At a follow-up seminar on the state of investigative journalism yesterday, it was clear that there was no shortage of investigative topics for journalists to tackle, but a great deal of staff resources, time (months to a year or more, not hours or days) and old-fashioned shoe leather were still required to get results. The 2009 finalists, who received $10,000 per organization, said that they had had strong support from their editors and media organizations in doing so, despite the wave of cutbacks in the industry.
The five investigative reporting finalists included New York Times reporter David Barstow, for a series on the Pentagon’s misuse of military analysts to promote the Iraq war on television and elsewhere (it won the Polk award for national reporting last month); a five-person team from The Charlotte Observer that investigated how a company that produces chicken parts for market endangered the safety of its largely immigrant workers; a painstaking investigation by the Detroit Free Press that brought down the city’s mayor, leading to his resignation and prosecution for multiple felonies; a two-person team from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that investigated a fraudulent MBA awarded to a local businesswoman who happened to be the West Virginia governor’s daughter; and a series by the new non-profit investigative journalism project ProPublica, whose reporter, Abrahm Lustgarten, exposed the potential threat to drinking water from unregulated drilling for natural gas. Most of the investigative projects included online multimedia presentations that accompanied the lengthy stories.
While women largely swept the Goldsmith journalism awards, the 2009 Goldsmith prize for an academic book on the media went to a Princeton University political scientist, Markus Prior, for Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections.
New York Times reporter Barstow, a 2004 Pulitzer public service award winner for a worker safety series that also won the Goldsmith award, commented after the investigative journalism panel that, while there was considerable progress by women in journalism, there was still much to be done in recruiting minority journalists into journalism.
“The newsroom is doing quite well in terms of women at all levels playing more significant roles,” he said. “But it’s a really significant problem that we do not have more members of minority groups in the newsroom,” a problem that, Barstow noted, is certainly not helped by current newsroom downsizing and job cutbacks. He is hopeful that a more diverse, younger, group working in new media and online will play a far more significant role in changing the face of journalism in the years to come.
Russell was a 2007 judge for the Goldsmith investigative reporting prize.
Anyone else who will say the obvious? That there is no 'gender gap' when type of work and work experience are factored in? And that the rise of female journalists that is applauded above is coterminus with a decline in the economic prospects of that industry, included in the companies for which these women work?
Everyone knows that the faculty lounge and the newsroom are two of the most politically-correct environments there are. That's what this article is (unintentionally) celebrating. Sorry to have such bad manners as to mention these things, but then P.C.-related issues are mostly about manners, rather than bedrock values.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 20 Mar 2009 at 01:51 PM
I want to thank you for this inspiring article about the breakthrough work done by those award winning female investigative journalists featured in “Gender Gap Gone?” by Cristine Russell.
If you search Yahoo for "Native American online investigative journalist," I'm #1.
I am not quite the caliber of those Cristine described but am working my hardest to answer this specific calling as we expose corruption, promote justice and give voice to the voiceless.
Our work proves why diversity is so crucial to our industry because as we shape shift from a tool for daily living to casualties recorded on ledger lines, it’s about surviving to serve our readers.
Writers write. Readers read.
The more viewpoints, the more readers, especially online.
I recently discussed “Just because we’re different does not mean we’re wrong” at a workshop at Seattle’s Rainbow Bookfest and last year, used the Medicine Wheel as the primary symbol for my presentation on diversity at one of our Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington Pro Chapter’s many journalism events.
The four directions are also the four colors; red, yellow, black and white.
If the directions and/or colors are not in balance, the wheel will not roll.
Your article focused on teams of women, also diverse among themselves, that synergized naturally to produce these excellent results, possibly made manifest by an innate intuition that turns our hunches into headlines.
That’s how it works for me, anyway.
So, thank you for this inspiring article about the impact of diversity on investigative journalism.
Sandy Frost
Award winning online nvestigative journalist, website here and author of “Shriners’ Shame: The Dark Side of the World’s Greatest Philanthropy.”
#2 Posted by Sandy Frost, CJR on Fri 20 Mar 2009 at 03:43 PM
To err is human, regardless of gender. Susan Schmidt's 2006 Pulitzer Prize for the Abramoff corruption scandal was a grave error. The key evidence in support of revoking her Pulitzer Prize is her September 26, 2004 story, which appears to be a knowingly false story. (Although her 2006 Pulitzer Prize was based on stories submitted in 2005, her September 26, 2004 story was essential to the 2005 stories submitted.) That story--followed two days later by a scathing Washington Post editorial--was the most sensational Abramoff story of them all: Abramoff had lobbied to shut down a tribal casino in western Texas just so he could appear as a savior the day after it closed, promising the tribe for a $4.2 million fee to get its casino reopened. The key was three words--'two Indian casinos"--which Schmidt foolishly included her story. Indeed, Schmidt did inform the reader that there was a second tribal casino in Texas that Abramoff was lobbying to shut down, but Schmidt neglected to mention its name. How come? The answer is that naming that second tribe's casino would have shut down her story. The second Indian casino (in eastern Texas, near Houston) happened to be only a couple of hours away from the highly lucrative casino of Abramoff's biggest tribal client near the Texas-Louisiana border, most of whose clientele came from the Houston area. That second Indian casino in eastern Texas was the one that was threatening the livelihood--if not the very existence--of the casino of Abramoff's client. Abramoff had absolutely no interest in--he couldn't have cared less about--the tribal casino in west Texas that Schmidt sensationally highlighted in her story, because that casino was 1000 miles away from his client's in Louisiana. Hence, if Schmidt had mentioned the name of the second Indian casino, even a grade-school reader would have quickly realized that Abramoff was only interested in shutting down the tribal casino in eastern Texas, not the one in western Texas. (To give you an idea of how big Texas is: Houston is closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso, which is where the tribal casino Schmidt highlighted is located.) She knew there were "two Indian casinos," because she said so in her story. But did she know the name of the second tribal casino and did she know that it threatened the livelihood of Abramoff's client in Louisiana? The answer appears to be yes. About three weeks earlier (on August 30, 2004), the Washington Post ran a story specifically naming the tribe in east Texas and stating that it was a threat Abramoff's client in Louisiana, and lo and behold, Schmidt's name appears on that very story in a tag line.
To recapitulate, Schmidt knew that there were two Indian casinos in Texas, she knew the name of that second Indian casino, and she knew it was a threat to Abramoff's nearby client in Texas, and yet she appears to have deliberately omitted the name of that second Indian casino from her "sensational" story on September 26.
The facts surrounding this story have already been brought to the attention of prominent members of the journalistic community, but no one seems to show any concern or interest. It would appear that the police are not the only ones with a "code of blue." In other words, it's okay for journalists to point out the sins and cause the destruction of others, but not if the sinner is one of their own.
Gary S. Chafetz, author of The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff
#3 Posted by Gary S. Chafetz, CJR on Fri 20 Mar 2009 at 03:44 PM
I'm glad that the women won the awards, but very offended that they didn't give the feminist movement any credit for "opening the doors." The women took the activists' work for granted and felt no inspiration to "give back" to the women's movement. Very insulting.
#4 Posted by Kathleen Trigiani, CJR on Fri 20 Mar 2009 at 09:16 PM