Goldsmith Prize-winners and finalists attributed their latest successes to fresh eyes, simple questions and supportive editors at a session titled “The Present and Future of Investigative Reporting” on Wednesday.
Debbie Cenziper’s and Sarah Cohen’s Washington Post series on landlords forcing tenants out of rent-controlled apartments won the $ 25,000 Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
New to D.C. after a Pulitzer Prize-winning career at The Miami Herald, Cenziper marveled at how many luxury condos were replacing low-cost housing. At the panel of Goldsmith winners and finalists, she had a “fairly obvious question: What happened to those families?”
It took Cenziper’s “fresh eye to see what’s right in front of people,” said Cohen, a database editor who has shared a Pulitzer for investigative reporting.
They had no secret sources, finding many irate and voluble tenants and landlords who admitted they wanted them out.
They showed the graphic results of housing code violations, like a child with welts from bedbugs. And by scouring more than a thousand court cases, they uncovered a pattern of housing inspection lapses that triggered the District’s Tenant Protection Act.
Cenziper said investigative reporting is “going strong” at the Post and that she and Cohen were “blessed with the kind of support we needed.” But she said she’s “sick” over The Miami Herald‘s severe newsroom cutbacks. She said her old paper “still has really good people, but it’s very sad.”
Pulitzer winner David Barstow, a Goldsmith finalist for his New York Times series on how the Pentagon recruited and rewarded military analysts for pro-Iraq War broadcast commentary, is another reporter who tries to think up “really simple questions.”
His stories started with his concern about the rise of “spin” of the media. Like the Post team, he mentioned the candor of some of his sources. One political appointee was proud of his role, he said, while some generals felt guilty about being used.
Despite the Detroit Free Press‘s financial woes, reporters Jim Schaefer and M.L. Elrick said they had steadfast support during their yearlong investigation that led to the resignation and jailing of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
“We had some very responsible editors,” Schaefer said. “We could have printed several stories the first day, but their editors encouraged them to examine thousands of text messages that revealed the mayor’s adultery, lies and insider dealings.
To obtain some documents, they filed Freedom of Information Act requests. For others, Schaefer said, “Our paper fought all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, God love ’em.”
Schaefer said that while the paper’s investigative reporting is still “great, we’re missing the middle reporting levels” because many print staffers have been shifted to Web site responsibilities.
On March 30, the Free Press will cut back home delivery to three days a week. “Content sells paper” and publisher David Hunke believes this Web emphasis will be a model for the newspaper industry, Schaefer said. “I hope to God it works (because) the ideal is to preserve our core values” of quality journalism.
Also filing FOIA requests by the score was the five-member Charlotte Observer team that uncovered a major cover-up of poultry company injuries and disregard for safety regulations.
“Investigative reporting is at the top of the list for our editors,” said Ames Alexander. “We had early drafts of stories, and it would have been very easy to get it in the paper earlier, editors said, ‘It’s great stuff but keep digging.’ They want to do this kind of work, and they want to do it right.”
His Observer colleague, Franco Ordonez, praised editors’ backing during these tense economic times. When the team wondered whether they’d be able to continue their lengthy investigation, he said editors stood behind them. And the reporters continue to work nearly full-time on the project, spotlighting such issues as child labor law violations.
Another series that’s not stopping: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s probe of corruption at West Virginia University.
The stories started when reporter Patricia Sabatini made a routine check of a master’s degree claimed by the West Virginia governor’s daughter. When a university spokesman kept putting her off, her editor told her to pursue it, and she recruited Len Boselovic, a reporter she said “wouldn’t be discouraged by roadblocks.”
After cold calls, secret meetings and leaked records, they ran the first of more than 50 stories that prompted the university’s president, provost and business dean to resign.
“And we’re still reporting,” Sabatini said.
Abrahm Lustgarten, a former Fortune magazine staff reporter now with ProPublica, a new Web non-profit organization for investigative reporting, said he “stumbled into” a story about the potential danger to drinking water from natural gas drilling when he got a private letter from an EPA source.
After that, he said, “All it was was a diligent examination of public records read patiently. I didn’t even have to FOI anybody.
“It was just a matter of traveling on long dirt roads in and knocking on doors.”
