Search Results for: investigative journalism

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

Melissa Segura admits that investigative journalism is not the first thing most people think of when they talk about BuzzFeed. But her work, especially her investigation into the corrupt practices of Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, is changing that perception.

Segura’s background began in sports. Thanks to an older brother who would muscle his way to the remote after school and keep ESPN on the TV, she went to college with “an inordinate amount of sports knowledge” and an interest in narrative journalism.

Melissa Segura

One piece in particular, written by Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, told of a nationally watched high school basketball player who was accused of sexually assaulting a disabled woman in a New York City hallway.

“He was the best prospect in the country at the time,” she said. “He served his time, he did what he was supposed to. But when the time came for colleges to recruit him, there was a lot of backlash and he lost all his offers.” Any school that had considered offering him a scholarship or tryout faced criticism and scorn and the young player was left with nothing.

“It was an incredibly human and deep piece, which had me looking at other things he was doing and other things Sports Illustrated was doing,” Segura said. It also fed into her lifelong interest in the justice system.

When Sports Illustrated went through layoffs, she found a fellowship with BuzzFeed for investigative reporting. She’d just had a conversation with an attorney about the plea bargaining and justice system in the United States, including a case where a woman in Chicago denied killing two men she’d been charged with murdering and, after taking a plea deal, the woman was still facing the death penalty.

Earlier this year, Segura won a Polk Award for local reporting for coverage of Guevara, who had been using shady practices for decades, locking up innocent people for years on end for crimes they didn’t commit.

Melissa Segura, a Polk Award-winning journalist with BuzzFeed, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss her journey from unwitting sports nerd with an interest in writing deep, human stories to shining a bright light on a dirty Chicago detective in the name of righting several decades’ worth of wrongs.

#294 — Polk Awards honor gutsy investigative reporting

#294 — Polk Awards honor gutsy investigative reporting

For the first time, three digital journalists and outlets have taken home major prizes with this year’s George Polk Awards.

Iona Craig of The Intercept won the Foreign Reporting Award for her work investigating a SEAL raid on a village in Yemen, hailed as a triumph by the Trump administration but rife with destruction and civilian casualties.

Melissa Segura of Buzzfeed won the Local Reporting Award for her investigation into the practices of a Chicago detective playing “fast and loose” with facts, locking innocent people away in prison for decades, people who Segura’s work helped free.

Ralph Engelman

Elle Reeve of VICE News won the National Television Reporting award for her astonishing and first-person reporting of the Charlottesville protest last summer that resulted in one woman’s death. Her work included one-on-one interviews with the leaders of the alt-right group that organized the event. (The work was also the subject of a previous episode of this podcast).

The Polk Awards were once referred to by a New York Times columnist as the “guts awards,” said Ralph Engelman, a senior professor of journalism at Long Island University Brooklyn and co-administrator of the awards.

The awards “recognize reporters who break important stories and are enterprising and sometimes take risks even getting the stories,” he said. “We live in a time when journalism is under attack, all the references to fake news, the changing finances that have hurt investigative reporting. But there is still important, great investigative work going on that has impact.”

He noted that one of the big prizes this year went to a team of reporters from different outlets, Jody Kantor and Mean Twohey of the New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker for their explosive piece on Harvey Weinstein. They won the National Reporting Award for their efforts.

“The repercussions are incredible,” Engelman said of their work. “I think it is important to basically encourage the great tradition in investigative reporting. This kind of recognition is a message to newspaper publishers and editors as well as the American public about the great cause of investigative journalism because of the kind of impact we’re discussing.”

Ralph Engelman, a senior professor of journalism at Long Island University Brooklyn and co-administrator of the George Polk Awards, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss this year’s award winners, including three first-time awards for digital outlets, and why newspapers need to reconsider the importance of investigative journalism.

#280 — Vice News Tonight and its different take on political news

#256 – Journalism education in the era of fake news

Teaching young journalists about technology is important; teaching them how to use it to tell stories that are unbiased, impartial and well-researched is urgent.

Margot Susca, a professorial lecturer at American University, wants journalists to understand the full scope and weight of their work, whether they’re just starting out in the newsroom or approaching the midpoint of their career.

Margot Susca, American University School of Communications

“I teach journalism ethics at American University and I think that’s a really important part of the curriculum,” she said. Journalists should follow the code of ethics presented by the Society of Professional Journalists, which implores reporters to “seek truth and report it,” while upholding transparency and accountability. “Once students have been immersed in this environment, it’s easy to understand how it gets done well in news organizations they respect. But they can also analyze when it doesn’t get done as well. What I want is for them to be a voice, when they have a seat at the table …where they can say I don’t know that this is being done for the right reason” if a story is reported in a certain way. In the age of “fake news,” this takes on heightened importance.

“To do journalism is such a huge honor in this country. I want my students to understand that and I hope we can get citizens to understand that as well.”

Susca often uses a story from her own life, early in her career as a reporter in Connecticut. A local incumbent politician was defeated in an election he expected to win and directly pointed the blame at her investigative work.

Reporters are supposed to be the “liaison between the government and taxpayers,” she said. “You’ve gotta grow a thick skin and you’ve gotta be tough. I can’t imagine what some of these reporters in the White House briefing room are going through.”

Not only are supporters of the president and members of his administration screaming “fake news” at any coverage they don’t like or agree with, reporters are being called the enemy and threatened with lawsuits simply for doing their jobs. The ability to remain composed and keep digging for information in such an environment is not an easy task.

Reporters are “in it for readers and citizens, not to make friends with politicians,” Susca said.

Journalists need to use all the tools at their disposal to report and uncover facts and present the best and most accurate details each and every time. Data and technology are an increasingly important aspect of this work, but the underlying mission of journalism needs to be taught alongside the latest apps and platforms.

Susca anticipates seeing more work in the news world from technology companies like Google and IBM, but, “I want to teach students to think beyond tech and social media. Tech changes so rapidly. We need to adapt to new technology and storytelling methods, but we need to be adaptable. Snapchat, a few years ago, it was crazy, but look how it’s being used now. It’s not the only thing we have to teach them; it’s a piece, but there’s more today than there was 10 or 20 years ago.”

The same goes for exploring new tools as they come along – imagine if today’s reporters and editors had relied on MySpace as a journalism tool in the same way they do Twitter and Facebook today, then consider how different journalism is as a result of those newer outlets existing and how their use has evolved in a few short years.

— Amber Healy

Margot Susca, professorial lecturer in the American University School of Communications, talks to It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell about how journalism schools remain relevant and vital in times of rapid technological changes and a volatile political environment.

#244 – Newsrooms need to build trust with their audiences

#225 – Investigative podcast sheds light on 27-year-old abduction

For more than 20 years, Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance remained a baffling puzzle.

“Jacob, in 1989, was 11-years old. He lived in a small town, St. Joseph, in central Minnesota. One night, he went with his friend and his brother on a bike ride, around 9 o’clock at night, to get a video,” recounted Madeleine Baran, a reporter on American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast. The ride was short, on a dead-end road, but on the way home, the boys came across a man in the middle of the road. The man forced the boys into a ditch, asked them their ages, then told the other two boys to run away and not look back or he’d shoot them.

Samara Freemark and Madeleine Baran of American Public Media

“The boys ran back to the Wetterling’s house, reported it to the police and the police got there right away,” Baran said. “A massive investigation began, with the National Guard, the FBI, the state’s crime bureau, the sheriff’s office. It was one of the largest missing persons operations in the United States.”

Yet from that day in 1989 until relatively recently, Jacob’s disappearance remained a mystery. The case is the subject of In the Dark, yet Baran and the podcast’s producer, Samara Freemark, didn’t set out to play detective or try to solve the case themselves.

“As an investigative reporter, I wanted to know what really happened here,” Baran said. “This is a case that seems, on the face of it, so simple and had so many resources, but it could not be solved.”

Instead, In the Dark looks at the responsibility to the public owed by first responders, investigators and others that were involved in the investigation of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance.

“From a production standpoint, it’s an interesting challenge,” Freemark said. “The part of the story that’s most compelling, the plot of what happened, interested us least.” They didn’t want to be exploitative in their work, nor was that the focus of the podcast.

The central theme was whether the investigators, on all levels and from all organizations, lived up to their responsibility to the public.

The biggest challenge to telling that story was the fact that the case was still an open investigation, at least at the beginning, meaning the case file was sealed and unusable.

“There’s a confession, and the case file itself, hundreds of thousands of pages of paper — there’s a whole room in the sheriff’s office for it – none of that’s been released to the public,” Baran said. “We were trying to figure out what went wrong in a case where we did not have access to the files you have in closed cases.”

As a result, their research had to go a little more low-tech – there was no internet in 1989, after all — and involved newspaper clippings from the investigation and, in one case, literally digging through boxes for research.

As Baran was interviewing a former police chief, his wife remembered she had a video of coverage of the investigation into Wetterling’s disappearance. She was about to throw the tape out that week when Baran came by for an interview.

“She recorded everything of the early days, all the stations, all of it on one tape,” she said.

Free mark added: “For the podcast, in terms of production, it helps place you in the scene, but also for facts. Just knowing what was going on at the time. We did a clip review, we went through all the newspapers as well, but being able to see some of that stuff, the way it was covered on TV and radio, it was useful.”

— Amber Healy

On this episode of It’s All Journalism, host Michael O’Connell talks to American Public Media’s Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark about In the Dark, their podcast investigation into the 29-year-old abduction case of Minnesota resident Jacob Wetterling. In the Dark does try to solve the case, rather it takes hard look at why it took authorities so long to solve the crime.

#205 – Where economic policy and real life meet

#208 – BINJ seeks to finance independent, investigative reporting

The last time Chris Faraone spoke to It’s All Journalism, he was in the midst of some independent investigative work out in Oregon. His work, Oregon Tale, looked at the phenomenon of small towns that didn’t have police services but were evicting people from their homes with military-style vehicles and operations. His work received new attention earlier this year during a standoff between federal agents and a group led by Ammon Bundy and his sons, when Bundy and supporters took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and demanded the release of two ranchers.

Chris Faraone

“I’d love to say there were big changes; there weren’t,” Faraone admitted. “Some of those cases we looked at, some people did have some relief. But they’re still losing their homes.”

Part of the problem is the evictions are happening in a “media desert,” and without the media, the factions that would normally speak to each other through journalists have no way to communicate.

“I hope the people who went there saw that this is really a unique part of America … they’re not government-hating rednecks. I hope the tens of thousands of people who read the series, I hope it helps them understand that.”

But he’s not resting on his past efforts. If anything, the work in Oregon has lit a fire under Faraone, now leading a nonprofit journalism endeavor in Boston.

The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, or BINJ (which Faraone has tattooed across his knuckles), is inspired by alternative and independent publications in California, including the San Francisco Public Press, in which people are working collaboratively to bring about not only investigative journalism but to serve the public in ways traditional media no longer can.

There’s a history of this kind of work in Boston, Faraone says. He points to the Boston Phoenix, an independent paper that went out of business in 2013 after more than 40 years of investigative work.

“When the Phoenix went out of business in 2013, they were still doing four or five 1,200 to 5,000 word pieces every week. That really was the incubator” for investigative journalists in the city, he said. “Dozens of people at the Boston Globe, including at least one person on the Spotlight team who was portrayed in the movie, came up throughout the Phoenix.”

Chris Faraone is so serious about the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism that he’s tattooed the acronym “binj” on his knuckles.

It’s important to remember that some of those headline grabbing stories “covered by the (New York) Times or 60 Minutes, started in more grassroots community newsrooms,” he said.

Now he’s working, through BINJ and Dig Boston, a news and entertainment website, to “keep alt press alive in greater Boston.”

Boston has a rich media landscape but newsrooms are seeing their bottom lines cut, just as in other cities. “Our idea with BINJ is that we’re not going to be our own outlet. We’re not trying to take the credit for everything.”

After meeting with every reporter, editor and publisher in town that would meet with him, Faraone and his partners asked those newsrooms for their wishlists of stories they wanted to cover but couldn’t, or issues that needed exploring but couldn’t be reached.

“We started talking about the stories we were interested in developing and how they can play a role,” he said. “If we do one story, how can we give a sidebar to this paper that’s relevant to that community? We want to do more than just syndication. … We want to be able to help with resources and network a lot of community outlets so their voices can be amplified to the point where the Globe or one of the TV stations will hear it, pick up on the story.”

Some skeptics might think this kind of work is expensive, and it can be, but more in the $2,000 range than the $50,000 range “We try to spread it around. We’ve contracted with 40 freelancers, video people, photographers — this isn’t just writers. In doing that, we have built a really awesome community.”

— Amber Healy

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#137- Chris Faraone treks the Oregon Tale

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#136 – Religion and empathetic journalism

Maybe Otis Redding had it right after all.

Perhaps the best approach to reporting isn’t to start researching a story without emotion, guard up and skepticism out front, but with a little tenderness and compassion.

Tony Carnes, editor and publisher of A Journey through NYC Religions, explained that his team embraces a different method of reporting for their street-by-street, alley-by-alley exploration of religious sites and culture in America’s biggest city.

Tony Carnes, editor and publisher of A Journey through NYC Religions, stands with the New York City Central Park skyline behind him. (Courtesy photo)

“We want to immerse people in and [let them] feel for themselves what people are going through, and see, then make their judgments about what’s going on,” he said.

The best way to do that, he believes, is to use what he calls sympathetic objectivity, a practice that, in some ways, turns the investigative journalism approach on its head.

The journalist’s “trinity” of skepticism followed by objectivity and maybe ending with empathy or sympathy sets each reporter off on the wrong foot with his or her interview subject, especially when the person being interviewed is a member of a religious community, Carnes explained.

“We think that you should start with sympathy or empathy with religious folks,” he said. “They have a great story to tell, you just have to find it.”

There’s room for asking tough questions. If someone from a church or religious organization is touting the outstanding success of their youth program, ask how many participants they have. If it’s a small number, the reporter is responsible to provide that information and let the reader make up her own conclusion, Carnes said.

“If you try to fool us or try to push something, [try to] pull the wool over our eyes,” his team will go forward with a more investigative approach, he said.

Carnes’ website launched in July 2010, just a month before the country was embroiled in a short-lived debate about the propriety of establishing a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan. While most of the national media were reporting the existence of 99 mosques in the city, Carnes and his team knew there were more than 179, because they had already started their work on cataloging all religious sites in New York City. They’d done some of the ground work establishing relationships with clergy and lay people, earning trust and building credibility along the way.

“Much of journalism is based on the paradigm of investigative journalism as the queen of journalism, that it’s the highest journalism,” Carnes said.. “We say ‘No. It’s one form of journalism. It’s a good form, we do favor it. But we believe community journalism, with sympathetic objectivity, is the main paradigm for journalism.'”

— Amber Healy

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#121 – Meet the I-Team: Investigative journalists Tisha Thompson and Rick Yarborough

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It takes time to learn how to be an investigative reporter and do it well. NBC Washington’s Tisha Thompson and Rick Yarborough have mastered the art of producing consistently enterprised stories that make a difference.

While they are both humble and say they found the path to investigative reporting in different ways, multiple awards prove their work is some of the best in the country and in joining us on It’s All Journalism, the reporter and producer team shared some tricks they’ve learned over the years.

Full disclosure, Tisha and I are old friends. I met Rick through the Investigative Reporters and Editors professional organization.

Rick Yarborough and Tisha Thompson are part of the investigative reporting team at Washington, D.C.’s NBC affiliate. (Photo by Michael O’Connell)

Our conversation started with the question that is often asked when it comes to local TV reporting, ‘How much do looks matter?’

“It’s a visual medium,” says Yarborough whose career was jump-started when he took the morning producing shift out of college at WIS in South Carolina.

“This is stupid. Here we are talking about investigative reporting and now I’m talking about my hair. But that’s what television is,” Thompson says.

While she found it frustrating to focus on appearance, everyone trying to make it in TV news knows it’s something that needs to be addressed if you’re on air.

“It just means you have to have a super thick skin and just keep trucking forward. And you have to be willing to take advice about whatever it is that isn’t working,” she says.

The two have churned out hundreds of investigative pieces in Washington, D.C. The latest for NBC Washington details the documents that expose the DUIs, speeding tickets and traffic infractions racked up by diplomats. The classified documents took years to procure as they were being withheld from the public because of diplomatic immunity.

Coming up with story ideas is the same process as it has always been, Yarborough says. The ideas come both from sources and by questioning what they hear and see.

“Tips are our bread and butter. That’s what we do. Some of our best stories are things Tisha has seen driving into work or I’ve noticed,” Yarborough says.

As far as style, NBC’s I-Team isn’t confrontational to start. Thompson says after every avenue has been exhausted, she’ll offer the department or person they’re attempting to contact the options.

You treat people with respect. You tell them what’s coming at them. I don’t want someone in an interview to be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That’s a stupid interview. — Tisha Thompson

“We can do this in a well lit room, where you know what’s coming at you and you have thought about what your answers are going to be. … Or we can do this when you’re not expecting me,” she says.

Though they stress that approach is reserved for stories that matter to people’s lives or livelihoods.

“You treat people with respect. You tell them what’s coming at them. I don’t want someone in an interview to be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That’s a stupid interview,” Thompson says.

The approach they use for an interview shocks people, she says. Both talk about why they like to spend time with the source before the camera starts rolling.

Later in the podcast, Yarborough discusses how they have to think twice about using social media, how to get what you want from a Freedom of Information request and the best ways to avoid paperwork.

— Megan Cloherty

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#66 – Investigating for big production: Showtime teams up with the Investigative Reporting Workshop

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#95 – Online Journalism Awards: Time to recognize digital innovation

UPDATE: The Online News Association has extended the submission deadline for the Online Journalism Awards to Friday, June 20, at 11:59 a.m. ET.

Journalists are using digital technology every day to find new and innovative ways to tell their stories. Shouldn’t they be recognized for those groundbreaking efforts?

Online Journalism Awards

For the last decade, the Online News Association has presented its annual awards to honor innovation in online news. The Online Journalism Awards committee and judges give special attention to those journalists and newsrooms who show a mastery of the emerging technology.

Thanks to the generosity of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Gannett Foundation and The University of Florida, 10 of the awards being presented Sept. 25-27, at the ONA14 Conference in Chicago will come with a total of $52,500 in prize money.

The awards recognize excellent work in the technical aspects of our field — data journalism, visual digital storytelling and technical innovation — as well as the more general — public service and investigative reporting.

The person in charge of running the awards is Josh Hatch, treasurer of the ONA Board.

It’s been more than a year since we last had Josh on our podcast. Back in January 2013, he talked to us about data visualizations and the work he was doing as senior editor of data and interactives at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In our new podcast, he talks about how the Online Journalism Awards have changed over the years and why people should get their material ready for the June 13 deadline.

— Michael O’Connell

#68 – Leonard Downie Jr. & Chad Garland — Building a future for investigative reporting

During his 44-year career at The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr. oversaw many important investigative stories, from the Watergate break-ins to mismanagement at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

When Downie stepped down after a 17-year stint as The Post‘s executive editor in 2006, one might think he would retire and leave journalism behind. Instead, he has continued to give back to the media industry through various foundations and journalism organizations.

With Sara Rafsky, Downie recently wrote a special report for the Committee to Protect Journalists detailing a lack of transparency within the Obama administration.

As a Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, Downie is one of the instructors at News21, an initiative started by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation to promote professional training at several journalism schools around the country.

From left, Chad Garland and Len Downie Jr. talk to It’s All Journalism about the News21 project: Back Home — The Enduring Battles Facing Post 9/11Veterans. (Photo by Michael O’Connell)

A new seminar takes place each spring, in which a group of advanced students receives instructions in intestigative reporting techniques and plan a multimedia project to be posted online later in the year. Each project is built around a theme. This year it was veterans returning home from war and the services they receive.

“Next year’s topic, which is gun legislation in the state legislatures around the country, another timely topic that the rest of the news media cannot cover adequately enough because they simply don’t have the resources that we’re going to have,” Downie said. “We’re probably going to have 26 reporters all across the country, a number of the them at the Cronkite School, but a number of them, at least 20, at other universities literally from coast to coast, from Florida to Oregon. They’ll all participate in the spring seminar by teleconference, during which we will do research for the project.”

News21’s 2013 project — Back Home: The Enduring Battles Facing Post 9/11 Veterans — contains 26 stories and more than 50 multimedia pieces, ranging from photos, videos to a 26-minute television documentary produced by the students in the program.

“We launch our own website that has everything on it and then all of our partners can use whatever they want to use, which they did last year through September and October,” Downie said.

Part of the goal of News21 is to supplement the coverage of news organizations that don’t have the resources to conduct such a large-scale investigative project.

“The main goal is to prepare these young journalists — and sometimes not so young journalists that come back to school — for work,” Downie said. “They’re already the best in the country. We’re able to select the best in the country. It’s a national competition. They learn an awful lot during the experience.”

Chad Garland, an older student with an interest in business journalism, has been a veteran since 2002. When heard about the topic of this year’s News21 project, he knew he had to get involved.

“I knew when I was applying that I was one of the few people that had veteran’s experience,” Garland said. He used that experience to become an investigative reporter, focusing on charities that were not what they professed to be.

This type of project, where journalism education intersects with professional training, is something Downie thinks more journalism schools ought to be doing, not only to help their students but to foster the future of investigative reporting.

“There are still a relative minority of journalism schools engaged in this kind of professional journalism with state news agencies as some schools have,” he said. “The Cronkite School has a Washington bureau for all the news media in Arizona, staffed by students. American University has the Investigative Reporting Project that produces professional level work. This is what I think journalism schools should be doing across the country.”

Garland agreed. “News21 was a way to get that real world, multimedia journalism experience that I hadn’t had outside the classroom,” he said.

— Michael O’Connell

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#66 – Investigating for big production: Showtime teams up with the Investigative Reporting Workshop

WASHINGTON – Pulling up the rock and seeing what’s there is the concept at the heart of investigative reporting. But finding a great funding source, a great backing, for an investigation can be difficult.

Two of our friends, former podcast producer Jolie Lee and former professor at AU, Mishi Ibrahim work at the Investigative Reporting Workshop and find themselves in this position — having money to do an investigation! They are working on co-creating an investigative piece for a Showtime/60 Minutes collaboration.

Mishi Ebrahim, left, and Jolie Lee of the Investigative Reporting Workshop talk about the Showtime documentary they’re working on The Years of Living Dangerously. (Photo by Michael O’Connell)

“Years of Living Dangerously is an 8-part, 8-hour series. It’s about climate change and putting a human face on climate change and investigating some interesting things that are going on around the world,” says Ibrahim.

IRW was approached 2 years ago to be involved in the project and although Ibrahim says they knew it was a big project to take on, they knew it would be worthwhile.

The project is being executive produced by legendary director James Cameron. Ibrahim talks about finding the balance between creating a beautifully shot, high production value project while still making sure it has investigative integrity.

“Our job is to do all the research and plan everything and be prepared for that to be thrown to the wind when we get out in the field,” Ibrahim says she tells Lee when preparing for shoots.

The biggest challenge, they say, is finding the characters to follow for a period of time who will allow them to tell the story. In the end, it is a visual product but there has to be the content to support it. They also share their process for investigating a project of this size.

The duo are working with actors who are narrating the piece, major directors and lots of equipment — something Lee had little experience with before this.

“It was such an opportunity that just dropped in my lap because I don’t have any film or documentary making experience and a huge part of this is production. We’re working with all these gadgets I’ve never worked with. We use dollies, cranes, even drones. It’s a whole new world. I think the key is being flexible … but you’re still bringing your journalistic eye to everything you do,” Lee says.

Although Ibrahim had her choice of who she wanted as an associate producer, she thought of Lee because of her hard-working reporting background.

“I’m a big believer that you don’t have know tho the technology and everything. You just have to be smart,” Ibrahim says.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop is housed at American University. You can find them online and the series is expected to be completed in April.

&mash; Megan Cloherty

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