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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Investigations

1. November 21, 2011 03:09 PM

   FT Style Undermines A Good Investigation

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Financial Times has a good investigation today into how hedge funds are stocking their boards with directors in the Cayman Islands who serve on hundreds of boards. The FT did a lot of work here, analyzing thousands of SEC filings to come up with its numbers, which show hedge funds are using something like robosigners: Call them robo-directors. Like...

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2. March 2, 2011 05:40 PM

   SI/CBS College Football Investigation Lacks Context

   Their stats on player arrests aren't so eye-opening after all

   By Ryan Chittum

   Sports Illustrated and CBS News are out with a big investigation into crime in college football. They looked at the teams in last season's preseason Top 25 poll and pulled the records of all the players to find out how many had been arrested and/or convicted and to rank the worst teams. Its eye-opening finding: Seven percent of college football...

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3. June 7, 2012 06:50 AM

   The Seattle Times sinks a local polluter

   Investigating the sketchy background of a capsized ship's owner

   By Ryan Chittum

   Most business investigations focus on corporations and investors. And for good reason: They're the ones with the money and the power. But sometimes a small business owner can have an outsized impact too. Here in Seattle three weeks ago, a boat moored off Whidbey Island caught fire and sank, spilling thousands of gallons of fuel, shutting down shellfish harvesting in...

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4. November 10, 2010 03:32 PM

   A Times Story Bodes Ill for the Washington Post

   An investigation shows how Kaplan used predatory tactics to get students and government money

   By Ryan Chittum

   The for-profit college business just looks worse and worse, and a New York Times investigation this morning paints a disturbing picture of what's going on at The Washington Post Company's cash cow, Kaplan. The Times relies on four whistleblower suits filed by ex-employees, but it backs them up with interviews with dozens of current and former Kaplan workers, as well...

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5. April 19, 2012 07:51 PM

   Excellent Reuters Probe Uncovers a CEO’s Billion-Dollar Loans

   By Ryan Chittum

   Reuters has a fantastic piece of enterprise reporting on natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy, reporting on serious conflicts of interest in investments by its founder and CEO Aubrey McClendon. Yesterday, the report helped send Chesapeake shares down 10 percent at one point. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette broke the news last month that McClendon was borrowing against his share of Chesapeake mineral-rights...

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6. October 7, 2011 11:29 AM

   Golden Teeth Redux

   A Dallas TV station investigates the state's Medicaid shenanigans

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Byron Harris, the dogged investigative reporter for Dallas, Texas television station WFAA, has come up with two more installments in his continuing investigation of the state’s Medicaid agency and the money it spends on braces for kids who, under the state’s rules, might not qualify for them. Throughout the summer Harris told stories of how dental chains profited mightily from...

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7. July 26, 2012 03:23 PM

   InsideClimate out front

   Investigation of Kalamazoo oil spill calamity led the pack

   By Curtis Brainard

   In early July, the media covered a long awaited report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which blamed the 2010 oil spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River on the pipeline operator’s “pervasive organizational failures” and “weak regulation” at the federal level, but one website beat even NTSB to the punch. Two weeks earlier, InsideClimate News had published the results of...

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8. September 23, 2011 11:31 AM

   Keeping an Eye on Patient Safety, Part IV

   Sac Bee catches nursing home lies

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Slowly the public is coming to realize that health care institutions are not always safe places. Since the Institute of Medicine published its landmark study on unsafe medical care more than a decade ago, a grassroots patient safety movement has blossomed and media interest along with it. This is the fourth in a series of posts that will examine what...

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9. April 23, 2012 06:38 PM

   The Times’s Extraordinary Wal-Mart Investigation

   By Ryan Chittum

   David Barstow's epic Wal-Mart investigation in the Sunday New York Times has already lopped $10 billion off the company's market value ($8 billion if you assume Wal-Mart would have been down 1 percent like the rest of the market today). Rest assured, though, the reverberations from this piece have just begun to be felt in Bentonville. The Times gives Barstow...

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10. August 12, 2011 02:10 PM

    The WSJ Advances the Foreign-Exchange Gouging Story

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal has a good investigation that advances its series of stories looking at how banks, and particularly Bank of New York Mellon, gouged pension funds on currency trades. The funds had standing orders to let banks exchange currency when they do other international trades that require different currencies. But BNY Mellon appears to have priced the trades...

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11. April 3, 2012 07:18 PM

    What Do I Owe You?

    Don't ask Bank of America

    By Ryan Chittum

    When a bank sells bad debts to third-party collectors, the first order of business would seem to be to tell the collectors how much they can legally collect. So when Bank of America sells hundreds of millions of dollars of bad credit-card debts to a third party for a couple of cents on the dollar and tells them at least...

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12. August 17, 2012 11:24 AM

    When hospital profits clash with patient care: an investigation

    The Times exposes questionable care at HCA hospitals

    By Trudy Lieberman

    This week The New York Times concluded a rare look at the inner workings of the country’s biggest for-profit hospital chain. The two-part expose is significant, coming at a time when places of healing are rapidly organizing themselves into big conglomerates much like the automakers did decades ago. The story raises significant questions. The economic ones: Is this good for...

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