From June 29 – July 1, 2009, nearly thirty investigative news organizations came together to strategize the creation of an investigative news network. At the conference, representatives from CIR, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, Huffington Post, Investigative Reporters and Editors, The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and many others explored new models for watchdog journalism at the Pocantico Conference Center in New York.

The event was sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Surdna Foundation, and The William Penn Foundation.

Today, the participants posted "The Pocantico Declaration: Creating a Nonprofit Investigative News Network":

Resolved, that we, representatives of nonprofit news organizations, gather at a time when investigative reporting, so crucial to a functioning democracy, is under threat. There is an urgent need to nourish and sustain the emerging investigative journalism ecosystem to better serve the public.

Recognizing, that there are many forms of potential collaboration: Editorial, which at the least could be doing joint accountability journalism projects, publishing on the same day on multiple websites with other, multimedia partners, which would entail efficient, shared information, reporting and synchronous editing; Administrative, exchanging information about necessary organizational “back office” functions such as employee benefits, health care and general liability insurance, libel review and insurance, directors and officers insurance, etc., and perhaps even centralizing some of these functions to increase efficiencies; and Financial, at a minimum, exchanging development-related information and even jointly fundraising, at the most, pioneering new economic models to help to monetize the shared, combined content of the member organizations, in order to achieve a more sustainable journalism.

>> Read the complete declaration here.

The Inter Press Service, an international news agency focused on development and globalization, published a lengthy review of photojournalist Mimi Chakarova's work on sex trafficking today. Chakarova's multimedia project, The Price of Sex, was produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Chakarova's work sensitively presents the tragic stories of women from countries such as Moldova or the Ukraine sold into brutal sexual slavery often by neighbours or acquaintances. The few women who manage to escape find themselves facing not only serious health issues or psychological trauma, but also the social stigma associated with having worked as sex workers.

One of the young women interviewed by Chakarova, Jenea, from a small village in southern Moldova, was sold into prostitution by a neighbour who had promised to help her get a job in Moscow. At 18, Jenea found herself locked in a hotel room in Turkey, forced to sleep with as many as 50 men on some days. She escaped after one year.

Back in her village, she now lives in a two-room house with her sister and niece, unable to find a job because of prejudice, and health problems - incontinence, a direct result of the sexual abuse suffered in Turkey. "It would have been better for me not to have been born," Jenea says softly, on camera.

Chakarova’s research certainly goes further than telling the terrible stories of trafficked women. The detailed personal accounts highlight the problems that need to be addressed if sex trafficking is to be controlled. Poverty emerges time and again as the main cause in each of her stories.

In recent months immigration judges have granted refuge to a small but emerging number of Mexicans fleeing drug-related violence, particularly in South Texas, as described in a recent CIR report published in the Los Angeles Times.

Anthony Matulewicz, an immigration attorney in Edinburg, Texas, said he has won two such cases, including asylum for a kidnapped businessman and refuge for a drug informant who was threatened by a Mexican federal officer.

Another man from Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, was given refuge after showing that because he'd refused a local drug lord's request to store drugs and weapons in his home, he’d been threatened, abducted and beaten by police officers who worked for the trafficker, said Henry Cruz, the man’s attorney. The attorneys asked that their clients' identity not be disclosed for safety reasons.

Warring drug cartels and corrupted police forces have led to a decline in public security in cities such as Juarez and Tijuana, as CIR recently reported for The Nation. This, in turn, has led to a new class of Mexican refugees fleeing drug violence and lawlessness for safe haven in the United States, as a joint CIR-LA Times collaboration highlighted in March.

An increasing number of Mexicans have arrived at U.S. border crossing points to ask for asylum, including nearly 200 last year. But, they have a hard case to make, as the San Antonio Express also recently reported.

In U.S. immigration courts, there were only 71 asylum grants, while the courts received more than 3,000 such cases. The majority of Mexican asylum claims in the courts are withdrawn or abandoned. Immigration officials say they don’t know how many of those asylum seekers are fleeing drug violence or related lawlessness, because the asylum process is confidential.

Drug cartels are battling over trafficking routes, fighting internal power struggles or retaliating against federal police or the Mexican military. The drug gangs have backed up their increasingly public threats, such as hanging banners with the names of targeted officers or sending warnings through police radio signals, with gruesome displays of violence.

Nearly 11,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006. Calderon has deployed some 45,000 troops around the country.

Since 2007, drug violence has claimed the lives of about 900 Mexican police officers — nearly 500 last year alone. Some had ties — real or perceived — to drug traffickers. Many were targeted out of revenge. And in some cases police officers were killed by turn-coat colleagues. The drug-related killings include the top federal police officer in Mexico, numerous police chiefs along the border and seven police officers in a single-day spree in Tijuana in late April.

Other police officers and chiefs have quit their jobs, such as Juarez police Chief Robert Orduna who resigned in February after a drug gang threatened to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he quit.

For an overview of asylum and refugees, see these reports from the Department of Homeland Security.

Advocacy groups are rallying around embattled Kosovo journalist Jeta Xharra following a vitriolic campaign against her in pro-government newspapers and a series of anonymous death threats.

Xharra hosts a popular and controversial television show in Pristina and is affiliated with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). BIRN reporters collaborated on our investigation into war crimes linked to former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Xharra hosted a lively discussion of the project on her show (I joined in via Skype).

Former KLA leaders dominate Kosovo’s current government so it wasn’t especially surprising that pro-government newspapers attacked Xharra and BIRN soon after our reports were published. What was surprising was the viciousness and implicit calls to violence in some of the commentaries. Infopress, a newspaper that gets much of its advertising revenue from the government, likened the BIRN journalists to Serbian spies and compared their work to fascist propaganda. A subsequent Infopress commentary said the author "would be honored to shake the hand of any such dutiful Albanian" who took it upon himself to "punish" the BIRN reporting team. Telephoned death threats to Xharra followed the newspaper smears.

"In a post-war society such as Kosovo where the wounds are still open, to compare someone to Milosevic's Serbia is not only an insult and incitement to hatred, but could also be life-threatening," Xharra said in a statement published by BIRN-Kosovo.

Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, who served as the KLA’s political director during the war, has been silent on the Xharra case, as has Kosovo’s president, Fatmir Sejdiu. Both men enjoy warm relations with Washington and have met with senior members of the Obama administration. Last February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Kosovo as the world’s “newest democracy,” following a meeting with Sejdiu.

But a number of human rights and press freedom groups are questioning Kosovo’s commitment to democracy, at least based on the government’s pointed refusal to support Xharra. Here’s what the Committee to Protect Journalist’s Joel Simon said in a June 17 letter to Thaci:

The death threats against Xharra and her team of journalists are deplorable and put Kosovo's fledgling democracy at risk. Press freedom in Kosovo must be protected as a fundamental human right for an independent and stable society. We ask you and your government to immediately and unequivocally condemn this attempt to intimidate an independent journalist and her colleagues, hold accountable all those responsible for making the threats, and ensure the safety of Jeta Xharra and her BIRN-Kosovo colleagues.

So far, Kosovo’s leadership hasn’t responded to appeals from a handful of NGOs. And so far, they’ve refused to order an investigation into the heart of the current allegations: that KLA operatives abducted and then murdered hundreds of Serbs as well as Roma and other Albanians in the months after the official end of the Kosovo war ten years ago.

Sources tell me the new European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) has opened a formal inquiry into some of the allegations. But the jury is still out on whether EULEX is ready to challenge Kosovo’s current political bosses if evidence points in their direction.

Michael Montgomery has been reporting in the Balkans for twenty years. His recent radio documentary for the BBC investigated the kidnappings of Serbs during and after the war in Kosovo. Montgomery's video journals from that reporting trip appeared in CIR's web video series, "The Investigators."

Today, Public Radio International featured Michael Montgomery's reporting on Kosovo in their radio program, "The World." They also showcased CIR's web-video journals with Montgomery, part of our web-video series, "The Investigators."

From PRI:

At this time ten years ago, the war in Kosovo had officially ended. NATO troops and UN administrators were flooding into the province to enforce a peace agreement with Serbia. Following the peacekeeping force into Kosovo were hundreds of thousands of triumphant ethnic Albanians who had been expelled by Serbian forces during the war. The war was over, but not the violence. In the months that followed, hundreds of people were murdered or disappeared. Many victims were from the minority Serb population. Investigative journalist Michael Montgomery spent years investigating what happened to them. Now with the San Francisco-based Center for Investigate Reporting (CIR), he recently returned to Kosovo to produce a radio documentary for the BBC. Together with a team of Balkan reporters, he uncovered strong evidence that some abductees may have been secretly removed from Kosovo under the noses of NATO and the United Nations.

"The Investigators" is also a regular feature on the Columbia Journalism Review's website.

A new Knight Foundation initiative seeks new models for investigative reporting, and three journalism organization have received funds:

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced a $15 million initiative to help develop new economic models for investigative reporting on digital platforms.

The grants, some on-going, some new and some yet-to-be announced, will promote both local and national investigative reporting in order to help provide the vital stories that citizens need to run their communities and their lives.

“Communities are harmed by what they do not know. A community can’t clean up a toxic dump, or remove a corrupt official or right any other wrong if its citizens do not know about it,” said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism. “We’re awash in information, yet it seems to be getting harder to find good investigative reporting.”

America’s daily newspapers employ some 10,000 fewer journalists in their newsrooms than they did a decade ago, he noted, and membership in groups like Investigative Reporters and Editors has declined in recent years.

By looking for projects that emphasize high-impact stories, digital platforms, diverse revenue streams and national leadership, he said the foundation hopes to “help pioneer models that help keep this important journalism flowing.”

The three newest grants are:

Center for Investigative Reporting ($1.32 million): to launch a new multimedia investigative reporting project in California that encourages print, digital and student journalists to collaborate on stories;

Sunlight Foundation ($565,000): to develop web tools so the public can easily access information on Congressional lawmakers, from their campaign contributions and votes;

ProPublica ($1.01 million): to help the investigative reporting organization create a sustainable business model

>> Read the full press release here.

In April, CIR launched our new series The Investigators, highlighting the
work of investigative reporters around the world, with an interview with
Hollman and Juan Pablo Morris, brothers and creators of the Colombian
television show Contravia. The show has been one of the few journalistic
sources of independent reporting to investigate human rights abuses by
Colombia's right-wing para-military groups and their connections to high
political and financial figures.

We've just received news from Hollman Morris in Bogota of an extraordinary
development: Documents released yesterday in the Colombian Congress confirm that the country’s intelligence service, the DAS, has been conducting systematic surveillance of Morris’ mail, movements, and computer communications for several years. This is part of a larger process at play in Colombia to marginalize independent journalists, human rights activists, and attorneys who are determined to provide unbiased reports on the players,
from all sides, in Colombia’s long-running civil war.

The revelations are described on Contravia’s website here.

Watch CIR's interview with the Morris brothers:

We are pleased to announce that Mark Katches will be joining the Center for Investigative Reporting as Editorial Director of CIR's new reporting initiative focusing on California.

Katches, a native Californian who spent 20 years as a reporter and editor covering major issues in the state, will be leaving the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which he joined in 2006 to help start a nine-person investigative reporting team there.

Since joining the Journal Sentinel his team has won numerous national awards for investigative reporting including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for a story that exposed a $50 million Milwaukee County pension scandal. That same year, the Journal Sentinel was named "Innovator of the Year" by the Associated Press Managing Editors for its watchdog work. This year, another project he managed, a series that exposed the failures of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to protect the public from dangerous household chemicals was a Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting. That story also won the George Polk Award, the John B. Oakes award, and a Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award.

Before moving to Milwaukee, Katches worked at the Orange County Register, where he twice directed projects that were Pulitzer finalists, including one in public service. In 2001, he was part of a reporting team that won the Gerald Loeb, Sigma Delta Chi and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) awards for detailing rising profits from the human tissue trade.

"We are very pleased to have Mark Katches direct our editorial team for this new California reporting initiative," said Robert Rosenthal, CIR's Executive Director. "He is a first-rate journalist with a long track record of leading award-winning teams that produce high impact stories in innovative ways."

"Katches' deep roots in California, as well as his extensive experience as a journalist reporting and investigating critically important California issues, will help us develop new strategies for informing and engaging Californians about crucial issues that affect them in their daily lives and their communities," said Louis Freedberg, Director of CIR's California reporting venture.

Katches served on the board of IRE from 2004 to 2008. He continues to oversee IRE's mentorship program. He taught journalism as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California from 2003 through 2006.

"California is a state facing immense challenges,"Katches said. "It has never been more important for a strong watchdog team to hold those in power accountable and to shine a light on important issues facing citizens of the state. I'm thrilled about returning home to help build and manage a team that will do just that."

For more information about CIR's California reporting initiative, read the announcement: "Powerful Journalism to Help Solve Key Issues in California."

Early this morning, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two American journalists working for California-based Current TV, were sentenced to 12 years of "reform through labor."

David Hawk, an expert on communist labor camps and author of the 2004 study, "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps," spoke to the Los Angeles Times and painted a grim picture of what their sentences might entail:

Ling and Lee may be sent to a "kyo-hwa-so" or re-education reformatory "that is the equivalent of a felony penitentiary in the U.S., as opposed to a county jail or misdemeanor facility," [Hawk] said.

"It's extremely hard labor under extremely brutal conditions," said Hawk. "These places have very high rates of deaths in detention. The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high."

Because the pair was tried by the nation's highest court, there can be no appeal, analysts say.

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement this morning saying members of the organization were "appalled" by the sentences, which were "clearly designed to scare journalists trying to do investigative reporting in the border area between China and North Korea, which is ranked as Asia’s worst country in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index."

The Committee to Protect Journalists also issued a statement, calling the sentences "deplorable":

"Euna Lee and Laura Ling are journalists who were doing their jobs reporting on an important humanitarian story. It is deplorable that they have been tried as criminals and sentenced so harshly," said Bob Dietz, CPJ’ Asia program coordinator. "We fear that their detention is linked to the ongoing security situation on the Korean Peninsula and we call on all parties to the Six Party Talks--North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States--to work together for their release."

Correspondent Elizabeth Rubin spent the fall of 2007 with Battle Company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade in northeastern Afghanistan. The Americans and the Taliban have been locked in a dead heat in the Korengal Valley for more than three years. In 2007, Rubin went on a six-day mission with a platoon into the insurgents' mountain hideouts that resulted in the death of three soldiers. Rubin returned to Battle Company and the Korengal in the summer of 2008. Both times, she took a video camera.

+ Watch the videos on FRONTLINE's website.

Elizabeth Rubin's reporting was supported in part by CIR's Dick Goldensohn Fund for International Investigative Reporting.