If you fill out the "Forgot Password" form but don't get an email to reset your password within 5-10 minutes, please email logistics@ire.org for assistance.
By Darian Muka
Panelists David Bornstein, Greg Borowski, Tina Rosenberg and Claudia Rowe spoke about the power of solution journalism during a panel at the 2015 IRE Conference. Dubbed “solution journalism,” positive deviants frame an issue around improvements or best practices.
“The idea is that you’re going to create a lot of awareness and outrage around a topic, but in fact the response to the problem, how people are trying to respond to that problem and the kind of results they're getting is often the stuff that goes under-reported,” said David Bornstein, co-author of the Fixes column in the New York Times and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network.
Greg Borowski, assistant managing editor of projects and investigations at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, spoke about “Deadly Delays,” a series dealing with cases where newborn blood work was not being screened in an acceptable time frame. A look at a a case of one newborn nearly dying in Wisconsin quickly expanded into a look at hospitals across the country.
Highlighting Iowa, a state with a nearly perfect rate of on-time screenings despite issues such as transportation through snowstorms, showed that other states could fix the problem. This spurred dramatic improvements in the worst preforming hospitals.
Tina Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-author of the Fixes column, stressed that solution journalism can also be the framework for a single story. When most of the traditional stories had already been told, she used solution journalism to tell a story about big pharmaceutical companies’ pressure to not use generic brands during the AIDS epidemic. She looked at Brazil, a country combating that pressure and successfully treating AIDS with generic medication. The result was a complete picture. Her article proved a country could use generic drugs and succeed.
Winner of the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, Claudia Rowe said solution journalism made her readers engage in her series. The Seattle Times’ Education Lab is a yearlong look at how schools are improving in Seattle. Rowe found schools outside the norm that had improved test scores drastically and told their stories.
“There have been a number of responses to this approach in general, because we do these stories pretty much monthly, that have surprised me in terms of impact,” Rowe said. “Not just the sort of traditional kind of impact with reader outrage in a lot of emails, but actual action that I am seeing happen in the legislature and state level, in response to the things that we’re showing in these stories.”
Overall, the panel stressed the need to report what is working and highlight solutions to the issues. It is not necessary to ignore things that are working just to stay objective as a reporter; in fact, not reporting solutions is missing a vital piece of the story. Using the positive deviants can show a path to change, engage the reader and provide a complete look at the issue.
Darian Muka is a recent Temple University graduate hoping to work in the magazine or publishing industry. She writes for the art blog Wallspin and has written for publications such as Familius, Philadelphia Neighborhoods and Fourteenth Street Magazine.
By Brittany Collins
Structuring an investigative news story is important. Not only does it help prevent confusion for viewers, but it also allows the reporter to get creative when putting together various elements of the story.
Solly Granatstein from The Weather Channel, Brendan Keefe from WXIA-Atlanta, Chris Vanderveen from KUSA/9News Denver, and Matt Goldberg from NBC 4 Los Angeles discussed story structuring tips during a session at the IRE Conference in Philadelphia.
Here are some of their top tips:
Find a good character. Sometimes it’s hard to identify your main character until after you’ve gone through your production. However, it doesn’t hurt to have an idea about the central character from the start. The main character will help the story flow and strengthen the narrative, especially if he or she can add emotion to the story.
Establish the story and stay focused. Decide early on your approach to the story. This will make the writing easier. When you’re logging, know what you need in order for the story to stay on target. Don’t allow your mind to wander to other ideas; this could make the final product confusing.
Build a moment. Build in the “applause line.” When you do this, it generates suspense. Writing around the character’s emotion engages the audience. Then, once the character has a “moment,” let that breathe. If a moment in your story doesn’t work, it could be because of bad video/audio, a lack of context or poor editing.
Less can be more. Our common enemy is information overload. Facts should work to enhance your theme. Sometimes too many details can hurt your story. A good story comes from writing around a character. After that, add details such as statistics and numbers in logical spots.
Write to the video. Visualize the story before you shoot it. Never write a single line until you know what you’re showing. It’s important for the audience to see exactly what you’re talking about. Use your standup to make the story more engaging. Get creative and think outside the box.
Brittany Collins is a senior broadcast journalism student at Florida A&M University. She has won an SPJ Mark of Excellence award for best non-fiction magazine article and an SEJC award for best TV hard news reporter.
By Pietro Lombardi
The number of enterprise stories covering climate change, illegal resource exploitation, food and water security and other environmental threats has increased in recent years. Deborah Nelson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and freelance investigative reporter for Reuters; Robert S. Eshelman, Environment Editor at VICE News; Andrew Revkin, Pace University, and Josh Meyer, Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, discussed the major challenges journalists face covering these issues.
These are the main points that emerged during the panel at the Investigative Reporters and Editors annual conference in Philadelphia.
Pietro Lombardi is a graduate fellow at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He is an Italian journalist, Fulbright grantee and graduate student in the journalism and public affairs program, with a concentration in the investigative track, at American University.
By Amber Liu
Trying to excel at covering diverse communities might include new techniques or resources, such as collaboratively developing a diverse source list and rethinking how to best use interpreters.
Sherry Yu of Temple University, Michael Matza of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Sabrina Vourvoulias of AL DÍA News suggested these techniques and more at an IRE session about reporting on diverse communities.
Yu explained the importance of cultural literacy and said language fluency affects how much reporters can cover other communities. She suggested journalists make use of professional networks across ethnic boundaries, such as Latino Print Network, New America Media and ASNE.
Yu also said journalism schools should play an important role in reporting on diverse communities by:
Matza said reporting could also benefit from language barriers. “Language barriers force me to ask simple, single-clause questions, and re-ask them even more simply,” he said.
He shared tips on the best ways to work with interpreters and better understand unfamiliar countries:
Vourvoulias suggested:
Ke (Amber) Liu is pursuing her master’s degree in Journalism and Public Affairs at American University with interests in both investigative and broadcast tracks. She also worked as a graduate researcher at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit newsroom at American University, and as an investigative intern at The Washington Post.
By Lenore T. Adkins
Some of the most important stories about the environment lurk beyond the city limits, but reporters often overlook those narratives because they aren’t in urban settings, said a group of panelists who investigate the environment.
"Agriculture is vastly under-covered," said Joseph Davis, editor of the WatchDog newsletter for the Society of Environmental Journalists.
The society hosted a panel at the 2015 IRE Conference and highlighted four areas of coverage for reporters to focus on:
Through his reporting, McClure, who runs the nonprofit newsroom InvestigateWest, produced a series of stories that found poor Native Americans primarily eat fish from polluted waterways in the Pacific Northwest. In writing stories like this, don’t concentrate on averages, but focus on who is eating the fish, McClure said.
"(It’s) those poor people fishing in the local waterways that are the story to me," he said.
Davis said dam safety is a critical issue, pointing to dams that collapsed in Texas in recent weeks from heavy flooding. He said dams typically fail due to bad engineering, inadequate maintenance, neglect and rainstorms.
Despite limited government data on dam safety, Davis highlighted tools journalists could use to bolster their reporting, including dam and related databases at www.sej.org/dams
"If we’re trying to save lives, it might be better people know about unsafe dams and where to go when the alarm sounds," Davis said.
With pipeline coverage, it’s important to know the kinds of pipelines running through your community, what they carry and whether they are classified as hazardous, said panelist Naveena Sadasivam, an environmental reporter at InsideClimate News.
Keep in mind how often pipelines are inspected, who inspects them (the company who owns them or a regulatory agency), whether companies are directed to send data to state or federal regulators and whether state and federal regulators treat them equally, she said.
There are 2.5 million miles of gas and liquid pipelines, so there’s a pipeline safety story near you, she said.
"When they’re operating and they’re operating safely, no one realizes that there are pipelines on the ground — you know, out of sight, out of mind," said Sadasivam, who has covered her share of pipeline explosions and breaks. "But when there is an incident, it can be catastrophic."
By Albert Hong
"For me, doing this panel is a real treat because it means, for once, I get to hang out with the cool kids,” Ken Armstrong, staff writer at The Marshall Project, said as he kicked off an IRE Conference session on unconventional storytelling methods for investigations.
Those “cool kids” consisted of Amy Julia Harris, an investigative journalist at The Center for Investigative Reporting; Tori Marlan, an independent journalist; and Gabriel Dance, managing editor of The Marshall Project.
Before moving to The Marshall Project, Armstrong worked at The Seattle Times, where he was part of a team covering the devastating Oso landslide. As part of the project, readers could scroll or swipe through an interactive graphic on their mobile phones to see the shifting landscape of the area leading up to the disaster.
Julia Harris’ experience covering the dilapidated public housing system in Richmond, California, had her working with three poets to create a spoken word piece on the conditions and struggles of the citizens living there. She discovered “different ways of making people care” about this issue while also making sure to work closely with the poets so that facts were never compromised.
Marlan, however, struggled with having not enough facts during her investigation into an Ethiopian orphan’s trek to America. This prompted her to consider other options of telling the story, which led to the creation of an e-comic with help of artist Josh Neufeld. Rather than bogging down the visual story with too many details, Marlan focused on maintaining journalistic accuracy with things like researching the TV shows that were on at the time in South Africa. Animated panels and ambient sound in the comic made the story much more personal, Marlan said.
For Gabriel Dance, innovative and interactive storytelling was something he picked up during his time at The Guardian, where he co-authored a lengthy story that explained Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. For that project, Dance said transparency was important. They knew it would be difficult for readers to fully understand the technical terms, so they employed tools like GIFs to illustrate the complicated process of anonymity tool Tor and had interviewees speak directly to the camera/audience. This increased engagement and understanding from the readers.
By understanding the benefits of digital tools and collaboration, Dance said that journalists could achieve more by “leveraging the powers of the Internet and powers of digital storytelling.”
Albert Hong is currently a junior at Temple University studying journalism and minoring in digital media technologies and is serving as the Lifestyle editor for his student-run newspaper The Temple News. With a special interest in technology, he's also passionate about what goes on in the video game industry.
By Rachel Premack
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko talked government programs and accountability with approximately 100 journalists at the annual IRE Conference in Philadelphia.
This inspector general’s job duties are not unlike that of an investigative journalist. Sopko leads an independent governmental department aimed at ensuring Afghan reconstruction programs are effective and free of fraud. Afghanistan reconstruction, Sopko said, has cost more than $110 billion since 2002 — more than all of the Marshall Plan intended to rebuild Europe after two world wars.
Sopko suggested questions for journalists to ask officials when looking for red flags in government programs:
Sopko said government agencies might describe positive trends — for instance, increased literacy or safety — without tying them to the taxpayer-funded programs. A red flag may be the inability to connect the program and community improvements.
Another way to reveal government fraud, Sopko said, is to simply be observant. Once, in Afghanistan, Sopko noticed the construction of a massive, elegant building. He asked locals what it was, but they were unsure.
He eventually got inside, discovering plastic-wrapped computers and equipment in a spacious facility that cost $38 million. The Afghans never used it; a clear waste of taxpayer money and poor planning.
"Make certain you get out there and kick the tires over," Sopko said.
Rachel is a senior at the University of Michigan studying East Asian history. She is interning at the Workshop this summer and writes investigative news for The Michigan Daily, an editorially-independent student newspaper at U-M.
By Moriah Balingit
In the past year, incidents of police brutality and fatal police shootings have served as a flashpoint for discussions on race in this country. And rightfully, much of the discourse has been centered around those events: the details, the characters, the protests and investigations in their aftermath. But how do journalists move "beyond Ferguson" to cover stories of racial inequality outside of those incidents?
At an IRE Conference panel, three journalists shared their thoughts on how to cover stories of race and racial inequality.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, now a reporter for The New York Times Magazine, previously worked for ProPublica, where she did a groundbreaking investigation on school resegregation.
Kimbriell Kelly is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post who previously covered housing discrimination for The Chicago Reporter. At the Post, she dug into the housing decline in one of the nation's wealthiest black communities, Fairwood, in suburban Maryland. The story was reported with the help of American University graduate students, including this reporter, as part of a practicum.
[Broken by the Bubble: In Fairwood, dreams of black wealth were shattered by the housing crisis]
Frances Robles, formerly of The Miami Herald, is now a Miami-based reporter for The New York Times. In recent years, she has covered the Trayvon Martin shooting, the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and more recently, a police shooting of an unarmed black man captured on video in Charleston, South Carolina.
Here are some takeaways from their remarks:
Racial inequality is not "magical"
“We write about racial inequality as if it’s this magical thing that kind of floats down from the sky and we don’t know how it happened. We don’t know how it occurred,” said Hannah-Jones.
But, she said, “A segregated school often comes from real people who have made real decisions … It’s not accidental and it’s not natural.”
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for example, she found that school enrollment boundary lines had been gerrymandered to cut out concentrations of black residents. Rather than just writing about inequality, investigate its roots.
Know the law
“Get some expertise in the subject area. Look at data. Look at policies,” Hannah-Jones said.
Understand the laws, identify the public officials and government agencies that might play a role in it and talk to experts. A sampling that Hannah-Jones recommended reporters school themselves on:
Data, data, data.
Kelly worked with John Sullivan, as well as other members of the Post’s investigative team, to analyze reams of home mortgage data and make definitive claims about the disparate treatment of black homebuyers in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The U.S. Department of Education also has in-depth data on every public school in the country that can help reporters determine if schools are getting equal resources, Hannah-Jones said.
Don’t get swept up in the narrative
Robles of The New York Times broke news that witnesses told the FBI that Mike Brown did not raise his hands during his fatal encounter with a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. That pivotal detail had become a symbol for protesters of police brutality, and her report inflamed many.
“You want to keep your focus on the facts you’re uncovering. Do not allow yourself to get swept up in what you’re supposed to be reporting,” she said.
That means background checks on everyone, including the unarmed victims of police shootings.
“You do not want to get blindsided,” she said.
Don’t wait for the smoking gun — or the racist email
Hannah-Jones said reporters are uncomfortable with reporting on racial inequality unless they are certain there is some explicit racist intent behind it.
“We are very afraid of calling out people unless we find some racist email,” she said.
But when policies and data show disparate treatment, they’re just as newsworthy — and perhaps even more — than cringe-inducing correspondence between public officials.
Moriah Balingit is the American University fellow at The Washington Post, where she covers education while working towards her master's degree in investigative journalism. Previously, she covered crime, city hall and crime in city hall at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has also reported from Bangladesh and Nepal courtesy of grants from the International Center for Journalists and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Seymour Hersh is an investigative reporter with a storied career dating back to his reporting on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Recently, his reporting on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a narrative that runs counter to the one widely circulated, has garnered a wide range of reactions. Hersh addressed all of that and more at the recent IRE Conference in Philadelphia. Today we’re sharing a section of his conversation with Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
By Meldon Jones
A few months ago, "SEO" was like a dirty word to Education Week reporter Benjamin Herold.
His reporting philosophy – "Build it and they will come" – placed the onus on readers to find and engage with content on his blog. Herold routinely ignored emails lauding anything related to the importance of web analytics, like making headlines SEO-friendly.
But it was his natural skepticism that finally piqued his interest. Herold caught himself being dismissive of something without first knowing all the facts – a realization that rubbed his journalistic instincts the wrong way.
A presenter at the panel "Analytics to find and grow your audience, from the reporter’s perspective," Herold acknowledged that reporters lacked control over variables, like when headlines and images are paired with stories, or what metadata gets attached. But the larger issue was that he lacked an adequate way to truly measure the impact of his work.
“Success felt like getting a big story on the front,” Herold said.
But once Rachael Delgado, Education Week’s director of knowledge services, helped him see that incorporating analytics into his workflow could yield greater control over efforts to capture success, Herold was sold. The assumption that readers read a story simply because it’s published quickly became overshadowed by the need to find evidence.
“The burden shouldn’t be on the readers to find our work,” Herold said. “[The reporter] should understand the [readers’] habits, and that’s only possible with analytics.”
The gap that exists between reporters on the ground and higher-level content strategy staff is a common one across newsrooms. The challenges facing shifts toward a data-driven culture are many, but Delgado grouped them into three main categories. The first challenge concerns access. Sometimes reporters lack knowledge about the data “gatekeepers” in their organization.
The second challenge is one of data limitations. For example, reporters might not have a way to measure something like “time on page” metrics or other types of variables, and overall, chunks of data just aren’t being collected.
The third challenge can be the organizational culture itself, where reluctance to move toward data-driven decisions abound. In the last scenario, it is especially critical that reporters and teams experimenting with analytics document their successes. Skeptics often need to see demonstrated value before coming on board.
The bottom line is that "all [reporters] want people to read their stories,” Herold said.
And with increased focus on measurement, that’s exactly what happened on Education Week’s blog. They’ve seen tremendous gains on key traffic-related metrics: a 102 percent increase in page views, an uptick in Twitter visits by 80 percent, an increase in mobile views by 113 percent and a 115 percent increase in site registrations.
Their blog still struggles to maintain engagement, however. The data indicates that their “bounce” rate also increased. But even the posts that Herold dubs “dog posts”- those rote, mediocre stories highlighting a government report or something similar - had more traffic.
Herold and Delgado said they established key performance indicators by identifying big ideas like “findability” and reach and found metrics to act as reasonable proxies. Content strategy-wise, they engaged in six main activities:
Herold said that most of the time, only simple changes need to be made. These include things like frontloading keywords in the URLs and headlines, hyperlinking key phrases, revamping blog categories and tags, and highlighting related stories.
“This process takes only four or five minutes [extra]," Herold said. “This stuff is not rocket science. It’s being systematic at the reporting level and saying, ‘This is my responsibility to do.’”
Mel Jones is a digital journalist, nonfiction writer, and former fundraiser. She holds a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College and will receive her master's degree in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University this summer with a specialization in investigative reporting. Mel has contributed to investigations for both the Washington Post and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. She enjoys startup events, programming, and green tea ice cream.
Looks like you haven't made a choice yet.
