maryland’s trustees to vote to join the Big Ten athletic conference—a multimillion-dollar move by the publicly funded university. The open-meetings board criticized the trustees, who promised to be more accountable to the public. Closer to home, the paper broke stories and filed complaints about the Kent County library board’s failure to keep accurate meeting minutes, to address one member’s chronic absenteeism, and to hold public sessions, all while it ran up a deficit of about $200,000. The seven board members were replaced.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the paper and several others also owned by Whitney Communications, which operated Chesapeake Publishing Corp., kept regular tabs on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as it grew into a bedroom community for Annapolis; Baltimore; Wilmington and Newark, Delaware; and Washington, DC. In December 1983, as officials were signing a multi-state agreement to protect the Chesapeake Bay, Chesapeake Publishing produced a special section about the fragile future of the bay that helped spark a regional conversation about its condition. “We did some great journalism then,” says Chuck Lyons, president of the company during the Whitney era.

For several decades, the Kent County News and other papers in the chain closely tracked issues affecting the region. They monitored a plan to develop fragile waterfront property on the Eastern Shore, exposed illegal closed-door meetings of the state authority that monitors the finances of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and chronicled an attempt by Chestertown to annex a large swath of land for development that it could not legally acquire.

And now? Like so many papers around the country, the Kent County Newsand its sister papers, including the daily Easton Star-Democrat, are part of a larger chain. In 2007, Whitney Communications sold its Eastern Shore newspapers to American Consolidated Media, which in 2014 sold them to Adams Publishing Group. Already small staffs were cut—theKent County News now has four reporters and one editor, down from a staff of seven in 2009. Its journalists are expected, like so many others, to do more with less, filing short daily stories for the online edition while also meeting their weekly print deadlines. They’re rarely able to carve out time for in-depth investigations.

Since March 2012, when Hemstock was replaced by Daniel Divilio as editor, the paper has run few deeply reported accountability stories. Since early 2014, it has filed no complaints about closed government meetings, according to online newspaper archives and state records. Kent County residents and public officials say that reporters don’t make beat rounds or chat up community officials as often as they did in the past.

“We are a small paper with a small staff,” says Divilio, who has to cover many night meetings himself to ensure that the half-dozen or so communities and government agencies in the newspaper’s coverage area get a mention. Hemstock, who now runs an antiques and variety store in Millington and is an elected member of the town council, says the newspaper’s challenges spell trouble for places like Kent County. Local governments, he says, “think they can run amok.”

Other potential watchdogs are also absent. The Baltimore Sun, now part of the Tribune Publishing Company, closed its Eastern Shore bureau several years ago. The Washington Post, never particularly attentive to the Eastern Shore, is emphasizing national and international news under new owner Jeff Bezos.

Such information gaps are increasingly the rule, not the exception. As news organizations shrink and shrink some more, a community’s problems may go unreported, sometimes festering into crises. As regional papers suffer, state and local muck gets raked less and less. When not tracked closely, issues such as the work of Michigan’s proliferating emergency managers can devolve into catastrophes like thelead-tainted water poisoning children in Flint.

Surveys conducted in 2009, 2011, and 2013 by the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), the Media Law Resource Center, and in 2015, aided by Investigative Reporters and Editors concluded that the downsizing and decline of local media play a key role in enabling state and local government secrecy. The surveys found that there are fewer news organizations holding state and local institutions accountable and that in many parts of the country, media watchdogs that do exist have grown quieter. “The traditional media, particularly newspapers, have always led the open-government charges if the school board is closing a meeting illegally or the city is denying records or a judge is kicking a reporter out,” says Jeffrey Hunt, a prominent media lawyer in Utah. “I just see the media leaving the field in terms of fighting these battles.”

As media scrutiny has waned, some governments have taken notice and, says Hunt, “become more aggressive in terms of secrecy and withholding information from the public.” Document retrievals take longer and requestors must pay more. Legislatures and courts are limiting access to text messages, police videos, complaints against corporations, gun permits, even the names of licensed pet owners. After 9/11, many states decided that just about any piece of information that might be linked to public safety could be exempted from disclosure. While such concerns can be valid, withholding information about, say, the condition of essential infrastructure like bridges, railroads, and highways can make it tougher for the media and the public to evaluate whether government is properly enforcing its regulations and laws and keeping residents safe.

The 2013 National Freedom of Information Coalition survey contained some other troubling data: a perception by the lawyers and journalists surveyed that “there is a greater inclination among government officials for gaming the system than complying with existing disclosure and accountability laws.” Last year’s survey echoed that finding.

FOR JOURNALISTS AND NON-JOURNALISTS ALIKE, it takes some digging to learn details about a business proposal, a neighbor’s construction plan, or an official’s calendar or meeting logs. To find out who has recently met with Kent County’s planning commission, for instance, requires going in person to the county government building in downtown Chestertown and requesting and reading visitors’ logs, which aren’t always complete and don’t often reveal details of what was discussed.

With about 20,000 residents, Kent County is the kind of place where people often bump into one another at the weekly farmers’ market in Chestertown or at one of many local music, art, and theater events. But when there’s a vacuum in news coverage and governments aren’t particularly communicative, the local grapevine can fail. Meetings happen, officials make decisions, and the public can find itself in the dark.

Kennedyville, where the wind turbines were slated to be built, is about eight miles north of Chestertown. Fields of soy, corn, and other grain crops flow like an ocean of green across miles and miles of undeveloped property. Like much of Kent County’s 414 square miles, Kennedyville is made up of small settlements with a few houses backed by hundreds of acres of farmland dotted with gray barns. “There is a sense of place around here,” says Joe Hickman, a farm manager, planning commissioner, and environmental activist who grew up in the county. “It’s a special place to farm owners.”

In 2006, after two years of debate among county officials and residents, the three-person county commission approved a master plan that preserved agricultural land. In 2011, following the recommendations of a county renewable-energy task force, the commissioners approved the 120-foot height limit for wind turbines as a way to deter commercial wind farms. “There does not appear to be sufficient wind in this area to justify utility scale wind farms,” the task force found, “and for this and other reasons, the task force determined that utility scale wind energy is neither a feasible nor desirable use for Kent County.”

The Kent County News didn’t publish its first story about Apex’s wind-energy plans until March 2014—nearly two years after its representatives first began traversing the county, appearing on farmers’ doorsteps, and offering leases that by some estimates were worth about $30,000 a year in exchange for the opportunity to install 35 to 50 wind turbines, and possibly more, each about 500 feet tall. The News’ single-source story, which quoted Tyson Utt, a director of development at Apex, was written by editor Daniel Divilio, who says that it came about after Apex officials contacted the paper seeking publicity.

Divilio’s article described a “new type of farm.” Although it said that wind-turbine heights “could be 500 feet tall,” it didn’t mention that local law forbids turbines taller than 120 feet. Nor did it note that the county’s own renewable energy task force had found in 2010 that the county wasn’t a very windy place.

Most critically, it failed to report that the county’s carefully hashed-out, seemingly airtight zoning laws had left a hidden, gaping loophole. As Apex knew, the local law banning turbines taller than 120 feet would be moot if the company lined up enough leases to generate a steady 70 megawatts of power. That was the tipping point that would allow the company to bypass local control and go to the state regulator, the Maryland Public Utilities Commission, which was under pressure from then-governor (and sometime presidential candidate) Martin O’Malley to approve clean-energy projects. (O’Malley’s Republican successor, Larry Hogan, hasn’t been as vocal about clean energy but recently signed a bill approving a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.) The county government, emails show, had even agreed to help Apex keep its plans quiet, at one point offering to allow the company to brief county officials at a closed-door meeting—a meeting that Apex eventually cancelled.

Even though it was missing key details, Graham recalls reading Divilio’s article “with horror. Why would anyone want to do that here?”

Still, there was little follow-up. The Kent County News didn’t publish another piece about Apex until a year later, and there was no media coverage elsewhere, according to online archives and Kent County residents. What types of activities went unreported? Mostly public meetings, of the sort that Hemstock was so persnickety about.

In May 2014, for instance, at a regularly scheduled gathering of the planning commission, two county planning officials briefly discussed the wind farm, according to meeting minutes. Amy Moredock, the county’s top planning official, says this exchange marked the first public airing of the turbine issue by anyone in government. The minutes offer little detail, but they do mention Apex’s decision to forgo a hearing with the planning commission and instead “explore another avenue to get their project up and running.”

That other avenue wasn’t described, but it could have been the basis of an important news story if anyone in county government or local media had tuned in. Instead, an entire additional year passed before Graham and Keep Kent Scenic came to understand that Apex was trying to bypass local control.

On May 7, 2014, six days after the first public discussion of Apex’s proposal at the county planning commission that no news organizations covered, the county’s Economic Development Advisory Board heard Apex officials outline the scope of the project, according to meeting minutes. Again, there was no news coverage. County records show that no agenda was published in advance (nor is one required by law in Maryland) and no community members dropped by to hear the presentation. The advisory board’s meeting minutes, which, unlike those of the county commissioners, were not posted on the county website, show no suggestion of any talk of local ordinances that ban wind turbines taller than 120 feet. They also mention nothing about Apex’s intention to bypass county officials entirely and seek approval from the state.

“Everywhere the wind turbine companies go, they really follow the same procedure,” says Paul Crowe, who helped lead a successful fight against a wind farm in North East, Pennsylvania. “They go into an area, very often a small town, and work very, very closely with individual residents to sign up for turbines, promising they will make lots of money. They try to get things moving before anyone really knows what is happening. They expect to run into a combination of no knowledge, lack of opposition, local officials uninformed.”

Crowe’s efforts have turned him into not just an activist but a journalist. As the Erie Times-News, the local paper of record, has endured cutbacks, Crowe has started his own fledgling news site, North East PA Online, which has been prodding local officials to take steps like posting agendas ahead of their meetings.

In Chestertown, as Bill Graham of Keep Kent Scenic investigated Apex’s efforts to secure permission for its wind farm, he, too, evolved into a quasi-professional reporter. A former nuclear engineer and steady reader of the Kent County News, The Baltimore Sun, and more recentlyThe Chestertown Spy, a two-person website started by a former nonprofit executive in 2009, Graham initially had no idea where to start. He wasn’t learning much from the local government and had not been aware of the recent public discussions at the two county committees. He says the planning commission and the county commissioner’s office told him there was nothing to announce or discuss since there was no application from the company. It wasn’t until 2015 that he and another resident learned they could find publicly available land records—to see who was signing leases—at the red-brick county courthouse in Chestertown.

Scanning the internet, Graham connected with Tammy Truitt, a chicken farmer in nearby Somerset County who had also fought plans for a wind farm and who told him there might be a filing with the Federal Aviation Administration about Apex’s proposed wind farm. Graham found that document, which gave a better sense of the scope and specifics of the Apex project, including a tentative map that showed where the company wanted to place the wind turbines. He also learned that the path of the proposed turbines would have to be assessed by the US Fish and Wildlife Administration to see if it would result in an excessive number of bird kills. The Eastern Shore is a major route on the north-south flyway for migratory birds.

In late February 2015, Apex representatives hosted an invitation-only dinner at a vacant hardware store in Galena, a small farming community northeast of Chestertown, gathering about 35 local landowners to listen to the company’s pitch about leases and turbines, according to people who attended. It was catered by Molly’s, a local restaurant, and featured wine from nearby Crow Farms, owned by former County Commissioner Roy Crow and his wife, Judy, who had been approached by Apex as possible turbine hosts.

County Commissioner Billy Short, whose family has lived in the county for three generations, says that at the dinner he pressed Apex officials to explain how they were going to win approval of their project given that it contravened the county’s master plan. “They hemmed and hawed and said, ‘We will talk about that later,’ ” says Short, whose day job is running a window-treatment business. He kept pressing. Finally, he says, “they admitted that once they got to a 70-megawatt system, they would bypass us and go straight to the state public service commission.” That did it for Short. “My takeaway was that our authority and zoning regs did not mean anything to them,” he says. But he didn’t make his misgivings known to the larger community at that time.

A day or so after the Apex dinner, Graham, who hadn’t been invited but who learned of it at the last minute and dropped in after it started, aired his concerns in a letter to The Chestertown Spy. He wrote about the height of the proposed turbines, the risk to birds on the migratory flyway, potential noise, and the disruption of the county’s scenic landscape. He says he had sent the letter two weeks earlier to the Kent County News but was told it couldn’t be published because it exceeded the customary length.

Janet Lewis, an artist and organic farmer, read Graham’s letter in The Chestertown Spy and got in touch with him. Together the two began to delve more deeply into the procedures for wind-farm approvals and decided to form Keep Kent Scenic, which quickly won support from dozens of residents who volunteered to help. “I have never done anything like this before,” says Lewis, who has since become an expert at researching land records and scouring other documents the group obtained through public information requests. She, Graham, and other members of Keep Kent Scenic finally learned about the Maryland Public Service Commission’s power to override local regulations by reading documents on the commission’s website and speaking with people like Truitt in other communities that already were fighting wind farms.

Graham and Lewis realized time was not on their side. They decided that they needed to publicize their findings and organized a community meeting at the Kent County Public Library on March 21, 2015. The Kent County News advanced it in a brief story, then afterward reported on the proceedings and the “standing-room-only” crowd, which Graham estimated at 200 people. Although the story did not include a detailed explanation of the county’s potential loss of veto power, it did allude to the commissioners’ desire to “ensure local authority over the approval” and their concerns “that Apex may be trying to work around the county’s zoning and planning process.”

As opposition grew, it generated more stories, in both the News and The Chestertown Spy. Local elected officials began voicing disapproval. With negative publicity building, Apex officials offered the newspaper an email Q&A, which was conducted by Divilio and published on April 2, 2015. Answers from Apex made it sound as if the state were forcing it to bypass local regulations.

Around the same time, Steve Hershey, a Republican state senator, tried to get a bill through the state legislature to keep veto power in the county. The bill died in committee, but the debate over the measure drew news coverage in the Kent County News and the Easton Star-Democrat.

“This fight,” observes Wayne Gilchrest, a former congressman and a moderate Republican, “has brought together some of the most liberal members of the community who would vote for Obama for a third term and the more conservative in the county, who still think Obama was born in Kenya.”

In June 2015, Keep Kent Scenic organized a second standing-room-only meeting, this one in the Kennedyville firehouse. Several speakers, including Truitt and a lawyer from the state Public Service Commission, explained the approval process in detail. Lewis and Graham spent much of the time signing up supporters. As county officials made their opposition plain, they drew loud applause.

Still, the Kent County News reported that the community was likely to be outflanked by Apex, noting that most of the hearings would be held in Baltimore, 50 miles away, and that the activists might need to hire a lawyer. “Opponents of wind turbines in Kent County are in for a protracted battle that will be expensive and difficult to win,” reporter Trish McGee wrote.

The turbine opponents kept working through last summer and fall to publicize their views, posting large signs around the county and gathering signatures every Saturday at the Chestertown farmers’ market. They also spoke with state legislators about passing a bill that would allow the community to retain control of alternative-energy projects.

Then, toward the end of the year, the winds suddenly shifted. In December, Apex announced that it was putting the turbines on hold and had instead filed an application with the Maryland Public Service Commission to build a 330-acre, 60-megawatt solar facility. Seeming to learn from the work of the anti-turbine activists, the Kent County News’ coverage pointed out that, as with the wind project, Apex’s solar plans were not required to comply with county code. Written by Divilio, the article went on to quote Graham, who had met with Apex officials about the new proposal and declared himself “just delighted.”

But Graham says he has to continue to keep a close watch, citing unresolved issues like the possibility that Apex could sell the already-signed leases for wind turbines to another developer “who isn’t weary of fighting us.” He was also concerned, at the time of the company’s December announcement, that Apex might disregard the county’s solar regulations. “We’re not popping Champagne corks,” he told Divilio.

Although Graham plans to stay involved, he has handed over the reins of Keep Kent Scenic to Lewis, the artist and organic farmer who co-founded the group. “I want my life back,” he says.

Lewis and others in the community are closely watching the solar project. The Kent County commissioners recently intervened at the Maryland Public Service Commission to oppose a recent request by Apex to plant more solar panels than county law allows, exactly the kind of move Graham feared back in December. This time, however, the county government has joined the fight much earlier, well-schooled about Apex’s penchant for trying to bypass local authority. For that, it has a group of community activists, not a newspaper, to thank.

Miranda S. Spivack is a freelance writer specializing in stories about government accountability and a former reporter and editor at The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @mirandareporter. This story was supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Marquette University’s O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism.

Starting today, IRE will begin accepting applications for candidates for the IRE Board of Directors. This year seven of the board’s 13 seats are up for election.

The initial filing period for candidates is April 18 - May 20. All candidates filing by this time will appear on the initial ballot when voting begins on May 31.

Electronic online voting will be open both before and during the IRE Conference this summer. Those coming to the conference will have a chance to hear from the candidates, and we encourage all those attending the conference to wait to vote until after hearing the candidates speak. Information about each candidate will also be posted online.

As in the past, candidates may join the election after the initial filing period. However, voting will have already begun, which could diminish a late-filing candidate's chances of being elected.

You'll also be voting for two members of IRE's Contest Committee, which judges the IRE Awards. Those interested in judging will apply using the same procedure as IRE Board candidates, and will be selected on the same ballot. Contest Committee candidates' information will also be available on the IRE website, but they will not make speeches at the conference.

Learn more about the 2016 election and read our voting Q&A.

By Susannah Nesmith, CJR

It’s been eight months since the Tampa Bay Times rolled out an investigation into five elementary schools in Florida’s Pinellas County that had become “Failure Factories”—almost exclusively black, with some of the worst test scores in the state, chronic violence, and crippling staff turn-over—and the impact just keeps on coming.

The county school district has reformed discipline practices to try to address the disparity in how black and white children are treated, and hired a “turnaround leader” who has a staff of eight and a charge to improve the schools. The district added 100 classroom aides, and community volunteer hours in the schools have more than doubled. The state legislature found $400,000 for a special reading program.

Then, just last week, the school district announced pay increases of up to $25,000 for teachers at the schools, in an effort to attract and retain better teachers. The school day at the five schools will be extended for an hour to give students more time devoted to learning to read, but also more time at recess and in art and music class. A minority achievement officer will be hired to look at systemic issues across the district.

That’s not all: Also last week, the US Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into the district, the Times reported. Top department officials had first visited the district after reading the originalTimes series, which made clear that these aren’t just any struggling schools—they’re schools where student performance plummeted beginning in 2007, when the district abandoned an integration plan that had been in place for decades and the schools became resegregated.

The federal probe follows a state review launched last fall, and at the district level, the first reforms were put in motion even before the Times series was published. But lately, just tracking the fallout, as the paper has been doing on the series landing page, has become almost a full-time beat. “In February it seemed to start snowballing,” says Michael LaForgia, one of the reporters on the project.

The impact is noteworthy, but it’s not surprising. As I wrote in August, the series was deep, thorough, and authoritative. It didn’t hesitate to assign responsibility to local officials, and it carefully showed that many other schools serving poor or minority students around the state were doing a much better job of educating those kids. Some of the solutions Pinellas officials are trying are taken from efforts at other school districts that the series highlighted.

The series has already won a slew of awards. The response from readers has been impressive, too, thanks in part to the smart interactive “prologue” designed by data reporter Nathaniel Lash.

“A good project put out by the Times used to get between 75,000 and 100,000 page views,” LaForgia says. “As of this month, ‘Failure Factories’ was up to about 600,000 views from more than 260,000 unique visitors. Our prologue element alone drew more than 260,000 views.”

Despite the list of reforms, the response of school officials has been mixed, with some board members and others complaining that the newspaper is focused on the past. “We don’t care if they admit [mistakes] or not, as long as they help these children,” says reporter Lisa Gartner.

But the response from the broader community has been overwhelmingly positive, say Times journalists—though they do get the “occasional racist phone message,” reporter Cara Fitzpatrick told me.  

Some hater also decided it would be a good idea to post the home address of Fitzpatrick and LaForgia, who are married. “And my driving record,” Fitzpatrick says. “That was fun.”

Then there was the mysterious subscription to Ebony magazine, which started showing up in the mail. “We have two kids,” LaForgia says. “It’s kind of hard to miss the message that ‘we know where you live.’ ” (On the other hand, Fitzpatrick says, she’s enjoyed reading it: “It’s a great magazine.”)

The reporters have no intention of backing down because of a few random racists. They recently met with their editors and gave them “a year’s worth of stories that we want to follow up on,” LaForgia says.

One angle to follow: whether there will be any serious effort to desegregate the schools. In March, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund announced it intends to revive the 50-year-old lawsuit that originally desegregated Pinellas schools.

Whatever happens on that front, the series is a great example of how a newspaper can make a concrete difference in a complex issue: Dive deeply into the data and report the hell out of what it shows.

Several members of Investigative Reporters and Editors were among journalists recognized in the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes:

The Associated Press won the Public Service Pulitzer for “Seafood from Slaves,” a story that freed 2,000 slaves. 

The staff of the Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the San Bernardino shootings.

Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, along with reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, won the Investigative Reporting prize for reporting on violence and neglect in Florida’s mental hospitals.

T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project won the award for Explanatory Reporting for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”

Michael LaForgia, along with colleagues from the Tampa Bay Times, won the award for Local Reporting for “Failure Factories.” 

The staff of The Washington Post won the National Reporting Pulitzer for creating a national database tracking police shootings.

 

See the complete list of winners and finalists here. Think we missed someone? Email Sarah Hutchins at sarah@ire.org.

By Brant Houston

The ongoing and spectacular investigation “Panama Papers” represents the culmination of a significant shift in the way journalism is now practiced.

The project, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and nearly 400 colleagues from 107 outlets, also represents the result of 40 years of
work done by groups of investigative reporters to bring the profession into the 21st Century.

The elements of the new journalism include:

• Collaboration, both on small and large scales;
• Increased sophistication in data analysis and ability to handle large datasets;
• The rise of nonprofit journalism allowing journalists to focus on in-depth investigations;
• The advent of the Internet, which has led to easier communication and collaboration;
• Rapid globalization spurred by the communications and information revolutions;
• The end of the Cold War and increased global mobility;
• The global spread of investigative journalism, spurred by professional groups and conferences, commercial media, international aid programs, and universities.

“The Panama Papers showcases not so much technological power but the power of the global investigative reporting movement,” says Sheila Coronel, co-founder and former executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and now dean of academic affairs at the Columbia Journalism School.

Conferences, workshops, and collaborations, Coronel noted, have “fostered camaraderie and trust among investigative reporters in different parts of the world. The bonds of professional solidarity that have been formed made the Panama Papers possible."

The shift actually began in the mid-1970s with creation of the U.S.-based Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), now a 5,000 member association, and the founding of the original Center for Investigative Reporting. Both were based on the idea of collaboration, whether among reporters or organizations.