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IRE has awarded the 2024 Don Bolles Medal to the Marion County Record for remaining steadfast and refusing to be silenced after police raided the Marion, Kansas, newsroom and the home of its publisher in August 2023. Police confiscated the news organization’s computers, hard drives and server, as well as reporters’ personal cell phones.
The raid was an extraordinary act by an American law enforcement agency, taken days after a reporter at the paper questioned the local police chief about potential misconduct at his previous job. It was quickly condemned by news organizations around the country as intimidation of the press and a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments.
The Don Bolles Medal recognizes investigative journalists who have exhibited extraordinary courage in standing up against intimidation or efforts to suppress the truth about matters of public importance.
The 98-year-old co-owner of the Marion County Record, Joan Meyer, died the day after police searched her home. Her son, publisher Eric Meyer, and the staff of the 4,000-circulation weekly newspaper cobbled together the equipment they needed to continue publishing that week’s issue.
“If we hadn’t been able to figure out how to get computers together, Phyllis and I and everybody else would be handwriting notes out on Post-it notes and putting them on doors around the town, because we were going to publish one way or another,” Meyer told the Kansas Reflector days after the raid.
The raid was based on a search warrant obtained by the police chief, who claimed that a reporter committed identity theft by accessing public state records posted online. The Marion County Attorney later said the search warrants were obtained without the evidence needed and the newspaper’s equipment was returned. Months later, the police chief resigned. A state investigation is ongoing.
“IRE is proud to honor the courage and sheer grit of Eric Meyer and his team in the face of the unconscionable actions of law enforcement against journalists doing their jobs for their community," said IRE Executive Director Diana Fuentes.
A six-member committee reviewed more than a dozen nominations for the Don Bolles Medal. The committee included four previous recipients: Roman Badanin, Pelin Unker, Jeremy Jojola and A.C. Thompson. Kristine Phillips and AmyJo Brown also served.
“We took particular note of the small size of the family-owned Marion County Record and its limited resources and recognized the courage it takes to stand up against this incredible pressure in a small community,” said Brown, the committee’s chair. “Local journalists such as Joan and Eric Meyer and Deb Gruver and Phyllis Zorn are critical to protecting our democracy. We want them — and the world — to know we support them.”
"IRE members immediately responded after hearing about these illegal raids, offering whatever help the Marion County Record might need and our condolences on the passing of his mother, Joan Meyer," Fuentes said. "We stood with Eric Meyer that day and we stand with him and his staff today. We will not be intimidated."
The Don Bolles Medal was created in 2017 in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the Arizona Project, an effort led by IRE to finish the work of Don Bolles. The Arizona Republic investigative reporter was killed in 1976 by a car bomb in retaliation for his reporting.
Bolles' death came a few days before the first national IRE Conference in Indianapolis, where the veteran reporter had been scheduled to speak on a panel. At the time, Bolles had been investigating allegations of land fraud involving prominent politicians and individuals with ties to organized crime.
After his murder, nearly 40 journalists from across the country descended on Arizona to complete his investigation. News organizations across the country published their findings.
Their message: Even if you kill a reporter, you can’t kill the story.
A remarkable commitment to keeping the public in the dark about what’s happening in Georgia’s prisons has earned the Georgia Department of Corrections the 2024 Golden Padlock Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. The award recognizes the most secretive government agencies in the U.S.
The agency was selected for shielding details about deaths, riots and drug overdoses in the state's prisons from the public, journalists, legislators and even investigators from the Department of Justice.
The department heavily redacted incident reports, rarely announced worker arrests linked to contraband and withheld video footage after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began exposing failures in the correctional system. After the DOJ opened an investigation, the state agency failed to comply with a federal subpoena for incident reports, internal investigations and audits until the court intervened.
IRE's Golden Padlock committee also named four other finalists that exemplified the techniques of secrecy and obfuscation the award seeks to highlight.
The winner of the 2024 Golden Padlock Award was announced during the awards luncheon at the IRE24 conference in Anaheim, California. IRE invited Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to Anaheim to accept the award, but received no response.
Welcome to Anaheim!
If you’re attending IRE24 and looking for some ways to step away from the conference bubble (in addition to Disney, of course), here are some local events and places to check out! Please note, most events here are not affiliated with IRE, and this is not an exhaustive list.
IRE's annual investigative journalism conference will take place June 20-23 in Anaheim. Learn more about the conference, explore the schedule and register here.
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) is thrilled to announce that the keynote speaker at the 2024 IRE Conference in Anaheim will be Ava DuVernay.
The award-winning filmmaker will speak as part of a fireside chat with Kevin Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, on Saturday, June 22 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. PDT.
DuVernay, an Academy Award nominee and winner of Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody Awards, among numerous other awards, often focuses her documentaries and other films on historical events and journalists bearing witness to history.
Her historical drama “Selma” — which chronicles the 1965 voting rights marches — was the first film directed by a Black woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. “When They See Us,” a Netflix miniseries, received 16 Primetime Emmy nominations for its portrayal of the five teens falsely accused in the 1989 Central Park jogger case.
DuVernay’s most recent film, the critically-acclaimed “Origin,” chronicles the tragedy and triumph of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, who investigates America’s class division and hierarchy as she writes her book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
"For years, Ava DuVernay has championed the important work of investigative journalists and also pushed for improvements in the media industry and in Hollywood," IRE Board President Brian M. Rosenthal said. "She is an important voice, and we can't wait for our members to be motivated and inspired by her message."
Merida, who will speak with DuVernay in the fireside chat, has led award-winning coverage at the Los Angeles Times, ESPN, Andscape and The Washington Post. During his tenure, the Los Angeles Times won four Pulitzer Prizes and its first Oscar for the documentary short film, “The Last Repair Shop.”
"With IRE24 so close to Hollywood, even jaded journalists can be a little starstruck,” IRE executive director Diana Fuentes said. “We’re certain this keynote conversation will resonate with IRE members."
DuVernary’s other credits include “13th,” “Middle of Nowhere” and “Queen Sugar,” which became the longest running Black family drama in television history in its seven seasons.
She also broke ground with “Origin,” becoming the first African American woman director to compete in the Venice Film Festival, the world’s oldest film festival, in its 90-year history.
DuVernay spoke to TIME about the film’s significance today:
“This is a time when we need to be alert,” DuVernay told TIME. “We need to be aware of the stripping of freedoms and rights. The intention of certain people to distort history, to say it doesn't matter, to say it never happened. And books being taken off shelves, information being contorted. This is the time when we have to push through our fatigue and open our eyes and engage.”
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) is the nation’s premier training organization for investigative journalism. We provide training, resources and a community of support to thousands of journalists around the world.
Our annual conference will take place June 20-23 in Anaheim, California. Learn more about IRE24 here.
Investigative Reporters and Editors has named its finalists for the 2024 Golden Padlock Award honoring the most secretive public agency or official in the U.S.
The 2024 award celebrates the best of government opaqueness with five finalists chosen from a competitive field of nominees. Together, their secrecy techniques include hiding vital public records of public interest, ordering a police raid on a newsroom and fighting journalists in court to block public access to records.
"This group of finalists have exhibited unique ingenuity in their attempts to ensure the public is left in the dark about important issues impacting their communities," said Golden Padlock committee chair Robert Cribb. "Their commitment to secrecy is matched only by the impassioned work of journalists fighting to make it public.”
The finalists for the 2024 Golden Padlock Award are:
Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto for a pattern of secrecy including suing a journalist for the return of public records that her own office gave out. The records included headshots of roughly 9,000 Los Angeles police officers released to journalist Ben Camacho in response to a public records request. Feldstein Soto later turned to the courts to demand the images not be published, claiming undercover officer images were included. Then, in a second suit, her office argued Camacho is liable for legal costs related to the release. Feldstein Soto failed to convince a judge that any undercover officers were included in the cache of images released. But the lawsuit remains before the courts amid vocal criticism from a coalition of media groups alleging her actions are an attack on First Amendment rights.
The Georgia Department of Corrections for shielding details about deaths, riots and drug overdoses in the state's prisons from the public, journalists, legislators and even investigators from the Department of Justice. Last year, a record 37 homicides occurred in Georgia’s prisons, yet the department issued only one news release between 2021 and 2023 about inmate deaths. The department increased secrecy by heavily redacting incident reports, rarely announcing worker arrests linked to contraband and withholding video footage — information it used to provide — after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began exposing failures in the correctional system and the DOJ opened an investigation. The state agency even failed to comply with a federal subpoena for incident reports, internal investigations and audits until the court intervened.
Marion County Kansas police chief Gideon Cody for leading a raid on the office of the Marion County Record and the home of its co-publisher, Eric Meyer. Police bodycam video shows Meyer’s 98-year-old mother and co-publisher, Joan Meyer, shouting down police officers as they rifled through the family’s personal belongings. She died the next day of a heart attack. The newspaper had been chasing a tip it had received about Cody but had not published the information. The raid has been widely condemned as an illegal abuse of power designed to silence small town journalists seeking to hold powerful figures in their community to account. Cody later resigned after released images of the raid showed him reviewing newspaper documents about himself. But there was other fallout, including the resignation of a senior journalist on the story, who cited anxiety about being a reporter in Marion County.
The Hawaii Department of Human Services for stonewalling a review of its own actions in the death of a 6-year-old girl. Federal law and state regulations require the state to disclose details of cases in which a child dies or nearly dies of abuse or neglect. It took a public interest law firm's petition to open the girl's case file to reveal why she was placed with adoptive parents who are accused of murdering her. Further reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat found that Hawaii reports far less than some other states about abuse and neglect deaths and near-deaths.
The Michigan State Police for refusing to release the names and employment histories of police officers. The data is crucial for reporters, citizens and researchers to identify "wandering cops" who find new law enforcement jobs following disciplinary actions, criminal misconduct or quiet firings. Michigan is among at least a dozen states where journalists have hit walls trying to access records that have helped identify officers that have changed jobs undetected after committing such offenses as planting evidence, beating suspects, taking kickbacks or making false arrests. Even Michigan’s attorney general — the state's chief law enforcement officer — is supporting reporters at the Invisible Institute and the Detroit Metro Times in a current lawsuit seeking to make the records public.
The winner of the 2024 Golden Padlock Award will be announced during the awards luncheon at the IRE Conference on Saturday, June 22, in Anaheim, Calif.
With Pride Month coming up in June, IRE members are excited to celebrate and reflect at IRE24.
Over the years, IRE has expanded programming on covering LGBTQ+ issues and historically marginalized communities, and this year is no exception. With more than a dozen IRE24 sessions — such as "Getting trans issues right in the 2024 elections" and "Investigating hate crimes and bias incidents" — journalists across the country will get top-notch training and guidance on how to responsibly and accurately cover these topics.
Some sessions were planned in partnership with LGBTQ+ members of IRE and the Trans Journalists Association; others were the result of listening sessions held to hear members' ideas and concerns.
Another panel, called "Authenticity in Investigations: Covering Your Own Communities," will help journalists navigate identity. Reporters who are members of minority groups, whether it be the LGBTQ+ community or a racial group, often face challenges and sometimes criticism when they cover their own communities. Especially on issues of objectivity and transparency.
At IRE24, Josh Hinkle of KXAN-TV, Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th and Kat Stafford of Reuters will share their experiences and how they ensure trust among their audiences.
This session was partly inspired by Hinkle's work at KXAN-TV, where he explored the nuances of this topic on an investigative podcast called "Catalyst." Francisco Vara-Orta, IRE's Director of Diversity and Inclusion, was a guest on this episode. (You can listen here before you head to IRE24).
Along with learning how to report, we're proud that the IRE Conference offers a friendly space for LGBTQ+ members and allies to meet and mingle. This year, the LGBTQ+ networking session will take place on Thursday, June 20, at 11:30 a.m.
Always a lively event, the networking session builds on others that have been hosted at conferences in recent years, including at NICAR24 in Baltimore.
"There was plenty of queer joy and connection among LGBTQ+ members and allies at NICAR24, and we’re expecting a similar spirit of camaraderie in Anaheim," said Olivia Sanchez, chair of IRE's LGBTQ+ subcommittee.
Sanchez and Hinkle, IRE Board Vice President and chair of IRE's Member Services Committee, hosted the two-part networking event in Baltimore. Vara-Orta and Training Director Adam Rhodes also were hosts. The listening part of the gathering led to a broad-based discussion on ideas for possible conference and workshop sessions, which bore fruit at IRE24 and will help shape conferences in the future.
At the NICAR24 event, members showed interested in increasing resources that could lead to stronger coverage of LGBTQ+ issues and finding ways to fill gaps for incomplete or inaccurate data related to queer and trans communities. These conversations are essential in helping IRE provide relevant and culturally competent training for its global membership.
If you have ideas or would like to contribute to this work, reach out to Vara-Orta at francisco@ire.org. Committees for 2024-25 will be appointed in July and August, and volunteers are welcome!
Francisco Vara-Orta is IRE's Director of Diversity and Inclusion. Josh Hinkle, of KXAN-TV in Austin, is IRE Board Vice President and chair of IRE’s member services committee. Olivia Sanchez, of The Hechinger Report, based in Portland, Oregon, is chair of the LGBTQ+ subcommittee.
IRE24 will take place June 20-23 in Anaheim, California. Learn more about the conference here.
IRE is adding a new membership category to benefit early-career journalists beginning this summer.
Beginning July 1, early-career journalists can join IRE for $50/year. Along with paying less in membership dues, these members will also have lower registration fees for some events. This category is open to journalists who have five years of experience or fewer.
The IRE Board voted unanimously to create this new pricing structure at its last meeting in April. There will be no refunds for early-career journalists who paid their dues before July 1, 2024 but you'll have the option to renew at the early-career rate next time if still applicable.
"I and the rest of the Board believe that these changes represent a major step forward for IRE and will help us to fulfill our mission to serve the investigative journalism industry," IRE Board President Brian Rosenthal said. "As our business continues to evolve, I am proud of our organization for keeping up."
In July, the professional membership rate will also increase by $5 to $75/year. This is the organization's first increase since 2011. The student membership rate will stay the same at $25/year.
Other membership changes to the Articles of Incorporation will be presented to IRE members at IRE24 in Anaheim next month. The proposals include:
These amendments aim to open IRE membership to more people and give young journalists greater flexibility as they start their careers. IRE members will vote on the proposed changes to the Articles of Incorporation at the annual meeting of the membership at the IRE24 Conference in Anaheim this June. The membership meeting is at 5:30 p.m. PDT Saturday, June 22. Only eligible professional, academic, retiree and student members may vote.
Learn more about the IRE membership tiers here. Read the minutes from the IRE Board of Directors' last meeting here.
The IRE Radio Podcast is back after a four-year hiatus. Check out these three new episodes on education-related topics:
You can find the podcast on Soundcloud, Spotify for Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and other streaming platforms.
Graduate editorial assistant Nakylah Carter reported and hosted the episodes. Doug Meigs edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Read on for more information about each of the new episodes and additional resources and links to topics discussed.
On this episode, we recap “Separate and unequal: 5 must-have stories from the K-12 education beat,” a panel from IRE’s inaugural AccessFest Conference in 2023, featuring two veteran journalists who cover education.
Melissa Barragán Taboada is the editor of the Globe’s “Great Divide” education team, which examines inequities in education. Prior to coming to the Globe in 2021, Taboada was a reporter and editor for 20 years at the Austin American-Statesman, where she led the paper’s education coverage. Taboada taught a "Reporting on Education" course in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, her alma mater.
Chastity Pratt is the education bureau chief responsible for leading The Wall Street Journal's coverage of pre-kindergarten through higher education, including managing education reporters based in bureaus across the country. She previously covered education at Bridge Magazine, the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian.
In the spring of 2022, an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas was victim of a mass shooting, resulting in 21 lives lost – a massive tragedy for the community. The ABC News Investigative Unit, lead by Cindy Galli, decided it was time to stay. Uvalde: 365 was a yearlong project where the ABC News team stayed in Uvalde for more than a year to report the aftermath of this tragedy.
You can watch the ABC News team’s new documentary, “21: Loyal and True,” streaming on ESPN+ and Hulu. Members of the Uvalde 365 team also have a new book coming out, “One Year in Uvalde,” a story of hope and resilience that will be released in May 2024.
On this special episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, we pull from 2023 and 2024 NICAR Conference recordings to explore how Phil Meyer inspired countless reporters, students and colleagues. This episode also includes excerpts from an interview with Meyer by Charles Lewis from a decade prior.
Meyer pioneered the field of computer-assisted reporting and introduced social sciences methods to newsrooms. His groundbreaking book, “Precision Journalism,” turned 50 years old in 2023. He died on Nov. 4, 2023, due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.
If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We would love to hear from you.
Journalists come to IRE conferences to sharpen their data analysis and investigative reporting skills, getting training on how to ask the toughest questions and pursue stories relentlessly.
That creates a great reporter in the field but often poses a dilemma for their editors and executive producers. How do you manage someone who’s trained to challenge authority?
Train the manager.
In 2022, IRE launched a new initiative to focus on investigative management, from story reviews and legal guidance to difficult conversations and safety concerns. We also sought to supercharge a community of support that continues to thrive today.
Our next management training will be at the IRE Conference, June 20-23, at the Anaheim Marriott in California. It’s an updated Master Class featuring a new segment on navigating union shops as well as other front-burner topics. The session includes instructors who are tops in their fields including Emma Carew Grovum of the Marshall Project, Cindy Galli of ABC News, Josh Hinkle of KXAN-TV, Gonzalo Magana of ABC10 Sacramento and Mc Nelly Torres of the Center for Public Integrity.
“Managing investigators is different than managing other groups, and that means managing not as a one-size-fits-all approach but managing people individually,” said Cody Lillich, a senior investigative producer at Arizona’s Family in Phoenix, who attended the Master Class at IRE23 in Orlando. “I would also say this group has helped to continue the conversation — I know if I have a management question, there's a group I can turn to for advice.”
So far, more than 180 managers and aspiring managers have trained at IRE online and in-person through these investigative management courses and associated webinars, creating a shared contact network of like-minded professionals with unique responsibilities.
The first “Managing Investigators” Master Class in 2022 was online, and it focused on pervasive management challenges of that specific leadership role. Hinkle and Torres joined Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group and Jennifer Forsyth of the Wall Street Journal to guide the class through more than three hours of discussion, advice and more.
“I love that I always learn something new from those attending while we open this space and try to teach this class,” Torres said.
It soon became an in-person course at both NICAR and IRE conferences, adding more top instructors to the lineup — including Carew Grovum, Nicole Vap of the CBS Innovation Lab and Jamie Grey of Gray’s InvestigateTV.
Outside of conferences, IRE has hosted webinars to make management training accessible to all our members. The latest webinars taught editors how to protect their teams from threats and bring more "people" skills to the newsroom. The online training is the work of a board subcommittee comprised of Grey, Vap and Kat Stafford of Reuters. It’s a subcommittee of IRE’s Member Services Committee, chaired by Hinkle.
If you’re a current (or aspiring) investigative manager, your colleagues want you to join IRE's next management training in June. Sign up for this Master Class now while spots are still available.
IRE24 will take place June 20-23 in Anaheim, California. Learn more about the conference here.
To celebrate Earth Day, we put together some tips for reporting on the environment. Journalists shared this guidance in past training sessions and interviews. Find more helpful resources at The IRE Resource Center.
Climate reporting often means presenting issues or conflicts that may not have happened yet. When that’s the case, try to find ways to get visually creative. This can help make your journalism not just more visually appealing, but more accessible. That’s what Amal Ahmed and Ivan Armando Flores did to tell the story of oil and gas development along the Texas coast.
“It’s either pipes, steel, industry, nature or just this very barren, empty landscape where something will happen,” Flores told IRE. With the help of a drone pilot, he combined long-exposure photography and drones to paint the landscape with light.
—The IRE Journal Q1 2023, “Show your work" by Matt McCabe
When an agency says it’s helping disadvantaged communities or addressing inequities, ask for the specifics. Scrutinize the data.
For example, in 2022, the White House released an environmental justice screening tool to figure out which communities are flagged as “disadvantaged." The tool used environmental, health, economic and other indicators, but Grist noted one major one missing — race.
Grist added race back in and then conducted its own analysis, concluding that the findings appeared to be the same.
"The tool appears to implicitly account for race in its selection of disadvantaged communities," Grist reporters Naveena Sadasivam and Clayton Aldern wrote. "That’s because many of the criteria that the tool uses — proximity to hazardous facilities, linguistic isolation, and proximity to traffic, among others — are effectively functioning as proxies for race."
—NICAR24 panel, “Data and Accountability on the climate beat” by Emily Zentner of The California Newsroom, Dillon Bergin of Muckrock, Savanna Strott of Public Health Watch, Clayton Aldern of Grist
Tampa Bay Times’ “Poisoned” revealed how a Florida factory exposed hundreds of workers to dangerous levels of lead — and how the company kept polluting despite promises to change. The series won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
But it was a challenging reporting process. The factory was run by a private company, so tools like FOIA could not be used. And workers weren’t eager to speak out.
“When I started to break through, it was because there were a few folks who … began to believe in what we were doing, who spoke up on our behalf,” Corey Johnson told KALW-FM. “That built over time. It didn’t happen initially. But it built up.”
—KALW-FM 2022, “Media Roundtable: How Florida’s only lead factory poisoned its workers and polluted the community” by Rose Aguilar
“FOIA is like the lottery,” E&E News’ Kevin Bogardus told IRE. “You gotta play to win. And it’s better than a lottery — there are things you can do to increase your odds.”
Bogardus recommends submitting FOIA requests for the calendars of your EPA regional administrator. (Ask for the “official record copy calendar,” not the public calendar). If a certain meeting seems newsworthy, say, with a major polluter, request any records that were “prepared for, created for, distributed at, or resulted from the meeting.”
This technique revealed the EPA’s concern over actor Mark Ruffalo’s tweets criticizing the agency.
After you get a confirmation email of your request, forward that email to the
designated FOIA officer and say, “Hey, I just FOIA’d this — let me know if you need anything
else,” Bogardus added.
—The IRE Journal Q1 2023, “FOI Files” by David Cuillier.
Sometimes, environmental reporting tries to answer complex, big picture questions. But other times, it can stem from what people are experiencing day-to-day. In Indianapolis, WTHR-TV decided to investigate when viewers asked: “Is my recycling actually getting recycled?”
WTHR’s Bob Segall placed tracking devices in curbside bins and followed trucks to show how items are taken to recycling facilities.
“There’s just a lot of interest in recycling right now,” Segall said. “It’s something that’s going to connect with viewers and readers.”
—IRE Webinar 2024, “Anatomy of the investigation: Recycling … Digging into a system of secrets” by Rick Gevers of Rick Gevers & Associates, Cho Park of ABC News, Bob Segall of WTHR-TV and Tonya Simpson of ABC News.
Flatwater Free Press’ Yanqi Xu reported on nitrate pollution in Nebraska’s water. But when she requested public emails for emails containing keywords, such as “nitrate,” the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy sent the newsroom a bill of more than $44,000.
“The department claimed that the fees were assessed to account for time NDEE employees needed to review which emails related to our request and which ones should remain confidential,” Xu explained.
Flatwater Free Press sued the department and won.
—The IRE Journal Q1 2023, “Nitrate pollution in Nebraska water” by Yanqi Xu
See more tipsheets, articles and webinars at The IRE Resource Center.
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