The Unequal State of America examines the government’s role in rising income inequality and allows viewers to explore what’s happening in their own states through interactive graphics. The Reuters project also appeared at The Atlantic.
Nov 05
The elephant files
My first foray into animal cruelty. The article details deaths, illness and injury within Ringling Bros.’ famed herd of performing elephants. I spent a year examining corporate and government records that surfaced over a decade through FOIA requests and lawsuits against Feld Entertainment, the parent of America’s most popular circus. Along the way, I really fell for the elephants…
Read the full story here:The Cruelest Show on Earth
Updates:
Feld Entertainment agreed to pay a $270,000 penalty — the largest ever under the Animal Welfare Act — to settle numerous alleged violations for mistreatment of elephants and other circus animals.
The USDA announced the settlement Nov. 28. Feld released a statement noting it was not admitting anything but would “enhance” its animal care.
The historic penalty ended decades of USDA inaction on abuse allegations against Ringling documented in inspections, investigations and through long-standing efforts by animal welfare groups — such as PETA, ASPCA and the Animal Protection Institute.
The announcement came on the heels of legislation introduced by Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia that would restrict use of exotic animals in traveling circuses.
Image by David Cook Wildlife Photography
Apr 30
Twitter: Rumor-monger and fact-checker
I asked my 18-year old recently where she gets her news. To my surprise, she said from Twitter. And not by following the Washington Post or New York Times, but through Tweets from friends in her Twitter community. I asked how she could be sure the news was true. She explained that it’s vetted aggressively by the crowd.
But where do they go to check out rumors? What sources do they consider credible? Andy Carvin, NPR online community organizer, shows how journalistic social media communities — communities that use reporting skills and values to collect and disseminate information — can play a crucial role. His tick-tock (or Tweet-tock) of a fact-check collaboration by him and his followers provides a playbook for how to do it right:
Apr 03
Oligarchs inspire creation of first Baltic investigative reporting center
Update: Inga Springe launched the Baltic Center for Investigative Reporting in fall 2011 with an exposé on money laundering. You can see it here.
What’s a hard-nosed reporter to do when her financially ailing newspaper is taken over by the people she likes to investigate?
Inga Springe emptied her desk in 2009 and joined an exodus of colleagues from Diena, Latvia’s most influential newspaper. Before long, they had launched their own investigative news magazine, ir, which exposed Diena‘s hidden ties to oligarchs — the super-wealthy businessmen who wield tremendous political power in the tiny country.
Now Springe is in the United States stumping for another project to bolster watchdog journalism in Latvia. She hopes to raise interest and money for creation of the first nonprofit investigative reporting center in the Baltic States.
She envisions a fortress for fearless reporting on government.
Modeled after successful nonprofit ventures in the United States, the Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism would pursue the kinds of stories that the mainstream media no longer have interest in or resources to do, she says. A small staff would conduct original investigations and provide grants and training in computer-assisted reporting.
Investigative journalism is a relatively young tradition in the Baltic States.
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are former Soviet states that declared independence in early 1990s. The countries since have developed a free press, albeit one subject to political influence, occasional violent attacks and, as throughout the world, failing fortunes.
Springe came of age during the post-Soviet years and developed an early interest in reporting. She worked at the small television station in her hometown in high school, helping to produce a local news show. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism and landed a plum job at Diena (which means “Day”), writing features for the weekend magazine. She wrote her share of light pieces on celebrities, homes, and real estate. But she says she found herself drawn more to stories on prominent government officials and businessmen – and unable to stop digging into their dealings once she started.
It was this compulsion that led her, and her editors, to recognize a special talent. She was assigned to organized crime, smuggling and official corruption. She caught the chief of Riga’s Public Utilities Commission on camera gambling during work hours and reported that she had racked up huge debts. Springe documented a lucrative land deal and suspicious interventions in smuggling cases by a top customs official who was subsequently arrested on bribery charges. (Click here for a story she wrote about the case in English.)
After Diena was sold by its Swedish owners, Springe continued her reporting for ir (Latvian for “is”), which has survived nearly a year on subscriptions and donations, especially from Latvian-Americans.
Last year, she was selected for a yearlong Hubert H. Humphrey fellowship to study a topic of her choosing in the United States. Springe decided to pursue a former colleague’s suggestion that she create an investigative reporting center.
Based at Philip Merrill College of Journalism on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, she has visited some of the leading U.S. investigative reporting nonprofits: Mother Jones, a bi-monthly magazine based in San Francisco and one of the oldest nonprofit journalism ventures in the country; the Center for Public Integrity, a booming Washington-based organization known for its innovative database analysis; ProPublica, based in New York — the first online-only media outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Their revenue models represent a mix of large, private donations, foundation grants and subscriptions. Springe says there’s little tradition of charitable giving in Latvia, the poorest country in the European Union.
Relying on a wealthy private funder in Latvia poses another problem: There are only a handful, and their influence makes them likely subjects of investigations.
By broadening the center’s mission to encompass Estonia and Lithuania, she hopes to generate interest among international foundations. But the diminutive region’s relative stability and safely ensconced democracies make it less interesting to funders, she is finding.
Yet corruption is on the rise, according to watchdog organization Freedom House.
While in the United States, Springe took advantage of public records and databases to check up on her government’s activities in Washington.
She discovered millions of dollars spent on lobbying here.
The story received big play in a prominent magazine back home. But when she makes her impassioned pitch here for a center that will “shine the light on private and government institutions” in the Baltic states, she finds she often has to start with a geography lesson.
“People even don’t know the difference between Baltics and Balkans.”
Some funders lose interest as soon as they realize she is not talking about the better-known “B” region, which boasts 52 million people to the Baltic’s seven million and whose recent history of ethnic conflict has made it a favorite target of media grants.
So far, Springe has raised more awareness than money. But she says she isn’t discouraged. A seasoned investigative journalist, she knows the next call might be the one that changes her luck.
Mar 04
New media entrepreneur seeks real water cooler for virtual world
Patrick Roanhouse, second from left, covers the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. (Photo by The Plan8 Podcast)
Even the new generation of independent, mobile journalists needs a home base.
That’s what Patrick Roanhouse discovered when he got serious about podcasting. He is founder and host of Plan8.TV, a two-year-old startup based in Baltimore that features his coverage of tech confabs and interviews with digital glitterati.
He said he enjoyed the freedom of doing his own thing but realized its limits when he reached a point in his business’s development where he needed to upgrade his video equipment.
Roanhouse envisioned a community meeting space that not only would allow sharing of equipment and stories but also would offer a supportive, even galvanizing environment for new media entrepreneurs and citizen journalists.
His center is just an idea right now. He is out recruiting a board of directors and finishing work on a mission statement that he hopes will help raise money for the nonprofit venture. His efforts could get a boost if Google selects Baltimore as one of its trial locations for an ultra-high speed broadband network. The mayor and a citizens’ group, Bmore Fiber, have been rallying support for the city. But more than 1,100 towns are vying for the investment, which is expected to deliver Internet speeds up to 100 times faster than current broadband and spur digital innovation and access. Google was to have announced its selection by the end of 2010 but pushed it into 2011.
While there are many virtual communities in existence, Roanhouse said he thinks the time has come for a physical place where mobile journalists and new media entrepreneurs can gather around a water cooler to trade tips, debate journalism ethics and promote independent voices.
Roanhouse’s background is in I.T. but he now he finds himself speaking of First Amendment ideals with a journalist’s zeal.
Feb 18
New force to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted
CARACAS, Venezuela — The rich hate him, saying he has stirred up class warfare. The privately owned media, closely aligned with his political opponents, pillory him daily as an enemy of democracy. And the Bush administration, which supported those who briefly overthrew him in 2002, describes him as a dangerous leftist.
But in the shantytowns here in the capital, President Hugo Chavez is revered as a national savior.
“Our hope is with Chavez,” said Carlos Contreras, who urged residents to support the president in Sunday’s recall vote. “All of our other presidents promised to help the poor, but he’s the first one who has kept his word.”
So opened a story in the Los Angeles Times on Aug. 16, 2004, as votes were being counted on whether to recall Chavez. Written by Ken Silverstein, the piece helped explain what would soon become become apparent: That Chavez’s ardent and mobilized support among the country’s poor would keep him in office.
Whatever you think of Chavez (and who doesn’t have a strong opinion?), it was both important and challenging to report the political situation accurately. Ken was on my investigative team in Washington at the time. One day during the lead-up to the recall, he came into my office to make a case for sending him to Venezuela.
Ken Silverstein (Photo courtesy of Sandy Chase)
He had worked for AP in Brazil from 1989-1993 as a young reporter, and he knew South American politics better than most Washington journalists. In his view, the coverage had been skewed toward those with greatest access to the foreign press: U.S. diplomats and the business class in Venezuela.
I had to agree. But we still had to convince the foreign desk, which already had an experienced correspondent covering the story, thank you very much. Making the case for Ken to join her took some negotiating. But Ken’s a persuasive (and persistent) fellow. He arrived in Caracus just days before the vote.
Over drinks this week, he recalled his motivation and approach to the assignment.
Getting the story entailed persuading editors that there were significant voices out there that weren’t being heard – like proving a negative — and then tracking them down. This was pre-Twitter, which launched in 2006. Five years later, social media have changed the dynamic. I asked Ken about the transformation:
Ken recently left Harper’s Magazine, where he was Washington correspondent, to practice his craft for Global Witness, an economic justice advocacy organization. He still sees an important role for journalists.
Photo credit: Sandy Chase
Feb 08
An audio entrepreneur
Andrew Kromah in Democracy on Deadline.
“By nature, true investigative journalists don’t work for anybody. They work for the story.”
I think I first made that observation in Democracy on Deadline: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press. It’s a fascinating documentary by filmmaker Cal Skaggs that features journalists from around the world who have found ways to dig up and disseminate stories in the toughest political and economic circumstances. They truly work for their stories and do so through an impressive, sometimes hair-raising mix of courage, invention and stubborn single-mindedness.
One of the memorable segments came to mind during a confluence of classroom discussion last week on mobile technology and entrepreneurial journalism. The story focused on the determination of Andrew Kromah, an investigative reporter and independent radio entrepreneur in Sierra Leone, to report on the country’s elections. Kromah first made a name reporting on government corruption under the name “Mr. Owl.” He started his own radio station in the capital of Freetown in 1993 and established another one three years later in Bo, the second largest city. The first was burned down twice. The other came under gunfire during the presidential election in 1996 as the station urged people to vote and warned them away from outbreaks of violence.
“The commandants came up to the station just about 100 yards away and the man who was standing beside me as the security was killed–I mean, this was like two feet away from me–and bullets kept coming up,” he told Terry Gross in a 2001 radio interview for Fresh Air. “So we had to tape the microphone over the speaker of the VHF radio. We ran into the bush and we were still broadcasting from the bush while guns were being shot, were fired. But the message at that time was to tell the people that go out and vote, because our broadcast was getting to the villages where voting was taking place.”
The documentary picked up in 2002, when Kromah was formulating a plan for covering the first post-war election with ridiculously scarce staff and equipment . Kromah joined forces with fellow journalist Hannah Foullah to recruit a network of stations to pool their meager resources. They dispatched reporters to polling places with basic (non-smart) cell phones. The reporters called into the station’s landline, where employees held the hearing piece up to the microphone to broadcast live reports to listeners. The voices and views of voters were transmitted in like manner. The audio wasn’t high quality but I can’t imagine high-end equipment doing a better job of capturing the excitement and import of the moment.
I checked in on Kromah’s recent activities. He continues to operate his radio stations. He also has a new venture that makes the most of another low-cost communications technology: He’s promoting community radio with programming largely produced by children and delivered to areas without electricity via solar-powered radios.
Feb 02
Call in the cavalry
Money and power have never been so concentrated in the nation’s capital. Yet the ranks of journalists are at a modern low. The Washington bureau has been replaced by the Washington beat at many major news organizations. Some have retreated altogether, saying they’ll rely on the AP. Really? Isn’t that like posting a single guard to keep watch over Fort Knox?
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a pine or whine for the good old days. This is an appeal for recognition that we’ve lost something critically important to democracy. And it’s a call to action for the sort of creativity and ingenuity at work in Iran in 2009, Haiti in 2010 and Egypt today. If they can find technologically innovative ways to keep the information flowing in much more dire circumstances, shouldn’t we be able to do the same?
“Abandoned Agencies” AJR June/July 2010
PowerPoint illustration by Deb Nelson
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