Pulitzercurriculumbook final

Journalism in the

Pulitzer Tradition

By Barbara Benish & Miles Maguire A curriculum guide to support the Centennial writing contest sponsored by

with funding provided by the Wisconsin Humanities Council from the Pulitzer Prizes Board

About Joseph Pulitzer and the Pulitzer Prizes Board

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oseph Pulitzer was known as the most skillful of newspaper publishers in the later 19th century. He was a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles and a visionary who endowed the journalism profession.

Pulitzer’s New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper journalism. He was the first to call for the collegiate training of journalists, and in writing his 1904 will he made a provision to establish a competition that awarded journalistic and other literary excellence.

In doing so, Pulitzer said: “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.”

Pulitzer established an advisory board for the competition and gave it the authority to make changes in any subject. He also allowed the board to withhold any award where entries fall below its standards of excellence.

Not surprisingly, the Plan of Award, which has governed the prizes since their inception in 1917, has been revised frequently. The board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prizes Board, has increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder’s will and its intent. In addition, in recent years the board also allowed online content to be included in the annual contest, recognizing how technology has been changing the profession.

Beginning with the 2006 competition, the board allowed online content in all 14 of its journalism categories. For 2009, the competition was expanded to include online-only news organizations, and for 2011, it was revised to encourage more entries of online and multimedia materials. The board also adopted an all-digital entry and judging system in 2012, replacing the historic reliance on submission of scrapbooks.

While major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, have received many of the awards, the board also has often reached out to work done by small, little-known papers.

For more information on Joseph Pulitzer or the Pulitzer Prizes Board, go to www.pulitzer.org.

About the Guide & Contest

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EWSPA’s Journalism In the Pulitzer Tradition curriculum guide and writing contest is a collaborative effort with the Wisconsin Humanities Council and the Pulitzer Prizes Board. This curriculum was produced as part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Council in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the Prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work.

For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, we thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board and Columbia University.

As you page through the booklet, you’ll notice that we’ve highlighted 10 Pulitzer Prize winning entries in a variety of categories. But rather than just point out why these are examples of good writing, the booklet gives detailed ideas about how you can take one of those subjects and report on it for your own high school publication. We offer you ideas where you can go to research your topics, give you possible sources and questions to ask during interviews, and much more.

Barbara Benish, executive secretary of NEWSPA, and Miles Maguire, journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and a longtime NEWSPA presenter, spent more than 100 hours creating this booklet, in hopes it will encourage high school students to take their writing to the Pulitzer level.

The 2017 competition was unveiled at the 2016 NEWSPA conference. For each category in which a student would like to submit an entry, he/she must write two stories that fit the topic/ theme. The two stories can be printed in one issue or throughout several. Articles must be published in student newspapers, magazines or websites between May 1, 2016, and Feb. 28, 2017.

Rutledge

The entries will then be judged by Raquel Rutledge, NEWSPA’s 2016 conference

keynote speaker and a Pulitzer Prize winner for her “Cashing in on Kids” series in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. That’s right —a Pulitzer Prize journalist will give students feedback on their stories! Cash prizes will also be awarded the student winners, who will be recognized at the 2017 NEWSPA conference on April 26 at UW Oshkosh.

How to apply • •

• • •

To apply, schools must be a 2016-17 member of NEWSPA; you’ll find the membership form in the back of this booklet.

In addition, each entry needs to fill out the application form and pay a $20 entry fee. That form can also be found in the back of this booklet, while both forms can be found at http://journalism. uwosh.edu/northeastern-wisconsin-scholastic-press-association-newspa/.

Multiple students can enter their joint work, but if they win, the prize money will be distributed equally among all.

Each school can enter up to two entries in the competition. Entries must be clearly identified and circled in red. (See entry form for more details.)

For more information or if you have questions, contact Benish at benish@uwosh.edu.

About the Wisconsin Humanities Council

The Wisconsin Humanities Council is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a leading statewide resource for librarians, teachers, museum educators and civic leaders, who drive entertaining and informative programs using history, culture and discussion to strengthen community life for everyone. The WHC awards more than $175,000 a year through seven rounds of grants to local organizations offering public humanities programming. For more information on Wisconsin Humanities Council, visit http://wisconsinhumanities.org.

About NEWSPA

The Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association officially began in 1969, when a UW Oshkosh professor, Gary Coll, took a few college students to local high schools to bring awareness to the journalism field.

Today, NEWSPA includes an annual spring conference, adviser training workshops, yearbook and newspaper competitions, and more. For more information, go to http://journalism.uwosh.edu/northeastern-wisconsin-scholastic-press-association-newspa/.

Connecting the DOT

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By Miles Maguire by substituting the word “talking” for “interviewing.” inding stories that matter and reporting them with This switch accomplishes two things: It creates an easy impact should be the primary goals of any journalto remember term, and it underscores the fact that ist. But good intentions will not make you a good when it comes to getting information from human reporter. You need to know the essential tools that topsources, there are alternatives to the question-based notch journalists use to gather information, applying interview approach that may lead to better results. them in a structured But it’s really the first way to produce articles word in the phrase, Connecting the DOT with high credibility. “connecting,” that is According to Canadian most significant. It is Journalists connect the DOT by using three tools–Documents, Observation and Talk–to look at a news topic in different ways and from different perspectives. The best reporters journalism scholar G. meant to underscore a know how to use these tools to cross-check and authenticate facts, to reduce or eliminate Stuart Adam, there are way of approaching the unsupportable allegations, and to arrive at a deeper level of insight and understanding. three specific tasks at news that is based on DOCUMENTS the core of a reporter’s a mindful comparison Documents make pursuit of authoritative of facts and purported up the backbone facts: “acts of observafacts as a way of getting of most major tion, analysis of docucloser to a true account stories and come ments and interviewing.” of events. Rather than in many forms, from routine Whether consciously or pretending to be a mere reports to confinot, the best reporters conveyor of information, dential audits. use these three tools in a a reporter who is conway that allows them to necting with the news in cross-check and authenthis way is using a “not ticate facts, to reduce or quite scientific” method eliminate unsupportable based on testing and OBSERVATION Some observations are retesting theories and allegations, and to lead collected in the form of suppositions with the them to a deeper level eyewitness reporting, of insight and underevidence that is providbut at other times Architect of the Capitol standing. The topflight ed through documents, TALK reporters will visit journalists may use these observation and talk.

Reporters ask questions in different the scene of a news ways and different settings, ranging event to do tools with greater sophisfrom formal press conferences to follow-up investigation. tication and efficiency How news comes one-on-one conversations. than less experienced to be known colleagues, but they are Each element of DOT exactly the same tools represents its own that are available both way of knowing, what to the Pulitzer Prize philosophers call “episwinner and to the rookie temology,” and each reporter assembling an comes with intrinsic overnight police roundup strengths and weakbased on blotter entries, nesses. Documents, assuming that they are based on questions posed to the department’s press officer and, the work of fair-minded and disinterested researchers, when time allows and circumstances warrant, a visit to reflect an accumulation of knowledge, but they provide the scene of a crime. no guarantee of accuracy and may embody hidden or For lack of a better term, and at the risk of appearing glib, this methodology is called “Connecting the DOT.” The first two letters of this acronym come from two of the three elements, documentary analysis and observations made in the field. The acronym is completed

unconscious bias. Information gained through firsthand experience has the benefits of immediacy and authenticity, but it is also limited, in no small part because of its specificity of perspective. Talk with human sources

Continued on next page

can lead to colorful details and unexpected insights, but verbal communication is fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding and omission. As reporters gain experience with these tools, they also learn about their limitations as well as their ability to function iteratively.

A document may contain names that lead to human sources; an interview may inspire a site visit to inspect a particular locale; as part of an observation, a reporter may meet additional sources, who may in turn provoke additional documentary research.

The difficulty of documents

Documents can be difficult to get and hard to understand. For those reasons, some journalists shun the idea of using documents in their research. They think that documents are just too time-consuming and too much work. But many of the most accomplished journalists, including those with a string of major prizes to their names, have made documents central to the way they work. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that documents are not always reliable and may not even be true. Documents come in many forms, everything from incident reports filed by police officers to email messages, classified reports, audits, photographs, databases, books and newspaper articles.

Firsthand observations

Unlike documents, which at least in theory provide the same information to all comers, observations are highly individualistic and depend on a range of factors, including vantage point and the skill of the observer.

For a reporter, the act of observation serves at least two purposes. First of all, the reporter wants to gain as complete an understanding as possible of a story or situation, and second the reporter is gathering specifics that can be incorporated into a news article. In the end these two goals come together as the reporter seeks to strengthen the credibility of a finished account by demonstrating an authoritative understanding buttressed with compelling visual images and other physical details.

It is certainly true that many stories, particularly breaking stories, have to be reported by phone. Sometimes a looming deadline means that a reporter cannot go out to a crime scene or a government meeting or the home of a grieving family. For many routine stories, the investment of time in making observations about wellknown locations or sources cannot really be justified.

But far too often reporters skip over the crucial step of firsthand inspection.

Importance of interviews

For all the valuable background that documents can provide and despite the critical role of direct observa-

tion, it is in talking to sources that reporters do their most important work. Human sources can provide confirmation about key details and can also walk a reporter through an explanation, with digressions as necessary, in a way that a documentary source cannot. Human sources also dispense the golden quotes that reporters need to emphasize key points about a topic or to reveal character traits about a person.

In general a source who is named and identified in a way that reveals the potential for bias is believed to give more credible information than either unnamed sources or sources whose partisan or corporate affiliations are not revealed. Some journalists take a quantitative approach to sources, insisting on two or more sources in a story. Such an approach, however, can create a false sense of security in that the sources may not have arrived at their positions on their own and could be, knowingly or unknowingly, echoing the same point, rather than providing independent confirmation of a fact.

One of the dangers of working with human sources is that it is very easy to be misled. Some sources may actively seek to mislead, but there are also many sources who may accurately and honestly say something that turns out to be wrong. A reporter needs to crosscheck one source against another and against what is found in documentary and observational research.

An integrated approach to news reporting

For close to a century, journalists, scholars and critics have urged the profession to adopt an approach that more closely resembles the way that scientists pursue knowledge through a process of experimentation and testing. But the idea of adapting the scientific method to journalism has never really taken hold, in large part because of the major differences between science and journalism.

That said, it is still true that top journalists follow certain patterns that can be described and emulated, even if they cannot be reduced to a step-by-step formula. This general pattern is what is referred to as “Connecting the DOT,” and it is based on a recognition that getting to the factual basis, or “truth,” of a situation is a significant undertaking that requires diligence, thoroughness and care.

Adapted from Advanced Reporting: Essential Skills for 21st Century Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2015).

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Beat Reporting Topic: Cancer Survivors

Background and Summary

Amy Dockser Marcus of The Wall Street Journal received a weeklong Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship in 2004 that focused on cancer research. A year later, she won a Pulitzer Prize in the Beat Reporting category for her stories on the way state-of-the-art cancer treatments were creating new challenges for patients. The judges wrote that her entry included “masterful stories about patients, families and physicians that illuminated the often-unseen world of cancer survivors.”

told her to put away her reporter’s notebook and to come with her to her doctor’s appointments as her daughter. But no matter how much time she spent on her research, there were no answers to find. “You could research from now until forever and you still wouldn’t find the answer to save her life,” she said. “The whole process of watching her deteriorate, and then ultimately die, was wrenching for me and my family.”

After her mother’s death, Dockser Marcus channeled her curiosity and determination into other writing projects. “Even though I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are confronted by very sad situations, I find that the current life is a very powerful force — the will to live. It’s so elemental. Being around patients trying to extend their lives … is in some ways, not sad at all,” she said. “It’s inspiring.”

Her stories went beyond the statistics of cancer, and showed the human Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger side of the disease, not presents Amy Dockser Marcus with the 2005 Pulitonly on its victims, but zer Prize in Beat Reporting. also on the victim’s families and friends. But the series also informed the readers what they can do to Yet she doesn’t consider herself a patient advocate. “An prevent the disease from occurring and detailed new advocate argues, forcefully, one point of view. I don’t approaches in fighting cancer. think I argue one point of view. I try to elucidate the complexity of the situation.”

Dockser Marcus knows firsthand how a cancer diagnosis impacts a family. In a May 2014 Mayborn InBut she admits she does become involved in the lives of sider story (http://issuu.com/mayborninsider/docs/ those she reports on, which can mean attending their mayborn_2014), she recalls sitting in the car outside funerals when they die. She has been praised for her her children’s elementary school in Newton, a suburb ability to merge the science of the story with the soul, of Boston, when her sister called to tell her that their and help her readers understand both sides. mother had just been diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. Having recently completed the Harvard media The Works fellowship, as well as spending a year writing about Dockser Marcus’ stories include: cancer, she knew that a cancer diagnosis was no longer • A Wife’s Struggle with Cancer Takes an Unexpected Toll a death sentence. But that didn’t stop the tears from • New Approach to Lung Cancer: Being Aggressive streaming down her face, she recalled.

• After Leukemia, Family Struggles to Define ‘NorFrom her mother Golda’s diagnosis in December 2004 mal’ until her death in May 2007, Dockser Marcus re• Medical Student Takes on a Rare Disease – His searched and looked for answers, even after her mother Own

• • • • •

A Patient’s Quest to Save New Drug Hits Market Reality At 32, a Decision: Is Cancer Small Enough to Ignore?

Cancer Fight Shifts to Survivors Early Warning: New Way to Find Cancer Earlier Fighting Cancer with a Frown: Research Questions Role of Optimism in Beating the Disease

The stories can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/ winners/6995 or http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SB111263120089597221.htm.

Biography Amy Dockser Marcus is a Boston-based staff reporter for the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal.

Born in Boston, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

She began her journalism career in 1987 as a reporter for the American Lawyer in New York. She joined The Wall Street Journal in July 1988 as a news assistant in the New York bureau and became a reporter, covering law, in October 1989. Prior to moving to the Boston bureau in April 1999, Dockser Marcus had been a reporter in the Journal’s Tel Aviv bureau and had covered Israel and the Middle East since July 1991.

She left the Journal in 2000 to work for Money magazine, but returned two years later to the Boston bureau.

Besides earning the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Dockser Marcus has also received other awards, such as: •

First place in the New York State Bar Association’s 1990 Media Awards Competition for a group of legal feature stories that covered such subjects as environmental liability for toxic-waste dumping, litigation over privacy rights and new developments in libel law

•

The Deadline Club Award in 2005 for specialized writing in science, technology, medical or environmental reporting

•

The National Media Award from the National Down Syndrome Congress in 2006

Dockser Marcus is also the author of “The View From Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East,” published in 2000, and “Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” published in 2007. Both books grew out of reporting she did as a Middle East correspondent.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

Follow the link above to read the full versions of her stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the reporter goes about telling her stories.

At times, it appears as if she is almost a “fly on the wall,” observing how the cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment was not only hard on families, but also hard on marriages. She includes dialogue of what is being said, and intersperses that with details that tell the reader that she was there. Together, they provide a timeline and deeper understanding of what cancer survivors and their families go through. For instance: A few weeks ago, Mrs. O’Donnell was in the kitchen of their Elka Park home when Jonny suddenly asked her, “Mom, do you think that someday I will be happily married?”

The question caught her off-guard. She thinks the issue was on his mind not only because he has a girlfriend but also because of what he has seen his parents endure during the past 10 years. She says she didn’t hesitate with her reply.

“Yes, Jonny,” she told him, “I think you will be happily married.”

Does she consider herself happily married?

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Mr. O’Donnell’s reply was more cautious. “In an imperfect world, I am as happily married as I think anybody can be,” he said.

Think about how you can earn people’s trust so they would allow you into their homes, treating you almost like family, even when they don’t know how their story will end. Dockser Marcus even includes journal writings that helped one husband deal with his wife’s cancer and subsequent health problems. How could you get one of your sources to allow you to use his or her private writing in a very public way?

She also knows when to paraphrase information and when to use direct, powerful quotations. See how she mingles the two in “Fighting Cancer With a Frown”: Ultimately, Ms. Miller says she did maintain an optimistic view that she could survive, but she doesn’t believe that simply being positive improved her survival odds. More important, she says, was staying true to her regular coping style, which involved actively seeking out complementary care to bolster what her doctor was doing.

She changed her diet to only organic foods, did massage to ease the pain and ran as much as

she could. “I’m a naturally optimistic person,” she says. “You are who you are, and you bring that to cancer.”

To get those stories, Dockser Marcus first had to earn the trust of the cancer survivors and their families that she was following. She told stories not only of the physical changes that come with a cancer diagnosis, but also the emotional changes that occur, particularly since more people survive cancer today.

Lastly, she included statistics to show that these people and what happened to them is not unusual. Each story shows that a cancer diagnosis can affect people in profoundly different ways.

A good story must be complete in having a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning must be strong and engaging. The middle must be thorough enough to draw the reader along and explain the significance of the experience without getting bogged down in details.

A good ending gives the reader a sense of satisfaction, often by bringing the reader full-circle back to where the story began. When you read “At 32, a Decision: Is Cancer Small Enough to Ignore?” you’ll note that the ending does just that. It goes back to the beginning, and explains the decision John MacMahon ultimately made.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. Read “A Wife’s Struggle with Cancer Takes an Unexpected Toll.” What type of lead does the author use? Is it effective? If yes, why? If not, come up with another lead you feel works better.

2. Read “Medical Student Takes on a Rare Disease – His Own.” What is the best direct quote in the story? Why is it effective?

3. Read “Cancer Fight Shifts to Survivors.” Name five sources in the article that you may also find useful in doing a similar story at your school.

4. Read any of Amy Dockser Marcus’s stories and find examples of descriptive writing. Why do they work in the stories?

5. Read “After Leukemia, Family Struggles to Define ‘Normal’.” Transition helps a story flow from one idea to the next. Find three examples of transition that are effective. How can you use those same techniques in your stories?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community Cancer has no boundaries. It is almost certain that a teacher, staff member or student has/had cancer in your school, or has a member of their family who has/

had cancer. You could write how someone beat the disease, what’s new in treatment and how that is impacting survival rates, what impact a cancer diagnosis has on a person’s school/family life, cancer trends based on statistics, and so on.

As explained earlier, the first part of writing begins with research, or Documents. Here are some sources where you can find data or background for your stories: § National Cancer Institute — http://www.cancer. gov/ — Here you will find information on cancer types, research, causes and prevention, treatment, and much more. Cancer statistics can be found at http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/ what-is-cancer/statistics. § Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — http://www.cdc.gov/ — For specific information on cancer, such as how to prevent cancer, cancer treatment, cancer survivorship, and more, go to http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/. For data and statistics, go to http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/data/ index.htm. (The United States Cancer Statistics: 1999-2012 Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report at https://nccd.cdc.gov/uscs/ combines cancer registry data from CDC’s National Program of Cancer Registries (http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/ npcr/ ) and the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (http://seer.cancer.gov/ ) to produce a new set of official federal statistics on cancer incidence (newly diagnosed cases) for a single year.) The current report provides state-specific and regional data for cancer cases diagnosed and for cancer deaths that occurred in 2012, the most recent year for which incidence data are available. § Lance Armstrong Foundation — http://www. livestrong.org/ — Find information on the side effects of treatment, managing your life during treatment, healthy living after treatment, or download the resource guide for cancer patients and survivors. You can also find information on the Livestrong at the YMCA program at http:// www.livestrong.org/what-we-do/our-actions/ livestrong-programs/ymca/. § President’s Cancer Panel — http://deainfo.nci.nih. gov/advisory/pcp/pcp.htm. The annual reports may be of particular help as you research your stories. § National Cancer Institute Office of Cancer Survivorship — http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/ocs/.

Research and statistics can be found at http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/ocs/resources/researchers. html. § American Cancer Society — www.cancer.org.

Learn about cancer, how to stay healthy, explore research, and more. § American Institute for Cancer Prevention — http://www.aicr.org/. Discover how to reduce cancer risk, what’s happening in cancer research, foods that fight cancer, and more. § Wisconsin Department of Health Services — https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/. For information on cancer incidence and mortality in the state, go to https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/wcrs/index. htm. For cancer facts and cancer cluster information, go to https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/environmental/cancerclus.htm. § UW Carbone Cancer Center — http://www. uwhealth.org/uw-carbone-cancer-center/cancer/10252.

The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: § Observing the student, teacher or staff member who has cancer in his or her day-to-day life. What does the cancer patient look like? Does he or she have good or bad days? How can you tell? How do fellow classmates/co-workers interactions change as the disease spreads or wanes? § Asking to go home (or to the hospital) with the cancer patient. Watch and record interactions between spouses, children, and hospital staff.

How does the diagnosis impact the family? What physical and emotional changes do you see taking place?

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask: § Cancer patients or survivors — What was their reaction when first diagnosed? How do they deal with the stress and unknown? What scares/ scared them most about the diagnosis? How did the cancer diagnosis change their interactions with friends, family, students or co-workers? How do/did they deal with highs and lows associated with the disease? If they could give people one message, what would it be? How did the diagnosis impact their faith? § Oncologists or other doctors — What are treatment options — both drugs and surgery? How do they treat the “whole” person? What is a patient’s chance of survival? How can someone limit his or her chances of getting cancer, or is it just in someone’s genes and there is nothing that can be done to stop it? § School counselor or psychologist — What services

do they offer in the school to help students or faculty members deal with a cancer diagnosis or death? What issues or problems are often common in school, especially after a cancer (or any other type of) death? How do you handle depression that can often result because of the cancer diagnosis? § Friends and family of cancer patients/survivors — How do/did they react when the diagnosis was first revealed to them? How has the diagnosis changed them? What message would they like/or wished they had told the patient? How did they try to support the patient? Did they ever feel they failed them? If so, how? What impact did this have on their faith?

Be sure to end every interview with this question: Is there anything else I should know or that you’d like to add that we didn’t yet discuss. You might get some real gems of information that way.

Commentary Topic: Society & Culture

Background and Summary

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize in commentary went to Leonard Pitts Jr. of The Miami Herald “for his fresh, vibrant columns that spoke, with both passion and compassion, to ordinary people on often divisive issues.” Like all good columnists, Pitt’s role is to provide a fresh perspective on the news, and to get readers to think in new ways about a topic they are already familiar with but aren’t quite sure what to make of. As Pitts once wrote, “They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul.”

His commentary is nuanced, and often it’s his reasoning rather than his final conclusion that is surprising.

For example, he joined in the general disapproval of a board game called “Ghettopoly” that was based on “Monopoly” but was situated in an urban area and used negative stereotypes of black culture. But in a surprising twist, Pitts said he was mostly upset not about the game but about the way that black leaders were attacking it. As Pitts explained, he didn’t disagree with their disapproval—only that it had taken them too long to come out against black singers and musicians who had done so much to spread these negative stereotypes of black culture.

A columnist like Pitts shares certain qualities with the reporter and certain qualiGood columnists are so ties with the editorial writer. Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, attuned to what is going on left, presents Leonard Pitts Jr. with the 2004 Like a reporter, a writer of around them that they often Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. commentary is working with are way ahead of the public, objective facts but has a litand the rest of the media, in tle more leeway in providing an interpretation of those what they are commenting on. For example, writing in facts. Like an editorial writer, a columnist is expressing 2003—more than a decade before the debate about an opinion—but the goal is not so much to win an argu- police conduct in the killing of black men became a nament as to start a conversation. It’s a tricky position to tional topic of debate in 2015—Pitts dissected the case be in, since a columnist is writing for and to a particular of a 41-year-old Cincinnati resident who was beaten to audience working with a shared set of assumptions. death by the police in that city.

The columnist works to challenge those assumptions without denigrating them.

The death was ruled a “homicide,” but Pitts takes the side of the police, sort of. He does not deny that black Pitts is African-American, and he frequently writes people have many good reasons to distrust the police, about race. But his perspective is not at all predictbut he also argues that cases need to be reviewed indiable or based on a kneejerk reaction to events. In one column he called for an eventual end to mandated affir- vidually. In this case, the man who was killed by police was high on PCP, a drug that Pitts has learned to fear mative action. But in another, he attacked white people based on his experience of living through a PCP epidemwho deny that members of their race long benefited ic in Los Angeles. In his view, the man—after getting from an unspoken kind of affirmative action, one that high on PCP and getting into a fight with officers—was gave whites, and especially white males, preferential the victim of a suicide, not a homicide. treatment in education, health care and the economy.

The works

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

Pitts received the Pulitzer based on these columns: • No cause justifies planting of bombs • Open casket opened eyes • Logic tells us: No death penalty • Affirmative action needs a deadline • High court needs supreme guidance • Gays may be hope for marriage • Faithful often give religion a bad name • To irate readers: Race has always benefited whites • Hard-core rap is cashing in on stereotypes • Cincinnati case not a tough call: Man killed self

A columnist like Pitts relies heavily on secondary sources, which makes sense since he is almost always writing about a news event that has already been reported.

He frequently cites news reporting that has appeared somewhere beside his own paper. What he does next is what raises his work into the realm of originality, and what he does is to take a conventional view of the news and turn it on its head.

They can be found here: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/6979 .

Biography Leonard Pitts Jr. grew up in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood known for its poverty and crime. But he was an exceptional student and entered the University of Southern California at the age of 15. He graduated in 1977 summa cum laude with a degree in English and began his professional career as a music critic.

Pitts describes himself in one word: writer. He wrote for numerous print publications and served as the editor of Soul, a tabloid that focused on black entertainment. But he has also written extensively for radio, including Casey Kasem’s Top 40. He joined The Miami Herald in 1991 as its pop music critic, but a few years later he was set upon by a group of drunken teenagers at a U2 concert and decided that it was time to move to a new assignment and switched to writing social commentary.

Although the Pulitzer citation noted that Pitts is known for writing on divisive topics, his most widely read column was on the theme of national unity and was published shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The column was addressed to the terrorists and it includes these lines: “Did you want us to respect your cause?

You damned your cause. Did you want to make us fear?

You just steeled our resolve. Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.” The column drew more than 30,000 email responses and has been widely reprinted.

Pitts is also the author of books of fiction and nonfiction.

One of his prize-winning columns, for instance, is headlined “Gays may be hope for marriage.” Here he takes the argument against gay marriage, that it will destroy the established institution of marriage, and points out that marriage has been on the decline for some time.

He writes: “We don’t attach so much importance to marriage anymore, do we? These days, we marry less, we marry later, we divorce more. And cohabitation, whether as a prelude to, or a substitute for, marriage, has gone from novelty to norm.” Keep in mind that he was writing this in 2003, when the country as a whole was becoming more negative on the idea of gay marriage, and note what he does next—he points out that gay activists are reminding the broader society of just how special, just how important, marriage is. “It strikes me as intriguing, instructive and poignant that gay couples so determinedly seek what so many of us scorn, are so ready to take the risk many of us refuse, find such value in an institution we have essentially declared valueless,” he writes.

In other words, Pitts is saying, the so-called “defenders of marriage” and the advocates for gay marriage actually agree on an idea that our broader society has rejected—that marriage matters. Pointing out common ground where none seems to exist is another signature of Pitts’s work. Pitts frequently uses this kind of irony, citing the incongruities between what people say and what their words actually mean.

In another prize-winning column, Pitts describes a woman who expresses sympathy for a man who has been bombing abortion clinics. She is quoted as explaining that the attacks were justified because they were against “things [that] are not right in the sight of God.” This causes Pitts to wonder “if she recognizes Osama bin Laden’s reasoning coming out of her mouth.” Pitts writes: “One doubts it. Religious fanatics are seldom perceptive of irony.” He goes on to say that abortion clinic attacks “amount to nothing less than terrorism.”

This is classic Pitts, bringing together an issue like abortion, on which there is major disagreement in our society, and an issue like terrorism, about which there is

little to no disagreement. The end result is that readers are prompted to rethink their views on both topics.

Pitts is most often offering controversial or unconventional opinions, which means that he has to be careful how he presents them. There is rarely any hard-sell in his writing. Instead he takes a casual, conversational approach, frequently starting his columns with simple, almost apologetic statements. One begins, “I guess I touched a nerve.” Another begins, “Forgive me, but I’m about to speak heresy.”

The other thing that a columnist has to provide is a good ending. Memorable columns almost always end with a memorable line, a punchy phrase that at once summarizes the columnist’s argument and invites the reader to think some more. Irony and contrast are tools that Pitts frequently uses to achieve this effect. One column, about the death of the mother of civil rights martyr Emmet Till ends like this: “Mamie Till Mobley was 81 years old at the time of her death. Her only child was 14 at the time of his.” Another, about religious people acting in unkind ways, ends with this thought: “Sometimes, piety is just an excuse to throw rocks at somebody’s head.”

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. What do you think of Pitt’s columns? How would you describe their tone.

2. What do you think Pitts would be like in person?

Do you think his writing accurately reflects his personality?

3. What are some issues that members of your community or school are currently concerned about?

4. Thinking about the issues from No. 3, is there a consensus opinion that many people share that you disagree with and would like to dispute?

5. Can you think of a way to use irony the way Pitts does to make your point? Can you think of a way to present an opposing view in a way that would encourage further conversation?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community

Columnists and news commentators like Pitts follow many of the methods that news reporters use. Before they offer their own perspective on an issue, they have to research it deeply and look for facts and angles that they can use to make their points. The best way to do that is to “connect the DOT.” As you complete this

assignment, you will follow this pattern, relying on documentary analysis, direct observation and talking with human sources.

Writing a column is really a two-step process. First you need to identify a topic that you want to write about, and then you need to decide how you could start a conversation about that topic, usually by thinking of an original point of view or by finding a way to encourage your readers to think differently about your topic.

Documents. The most important documents that you will use to write news commentary are news reports from your school or community newspaper. If at all possible, look at various accounts from different sources.

You should also seek out source documents, say from the school board’s website, and you may be able to review video or audio recordings about the topic.

Observation. The next step in the DOT process is observation.

• Look around your school and observe students, teachers and faculty. Are there things they have in common and things that separate them? Think about preferences in fashion and music as well as contrasting political or cultural values. Finding a way to cross these kinds of divides is a good strategy for writing a conversation-starting column.

• You can conduct a similar exercise on a smaller scale, such as an individual class, or on a larger scale, at the local shopping mall or some other place where community members gather, such as a church or entertainment venue.

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. First of all, ask your friends, classmates and family members what’s on their minds. Get an idea of what issues, either local or national, they care about.

Try to think of ways that you might get them to think some more about these issues by offering an ironic or contrasting perspective. As you write your commentary, “try out” some of your ideas on your friends to see how they react. You don’t want your readers to reject your ideas completely or to accept them as a given. The trick is to find a middle ground that will get them thinking about your topic.

Explanatory Writing Topic: Hunger/Government Food Programs

Background and Summary

The Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting is awarded for journalism “that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear presentation.” In 2014 it went to Eli Saslow of The Washington Post “for his unsettling and nuanced reporting on the prevalence of food stamps in post-recession America, forcing readers to grapple with issues of poverty and dependency.”

disbursements, with a surge in activity on the first of the month that recedes as the days go by and residents run low on funds and food.

The second story was reported out of Florida, a state that tries to encourage residents to sign up for food stamps as a way of stimulating the economy. But this approach puts some people in a quandary, those who have taken pride in refusing financial help from the government but who are now struggling to make ends meet.

Saslow’s reporting is exemplary in at least two ways.

First it shows that a good The third story focused on journalist can take on a Tennessee, where school topic that has already been food programs are a critical widely reported on and still part of providing adequate find ways to find “news,” nutrition to young resiby shedding a different dents. The state has had light on that topic or by to make adjustments for looking at it from novel Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, summer, when schools are perspectives. His reportleft, presents the 2014 Explanatory Reporting closed but children’s stoming is also remarkable in award to Eli Saslow. achs are still empty. The that it was able to take a solution is to pack school potentially dry policy issue buses with food and turn them into delivery vehicles. and humanize it, taking what is often seen as a political story and making it personal.

The fourth story describes a Republican congressman As Post editor Martin Baron wrote in his nominating let- from Florida who has spearheaded a plan to reform the food stamp program by tightening eligibility. Saslow’s ter to the Pulitzer judges, “One of Eli Saslow’s greatest story explains how the congressman views his efforts as skills as a journalist is his ability to transform the most a moral crusade, not just a fiscal one. complicated subjects into stories that are understandable and deeply affecting.” Saslow’s starting point was In the fifth article, Saslow goes to a county in Texas a look at the federal budget and the recognition that where the food stamp program may have unintentionthe food stamp program had exploded in size so that ally added to a health crisis, by encouraging residents to it reached 47 million citizens at a cost of $78 billion. buy low-cost but highly processed food. Their diet has “From that abstract beginning, Eli ended up reporting led to extremely high rates of obesity and diabetes. and writing six extraordinary stories,” Baron wrote.

In the first story, Saslow reported on a town in Rhode Is- The final article describes how one impoverished mother in Washington, D.C., struggled to deal with cuts land where a third of the residents are on food stamps. in the food stamp program, until she came up with a He used this setting to describe how the town’s economic rhythm is tied to the monthly cycle of food stamp solution. To make up for the smaller amounts of grocer-

ies she could buy with her own food stamp allotment, she would just sign up one of her sons so that he could contribute to the family table.

The works

Saslow received the Pulitzer based on these articles: • Hungering for a new month to begin • ‘I’m not ready to sign up for this yet’ • Driving away hunger • Rep. Steve Southerland believes in hard work. And that’s what he got.

• Too much of too little • Dec. 7th-Dec. 8th: the months seem a bit longer for a DC woman They can be found here: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7204.

Biography

Eli Saslow is a 2004 graduate of Syracuse University, where he was sports editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Orange. He started as a broadcast and digital journalism major, but decided that he was more interested in writing.

After graduation he was hired by the Post to cover high school volleyball in a suburban county.

While writing mostly short pieces for the sports section, he started working on longer stories in his spare time that caught the attention of his editors and led to his eventual transition to the paper’s national staff.

Saslow is a founder of Press Pass Mentors, a nonprofit organization that works with low-income students to help them go to college and enter professional careers.

The group says that it is “built on the belief that good writing provides a pathway to college and that college is the gateway to a world of opportunity.” It pairs students with professional writers to provide mentoring, experiential learning and writing practice.

He is an occasional contributor to ESPN the Magazine¸and in 2011 published his first book, “Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President.” The title refers to the fact the each day President Obama is given

a small sample of the daily correspondence he receives from ordinary citizens so that he can get a sense of the concerns of the American people. For the book Saslow profiled 10 of those letter writers.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Saslow won a George Polk Award for National Reporting for his series on food stamps. In 2010 he was a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Montana.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

Saslow is a master at putting a human face on an issue in the news. Although this is a relatively common strategy in journalism, few journalists are as skillful in pursuing it as Saslow. It is far easier said than done. In an interview with journalism students at Indiana University in 2015, Saslow explained several key elements of his approach. One of them is to take a big topic and then to break it down into successively smaller chunks, thinking about, for example, recent news developments, regional differences and ultimately the individuals who are affected.

In his food stamp series, Saslow uses individuals as the lens to understand a complicated topic. Some of them are food stamp recipients, but many are not. One of them is an outspoken opponent of the current system of administration. Finding the right people to tell a story is not quick or easy. In another interview, Saslow talked about “farming for characters,” a process of considering a variety of potential sources before settling on the right one.

Once he has found the right sources, he knows that it will take time for him to get to know them well. Building trust with his sources is a critical part of the reporting process. “It’s the little, interpersonal stuff that make[s] people feel comfortable with you and feel comfortable in a space,” Saslow said in a presentation at his alma mater Syracuse University. “If you can convince them and it’s genuine…that gets you a long way with people.”

Spending time with his sources allows him to observe them, which gives him a key ingredient for his narrative: details. “The key always is details,” Saslow said in an interview with the Nieman Foundation. “It’s a very simple, simple rule – not details for the sake of show – but the right details are everything.” Saslow explained that

details help the readers connect on a deep level. “What creates empathy in a story is having the reader feel at the end like they know somebody, and details are the way that happens.”

While many reporters think that interviewing is the best way to get quotes, Saslow has a different approach—listening for dialogue that he can use. “In a story, I almost never use quotes in the sense of I-asked-somebodyand-they-told-me-X. It’s all dialogue,” Saslow said in an interview with the Nieman Storyboard website. “When you are trying to ask people to read something like this, you want them to disappear into it.”

In one article he described how a couple, who had never used public assistance before and were uncomfortable with the idea of being “takers,” debated whether to sign up.

“I think we qualify,” Lonnie said.

There was a pause.

“Might be a good idea,” Celeste said.

“It’s hard to accept,” he said.

Another pause.

“We have to take help when we need it,” she said.

Saslow next describes in a descriptive paragraph the pros and cons of signing up for food stamps and then ends his story with more dialogue between the husband and wife.

He wondered: Sixty years old now, and who was he? A maker? A taker?

“I’m not ready to sign up for this yet,” he said.

“Soon we might have to,” she said.

He tucked Nerios’s business card into his back pocket.

“I know,” he said. “I’m keeping it.”

While acknowledging that different reporters have different approaches to writing, Saslow says that he tends to focus on each individual sentence rather than writing a complete draft and going back to polish. “By the time I turn a story in, I feel like the next day I could almost recite it from memory, because I’ve read through and thought about every sentence so many times before I move on to the next graf,” he told Nieman.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. To what extent do you think food insecurity is a problem in your community?

2. Many schools offer free or reduced price meals to students from low-income families. To what extent does this occur at your school?

3. Do you think food stamps are a necessity for low-income people, or do they represent a government program that is abused by people who don’t have a real need?

4. What do you think are the root causes of food insecurity in your community?

5. There are six articles in this series. Which one do you think was most effective, and why?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community

Mirroring national trends, food assistance costs in Wisconsin have risen dramatically in recent years and were more than $1 billion in 2015. This growth can be seen as a result of economic breakdowns that have left more people in need, or it could be traced to programs that have grown too generous and attractive. The state government appears to have taken the latter view and has moved to restrict eligibility, although elements of both explanations could be true.

Your assignment, like Saslow’s, is to try to examine this issue by putting a human face on the situation and developing stories that explain how broad governmental policies have an impact on individuals and their families.

As you complete this assignment, you will follow the pattern of “Connecting the DOT,” relying on documentary analysis, direct observation and talking with human sources.

Documents. Here are some sources you can use to learn more about food assistance in Wisconsin.

• The Wisconsin Department of Health Services administers the food stamp program in the state and provides extensive statistics about participation at this site: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/ foodshare/rsdata.htm • Background information on the issue of food security can be obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture at this site: http://www.ers.usda.gov/ topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-inthe-us.aspx.

• You can learn about the degree of food assistance provided at your school using statistics from the Department of Public Instruction: http://dpi.wi.gov/school-nutrition/program-statistics. Statistics on the percentage of studnets on free or reduced price lunch can be found at http://dpi.wisconsin.gov/news/maps/freereduced-lunch-private for private schools. For public school districts, the information can be

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found at http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/ tables/3457-students-participating-in-free-and-reduced-school-lunch-program?loc=51#detailed/10/8346-8770/false/36,868,867,133,38/ any/15141,7118 or http://dpi.wi.gov/nutrition.

A nonprofit organization, Feeding America, provides useful background on the topic: http://www. feedingamerica.org/. It has a county-by-county breakdown of food insecurity in Wisconsin here: http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/our-research/map-the-meal-gap/2013/WI_AllCounties_CDs_MMG_2013.pdf.

The Wisconsin Food Security Project provides mapping and other tools you can use to visualize the extent of hunger in your community: http:// foodsecurity.wisc.edu/ Program statistics (participation and funding data) for Food and Nutrition Programs operating in Wisconsin Schools and Institutions — http://dpi. wi.gov/school-nutrition/program-statistics. Statistics include only district level information regarding student enrollment and free and reduced price eligible students, as well as meal participation data by free/reduced price and paid categories.

School Breakfast Program Enrollment and Participation Report — (For public school districts and charter schools only; information not given on particular schools within a district.) http://dpi. wi.gov/school-nutrition/program-statistics#sbp Compare your School to State Data — http:// wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp Wisconsin Council on Children and Families — http://www.wccf.org/. Click on Publications and read “Child Poverty in Wisconsin” to get more insight. Or check out the Press Room link to read the latest information.

University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty — http://www.irp.wisc.edu/index.htm National Center for Children in Poverty — http:// www.nccp.org/ American Pediatric Association Task Force on Poverty — http://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx

The next step in the DOT process is Observation.

• A good place to learn more about food insecurity is a community food pantry. Depending on the size of your community, this may be a standalone operation or could be affiliated with a church or social service provider. See if you can volunteer there, perhaps stocking shelves or providing other assistance, to get a close-up view of what it’s like to need help with putting food on the table.

• Is there a soup kitchen in your community? If so, that would be another good place to visit and to get to know the staff, who may be able to help you learn more about this issue and perhaps introduce you to clients.

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask.

• Talk to the staff at your local food pantry or soup kitchen to get their perspectives. If you can earn their trust, they may be willing to facilitate interviews with clients. Ideally you will talk to people who use the Wisconsin FoodShare program. Be mindful that some people may be reluctant to share their stories with reporters. But if you are persistent and respectful, you should be able to get people to open up.

• Talk to you school counselor and cafeteria manager to see if they can provide some general information about the situation at your school.

• In Wisconsin many social service programs are administered at the county level. Check with your county government to find those who are most involved with food security issues.

• On the websites of the organizations listed in the Documents sections above, you can find contact information for expert sources on this topic. Use them to help you develop as full a picture as possible about this topic.

Feature Writing Topic: Inner-city Honor Students

Background and Summary

Ron Suskind of The Wall Street Journal was a Pulitzer winner in 1995 for his stories about inner-city honor students in Washington, D.C. and their determination to survive and prosper. The Pulitzer Board cited Suskind’s stories as a “distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.”

To be able to accurately report what it is like to be an honor student in an inner-city school, Suskind had to first go “inside,” spending time with students and their families, to truly understand the difficulties they must overcome.

As Suskind turned to leave, a student named Cedric Jennings bumped into him, coming in to the office to complain that his computer science teacher had a problem with him as a person, and not with his work, and that he deserved a better grade. When Suskind asked who he was, the principal admitted he omitted him from the list because Cedric is a problem.

“He’s too damn proud,” the principal said, and that results in fights in the hall.

Suskind followed Cedric to chemistry, introduced himself, and with time, slowly built a relationship with the boy and his mother. He said Cedric and his mother educated him, even when he didn’t want to be educated. “I was taught that SAT scores said something about my character, but that is false,” he said at the Brown University speech.

In a 2015 speech at Brown University, Suskind said he Ron Suskind receives the 1995 Pulitzer Prize got the idea for the story from George Rupp, president of Columbia from a friend and reporter University. who had just returned from Suskind followed up his Pulitzer Bosnia and told him about stories with a book, “A Hope children there who remain hopeful, even in times of in the Unseen,” which followed Cedric through his last war. He thought of some of the schools in the Washtwo years of high school, to his first tumultuous year at ington area and realized that those students were also Brown University, to his subsequent success in college experiencing a type of “war.” and work.

So, he went to the worst high school he could find, and asked for a list of their students with a 3.0 GPA. The principal gives him a list of 82 students out of 1,400.

Suskind recalls: “The kids came in one at a time and I had a list of questions: Where do you want to go to school? Do you have many friends…?”

But he got few answers and became very frustrated.

The principal didn’t want him there, and when Suskind admitted he had nothing, the principal told him he had tried to tell him it wouldn’t work. The principal said: “Scholarship is not some type of honor here. We have to pay honor students to get an award at an assembly.

They won’t come out in public because in this place they’re not respected. We call them undercover honor students, and you’re going to out them. That’s why they won’t talk to you.”

“I spent a year here at Brown, hanging around trying to be a fly on the wall,” Suskind recalled, adding that he went to classes and to parties, following Cedric nearly everywhere. But there was a caveat: No one was to know whom he was following, and Brown University agreed to cooperate.

“Thankfully, it was the pre-Internet period; that was huge,” Suskind said. No one discovered that Cedric was the focus of his book.

Student achievement, affirmative action and race are highly contentious issues in the United States. Suskind’s stories and book created a dialogue that needed to be heard. In a review, CNN declared: “As more voters, politicos and talk-show hosts write off affirmative

action as a well-intentioned anachronism, ‘A Hope in the Unseen’ should be required reading for would-be opinion-mongers.” In his review for Newsday, Bill Reel stated: “I changed my thinking about affirmative action.

I was against it, now I am for it. The agent of change was a mind-opening book—‘A Hope in the Unseen’ by Ron Suskind.”

Suskind said his writing style for these stories and the book was to use exhaustive reporting to place readers inside the heads of characters. He added that this “writing style” was a delving into motive and intent in an effort to understand the “good enough reasons” that underlie actions, which allowed for a fuller, more accurate—and often emotionally powerful—rendering of characters.

The Works

York Times Magazine and Esquire, and is the author of six books: • “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League,” 1998 • “The Price of Loyalty,” 2004 • “The One Percent Doctrine,” 2006 • “The Way of the World,” 2008 • “Confidence Men,” 2011 • “Life, Animated” 2014

Suskind received the Pulitzer for the following articles: • Against All Odds • Desperately Trying to Stay on Course • Class Struggle

Suskind is also the director of the Investigative Journalism Project at Harvard Law School. For more information, go to www.ronsuskind.com or www.ethics. harvard.edu/people/ron-suskind.

The stories can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/ winners/6795.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

By taking on this topic, you will be adding to the discussion of affirmative action, student achievement and race. The stories you uncover in your own school or neighboring schools will help to educate others about the issues and help them develop a deeper understanding of other races and the challenges they face.

Biography Ron Suskind, a native of Kingston, New York, earned a bachelor’s degree in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He began his journalism career in 1983 as a news assistant and interim reporter at The New York Times, where he worked for the Times’ metro section and covered national business.

In 1985, he went to the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times as a city/state staff writer covering crime and general interest stories. He moved to Boston in 1987 and became senior editor of Boston Business magazine; in 1988, he was named its editor.

Suskind was The Wall Street Journal’s senior national affairs reporter from 1993-2000. Today, he often appears on network television, contributes to The New

Follow the link under “The Works” section to read the full versions of Suskind’s stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the reporter goes about telling his story.

First, think about trust. Without trust from Cedric Jones and his mother, Barbara, Suskind would not have been able to do write the Pulitzer articles or the subsequent book. How did he develop that trust? How could you develop that sense of trust with potential sources at your school?

As mentioned above, the book also drew high praise for its innovations to writing style - using exhaustive reporting to place readers inside the heads of characters. For example: In truth, Cedric may not be the smartest student in his class. In a filthy boys room reeking of urine, Delante Coleman, a 17-year-old junior known as “Head,” is describing life at the top. Head is the leader of Trenton Park Crew, a gang, and says he

and “about 15 of my boys who back me up” enjoy “fine buggies,” including a Lexus, and “money, which we get from wherever.” There is a dark side, of course, like the murder last summer of the gang’s previous leader, Head’s best friend, by a rival thug from across town. The teen was found in his bed with a dozen bullet holes through his body.

But Head still feels invincible. “I’m not one, I’m many,” says the 5-foot-3, 140-pound plug of a teenager. “Safety, in this neighborhood, is about being part of a group.”

Head’s grades are barely passing, in the D range.

Yet Christopher Grimm, a physics teacher, knows a secret about Head: As a sophomore, he scored above 12th-grade-level nationally on the math section of a standardized basic-skills test. That’s the same score Cedric got.

“How’d you find that out?” barks Head when confronted with this information. “Well, yeah, that’s, umm, why I’m so good with money.”

Powerful quotes also give us insight to the challenges that Cedric and other honor student faced. For example: Being openly smart, as Cedric is, “will make you a target, which is crazy at a place like Ballou,” Phillip explains to his 15-year-old sister Alicia and her friend Octavia Hooks, both sophomore honor students, as they drive to apply for a summer-jobs program for disadvantaged youths. “The best way to avoid trouble,” he says, “is to never get all the answers right on a test.”

Alicia and Octavia nod along. “At least one wrong,” Octavia says quietly, almost to herself.

In addition, Suskind uses description to get readers to visualize the realities of life for Cedric and other high achievers at Ballou Senior High. Note how Suskind describes “double locking the doors” and “gazing at the dealers” in the following paragraph: Cedric became a latchkey child at the age of five, when his mother went back to work. She filled her boy’s head with visions of the Ivy League, bringing him home a Harvard sweatshirt while he was in junior high. Every day after school, after double-locking the door behind him, he would study, dream of becoming an engineer living in a big house -- and gaze at the dealers just outside his window stashing their cocaine in the alley.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. Read “Against All Odds.” The judges awarded Suskind the Pulitzer for feature stories because of “high literary quality and originality.” Find examples of that in this story.

2. What type of lead does “Against All Odds” use? Is it effective? Why or why not?

3. Read “Desperately Trying to Stay on Course” and “Class Struggles.” Find five examples of descriptive writing. Why do they work in the stories?

4. What is the best direct quote in “Class Struggles”?

What makes it good?

5. Transitions help a story flow from one idea to the next. Find an example of a transition that is effective in one of Suskind’s three stories. What makes it effective?

How to Pursue this Topic in Your School or Community

As explained earlier, the first part of writing begins with research, or Documents. Here are some sources where you can find data or background for your story: § WISEdash Public Portal — Each year, all Wisconsin public school districts collect information about their students, staff, and courses based on federal and state requirements. WISEdash gives you an interactive way to select and filter Wisconsin public school data from the 2005-06 school year forward. Additional historical datasets (from 1995) can be downloaded at http://wise.dpi.wi.gov/ wisedash_downloadfiles. (However, private school data is not included in WISEdash.) Specifically, you can find information on your public school or district enrollment including trends, and attendance rate and drop-out information, as well as information on post-graduation trends, academic performance (ACT, AP, WKCE, etc.), graduation, discipline including suspensions and expulsions, staff-to-student ratios, teacher experience, courses, and finance. http://wise.dpi.wi.gov/wisedash.

Statistics on drop-our rates, attendance, academic performance and discipline could be helpful to your stories. § One of the qualifiers school districts in Wisconsin use to determine poverty is the percentage of students on free or reduced price lunch. You can find that statistic for your private school at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction website at http://dpi.wisconsin.gov/news/maps/freereduced-lunch-private. For public school districts, the information can be found at http://datacenter. kidscount.org/data/tables/3457-students-participating-in-free-and-reduced-school-lunch-pro-

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gram?loc=51#detailed/10/8346-8770/ false/36,868,867,133,38/any/15141,7118 or http://dpi.wi.gov/nutrition.

Program statistics (participation and funding data) for Food and Nutrition Program operating in Wisconsin Schools and Institutions — http:// dpi.wi.gov/school-nutrition/program-statistics.

Statistics include only district level information regarding student enrollment and free and reduced price eligible students, as well as meal participation data by free/reduced price and paid categories.

School Breakfast Program Enrollment and Participation Report — (For public school districts and charter schools only; information not given on particular schools within a district.) http://dpi. wi.gov/school-nutrition/program-statistics#sbp Resources for More Data and Reports — http:// wise.dpi.wi.gov/wisedash_dataresources About the Data — http://wise.dpi.wi.gov/ about-data Definition of Key Terms – http://wise.dpi.wi.gov/ wisedash_glossary Compare your School to State Data — http:// wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp Wisconsin Council on Children and Families — http://www.wccf.org/. Click on Publications and read “Child Poverty in Wisconsin” to get more insight. Or check out the Press Room link to read the latest information.

Community Advocates Public Policy Institute — http://communityadvocates.net/ KIDS COUNT Data Center — http://datacenter. kidscount.org/ Vision 2020 — http://www.2020wi.org/ Child Trends — www.childtrends.org/ Center on Wisconsin Strategy— http://www. cows.org/ University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty — http://www.irp.wisc.edu/index.htm Community Advocates — http://communityadvocates.net/ National Center for Children in Poverty — http:// www.nccp.org/ Urban Institute — http://www.urban.org/poverty/ The Henry K. Kaiser Family Foundation — http:// kff.org/ Half in Ten — http://halfinten.org/ Shriver Center National Center on Poverty Law — http://povertylaw.org/ American Pediatric Association Task Force on Poverty — http://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx

You may also get some good statistics from your school principal, social worker or other administrator. For instance: § Number or percentage of students in your school who eat school breakfast daily or weekly § Number or percentage of students in your school who receive free or reduced-price lunch § Number or percentage of students considered homeless. How is homeless defined? (Living with family or friends, living in a shelter, living in a car, etc.) § Percentage of low-income students with a GPA of 3.0 or above in your school § Average GPA of low-income students in your school The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: § Observing fellow classmates throughout the day.

Are they respectful to the honor students? How about the low-income students? Do they tease or bully them in class or in the hallway between classes? Are the honor students delegated to one corner of the cafeteria during lunch, etc.?

Through your observation, try to paint a picture in the reader’s mind so they can visualize what it would be like to be a low-income honor student in your particular school. § Going to your school early or staying late. Are low-income students coming in early or staying late for additional help on assignments? What is the atmosphere like when school is officially not in session?

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask: § School counselors or police officers — What kind of needs do low-income students have? What problems do they face? What kind of help or support does the school district or police department give those students? Do they recall stories of low-come or at-risk students who have gone on to success? (Don’t be afraid to ask if they would be willing to contact those former students and see if they would be willing to do an interview with you.) In their opinion, what factor or factors are most important for a low-income student to succeed? § Are teachers, particularly those in the “tough” subjects like math or science, providing help or extra challenging assignments outside of class to honor students who may have a challenging

life? Why? Do they recall success stories of other students? Get details of those stories. § Low-income honor students — What challenges do they face, both in school and at home? Why this burning desire to succeed? Do they ever feel ridiculed by other students — whites and various minorities? Do they ever feel not safe? How do they respond? What do they hope to become?

Where do they want to go to college? What is/are the greatest obstacles in their way? § School administrators (Principal, Assistant Principal, Dean of Students, etc.)— Ask for reaction from some of the statistics you uncovered. Do

those statistics surprise them? Why or why not?

Can they explain trends? Do the trends trouble them? Or is your school showing better scores and more success than schools are statewide? Can schools solve the problems themselves? What other entities need to get involved if they are truly to make a difference in students’ lives, particularly those from low-income homes?

Lastly, be sure to end every interview with this question: Is there anything else I should know or that you’d like to add that we didn’t yet discuss? You might get some real gems of information that way.

Feature Writing Topic: Immigration

Background and Summary

27 unsuccessful attempts to get to the United States.

In 2003 Sonia Nazario of the Los Angeles Times won the His experiences included being beaten and learning that one of his traveling companions had been gang-raped.

Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for “Enrique’s Journey,” which the judges described as a “touching, exhaustively He was determined to make try No. 28 to cross the border and meet up with his mother. reported story of a Honduran boy’s perilous search for his mother who had migrated to the United States.”

Immigration is a highly Enrique’s story was contentious issue in the remarkable for many United States, and is a reasons. First, he was major source of controonly 5-years-old when versy during the 2016 his mother left him presidential election in Honduras, hoping campaign. This state of to find a better life affairs is ironic, given in the United States, that nearly all Ameriand he had not seen can citizens are either her for 11 years when immigrants themselves they finally reunited. or descendants of To get to the United immigrants. Nazario States, the teenager is sympathetic to the had to travel 1,600 plight of immigrants miles, riding what is who have entered the known as the “Train country illegally, but of Death,” which is in interviews she has really a series of trains also acknowledged that run the length that the ones who are of Mexico. The trip is most affected by illegal extremely dangerous entry are those at the for immigrants, who face the risks of arrest, Sonia Nazario, a native of Madison, Wisconsin, sits on top bottom of the economic ladder, often black- or assault, robbery—and of a freight train in Mexico. She spent three months, off falling from the train and on, riding on top of seven freight trains up the length brown-skinned people with limited skills and of Mexico to report on Enrique’s Journey for the newspato injury or death. In opportunities.

Enrique’s case, he was per series that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. arrested and deported By taking on this topic, you will be contributing informato Mexico seven times before he crossed the border tion to a highly charged debate and educating yourself into the United States after a two-month trip from his and your readers about the dimensions of immigration hometown. in your community. As a nation of immigrants, America has benefited greatly from the talents and energy of To be able to report accurately on what it is like for new arrivals to the country. But even in its legal form, these migrants, Nazario decided that she needed to immigration can have negative economic effects, such ride the same freight trains in the same unconventionas depressing wages or creating tougher competition al manner. After she made one trip, she retraced the for jobs. While reporting on this topic may seem like a route a second time so that she could interview more daunting task, keep in mind that at the very least you migrants and observe more of their experiences.

Later she said that she had been especially struck by the will likely find some good stories by tracing the immigrant history of your classmates. Some of their families determination of the migrants, one of whom had made

may be recent arrivals in Wisconsin, while others may go back a century or more. These personal narratives, much like Enrique’s, will help to shed light on this complex topic.

The works

Nazario received the Pulitzer based on these six articles: • Enrique’s Journey: The Boy Left Behind • Badly Beaten, a Boy Seeks Mercy in a Rail-side Town • Defeated Seven Times, A Boy Again Faces ‘the Beast’ • Inspired by Faith, the Poor Rush Forth to Offer Food • A Milky Green River Between Him and His Dream • At Journey’s End, A Dark River, Perhaps a New Life The stories can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/ winners/6965.

Biography

Sonia Nazario was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in Kansas and Argentina. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Williams College and a master’s in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

She began her journalism career in 1980 as a freelance reporter at El Pais, in Madrid. After graduating from college she joined The Wall Street Journal in 1982, covering social issues and Latin America from Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles and New York. In 1993 she joined the Los Angeles Times, where she has been most recently a projects and urban affairs reporter.

Nazario’s professional recognitions include a George Polk Award for Local Reporting based on a 1994 series called “The Hunger Wars -- Fighting for Food in Southern California.” She was also a 1998 Pulitzer finalist in the public service category for “Orphans of Addiction.”

A book-length version of “Enrique’s Journey” was published by Random House and became a national bestseller. In 2014, the book was revised and updated, and Nazario later reported on this topic for The New York Times.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

Follow the link above to read the full versions of her stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the

reporter goes about telling her story.

Nazario uses a variety of dramatic and narrative devices to construct her account. For example, she begins the first installment of her series with a description of Enrique’s mother leaving him when he was 5. She does this in just a few simple sentences that have been stripped down to the barest of details.

The boy does not understand.

His mother is not talking to him. She will not even look at him. Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do.

Lourdes knows. She understands, as only a mother can, the terror she is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel and finally the emptiness.

Rather than using a straightforward chronology to tell Enrique’s story, Nazario relies on a technique known as “scene-by-scene reconstruction,” in which she describes key moments in Enrique’s life and connects them together by providing background information that the reader needs to understand fully his predicament.

Because Nazario has gathered so much information in her reporting, she often turns to summaries to pull together key facts. In the second installment, Nazario summarizes the challenges that young travelers like Enrique face.

They leap on and off rolling train cars. They forage for food and water. Bandits prey on them. So do street gangsters deported from Los Angeles, who have made the train tops their new turf. None of the youngsters have proper papers. Many are caught by the Mexican police or by la migra, the Mexican immigration authorities, who take them south to Guatemala.

Nazario also wants to make the point of how determined Enrique has been. She does this by briefly summarizing each of his first seven attempts, and how each of them ended in failure.

Nazario is sympathetic toward her subject Enrique, and it might have been easier for her to present him as some kind of innocent victim of circumstances. But human beings are more complicated than that, and journalism that shies away from complications and complexity often comes up short. Instead Nazario tries to paint an honest picture of Enrique, including his addiction to drugs.

The poverty and violence that Enrique experiences are painful to read about. But Nazario does not neglect the

human goodness that emerges as people try to help.

In the fourth installment of the series, for example, she describes how people who live in very poor villages that the freight trains pass through sometimes come out to offer food and other supplies to the immigrants on board.

Families throw sweaters, tortillas, bread and plastic bottles filled with lemonade. A baker, his hands coated with flour, throws his extra loaves. A seamstress throws bags filled with sandwiches. A teenager throws bananas. A store owner throws animal crackers, day-old pastries and half-liter bottles of water.

Many of these people are motivated by their religious faith, and Nazario deftly captures this in a quote.

“If I have one tortilla, I give half away,” one of the food throwers says. “I know God will bring me more.”

A good story, a successfully told story, must be complete in having a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning must be strong and engaging. The middle must be thorough enough to draw the reader along and explain the significance of the experience without getting bogged down in details or without wandering off topic. A good ending gives the reader a sense of satisfaction, often by providing an unexpected perspective or by bringing the reader full-circle back to where the story began. When you read the final sections of the sixth installment, notice how Nazario has done both.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. Nazario has tried to make readers move beyond a stereotypical image of the immigrants who come to this country illegally by showing that Enrique has both good traits and bad traits. What are some of his good traits? What are some of his bad traits?

2. Good reporters look for specifics, concrete details that they can use to help the reader experience the story. Identify five specific details that caught your attention.

3. A danger of focusing on one person’s experience is that the reporter comes away with a limited picture of a situation. How does Nazario balance her focus on Enrique by providing statistics and context for his journey?

4. What are some of the risks that Enrique faces?

Considering one of those risks, describe how Nazario conveys a sense of danger.

5. Nazario’s uses a similar approach for all of her

leads, the so-called “scene-setter,” in which the writer relies on descriptive detail to draw the reader in rather than providing a summary of what the story is about. These leads work best to whet the reader’s interest if they contain enough detail to create a sense of intrigue without providing an immediate explanation of what is happening. Looking over the stories in this series, try to decide which lead you like the best and explain why.

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community

While immigration is an important political and economic issue, Nazario’s series approached the topic through a different lens, looking at the way that family connections provided a key motivation for people coming to this country. This focus on people and their stories is a critical element to successful feature reporting and writing. Your task will be to research the family stories of people in their community to understand what motivated them, or their ancestors, to move to Wisconsin. You may be able to develop sources who are recent arrivals to the state and get their stories directly.

Otherwise, you may interview parents or grandparents to learn about how their ancestors came to the state and why.

Your emphasis here is not simply on facts, such as dates and numbers, but on storytelling. You should try to learn as much as possible so that you can weave together a narrative about human struggles and interactions.

As you complete this assignment, you will follow the pattern of “Connecting the DOT,” relying on documentary analysis, direct observation and talking with human sources.

Documents. Here are some sources you can use to learn more about immigration patterns in Wisconsin.

• Wisconsin Historical Society – http://www. wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-052/?action=more_essay. This site provide background information on the major immigration patterns in the state in the 20th century.

• Net Migration Patterns for U.S. Counties – http:// www.netmigration.wisc.edu/ This online tool from the University of Wisconsin Madison allows you to track immigration patterns into your county.

• New Americans in Wisconsin: http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/new-americans-wisconsin • Oshkosh Doctor Defends Immigrants in Letter at http://www.jsonline.com/news/opin-

• • •

ion/bring-the-border-children-to-oshkoshb99319837z1-269236511.html State immigration statistics http://dcf.wisconsin. gov/refugee/statistics.htm Overview of historical immigration patterns in Wisconsin: http://www.apl.wisc.edu/publications/ APL_Rural_Immigration_Summit.pdf Many similar documents can be found by doing a Google search on a term like “Wisconsin immigration statistics.”

The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: • Looking around your school and observing students, teachers and faculty.

Do they appear to come from different ethnic backgrounds? It’s very likely that members of different ethnic groups, whether European, Asian, African or Native American, have different stories about how their families came to reside in your community.

• Looking around your community and observing the names and product lines of retail shops and restaurants.

Have businesses developed to serve the needs of specific communities of people who have arrived in your area?

Are some of these new businesses and some of them well-established businesses?

about the experiences of immigrant families in your community.

•

Immigration is difficult under the best of circumstances, and some people may be reluctant to talk about their experiences. But a test of a good reporter is the ability to develop a sense of empathy by being a good listener and showing a sincere interest in the people you interview.

•

Talk to the authors of the reports listed under Documents. They are experts on local immigration patterns and can offer you insights into this issue.

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask.

• Find a person in your class who has Enrique and Sonia Nazario in 2013 at the Baker County grandparents or even great grandparDetention Center in Florida where Enrique was being held. ents) who can talk about how their Today, Enrique is married with two children and living in family came to Wisconsin. Ask them Florida. He works as a painter during the week, but still about their families and what kind of sporadically abuses drugs, which he had gotten hooked as an factors affected their decision to come early teen in Honduras. to the state.

• See if someone in your school is from a family that has migrated to this country in the last several decades. Ask them about their families and what kind of factors affected their decision to come to the state.

• Identify people or organizations that are involved in providing direct services to immigrants and their families. There may be a counselor at your school, an administrator in the city or county government or someone associated with a church or nonprofit organization. Ask them to tell you

Investigative Reporting Topic: Product Safety

Background and Summary

In 2008 the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting was awarded to six members of the Chicago Tribune staff for “Hidden Hazards: Kids at Risk,” a series of articles that exposed major shortcomings at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and that led to expedited product recalls, congressional hearings and increases in the agency’s budget and authority.

about other children’s products. Other product categories that the journalists focused on included baby cribs, spinning tops, child safety seats and jewelry.

One of the outcomes of the Tribune’s series is a revamped website operated by the CPSC that should make your reporting a lot easier than what the Pulitzer winners faced. As described below, you will be able to use this website to track product recalls by state and to find related documents.

It could be a big help as you look into product safety issues in your school or community.

While this investigative project turned out to have a sweeping impact, including the recall of 1 million baby products, it got started in a mundane For Callahan and her way, when Tribune colleagues, the chalreporter Patricia Callenges of reporting lahan was shopping this series were quite for a baby shower significant. For example, gift for a friend. the investigative team As she researched ended up filing three Richard Oppel, Pulitzer Board co-chairman, left, presents baby strollers, she to four dozen requests a 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting to, from under the Freedom of discovered that one left, Maurice Possley, Patricia Callahan, Michael Oneal, Information Act. Delays major manufacturer Evan Osnos, Sam Roe and Ted Gregory. in getting responses had acknowledged were created by the in documents that it did not disclose product-related fact that the CPSC is required to gather information and information on deaths and injuries. This finding sparked show it to an affected manufacturer before it releases a lengthy battle for government documents under the information to the press or public. Fortunately, the Freedom of Information Act and led Callahan and her reporters developed a source who leaked to them an colleagues to foreign factories, and domestic businesses internal database that showed that the government was and to consumers who had suffered from faulty prodimproperly withholding documents. The newspaper ucts. also arranged for, and paid for, independent tests for lead in children’s toys and other products.

The reporters found that the federal government had One of the surprises that came out of this investigative severely cut the budget for the safety agency and instiproject was just how weak the regulatory system has tuted policies that hampered its effectiveness. In this become for consumer products, a situation that arose environment of reduced regulation, there were notabecause the press, the public and elected officials ble negative results. For example, the paper was able had stopped paying much attention. By taking on this to highlight the dangers presented by magnetic toys, project, you will help to raise the consciousness of your which caused the death of a Seattle toddler, and the community and your school about potential hazards in way that the agency had responded sloppily to warnings commonly used items.

The works

The Tribune reporters received the Pulitzer based on these articles: • Not Until a Boy Died • Inside the Botched Recall of a Dangerous Toy • Major Retailers Pull Magnet Toy: Tribune Inquiries Prompt Toys “R” Us, Others To Act • Deaths Spur Huge Crib Recall: Feds: ‘We Do Not Want Your Child In That Crib Tonight’ • Missteps Delayed Recall Of Deadly Cribs: Despite 55 Complaints, Seven Infants Left Trapped and Three Deaths, It Took Years For The Consumer Product Safety Commission To Warn Parents About 1 Million Flawed Cribs.

• Many More Toys Tainted With Lead, Inquiry Finds: Tribune Tests Prompt Stores To Pull Items From Shelves • Toymaker Knew About Lead: Tribune Inquiry Prompts Company To Recall Toy 5 Years After Test • Why Lead-Tainted Chinese Goods Slip Through Despite U.S. Recalls • When Car-Seat Safety, Commerce Collide • Magnetic Jewelry An Overlooked Danger: Expert: Earrings Marketed To Kids ‘Fall Through The Cracks’ They can be found here: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7059 .

Biographies

Patricia Callahan, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, the first as part of The Denver Post team that won in Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Columbine High School shootings. She has been an investigative reporter at the Tribune since 2004.

Ted Gregory, a graduate of Eastern Illinois University, has been at the Tribune since 1991, where he is a general assignment reporter. He has co-written two books, “Our Black Year” and “To Chase a Dream.”

Michael Oneal earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University and held reporting and editing positions at BusinessWeek and SmartMoney.com before joining the Tribune in 2003. He is now a freelance writer in Oakland, California.

Evan Osnos graduated from Harvard University in 1998 and in 1999 joined the Tribune, eventually becoming Beijing bureau chief. He is now a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,” winner of a 2014 National Book Award.

Maurice Possley is a graduate of Loyola University in Chicago and an alumnus of Chicago’s City News Bureau.

After more than two decades at the Tribune, he left the paper in 2008 to be an independent investigator, writer and consultant focusing on criminal justice issues.

Sam Roe holds degrees from Kent State University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been an investigative reporter at the Tribune since 2000. He teaches investigative reporting at Columbia College Chicago.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis

Follow the link above to read the full versions of these stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the reporters go about getting, and telling, their stories.

For journalism students, perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from this investigative project is the importance of documents. Although they were difficult to get, they eventually proved to be a wealth of information—and they played a critical role when the reporters came under pressure from companies that threatened to take the journalists to court if they published their findings. Some of the documents came from requests under the Freedom of Information Act while other documents came through publicly accessible sources, such as court records, corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and local health reports.

“I’m a great believer in documents because the document speaks for itself,” Maurice Possley said in a 2008 interview published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “They’re great evidence. They’re libel-proof. Dealing with FOIA can be frustrating and sometimes you don’t get what you think you should get, but you can get documents that lead to other documents that can spark the chase anew.”

The reporters said that it was important to be strategic in how they went about asking for documents. They were careful to be as precise as possible in making each FOIA request so as not to overwhelm agency staff, and they split their requests into separate items so that a snag in one area would not hold up the release of other information. While they were polite in their dealings with FOIA personnel, they were also insistent about their rights to get information and asked for agencies to provide specific legal reasons if they denied a request.

But documents are never enough to tell the story. The information there needs to be fleshed out, primarily through interviews with affected parties. When they

came to writing their stories, the Tribune reporters were careful to emphasize the human dimension of the bureaucratic failures by including anecdotes about individuals who had warned regulators about problems or eventually suffered harm. Here is how the series began: Sharon Grigsby pleaded with the operator at the federal safety hot line. A popular new toy, Magnetix, nearly killed one of her preschoolers.

Please do something, Grigsby remembers urging.

When the plastic building sets broke, she told the operator, they shed powerful magnets inside her northern Indiana preschool. Grigsby didn’t see the loose magnets, not much bigger than baby aspirin.

But one of her 5-year-old students did. He found some and swallowed them. The extraordinarily strong magnets connected in the boy’s digestive tract, squeezed the folds of his intestines and tore holes through his bowels. Only emergency surgery saved his life.

While the series told lots of individual stories, the reporters worked hard to show that they were not talking about random occurrences, but rather a systemic breakdown. As Callahan write: But this is not a story about just one defective product and one family’s grief. A Tribune investigation found that Kenny Sweet’s death is emblematic of how a weakened federal agency, in its myopic and docile approach to regulation, fails to protect children. The result: injury and death.

For instance, the safety agency waited years to respond to consumer and attorney complaints that soapmaking kits were landing children in hospital burn units. In the meantime, more kids suffered disfiguring injuries.

The safety commission also recalled several types of playpens after they collapsed and suffocated babies.

But the agency did not act on reports that yet another style of playpen posed the same hazard. It recalled those only after another baby suffocated.

The reporters did not shy away from the complexity of the situation, instead showing how interlocking factors created the problem. One of their articles explained how falling prices for children’s toys had led manufacturers to seek lower-cost supplies in countries that were hard for U.S. regulators to inspect and that did not have their own safety laws. This kind of deep analysis of a multifaceted situation could only be accomplished through teamwork. One reporter would not have been

able to carry out this investigation. Working in teams can present challenges, but, as this series shows, it can also be extremely rewarding.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. Which of the product safety hazards described in this series is the most serious in your opinion?

2. Thinking about some of the products in your home, can you think of hazards that they might pose? In our global economy, many everyday products come from overseas. Do you know the country of origin of your family’s car, clothing, holiday ornaments, dinnerware, electronics?

3. The CPSC has issued product safety guides covering about 20 different topics that can be found at http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Safety-Education/ Safety-Guides/General-Information/Publications-Listing/? Which of these do you think would be most relevant for the people in your school or community?

4. Have you or anyone in your familiar ever received a product recall notice? What did you do about it?

5. There are 10 articles in this series. Which one do you think was most effective, and why?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community

The consumer movement in the United States is decades old and has been one of the factors in reducing the risks of using many products, ranging from automobiles to children’s clothing. But one of the key lessons of the Tribune series is that a lack of vigilance can allow problems to creep back in.

Given time constraints and limited resources, it is unlikely that you and your fellow students can develop as much information about different products as the Tribune reporters did. But you can still exercise an important watchdog function by checking into the many products that are recalled each year or that have safety warnings issued about them. Thanks to the Tribune’s work, the government does a much better job about warning consumers, but it is not clear whether those warnings are getting through. Your assignment will be to follow up on some of the government’s product safety warnings to see if your community is at risk.

As you complete this assignment, you will follow the pattern of “Connecting the DOT,” relying on documentary analysis, direct observation and talking with human sources.

Documents. Here are some sources you can use to learn more about consumer products and related safety issues.

• •

•

Background reports including safety statistics from the CPSC can be found here: http://www. cpsc.gov/en/Research--Statistics/ One site that the CPSC maintains is called “Saferproducts.gov” (http://www.saferproducts.gov/ Search/default.aspx), and it includes what are called “reports of harm” from consumers and manufacturers. You can use the search function to see what kinds of things are being said about products in a variety of classifications. Another page on the CPSC site allows you to search for product recalls using various criteria: http://www. saferproducts.gov/Search/AdvancedSearch.aspx.

The main recalls page is here: http://www.cpsc. gov/en/Recalls/. You can search for products that have been recalled in Wisconsin. The CPSC has joined with five other federal agencies to produce a website that is a “one-stop shop” to learn about recalled products: https://www.recalls.gov/ Don’t forget to see what is happening at the state level by checking in with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection: http://datcp.wi.gov/index.aspx.

The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: • Visting local retailers to see how well recall notices are complied with. Have named products been removed? What alternatives are left?

• Visiting retailers that sell products with significant safety issues, such as all terrain vehicles or baby toys, and looking for the ways in which safety warnings are communicated to consumers.

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask.

• Often lawyers become involved in product safety suits. To find a lawyer specializing in this area of the law, Google a term such as “Wisconsin product liability lawyer.”

•

• •

The government says it has trouble getting safety message to neighborhoods that have large numbers of low income, minority or non-English speaking residents. Is anyone in your city or county government health department working to overcome this problem? Find out who in your local government handles product safety issues and interview that person.

Talk to classmates to see if they have direct experience with defective products.

Talk to store owners or managers where “risky” products (such as toys) are sold, and find out what they do to educate consumers on safety issues.

Investigative Reporting Topic: Health Care Costs

Background and Summary

The staff of The Wall Street Journal was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting in 2015 for “Medicare Unmasked,” a pioneering project that gave Americans unprecedented access to previously confidential data on the motivations and practices of their health care providers. The paper’s reporting was based on five years of efforts to get government records on medical costs, but now that the records have been released other journalists can pick up where the Journal left off, using searchable databases that are available on the Internet to probe medical costs in their communities.

said it could not release that data because of an injunction issued in 1979 at the request of the American Medical Association that barred any such release. Finally newspaper lawyers were able to get a federal judge to lift the injunction, saying that the public’s interest in taxpayer-funded medical payments had come to outweigh doctors’ right to privacy.

The Journal’s entry consisted of eight articles and a searchable online database. In addition to generating a great deal of attention for the problem of Medicare fraud, the paper was able to point to several specific changes in law or policy that were prompted by In its cover letter to its reporting. For the Pulitzer judges, example, one article the paper quoted a showed that pain top federal official: specialists were mak“The Journal’s efforts ing large amounts of ‘changed the whole money from testing paradigm,’ allowing all senior patients for the of the media to uncovabuse of drugs such er potential medical as PCP even though fraud and abuse, said there was little reason Donald White of the to think they were Office of Inspector using such drugs. The General at the Depart- From left, Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize administrator, and government reLee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, present ment of Health and sponded by rejecting a 2015 Investigative Reporting Prize to John Carreyrou, Human Services. ‘And proposals to add more now that (the govern- Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty, Stefanie Ilgenfritz and tests and promised to Mike Siconolfi. ment) has released look into the problem that data, it realizes of overbilling. it’s going to have to release more.’” At least two of the Journal’s top newspaper competitors, The New York Another article reported on physicians who concentratTimes and The Washington Post, made special mention ed their efforts on unusual, but highly lucrative proceof the Journal’s efforts to break this story, noting that dures, such as strapping very sick cardiac patients to a there was more work to be done based on the foundabed and using large inflatable cuffs to stimulate their tion that had been created. circulation. This report prompted an FBI investigation.

The target of the paper’s attention was the problem of runaway medical costs, fueled in part by $60 billion in fraudulent billings to the federal government each year.

For years the paper had fought to get information about individual doctors, but the agency that runs Medicare

Other articles led to a range of results from the very broad, such as increased legislative scrutiny for the government’s efforts to fight fraud, to the very specific, such as patients ending a particular treatment that was shown to have negative side effects.

The works The Journal reporters received the Pulitzer based on these articles: • Taxpayers face big tab for unusual doctor billings • Doctors cash in on drug tests for seniors • Probes of overbilling run into political pressure • Doctors bill big for tarnished drug • Agents hunt for fraud in trove of medical data • Web entry - Database: Medicare Unmasked: Be hind the Numbers • A fast-growing medical lab tests anti-kickback law • Doctor ‘self-referral’ thrives on legal loophole • Sprawling medicare struggles to fight fraud They can be found here: http://www.pulitzer.org/ winners/7226.

Biographies

The newspaper staffers who worked on this project included the following individuals: John Carreyrou is a graduate of Duke University and a member of the paper’s investigative team.

Christopher Weaver is a graduate of Tulane University and the University of Maryland’s journalism graduate school. He writes about the business of health care.

Christopher S. Stewart is a senior special writer at the paper and the author of “Hunting the Tiger: The Fast Life and Violent Death of the Balkans’ Most Dangerous Man” and “Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure.”

Rob Barry, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry, has degrees in English and mathematics from the University of Miami. He specializes in computer assisted reporting.

Anna Wilde Mathews, a Wisconsin native, is a graduate of Harvard College who covers health insurance.

Tom McGinty, a graduate of Utica College of Syracuse University, is a co-leader of the data journalism group on the paper’s investigative reporting team.

Michael Siconolfi, who has a master’s degree from New York University, is the paper’s investigations editor.

Janet Adamy, a graduate of the University of Michigan, is a news editor in the paper’s Washington bureau.

Martin Burch has a master’s in journalism from the City University of New York and is a member of the paper’s interactive graphics team.

Chris Canipe has a master’s from the University of Missouri and is an interactive graphics editor for the paper.

Madeline Farbman works as a visual editor at the paper; she has a master’s degree from Columbia.

Jon Keegan received a bachelor’s in fine arts from Syracuse University and now is a visual correspondent for the paper.

Palani Kumanan, a graduate of the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, India, is a software architect for the paper.

Stuart Thompson, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, directs the paper’s enterprise visuals and interactive graphics team.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the paper’s bureau chief for health and science.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis A special kind of document, the dataset, was key to this project’s success. Datasets are essentially large collections of quantitative information that match numerical observations to a set of variables and that can be sorted in various ways to show patterns. They derive their power because they are official, inclusive and authoritative, and as such they are often viewed as a kind of Holy Grail in investigative journalism. But as powerful as data can be as a tool for understanding a complex situation, it must be recognized that datasets have their limitations and alone will not make a story.

First, let’s look at how the Journal used the government data it received. Here is the kind of powerful, sweeping statement that data allows a reporter to make: “More than 2,300 providers earned $500,000 or more from Medicare in 2012 from a single procedure or service, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare physician-payment data made public for the first time in April.” Here is another example: “Medicare’s spending on 22 high-tech tests for drugs of abuse hit $445 million in 2012, up 1,423% in five years.” Both of these are eye-popping statements that command the reader’s attention.

The backbone of this series was the Medicare billing data, containing 9.2 million records, that the paper received after a long legal fight. But the reporters also worked with other datasets, some of which were publicly available. Other kinds of documents were also used, such as internal government memoranda and investiga-

tive reports, emails, contracts and corporate publicity materials.

But as the Journal staff learned, getting a great deal of data can be problematic. The beauty of data is the way that complex issues can be simplified and reduced to simple comprehensive statements. But the complexities cannot be ignored. The numbers have to be carefully handled because, although numbers look to be neutral and reliable, they can actually be misleading. Journal reporters said they sometimes hit dead ends when pursuing what looked like an outrageous pattern of abuse because some doctors actually had very good reasons for using unconventional treatments. There were also inherent limitations in the data, which did not reveal anything about treatment outcomes or the quality of care. Sometimes billings from multiple individuals were actually bundled together and included with those of their supervisor.

This series is a good example of how reporters need to use all of their reporting tools and not just rely on one type. In this case the data had to be fleshed out with information derived from human sources. According to a contest entry form that the paper submitted to a group called Investigative Reporters and Editors, the reporters sought out “expert guidance” to interpret the data by contacting individual doctors to talk about their billing data. These experts included physicians, academic medical experts and government officials. As a general matter, the paper said, “Picking areas with known controversy and using available data to drill deeper into workings of questionable treatment or billing practices can be a fruitful approach.“ When it comes to producing stories based on a deep investigation like this, it is important not to get bogged down in statistics or dry facts. The goal is for the finished product to be “effective and approachable,” the paper said. Here the key is to use storytelling techniques, such as recounting specific anecdotes or making sure to include revealing details, to bring the stories to life. For example, one story described the collection of guns that one doctor who was under FBI investigation kept at his home, including an AR-15 assault rifle. The story ends with a judge ordering agents back to the house to collect the weapons.

The single most important lesson to be taken from this example is the power of persistence. The investigation began five years before the prize-winning articles were published, and there were many ups-and-downs.

“There were many times during the course of the past several years where Journal editors or reporters could have stopped the pursuit of this information,” the paper said.

Classroom Discussion Questions 1. Health care costs and how to pay for them have been a major political issue over the last five years. What do you know about this debate?

2. Do you know anyone who works in the health care industry? What are their views on the issue of high costs?

3. Do you know how much it costs to go the emergency room of a hospital?

4. Do you know of anyone who has had problems either paying for health insurance or paying an actual bill?

5. There are nine articles in this series. Which one do you think was most effective, and why?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community It took the Journal reporters many years to pursue this story and a great deal of effort to get the government records about health care costs. You will have a much easier time reporting on this topic because much more data is now publicly available. That said, it is also true that this is a complicated area, and there is the danger of misreading or misinterpreting the data that you can now find on the Internet. For that reason, the Journal reporters emphasize the importance of finding experts to help you understand what you discover. This will likely be easier than you might think, since local hospitals will have public relations professionals available who will have an interest in making sure that you produce an accurate story. They can put you in touch with knowledgeable sources. Other potential sources are discussed below.

Essentially you will be providing comparative information on costs from providers in your community. You will likely find large discrepancies in certain categories, and just highlighting these discrepancies will be a public service. As you dig deeper and find out explanations for these contrasts, even more stories will emerge.

As you complete this assignment, you will follow the pattern of “Connecting the DOT,” relying on documentary analysis, direct observation and talking with human sources.

Documents. Here are some sources you can use to learn more about health care costs in your community.

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The Wall Street Journal will let you search its database of Medicare payments to individual providers here: http://graphics.wsj.com/medicare-billing/ The Pricepoint database from the Wisconsin Hospital Association will let you compare costs at specific hospitals across a range of services: http://www.wipricepoint.org/.

The National Council of State Legislatures website will let you compare health insurance premiums by state: http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/ health-insurance-premiums.aspx This website, from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will give you information about the health of your community: http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/. Similar information can be found here: http://www.healthstatus2020.com/ This page, published by the Association of Health Care Journalists, includes information about a variety of online data sources: http://healthjournalism.org/resources-tips-details.php?id=817#.

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The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: • Arranging for a visit to your family physician’s office or to a local hospital.

• If your school has a physician who cares for student athletes, arranging a visit at that person’s office.

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask.

• Talk to your school nurse. There will be confidentiality/privacy issues that may limit what you can be told, but you may be able to get some general guidance on this issue.

• You local government, at the city or county level, likely has a Health Department. Ask the staff to help you understand the local dimensions of the heath care issue. For a statewide perspective, contact the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services.

• Ask your classmates if they would be willing to share stories on their and their families’ experience with health care delivery and health care costs.

• Contact the professional organizations that deal with health issues: the Wisconsin Hospital Association, the Wisconsin Health Information Organization, the Wisconsin Medical Society and the Wisconsin Nurses Association. A list of Wisconsin health organizations can be found at this site: http://www.theagapecenter.com/Organizations/ Wisconsin.htm.

Local Reporting Topic: School Corruption

Background and Summary

Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci of the Daily Breeze, Torrance, California, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for their inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district, including impressive use of the paper’s website.

The Pulitzer Board cited their reporting as “a distinguished example of reporting on significant issues of local concern, demonstrating originality and community expertise, using any available journalistic tool.”

The densely legal contract hid not only the superintendent’s true compensation, but also a variety of other lucrative perks unheard of in K12 education leadership.

In February 2014, we launched a series of articles examining the inner workings of Centinela Valley and exposed how this came to pass.

The reporting has included hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the district, dozens of public records requests and poring through tens of thousands of documents.

In a letter to the judges with their entry, Executive Editor Michael A. Anastasi, wrote: Serving one of the poorest communities in Los Angeles County, the Centinela Valley Union High School District was on the brink of insolvency a few years ago when Jose Fernandez became superintendent. A Cuban immigrant who was the product of the district, the soft-spoken leader had gathered political savvy as From left, Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize administrator and Lee C. Bollinger, a local city councilman and president of Columbia University, present the 2015 Local Reporting Prize was well connected. to Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci.

He balanced the budget, successfully campaigned As a direct result of our reporting, more for money to repair broken-down schools and than 50 stories, the FBI and Los Angeles County launched academic programs that created a District Attorney’s Office have launched ongoing buzz in educational circles. In a short amount criminal investigations. of time, he buoyed hopes for revitalizing the Our reporting found: district. § The superintendent took out a district-funded The real story was one of manipulation, $750,000 whole life insurance policy withintimidation and corruption. out board approval and then had the board Reporter Rob Kuznia worked for months to approve it retroactively.

We later reported he decode the superintendent’s byzantine contract. could cash out policies in excess of $200,000.

Hidden in the opaque language, we found the § After his second personal bankruptcy, the leader of the tiny district with just four schools board threw him a golden lifeline — a and 6,000 students made more than $660,000 $910,000 home loan with no down payment in 2013. That’s nearly double the compensation to be repaid at 2 percent interest over 40 of the superintendent of nearby Los Angeles years.

The loan terms are exceptional to Unified, the country’s second-largest district.

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anyone with excellent credit and unheard of for someone who has just gone through bankruptcy.

Fernandez was selected by politically naive school board members whose campaigns were financed by a construction company to which the superintendent later awarded about $200 million in construction bonds. He also put a stipulation in his contract that he could only be fired by a “supermajority” of the board (four of the five members).

The superintendent steered other lucrative contracts to political allies.

The district spent as much as 10 times what neighboring districts did on legal fees, using lawyers to bully opponents into submission.

The superintendent had a contracted work year of 215 days, 30 days shorter than other superintendents, which meant he was paid overtime for “extra” time he worked.

Additionally, he claimed he had worked every legal holiday and had never taken a vacation day throughout his tenure, resulting in even more pay. Investigators found that was highly unlikely.

School board members were paid more than five times the legal limit for a district of its size, which spans just 4 square miles, including $600 a month in mileage. Prompted by our reporting, the county ordered an end to the stipends.

Fernandez had just one performance review in five years, despite the fact that a 9 percent automatic annual raise was hidden in his contract.

Despite the spending of the superintendent and his lawyers, the district laid off teachers and shut down the popular vocational program citing lack of funds.

The superintendent ushered in a “reign of terror” at the district, surrounding himself with yes men who feared to speak out against him.

Despite the superintendent’s high compensation, the district was among the worst academically in California, ranking 80th out of 80 in Los Angeles County.

The Works Kuznia, Kimitch and Suraci received the Pulitzer for: § Centinela Valley schools chief amassed $663,000 in compensation in 2013 § Construction firm bankrolling Centinela Valley school board campaigns, receiving millions in contracts

§ Superintendent Fernandez got low-interest loan from the district to buy $910,000 home despite bankruptcy § Centinela Valley high school students’ scores rank near the bottom in county § Centinela spending on legal fees dwarfs those of nearby school districts § Fernandez took out $750,000 life insurance policy before school board approval § Centinela Valley employees describe ‘reign of terror’ under Jose Fernandez § Centinela Valley board members benefitted from cronyism, critics say § Inglewood Councilman benefited from Centinela Valley’s crony culture § Troubles linger for the Centinela Valley school district, a year after pay scandal Links to the Daily Breeze stories can be found at http:// www.pulitzer.org/winners/7228.

Biographies A 1999 graduate of the University of Minnesota, Rob Kuznia spent 15 years as a reporter at newspapers and magazines along the West Coast. He started his career as a city hall reporter in Oregon before he developed a specialty in education reporting at the Santa Barbara News-Press. As education reporter at the Daily Breeze newspaper in the Los Angeles News Group from 2010 to 2014, Rob covered 13 school districts. Although he generated scores of stories on issues of specific interest, his specialty was big-picture reports of widespread interest to parents and educators that were often carried in nine newspapers of the L.A. News Group.

Since August 2014, he has worked as a freelance writer and as a publicist for the USC Shoah Foundation, which is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action.

For more information, go to http://robkuznia.com/.

Rebecca Kimitch works on special investigations and projects for the Los Angeles News Group, which includes nine newspapers across Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, and edits the Spanish-language newspaper Impacto. She has worked for the organization’s papers since 2008 in various capacities, including city editor, political editor and political reporter, writing extensively about health care, redistricting, water and the region’s changing demographics.

Before coming to Los Angeles in 2008, Kimitch worked as a reporter for publications in Washington, San José,

From left, Frank Suraci, Rob Kuznia and Rebecca Kimitch won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting that uncovered school corruption.

Costa Rica, and San Diego. She also served as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association in 2007. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, Kimitch graduated from Northwestern University.

Frank Suraci considers himself a journeyman editor, working for more than 30 years as city editor of the Daily Breeze in the Los Angeles News Group. A graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, he worked more than seven years as a reporter on a variety of beats — from cops and courts to city hall and politics.

Over the years, Suraci has covered or overseen the paper’s coverage of several huge national stories — among them the years-long McMartin preschool molestation case, passage of the groundbreaking Proposition 13, the OJ Simpson murder case and a deadly plane crash at the Los Angeles International Airport.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis Follow the link on the previous page to read the full version of their stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the reporters go about telling their stories.

Their stories were a case of pure dedication and perseverance to find the truth. As noted in their Pulitzer entry, the team conducted hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the district, made dozens of public records requests and pored through tens of thousands of documents.

Let’s first look at some of the documents the team used in their articles and how they reported on those documents in their Pulitzer Prize winning-stories: • Documents obtained by the Daily Breeze from the Los Angeles County Office of Education show that although Jose Fernandez had a base pay of $271,000 in the 2013 calendar year, his other benefits amounted to nearly $400,000.

• TELACU first demonstrated its ability to influence the outcomes of Centinela Valley school board elections in 2009. The company donated $28,000 to a political action committee called Citizens for Better Schools, according to campaign finance reports obtained from the Los Angeles County Register-Recorder’s Office. Citizens For Better Schools, in turn, dished out $55,000

to purchase mailers and other promotional materials touting three candidates: Rocio Pizano, Hugo Rojas and Maritza Molina.

• Because of Rojas’ relationship with Cruz, he abstained from the August 2012 board vote to hire her as a counselor at Lawndale High, according to minutes of the meeting. He abstained again in February 2013, when the board voted to boost her $67,830 salary by $6,800.

• The invoices offer what appears to be the latest example of a cronyism culture that thrived under Fernandez’s tenure. Fernandez used his position to find jobs for friends, political allies and, on one occasion, a board member who later voted on his lucrative employment contract that gave him nearly $700,000 in compensation last year.

• In an effort to make a fair comparison, the Daily Breeze obtained the same W-2 documents from the county for the superintendents of the Torrance, Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes Peninsula unified school districts. Total 2013 compensation amounted to $257,804 for George Mannon of Torrance Unified, $251,032 for Steven Keller of Redondo Beach Unified and $227,229 for Walker Williams of Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified.

What records might be appropriate as you research your school district’s finances?

Next, let’s look at some of the interviews the reporters conducted, and specifically those that quoted unnamed sources or noted that sources couldn’t be reached for comment: •

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“A lot of the API score comes from the 10th grade CAHSEE score,” said a district employee who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, referring to the California High School Exit Exam. “There was a big sweep of 10th-graders sent to Lloyde. Those kids should not have been sent.”

Morales couldn’t be reached for comment. But sources say one of his main duties was to monitor contractors’ compliance with a local-hire policy stating that at least one-third of the workers on the job sites of school construction projects were residents of the district serving Hawthorne, Lawndale and Lennox.

Reached on his cellphone Thursday, Fernandez declined to comment. The Daily Breeze also emailed detailed questions to Fernandez’s attorney, Spencer Covert. Aside from a follow-up

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question sent by Covert’s secretary, the office had not responded by Thursday evening.

As for Fernandez’s compensation package, the retired school finance expert, who helped the Daily Breeze deconstruct the contract, said he has never come across a deal like this during his 29 years in the business. “I’m just appalled — it’s horrible,” he said. “It’s such a rip-off. There are some similarities to Bell, you might say. And the problem is, since most of it is legal, who can do anything about it?”

What do you think of the practice of using unnamed sources? Does it hurt your credibility? How about stating that sources couldn’t be reached for comment?

Does that imply that you tried shortly before deadline to reach a source, or, in other words that you really didn’t try hard to get the other side of the story? Lastly, while one source is identified only as a “retired school finance expert,” do you think that was enough to identify him in a school district so small? In other words, was it appropriate to give a “generic” description that could also include other people? Decide now: Will you use unnamed sources in your story? Why or why not?

Finally, when using so many documents and sources, you need to ask if the reporting is fair. For example, is the following fair reporting?: § But where critics see cronyism, some who benefited say the arrangements were merely the product of the cross-pollination that happens in a small town.

As you write and edit your stories, make sure your allow both sides to tell their stories. In short, make sure your stories are fair.

Classroom Discussion Questions 1. How do you think this series came about? What were the activities going on in the district that alerted the reporters to the story and problems the district was facing? What problems did they likely run into? How did they overcome those issues?

2. Read “Centinela spending on legal fees dwarfs those of nearby school districts.” Was the lead effective? If yes, why? If not, what would be a better lead?

3. Read “Troubles linger for the Centinela Valley school district, a year after pay scandal.” Even though a year has passed, the story is still not over. What other stories must the paper complete

to stay on top of their coverage?

4. Read “Centinela Valley employees describe ‘reign of terror’ under Jose Fernandez.” How do you find sources willing to comment when they are afraid of losing their job or being retaliated against?

5. What is the best direct quote in “Inglewood Councilman benefited from Centinela Valley’s crony culture”? Why do you think it is particularly effective?

How do you get such good quotes from sources?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community Start by looking at school or district finances, compensation, test scores, etc. and note if there are any discrepancies. Then narrow down the topic. It’s unlikely your school district has all the things going on that happened in the Centinela district. Pick one “story” and stick with that unless your research later determines there are multiple angles to your story. Numbers and statistics must be an important part of your coverage, particularly if the numbers show any trends. The story or stories must also include some background information that puts the information in focus.

As explained earlier, the first part of writing begins with research, or Documents. Here are some sources where you can find data or background: § Your Own School or School District — First check out your school or your district’s website to see what data is available online. Also check with your adviser how to best access the documents and statistics. § Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Data Collections — https://lbstat.dpi.wi.gov/lbstat_data. Search the Online Database, check out the school performance report, which measures school accountability, student knowledge growth, closing gaps and on-track to graduation and post-secondary readiness, and more. § Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Accountability Resources — http://dpi.wi.gov/ accountability/resources. § Wisconsin Public School District Public Salaries — http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/dataondemand/wisconsin-public-school-employee-salaries-33534649.html. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel database, updated on Jan. 5, 2015, includes salaries on 162,000 superintendents, principals, teachers and other employees at public school districts across Wisconsin during the 2013-14 school year. § Google or create news alerts about your school

or district. Find out what has been reported recently. That may help you hone in on your topic.

For instance, do a search on “What do school districts pay for legal fees?” and you’ll find several recent stories detailing with that topic that will help you put things into perspective at your local school or district.

The next phase in the DOT process is Observation.

These steps could include: § Observing faculty and administrators. Does anything seem out of line or unusual? § Going to a school board meeting. Does there appear to be tension between your superintendent of schools and the board, or even between board members? If so, why? What is the history of this tension?

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview: § Office of Educational Accountability — http:// dpi.wi.gov/accountability/staff-directory. Your topic will determine who is the right person to interview. § School principal or superintendent of schools — Again, your topic will determine what questions you need to ask. § School board members § Teachers, students, staff impacted by whatever occurred Again, be sure to end every interview with this question: Is there anything else I should know or that you’d like to add that we didn’t yet discuss. You might get some real gems of information that way.

National Reporting Topic: Hazardous Use of Cell Phones, Technology

Background and Summary

Matt Richtel and members of The New York Times staff received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Award in National Reporting for their “incisive work, in print and online, on the hazardous use of cell phones, computers and other devices while operating cars and trucks, stimulating widespread efforts to curb distracted driving.” The Pulitzer Board cited the stories as a “distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, in print or online or both.”

Richtel followed up his Pulitzer Prize stories with the 2010 series, “Our Brains on Computers,” which focuses on how constant use of our devices impacts not only our behavior, but also our thought processes and even our neurology.

ban texting and driving, while talking on a hand-held cellphone while driving is banned in 14 states and the District of Columbia. (In Wisconsin, cell phone use while driving is against the law for any driver with a probationary license or instruction permit, and texting while driving is against the law for all drivers in the state.)

“I think we need to think critically and make informed choices about the extent to which we want to be constantly interrupted.

What is technology doing to us? And why is there such a glaring disconnect between our attitudes and behaviors?” he said during a 2014 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “Everyone at this point knows that using a phone behind the wheel will kill them,” Richtel said.

“And yet you see it everywhere. People say one thing and do another. I couldn’t understand why the lure Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, left, of this thing is that presents the 2010 National Reporting prize to Matt Richtel. powerful.”

Richtel said as he reported on the connectedness of people 24/7, he noticed that technology was altering his own behavior. He “was feeling a tick of anxiety when away from my device,” he wrote in his nonfiction book, “A Deadly Wandering.” The book weaves research into attention and information overload with the story of Reggie Shaw, a Utah teenager who killed two people while texting and driving in a 2006 accident. It was one of the first texting-and-driving legal cases in the United States, and Shaw subsequently spoke to Utah lawmakers and convinced them to pass one of the toughest laws against texting and driving in the country.

Richtel’s Pulitzer Prize series not only informed people about the problem, but also created legislative momentum. Today, 46 states and the District of Columbia

His book, “A Deadly Wandering,” tries to understand that lure. He makes an analogy between people’s desire for digital interactivity to what smokers experience when they crave another cigarette. “When you check your phone, you get a little dopamine peak, it regulates and then you start to feel a little yearning, and so you check it again.”

With no doubt, technology has changed our lives. In 2010, the average person consumed almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960. And the New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times an hour.

Richtel said scientists question how much is too much when it comes to processing technology. “What is the line right now when we go from a kind of technology nourishment to a kind of stepping backwards, to a kind of distraction — where instead of informing us, [technology] distracts us and impedes our productivity?” he said. “There’s growing evidence that that line is closer than we’ve imagined or acknowledged.”

A study conducted at Stanford University showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks, he said. Other research, he added, shows that heavy video game playing may release dopamine, which is thought to be involved with addictive behaviors.

Richtel said that research is ongoing, particularly into how addictive behavior can lead to poor decision-making and how the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information.

By taking on this topic, you will be contributing information to a highly charged debate about the safety of using technology while driving, and informing and reminding your readers of the very real dangers associated with it. Your stories could have an impact, and may actually save a life if they stop one person from using technology while driving.

The Works

Richtel and members of The New York Times staff received the Pulitzer based on the following submissions: § Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit § Game § U.S. Withheld Data Showing Driving Risks § Not Driving Drunk, but Texting? Utah Law Sees Little Difference § When Driver Starts Texting, Back Seat Delivers a Message § Truckers Insist on Keeping Computers in the Cab § At 60 M.P.H. Office Work is a High-Risk Job § Video § Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks § Timeline They can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7118.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

“It’s an onslaught of information coming in today,” Richtel said in a 2010 National Public Radio interview.

“At one time a screen meant maybe something in your living room. But now it’s something in your pocket so it goes everywhere — it can be behind the wheel, it can be at the dinner table, it can be in the bathroom. We see it everywhere today.”

Biography Matthew D. Richtel joined The New York Times in January 2000 as a technology reporter in the San Francisco bureau. He has covered the dot-com boom and bust, the cellphone industry, Internet gambling, identity theft, corporate espionage, the videogame business, personal computers and the culture of Silicon Valley.

Richtel has approached technology as more than a business story about companies, hardware and software. He has a sociologist’s eye, and regularly appears on Page 1 with surprising trend-spotting stories, including churches using violent video games to attract young congregants, the impatience of computer users as they wait for machines to boot up, and the way email actually hurts productivity.

He is also the author of “Devil’s Plaything,” “The Cloud” and “Hooked.”

In his spare time, he writes the syndicated daily comic strip “Rudy Park,” launched in 2001. It revolves around the lives of regular patrons at an Internet cafe. Richtel writes the strip under the pen name “Theron Heir,” while Darrin Bell illustrates the comic Richtel got his start in journalism at The Peninsula Times Tribune where he covered the city of East Palo Alto, California and then served as business editor.

Born in Los Angeles, Richtel grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He received a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1990. He said he thinks this is an exceptional time and place to be a journalist — like being in New York at the last turn of the century — watching an entire new world taking shape.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis Fellow the link above to read Richtel’s stories. As you do, think about the ways in which he goes about telling

his stories.

Richtel spent months researching the toll technology and “information juggling” take on our lives — and our brains. He even accompanied several scientists, all who are studying the brain, on a weeklong retreat that included no cell phones, no Internet access and no technological distractions. (He found the scientists noticed something significant happening on the third day they couldn’t use their hand-held devices, computers and mobile phones. He terms it the three-day effect. “You start to feel more relaxed,” he said. “Maybe you sleep a little better. Maybe you don’t reach for your phone pinging in your pocket. Maybe you wait a little longer before answering a question. Maybe you don’t feel in a rush to do anything — your sense of urgency fades.”)

While you don’t have scientists at your disposal to conduct official experiments, you do have family and friends. Could you persuade them to give up technology for a week, or at least a three-day weekend? What do they experience? How does it impact them?

Notice that Richtel leads his first story, “Dismissing the risks of a deadly habit,” with an anecdote, a story of how a distracted driver — one proud of his clean driving record — blows through a red light because he was texting, hits another car and kills the driver: On his 15th birthday, Christopher Hill got his first cellphone. For his 16th, he was given a used red Ford Ranger pickup, a source of pride he washed every week.

Mr. Hill, a diligent student with a reputation for helping neighbors, also took pride in his clean driving record. “Not a speeding ticket, not a fender bender, nothing,” he said.

Until last Sept. 3. Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor. He dialed her to pass along news of the find.

Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after.

Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. “I never saw it,” he answered.

In other stories in his series, he also uses a “shocker” type lead such as in “Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks.” There, the shocking or surprising statement isn’t given until the fifth paragraph — that it occurred during the 1960s. Is this type of lead effective? Why do you

think so? Would this type of lead work for your story(ies)? What other types of leads might be effective?

Notice, too, the documents and studies Richtel cites in his stories: • A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

• Last year, the federal agency dealing with road safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a study, based on researchers’ observations of drivers, suggesting that at any time during daylight hours in 2007, 11 percent — or 1.8 million drivers — were using a cellphone.

• Mr. Strayer’s research, showing that multitasking drivers are four times as likely to crash as people who are focused on driving, matches the findings of two studies, in Canada and in Australia, of drivers on actual roads.

What studies or documents might be relevant in your research? Do they back up your conclusions from your sources?

Richtel also uses a variety of sources in his stories. He talks to ordinary people about their cell phone use while driving, as well as legislators, police officers, lawyers, truck drivers, researchers, cell phone providers, and others. Is there any source he missed as he reported that might have been helpful? If so, who?

Also notice how Richtel “weaves” in relevant background information with quotes so the story flows well and the quotations leave a big impact on the reader. For example: And in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

“When we ask people to identify the most dangerous distraction on the highway today, about half — correctly — identify cellphones,” said Bill Windsor, associate vice president for safety at Nationwide. “But they think others are dangerous, not themselves.”

As stated earlier, a good story must be complete in having a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning must be strong and engaging. The middle must be thor-

ough enough to draw the reader along and explain the significance of the experience without getting bogged down in details or without wandering off topic. A good ending gives the reader a sense of satisfaction, often by providing an unexpected perspective or by bringing the reader full-circle. Look how Richtel accomplishes this in “Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit,” going back to the lead (cited on the previous page) to the ending below: Some drivers who caused accidents themselves have become activists, too. Mr. Hill, as part of his misdemeanor charge, must devote 240 hours to community service — talking about the risks of distracted driving, as well as working with animals, as Ms. Doyle’s family said she would have liked.

He spoke to a classroom of fellow students about his experience, sparing no details.

“Their jaws just dropped,” he said. “They couldn’t believe they had someone standing in front of them who was talking on the cellphone and killed someone.”

Lastly, the series doesn’t include just print stories, but also a video and interactive video game. How can you make you make your reporting more interactive?-

Classroom Discussion Questions 1. Read “Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit.”

Why is that anecdotal lead so effective?

2. In “Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit,” it states: “Extensive research shows that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a 0.8 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated.

Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.” Should the source of the research be cited immediately? Why or why not?

3. Play the online game. Did you find it difficult to drive while being distracted? What other types of things could this series have created to make that point and make it more interactive? Should interactive elements be an impartant part of your coverage?

4. Read “Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks.”

Should the history of car phones be a part of this series? Why or why not?

5. Read “At 60 M.P.H. Office Work is a High-Risk Job.” Find three instances where the story included good transitions. Why are they effective?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community You’ve probably done it, and know of friends and family who do it, too — talking or texting on your cell phone while driving. The National Safety Council estimates that at least 23 percent of all crashes (more than 1.3 million) involve cell phone use each year. A recent study showed that texting while driving is now the leading cause of death among teenagers — exceeding the drunken driving numbers.

For this category, you will write about this national phenomenon and its local impact. You could write how dangerous distracted driving is, highlight accidents in your area caused by distracted drivers, what can and is being done to stop distracted driving, teen drivers’ texting habits while driving, etc.

As explained earlier, the first part of writing begins with research, or Documents. Here are some sources where you can find data or background for your stories: § Distraction.gov — http://www.distraction.gov/ stats-research-laws/facts-and-statistics.html. The official U.S. government website for distracted driving includes definitions, key facts and statistics, etc. Enforcement information can also be found at http://www.distraction.gov/dot-activities/enforcement.html. § NHTSA Research on Distracted Driving — http:// www.distraction.gov/downloads/pdfs/Distraction-Cell-Phones-Texting.pdf. Includes information on causes, costs, statistics, vehicle technologies, and more. § National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA. The NHTSA offers data and research on traffic fatalities by state and more. § Network of Employers for Traffic Safety — http:// trafficsafety.org/. Offers a comprehensive guide to road safety.

§ State Laws Regarding Distracted Driving — http:// www.distraction.gov/stats-research-laws/statelaws.html § Governors Highway Safety Association — http:// ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/bystate/wi.html. § Wisconsin Department of Transportation — http://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/home.aspx. You can find traffic crash information at http://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/safety/education/crash-data/ crashfacts.aspx, county crash statistics at http:// wisconsindot.gov/Pages/about-wisdot/newsroom/ statistics/crash.aspx, and projects and studies by region at http://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/projects/ by-region/default.aspx. § End Distracted Driving — http://www.enddd.org/ the-facts-about-distracted-driving/?gclid=CO-NqKmR5skCFYYjgQodQQ8Dcg. Movement started by parents after the death of their daughter in 2009 after being struck by a distracted driver. § Stop the Texts. Stop the Wrecks — http://stoptextsstopwrecks.org/?gclid=COfqveqR5skCFVKEfgod3LgEbw. § Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/. Includes distracted driving study, risk factors, what is being done, additional resources and references, and more. § Insurance Institute for Highway Safety — http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/cellphonelaws?topicName=distracted-driving. § National Safety Council — http://www.nsc.org/ learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/distracted-driving-research-studies.aspx. Includes meta-analyses and literature reviews, crash risk and crash data, hands-free devices, traffic safety survey and more. § Texting and Driving Safely — http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/texting-and-driving-stats.

This family-owned, family-run company is dedicated to stopping texting and driving injuries and deaths in North America. § Nationwide Mutual Insurance — http://www.nationwide.com/teen-distracted-driving.jsp. Includes information that parents can use to keep their teen drivers safe. § Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association — http://www.ctia.org/. Provides statistics on texting, wireless-only, etc. § Center for Auto Safety — http://www.autosafety. org. Information on cell phone and distracted driving available at http://www.autosafety.org/ cell-phones-and-distracted-driving-0. § AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety — https://www. aaafoundation.org/distracted-driving. Includes information on studies of teen driving habits.

§ New England Journal of Medicine — http://www. nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1204142. “Distracted Driving and Risk of Road Crashes among Novice and Experienced Drivers” was published in January 2014. § Survey students and faculty and staff at your own high school. Do they ever use the phone while driving? Do they dial the number? Do they text?

How often do they call or text when driving? Do they text only by pulling over or when stopped at stop signs? Do they think their behaviors are dangerous? Why or why not? Etc. The next step in the DOT process is Observation. That could include: § Observing students, teachers and staff members, or the general public when driving. Do you see them texting or on the phone? Do you see them going over the center line, not stopping for red lights, or other things that show they are not paying attention to the road? Where did this occur?

How often do you see it occurring? Do you see it occurring more in areas that surround your high school?

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask: § Teen drivers, middle age drivers and retired drivers — Do they text and drive? Do they talk on the phone while driving? Why or why not? Do they think it impacts their driving ability? If yes, why do they still do it? Do they know the laws about distracted driving? If they are riding in a car, do they ever ask the driver to put the phone away?

Why or why not? Do the answers vary by the age of the driver? Etc. § Local Police Department — How much of a problem is distracted driving in your city? How do they enforce it? Do they keep statistics on the number of accidents caused by distracted driving? If so, do they also keep track of the age of the majority of distracted driving accidents? Etc. § Local “experts.” Contact the news bureau at your local or nearby college. Do they have any professors who are doing research on this? If so, what are the results of their research?

Lastly, be sure to end every interview with this question: Is there anything else I should know or that you’d like to add that we didn’t yet discuss. You might get some real gems of information that way.

Public Service Reporting Topic: School Violence

Background and Summary

The Philadelphia Inquirer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 in Public Service reporting for its exploration of pervasive violence in the city’s schools, using powerful print narratives and videos to illuminate crimes committed by children against children and to stir reforms to improve safety for teachers and students.

The award went to staff members John Sullivan, Kristen Graham, Sue Snyder and Stan Wischnowski for their “Assault on Learning” series.

In some cases, children as young as elementary students and even kindergarteners were victims of violence or were committing violence, Graham said. And not surprisingly, violence at the high school level was even worse. “There was a group of students who went from room to room, looking for victims and the teachers and principal allowed it to happen,” she said in the PBS News Hour interview.

But their research also showed that much of the violence occurring was not reported. “At the time, it was up to school officials to report their own violence,” Graham said, “and since it didn’t reflect well on them, they didn’t report all incidents.”

The Pulitzer Board cited The Philadelphia The responsibility to Inquirer’s stories as a report such incidents was From left, Gregory Moore, co-chair of The Pulitzer “distinguished example originally up to school Prize Board, presents the 2012 Public Service Prize to of meritorious public administrators; since the John Sullivan, Kristen Graham, Sue Snyder and Stan service by a newspaper series ran, the responsibilWischnowski. or news site through ity is now up to the school the use of its journalpolice. Their coverage also resulted in reforms and a istic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, new administration, she said. cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual It was sometimes tough to keep working on the series material.” for such a long time, but during those times she thought about Tamika McNeill, Graham wrote in an Oct. 17, In a PBS News Hour interview published on April 6, 2013, Philly.com blog. She also keeps a picture of Tami2012, Graham said they decided to do the story after ka at her desk to keep her focused. learning about a racially motivated beating in 2009 at Philadelphia High School that severely injured a group of Asian immigrant students. The district’s response to the beating was lukewarm at first, and advocates questioned how such violence could happen within a school.

That’s when the paper decided it needed to devote resources to investigate the culture of violence within schools, Graham said.

Five reporters spent more than a year researching, interviewing and writing. “It was a huge commitment on the paper’s part … but we felt that public service journalism is important to do,” she said.

She explains: “Tamika was 12 when classmates from Cleveland Elementary School in North Philadelphia grabbed her, forced their hands inside her shirt and tried to fondle her breasts. They threatened to attack her if she told the truth. School officials didn’t report the incident for months. Tamika thought about killing herself.

“I remember sitting in her living room, listening to Tamika struggle to articulate the terrible things that had been done to her, things that no child should have to endure, especially at school.”

By taking on this topic, you will be contributing information to a highly charged debate on school violence and educating yourself and your readers about the extent of the problem locally and how violence is reported; you can also add to the discussion about what can ensure that schools are a safe place where every child can learn.

The Works The works of John Sullivan, Kristien Graham, Sue Snyder and Stan Wischnowski included: § Climate of violence stifles city schools § Taking a closer look at the numbers behind school violence § Assault on Learning: Database of school violence — Online database (Note: No longer available) § VIDEO: Audenried High School student attack (Note: No longer available) § Underreporting hides violence § Young and violent, even kindergarteners § Violence targets teachers, staff § Data visualization: Teachers speak out § A flawed system of intervention § Some anti-violence efforts are working The stories can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/ winners/7154.

Biographies John Sullivan is an investigative journalist-in-residence at the American University School of Communication, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and a senior editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop (http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/).

Previously, Sullivan worked for nearly a decade at The Inquirer, where his assignments included covering the war in Iraq, state government, city hall, science and health.

Kristen Graham is a veteran education/investigative reporter producing award-winning journalism on multiple platforms. She has been a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer since August 2000 and currently is an education reporter covering the Philadelphia School District. She previously covered suburban education, municipal government and county government. She was also the lead writer for the Pulitzer Prize series.

Graham is a social media expert and a 2015 Kiplinger Fellow in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University. Named one of the most influential Philadelphians on Twitter by Philadelphia Magazine, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Temple University in 2000.

Sue Snyder has decades of experience in education reporting at small, medium and large metro newspapers and vast knowledge of both K-12 schools and colleges and universities. In addition, she is fluent in the use of social media.

She has been an education reporter at The Inquirer since October 1998, and has covered the region’s 80plus private, public and for-profit colleges, as well as local and national trends, since January 2012.

Snyder previously worked as an education reporter at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and at The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She also worked as a general assignment reporter at the Standard Speaker in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and at The Freeman’s Journal in Cooperstown, New York.

Snyder graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Stan Wischnowski has worked as vice president, news operations for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com since 2014. He previously served as the executive editor of The Inquirer (2012-14); editor (20102012); deputy managing editor (2006-2010); assistant managing editor (2002-2006); and news editor (20002002.)

The Inquirer has won two Pulitzer Prizes under the leadership of Wischnowski and Inquirer Editor William K. Marimow.

Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Western Illinois University, Wischnowski also worked as a night editor at the Detroit News from 1993-96 and as the deputy managing editor/acting manager editor at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle from 1996-2000.

Technique: Excerpts and Analysis Follow the previous link to read the stories. As you do, think about the ways in which the reporters go about getting and telling their stories.

As noted above, this series came out of one brutally violent and racially motivated attack at the high school, even though security guards roamed the halls and a sophisticated camera-surveillance system kept on eye on hallways.

The reporters spent a year interviewing hundreds of teachers, parents, students and education experts about the district’s problems. But it was statistics that helped to prove the magnitude of the problem — 4,541

violent incidents in one school year. Or as the reporters explain it: “That means on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes.”

For journalism students, perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from this project is the importance of documents. Case histories of assaults that landed in Common Pleas Court were reviewed, and the paper created a database with information provided by the school district, allowing them to analyze more than 30,000 serious incidents — from assaults to robberies to rapes — reported in the district during in a five-year period.

The Inquirer also obtained thousands of internal school district police reports of violent incidents dating back to 2007. They showed that during the last four years serious crimes occurred dozens of times a day, in every corner of the city, at every level of school.

In addition, The Inquirer commissioned an independently administered survey by Temple University that sampled the opinions of more than 750 teachers and aides, or 6 percent of the 13,000 people the district employs.

The survey showed that more than two-thirds of those who responded felt that violence and disruption in their building hindered students’ ability to learn. And more than half said violence had worsened during the last three years.

But just as importantly, The Inquirer also found a lack of reporting on acts of violence, which was confirmed by both statistics as well as interviews with teachers, students and administrators.

Statistics alone don’t make an interesting story, however. The information needs to be fleshed out, and the reporters weaved in stories of students, teachers or staff who were assaulted at school, and those stories made the numbers seem even more alarming and relevant.

Consider this lead in “Cases of students fighting, hitting teachers, making threats discovered much later”: Tamika McNeill, who had just turned 12, contemplated killing herself last April after classmates at Cleveland Elementary School grabbed her in the cafeteria, wedged their hands under her shirt, and tried to fondle her breasts.

“It made me feel like: End it all right there,” said Tamika, then a sixth grader, who had been teased and taunted for months before the attack. “But I knew that it would make my family feel worse.”

Look at how the reporters end the story, going back to Tamika’s story in the lead:

The drawn-out process was an ordeal for Tamika. She stopped going out for recess because her mother was too worried. Instead, she sat in the school office. She never wanted to take her coat off. She felt “violated,” she said.

The bright girl who had a knack for drawing began to like school less. She would cry frequently, wondering why the classmates who attacked her were allowed to remain in school.

“It was hard to walk past them,” she said softly.

Tamika, now a seventh grader, has since moved to Kenderton School, which is only a slightly longer walk than Cleveland, and she’s happier.

“The word needs to get out on how violent the schools really are,” her mother said, “and they really need to take it seriously.”

The series did not shy away from the complexity of the problem; it also took a look at how the impact of troubled students, such as those with learning disabilities or behavioral disorders, have on school violence, as well as what help is provided those students. To give a complete understanding of school violence, those elements should also be included in your stories.

Classroom Discussion Questions 1. The Philadelphia school district’s superintendent became hostile with the Inquirer staff for its investigation, which shined light on the issues deep within the school district. How could such a relationship with hostile sources or administrators be “handled”?

2. The Inquirer commissioned an independent survey that sampled the opinions of more than 750 teachers and aides about school violence. Is it important that a third party conducted the survey?

Why do you think so?

3. Read “Climate of violence stifles city’s schools.”

What type of lead does it use? Is it effective? Why or why not?

4. The series didn’t just brush the surface of school violence. It attempted to find possible deeper causes and determine why kids are violent. Find examples of those causes in any of the stories.

Is it clear what the writer was doing? If not, how would you improve it?

5. Read “Young and violent, even kindergartners.”

How do you think the reporters gained the trust of their sources?

How to Pursue This Topic in Your School or Community Violence is a part of many school districts, no matter a student’s race, financial situation or grade level. For Public Service reporting, you need to write at least two stories that look at violence in your city or school district. Numbers and statistics must be part of your coverage, particularly if the numbers show trends. The stories must also include some background information that puts the information in focus.

As explained earlier, the first part of writing begins with research, or Documents. Here are some sources where you can find data or background for your stories: § Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/schoolviolence/data_stats.html. The website includes a fact sheet on understanding school violence, behaviors that contribute to violence on school property, an overview of youth violence, and more. It also includes links to data sources (http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/ youthviolence/datasources.html), such as the School Associated Violent Deaths Study, Indicators of School Crime and Safety, School Health Policies and Programs Study and more. Be sure to also look at the Youth Violence: Definitions tab since a consistent definition is needed to monitor the incidence of youth violence, examine trends and determine the magnitude of the problem. § National Criminal Justice Reference Service — https://www.ncjrs.gov/yviolence/schoolviolence. html. Includes links to the Indicators of School Crime and Safety from 1998 to present § Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Safe Schools — http://sspw.dpi.wi.gov/sspw_safeschool. Learn about the Safe Schools Initiative, bullying prevention resources, success stories, and more. Includes links to other possible sources. § Wisconsin Youth Risk Behavior Survey — http:// sspw.dpi.wi.gov/sspw_yrbsindx. Wisconsin Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) is conducted as part of a national effort by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor health-risk behaviors of high school students throughout the nation. These behaviors, in turn, result in the most significant causes of both mortality and morbidity during youth and adulthood. The YTBS monitors the following behaviors: traffic safety; weapons and violence; suicide; tobacco use; alcohol and other drug use; sexual behavior; and diet, nutrition and exercise. Be sure to look at the section, violence and weapons, in the executive summary at http://sspw.dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/

files/imce/sspw/pdf/yrbs13execsum.pdf § Your Own School District — Go to its website or call your public school district to see if it has statistics on school violence.

The next phase in the DOT process is Observation. That could include these steps: § Observing students who are violent in school and how teachers or staff members deal with that violence. How often do you see violence in the classroom or in the school parking lot? What type of violence is most prevalent? § Observing the school resource officer(s) in your school. How and when do they interact with students? How do they stop violence before it escalates? § Observing if violence occurs against only students, or if teachers and paraprofessionals are also abused. How do victims respond?

The last step in the DOT reporting process is Talking, or interviewing. Here are some possibilities of people you should interview and some of the questions you may want to ask: § School resource officers — How do you define school violence? What do they think are their most important duties at schools? Why? How do they try to prevent violence? How do they deal with violence in progress? Do they see any trends? § School principal, superintendent of schools, or dean of students — How do you define school violence? What type of training do they provide to faculty and staff to handle school violence? Do they see any trends? How can they combat the reasons for school violence? Do they feel schools are a safe place for staff and students? Why or why not? What are the repercussions for students engaging in school violence? Do they have any statistics on violence against other students, teachers or staff? How do those compare to past years?

What more could be done to improve safety?

What safety measures are already in place? § Students — How do they define school violence?

Try to interview the students committing the violence, as well as those who are on the receiving end of the violence. Why do they fight? How do they pick their victims? For the victims, does the fear of violence make them skip or miss school?

How do they deal with the perpetrators? (For instance, do they come late to school, go different routes in the halls to avoid them, etc.) Have they talked to anyone in authority about the problems?

Why or why not? What more should the schools do to improve safety?

Photo Credits Pulitzer Prize presentation and Jospeh Pulitzer photos: Courtesy of Pulitzer Prizes/Columbia University Raquel Rutledge: Photo by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Leonard Pitts: By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44329378 Eli Saslow: Creative Commons License, By Miller Center, https://flic.kr/s/aHsjz9WiVa or https://www. flickr.com/photos/miller_center/6985626709 Ron Suskind: By Chatham House [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Sonia Nazario: All photos courtesy of Sonia Nazario; Train photo taken by unidentified migrant Frank Suraci, Bob Kuznia and Rebecca Kimitch: Robert Casillas/Daily Breeze Matt Richtel: Photo courtesy Matt Richtel and Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

Reporting Resources Fact-Checking Resources

1. http://www.schooljournalism.org/fact-checking-resources/ 2. http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/general-resourcesfact-checkinglibraries/

Freedom of Information

1. How to Make a Freedom of Information Request: http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html 2. Wisconsin Sample Freedom of Information Request: http://www.nfoic.org/wisconsin-sample-foia-request 3. Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council: http://www.wisfoic.org/

Miscellaneous

1. ASNE Youth Journalism Initiative: http://www.schooljournalism.org/ 2. Journalist’s Toolbox (Presented by the Society of Professional Journalists): http://journaliststoolbox.org/ 3. Student Press Law Center: http://www.splc.org/

Open Meetings

1. Wisconsin Open Meetings Law: http://www.nfoic.org/wisconsin-foia-laws

Open Records

1. Wisconsin Open Records Law: http://www.nfoic.org/wisconsin-foia-laws 2. Public Records Compliance: https://www.doj.state.wi.us/sites/default/files/dls/public-records-compliance-outline-2012.pdf

Help in Finding Sources College Media Relations or News Bureaus: ü UW-Oshkosh: http://www.uwosh.edu/imc/media-relations/newsroom ü UW-Madison: https://uc.wisc.edu/working-with-us/ ü UW-Milwaukee: https://uwm.edu/universityrelations/news-media/ ü UW-Green Bay: http://www.uwgb.edu/univcomm/experts/ ü Other UW Institutions: https://www.wisconsin.edu/news/media-liaisons/ Expert Sources, Journalist’s Toolbox: http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/expert-sources/ Help a Reporter Out — https://twitter.com/helpareporter or www.helpareporter.com

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Entry deadline:

Monday, March 6, 2017

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Questions?

Contact NEWSPA Executive Secretary Barbara Benish benish@uwosh.edu

This section needs to be completed only once for all entries submitted from a school.

2016-17 Membership - $55 (before Nov. 30) $65 (After Dec.1) Go to http://journalism.uwosh.edu/northeastern-wisconsinscholastic-press-association-newspa/membership/ to see if your school has already paid membership for the year.

ENTRY FEE(S):

$20 per student Pulitzer Prize entry

_______ Total amount enclosed

Department of Journalism • College of Letters and Science University of Wisconsin Oshkosh • 800 Algoma Blvd • Oshkosh, WI 54901-8696 (920) 424-1042 • Fax (920) 424-7146 • http://journalism.uwosh.edu/northeastern-wisconsin-scholastic-press-association-newspa/