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Justin Elliott, Jesse Eisinger and Laura Sullivan turned a vague tip about the American Red Cross’ inefficiency into a powerful report about the organization’s failings after Hurricane Isaac and Superstorm Sandy.
The joint project between ProPublica and NPR revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in from donors in 2012 fell to organization leaders often more concerned with the appearance that they were helping than with actually providing aid. The team of reporters got the story through public records, internal emails and documents, and accounts from current and former disaster relief specialists.
The team reported the project in earnest for about five months, but the story has its earliest roots in a tip ProPublica’s Eisinger received at the beginning of the year. Someone wanted him to look into where exactly the $312 million in Sandy donations had gone. Eisinger and Elliott, also of ProPublica, soon realized just how tightly the Red Cross protected that information.
We basically couldn’t answer the question,” Elliott said.
So, for the time being, that became the story. The two posted an article about how difficult it was to track donations from beginning to end. In that piece, ProPublica included a call: “If you have experience with or information about the American Red Cross, including its operations after Sandy,” it read, “email justin@propublica.org.
While sources gradually came forward, ProPublica enlisted the help of NPR to launch a deeper investigation. NPR’s Sullivan added another experienced reporter to the team and the public radio platform gave their story a wider audience.
The reporters sent out a score of state and federal public records requests. They sought correspondence between the Red Cross and the government agencies – New York City’s Office of Emergency Management and the New Jersey Governor’s Office, among others – that played a role in responding to the storms.
The team hit a snag in New York, but in some ways the problem ended up working in their favor. The team had asked for information that the attorney general’s office had gathered from charities that raised money after Sandy. The office had released some of it the information, including some hard numbers, in a summary format but Elliott wanted to see all the raw data.
In response to the Freedom of Information Law request, Elliott received a letter in the mail from the Red Cross that said the agency had hired a major law firm to fight the request. The agency argued that the information Elliott sought should be exempt as a "trade secret."
It struck us as incredibly strange because the Red Cross is not like Goldman Sachs or something,” he said. “If they have a trade secret about how they better respond to disasters, seems like that shouldn’t be a secret.”
ProPublica again used the endless space of the internet to its advantage, posting a story that might not have justified space in print. It went “fairly viral,” Elliott said. And again, ProPublica included that line, asking anyone with information about the Red Cross’ dealings after Sandy to come forward.
“I think that we maybe – or at least speaking for myself – in the past have just assumed that potential sources know that we want to hear from them,” Elliott said. “But sometimes it requires a little bit of nudging.”
In time, the Red Cross ended up reversing course and dropping its fight to exempt the files as “trade secrets.” Getting word out about ProPublica and NPR’s ongoing investigation helped bring more sources forward.
Reaction to the story was swift. The Red Cross denounced the reporting and then, in what Elliott described as a slight softening in tone, admitted that there were some problems but they’re getting better.
And the story isn’t over. ProPublica and NPR have continued to report. Since the investigation, they’ve released a story about an internal survey that shows Red Cross employees’ distrust of the organization’s leadership.
While Elliott continues to focus his energy on the massive organization, he urged other journalists to investigate similarly overlooked agencies.
“For the last few years, basically no one’s been covering it,” he said of the Red Cross. “So I think in general, there’s a lot of other institutions out there, including non-profits, that aren’t getting the coverage they deserve.”
Shawn Shinneman is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism and a student employee at IRE. Prior to graduate school, he spent two and a half years reporting daily news at a newspaper in the Chicago suburbs. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at shawns@ire.org.
Listen to Elliott and Shinneman discuss the Red Cross story and learn more about reporting on charities on the IRE Radio Podcast. Listen to NPR’s version of the Red Cross investigation here. And don’t forget to follow Elliott, Eisinger and Sullivan on Twitter.
A decision by the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma to join its staffer’s lawsuit against the school caused officials to reverse course on their original decision to withhold parking ticket citations.
OU Daily staff member Joey Stipek had filed the suit in May 2013 after his open records requests for parking tickets was denied on the grounds that the citations were protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.
Last week, the Daily published an editorial backing Stipek and declaring that the newspaper is joining the lawsuit. OU President David Boren soon after issued a statement that said the parking ticket information would be made available.
Learn more about Stipek's legal battle and read his tips in the next issue of issue of IRE Journal.
Americans donate about $300 billion a year to charities, with about 30 percent of that taking place in December. But not all charities are good stewards of donated dollars. For our last podcast of 2014 we’re talking about how to investigate nonprofits and charities. Here’s the lineup:
You can find and download previous podcast episodes on iTunes or our Soundcloud page.
We’ll be back in January with new episodes and guests. Until then, we’d love to hear your ideas for the podcast. Email us at web@ire.org.
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
We know you've done some amazing work this past year and we'd love to see it! Enter the Philip Meyer Journalism Award contest for your chance to be recognized along with some of the best journalists in the country. Entries are now being accepted online, through November 21st.
Established in 2005, the award was created to honor Philip Meyer's pioneering efforts to utilize social science research methods to foster better journalism. The contest recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways that lead to journalism vital to the community. Three awards are given annually:
For more information on the awards watch the video embedded to the right, go to the Philip Meyer Award FAQ page, or contact IRE's contest coordinator, Lauren Grandestaff at 573-882-6668 or lauren@ire.org.
The 2014 deadline for entries is November 21, 2014, 11:59 EST.
We’re back with another round of Story Shorts, our new video series highlighting investigative reporting tips and techniques. This week we’re going behind the story with CNBC’s Dina Gusovsky and Jeff Pohlman and highlighting lessons from their series "Death & Dishonor: Crisis at the VA".
We’ll be releasing a new video every day this week at 6 p.m. Central. The CNBC team will talk about how to work with anonymous sources, find and vet documents, and identify any potential hidden agendas.
Visit the Story Shorts page to see each new clip as well as our previous segments.
Interested in participating in Story Shorts? Drop us a note at storyshorts@ire.org. Please include a link to a story you think we should feature, as well as some background on the reporting process.
Every journalist faces challenges when digging into an investigative project. For independent journalists, those roadblocks can be even greater, because they typically don't have the support of a news organization behind them.
To help those journalists do vital work, IRE awards several Freelance Fellowships annually. Thousands of dollars have been awarded to independent journalists over the past few years, and great work has resulted.
For much of this year, we have been conducting a matching fund drive to increase the power of this fellowship fund. We have almost reached our goal, and with only $3,500 remaining, our donor has now increased the size of the match to $15 for every $10 donated. That means that if you donate $30, for example, it becomes $75. And $100 becomes $250. And because this fund is endowed, it will generate money for more fellowships for many years to come. So your donation today not only multiplies immediately, it never stops supporting great journalism.
To get an idea of the program's impact visit our Freelance Fellowship page.
If you're a current member, click here to make a secure credit card donation through our site. Please put "Freelance Fellowship" in the message line.
Donate through Paypal: If you're not a current member or if you prefer to donate via PayPal, click below.
The no-fly zone in place during August’s protests in Ferguson, Missouri, was enacted to keep the media from shooting overhead footage from helicopters, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The AP got its hands on audio recordings of conversations between the Federal Aviation Administration and local police officials. In the recordings, local authorities admit that the no-fly zone, billed as a measure to ensure the public’s safety, was in fact aimed at boxing out news media.
Police have claimed the 37 square miles of space was restricted in response to shots fired at a police helicopter, but didn’t provide the AP a report of the incident.
Join us for the first-ever LA IRE Meetup! We’ll be gathering at Sadie (1638 N. Las Palmas Ave in Hollywood) on Thursday, Nov. 13 starting at 6:30 PM. We’re co-hosting this event with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Los Angeles chapter, and you don’t have to be an IRE member to attend. So bring a friend, colleague or anyone you know who loves investigative reporting/data journalism.
Please join the LA IRE Meetup group if you haven’t already. No need to RSVP beyond the meetup website.
There is no perfect or universal way to classify a mass shooting. As such, reliable, nuanced data on the topic is sparse. And further complicating the reporter’s job is the way even the most human stories can become fuel for the right-versus-left fire.
It’s with these challenges in mind that three reporters and researchers came together at the 2014 IRE conference. Patricia Carbajales, who has worked on Stanford University's journalist-friendly database on mass shootings that dates back more than 45 years, and Mark Follman, a senior editor at Mother Jones who led an award-winning investigation on mass shootings, discussed their techniques for compiling data. Pulitzer Prize winner Trymaine Lee, who covers education, poverty and gun violence for msnbc.com, provided a perspective on how gun violence is reported in black communities.
Follman says his investigative efforts sprung from a post-Aurora shooting realization that no data existed to classify mass shootings of the manner that seemed to be happening more frequently. Follman and his team established criteria, deciding to seek out instances in which at least four people were killed and in which the shooter had an apparent motive to kill indiscriminately. They sorted through years of news reports to compile their data.
But Lee, who was one of the first reporters to cover the case of Trayvon Martin, warns against falling into a pattern of belief that says only some shootings are important.
Later, Carbajales discusses how a similar numbness can take hold from the force of the political left vs. right. She urges reporters to humanize the stories of shooting victims and their families, and to dig deeper.
The executive director of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting was detained in Russia Thursday "for allegedly illegally conducting a journalism workshop in St. Petersburg," according to the center’s website.
Joe Bergantino was kept for several hours along with University of South Carolina professor Randy Covington. The two men were teaching a journalism workshop to a group of 14 journalists in Russia that was supposed to last two days, NECIR wrote. The workshop was part of a grant to teach Russian journalists and was awarded to the university by the U.S. government.
The two men were not allowed to continue their workshop.
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