After following capital cases and executions in Texas for several years, Renee Feltz (Stabile ‘08), noticed that, despite a 2002 Supreme Court ruling (Atkins v. Virginia) that banned the execution of mentally retarded prisoners, Texas seemed to release fewer such inmates from death row than other states. In fact, her reporting revealed that appeals citing the Atkins case have had a 40 percent success rate nationwide versus 28 percent in Texas.

This interactive graphic published by the Texas Observer shows the 29 Death Row inmates evaluated by a controversial psychologist whose competence in determining mental retardation has been questioned

“One of the key defense attorneys working on these cases mentioned to me that there was a psychologist who had testified in more than half of Texas’s Atkins cases—often as the state’s only witness—that the defendants were not retarded,” Feltz said. “Many of the men were strikingly slow. This really piqued my interest, and I got to work.”

Eager to learn more, Feltz continued to research the story and pitched it to the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, which agreed to support her project. With a borrowed car and a volunteer Spanish-English translator, Feltz spent November reporting in Texas.

This month, The Texas Observer published Feltz’s project, “Cracked,” a 4,000-word cover story, accompanied by a six-minute video and an interactive graphic.

The compelling package follows death row inmate Daniel Plata, who was born with “profound cognitive defects,” through his Atkins appeal. Feltz reveals that the state prosecution’s go-to psychologist for this and more than a dozen cases, Dr. George Denkowski, administered a series of tests to Plata to determine his mental aptitude, using seriously flawed testing practices.

Feltz’s story has also gotten attention from other media outlets: Democracy Now interviewed her and aired the six-minute video; an excerpt of the story appeared in the Huffington Post; The Raw Story interviewed her about the report; and it was featured in ProPublica’s “Investigations Elsewhere” section.

Feltz is an alumni of the Stabile Center for Investigation Journalism. “The investigative skills I learned working with Sheila Coronel and Jim Mintz as a Stabile fellow were invaluable in reporting this story, such as how to search legal databases and develop sources, and how to tell a compelling story about the minutia of the proper procedure for clinical diagnosis of mental retardation,” said Feltz, who also expressed gratitude to the Nation Institute and The Texas Observer for supporting criminal justice reporting.

Students of the Stabile Center  published today the first two of a series of investigations on student lending. The series is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. Students pitched, investigated and wrote the articles while the Fund, led by Stabile alumnus Ben Protess, oversaw the reporting and edited the reports.

Today’s report details how nonprofit lenders persuaded the U.S. House to award them the equivalent of no-bid contracts potentially worth millions of dollars each. Based on interviews and a review of documents and e-mails obtained through public records requests, students showed how these nonprofits – including some accused of previous misconduct by state and federal authorities — are on the verge of winning a protected position in the higher-education business. The bill passed by the House in September gave these nonprofits a guaranteed annual contract to service government loans for up to 100,000 borrowers in their state.

When the U.S. House passed an overhaul of the student lending industry in September, lawmakers added a little-noticed provision that could award nonprofits exclusive rights to service federal loans in states with fewer than 100,000 student borrowers. The legislation now awaits action in the Senate. States in dark red have fewer than 100,000 borrowers and these are where nonprofits are set to win a monopoly; those in light red are states with fewer than 100,000 borrowers and where monopolies could develop. Graphic by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. Source: Federal data compiled by research firm Student Lending Analytics. » Full Data: Estimated Borrowers by State.

Nonprofit lenders in at least 10 states ran afoul of state and federal rules between 1993 and 2008, records show. Government investigators have exposed illegal payments to an alumni association, questionable executive compensation and perks, deceptive advertising and tens of millions of dollars in unwarranted federal subsidies.

The reports were also published in The Huffington Post, where they generated lively comments from readers. During the spring semester, Stabile students will continue investigating the relationships between financial companies and universities.

More on the Stabile Center-Huffington Post Investigative Fund collaboration here.

Despite the gloomy outlook for the media business and worries about the decline of investigative reporting, Stabile graduates are pursuing investigative projects as freelancers and as reporters for newspapers, TV networks and nonprofit investigative reporting centers.

This week, the Center for Public Integrity began a series of reports on the veil of secrecy over sexual assaults in college campuses. Kristin Jones (Stabile ‘08) was one of two lead reporters in the Center’s nine-month investigation,  which entailed  surveying 152 crisis programs and clinics near campuses and interviewing 50 students who said they had been sexually assaulted as well as campus administrators, advocates and lawyers.

In New Jersey, Tomas Dinges (Stabile ‘o8) published on November 22 an investigation on military suicides for the Star-Ledger.  Together with reporter Mark Mueller, Dinges wrote that there are 2,100 recorded cases of military suicides since 2001, nearly triple the number of soldiers who have perished in Afghanistan and almost half of all U.S. fatalities in Iraq. They also reported the rising cases of post-traumatic stress among veterans.

In Chicago, Ellen Gabler (Stabile ‘07) reported November 19 on a  “stealth budget account worth millions [that] has allowed Chicago aldermen to put family members, campaign operatives and those with political baggage” on the city’s payroll. Gabler joined the investigative team of The Chicago Tribune this fall after more than two years at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s watchdog team.

This summer, Ben Protess (Stabile ‘08) joined the staff of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, where he has reported on a group that has produced ads attacking health care reform, problems with the collection of DNA evidence (written with Emily Witt, Stabile ‘09) and the poor regulation of derivatives trading.

At Pro Publica, the New York-based nonprofit investigative reporting, staff reporter Sharona Coutts (Stabile ‘08) has been reporting on the bailout of AIG, the pension funds’ “pay for play” scandal in New York and California and enrollment anomalies at the University of Phoenix.

At the same time,  Olga Pierce (Stabile ‘08), a fellow at Pro Publica, has been tracking health care reforms and how widespread joblessness is taxing the unemployment insurance system in many states. In October, Pierce collaborated with CBS News for a feature on the growing power of some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Congress.

Renee Feltz, also from the class of 2008, was recently in Texas to report on death penalty cases. She produced a text and video report for The Texas Observer on a possibly retarded inmate who has since been executed. Her research is supported by The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, and she will publish a bigger, multimedia report for the Observer in January 2010.

As a 2008 Stabile Fellow, Kristin Jones researched Tamil Tiger funding for U.S. politicians. She found that wealthy Tamils were contributing to the political campaigns of influential Democrats in the hope of influencing U.S. policy toward the Tigers. Today Jones co-authored a report for The Blotter, a blog produced by the Brian Ross Unit, on how a hedge fund billionaire linked to the Tigers was a major contributor to Hillary Clinton’s campaigns.

Here’s an excerpt from the report:

The New York hedge fund billionaire indicted today in an alleged $20 million insider trading scheme, Raj Rajaratnam, was a major contributor to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and also the single largest known U.S. contributor to a charity linked to the Tamil Tiger terror group in Sri Lanka, according to records obtained by ABCNews.com.

Rajaratnam is accused of operating an elaborate insider trading operation through his Galleon Group hedge fund, which made him one of the wealthiest men in America with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.

Raj Rajaratnam, billionaire founder of the Galleon Group, a major hedge fund, is led in handcuffs from FBI headquarters in New York Friday, Oct.16, 2009. Rajaratnam was charged with insider trading in the stock of several companies including Hilton, Clearwire, and Google.

Hilke Schellmann (Stabile ‘09) and Habiba Nosheen (Broadcast ‘09) aired their master’s project, an exposé on the dark side of commercial surrogacy, on Sept. 18 on the PBS program, NOW.

Commercial surrogacy—when women are paid to carry and deliver babies for people who cannot conceive them biologically—is banned in almost every developed country except the United States. The students’ report shows how surrogacy is an unregulated industry in the U.S. and therefore open to abuse. They focused on Surrogenesis, a company that has defrauded  hopeful parents and victimized  mothers trying to help them.

The students worked with NOW senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa as they followed the surrogate pregnancy of a single mother over the course of several months. When she was 14 weeks pregnant, the surrogate agency that brokered the deal between her and the future parents vanished, leaving the woman stranded without health insurance and nowhere to turn.

Schellman and Nosheen began the project with a small grant from the Stabile Center and raised additional funds from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and The Fund for Independence in Journalism to complete their project.

In the spring of 2009, students of the Stabile class  worked with the Hearst investigative unit on an investigative series on medical errors. “Dead by Mistake” reports that more than 20,000 Americans will die this year from preventable medical errors and hospital infections.  Despite an authoritative federal report 10 years ago that laid out the scope of the problem and urged the federal and state governments and the medical community to take clear and tangible steps to reduce the number of fatal medical errors, a staggering 98,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors each year and just as many from hospital-acquired infections, the investigation found.

“Dead By Mistake” reveals that the federal government and most states have made little or no progress in improving patient safety through accountability mechanisms or other measures. According to the Hearst investigation, special interests worked to ensure that the key recommendations in the report — most notably a mandatory national reporting system for medical errors — were never implemented.

Stabile students were among those who wrote profiles of more than 30 people who died or were injured while seeking medical care.  In addition, students Olivia Victoria Andrzejczak and  Kyla Calvert worked after the semester to continue reporting on the project and to help build the Dead by Mistake Web site.

The investigation utilized the reporting resources of seven Hearst newspapers — the San Francisco Chronicle, Albany Times Union, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate and the Connecticut Post — as well as SeattlePI.com and Hearst Television. In addition to contributing to the national television, print and Web stories, these Hearst journalists also produced market-specific reports highlighting the results of local investigations. Students, faculty and graduates of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism also contributed research, stories, photos, audio, video and Web content to the report.

In a report published on The New York Times front page on July 16,  Kristina Peterson (Stabile ‘09) told  the story of  college athletes who end up shouldering thousands of dollars in medical bills after being injured while playing college sport.

This report grew out of Kristina’s master’s project, which traced the problem to the inability of the National Collegiate Athletic Association to establish clear standards for medical coverage for its athletes.  The result is a patchwork of policies: some colleges shoulder most of their injured athletes’ medical claims while many others leave the athletes to fend for themselves. Kristina found this out by  reviewing records  from a cross section of universities and interviews with current and former athletes, trainers, administrators and NCAA  officials.

She cited the example of  Erin Knauer, a Colgate University student who racked up medical bills of  $80,000 after injuring her back and legs in training for the crew team.

Here’s an excerpt:

After years of concerns about inadequate health coverage for college athletes, the National Collegiate Athletic Association started requiring universities to make sure their athletes had insurance before competing.

But the association never established clear standards for that coverage when it introduced the rule four years ago, leaving colleges to decide for themselves. While some colleges accept considerable responsibility for medical claims, many others assume almost none, according to a review of public documents from a cross section of universities and interviews with current and former athletes, trainers, administrators and N.C.A.A. officials.

Read the New York Times story

The Stabile Center was present at the birthing of a new nonprofit investigative reporting network that will bring together a range of groups from across the country to collaborate on reporting and sustainability projects. The Investigative News Network, which was formalized today at Pocantico, New York, will initiate various forms of collaboration among nonprofit investigative centers, many of which have been set up just in the last year.

Stabile Center director Sheila S. Coronel is part of the steering committee of the Investigative News Network, which will oversee the new venture. The Pocantico Declaration, signed today by representatives of 21 nonprofit news entities, outlined various forms of collaboration: editorial, administrative and financial, including possibly joint fund-raising and “pioneering new economic models to help to monetize the shared, combined content of the member organizations, in order to achieve a more sustainable journalism.”

Other steering committee members are Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity; Sandy Close, executive director of the Pacific News Service;  Margaret Engel, executive director of the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation; Laura Frank, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network; Margaret Wolf Freivogel, founding editor of the St. Louis Beacon; Brant Houston, Knight Chair professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois; Joel Kramer, CEO and Editor of MinnPost; Charles Lewis, founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University; Scott Lewis, CEO of voiceofsandiego.org; and Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Forrest Foggarty shows off his neo-Nazi tattoo (photo by Matt Kennard)

Lax recruitment regulations, brought about by the need to enlist increasing numbers of troops, have opened the way to the entry of neo-Nazis in the U.S. Army, according to a report by Matt Kennard (Stabile ‘08) published today in Salon.

Matt  began reporting on neo-Nazi enlistment while still a student in the Stabile program and doing his master’s project on the topic.  He visited Army recruitment centers and spoke to white supremacists who had fought in Iraq and Afghansitan. He also trolled  social networking sites where neo-Nazi soldiers boasted of their exploits. After graduation, Matt continued reporting  the story with a grant from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.

In a reporting trip while he was still a student, Matt met Forrest Foggarty, the key character in his report, in a bar outside Tampa. “I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi,” Foggarty told him over a plate of chicken wings. Read more in “Neo-Nazis are in the Army now.”

In a piece published by the Guardian on July 13, Matt explained how he researched this report and recounted some of his conversations with these soldiers:

I spoke with neo-Nazi soldiers who had served in Iraq and the picture they painted was truly awful: the level of hatred for Arabs they evinced made me shudder to think what effect this had in the war zone. I talked to non-extremist veterans who said the general culture of racism towards Iraqis or “hajjis” would make it difficult even to notice a white supremacist soldier, as everybody was at it, including the brass. One veteran told me he had heard a general call the Iraqis “fucking hajjis” at a meeting outside Tikrit.

Early this year, the Stabile class  discovered a cache of videos promoting suspicious Web sites that sell controlled drugs without  a prescription, in violation of U.S. laws. Posted on YouTube — the popular video-sharing site and the second most popular Internet search engine — the videos circumvented stringent rules that regulate the advertising of pharmaceuticals. They also made it easier for YouTube users, many of them young people, to find online pharmacies peddling prescription-only drugs.

The class wanted to find out more, so all 14 students did a search on YouTube  using the query terms “buy online” and a list of controlled substances from the Food and Drug Administration. They found close to 170 promotional videos that have nearly 65,000 hits. And then they bought  generic Prozac from one of the promoted sites — without ever having a prescription.

On June 5, the class’s story, “Dr. YouTube: Rogue Internet Pharmacies Discover the Online Video ,” was published by the Huffington Post. The report reveals  how “rogue” Internet pharmacies are using YouTube as a marketing tool.  YouTube and its mother company Google  also make money from the advertising by e-pharma sites that circumvent U.S. law.

For more on the Stabile class investigation of online pharma, check out the class Web site,”From Mumbai to Riga to New York: Our Investigative Class Follows the Trail of Illegal Pharma,” at  http://behindonlinepharma.com/

During the spring semester, the Stabile Class of 2009 investigated the proliferation of Web sites selling prescription drugs online. Some of these sites are legitimate operations but a large percentage of them allow customers to obtain controlled drugs without the required prescriptions.These “rogue” Internet pharmacies comprise a multibillion-dollar, global industry.

The investigation,  “From Mumbai to Riga to New York: Our Investigative Class Follows the Trail of Illegal Pharma,” casts light on the  shadowy world of Internet drugstores.   The class ordered and received generic Prozac — shipped from India — from what appeared to be a rogue site. The students then tracked the opaque purchase transaction to see who was behind it.  They also examined the complicity in the business of drug manufacturers as well as drop shippers, middlemen who transport drugs across the globe. They  documented the cases of doctors who signed off on thousands of prescriptions for patients they had never met. They also  took the pulse of domestic and international law enforcers to see who is winning the battle against rogue e-pharma.

In the fall of 2008, all 15 members of the Stabile investigative class did a public records exercise. They worked with alumna Sharona Coutts,  a member of the ProPublica staff. While in the Stabile program, Sharona  did her master’s project on New York City placement agents. These are  brokers who get commissions  from hedge funds. Their role is to introduce fund managers to well-connected officials who have a say as to where public pension monies are invested.

Sharona  continued with that investigation while at ProPublica but needed help with the paper trail. So the Stabiles each took a placement agent on her list. They scoured news archives;  court records;  documents at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which regulates securities companies; campaign finance records and even alumni registries to write comprehensive backgrounders on these well-connected brokers, who included a former first lady of Bermuda and the sons of public officials.

Earlier this year, the controversy heated up, with fresh revelations  of scandals involving placement agents and the New York State Comptroller’s Office. On May 19, 2009, ProPublica published Sharona’s tongue-in-cheek guide on how to be a placement agent, which draws from the research done by the class.

The Stabile Class of 2009 ran away with some of the most coveted awards that the Journalism School gives out on Journalism Day. Three Stabile students graduated with honors: Olivia Andrzejczak, Kristina Peterson and Emily Witt. Kristina also got one of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowships which are given out to the top five students of the School.

In addition, six Stabiles received several other awards:

• Horgan Prizes for Excellence in Science Writing:  Emily Witt (for her master’s project on how U.S. traders are dumping  lead battery scrap overseas)  and Rhiannon Coppin  (for her  master’s project on the deaths caused by the contraceptive Nuvaring)
• Sackett Graduate Award (for excellence in the law class): Olivia Andrzejczak
• Leslie Rachel Sander Social Justice Award: Hilke Schellman (and non-Stabile Habiba Nosheen) to complete their documentary on the business of surrogate motherhood
• James A. Wechsler Memorial International Reporting Award: Vytenis Didziulis and Catalina Lobo- Guerrero (for their master’s project on U.S. military assistance to Colombian military units guilty of extradjudicial executions and other abuses)

www.nlm.nih.gov

In the fall of 2007, Benjamin Protess (Stabile ‘o8) began researching his master’s project on crime lab errors in DNA testing and the increasing  backlogs of untested DNA evidence.  He found cases where innocent individuals were sent to prison because of the mishandling of DNA tests.  He also found that  hundreds of thousands of DNA samples remain untested. Protess’s investigation focused on  Michael Sheppo, a  forensic scientist who heads the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the justice department.

Protess  worked as a fellow at at Pro Publica after graduating from the Journalism School in the spring of 2008. But he continued his research on DNA backlogs. In a report published on May 19, 2009, Protess  wrote that  Sheppo had not,  contrary to his claims, reduced the DNA backlog while he was head of the Illinois crime laboratory prior to taking over the NIJ,   which runs federal grant programs to pay for DNA testing and oversees  crime labs.  Under his  watch, the Illinois crime lab also awarded a no-bid $750,000 training contract to a Florida nonprofit that he  was affiliated with.

On May 4, 2009, Ben  published, “The DNA Debacle:  How the Federal Government Botched the DNA Backlog Crisis” on the Pro Publica website. The article draws from his master’s project research.

The article cites  a lobbying firm “with close ties to both the justice department and to companies that profit directly from increased DNA testing.”

The firm, Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs, lobbies the Justice Department and lawmakers on behalf of the world’s leading producer of DNA testing equipment. Despite that relationship, the Justice Department awarded Gordon Thomas Honeywell a no-bid grant in 2002 to do a key study [3] (PDF) on backlogs that has helped shape the government’s DNA policies — policies that have benefitted the firm’s private clients.

A version of the ProPublica story was published on the May 5, 2009 issue of Politico.

Nadja Drost (Stabile ‘08) worked as a fellow for the Hearst Investigative Unit for several months after her graduation from The Journalism School.  Her investigation on the Canadian border was  published in mid-April  by the Albany Times-Union and seattlepi.com.

Among her findings:

Public data obtained by Hearst Newspapers show the U.S. government, despite a massive injection of resources and staff to guard against terrorists crossing the Canadian border, is mostly catching ordinary illegal immigrants, creating a backlog of court cases and a flurry of protest from the public about random highway stops and bus or train inspections.

The investigation focused  on the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the government agency patrolling the U.S. border. The agency is supposed to prevent terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals and drug smugglers from entering the United States. CBP’s budget, reported Drost, doubled in the last five years, reaching  $11 billion in 2009. The number of  border patrol agents  increased since 2001, from 340 to 1,530.

But despite the added resources, CBP’s efforts on the counter-terrorism front have produced meager results. Drost reported: “Of all the national security and terrorism charges filed in federal district courts along the northern border since 2001, only three were based on referrals made by CBP. In other words, there is scant record of northern border enforcement catching terrorists.”

Drost is the first Stabile-Hearst fellow and was based in Albany for the duration of her fellowship.  In February, her investigation on the Boy Scouts was published by the Times-Union. She is currently a freelancer based in Bogota, Colombia, where she reports regularly for GlobalPost.

Olga Pierce (Stabile ‘08), currently an intern at ProPublica, set out to do what looked to be a fairly straightforward task: obtain the financial disclosures and ethics letters submitted by presidential appointees and work with the ProPublica staff to put them up online. Except that it wasn’t that simple. As chronicled by CJR website, the task became needlessly– and almost comically– complicated.

To begin with, the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), the small government body that collects the disclosure forms, says that provisions of the 1978  Ethics In Government Act require that the Office ensure the information they release cannot be used for commercial purposes. The OGE is also required to keep a record of all the people to whom the documents are released. The OGE lawyer told CJR that posting the disclosures online via a download-on-demand system would violate both requirements.

To obtain the disclosures, ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting center, has had to submit certifications to the OGE saying that it is not using the information for commercial purposes. A certification, however, can cover only six individuals at a time.  The OGE then processes the request and mails copies of the disclosure forms. ProPublica then scans the documents and posts them as part of a “distributed reporting effort” that asks readers to examine the documents and report what they find.

ProPublica has already posted some interesting “Obama Team ” disclosures online. All the OGE releases publicly is a list of the names of executive branch officials who’ve submitted their disclosure reports.

Business of Detention, the award-winning project produced by Stabile ‘08 students Renee Feltz and Stokely Baksh was  nominated for best student website in the 13th Annual Webby Awards, which will be announced on May 5.

Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards, established in 1996,  is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile web sites. This year’s is the 13th Annual Webby Awards and the contest has received over 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards is presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

The Business of Detention project was created by Feltz  and  Baksh while they were  students in the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.  “Our desire was to create an innovative way to present the business of privatized immigration detention management — using solid reporting skills in a four-part print story and pairing that up with video, audio and interactive infographics,” said Feltz. “This was also an experiment for us in creating a platform for a news topic that was underreported when we started in late 2007.”

The project was the first new media project ever undertaken by the Stabile students since the program started in 2006. It  has  won the Melvin Mencher Award for Superior Reporting and James A. Wechsler Award for National Reporting,  both given by the School. It was also  a finalist for the SxSW Interactive Award.

Visit  http://pv.webbyawards.com to vote for the site to win the People’s Choice Award in the student category. The project is listed  under ‘Websites’ and then ‘Connections’ and then ‘Student.’ Voting ends on  April 30.

In 2006, before the mainstream press began reporting on the neglect of soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD and a year before the Washington Post exposed the horrible conditions of soldiers at Walter Reed, National Public Radio’s ace investigative reporter Daniel Zwerdling was on to the story.

Following a tip from a source, he went to Fort Carson, Colorado and began interviewing war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and coming back with PTSD and other serious mental health problems. Zwerdling found that these soldiers were being punished and mistreated by their officers; some of them were even kicked out of the Army because of their illness. His reporting prompted the U.S. Congress,  the Pentagon and the Government Accountability Office to  launch separate investigations. At the same time, commanders at the army base acknowledged their lapses and promised to treat emotionally wounded soldiers better.

On March 26, in a talk hosted by the Stabile Center and the Columbia chapter of SPJ,  Zwerdling  walked  students through his investigation from the time he first heard about the soldiers, to how he got them to open up and how he corroborated their stories of abuse and maltreatment. He also recounted how he dealt with the Army’s top brass. He paused at every key decision point during his reporting, giving students insights into how he strategized his approaches to reluctant sources and how he tried to get into the minds of his interviewees in order to convince them to talk.

Zwerdling said  he got “compelling details” by getting sources to go back in time, sometimes with the aid of maps, and to reconstruct events as they happened.  It’s almost like hypnosis, he said, asking people to dig deep into their memory of what happened — the time, the place, the weather — so that the incident comes back to them. “Make me a movie,” Zwerdling said he told them. And as their story unfolded, he would prompt, “And then what happened?” That, he said, can be the greatest question in journalism.

Listen to Zwerdling’s talk here.

The Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism will collaborate with a new  investigative journalism venture announced today by the Huffington Post.

The popular online news site has raised $1.75 million to launch a new nonprofit venture that will fund investigative reports that will be available for free to any publication or Web site that wants to use them. The reports will be published in the Huffington Post as well. (Read the press release here.)

The project is  funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies, the American News Project  and Huffington Post.  Based in Washington, DC, it will have a small staff but will be working mainly with freelancers, including recently laid off journalists. Stabile students will have the option to pitch their investigations to the new venture. Other forms of collaboration are still being worked out.

Nick Penneman will be the  executive director of the latest investigative journalism nonprofit, which is being launched just a little over a year since the founding  of ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative reporting center funded with an initial $10-million grant from The Sandler Foundation.

The initiative comes amid growing concern that the downsizing of newspapers will hurt watchdog journalism.

“All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism,” Arianna Huffington said in a statement.

Sheila Coronel,  Stabile Center director, said, “This is an exciting development and we look forward to having our students work on investigative projects with this new venture. Now more than ever, we need strong collaboration and funding for journalism that holds individuals and institutions accountable.”

Frustrated by their inability to get public records from the Department of Education, three students — Kyla Calvert, Malia Politzer and Andrew Schmid — appealed to citizens instead. Here’s how Lori Giovinco-Harte, a New York City educator who publishes the NY Education Examiner blog describes their “experiment” in investigative reporting:

It reads like something from a movie; three journalism students from Columbia University take on a mayor who also happens to be the CEO of one of the largest multi-media corporations on the planet.

Talk about guts.

Yet, this isn’t the plot of a movie drama - it’s actually happening right now. Three young journalists who call themselves “Public Eyes on Public Schools” have engaged in what they call an “experiment” of investigative journalism.

The students have set up a blog on sole-source contracts awarded by the New York City Department of Education. Through the blog, they are enlisting the public’s support in their investigation. Here’s how they describe their effort:

As a reader of our blog, you can expect to find several posts a week about the discoveries we have about Department of Education contracts, procedures and vendors. You will also read about our process - who we request information of and how - and our frustrations. As a member of our community you can do more than read about our work. You can make contributions to the project. If you know some one who used to work for one of the no-bid vendors who may be willing to share their understanding of the no-bid process, send us an email or comment on a relevant post. Want to peruse our primary sources? Just go to our document archive and start combing them for connections, irregularities and other interesting bits of information we haven’t seen yet. We’re excited about the things we have already learned and can share with you here. We hope some of you will be excited enough by this project to join us in figuring out why the Department of Education has relied so much more heavily than before on no-bid contracting and what that means for New York City and its schools.

A recent blog post narrated the problems the students had in getting access to records from the education department. Another posted the list of sole-source contracts that had been awarded and asked the public to forward leads as part of what they called an experiment in “open source investigative journalism.”

The collapse of newspapers — the latest among them the prize-winning Seattle Post-Intelligencer — has led to worries that the infrastructure and resources that have supported Pulitzer Prize-quality muckraking in news organizations will diminish. After all, U.S. newspapers have the largest investigative staffs. Who will keep the muckraking flame alive if they downsize or die?

At Columbia’s Watchdog Journalism Conference on Friday, five journalists from print, documentary and online investigative outlets talked about how they are developing innovative funding models for investigative reporting. (See the conference website for more information. Audio of the panels is also available at the Watchdog Conference channel on BlogTalk Radio.)

The Voice of San Diego, a four-year-old, investigative online news site covering the San Diego area, is a nonprofit and relies mainly on large individual donors, grants from philanthropic organizations, reader pledge drives and online ads, said its executive director Andrew Donohue. Its annual budget is just $1 million, small for a news organization. “We spend $9,000 every year on production costs,“ he said. Voice of San Diego has 13 staff members – 10 of them reporters. The organization, he said, is incredibly efficient.

Brant Houston, a professor for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, was most recently involved in the opening of The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University.

The surge in investigative reporting nonprofits has to do with the recent massive layoffs in the newspaper industry. “As people are laid off, they still have the fire to do investigative reporting,“ Houston said. Continue reading…