How one paper filed a FOIA request in Michigan—and got sued by the county

By Jonathan Peters, CJR

Michigan’s primary elections, taking place today, may offer few competitive races. But one of them has offered a look at an unusual type of legal action—one in which a government entity sues a local media outlet in response to a public-records request.

These cases aren’t unprecedented. Often, they arise when a local government entity says it fears being sued after responding to a records request, and decides to go on offense. But they are, fortunately, uncommon, in part because courts generally have tended to take a dim view of the legal maneuver—which is what happened here.

The case began when The Daily News, in Greenville, used the state records law to request the personnel files of candidates for sheriff in two counties. The paper’s plan, the publisher said, was to “research whether there was anything in the candidates’ career history that might support or put in question their ability to uphold the highest standard of behavior and judgment required to hold the office of sheriff.”

One county released the files immediately. But Montcalm County, where Deputy Charlie Mahar and Undersheriff Mike Williams are opposed in the primary, responded differently. According to court papers and a storyin The Daily News, the controller-administrator released the candidates’ work histories but not their disciplinary or commendation records, which are kept in the sheriff’s office. Mahar’s attorney had asked the sheriff not to release those.

Shortly thereafter, the county invited The Daily News to submit a modified request for only the last four years of Mahar’s and Williams’s personnel files. The paper refused to do so, and then Montcalm County sued the paper—asking the trial court for a declaratory judgment to resolve what it characterized as a “statutory conflict.”

"Never about concealing information"

In court papers and at a hearing, Montcalm County attorney Timothy Monsma argued that the county faced a conflict between the state FOIA’s disclosure requirements and another statute protecting employee privacy rights in discipline records over four years old. He said Michigan courts have not resolved the inherent conflict, and that the county faced inconsistent obligations and liabilities.

“This case was never about concealing information or preventing the disclosure of public records,” Monsma told me. “The county took no position on whether the records should or should not be disclosed. However, the county considered this the best way to protect the taxpayers’ resources, by avoiding additional subsequent litigation, while also providing the interested parties (i.e., the candidates and The Daily News) with an opportunity to be heard on the issue.”

Meanwhile, attorney Joseph Richotte, who represented The Daily News,argued—in court papers and at the same hearing—that the county had no right to sue the paper. FOIA lawsuits are of two kinds, Richotte argued: one brought by a requester after access has been denied, and a second, known as a “reverse FOIA,” brought by a third party who claims “a common-law or statutory right” to block the release of records about themselves.

A declaratory judgment action filed by a government entity itself to resolve a conflict doesn’t fit either of those categories. Therefore, Richotte said, the court lacked jurisdiction because Montcalm’s action wasn’t even authorized by law.

The judge, who had temporarily blocked release of the personnel files, agreed. In his ruling, the judge ordered the county to release or deny access to the requested records, in whole or in part, under the state FOIA—in other words, to respond to the paper’s original request, following the path set out by the FOIA, rather than a declaratory action. That was the proper course, he said, for any records dispute.

After the court ruled, Montcalm County did respond—and it released the personnel files the paper had sought. Monsma, the county attorney, told me, “Although we do not agree with [the court’s] conclusion, we respect the … ruling, and further appeals would not provide the cost-effective or expeditious resolution that the county was hoping to procure.” The county released the files, he said, because “the public interest and statutory language seemed to weigh in favor of disclosure.”

And for the record, the files did contain some notable items, as The Daily News reported.

For example, Mahar’s file revealed that he was once disciplined in connection with an affair he had with a woman he met while investigating a criminal sexual conduct complaint she filed against her husband. Mahar and the woman sometimes met during his patrol shifts, making him unavailable to take calls and radio dispatches. Meanwhile, Williams’ file revealed that he was once disciplined for losing nearly 11 grams of cocaine, given to the department by the DEA for a training exercise involving a drug-sniffing dog.

Frustrating the purpose of FOIA

I have some sympathy, in this case, for the county’s desire to clarify its obligations and minimize its liabilities. But that can’t come at the expense of open government—and beyond the facts of any particular dispute, the practice of suing requesters undermines public-records law.

As I wrote last year, these lawsuits filed against record requesters create a real risk that the free flow of information will be chilled. You can even liken the actions to SLAPPs, because they force requesters to surrender or hire an attorney to defend them, a burden that many can’t bear.

Moreover, these legal actions frustrate the purpose of the typical FOIA statutory scheme, which gives the requester alone the choice of going to court, and requires the government to pay the litigation expenses if a requester prevails.

A declaratory action is basically an end run around that scheme. It creates a scenario, as Richotte argued in a motion, in which “every person who requests a public record now does so at the risk of being sued”—in an action, no less, that could require them to pay their litigation expenses even if they prevail, because declaratory actions do not follow the same fee-shifting rules.

Even if you’re sympathetic to the government, that’s too high a price to pay.

By Chava Gourarie, CJR

The team behind Muckrock, a nonprofit that helps users navigate government records laws, launched a project today that aims to catalog all of the reasons state agencies give for rejecting public records requests. In doing so, they hope to shed light on the network of state laws that impact the public’s right to know, thereby helping journalists and citizens appeal when their requests are rejected.

Michael Morisy, Muckrock’s cofounder, says the project will use the 22,000 requests already processed through Muckrock as its starting point. It will also turn to crowdsourcing from the organization’s community of researchers, journalists, and citizens to begin compiling the database of exemptions.

Morisy says the debate surrounding the disclosure of police body camera footage is partially what inspired him to embark on the project.

In the past week, both Missouri and North Carolina passed laws restricting access to police body-cam footage. North Carolina’s law, one of the most restrictive to date, states that both body-cam and dashcam footage are not considered public records. Missouri’s law would both restrict access to footage during ongoing investigations and exempt footage if filmed in a private place, such as a school or home.

Similar laws are being discussed in other state legislatures as cellphone footage continues to challenge police accounts. In the wake of Alton Sterling’s and Philando Castile’s deaths last week in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively, the discourse surrounding police violence against minority men is only intensifying.

“The whole point of a body-cam is to provide transparency and accountability,” says Morisy, “and states are trying to exempt that very footage.” Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, was among those who campaigned for body-cams to be introduced in Missouri. Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 became emblematic of police violence against African-American men and marked the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “It would have given me the truth,” McSpadden said of the footage at a press conference earlier this year. “It would have answered a lot of unanswered questions.”

But while the debate over body-cam footage has received attention, many state laws that impact the public’s right-to-know don’t happen in the public eye. Morisy explains that while most states’ public records laws haven’t changed significantly since enacted, many other bills impact them. “Eventually the public records laws become like swiss cheese,” says Morisy. “Nobody really knows how many exemptions are in a given state’s public records laws because they’re buried in other unrelated laws.”

Laws governing education, for example, have exempted police records at private universities in Massachusetts from public disclosure, and agricultural trade groups are lobbying to be exempt from federal FOIA laws. 

Adam Marshall is a lawyer and fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which compiles guides to the public records laws of each state. He says it’s “absolutely correct” that at both the state and federal levels “there’s this partially invisible, ever-expanding web of laws that interact with public records laws that impact their effectiveness.”

Morisy says by compiling a database of exemptions and keeping track of them as they are introduced, it may make it more difficult for some of these restrictions to be passed in the first place.

In addition to providing a map of public records exemptions, the Muckrock project will help reporters and citizens appeal when their requests are rejected. Muckrock’s online tools simplify the process of filing public records requests by providing templates and automating follow-up responses if agencies don’t respond within the required timeframe, among other features, and Morisy hopes to do the same for the appeals process.

On the federal level, less than 3 percent of requests that are denied are appealed, but about 40 percent of those appeals are then successful, according to data released by FOIA.gov. This suggests that a large percentage of exemptions are improperly applied, and appeals are often worth the effort. But while veteran FOIA journalists know their best tool is to “appeal, appeal, appeal,” says Morisy, they are the exception. Most people who file requests never challenge the rejections.

Finally, Morisy says, he hopes the database will make for a more efficient process that will benefit all sides. “We’re hoping this will be a resource for agencies to better understand their obligations.”

By Jackie Spinner, CJR

In the years since officials in Chicago began to demolishthe city’s troubled public housing projects, people in the region have become accustomed to hearing stories about where the former residents of Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes, and other developments ended up. They all moved to the suburbs south of the city, the stories went, or even relocated to places as seemingly random as West Lafayette, Indiana. Often, the word-of-mouth tales blamed crime or other problems on an influx of public housing residents.

But those narratives were never grounded in clear data or backed by rigorous accounting. A recent investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times andBetter Government Association investigation published on June 25 attempts to provide a clearer picture.

After acquiring extensive records from the Chicago Housing Authority and analyzing them along with data from the US Housing and Urban Development Authority and the US Census Bureau, the outlets set out to map where the former residents of the projects are living today and how the footprint of public and subsidized housing has changed. 

“For the last 16 years, as I’ve been reporting around Chicago, you’ve heard people talk about what happened when the projects came down,” said Mick Dumke, the lead Sun-Times reporter on the investigation. “Most of it is speculation and some mythology. I wanted to take a closer look at the actual data and track this beyond the speculation.”

It’s not the first time journalists have done something like this. Perceptions about where Chicago’s public-housing residents ended up were so pervasive that in 2014, the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, Indiana—124 miles to the south—published a multi-part investigationdebunking what it called “the great Chicago migration myth.”

The Sun-Times/BGA project, while similar in spirit, was both broader in scope and focused more directly on Chicago itself. The reporters accounted for the whereabouts of thousands of families who were living in Chicago public housing when the changes began. (Many others have died, violated lease terms, or could not be traced.) They also examined the change over time in subsidized households in census tracts in and around the city. 

What they found: The “Plan for Transformation,” begun in 2000, has had effects across the region, and the number of subsidized households in suburbs around Chicago—to the south, and also to the north—has in fact grown. That’s consistent with policies designed to open up opportunities in places that traditionally had little subsidized housing. It’s also part of a big increase in the total number of families in the region receiving some kind of housing assistance.

But thousands of families who were living in public housing when the changes began remain in mixed-income or traditional public housing within the city. And among thousand of others who took vouchers to pay for new apartments in private buildings, “few moved far.” Most stayed in the city, ending up in South Shore—“the new subsidized-housing capital of Chicago,” the reporters call it—and a handful of other neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides. All 13 neighborhoods that saw the largest growth in use of housing vouchers are predominantly African-American. 

Meanwhile, neighborhoods near the Loop, the city’s center, that were home to former public housing projects have seen rapid gentrification. Despite the construction of some new mixed-income developments, those areas have seen the greatest reduction in subsidized households.

“There’s a very public narrative about a cause and effect as the public housing units have gone down,” said Andrew J. Greenlee, an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is quoted in the Sun-Times/BGA investigation. The new reporting, he said, “helps us take a more concrete look at where people actually are. It helps us to understand that many people are remaining closer to their initial homes. It also helps to underscore the struggle people face in trying to live in communities of their choice.”

The recent package, the latest installment in the Sun-Times/BGA “Beyond the Rubble” series, is understated in its language and presentation. But it offers a valuable look at how the city has and hasn’t changed, along with insights into the choices public-housing residents made and how they feel about them today. It also points the way to future reporting opportunities, for example, into the persistence of housing segregation, how neighborhoods respond to change, or where resources are needed.

“Understanding the community and the resources available is important,” said Samantha Tuttle, director of policy and advocacy for the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. “It really does help us paint a picture and make positive change.”

The BGA is a watchdog and advocacy group that also produces investigative journalism. Brett Chase, the group’s director of investigations, said that to report on the migration patterns, the journalists first filed a Freedom of Information request with the Chicago Housing Authority, which provided an extensive amount of information, including the address of every resident living in public housing or using a voucher for private housing. Because private landlords often enter into long-term contracts with the federal government, the reporters had to look at federal housing data as well. “This became so complex,” Chase said.

Although the Sun-Times and the BGA have often worked together in the past, as CJR noted in a 2014 story, this is the first project of its type that the two have collaborated on.

Jim Kirk, editor and publisher of the Sun-Times, said the partnership was born out of discussions last year. “The BGA over the past couple of years has beefed up its investigative reporting… and we have this great staff, too, so the question I posed to the BGA and our guys is can we do something major that is significant to the community at large, extending our reach,” he said. 

The first story in the collaboration, a March look at people using vouchers to live in pricey areas, didn’t land especially well, prompting criticism from housing writers and researchers.

But one of those critics, Daniel Kay Hertz of City Observatory, praised what he’s seen of the series since then, including stories about former public housing tenants living in private buildings with a history of code violations and the wait list for vouchers.

The latest story was particularly informative, he said. “There have been people in places like South Shore and Chatham and Grand Crossing who have been saying for a long time that there are all these CHA people moving into our neighborhood and they were not happy about it,” Hertz said. “That part was confirmed in some way. But certainly it also debunked some of the public narrative.”

By Jackie Spinner, CJR

A pair of investigations that arrived just days apart last week—one from a small nonprofit, the other by a leading daily—brought new scrutiny to the way the city of Chicago handles allegations of police misconduct. The reports, each based on an analysis of hundreds of lawsuits, highlight the soaring cost of alleged misconduct to taxpayers, the city’s failure to track patterns of abuse, and the extent to which officials try to keep crucial information under wraps.

One of the investigations, a remarkable effort by The Chicago Reporter, found that the city spent more than $210 million for settlements or judgments stemming from police misconduct lawsuits between 2012 and 2015, borrowing money to pay the tab at a time when the city already is struggling with crippling debt. The nonprofit newsroom’s report also emphasized that the city does not analyze the lawsuits for trends, something other major cities do in order to address police misconduct and curb legal costs.

“I have no doubt that they do see these patterns,” said Jonah Newman, who led the 18-month investigation for the Reporter. “Of course they see them. You can’t work on a lot of these and not see them. It’s a failure what they’re not doing systemically and with the data tools that exist these days.

Just days after the Reporter published its story and an accompanying interactive database, the Chicago Tribune rolled out its own significant investigation into the city’s handling of police lawsuits. Reporters Stacy St. Clair, Jeff Coen, and Jennifer Smith Richards reviewed 445 federal civil rights suits filed since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011. In nearly one in five of the cases, they found, a federal judge ordered the city to turn over information or records that it had tried to keep from plaintiffs. In five cases, a judge took the unusual step of sanctioning the city for withholding evidence. (The Trib also got an extended interview with a top city lawyer, who “rejected any implication of wrongdoing” by the legal department, the paper reported.)

The Tribune’s story focused on the city’s approach to private litigation—but it underscores how difficult it can be for the press and public to get information from the city, especially about police conduct, in any context.

“The Tribune and other news organizations have had a lot of problems getting the city to give us information that we feel we are owed under the Freedom of Information Act,” said Mark Jacob, the paper’s associate managing editor for metro news. “We are really only seeking to get the city to follow the law.”

The recent reporting is the latest in a wave of scrutiny for the police department, which continues as the city grapples with the fallout from the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Dash-cam video of the 2014 shooting was itself the subject of a FOIA dispute, which the city lost in court late last year. The video’s release brought renewed attention to the issue of police accountability.

“Laquan McDonald kind of broke everything open,” said Jacob, theTribune editor, who added that Chicago is facing a “take-stock moment.”

That’s not to say, of course, that there had been no aggressive reporting of police abuses before now. The Reporter’s database of lawsuit settlements calls to mind a separate database of police misconduct complaints, launched last year with records obtained by the Invisible Institute following years of litigation.

Newman began working on the project as soon as he was hired at theReporter in October 2014. The first step was to review the list of all legal settlements and judgments the city pays each year, which is available online. The online information includes the name of person who received money, the value of the settlement or judgment, the department involved, and the kind of case.

“We started from there,” Newman said. “Everything else”—like the details of allegations and the officers involved—“we had to get through state and federal court records.”

It wasn’t long before patterns started to emerge, Newman said. “A lot of these cases were about false arrest, people stopped without probable cause. It took one round of entering data on these cases to read through and to comb through to see that.”

One thing that Newman found surprising—and disturbing, given the nature of many of the allegations against police—was how small most of the settlements were. Half paid out $36,000 or less. “It’s not like you’re getting a free ride or access to upper mobility with the amounts,” he said.

Still, the cases add up to a substantial cost for the city. Susan Smith Richardson, editor and publisher of the Reporter, said she had been interested for a while in making the connection between police misconduct allegations, which disproportionately affect black and Hispanic residents, and the fiscal impact for the entire city.

At times, Richardson said, “We don’t see how racial issues connect back to larger government accountability issues. Nothing provides a stronger link than looking at these settlements.”

The Reporter’s investigation was supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundation. The funding was used to pay the Institute for Nonprofit News to build the database of 655 settlements, which allows users to filter lawsuits by neighborhood and officer involved. The collaboration was a first for the two organizations.

“We thought the neighborhood piece was really important to make the data more accessible or more personable for people actually living in Chicago,” said Julia Smith, the INN lead design developer on the project. “It was a nice way to let it out. And also the ability to search by officer that was important as well because you’re able to identify the officers who show up in multiple cases.”

The ability to filter the cases should also make it easier to identify trends in the data. If a small news organization like the Reporter—with seven full-time staffers—can create a database to track patterns in allegations of police misconduct, the city ought to be able to do the same, Richardson said.

“For them,” she said, “it’s a question of vision and accountability.”

By Erica Berry

From the possibility of terrorists using encrypted apps to file-sharing software co-opted for pirated media, the gatekeepers of new technology are constantly confronted with what to do when users approach their tools in unexpected or suspect ways.

Last week, this issue landed closer to home in the journalism field, when ProPublica published “An Unintended Side Effect of Transparency,” an editorial about the site’s “Prescriber Checkup” database. Steve Engelberg, the site’s editor-in-chief, wrote that ProPublica had identified “clear signs” that a significant number of readers were using the database to search for doctors who freely prescribe opioids, raising questions about potential abuse.

Released in 2013, Prescriber Checkup relies on Medicare Part D data to show the prescribing habits of hundreds of thousands of doctors nationwide. The tool has had wide-ranging positive effects: ProPublica reporters have revealed how doctors often prescribe narcotics and antipsychotics in dangerously high doses, and patients, hospital administrators, and law enforcement officials have been able to compare, assess, and regulate doctor practices. 

But according to the site’s Google Analytics data, up to 25 percent of database pageviews this year involved narcotic painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, and amphetamines, with many readers finding these pages after reading a “reporting recipe” framed to help local journalists pinpoint doctors who prescribed the highest number of narcotics. Others arrived after conducting web searches like “doctors who prescribe narcotics easily.” 

The high readership and web traffic patterns led ProPublica to suspect the database was being used for, as Engelberg wrote, “not-so-beneficial” purposes. So the site, in addition to running the editorial, has added a warning to the database pages on narcotic drugs that links to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Today, we added warnings labels to the pages of narcotic drugs in our Prescriber Checkup app https://t.co/npfEc9WYxi pic.twitter.com/gvaPfBTYD8

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) May 12, 2016

ProPublica also published a brief story last week about efforts to fight the opioid epidemic. What it didn’t do is pull anything down.

The site’s measured handling of the issue has been applauded by other journalists on social media:

This is a fascinating ethical dilemma handled with great care. https://t.co/S1o9OqT9nG

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) May 12, 2016

In an interview Friday, though, the healthcare data journalist Fred Trotter expressed concern that ProPublica, by calling attention to what it found, could trigger its own unintended consequences.

“The news here is that people are seeking opioids through ProPublica,” said Trotter, founder of CareSet Systems andDocGraph. But in his view, the data doesn’t support strong conclusions about motives: While some readers may be looking to support an illegitimate drug habit, others may simply be pain patients struggling to obtain legitimate opioids, given the concerns over abuse. In that climate, he worried that the steps taken by ProPublica might make things harder for people in need of pain treatment.

“If I was a person who was on opioids right now and I was reading this [editorial], I would have a knot in my stomach that you would not believe,” he said. “The number-one concern those people have…is that they will be lumped in with opioid abusers and their pain medication will be cut off.”

In his editorial, Engelberg did acknowledge that some of the people using the database were no doubt legitimately in need of treatment. Asked about Trotter’s concerns, he noted that the data in Prescriber Checkup continues to be fully available. “As far as I can see, we’ve done nothing that would affect the ability of patients hoping to find doctors who will treat their chronic pain,” he said.

Trotter said he believes he and ProPublica both subscribe to the same model of “radical transparency.” Rather than any big divergence in approach, then, the difference may just reflect different assessments about the risks in this context.

In an interview Friday, Engelberg added that he was skeptical of trying technical approaches to address ProPublica’s concerns, like obscuring the database from particular types of web searches. “I think that people who are determined to find things on the web go around you,” he said. “It’s kind of like stopping the ocean. You can build all the castles you want but the tides go where they go.”

He also discussed another possible consequence—that by publicizing its concerns, ProPublica could give a talking point to someone opposed to releasing other data sets. 

“I wouldn’t be shocked if in our next argument about making public some certain data, someone in the government said, ‘Well this could happen,’ but I don’t think it’s a terribly valid argument,” said Engelberg. “Everything that you do in journalism when you bring something to light has potential benefits and potential downsides.”

Trotter agreed about that, noting that organizations on the fence about using open health data could “use this as an arrow” to articulate why they will avoid it.

He said he sees open data as a kind of “population health treatment.” In this sense, Trotter said, ProPublica’s recent findings of potential illegitimate use are a side effect, but one that should not distract from the larger good of the service. “If you have a drug that works, but five percent of the time it causes awful headaches, you don’t pull the drug.”

By Deron Lee, CJR

One day in late January 2015, Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle was at a Mexican restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, when he received an email forwarded from a source. He immediately knew he was onto something big.

“I said, ‘Wow, this is a story,’” says Lowry, the Eagle’s statehouse correspondent.

He was right: Lowry’s article, published by the Eagle the following day, revealed that the state’s budget director had used his personal email account to send two lobbyists a preview of Gov. Sam Brownback’s controversial budget in December of 2014, weeks before the legislature or the public had a chance to see it. The story shed light on the decision-making behind the budget battles that have rocked the state ever since Brownback’s massive tax cuts went into effect in 2013.

But the story also did something else, which Lowry couldn’t have anticipated at the time: It set off a debate in the capitol over a public-records loophole that would extend for two legislative sessions, finally resulting in a major reform that was signed into law by Brownback himself this week. The bill makes clear that private e-mails sent by public officials are subject to disclosure under the open-records law if they pertain to public business.

“We owe him a debt of gratitude for digging into this story,” Doug Anstaett, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, says of Lowry.

Lowry’s original story wasn’t just about a transparency crusade. The fact that lobbyists were involved at an early state in the budget process was pretty newsworthy in its own right.

But the budget director’s use of a private account pointed to a loophole in the state open-records act and opened up a fruitful line of inquiry. The scoops kept coming in the 2015 session, as Lowry debunked the budget director’s claim that he hadn’t had access to his state email account when he sent the private email, and revealed that Brownback himself had used private email to conduct public business for years.

State lawmakers, meanwhile, began calling for a legislative fix to the private-email loophole—a push that gained bipartisan momentum that March when Hillary Clinton’s email scandal broke. In May 2015, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt put forth a proposal to close the loophole. Legislation was introduced a week later, at the tail end of the session, and in June, Senate leadership asked the Kansas Judicial Council, a state agency that advises the legislature and judiciary on legal matters, to study the issue. The resulting advisory committee report, released in December, provided much of the basis for the bill that was ultimately passed in this year’s session.

“Whether it’s smoke signals or a smartphone”

The thrust of the reform is to shift the focus from the location of a record to its content and purpose.

While the previous open-records law applied to records made or maintained by a public agency, the act will now apply, according to the bill summary, to “any recorded information that is made, maintained, kept by, or in the possession of any officer or employee of a public agency pursuant to the officer’s or employee’s official duties, and is related to the functions, activities, programs, or operations of any public agency.” And it will apply “regardless of the location of the information.”

Adam Marshall, a legal fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language was well crafted. Removing any potential location-based exemption, he said, is “not something that’s common in public-records statutes, but it’s terrific.” Other states have codified that distinction only after court battles, Marshall added.

Anstaett of the Kansas Press Association, who served on the advisory committee that made recommendations for the legislation, said the location issue was “the key” to the group’s deliberations.

“Whether it’s smoke signals or a smartphone,” he said, the committee determined that “location is not the issue as much as, does the record involve the public business?”

The reform, of course, doesn’t mean that all is well on the transparency front. The loophole revealed by Lowry’s reporting was just one of many reasons cited by the Center for Public Integrity last year for the failing grade it gave Kansas for public access to information. Anstaett says he remains concerned about the high costs that state agencies sometimes charge for access to records. Marshall points out that mechanisms must be put in place to make sure public business conducted on private accounts is stored and searchable. And Lowry says there are still seemingly “a million exemptions in KORA,” the open-records law. In the very same bill that closed the email loophole, the legislature also moved to block media and general-public access to police body-cam footage.

Even as Anstaett’s organization continues to lobby the state on these other fronts, he says, at least for now the new reform “sends a message that you have to do the public business in the light of day, and not try to hide.”

As for Lowry, his reporting over the last 18 months has drawn awards and recognition. But, he said on Wednesday night, hours after Brownback signed the new bill: “Today was really when it hit me hard. Because you think, ‘Something I wrote actually changed the law in Kansas.’”

By Deron Lee, CJR

About 500 subscribers over the course of eight months: If your reference point is Facebook-fueled pageviews, or even a typical newspaper’s print circulation, it might not sound like a lot.

But for the leaders of The Frontier, an investigative journalism startup in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that number is reason for encouragement—a sign that some people will spend real money on local news online, and that their unique business model may yet pay off.

The Frontier was founded a year ago by Robert Lorton, whose family had owned the daily Tulsa World for generations before selling the paper to Warren Buffett’s company in 2013. As he contemplated a return to the news business, Lorton says, he knew one thing for certain: “I didn’t want to sell advertising that was going to bring in pennies and that will be clunky and distracting to the reader.”

The target, instead, was a user-supported model—and even for a lean newsroom, support doesn’t come cheap. Frontier subscribers pay a monthly membership fee of $30 for access to paywalled stories, the kind of price that’s associated more with trade publications aimed at niche audiences than with local news. The for-profit site still has a long way to go to become self-sustaining, but it’s made some progress down that path.

“I preach all the time, content is not free,” says Lorton. “What we’re trying to sell is the value of having someone in your community being a watchdog.”

In the beginning, The Frontier almost didn’t get off the ground at all. Lorton’s first and only choice for editor in chief was Ziva Branstetter, a veteran investigative reporter at the World. But Branstetter wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the paper where she had worked for two decades, enjoyed latitude to pursue stories, and had colleagues who were “like family.”

“It sounded frightening,” Branstetter says. “It sounded like a risk.”

In the end, she said yes, drawn by Lorton’s pitch and the opportunity to grow professionally without leaving her hometown. And she reasoned that, for better or worse, “it’s no more a risk to do something like this these days than it is to work for a newspaper.”

Three other World staffers—Cary Aspinwall, Dylan Goforth, and Kevin Canfield—followed Branstetter to the nascent Frontier, rounding out the staff. They work out of a start-up incubator in downtown Tulsa filled with, in Branstetter’s words, “hipsters and vegan coffee and West Elm furniture.”

The hires immediately made the site stand out, says Andy Rieger, a former longtime executive editor of The Norman Transcript, and now an adjunct instructor in public affairs journalism at the University of Oklahoma.

“They were some of the best writers and editors the World had,” says Rieger. “That gave it credibility not only in Tulsa, but in Oklahoma.”

That credibility was bolstered by the fact that, on the same day the new venture was announced, Branstetter and Aspinwall were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for their reporting in the World on the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

At The Frontier, the new staff hit the ground running: Before there was a paywall, or even a website, Branstetter and Goforth followed up on a story they had broken just before leaving the World, in which they revealed that officials in the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department had pressured employees to falsify training records on behalf of a citizen “reserve deputy”—a wealthy local insurance executive—who accidentally shot and killed an unarmed black suspect when riding along on a gun-sting operation.

Since then, as more disturbing revelations have come to light, and the sheriff was forced to resign, The Frontier has remained “at the tip of the spear” on the story, Rieger says. The coverage is marked by both ambitious scope and irreverent tone: Late last month, with a criminal trial in the case approaching, the site rolled out an epic three-part series called “The Shit Sandwich,” after a phrase one officer used to describe the executive’s involvement with the department. The series contains a well-produced 11-minute video and, like all Frontier stories, is rich in links and embedded documents. All three installments were released simultaneously—as in a Netflix series—in an effort to keep users binge-reading.

Other deep dives from the past year include a report revealing that Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry intervened on behalf of a controversial Oklahoma surgeon who faced the loss of his medical license; that story was followed by an ethics complaintfiled against Fallin. And Branstetter’s reporting on the practice of “selling rank” in the Tulsa Police Department led to an investigation by the city auditor.

The “selling rank” story was one of several done in partnership with KOTV, the local CBS affiliate; the ongoing arrangement gives the TV station access to The Frontier’s investigative resources while giving the website some on-air publicity. The site also partners with The Marshall Project as part of the national “Next to Die” series, contributing storieson Oklahoma’s controversial death-penalty regime.

The stories produced via partnerships are available free on the Frontier site, as are the podcasts and staff blogs, which mix daily items and explainers into the investigative fare. Most of the rest are behind the paywall, accessible for the $30 monthly membership fee or individually for $5 or less.

So who’s buying? Lorton acknowledges that the paywall restricts readership, but he says the audience is loyal, influential, and, he insists, not exclusively affluent—akin to the slice of committed newspaper readers who might take action after reading a story. “I think every community has a percentage, say 10 percent, of people who are engaged in their community—the person who calls the mayor, who volunteers on their school board, who is willing to invest in finding that content.”

Big stories do reach beyond monthly subscribers: A well-read paywalled piece might reach 3,500 unique views, according to Lorton; free stories have gone as high as 10,000. Impact was a concern at first, he says, but “I think we’ve built up enough traction that people are paying attention to us.”

His goal is to reach 750 members at the end of 12 months with the paywall, which went up in August, a target that puts The Frontier more or less on pace. Ultimately, he says, the site needs least 1,000 members to be sustainable, a bit of a recalibration from the targets sketched out at the launch.

Though there are no ads, the Frontier does have 30 to 40 corporate sponsors, along with about a dozen “pioneer” members, who pay $1,000 to get additional perks. The annual budget currently runs to about $300,000, Lorton says. The goal is to add more staff eventually, says Branstetter, but “we’re just trying to stay lean for a couple of years.”

It’s too soon to tell, both she and Lorton acknowledge, whether The Frontier can maintain its growth and survive those first few crucial years, much less blaze a trail for other journalists to follow, as they hope it might. Even if they can make it work, the high-cost paywall approach may not replicate easily. As Michael Mason, editor of the Tulsa startupThis Land Press, says, “the model is tricky.”

Lorton says that if the for-profit approach doesn’t pan out, he might consider going the nonprofit route, as many other investigative startups have done. But he chafes at the idea.

“Does the industry really have to be nonprofit to survive?” he asks. Another possibility, he says, might be to establish a nonprofit solely for defraying the costs of obtaining public records.

Whatever the future holds, at a time when even the most prominent new-media businesses are facing financial obstacles, as Google and Facebook eat up a huge proportion of the digital-ad “pennies,” and readers increasingly revolt against web advertising, this experiment in ad-free, reader-supported local news is worth watching. The Frontier took a risk, and we should all learn something as a result.

By David Uberti, CJR

In 2014, The Center for Investigative Reporting found itself at a crossroads: Cut much of its staff or create a full-time radio show. That was the choice then-editorial director Mark Katches says the organization faced. “The burn rate can be a pretty scary thing to witness when there is very little revenue coming in to cover your costs,” he adds. “You can’t just sit still and watch everything go up in flames.”

The quandary wasn’t unique to the nation’s oldest nonprofit investigative journalism outfit, though the scale was unprecedented. For decades, its small staff fluctuated alongside project-by-project financial support, publishing hard-hitting exposés wherever it could: TV, magazines, books. During the late-2000s surge in nonprofit journalism funding, CIR was able to build a bona fide investigative newsroom that partnered largely with California newspapers and public media. The organization counted about 70 in its ranks by 2012. 

“We went into it with the idea that if you do great journalism, you would build something that would last,” says Katches, who came on in 2009. “The sad reality was that all of those awards and recognition, all the good journalism we did, wasn’t enough in the nonprofit world, where people write checks for two or three years and then move on to the next bright and shiny thing.”

The predicament left CIR searching for its next chapter. It formally began with a July 2014 press release trumpeting millions in new funding to jumpstart Reveal, an hourlong public radio show and podcast. The announcement commenced perhaps the most intense period of evolution in CIR’s long history. 

The organization’s goal is to carve out a home for investigative reporting on a medium without a long tradition of it. Its challenge has been to maintain the soul of the organization while carrying out massive internal change. The creation of a self-contained platform for CIR’s reporting is a fundamental shift for the nonprofit, which has traditionally relied on outside partners to distribute its work to a broader audience. Now, CIR aims to control its own means of publication—and nurture its own following—while creating a megaphone for partners’ work. So far it has been a selling point for fundraisers, as it gives CIR direct access to a national, mobile-friendly audience.

“To sustain any type of investigative reporting, it requires you to think differently,” CEO Joaquin Alvarado says. “We’re big enough to do that. That’s our responsibility.”

CIR’s current ambitions carry considerable risks. A weekly publishing schedule is a tight window for projects that take months of reporting, and keeping pace over the long run will require deft coordination with a sprawling web of radio and non-radio partners. The quality and quantity of this outside work will play a large part in determining Reveal’s fate. 

Some of CIR’s team has been skeptical of the wholesale shift in publishing strategies, fearful that managing so many moving parts would inevitably distract from their core work. Roughly 20 staffers have left since 2014, taking firepower to the likes of ProPublica, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, BuzzFeed, Google, Apple, The Guardian,Forbes, and even a few audio outlets. The organization has responded largely by hiring a slew of radio veterans, adding production know-how before Reveal moved to a weekly schedule in January.

“We’re taking a huge percentage of our nonprofit budget and making a huge gamble to make a platform for investigative journalism,” says Nathan Halverson, a reporter who joined CIR in 2014 after years in newspapers. “It might not work. Reveal might fail. But for me, in my soul, it feels better to be at a place that’s trying to do something really big.” 

Indeed, this is the latest iteration of something really big. A few current staffers joke that CIR has been in constant transition. Others who departed recently frame the ongoing transformation as a borderline identity crisis. “CIR has never been afraid of change in the way most newsrooms are,” says one former staffer, who requested anonymity out of deference to past colleagues. “But that also means that it won’t really stick to anything long enough to get really good at it—and to let people catch up. I feel like we often start these new initiatives and projects, and then we abandon them.”

The current proposition, Reveal, is at once risky and exciting, and in many ways that’s a refreshing combination. But it also raises a broader question that commercial media outlets have debated for much of the past decade: how to square an organization’s core mission with its need to evolve—and survive—in the digital age. Raising money to fund investigative journalism is a Sisyphean task, and CIR has bet that it can innovate its way to financial sustainability.

THE BURDEN WAS SMALLER with past versions of CIR, which, in the decades following its 1977 launch, typically employed less than a dozen. Nonprofit journalism was in its infancy, and funding was scarce. “Sometimes it’d get so tight that we’d have to go on unemployment for a while until some grants came in,” says David Weir, one of three co-founders. 

CIR partnered with outside organizations to produce stories for TV programs like Frontline and magazines like Mother Jones, turning some projects into books. “We always tried to adhere to the freelance mantra, which was Sell the same story as many different ways as you can,” adds Dan Noyes, another co-founder. The scrappy outfit produced periodic but massive investigations on topics such as the Black Panthers or the export of banned pesticides to the developing world. The objective was to radically alter readers’ or viewers’ understanding of an issue.

Still, convincing outside donors to support journalism in the 1980s and 1990s was a hard sell, and there have always been strings attached. Even now, outside money often focuses coverage on specific topics, such as criminal justice or the environment. 

In the mid-2000s, however, philanthropic response to the implosion of print advertising sparked something of a revolution. A spigot of cash opened onto fledgling nonprofits sprouting nationwide, while journalists jettisoned by legacy media provided a deep talent pool from which these new organizations could draw. Today, there are more than 100 of them across the United States.

Just a few giants emerged in this new environment, taking various approaches toward growth. The Texas Tribune has gradually built out its state-focused newsroom with the help of revenue from live events and corporate sponsorships. The Center for Public Integrity attempted to create a daily news operation called iWatch in 2011, though the experiment failed to attract an audience and keep foundations interested. The organization had to lay off about a third of its staff in response, and has since returned to stability with a balance of big projects and quick analysis. ProPublica, widely recognized as best in class, launched in 2008 with a $30 million commitment from the Sandler Foundation. That financial runway provided room to not only attract first-rate talent for the newsroom, but also to establish its brand and diversify funding sources.

“More sophisticated funders do understand that it’s necessary to keep the lights on,” ProPublica President Richard Tofel says.

CIR didn’t have such a financial cushion in place in 2009, when it began a period of intense growth. Reveal is a response to the early miscalculation that funders would fall in line quickly enough to sustain that growth. Departures aside, the product has so far succeeded in keeping a much larger version of CIR intact.

“What they’re doing is historically important and different,” says Charles Lewis, who founded CPI in 1989. “It also, like any new entrepreneurial thing, presents risks … . Starting something is the easy part. Sustaining it is the hard part.”

THE DOMINOES OF CHANGE that led to Reveal began to fall in 2008, as the bottom was dropping out of American newspapers and investigative reporting was collapsing around the country. Enter: Robert Rosenthal, former managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle and, before that, executive editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. CIR’s new executive director moved quickly to institutionalize a system in which the newsroom, which was just a handful of staffers at the time, would collaborate with partners across media to publish numerous versions of the same story concurrently, maximizing impact in various markets.

Rosenthal eventually gained traction with a few big funders, including the Knight and Hewlett Foundations, for a state-focused outfit essentially aimed to plug growing holes in California media’s collective enterprise efforts. He also hired Katches, then an investigative editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to lead the project.

California Watch’s first story, on waste in the homeland security grant system, was published in September 2009 across TV, radio, and digital outlets, not to mention front pages of roughly two-dozen newspapers that combined for 1.8 million subscribers. CIR developed a distribution network from this blueprint, working with partners to localize stories or adapt them for various formats, and charging meager content fees of usually a few hundred bucks per piece. 

Katches proved an intense and charismatic leader as he built a talent-rich, newspaper-style investigative team within CIR. Staff grew to more than 30 as the organization filled a trophy case full of awards. “We started to become a known quantity in California,” says Will Evans, who reported for CIR from 2005 to 2008, and then returned in 2011. “You’d call and people would actually know who you were.” 

Still, the financial reality of that success—CIR’s annual budget had ballooned to $4.6 million by 2011—wasn’t as bright. Key funders walked away, citing a desire for more national focus. “The model evolved to follow where the money was,” Rosenthal says. As CIR began exploring this shift in 2012, it merged with another local nonprofit, The Bay Citizen, which published Bay Area news and features in The New York Times. Rosenthal helped convince many of The Bay Citizen’s funders to support this larger, harder-edged organization. All together, the move essentially doubled CIR’s revenue and staff overnight, to more than $11 million and 70 employees, respectively. 

The organization set out on a yearlong strategic planning process, which led to the consolidation of The Bay Citizen and California Watch under the CIR name. It was during this period that Alvarado, hired in May 2012 as the organization’s first-ever chief strategy officer, began turning it into something of a laboratory for the delivery of journalism. Whereas ProPublica is The New York Times of nonprofits, the Alvarado-led CIR has become its Silicon Valley equivalent. “We’re in the Bay Area—crazy is OK sometimes,” he says.

Alvarado took more active control of the distribution and engagement team, which began experimenting with live events such as investigation-fueled theater productions. The team gradually turned attention away from California Watch’s distribution strategy. 

For Alvarado, relying on publishing partners to reach audiences was “an existential threat” both to CIR and investigative journalism broadly. “If you did not own and control your platform as an individual organization—or as a cohort with the resources and openness to collaborate—you were not going to survive.” He worked intensely on a YouTube channel that would curate investigative content from partners, an expensive project that “we learned an insane amount from,” he says. Along with Susanne Reber, who joined CIR in 2012 after two years heading NPR’s first-ever investigations unit, Alvarado began exploring a similar idea in audio.  

“There was this vacuum for investigative material on public radio,” Reber says. While NPR has seen early success with its nascent investigative effort, individual public radio stations don’t often have the resources for months-long projects. Podcasts, meanwhile, tend to veer toward explanatory storytelling. Reber and Alvarado believed a CIR-powered program could fulfill unmet demand for deeper reporting. “It sounded a little crazy, and it was,” Reber says. “But it was sitting right there as an obvious strategic play.”

CIR joined up with the Massachusetts-based PRX to produce a trio ofReveal pilot episodes. The first, released in September 2013, won a Peabody for a segment on how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing painkillers to vets. Two more the following year appeared to further validate the hypotheses. “We thought we would have 10 stations carry the pilots,” Alvarado says. “We actually had 150.” Perhaps more importantly, the prospect of a CIR-controlled publishing platform soon excited funders, including the Logan Foundation, to the tune of millions. 

Staffers were pleased with this early success, though most had been detached from the long phase of experimentation leading up to it. Some bristled at what they saw as new media evangelism—jazz hands—that distracted from the core mission. The sentiment was reinforced by confusion over the organization’s chain of command. In July 2014, Katches left to pursue his dream of running a regional newspaper, The Oregonian, rather than lead this new vision of CIR. Alvarado was soon after promoted to CEO as Rosenthal gradually moved away from many day-to-day operations.

“I left because I got a great job offer, but I didn’t know where [CIR] was headed,” says Ryan Gabrielson, who departed for ProPublica in 2014. He was one of about a dozen staffers who left that year. ”In the end,” Gabrielson adds, “CIR was about being experimental in the age of media disruption. It wasn’t what I signed up for.”

Any confusion regarding newsroom leadership was heightened by a formal vaccuum last year, when Katches’ replacement, Robert Salladay, joined a new project to create a Reveal-branded documentary series. Amy Pyle, who joined CIR in 2012 after a long career in newspapers, took over in the interim and was finally given the editor in chief title in March.

“The lengthy EIC hiring process was helpful for this organization, in that we all learned a lot about each other,” Pyle says. “But it also left us in limbo for quite some time.”

THROUGHOUT 2015, Reveal ran on a monthly schedule as CIR began building out the partnership network expected to supply most of the weekly show’s content. PRX expanded the program’s distribution to numerous new member stations. The newsroom honed more audio-friendly storytelling styles through bootcamps for reporters and editors. It also produced a handful of stories to bank in advance of the January 2016 move to one hour of programming a week.

“That year was really important for us because it gave us so much time to think about our workflow,” says Meghann Farnsworth, managing director for distribution and engagement. “But, as with anything, you don’t know how it’s going to be until you’re into it.”

While Reveal is not an NPR-quality listening experience so far, it’s a remarkably sharp radio program and podcast given CIR’s lightning transition. Host Al Letson, part navigator, part passenger, leads listeners through topically themed episodes generally broken down into a few segments apiece. CIR reporters have dropped illuminating stories on theAmerican trapping boom, discrimination in the temporary jobs sector, and religious day care centers, among other topics.

The new medium has forced staffers to rethink the way they tell stories at the most basic level. They still publish text investigations on CIR’sReveal-branded website and, occasionally, with outside partners. But the typically data- and document-heavy work must be adapted into more radio-friendly formats to travel over the airwaves. CIR producers sonified Oklahoma seismic data into a crescendoing melody that conveyed how hydraulic fracturing has been tied to a spate of earthquakes in the state.

Clip begins at 38:04

 

In a segment on abuse of foreign aid to humanitarian organizations, CIR reporters went to Malawi to question a key subject, capturing a damning interview on tape. 

Clip begins at 36:20

 

In March, each new episode of the podcast was downloaded about 100,000 times, while Reveal’s back catalog drew 150,000 additional downloads. More than 250 radio stations also carried the show each week, including in eight of the top 10 markets, and CIR brass say they expect to reach upward of 275 this summer. “For a show that is this challenging? Right out of the box that’s a really good number,” adds PRX’s John Barth, who leads distribution efforts. WBEZ’s This American Life, by comparison, claims more than 500 stations and 2.1 million listeners.

The partner network has also born early fruit. In late January, just as the Flint water crisis was drawing national headlines, CIR contracted an entire hour of programming from Michigan Public Radio. Other partners so far have ranged from American nonprofits like ProPublica, to international partners like the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to public radio outlets scattered across the United States.

The question going forward is whether CIR can manage enough partner stories to allow its staffers to continue drilling deep into their own pieces.Reveal’s content ratio—initially estimated at one-third CIR, two-thirds outside work—has hovered around 50-50 this year. “But we don’t want to stretch that too far,” says Reber, now Reveal’s executive editor, “because we want to make sure our investigations at CIR have pride of place on the show.”

The organization has five contracts for producing multiple Reveal stories annually, with The Center for Public Integrity, KQED, The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, The Texas Tribune, and Houston Chronicle. The latter two share a full-time staffer with CIR, which hopes to grow this core partner group to eight or 10 organizations. Reber, who is moving to Washington to manage CIR’s East Coast partnerships, also plays matchmaker with potential collaborators. “We have stuff on the books right now well into the summer and fall,” she said in March. “And we have stuff that we know will come in 2017.”  

Turning this mixture into a cohesive show will largely fall on the shoulders of Executive Producer Kevin Sullivan, poached from NPR and WBUR’s Here and Now in late 2014. “My original concept was to have shows done a month ahead of time,” Sullivan says. “What I’m finding is that is not happening. We are often finishing the show on the day we have to upload them … . But they’re in really good shape.”

The newsroom has set aside funds so it can acquire full hours of programming throughout the year. “We want to do something really major once a quarter, either by purchasing a full hour or doing something huge ourselves,” adds Sullivan. “That’s how we’ve set up our budget.” Of the first 16 episodes on the weekly schedule, one has been a rerun and another a decidedly non-investigative, though interesting,feature on Donald Trump supporters.

CIR’s investigative team remains huge—19 reporters by Pyle’s count. “My focus is to make sure what comes out of our core staff is the hardest investigations we are doing, because we know that the stories partners pitch are sometimes not as heavily investigative as CIR is accustomed to,” Pyle says. “A lot of it is coming out of radio [outlets], which often has a more exploratory approach. We juggle a lot, and we try to always have another show in the wings in case something falls through.”

She’d like each of her reporters, at minimum, to gather sound for two segments every year, enough for roughly 30 minutes of Reveal. “We also plan to seek out and nurture investigative skills in the radio producers we hire whenever possible,” she adds. 

While the audio-first mentality adds a new degree of difficulty to the CIR newsroom’s work, staffers say fears of sustaining an hour-long show each week haven’t materialized. “Ask me another year from now and I might give you a new perspective,” says Christina Jewett, a longtime reporter and self-described “radio superfan” who’s jumped into the new medium with vigor. “So far I haven’t felt pressure to produce more. But our metabolism is going to have to change again, to be a little bit more nimble.”

That will be especially necessary for CIR to also build out its digital presence on RevealNews.org, which internal metrics show averages about 260,000 pageviews each month (Tofel claims ProPublica draws more than 2 million). Jewett’s recent investigation into profiteering in California’s worker comp system ran as a 4,000-word piece on the site—aversion also appeared in The Sacramento Bee—and as a 16-minute segment on Reveal. Jewett penned a sidebar to the story as well, along with a follow-up the next week. 

“If you cross-reference the print and radio piece, there’s going to be a lot more facts in the print,” says Jewett, speaking generally about the formats. “That’s the nature of the media. But the emotion you can get with audio storytelling is far more than that of print.” 

That difference ties into a broader critique leveled by some former staffers, who argue that audio’s narrative-driven style makes it more difficult for stories to highlight systemic flaws. They have a point: Revealsegments typically zero in on a few characters, shaving off some context more easily conveyed visually or through text. Audiences who listen toReveal without reading CIR’s corresponding written stories, which typically reach fewer people online, lose some of that big-picture analysis.

But it’s also true that the trend toward more vivid, character-focused narratives extends across formats. “Everybody is aware that all the great documents and data in the world are not going to give you a very interesting piece for digital media,” Pyle says.

So CIR staffers will continue walking a familiar line to adhere to the old mantra: Sell the same story as many ways as you can. Only now the onus will be on them not only to package journalism for various forms of consumption, but also to connect audiences across media so they don’t lose anything in translation. CIR’s staff has upped efforts to lead listeners and readers between stories through in-show callouts, social media engagement, and a weekly newsletter, among other tactics. They will soon be doing so without Farnsworth, head of distribution and engagement, who will leave for Vox in May. 

Taken together, it’s no small task. But, already, CIR has begun looking toward its next platform. The new project of a small team that includes Salladay is exploring how to adapt CIR stories for the likes of Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix—fuller multimedia integration under the Reveal banner. It comes despite the departures of three video producers over the past six months, two of whom say they left largely because they didn’t want to pursue radio.

“We have to acknowledge that Reveal is helping with our survival,” Salladay says. “You have to adapt. You have to figure out what the next thing is.”

By Miranda S. Spivack

KEVIN HEMSTOCK, THE LONGTIME editor of the Kent County News, took his paper’s watchdog role literally. From his office in downtown Chestertown, Maryland, he had a sweeping view of High Street, the main thoroughfare. One February day in 2010, he looked out his window, saw the three council members from the nearby town of Millington entering a lawyer’s office, and immediately sensed trouble. Why, he wondered, was the entire Millington Town Council arriving for what looked like a closed-door meeting in the middle of the day? Hemstock, who long ago had memorized the Maryland Open Meetings Act and regularly scanned the council’s schedule, knew the meeting had not been announced in advance and believed that it violated Maryland law.

Hemstock’s office sat only a few blocks from the Chester River, site of the annual reenactment of the 1774 Chestertown Tea Party, when local residents followed Boston’s lead and dumped tea into the river to press for free speech and protest taxation without representation. Hemstock is a history buff, proud to carry on the more than 300-year-old community’s tradition of standing up to government. So he didn’t hesitate to assign a story about the council gathering and had a reporter file a complaint on the newspaper’s behalf with the Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board. A year later, prodded by the complaint and the newspaper’s coverage, the compliance board ruled against Millington for convening in secret without prior notice to discuss what turned out to be leaky water pipes.

In Hemstock’s view, even though the plumbing issue hardly rose to the level of scandal, the compliance board’s ruling, and others sought by the weekly paper, put the community on notice: The Kent County News was watching. The paper not only covered the county fair and printed school-lunch menus, but also monitored the officials who hold the county’s purse strings and make decisions that can have major influence on people’s lives.

But what happens when the paper stops paying close attention? Kent County residents are finding out. More than three years ago, while the erstwhile watchdogs were otherwise occupied, Apex Clean Energy, an out-of-state company, moved in, quietly planning to build a massive wind farm with turbines as tall as the Washington Monument.

“Nobody knew anything about this,” says William Graham, who in March 2015 founded Keep Kent Scenic, an anti-turbine group that eventually, without much help from the local government and media, pieced the puzzle together. Were it not for the efforts of Graham and a handful of other activists—all volunteers learning on the job—residents might not have known about the Apex project until it was a done deal. The activists also discovered that, despite a county law that seemed to ensure that wind turbines could be no taller than 120 feet, the state could, if it wanted to, approve the project and simply override the local height limit.

After first agreeing to an interview with CJR, Apex officials canceled and declined to provide details of the company’s plans, leases, and timetable. Kevin Chandler, a company spokesperson, emailed a statement: “We always strive to provide accurate, up to date, digestible information to local stakeholders.”

ESTABLISHED IN 1793 in a community that has grown to include massive dairy farms, rolling fields of corn and soybeans, and watermen fishing for crabs—as well as elegant second homes for urbanites—the Kent County News has a long history as a community watchdog. During Hemstock’s 12 years as editor, he and his staff filed about a dozen complaints with the state compliance board alleging open meetings violations and wrote many stories about failures to adhere to Maryland’s open-government laws—far more than any nearby competitor, state records and newspaper archives show. “They hated us at the Open Meetings Compliance Board,” Hemstock says with a chuckle.

Many residents read the paper closely and took it seriously, according to several elected officials and community members. Hemstock left in 2012 after refusing to lay off staffers for a second time in three years. Instead, he says, “I laid myself off.”

For Kent County residents, the newspaper’s constant vigilance had paid off time and again, often affecting officials’ behavior and methods of governing. While larger media organizations stood by, the paper filed a complaint in 2012 protesting secret meetings held by the University of Maryland’s trustees to vote to join the Big Ten athletic conference—a multimillion-dollar move by the publicly funded university. The open-meetings board criticized the trustees, who promised to be more accountable to the public. Closer to home, the paper broke stories and filed complaints about the Kent County library board’s failure to keep accurate meeting minutes, to address one member’s chronic absenteeism, and to hold public sessions, all while it ran up a deficit of about $200,000. The seven board members were replaced.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the paper and several others also owned by Whitney Communications, which operated Chesapeake Publishing Corp., kept regular tabs on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as it grew into a bedroom community for Annapolis; Baltimore; Wilmington and Newark, Delaware; and Washington, DC. In December 1983, as officials were signing a multi-state agreement to protect the Chesapeake Bay, Chesapeake Publishing produced a special section about the fragile future of the bay that helped spark a regional conversation about its condition. “We did some great journalism then,” says Chuck Lyons, president of the company during the Whitney era.

For several decades, the Kent County News and other papers in the chain closely tracked issues affecting the region. They monitored a plan to develop fragile waterfront property on the Eastern Shore, exposed illegal closed-door meetings of the state authority that monitors the finances of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and chronicled an attempt by Chestertown to annex a large swath of land for development that it could not legally acquire.

And now? Like so many papers around the country, the Kent County Newsand its sister papers, including the daily Easton Star-Democrat, are part of a larger chain. In 2007, Whitney Communications sold its Eastern Shore newspapers to American Consolidated Media, which in 2014 sold them to Adams Publishing Group. Already small staffs were cut—theKent County News now has four reporters and one editor, down from a staff of seven in 2009. Its journalists are expected, like so many others, to do more with less, filing short daily stories for the online edition while also meeting their weekly print deadlines. They’re rarely able to carve out time for in-depth investigations.

Since March 2012, when Hemstock was replaced by Daniel Divilio as editor, the paper has run few deeply reported accountability stories. Since early 2014, it has filed no complaints about closed government meetings, according to online newspaper archives and state records. Kent County residents and public officials say that reporters don’t make beat rounds or chat up community officials as often as they did in the past.

“We are a small paper with a small staff,” says Divilio, who has to cover many night meetings himself to ensure that the half-dozen or so communities and government agencies in the newspaper’s coverage area get a mention. Hemstock, who now runs an antiques and variety store in Millington and is an elected member of the town council, says the newspaper’s challenges spell trouble for places like Kent County. Local governments, he says, “think they can run amok.”

Other potential watchdogs are also absent. The Baltimore Sun, now part of the Tribune Publishing Company, closed its Eastern Shore bureau several years ago. The Washington Post, never particularly attentive to the Eastern Shore, is emphasizing national and international news under new owner Jeff Bezos.

Such information gaps are increasingly the rule, not the exception. As news organizations shrink and shrink some more, a community’s problems may go unreported, sometimes festering into crises. As regional papers suffer, state and local muck gets raked less and less. When not tracked closely, issues such as the work of Michigan’s proliferating emergency managers can devolve into catastrophes like thelead-tainted water poisoning children in Flint.

Surveys conducted in 2009, 2011, and 2013 by the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), the Media Law Resource Center, and in 2015, aided by Investigative Reporters and Editors concluded that the downsizing and decline of local media play a key role in enabling state and local government secrecy. The surveys found that there are fewer news organizations holding state and local institutions accountable and that in many parts of the country, media watchdogs that do exist have grown quieter. “The traditional media, particularly newspapers, have always led the open-government charges if the school board is closing a meeting illegally or the city is denying records or a judge is kicking a reporter out,” says Jeffrey Hunt, a prominent media lawyer in Utah. “I just see the media leaving the field in terms of fighting these battles.”

As media scrutiny has waned, some governments have taken notice and, says Hunt, “become more aggressive in terms of secrecy and withholding information from the public.” Document retrievals take longer and requestors must pay more. Legislatures and courts are limiting access to text messages, police videos, complaints against corporations, gun permits, even the names of licensed pet owners. After 9/11, many states decided that just about any piece of information that might be linked to public safety could be exempted from disclosure. While such concerns can be valid, withholding information about, say, the condition of essential infrastructure like bridges, railroads, and highways can make it tougher for the media and the public to evaluate whether government is properly enforcing its regulations and laws and keeping residents safe.

The 2013 National Freedom of Information Coalition survey contained some other troubling data: a perception by the lawyers and journalists surveyed that “there is a greater inclination among government officials for gaming the system than complying with existing disclosure and accountability laws.” Last year’s survey echoed that finding.

FOR JOURNALISTS AND NON-JOURNALISTS ALIKE, it takes some digging to learn details about a business proposal, a neighbor’s construction plan, or an official’s calendar or meeting logs. To find out who has recently met with Kent County’s planning commission, for instance, requires going in person to the county government building in downtown Chestertown and requesting and reading visitors’ logs, which aren’t always complete and don’t often reveal details of what was discussed.

With about 20,000 residents, Kent County is the kind of place where people often bump into one another at the weekly farmers’ market in Chestertown or at one of many local music, art, and theater events. But when there’s a vacuum in news coverage and governments aren’t particularly communicative, the local grapevine can fail. Meetings happen, officials make decisions, and the public can find itself in the dark.

Kennedyville, where the wind turbines were slated to be built, is about eight miles north of Chestertown. Fields of soy, corn, and other grain crops flow like an ocean of green across miles and miles of undeveloped property. Like much of Kent County’s 414 square miles, Kennedyville is made up of small settlements with a few houses backed by hundreds of acres of farmland dotted with gray barns. “There is a sense of place around here,” says Joe Hickman, a farm manager, planning commissioner, and environmental activist who grew up in the county. “It’s a special place to farm owners.”

In 2006, after two years of debate among county officials and residents, the three-person county commission approved a master plan that preserved agricultural land. In 2011, following the recommendations of a county renewable-energy task force, the commissioners approved the 120-foot height limit for wind turbines as a way to deter commercial wind farms. “There does not appear to be sufficient wind in this area to justify utility scale wind farms,” the task force found, “and for this and other reasons, the task force determined that utility scale wind energy is neither a feasible nor desirable use for Kent County.”

The Kent County News didn’t publish its first story about Apex’s wind-energy plans until March 2014—nearly two years after its representatives first began traversing the county, appearing on farmers’ doorsteps, and offering leases that by some estimates were worth about $30,000 a year in exchange for the opportunity to install 35 to 50 wind turbines, and possibly more, each about 500 feet tall. The News’ single-source story, which quoted Tyson Utt, a director of development at Apex, was written by editor Daniel Divilio, who says that it came about after Apex officials contacted the paper seeking publicity.

Divilio’s article described a “new type of farm.” Although it said that wind-turbine heights “could be 500 feet tall,” it didn’t mention that local law forbids turbines taller than 120 feet. Nor did it note that the county’s own renewable energy task force had found in 2010 that the county wasn’t a very windy place.

Most critically, it failed to report that the county’s carefully hashed-out, seemingly airtight zoning laws had left a hidden, gaping loophole. As Apex knew, the local law banning turbines taller than 120 feet would be moot if the company lined up enough leases to generate a steady 70 megawatts of power. That was the tipping point that would allow the company to bypass local control and go to the state regulator, the Maryland Public Utilities Commission, which was under pressure from then-governor (and sometime presidential candidate) Martin O’Malley to approve clean-energy projects. (O’Malley’s Republican successor, Larry Hogan, hasn’t been as vocal about clean energy but recently signed a bill approving a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.) The county government, emails show, had even agreed to help Apex keep its plans quiet, at one point offering to allow the company to brief county officials at a closed-door meeting—a meeting that Apex eventually cancelled.

Even though it was missing key details, Graham recalls reading Divilio’s article “with horror. Why would anyone want to do that here?”

Still, there was little follow-up. The Kent County News didn’t publish another piece about Apex until a year later, and there was no media coverage elsewhere, according to online archives and Kent County residents. What types of activities went unreported? Mostly public meetings, of the sort that Hemstock was so persnickety about.

In May 2014, for instance, at a regularly scheduled gathering of the planning commission, two county planning officials briefly discussed the wind farm, according to meeting minutes. Amy Moredock, the county’s top planning official, says this exchange marked the first public airing of the turbine issue by anyone in government. The minutes offer little detail, but they do mention Apex’s decision to forgo a hearing with the planning commission and instead “explore another avenue to get their project up and running.”

That other avenue wasn’t described, but it could have been the basis of an important news story if anyone in county government or local media had tuned in. Instead, an entire additional year passed before Graham and Keep Kent Scenic came to understand that Apex was trying to bypass local control.

On May 7, 2014, six days after the first public discussion of Apex’s proposal at the county planning commission that no news organizations covered, the county’s Economic Development Advisory Board heard Apex officials outline the scope of the project, according to meeting minutes. Again, there was no news coverage. County records show that no agenda was published in advance (nor is one required by law in Maryland) and no community members dropped by to hear the presentation. The advisory board’s meeting minutes, which, unlike those of the county commissioners, were not posted on the county website, show no suggestion of any talk of local ordinances that ban wind turbines taller than 120 feet. They also mention nothing about Apex’s intention to bypass county officials entirely and seek approval from the state.

“Everywhere the wind turbine companies go, they really follow the same procedure,” says Paul Crowe, who helped lead a successful fight against a wind farm in North East, Pennsylvania. “They go into an area, very often a small town, and work very, very closely with individual residents to sign up for turbines, promising they will make lots of money. They try to get things moving before anyone really knows what is happening. They expect to run into a combination of no knowledge, lack of opposition, local officials uninformed.”

Crowe’s efforts have turned him into not just an activist but a journalist. As the Erie Times-News, the local paper of record, has endured cutbacks, Crowe has started his own fledgling news site, North East PA Online, which has been prodding local officials to take steps like posting agendas ahead of their meetings.

In Chestertown, as Bill Graham of Keep Kent Scenic investigated Apex’s efforts to secure permission for its wind farm, he, too, evolved into a quasi-professional reporter. A former nuclear engineer and steady reader of the Kent County News, The Baltimore Sun, and more recentlyThe Chestertown Spy, a two-person website started by a former nonprofit executive in 2009, Graham initially had no idea where to start. He wasn’t learning much from the local government and had not been aware of the recent public discussions at the two county committees. He says the planning commission and the county commissioner’s office told him there was nothing to announce or discuss since there was no application from the company. It wasn’t until 2015 that he and another resident learned they could find publicly available land records—to see who was signing leases—at the red-brick county courthouse in Chestertown.

Scanning the internet, Graham connected with Tammy Truitt, a chicken farmer in nearby Somerset County who had also fought plans for a wind farm and who told him there might be a filing with the Federal Aviation Administration about Apex’s proposed wind farm. Graham found that document, which gave a better sense of the scope and specifics of the Apex project, including a tentative map that showed where the company wanted to place the wind turbines. He also learned that the path of the proposed turbines would have to be assessed by the US Fish and Wildlife Administration to see if it would result in an excessive number of bird kills. The Eastern Shore is a major route on the north-south flyway for migratory birds.

In late February 2015, Apex representatives hosted an invitation-only dinner at a vacant hardware store in Galena, a small farming community northeast of Chestertown, gathering about 35 local landowners to listen to the company’s pitch about leases and turbines, according to people who attended. It was catered by Molly’s, a local restaurant, and featured wine from nearby Crow Farms, owned by former County Commissioner Roy Crow and his wife, Judy, who had been approached by Apex as possible turbine hosts.

County Commissioner Billy Short, whose family has lived in the county for three generations, says that at the dinner he pressed Apex officials to explain how they were going to win approval of their project given that it contravened the county’s master plan. “They hemmed and hawed and said, ‘We will talk about that later,’ ” says Short, whose day job is running a window-treatment business. He kept pressing. Finally, he says, “they admitted that once they got to a 70-megawatt system, they would bypass us and go straight to the state public service commission.” That did it for Short. “My takeaway was that our authority and zoning regs did not mean anything to them,” he says. But he didn’t make his misgivings known to the larger community at that time.

A day or so after the Apex dinner, Graham, who hadn’t been invited but who learned of it at the last minute and dropped in after it started, aired his concerns in a letter to The Chestertown Spy. He wrote about the height of the proposed turbines, the risk to birds on the migratory flyway, potential noise, and the disruption of the county’s scenic landscape. He says he had sent the letter two weeks earlier to the Kent County News but was told it couldn’t be published because it exceeded the customary length.

Janet Lewis, an artist and organic farmer, read Graham’s letter in The Chestertown Spy and got in touch with him. Together the two began to delve more deeply into the procedures for wind-farm approvals and decided to form Keep Kent Scenic, which quickly won support from dozens of residents who volunteered to help. “I have never done anything like this before,” says Lewis, who has since become an expert at researching land records and scouring other documents the group obtained through public information requests. She, Graham, and other members of Keep Kent Scenic finally learned about the Maryland Public Service Commission’s power to override local regulations by reading documents on the commission’s website and speaking with people like Truitt in other communities that already were fighting wind farms.

Graham and Lewis realized time was not on their side. They decided that they needed to publicize their findings and organized a community meeting at the Kent County Public Library on March 21, 2015. The Kent County News advanced it in a brief story, then afterward reported on the proceedings and the “standing-room-only” crowd, which Graham estimated at 200 people. Although the story did not include a detailed explanation of the county’s potential loss of veto power, it did allude to the commissioners’ desire to “ensure local authority over the approval” and their concerns “that Apex may be trying to work around the county’s zoning and planning process.”

As opposition grew, it generated more stories, in both the News and The Chestertown Spy. Local elected officials began voicing disapproval. With negative publicity building, Apex officials offered the newspaper an email Q&A, which was conducted by Divilio and published on April 2, 2015. Answers from Apex made it sound as if the state were forcing it to bypass local regulations.

Around the same time, Steve Hershey, a Republican state senator, tried to get a bill through the state legislature to keep veto power in the county. The bill died in committee, but the debate over the measure drew news coverage in the Kent County News and the Easton Star-Democrat.

“This fight,” observes Wayne Gilchrest, a former congressman and a moderate Republican, “has brought together some of the most liberal members of the community who would vote for Obama for a third term and the more conservative in the county, who still think Obama was born in Kenya.”

In June 2015, Keep Kent Scenic organized a second standing-room-only meeting, this one in the Kennedyville firehouse. Several speakers, including Truitt and a lawyer from the state Public Service Commission, explained the approval process in detail. Lewis and Graham spent much of the time signing up supporters. As county officials made their opposition plain, they drew loud applause.

Still, the Kent County News reported that the community was likely to be outflanked by Apex, noting that most of the hearings would be held in Baltimore, 50 miles away, and that the activists might need to hire a lawyer. “Opponents of wind turbines in Kent County are in for a protracted battle that will be expensive and difficult to win,” reporter Trish McGee wrote.

The turbine opponents kept working through last summer and fall to publicize their views, posting large signs around the county and gathering signatures every Saturday at the Chestertown farmers’ market. They also spoke with state legislators about passing a bill that would allow the community to retain control of alternative-energy projects.

Then, toward the end of the year, the winds suddenly shifted. In December, Apex announced that it was putting the turbines on hold and had instead filed an application with the Maryland Public Service Commission to build a 330-acre, 60-megawatt solar facility. Seeming to learn from the work of the anti-turbine activists, the Kent County News’ coverage pointed out that, as with the wind project, Apex’s solar plans were not required to comply with county code. Written by Divilio, the article went on to quote Graham, who had met with Apex officials about the new proposal and declared himself “just delighted.”

But Graham says he has to continue to keep a close watch, citing unresolved issues like the possibility that Apex could sell the already-signed leases for wind turbines to another developer “who isn’t weary of fighting us.” He was also concerned, at the time of the company’s December announcement, that Apex might disregard the county’s solar regulations. “We’re not popping Champagne corks,” he told Divilio.

Although Graham plans to stay involved, he has handed over the reins of Keep Kent Scenic to Lewis, the artist and organic farmer who co-founded the group. “I want my life back,” he says.

Lewis and others in the community are closely watching the solar project. The Kent County commissioners recently intervened at the Maryland Public Service Commission to oppose a recent request by Apex to plant more solar panels than county law allows, exactly the kind of move Graham feared back in December. This time, however, the county government has joined the fight much earlier, well-schooled about Apex’s penchant for trying to bypass local authority. For that, it has a group of community activists, not a newspaper, to thank.

Miranda S. Spivack is a freelance writer specializing in stories about government accountability and a former reporter and editor at The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @mirandareporter. This story was supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Marquette University’s O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism.

By Susannah Nesmith, CJR

It’s been eight months since the Tampa Bay Times rolled out an investigation into five elementary schools in Florida’s Pinellas County that had become “Failure Factories”—almost exclusively black, with some of the worst test scores in the state, chronic violence, and crippling staff turn-over—and the impact just keeps on coming.

The county school district has reformed discipline practices to try to address the disparity in how black and white children are treated, and hired a “turnaround leader” who has a staff of eight and a charge to improve the schools. The district added 100 classroom aides, and community volunteer hours in the schools have more than doubled. The state legislature found $400,000 for a special reading program.

Then, just last week, the school district announced pay increases of up to $25,000 for teachers at the schools, in an effort to attract and retain better teachers. The school day at the five schools will be extended for an hour to give students more time devoted to learning to read, but also more time at recess and in art and music class. A minority achievement officer will be hired to look at systemic issues across the district.

That’s not all: Also last week, the US Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into the district, the Times reported. Top department officials had first visited the district after reading the originalTimes series, which made clear that these aren’t just any struggling schools—they’re schools where student performance plummeted beginning in 2007, when the district abandoned an integration plan that had been in place for decades and the schools became resegregated.

The federal probe follows a state review launched last fall, and at the district level, the first reforms were put in motion even before the Times series was published. But lately, just tracking the fallout, as the paper has been doing on the series landing page, has become almost a full-time beat. “In February it seemed to start snowballing,” says Michael LaForgia, one of the reporters on the project.

The impact is noteworthy, but it’s not surprising. As I wrote in August, the series was deep, thorough, and authoritative. It didn’t hesitate to assign responsibility to local officials, and it carefully showed that many other schools serving poor or minority students around the state were doing a much better job of educating those kids. Some of the solutions Pinellas officials are trying are taken from efforts at other school districts that the series highlighted.

The series has already won a slew of awards. The response from readers has been impressive, too, thanks in part to the smart interactive “prologue” designed by data reporter Nathaniel Lash.

“A good project put out by the Times used to get between 75,000 and 100,000 page views,” LaForgia says. “As of this month, ‘Failure Factories’ was up to about 600,000 views from more than 260,000 unique visitors. Our prologue element alone drew more than 260,000 views.”

Despite the list of reforms, the response of school officials has been mixed, with some board members and others complaining that the newspaper is focused on the past. “We don’t care if they admit [mistakes] or not, as long as they help these children,” says reporter Lisa Gartner.

But the response from the broader community has been overwhelmingly positive, say Times journalists—though they do get the “occasional racist phone message,” reporter Cara Fitzpatrick told me.  

Some hater also decided it would be a good idea to post the home address of Fitzpatrick and LaForgia, who are married. “And my driving record,” Fitzpatrick says. “That was fun.”

Then there was the mysterious subscription to Ebony magazine, which started showing up in the mail. “We have two kids,” LaForgia says. “It’s kind of hard to miss the message that ‘we know where you live.’ ” (On the other hand, Fitzpatrick says, she’s enjoyed reading it: “It’s a great magazine.”)

The reporters have no intention of backing down because of a few random racists. They recently met with their editors and gave them “a year’s worth of stories that we want to follow up on,” LaForgia says.

One angle to follow: whether there will be any serious effort to desegregate the schools. In March, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund announced it intends to revive the 50-year-old lawsuit that originally desegregated Pinellas schools.

Whatever happens on that front, the series is a great example of how a newspaper can make a concrete difference in a complex issue: Dive deeply into the data and report the hell out of what it shows.