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WyoFile is featuring a special investigative series, “The Two Elk Saga,” by former Los Angeles Times correspondent and regular WyoFile contributor Rone Tempest. Wyoming has a long history of uncritically embracing, then giving public money to, dubious and expensive energy projects. The proposed $2 billion DKRW Advance Fuels — coal-to-liquids — plant near Medicine Bow is the latest example. The aborted $100-million GE-UW High Plains Gasification project — which cost the state $7 million before GE abruptly backed out in 2011 — is another.
This Two Elk series, supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and WyoFile founder Christopher Findlater, is an extensive case study of one such troubled project; its audacious Colorado-based promoter, and the state and federal officials who kept the project alive despite numerous warning signs that it was a scheme beyond saving. It is also a human story of dreams — outsized American dreams — and of one man’s ingenious but fruitless 20-year quest to build an energy empire in the heart of Wyoming coal country. In this regard it is an example of WyoFile’s continuing commitment to report fearlessly on the people, places and policies of our mountain state. Stories in “The Two Elk Saga” have appeared on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the series concludes on Tuesday, June 10
Part 5 runs today. Read the entire series here.
Every year, the federal government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. And long after the investigations that spawned them have ended, the vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view—unlike nearly all other aspects of American judicial proceedings.
The Wall Street Journal surveyed 25 of the top federal district courts in the U.S. and found that most couldn’t provide even basic data on the electronic-surveillance orders, which allow investigators to trace telephone calls, locate wireless phones and monitor Internet accounts. What data were available indicates a significant increase in location tracking and other high-tech surveillance methods—and a system in which more than 90% of the documents showing the government’s legal reasoning are sealed from the public.
On the heels of its investigation, the Journal filed legal motions in federal court in Texas to unseal some of these applications and orders, arguing that the First Amendment grants the public the right to access court records, including hearing transcripts, docket sheets, and search-warrant applications, and that electronic surveillance orders should be no different.
To read the story, click here. To learn how the Journal evaluated sealed surveillance orders, visit the Law Blog.
We're offering more than 100 sessions focused on honing specific skills, covering key beats, digging into data and documents and much more. Here are a few highlights we recently added to the schedule:
- This year's Showcase Panel will focus on government surveillance – how to cover it as a story and how those prying eyes impact your work. Panelists include former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, members of the Guardian and Washington Post teams whose award-winning work exposed many of the issues, and more. Separately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will hold a couple of hands-on sessions to help you equip yourself to communicate more securely - bring your laptop.
- Lowell Bergman will deliver the keynote address during our annual Awards Luncheon. He's a pioneer in nonprofit investigative journalism, worked for 60 Minutes and ABC News, was a correspondent for The New York Times, and now teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and does documentary work for FRONTLINE. And, for good measure, he was portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider.
- A number of sessions will focus on international issues, including a just-added session featuring reporters working in the midst of the uprise in Ukraine, examinations of collaborations that cross borders, and covering organized crime, from Mexico to Eastern Europe.
- Two new types of sessions are being offered. Deep Dive panels give speakers a chance to really dig in on a specific topic or approach. And we're turning over one segment of the conference on Saturday to attendees with IRE By Design, in which members propose sessions onsite and the ideas with the most votes will be held.
The IRE Conference schedule is available online. You can also view the speaker list.
In the weeks leading up to a botched execution, an Oklahoma assistant attorney general referred to defense attorneys’ warnings that the execution could go awry as “hysterical speculation,” records released to the Tulsa World show.
Assistant Attorney General John Hadden also wrote in a March 21 email that he was “not eager to answer a bunch of questions” from reporters about the state’s execution plans but worried about appearing “overly secretive.”
Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office released more than 100 pages of emails to the World Friday following an Open Records Act request. The World requested all emails since March 1 regarding the execution of Lockett and Warner and development of the state’s execution protocol.
The World’s records requests to Fallin’s office, DOC and the DPS all remain pending.
Eight Houston Police Department detectives have been disciplined for failing to properly investigate more than two-dozen homicide cases spanning almost a decade. The victims were as young as 11 months old. They were nearly all black or Hispanic. They were walking along the sidewalk or just answering their door when they were killed.
When news of the shocking oversight became public in April, Police Chief Charles McClelland apologized but said the problem had been fixed. That was of little comfort to the families of the victims, who were nowhere mentioned by name. The identity of each and the sketchy details surrounding their deaths are laid out in cursory offense reports recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
IRE and the University of Missouri Journalism School are offering a special workshop Sept. 4-7 that will introduce the basics of newsroom programming by teaching how to build one of the simplest but most useful tools in a data journalist's toolbox: a web scraper designed to automate the downloading of data. The workshop will also teach basic data-cleaning skills needed to prepare a dataset of public records for analysis.
The course will be taught using Python, but the concepts will be applicable to any programming language. We'll cover topics like how to write and run code, how computer programs are structured and how data journalists use these tools to produce award-winning journalism in real-world newsrooms.
Classes will be held at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute in Columbia, MO and follow this schedule:
Instructors are Chase Davis, assistant editor for interactive news development at The New York Times.
Space is limited. Registration will be allowed on a first-come/first-serve basis. Click here to register for the workshop.
Of the Wyoming Legislature’s 90 members, only 28 lawmakers got one bill passed in this year’s legislative session, according to a Casper Star-Tribune analysis. Thirty-nine didn’t succeed in getting any bills passed. Fourteen didn’t sponsor anything.
But passing bills is only one way to measure a lawmaker’s effectiveness.
“There are a lot of legislators who may be equally effective because they kill bills that wouldn’t be any good,” Karl Kurtz, a political scientist for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures, told the Star-Tribune.
Read the story here.
There’s still time to register for the IRE Conference in San Francisco. But if you’re still on the fence, we hope this will help. We asked some of our members to tell us why they think you should go to IRE14.
San Diego County Supervisor Bill Horn said he bought a charity decades ago for $25, called it the Basic Faith Foundation and used it to hold money from real estate deals.
Horn said he gave the interest to Christian missionaries in Mexico and South America.
inewsource dug into the Basic Faith Foundation and into Horn’s own description of how he used it. Five experts with national reputations in tax law and nonprofit management reviewed the transcript of inewsource’s interview with the supervisor, as well as the supporting documentation from state and federal agencies.
All reached the same conclusion: the way Horn used Basic Faith violated both state and federal laws, civilly and possibly criminally.
In 2011, three car crashes caught the attention of Greg Burton, executive editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California. The first involved a 100 mile-per-hour road race that led to a deadly wreck at a park. The other two also ended with fatalities. All three involved Marines.
The news got Burton wondering, why were so many Marines dying off duty?
The Desert Sun found that, since 2007, more Marines from the nearby Twentynine Palms military base have died off-duty and on American soil than in combat in the Middle East. A little less than half of those deaths were a result of car wrecks.
Coming up with those numbers wasn’t easy. The base didn’t keep records on individual non-combat deaths. Rather, each Marine battalion kept its own data, and base spokesmen said they couldn’t give figures for the base as a whole.
So The Desert Sun compiled its own list. The Department of Defense’s Freedom of Information Act requester service center was able to provide a list of all military deaths across branches between Jan. 2011 and Nov. 2012.
There were more than 18,000 deaths on the list.
More challenges popped up. The list didn’t include names, only ages, cities, causes of death, military branches and dates of death. Reporter Drew Schmenner spent months picking out deaths that could have involved Marines from Twentynine Palms, matching them by age, location and date of death. Brett Kelman, another Desert Sun reporter, went through obituaries, death certificates and grave records to further narrow the list.
For each Marine in the story the reporters gathered personnel files and incident reports from the base, as well as crash investigation, death and toxicology reports from local law enforcement agencies.
The final count: 64 deaths involving Marines from Twentynine Palms since 2007. By comparison, 60 Marines from the base died in war zones in the Middle East.
This data was “the spine on which we built this emotional tale,” Kelman said. But the real power came from the sources - grieving family members and friends - that The Desert Sun spoke with.
Genevieve Scahill, the wife of one of the Marines featured in the story, “really bared her soul to us,” Kelman said. Scahill shared the story of her husband’s struggle with alcohol abuse, one that eventually ended in his suicide.
A military investigation into his death found that Sgt. Martin Scahill’s suicide was unforeseeable. But, looking back, Genevieve thought that there had been signs: a history of suicide in his family, a morbid cartoon drawing and some subtle remarks. She told The Desert Sun that she wished she had been able to see them sooner.
Alcohol abuse and mental illness surfaced as common themes among those Marines from Twentynine Palms who had died off-duty. In one case, a Marine with PTSD unintentionally poisoned himself with a cocktail of psychiatric medications.
Schmenner, who did most of the data work and reporting, left for graduate school before the story was finished. Kelman, normally a reporter on the education beat, had to take over. His editor had him work on the story nearly full time.
“Education coverage took a bit of a hit,” Kelman said, “We had to make some priority choices, had to let some things go because we were making time to work on this thing we knew was important.”
Kelman had never attempted a project of this magnitude or style before. The story is published online in three parts, each broken down into one or two full-length stories focused on a central theme, with multiple accompanying videos.
“The most interesting part for me was writing it,” Kelman said, “Some days it felt more like writing a book than writing a news story.”
The team approach that The Desert Sun took on the project helped, Kelman said.
“When you tackle enormous projects, sometimes the truth is that it is too much for one reporter,” Kelman said, “Sometimes it takes two or more people.”
Before he started writing, Kelman said he spent a week avoiding the project. It felt so enormous that he didn’t know how to get through it. But he plodded ahead and took it in increments.
At the end, however, there was one voice absent from the story. Twentynine Palms base commander Maj. Gen. David H. Berger declined be interviewed for the story, a perspective Kelman regretted not being able to include.
Berger could have spoken to why these kinds of incidents are still happening, even after everything the Marine corps has done to try to prevent them, Kelman said.
Still, Kelman hopes the series shed light on the true scope of off-duty deaths and why they happen.
The Desert Sun is planning more follow-up stories on some of the themes addressed in the Twentynine Palms series. Local law enforcement agencies have started pushing to have a system for getting Marines rides back to base, he said. A major report on suicide in the Marine corps also is slated to come out within the next few months.
“[The report] might be the hardest look anyone has taken at suicide in the Marine corps,” Kelman said.
Read the series: Project launch page | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Interactive Map
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