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Small newsroom ideas: Good investigations don't always require the biggest newsrooms

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Good investigations don't always require the biggest newsrooms

When Steve Pizzo first learned that the local savings and loan was being mismanaged, he tried to find somebody else to do the story. After all, Pizzo was publisher of the Russian River News, a weekly in tiny Guerneville, Calif., and his reporter, Mary Fricker, was newly returned to journalism after raising a family. The Russian River News was the only paper willing to hire her.

None of the bigger news organizations to which they pitched the story was interested. So a persistent publisher and a nervous neophyte dug into what was to become one of the most important stories of the decade, the looting of America's S&Ls. Before they were finished, Pizzo, Fricker and National Mortgage News reporter Paul Muolo even wrote a book on their investigation. The book won an IRE Award in 1989.

Ideas for others

Fricker, now a senior reporter at the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, told the story of her unorthodox introduction to investigative reporting while a panelist at the recent IRE Annual Conference in San Francisco. Her story showed that good investigative reporting can be done in small newsrooms. She offered more than a dozen ideas for others.

Fricker's top 3 tips:

1. Every time you have a disaster in your area, there is a workers' compensation component to that story. The key questions are: What benefits are the workers entitled to? Often your readers will be surprised at how low they are. And do the workers ever actually get those benefits? Many will not, or their benefits will be delayed, sometimes for years.

To get started on this story: Talk to attorneys who represent injured workers and read the workers' files. Disputed cases will go to a special workers' comp court, and those files are public records.

2. Yes, injured workers sometimes commit fraud. But probably at the rate of less than 1 percent, not the 30 percent some insurers claim. Don't fall for the easy story of a supposedly injured worker videotaped playing golf. Instead, studies show that the fraud that really costs money is fraud by employers, who lie about the size of their workforce or about the danger of the jobs their workers do, so they can get lower premiums. And what about the millions of dollars taxpayers have to pay to take care of workers who get injured working for uninsured employers, even though the laws in most states require employers to carry workers' compensation insurance?

To get started on this story: Check with your district attorney, state district attorney associations and your state workers' compensation agency to find employers who have been charged with fraud. Your state workers' comp agency can give you data on uninsured employers.

3. Unnecessary amputations: Up to 85 percent of the 82,000 lower-leg amputations in the United States each year could be prevented, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if the patients - usually diabetics - could get proper care for the sores that become gangrenous and lead to amputations.

To get started on this story: Check the National Hospital Discharge Survey (www.cdc.gov/nchs) to see if wounds and diabetes are increasing reasons for hospital admissions in your area. If they are, does your hospital have a wound care clinic? If not, you'll find doctors in your area who know it's needed.

Tom Roeder of the Yakima (Wash.) HeraldRepublic, on the same San Francisco reporting panel, helped his paper win an IRE Award this year for investigating the deaths of four young firefighters in a national forest blaze. In this case, too, a small newsroom focused its resources (one-third of the city staff) to uncover the "how" and "why" behind a tragic local story. Unlike Fricker's first S&L story, metro reporters descended on the fire story. The Yakima staff just out-hustled and outworked larger outsiders.

Roeder's top 3 tips:

1. Poverty pimps: Nonprofit organizations seem happy and good from the outside, but from the inside, they can prove devious.

Case in point: The Washington State Migrant Council double- and triple-billed state and federal accounts for Head Start programs. This was discovered in an investigation prompted by a tip, then a quick check of the nonprofit's annual filings with the state, which showed that the Migrant Council was sitting on $1.5 million in cash after all its bills were paid.

2. Teacher sex: Most of the sex scandals at schools actually don't wind up in the paper. But if your state has a solid public records law, they could. In Washington, you can request all disciplinary actions taken against teachers in a calendar year.

One of those newsroom reviews led us to a football coach whose senior-year honey was bought off with a used car and a plane ticket. The coach is now stocking shelves at Yakima's Target.

3. Investigate something positive: I'm sure that you are perceived as the doomsayer of your community. "Why can't you ever write something positive?" the PTA asks.

Here's a positive idea that upset a local myth. The Anglos here believed the local jail was mostly populated by Hispanics. A public records request for three months of daily head counts by race revealed that Hispanics, who make up 37 percent of the county, made up 30 percent of the jail population. Good fast story.

The Wisconsin State Journal's Andy Hall - recently elected to the IRE Board of Directors - also served on the conference panel. His favorite investigation began, he recalls, as he struggled to come up with a lead for an education package. He pulled out his calculator and began figuring the grade-point averages for black and white students in Madison. The readily available figures gave him his lead: "Year by year, African Americans are falling further behind whites in the Madison School District despite nearly a decade of efforts to boost their achievement levels."

Hall's top 3 tips:

1. Racial achievement gap: In virtually every school district, average grades and test scores of minority students lag behind those of whites. Has the achievement gap in your community's schools widened? Who's succeeding, and who's not?

To get started: Compare current high school cumulative grade-point averages, listed by race, to figures five and 10 years ago. Use the same procedure for standardized test scores. Don't let school administrators simply release the "average" score for the entire student population. Also, you'll find interesting differences if you examine the scores by race for each school. Can achievement scores be explained by other factors such as poverty and mobility?

2. Violent crime: Residents ought to be shown which areas of your community are safe - and which aren't. Where is violent crime concentrated in your community? Why?

To get started: Obtain the police department's database of calls for service, or of reported crime. Or persuade the department to provide you with such information as the address having the greatest number of violence-related calls, the block with the greatest number of calls, and the officer responding to the greatest number of violence calls.

3. Public pays for political campaigns: In Wisconsin, taxpayers were paying about $4 million a year for partisan legislative caucuses - agencies that were thinly disguised campaign machines controlled by legislative leaders. Are taxpayers unwittingly financing political campaigns in your state? Are their activities legal?

To get started: Find out everything you can about who's running legislators' campaigns. Check lists of legislative and state agency workers. Are those campaign activists public employees? Obtain calendars, phone records and payroll records. Can campaign workers prove that none of their time or phone calls was billed to taxpayers? Public records requests of caucuses may unearth partisan campaign materials, too.

BY GEORGE KENNEDY

George Kennedy is a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, former managing editor of the Columbia Missourian and former editor of The IRE Journal.