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Chris Baxter and NJ Advance Media wrestled out a compelling and untold story, let the digital presentation take the lead and came away with a “smashing” investigative success.
Using a system he developed to keep tabs on lawsuits involving state police, Baxter came upon the stifled story of Kenwin Garcia, a Newark man who died in 2008 after an altercation with police along the side of the highway.
Baxter embarked on a deep reporting project that resulted in 7,000 words, an 8-page special print section in The Star-Ledger and a digital presentation as rich as any Baxter remembers NJ.com undertaking.
He uncovered a series of inconsistencies in the stories of police officers on the scene and talked to experts of various backgrounds who questioned police tactics and the eventual determination that 25-year-old Garcia died of “excited delirium.”
First came the legwork. Garcia’s death was at the time glazed over by police with a vague, two-paragraph press release. Five years later, the public was still lacking information about the internal investigation into the matter.
“My mindset the whole time – and eventually I brought everyone on board – was, I want to tell this online in a longform format with multimedia,” Baxter said. “I want it to be interactive. I want people to see the scene, hear the scene. I want them to hear from the experts.”
Baxter reached out to the family, which sued in 2010, after he saw they won a 2013 settlement from the state for $700,000. But he found that a confidentiality clause made the family reluctant to talk. Baxter argued against the clause, which the state said had been included to protect relatives, and learned that family members were free to talk to the media as they pleased. Baxter knew he had one side of the story.
To build the rest, he sent a barrage of open records requests – eighteen by the time he’d finished his investigation. Officials denied some of the records requests. In a few of these cases, however, Baxter was able to successfully argue for freeing the files. He obtained the toxicology report, brain screenings, ambulance records, and medical records. But he also used the act to gather pieces that would drive the digital presentation, among them the dashboard recordings from state and local police on scene that day and a request for arrest-related deaths dating back 10 years.
“Some of the sentences in that story took a month,” he said.
Baxter wrestled with the state, in particular, over a request for copies of bills showing the state’s payment for two experts, who ultimately helped them build a case for an “excited delirium” cause of death, which some critics say absolves police of wrongdoing. The state claimed it didn’t have a record responsive to a request for one of the bills, and withheld the other because it was a part of a criminal case file. After Baxter’s prodding, they reversed course.
“They gave us the one bill they’d denied, and lo and behold they found the other bill and provided us that one as well,” he said.
But the biggest break came when Baxter – benefiting from connections built over about three years working New Jersey police sources – got his hands on files that weren’t subject to open records law. A source leaked him 100 pages of confidential state police investigative files. The files contained summaries of interviews with troopers and Garcia’s family, summaries of the scene and the incident, and a day-by-day summary of the state’s investigation into what happened.
“That really presented us with a good picture of what state authorities determined or said had happened,” Baxter said.
With the reporting taking shape, the NJ.com team honed the digital presentation. The 10 years of arrest-related death records were compiled into a database. The team put together an interactive timeline and added story video and audio from the scene to bolster Baxter’s descriptions.
Baxter also flew to San Antonio and Indianapolis for original, on-camera interviews with expert sources – a commitment of resources that shows how serious NJ Advance Media was about the digital presentation, he said.
All things considered, the success of the story justified the expenses, Baxter said.
“From my perspective, this was really a smashing success for us,” Baxter said. “The traffic that it drew online was phenomenal. It proved to ourselves and to others here in the state that this is a successful way to do big, enterprise, investigative journalism.”
The story resonated with readers, many of whom were following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of teeanger Michael Brown. But Baxter points out that his reporting began well before Ferguson gripped the country. His story published not quite two months after Brown’s death.
Baxter maintains, too, that the story of Kenwin Garcia stands strong by itself.
“This was a man who during his life was mostly invisible to most of New Jersey and, after his death, was going to be easily forgotten,” Baxter said. “It was difficult at many turns. It was difficult fighting for information. But that’s what really drove me through all of this because if it weren’t for our work, this was truly a story that would never have been told.”
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 here or email him at shawns@ire.org.
Follow NJ Advance Reporter Chris Baxter on Twitter @cbaxter1.
The Democrat & Chronicle is fighting a county’s denial to provide license plate information about seven newspaper employees and a couple government-owned vehicles, the paper reports.
The Rochester, New York-based paper has reported that Monroe County is indiscriminately amassing license-plate information from high-speed cameras. During the summer, a reporter filed a Freedom of Information Law request to obtain the records about his own license plate and that of six colleagues and two government vehicles.
County officials denied the request because, they said, a release of the data could violate personal privacy or interfere with a law enforcement investigation. The paper is now asking a judge to overturn that denial, arguing in part that a license plate by its nature is public and that none of the owners of the plates for which information was requested are under investigation.
Interested in learning more about the story behind the new movie, "Kill the Messenger"? Listen to this panel from the 1997 IRE National Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. titled "Can Investigative Reporting Go Too Far?".
In the early 90's investigative reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News dug into the CIA's involvement of cocaine trafficking into the US.
After the story was published in 1996, Webb and the Mercury News experienced intense criticism not only from the U.S. government but from fellow reporters and news organizations.
On this panel, Webb defends himself and the story while Jeff Leen of The Washington Post offers criticism. Steve Weinberg moderates the panel. Several members of the audience also weigh in with questions and comments.
We've also included Steve Weinberg's IRE Journal article on the same subject.
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Webb 10082014114729 (PDF)
Webb 10082014114729 (Text)
You've done all of your reporting and now it's time to write, but how do you structure your story?
Jacqui Banaszynski, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, explored this issue during the 2014 IRE Conference in San Francisco, demystifying the process and offering insight on how to think beyond the traditional inverted pyramid format.
One useful structuring device is the broken – or woven – narrative, which allows journalists the ability to weave together narrative material (scenes, characters, dialogue) with expository information. Banaszynski cites Alex Kotlowitz’s book “There Are No Children Here” as an example of how this can work.
As a college intern at the Wall Street Journal, Banaszynski would read stories in the WSJ and draw boxes around each of the sections. She would take notes and try to explain what the journalists were trying to accomplish in each part of their story. Banaszynski shares this deconstruction process and explains the different structural elements of a WSJ article.
Banaszynski also explored how to combine elements of the broken narrative with the Wall Street Journal structure
This week we launched Story Shorts, a new series of web videos designed to help journalists share tips and techniques they’ve used on a variety of investigative stories. We’ve paired the minute-long videos with related resources (tipsheets, stories, webinars and audio) curated by IRE staff. We’ve even made a few of our tipsheets free for a limited time.
Our first set of clips features KSHB reporter Ryan Kath, who filmed a “Behind the Story” video for us earlier this year. Kath’s series, “Trail of Dirty Deeds,” exposed a widespread real estate fraud scheme and was a finalist for the 2013 IRE Awards.
A group of journalism students at the University of Missouri worked with IRE to repackage Kath’s footage into short, informative video segments. Topics include: Making paper look good on TV, chasing down tips, and capturing first reactions on camera.
You can view the clips and related resources at ire.org/storyshorts. If you’d like to participate in the project, email IRE’s Sarah Hutchins at sarah@ire.org.
Investigative reporters spend months on story basics, building data and documents. But without the right sources, even the most telling facts can read a bit, well, boring.
With that in mind, four battle-tested investigative reporters spoke at the 2014 IRE Conference on the topic of building trust with sources. Ellen Gabler, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Tony Kovaleski, of NBC Bay Area; and Andres Cediel, who produced the recent documentary “Rape in the Fields,” used their own experiences to discuss strategies for getting people to talk.
Kovaleski stressed the importance of building a relationship by meeting as many times as it takes to get the source on the record.
In many cases, the source-reporter relationship is just beginning when a source agrees to participate in a story. Gabler, who discussed her recent work on a project to expose flaws in newborn screening, earned the confidence of her sources by staying diligent in her reporting.
Cediel and his team knew it would be difficult to find outspoken sources for “Rape in the Fields.” They sought sexually abused, Spanish-speaking women who typically were in the country illegally. Cediel’s extreme but vitally important example reminds us to consider how our stories will affect the people within them.
This post originally appeared on the DocumentCloud blog.
On Aug. 3, The Marshall Project, a new nonprofit journalism organization focused on criminal justice issues, published an investigation in partnership with The Washington Post that revealed new evidence raising doubts about a high-profile Texas execution.
Tom Meagher, data editor at The Marshall Project: Our reporter, Maurice Possley, began working on this story months before most of the rest of our newsroom at the Marshall Project was even hired. By the time we were able to start helping, the story was mostly reported, so we dove into the documents to bring ourselves up to speed.
The case against Cameron Todd Willingham — who was executed in Texas for the murder of his three daughters — had been written about extensively over the last 22 years, but a lot of new information was uncovered, and it was all in the documents. We knew we wanted to be able to explore and highlight the correspondence that cast this case in an entirely new light. DocumentCloud was clearly the answer.
Matt DeLong, national digital projects editor at The Washington Post: I started working on the story in earnest a couple of weeks before it published. We were very excited about having so many primary-source documents to enrich the narrative. The Post has been using DocumentCloud for years, but we’ve long been frustrated by one of its biggest limitations: it isn’t mobile-friendly. This isn’t really DocumentCloud’s fault; these scanned documents are a set size, so when you scale them down, at some point words will become too small to read.
We had seen how the New York Times addressed the problem, by putting up the text and linking to the original document in DocumentCloud. That’s totally logical and fine if the words are all that you care about, but in this case we have official letters and handwritten notes between the characters in the story. The pages themselves are interesting, and many readers will want to see them with their own eyes.
Click here to read the entire post.
Applications are now being accepted from college students at several historically black colleges and universities for the Knight Scholarship to attend IRE’s 2015 data journalism and annual investigative reporting conferences. Apply online by Sunday, Dec. 7.
The 2015 conferences include our annual data journalism conference in March in Atlanta and the annual investigative reporting conference in June in Philadelphia. Both conferences offer great opportunities to learn, network with professional journalists and build new skills. More details about each conference can be found below.
Scholarships will cover travel and registration for selected students. They will also receive mentorship before and during the conference to help them make the most out of the experience. Each student will contribute to our conference blog during the event. See what previous scholars wrote about by clicking here.
Eligibility and application information
Students from the following schools are eligible for this scholarship:
Florida A&M University
Grambling State University
Hampton University
Howard University
Jackson State University
Morehouse College
Norfolk State University
North Carolina A&T State University
Savannah State University
Southern University
Application requirements
Each student must complete an application. Students will be asked to select a preferred conference that he or she would like to attend. Applicants will be asked to upload (or provide links for) two published work samples. If no work has been published, please submit some classwork that best demonstrates your abilities. Students must include the contact information for at least one reference. Lastly, each student will be asked to answer the following questions, each in no more than 200 words:
Please describe your career goals and what led you to pursue journalism.
Please tell us why you want to attend a conference and what you hope to gain from the experience.
IRE’s Data Journalism Conference March 2015
The Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference will be held in Atlanta, March 5-8, 2015. It’s a skills-based conference that drew about 1,000 people from around the world to Baltimore in 2014. Attendees can expect to leave with story ideas and tools to help with everything from obtaining to analyzing to visualizing data. Many hands-on classes will be offered at this conference giving attendees experience working with tools that can help up their game. This conference is suitable for all skill levels – from reporters who want to dig deeper to developers who want to create the latest in data visualization. Attendees include students, educators, reporters, editors, producers, news application developers and more. Look to the IRE website for more information on this conference and check out the speakers and schedule from the 2014 conference in Baltimore here.
IRE’s Annual Investigative Reporting Conference June 2015
The best in the business will gather for more than 150 panels, hands-on classes and special presentations about covering business, public safety, government, health care, education, the military, the environment and other key beats at the annual investigative reporting conference. Speakers will share strategies for locating documents and gaining access to public records, finding the best stories and managing investigations. More than 1,600 journalists from around the world attended the 2014 conference in San Francisco where special tracks highlighted campus investigations, broadcast and writing the investigative story. Look to the IRE website for more information on this conference and check out the speakers and schedule from the 2014 conference in San Francisco here.
About IRE
IRE is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting. We have more than 4,500 members and this past year we've conducted training for journalists in 23 states and in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Programs of IRE include the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting and DocumentCloud.
Please contact training@ire.org with any questions.
An Alabama judge has lifted a temporary restraining order banning the Montgomery Advertiser from publishing public documents it obtained from a gas company.
The newspaper had obtained, through an open records request to the state’s Public Service Commission, a copy of Alabama Gas Corp.’s Integrity Management Plan, which contained information about the age and condition of gas pipes in communities such as Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma.
Alagasco argued that publishing the location of the pipes raised the risk for terrorism. Judge Robert Vance originally agreed but, in lifting his restraining order, wrote that “while such possibilities might exist, they now appear to be only vague phantoms,” according to the story from USA TODAY.
The Advertiser, owned by Gannett, is partnering with USA TODAY on a broader, nationwide investigation about the age and condition of gas pipes. It’s set for release today.
A story that helped change the way Chicagoans digest crime stats started with suspicion.
Immersed in a different crime-related piece, Chicago Magazine Features Editor David Bernstein and Contributing Writer Noah Isackson noticed something amiss with the statistics. When their trusted police sources voiced skepticism, the early trappings of an idea took hold.
In the spring of 2013, fresh off a year of 507 murders in Chicago, the most of any U.S. city, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy started celebrating what the stats showed was a drastic turnaround in the amount of crime on Chicago streets. Crime rates, the two proclaimed at press conferences, were lower than they had been in more than 40 years. But Bernstein and Isackson weren’t convinced.
Plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet spurred a 12-month investigation, which culminated in a two-part series titled, “The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates.” Heavily anchored by data and lifted by strong sourcing and documentation, the report found several instances where police had misclassified crimes. Several clear homicides were reclassified as “death investigations,” which don’t count toward the city’s murder totals, or closed as noncriminal incidents.
Bernstein and Isackson’s first step was to build a spreadsheet with the number of “index crimes” – the eight violent and property crimes police report to the FBI – for each of the last 20 years. The resulting graph gave visual evidence that the period saw a steady drop of 3-to-4 percent a year – until 2011.
“All of a sudden, when you get to 2011, it goes off a cliff,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein and Isackson discovered 10 homicides misclassified by police, but they investigated countless others.
A base of current and former police sources, some of them high-ranking, provided guidance throughout the process.
“Sources would tell us, ‘This one doesn’t look quite right; that one doesn’t look quite right,” Isackson said. “And once we’d been getting that information for several months, you could start to pick up different cues and signs.”
The two tracked cases through news clips and kept an eye on the ones that seemed suspicious. They maintained close contact with their sources.
FOIA helped them dig deeper into investigations. They uncovered the ways the narrative of a death changed or the ways that information from the medical examiner contradicted the police investigation. They sought documents from the Chicago Police Department and from the Cook County clerk and medical examiner’s office.
But along the way, while placing FOIA requests, they remained mindful of their sources’ confidentiality. They requested documents in generalities, seeking annual lists of investigations rather than honing in on specific cases, so as to not hint at a specific tip.
Still, several leads produced no fruit.
“Some (cases) were handled appropriately,” Bernstein said. “Some we couldn’t get enough reporting on. The thing you have to keep in mind is that we were just two reporters with a limited amount of time and a limited amount of resources.”
The two figured the story went deeper, but they also knew that an article about crime rates would get the most attention at the brink of Chicago’s homicide-heavy summer months. So, they began to write.
The two set aside the cases that didn’t involve a death and started writing the homicide sections. Their story grew quickly, morphing into more than 14,000 words over two parts, the first focused on homicides and the second looking at other crimes. The articles ran online in April and May, respectively, and hit newsstands in the May and June issues.
One of the most challenging but rewarding parts of the process for Bernstein and Isackson was developing sources. Earning the trust of cops took time. Their editor, Elizabeth Fenner, provided it.
“We needed a long runway to do this,” Bernstein said. “Our editor Beth had our back all the way.”
Armed with the support of Fenner, Bernstein and Isackson hit the pavement. The sensitivity of the topic, they found, contributed to skepticism from the police, who were already distrustful of the press.
Bernstein and Isackson broke bread with cops, holding long conversations during which they often felt they were being tested. The more they proved they knew, the more their sources felt comfortable talking.
“Police officers would ask us when we’d meet, ‘Is your magazine really willing to go there? Are you really willing to challenge the numbers in this way?’” Isackson said.
They were, and their Rolodex proved vital.
Also important in the building of sources, no doubt, was a decision by Bernstein and Isackson – and backed by their editor – to keep anonymous the law enforcement officials quoted in their stories. The cops had much to lose by talking publicly, and Bernstein and Isackson opted to protect their anonymity, a move they said allowed them to cultivate the right sources.
“There was no other way to get this information,” Isackson said. “But at the same time, we cross-checked and cross-checked and cross-checked the information.”
It was clear immediately that Bernstein and Isackson’s reporting had struck a nerve.
When part one hit the web in April, it was quickly passed around on social media. Other news media covered the report. And maybe the greatest indicator of impact: by April 8, one day after the story ran online, a 12-page memo from Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy hit Fenner’s inbox. He denounced the magazine for the piece. Fenner publicly backed her journalists.
Despite the public buzz, Isackson said he’s heard from families of murder victims identified in the story who say that police have done little to nothing to remedy the misclassifications, which downplayed their family members’ deaths.
Bernstein and Isackson say they are encouraged, though, by the way dialogue about crime rates in the city has shifted. Colleagues working for the city’s dailies have added nuance to their reporting, they say, and the general public has gained some healthy skepticism.
“It’s permeated into the conversation now,” Bernstein said. “People are finally starting to say, well, can we trust the police department with these numbers?”
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 here or email him at shawns@ire.org. Follow Chicago Magazine on Twitter @ChicagoMag.
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