Every Monday it feels like our entire staff gets shot out of a cannon.
In the past few weeks we’ve produced a story examining an unusual, and lucrative, stimulus contract; a story detailing the alarming increase in maternal death rates in California; and a story this past weekend revealing how police at sobriety checkpoints are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than take drunks off the road.
Sunday’s DUI checkpoint story served as a good example of our hectic, intense workflow. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of how our collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, KQED Radio and other news outlets came together last week:
Monday: We started contacting news partners about the checkpoint story, first giving them a several paragraph “budget line.” It pretty closely mirrored the top of the story as written:
California police departments are increasingly turning sobriety checkpoints into profitable operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed minority motorists than catch drunken drivers on the state’s roadways.
Many of the drivers losing their cars at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, an examination by the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with California Watch has found.
These unlicensed motorists rarely challenge the impounds, or have the cash to recover their cars.
Impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated tens of millions of dollars in towing fees and police fines. Additionally, police officers collected checks for about more than $25 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.
In the course of its examination, The Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from checkpoints the past two years. Other findings include:
• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods.
• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed.
• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime pay.
Every day in newsrooms across the country, editors and reporters try to capture the interest of their bosses with tantalizing budget lines. Our situation is unique. We pitch our work to multiple outlets at the same time. Will they want our story? And if so, how will they play it?
Robert Rosenthal, the executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Louis Freedberg, the California Watch director who oversees our distribution efforts, began drumming up interest. They sent the budget line to numerous news organizations and followed up with e-mails and phone calls.
In the meantime, our copy editor William Cooley was looking over the story. Copy editors are a rare breed. The best ones are pains in the behind. And they consider it the highest possible compliment to be labeled as such. That’s what I love about Cooley. He is a talented intern from San Jose State. But he carries himself like a veteran.
He has not shied away from asking major prize-winning veteran reporters and editors to explain their methods or their premise. He asks uncomfortable but important questions. And he’s made some outstanding catches that have saved us from potentially embarrassing moments.
Tuesday: The reporter on the project, Ryan Gabrielson, sat down to go over Cooley’s comments and final questions from Rosenthal and me. Gabrielson is a fellow at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award in 2009.
Last summer, he was offered a fellowship at UC Berkeley under the direction of the legendary Lowell Bergman. Soon after arriving in California, he began working on the checkpoint story. Bergman and Gabrielson started talking to us about it late last year and a first draft was submitted in January. I started editing it during our “Open Newsroom” on January 21.
We went back and forth on several drafts and were feeling really good about it. But there was work to do. Cooley had thought we needed more attribution and additional context. Gabrielson and I agreed. I also asked to have his methodology reviewed, so Gabrielson sent it to Steve Doig, a Pulitzer-winning journalism professor at Arizona State University and former board member at Investigative Reporters and Editors.
In the meantime, Data analyst Agustin Armendariz and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White polished a snazzy interactive map of all the cities that got federal funding for checkpoints in 2008 and 2009. They built the map with data Gabrielson had gathered during his reporting.
Wednesday: Time to cut the story. The full-length version of Gabrielson’s draft was about 4,500 words – well over 150 inches. No daily newspaper in California would likely print a story of that length. We trimmed it to about 3,800 words – an appropriate length for the California Watch Web site.
Once that was done, the hard work began. I cut the story again – this time by more than half – to about 1,800 words. At that length it could fit in the news pages of our newspaper partners.
I showed it to Gabrielson, and he didn’t have a heart attack. A good sign. Rosenthal and Freedberg continued to work the phones to find media partners and to keep editors informed about our progress.
Based on our budget line, the Sacramento Bee seemed interested. So did the Orange County Register. The Bakersfield Californian and Stockton Record soon came on board. In addition to showing our methodology to an expert in computer-assisted reporting and statistical analysis, such as Doig, Rosenthal thought we needed to write about our methodology so that readers could understand how the reporting process evolved. Gabrielson banged that out.
He also wrote the text for two data pieces that Armendariz helped put together – one focusing on overtime costs and another looking at the UC Berkeley program that helps administer DUI checkpoint money.
Working with Gabrielson was a pleasure. It's comforting to an editor when a reporter can quickly answer every question you toss their way. Gabrielson had great command of the subject, and he worked quickly and efficiently to turn around all of our requests. By midday, we were ready to distribute both versions of the story.
Even though we didn't expect any newsroom to publish the full-length story, we made it available in case editors saw things in the longer draft that they wanted in the condensed version. Once the drafts are dispatched to news outlets, we await questions from editors. Because we're almost always dealing with multiple partners, we end up fielding lots of inquiries from copy editors, project editors and managing editors as the week progresses.
When we launched California Watch last fall, I worried that it might be a little overwhelming to have so many layers of editors. We all know what it’s like to have too many cooks trying to season the soup. So far, knock on wood, it has actually worked. And we saw a perfect example of that just a few hours later. Sacramento Bee Projects Editor Amy Pyle suggested tweaking the first paragraph of our story. It made the top better and tighter. We made a couple of other adjustments and added a new fourth paragraph.
This was the new start (You can see how it differs slightly from the budget line):
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.
And this was the added fourth paragraph:
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.
Doig, the Arizona State professor, got back to us and said he was comfortable with our methods. In the meantime, Gabrielson was going through an entirely different editing process with the New York Times. Bergman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize working with the Times, had gotten the newspaper's new Bay Area edition and PBS NewsHour interested months ago.
Gabrielson tailored a tightly focused draft for the Times that contained mostly information about Bay Area checkpoints. And he was going back and forth with editors there about changes to the story. He also prepped for a KQED Radio interview with Michael Montgomery and reviewed final video.
Thursday: La Opinion had begun to translate the story into Spanish. Web production assistant Sarah McHie made sure all our articles and pieces were coming together for our Web site. Pickoff-White produced a cool graphic showing the cities with the highest impound rates. She did this even though she had been laid up in a hospital for two days over the weekend. Now she had been ordered by her doctors to rest at home because she had what appeared to be swine flu. But a little H1N1 wasn't going to stop her.
Gabrielson, meanwhile, headed over to KQED Radio in the morning to tape his radio interview. Later, he watched the NewsHour piece one last time before it got shipped to New York. He also went over the story line-by-line with the New York Times to make more changes to their draft.
Friday: We prepared a Word document with final fixes – just two revised paragraphs that added context in response to a question from Orange County Register Investigative Editor Chris Knap and another from the Sacramento Bee. Through this editing process, the story kept getting stronger.
Some news organizations were still weighing whether to run it. The Modesto Bee told us they would publish the story the following week. The Fresno Bee said they also would like to run it later. Freedberg got back the translated version from La Opinion.
One more time, we all looked over the final pieces that McHie had loaded into our content management system. We rewrote one headline on a graphic, but otherwise everything looked ready. Just as we were leaving the office, we received word that three more Southern California newspapers were interested.
Saturday: Logging in from home, Pickoff-White made sure everything went live at the right time. We posted the stories, charts, graphics and interactive map around 6 p.m.
Our California Watch News Alert went out shortly after, and we started sending out our “tweets” announcing the story. We also posted a link on Facebook. As a small startup, these social media tools are especially important to help spread the word about our work.
The New York Times posted their version early Saturday evening. In the meantime, around the state, several newspaper staffs were getting ready to put the story on their front pages for Sunday. KQED Radio would broadcast an interview with Gabrielson on Monday and the PBS NewsHour would devote a segment to the story Monday night.
Sunday: Finally, an opportunity to exhale – but not all of us. Sarah Terry-Cobo, a freelance journalist who also helps with distribution, scoured the Web for newspaper front pages for our own archives. We also kept pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook. Huffington Post picked up the story, driving thousands of new readers to our site. By the time the day was over, we had shattered our record for the most traffic on californiawatch.org in a single day.
Monday: The cannon goes off again.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
We really had no institutional baggage to overcome when we built our California Watch team from scratch. No voices telling us, “You can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not the way we do it here.” We weren’t weighted down by the kind of intractable culture that has made it hard for lots of newsrooms across America to adjust and adapt quickly enough to a fast-changing world.
We have pretty much thrown out the old rule books. Here editors will write and report and – gasp – reporters will edit. And even crazier than that: investigative journalists are blogging – a ton. Our hard-working staff has generated close to 100 blog posts in a little more than three weeks, on top of some kick-ass stories, terrific multimedia and nearly two dozen searchable databases. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video by Mark S. Luckie about our team and mission.
In our first few months of operation, the staff of California Watch has begun to mold its own way of doing things – one that stresses innovation, ideas, and a can-do spirit. We will try new things, and we will occasionally miss the mark, but you can’t move forward without throwing out antiquated, obsolete rules and challenging the way journalists have operated. It’s one of the endearing things in our little newsroom that makes this an absolutely thrilling place to be.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
If you're sipping your mocha at a coffee shop somewhere in California on Thursday, keep an ear out for the furious tapping on the keyboard. It could be one of us blogging or tweeting, building multimedia packages or pounding out the next big story.
Members of the California Watch and Center for Investigative Reporting staffs will be fanning out around the state and working in coffee shops with WiFi access on Jan. 21 as part of our first "Open Newsroom."
Here's how the idea came about: For most of this week, our operations are being disrupted by an office move. We’re packing up and transporting the whole shebang from our existing location on Newbury Street to a beautifully remodeled landmark building on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. Our Internet connection went down Friday at our old location, and we don't have a place to sit in the new space. If you're trying to call right now, our phones are unattended, if they're plugged in at all. After the holiday today, we're mostly going to be working from home until Jan. 25 when the doors open at our new digs.
We figured we should turn this temporary inconvenience into an opportunity. So we decided to set up shop on Thursday at various WiFi hotspots.
The Open Newsroom concept is part of a goal to connect with readers and get out of the office. We’re hoping it will be a regular part of what we do. On Thursday, please stop by to say hello. We're looking forward to meeting you. And if you have any great story tips, we'll be there to listen.
The locations and hours to find us are on the map below.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
We’ve gotten lots of feedback on our new California Watch site. People are commenting on the clean look and applauding the simple organization. Several readers have complemented us for the array of searchable databases on our Data Center.
I’ve also gotten some really great feedback about the way we’re making our staff more accessible to readers. Carrie Brown-Smith, a University of Memphis journalism professor, commended us for our bio pages, which include each staffer’s list of coverage priorities and some details about what they are working on – even the stories, journals or Web sites they’re reading.
We felt strongly that our reporters, multimedia producers and editors should let their personalities shine through on these pages and that it might help lift the veil on who we are and what we do.
“I just think that is incredibly smart and utilizes the research on credibility as well,” Brown-Smith wrote in an e-mail to me.
We’ve implemented other subtle innovations – including the way our reporters and a couple of other acclaimed investigative journalists have helped organize our Resources pages. Our resources are organized by topic. They serve as a guide for civic-minded citizens, students, bloggers and young journalists to conduct their own basic investigative reporting.
And we’ve also broken the traditional mold of story crediting by adding the names of our editors who work on each of our major stories. (One reader "tweeted" that it was her favorite thing about our new site.) We think it’s a way to increase accountability and credibility – and also to give props to the traditionally nameless and faceless journalists who partner with our reporters and multimedia producers on stories.
Since our site went live on Jan. 2, we've heard excellent criticisms as well. Some have worried that we’re allowing anonymous commenting, which can encourage the lunatics to dominate discussion boards (although that, thankfully, hasn't happened here). Others have expressed hope that we would allow some type of rating system of comments as a way to encourage responsible commenting. We couldn’t agree more, and we want to make this a top priority to add soon. We hoped to tackle that before our launch, but we set it aside. Too many other things needed to get done first.
We’ve also had readers tell us it's way too difficult to register to comment and to e-mail our staff. We agree. Our site was set up so that you have to be logged in as a registered user to connect with our reporting, editing and multimedia teams. We’re going to try to figure out a way to break down those barriers during the next phase of our site's development. And we're not wasting any time. We're planning to start moving ahead with a slate of enhancements and refinements in the coming weeks.
So if you would like to see changes on our site, now is a perfect time to share your thoughts.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
We’ve published more than 80 blog posts on our two blogs, and our new site isn’t even two weeks old. But one question I’ve been asked lately is how often we will be publishing big investigative stories on our site – stories that will also be distributed to news outlets throughout California.
Nailing down publication dates can be tricky. Years of managing investigative projects has taught me how wildly unpredictable these complex, high-stakes stories can be.
But our sincere hope is to have at least one strong enterprise or investigative story each week. We’ve hit that mark so far this month. Reporter Chase Davis analyzed contribution data for a story about local party committees that funnel campaign money to individual candidates in a way that sidesteps state campaign finance laws. It ran January 3 in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Modesto Bee, the Stockton Record, the Ventura County Star, the Voice of San Diego and the Bakersfield Californian. Last weekend, we distributed a story by freelancer and former Center for Investigative Reporting staffer Will Evans about stimulus grants going to large corporations despite records as environmental polluters and other problems. The Chronicle and Ventura County Star also took that story, as did the San Diego Union Tribune, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News and La Opinion, which translated the story into Spanish. We have an exciting environmental-themed story ready for this weekend. We're working now to shore up our distribution partners for that piece. We should have another strong story the week after that.
And the week after that.
Our philosophy is to distribute and publish stories when they are ready, and not to worry about trying so hard to hit a once-a-week target. Some stories will need more time to cook. When we collaborate with news partners on joint reporting projects, it adds a whole new set of moving parts to the machine. And we have to coordinate with our partners to make sure the machine is both well-oiled and moving in the right direction. It's not as easy as it might look.
But when I scan the list of our upcoming stories, I see a lot of machines humming along, nearing the end of the tunnel. So I feel pretty confident we'll be releasing a regular dose of the big story.
That’s on top of the aggressive daily blogging. Our target is to generate eight to 10 new blog posts each day. We'll be using the blog to break news. (We posted details and quotes from the governor's press conference on the budget last week before he had left the podium.) We'll also be updating readers on the status of our investigations, offering up nuggets from our notebooks and providing more insights on our two blogs – the California WatchBlog and the Inside the Newsroom blog.
Additionally, we’ll be adding searchable databases in our Data Center – many of them connected to stories we’re producing along our priority topic areas: money and politics, K-12 schools, higher education, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
It all adds up to a site that will be active – a dynamic place we hope readers will want to visit multiple times a day.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting
and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state.
Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12
schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public
safety and the environment.
One of my favorite things to do each morning is to go through the nonprofit Newseum site to check out front pages around the world. It’s especially fun to do when so many of the California papers carry our work. The combined daily circulation of newspapers that ran California Watch content today was in the neighborhood of 1.2 million.
We had two stories out there today. One by Will Evans about stimulus funds going to environmental polluters and other companies with legal woes ran on the front pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register, the San Diego Union Tribune, Monterey Herald, Los Angeles Daily News and La Opinion.
Here are links to PDF versions of the front pages of the papers that carried our story today:
Los Angeles Daily News
La Opinion
San Diego Union Tribune
Orange County Register
San Francisco Chronicle
Monterey Herald
Meanwhile, the Stockton Record and Bakersfield Californian ran versions of our story released last week about party central committees routinely funneling campaign cash to candidates around the state in a way that sidesteps individual candidate contribution limits.
Check out the PDFs below:
Stockton Record
Bakersfield Californian
No better way to enjoy the morning coffee.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
The best watchdog journalism exposes problems. But it can be frustrating for readers when investigative stories leave them feeling hopeless – like nothing can be done about a bad situation.
At California Watch, we hope that our stories will be the starting point – a catalyst for discussion debate and change. We want to facilitate that to the extent that we can by providing a venue or forum about the key topics we’re writing about. We want readers to feel engaged and empowered to be part of the solution. We’re going to try to make that as easy as possible with our React and Act features that will accompany most of our stories. You can find the feature on the right rail of our story pages.
We plan to give you the names, numbers and e-mail addresses of major stakeholders who can make a difference. We used React and Act on our story about stimulus funding going to companies with histories of environmental pollution and other legal woes. We also used React and Act for our story about party central committees sidestepping campaign limits. Check out the way we did it. I think it's pretty cool.
We’ll also be hosting chats with key players – a sort of "virtual round table" discussion set around important issues. After the chats are completed, I'd like our chat moderators to review the chat transcripts and develop talking points from those conversations that policy leaders can use as a roadmap for reform. We’ll also make it easy for you to track the changes that come as a result of our investigative reporting. And we’ll be exploring other ways to help readers engage.
As always, let us know how we’re doing. We’re going to count on feedback from our readers to make refinements and improvements.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
More than 40 media partners have carried California Watch stories – a pretty extraordinary number given that we haven’t been around that long. You can see the names of all our partners if you scroll about half way down our About page.
Here’s the scoop on how we partner up with news organizations. First we look for geographic symmetry. If a story has a strong tie to say, Ventura County, it’s a no brainer for us to approach the Ventura County Star. That's just one example. Newsroom leaders up and down the state have told us they are especially interested in our content provided the stories have a strong local hook.
We also know that stories about statewide politics will appeal to the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle. Other newsrooms have told us they like these stories too, but without a local connection, they probably won’t bite.
Some newsroom leaders have told us that environment and higher education top their lists of topics of interest. Others say public safety and health and welfare coverage matter most.
That works for us. We have plans to cover all of these topics.
Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as we can. But we also understand that individual stories we produce will not appeal to every news outlet in the state. We can live with that. The trick is to find the news outlets that do want the work we’re trying to place. We have a lot of balls in the air and couldn’t be happier with the response we’re receiving from newspapers, TV and radio and online outlets.
Collaboration can take many forms. In some cases, we will partner early with news organizations to tailor our project to regional interests. With the largest investigative team in California on our staff, more often we hope to develop stories that are ready to publish.We are also working in unique ways to partner with ethnic media outlets. So far, our stories have been translated into four languages.
In most ways, my job is no different than the last two places I worked and where I built investigative teams. I manage and edit projects and prepare them for publication. But where things change radically is toward the end of the process. That can mean editing multiple versions of a story and then working with my boss Robert Rosenthal and colleague Louis Freedberg to distribute the stories and find partners who want our work. Each stage of the process has its thrills and its frustrations. But it’s a new world we’ve embraced here at California Watch – a new world with enormous possibilities.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
Freelance reporter and Center for Investigative Reporting veteran Will Evans came on board with California Watch in October to look specifically for a focused, compelling story having to do with the awarding of stimulus grants and contracts in California.
And he found a barnburner.
Evans combed through a database of stimulus funding in California, looking specifically at some of the biggest recipients. He also reviewed public records and other databases to find details about stimulus recipients that may surprise you.
Stay tuned. We’ll be posting our story on this site Saturday night by 10 p.m. Several newspapers – including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, Ventura County Star, the Orange County Register and La Opinion – are planning to run our story Sunday.
And if you want to check out our database on stimulus recipients to find your own nuggets, have at it. We have $18.5 billion in stimulus spending on our Data Center site, and we’ll be updating it every quarter.
The Data Center on the new California Watch website will be the place to go for searchable databases of interest in California.
We expect to build this site over time, mostly adding new databases in connection with our stories. Right now, we’re starting with an impressive array of searchable databases. Our list includes stimulus contracts, lobbying and campaign finance records, university fees, FBI crime statistics and California census statistics.
We have close to 20 searchable databases online right now. The steward of our Data Center will be Agustin Armendariz, our computer assisted reporting guru. Agustin has prepared most of the data sets available with lots of help from one of our contributors Sarah Terry-Cobo, California Watch multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White and Chase Davis, one of our two money and politics reporters.
If you have ideas for available electronic data that we ought to add, please drop Agustin a line.