Good, old-fashioned hard work often wins

By Will Corbin

Here’s the premise: Every great journalistic effort requires critical decisions at critical junctures. We asked editors to tell us about key decisions in the life of the fine journalism that contended for the 2000 Pulitzer Prizes. Those who responded represent winners, finalists and strong contenders for those prizes.

This is the third of a three-part series. This material was assembled largely through e-mail, so what you’ll read here are the relatively unfiltered words of the editors.

Thanks go to the Pulitzer jury chairs who offered up the strong also-rans in this year’s competition — and a special thanks to the editors who responded to our inquiry.

The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C., was a finalist in Breaking News Reporting for Hurricane Floyd coverage. This comes from an interview with Anders Gyllenhaal, editor:

What looked like a “standard” hurricane at first — the usual coastal damage — became something new and different when Floyd left the coast relatively unscathed and then dumped 20 inches of rain on much of North Carolina in the space of a day and a half. That brought the first phase of the N&O’s coverage.

“The first phase was maybe the easiest part, because it’s the part we understand the best, a huge natural disaster,” said Gyllenhaal. “You just go out and cover the hell out of it. You know just what do to, which is to go all out, spare no space.”

The dimensions of storm for North Carolina were “huge,” and so was the coverage, involving some 50 to 100 people.

Phase Two: Everybody’s tired, everybody wants to come back. “We needed to figure out how to have a whole team to focus on the long term, a month or two out.” That meant establishing clear responsibility for that follow-up coverage. The N&O’s editors knew they were dealing with something unlike previous breaking news events, so they had to invent a new kind of response.

Rather than having reporters move in and out of continuing storm coverage, the editors came up with ways to keep a team on the subject and relieve those staffers of other day-to-day beat coverage responsibilities.

The final phase will be “with us for not weeks or months, but years. There are a couple of people following pieces of this perhaps forever.”

Gyllenhaal points out that North Carolina, in the line of many Atlantic hurricanes, provides plenty of opportunities: five big storms in recent years. “That practice does help you.”

It also makes readers keenly interested. “Your readers are very much attuned to this after these experiences. There’s a lot of interest in it on the part of our readership, which makes it easier to gear everybody up. The inclination on everybody’s part was to do more.”

*****

The Star-Ledger, Newark, had a contender in Public Service on racial profiling in New Jersey. Jim Willse, editor, writes:

I suspect our experience goes exactly against your thesis. Which is not to say the thesis isn’t true — I’m sure it is. But in the case of racial profiling, I’m not sure there was ever a point where we said to ourselves, “Hey, this could be Pulitzer quality. Let’s put it into overdrive.”

It was pretty simple. Four guys get shot by state police, an organization that has been accused in the past of targeting minorities. So we asked for the relevant records and got stonewalled. We are blessed with tenacious lawyers, but even so, it took eight months for a judge to order the state to turn over even the first trickle of data. We would have done it faster if we could have.

The central decision that the story was worth all that effort was pretty straightforward. Cops should not be hassling motorists because of their color, and as the state’s biggest paper, we should do something about it. I suspect that sounds a bit self-important, but it really wasn’t any more complicated than that.

In fact, the heft of the work sort of snuck up on us. This is largely because there were many intermissions between stories. There was a shooting on the Turnpike in April 1998, after which we started asking for arrest data. Eight months later we got it. Then a few more weeks went by before we got more. There were weeks in between other stories that reconstructed the shooting, or in which the head of the state cops ran his mouth, or where we learned damaging information about troopers.

It wasn’t until after the bulk of what eventually became the entry had actually been in the paper that we understood that the stories, taken together, were pretty powerful and certainly had produced a wealth of reform.

*****

The Chicago Tribune had a contender for the work of Dianne Donovan in editorial writing (and winner of ASNE’s writing award in that category). Don Wycliff, then editorial page editor, and now the newspaper’s public editor, writes:

I traditionally ask all of my board members at the start of each year to identify one or two issues they can make a “cause” of. Dianne, who had written occasionally on juvenile justice in the past, adopted that as one of her causes. It was particularly appropriate because last year was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the nation’s first juvenile court — that in Cook County.

To be frank, this cause didn’t produce much in the first few months of the year. But in April, we got the case of the 9-year-old boy who was accused of killing his 5-year-old foster brother. That case seemed to arouse Dianne’s passions. She wrote the first of the editorials in her Pulitzer entry, the one that called attention to the absurdity of questioning a 9-year-old without parent or lawyer present in the middle of the night.

That editorial was the real takeoff point for Dianne’s campaign. She began to develop sources on the research into the validity of children’s confessions and the conditions under which kids can or cannot be legitimately interrogated. And she began to identify policy prescriptions that she pressed for in subsequent editorials.

*****

The Philadelphia Inquirer, had a contender in Public Service for stories on frequently fatal hospital errors. Jonathan Neumann, editor for investigations, writes:

Reporter Andrea Gerlin was covering the daily breaking story of the impending and eventual bankruptcy of Allegheny Medical Systems, the largest private hospital chain in the Philadelphia area at the time. In doing news stories and relatively quick-breaking investigative stories, Andrea was going through the bankruptcy filings in federal court in Pittsburgh when she came across a large bound document that did not have a title, just a court filing number.

She looked through it and saw that is was what is called an insurance “loss run” for Allegheny hospitals. In less technical terms, what that means is that the document listed hundreds of individual cases of patients who Allegheny managers believed might potentially sue the hospital as the result of “adverse events” that were reported by hospital staff. As soon as Andrea saw the document, she realized it was potential dynamite, and she requested and received a copy.

For several months, as the bankruptcy story was developing as news, Andrea and I looked through the “loss run” files and tried to figure out what was in there. The document was very long and hard to understand, including reports from five hospitals, and including names, dates and specific descriptions of medical mistakes over the course of 10 years.

Here were the critical turning points in the development of the story:

First, we recognized that this document was the starting point for a major project. The subject would, at the very least, be the story of how one big-city hospital experienced hundreds of medical errors over the course of a decade, many resulting in deaths of patients. It took months of persuading managers and editors at several levels, but the newspaper made the decision to detach Andrea to work on the story. (I’d say that is almost always the key turning point in doing a project. Without that, the story doesn’t get done.)

We started by selecting about 50 cases to look at in depth, by going to court records when lawsuits had been filed, and interviewing patients, surviving family members, doctors and other medical professions.

I think the major turning point in developing the story came a few months into the reporting. Andrea and I were going through the document for about the 100th time, and we noticed that most of the cases included the initials “SL” at the top. We learned that “SL” meant the statute of limitations had run out on the time for a family to sue the hospital for malpractice. We suddenly realized for the first time after months of studying the document that this meant the hospital had kept meticulous records of serious medical errors, but that the hospital had never informed the patients or their survivors.

The logic was clear: Of some 600 cases at one hospital, there were about 150 lawsuits, and all were indicated in the document. But some of the “SLs” were even more serious than the cases that had lawsuits. We wondered why the family wouldn’t sue if a family member died as the result of a medical error. The answer seemed to be because the family didn’t know about the error. So we set out to interview all 380 families with cases that said SL.

So a major focus of the story changed. All people make errors; that is only human. But we learned that the hospital had a policy to keep records of the errors, but not inform the patients.

The next turning point was to spread out from one local hospital to the entire nation. While we did have some broad-based medical journal reports on this matter, we reasoned that if one big city hospital makes so many errors per year and has a policy not to tell patients if they can avoid it, then it may be that hospitals across America do the same. So we interviewed doctors, medical professors and hospital officials at major medical centers across the country. We found that the Philadelphia example was exactly illustrative of all hospitals in America.

*****

The Baltimore Sun had a contender in National Reporting, “The Plucking of the American Chicken Farmer,” a series by Dan Fesperman and Kate Shatzkin, about how big chicken processors, with help from government regulations, take advantage of chicken farmers. This report comes from an interview with Bill Marimow, editor:

At the Sun, which makes a big deal about such projects, the ideas come from a reporter seeing bigger possibilities from a spark of a story, a reporter with an idea from a beat or an interest, or an editor who gets an interesting tip and enlists reporters to carry it further. This one, Marimow said, came via the last route. Then-editor John Carroll, now heading up the Los Angeles Times newsroom, got an idea from a source who said the chicken business — a major economic engine on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — would be worth a hard look.

Carroll saw the potential, so he assigned two strong reporters who would make a stronger team: Fesperman from general assignment and Shatzkin, from the court beat. Marimow describes Fesperman as sophisticated and determined, with a keen eye for a good story, and Shatzkin as tenacious, dogged, analytical and smart. They talked up the story and launched the reporting effort. Other key decisions would follow:

• They would go anywhere in the country to pursue the story (it took the reporters far beyond Maryland).
• A photographer, John Makely, would join the reporters from the start, to document every step on film.
• They would work as hard to get the other side of the story as they did to pursue the story’s focus.

*****

The Miami Herald had a close contender in Public Service for a series of stories detailing questionable spending of public funds at Miami International Airport. Judy Miller, city editor and head of the paper’s investigative efforts, writes:

In 1998 and 1999, The Herald focused a sharp spotlight on public spending in Miami Dade County. The paper revealed that a politically connected tree grower had literally shorted the county on palm trees, routinely billing for 32-footers while delivering palms of barely 24 feet. Another story detailed how contractors billed for phantom street striping and paving jobs. We told how Port of Miami money had been used to fund political campaigns and lavish shopping sprees.

We decided to turn out attention on Miami International Airport, where billions of dollars in spending is controlled by the 13-member Miami Dade Commission. We did several front-page stories that showed the airport had paid far too much for routine projects, such as a basic car wash that cost $3.5 million. All of the stories were well received by readers, who encouraged us to do more.

Our “critical juncture’’ came when a common theme emerged: Most of the bloated no-bid contracts were going to contractors represented by a small circle of lobbyists closely tied to county commissioners.

*****

The (Portland) Oregonian had a finalist in Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the New Carissa, a ship laden with heavy petroleum fuels that grounded on the Oregon coast, and a contender in National Reporting for an investigation of eco-terrorists. Len Reed, environmental team leader, writes:

I think four decisions established New Carissa as a big commitment story that went to “a higher plane:”

Decision 1. The decision, made on Day Two of the grounding, to go on-site with editors, graphic artists, shooters, systems specialists. This transformed the story from fragmented “remote” dispatches by a field correspondent and staff reporter to a directed newsgathering team that could collaborate and debate all day (and sometimes night), driving the story in multiple directions while otherwise covering obvious developments.

We made the decision to go on-site at an early morning meeting held in the old news conference room at which all top editors were present, as well as photo and graphics. My argument at the time: This looks like a regional story now, but it threatens to become a devastating environment story. The ship was loaded with 400,000 gallons of oil. While the full devastation never came to pass, the Carissa did menace as an environment debacle, sullying coastline and ocean along the way, and its threat marshalled our collective will as a serious environment-writing newspaper. By being there, we “created” our expertise and, I think, the story.

Decision 2. Our decision, after three days of teamwork at the beach, that the “experts” really didn’t have control of the situation despite their confident performances at press briefings. Our reporting showed that things were even more threatening than we’d imagined. As we calculated failure odds, chronicled ongoing division within the so-called “unified command” and grasped the fragility of the Coos Bay coastline and fisheries, we realized that no one ever gets a glimpse into the rarified, arcane world of marine salvage. We were determined to do so.

Therese Bottomly, our managing editor for news, backed us in our assessment, and it was clear at that point we were in for the long haul. Most papers showed up and went home by this point, bewildered (and bored?) by the complexity and enormity of the situation.

Decision 3. The decision by me and James Holman environment assistant team leader, and a core constituency of the environment team, to continuously staff and manage the story, no matter how long it took (oh, noooooo!), to maintain continuity and story authority. Put another way, we avoided democratizing the story around the newsroom or having it rotate in shifts among many, fearing that so much relearning by new staff would make the succession of stories lose edge and suffer redundancy. Thus all far-flung reporters who rotated in for relief wound up assisting/collaborating with one or two of the four core reporters. Important operational note: It didn’t matter that it was me or James or the environment team (we just happened to have this beast called Carissa slide into our lives). What mattered is that one team committed and sustained continuity.

Decision 4. Our decision to commit to an aggressive analysis of the mayhem at the beach, months after we’d done the “hot” news stories and well after people could hardly bear another Carissa thought. Result: Our final end-of-the-year piece, which deconstructed the performance of clowns in official capacity, all at risk to the public and environment. Going after this piece helped us assess our own performance, too, as we re-reported key events and our understanding of them as they had happened.

The key decision in the eco-terrorism story is singular: We agreed to ask at every step of the way, what do our findings really mean? While this gimme-a-break refrain pleads the obvious, it also helped us resist going into print with the latest cool findings as they were reported, losing them to the white noise of extremist lore. The very story was about connecting dots or not, as it was occasioned by the Vail explosion and our memory of so many other, smaller acts of sabotage. Only new, primary research conducted systematically could guide us, and only by exerting restraint in reviewing our findings would we have a shot at doing something that might be original, credible, even potentially important. So this little Socratic game of asking what everything meant was a useful device, lifting the story, ultimately a series, out of the ordinary to its final level.

*****

Montana’s Great Falls Tribune had a winning entry in Explanatory Reporting for reporter Eric Newhouse’s series on alcohol abuse and its effect on the community. Jim Strauss, editor, writes:

Two key decisions affected the series from start to finish: First, we decided up front that we would spread the series out over a year. We did that for a couple of reasons. For a small paper (34,000 circulation) such as ours to be able to handle a project of the size we envisioned, we had to spread the load. We don’t have project teams. There was no other practical way to do it.

We also pitied the reader. Alcohol abuse is a tough topic. Giving it all to our readers in one huge section or over several days would have been too much.

Not only did this approach allow us to put in the reporting, photo, editing and design time needed, it also allowed us to develop stronger sources. As Eric Newhouse pursued the series month after month, his sources were familiar and impressed with his work and, therefore, were more willing to cooperate.

The yearlong approach also paced readers, who looked forward to each month’s installment.

Second, we decided up front that this would be a series on the record. Often, social-problem stories are pursued through anonymous sources. To have the maximum impact with the series, we felt the segments should be Montanans on the record. Montana is a small (in population), tightly knit state that is often referred to as one big small town. We wanted our coverage to be neighbor to neighbor.

In the end, a couple of sources who would have talked with us off the record did not participate. Overwhelmingly, though, people realized they had a story to tell that could help other Montanans. The depth of emotion that came out through this approach, in my opinion, separated our coverage from other similar series.

Corbin is editor of the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.