One month after the Post and Courier won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, my visit to its Charleston, South Carolina newsroom revealed a mix of continuing celebration and concern about whether legislative inaction would blunt the impact of its project.
“Till Death Do Us Part” had opened with a shocking summary of the situation that the reporters and editors were trying to change: “More than 300 women were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned, or burned to death over the past decade by men in South Carolina, dying at a rate of one every 12 days while the state does little to stem the carnage from domestic abuse.”
1 The Pulitzer board had praised the staff for putting the issue on the South Carolina agenda, but one of the project’s lead reporters, Doug Pardue, had a starker assessment. The work “may ultimately be meaningless if the state’s General Assembly doesn’t pass the domestic violence law reforms bill it has on its table,” Pardue said in his own paper’s news story about its Pulitzer.
2 Even in publicity’s glare, the legislature balked at limiting the right of convicted spousal abusers to keep firearms, for example. (
Post and Courier research showed that 70 percent of the murdered women were gunned down.)
My first Charleston interview was with Pierre Manigault, chairman of the anachronistically named Evening Post Industries, his family-controlled company that owned the 212-year-old paper. (Delivered mornings, it reached 82,000 households, 88,000 on Sunday.) When he took over for his father in 2004 he saw the
Post and Courier as a community beacon but soon developed a grander view. “Charleston was already the cultural capital of the South,” he told me, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t be the best paper in the South—the new voice of the South, really.”
3P. J. Browning, who joined as publisher in 2012, had seen investing in Web-based news and presentation as key to enlarging its reach, as long as its reporting power also grew. “Digital opens up the world to us,” she said. “It would have been an awfully lofty goal to think we could be the new voice of the South in print,” where financial constraints were more daunting.
4 Manigault and Browning both favored hiring Mitch Pugh as executive editor in March 2013, bringing him from Iowa’s
Sioux City Journal, a Lee Enterprises property. The chairman thought Pugh had “a real vision for quality investigative reporting.” From the St. Louis-born candidate’s perspective, meanwhile, the attraction to Charleston was ownership’s commitment to improving coverage
and online technology. “They were willing to invest in the paper in a way Lee just couldn’t,” in part because of Lee’s heavy debt, Pugh told me. “It almost felt too good to be true.”
It
was true. Corporate support came quickly for Pugh’s drive to reinstitute the paper’s enterprise reporting function. (The paper already ran quality investigative pieces and feature stories—including two of reporter Tony Bartelme’s projects nominated for Pulitzers in 2011 and 2013
5—but one-person efforts had replaced team projects.) The veteran reporter Glenn Smith, who would join Pardue in leading the domestic violence investigation and would cowrite the stories with him, loved the new digital capability. “In the past we’d do these great stories that would land on junky websites,” Smith told me. “Yes,” Pardue agreed, “we really brought it all together.”
6The digital editor Laura Gaton and the newly hired interactive editor J. Emory Parker had just finished the online revamping when a story came along that seemed perfect for an extensive digital presentation. A September 2013 study from the national Violence Policy Center ranked the state as having the highest rate of women killed by men, drawing Smith and Pardue’s attention. “Once again we were at the top of a list you didn’t want to be at the top of,” said Pardue, who had written previously about areas where South Carolina was statistically backward.
7 Mitch Pugh teamed Pardue with “faith and values” reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes to do some basic reporting. Smith was teamed with courts reporter Natalie Caula Hauff, who was asked to develop data for the story—a task that Pardue, Smith, and Pugh knew would be critical to explaining a complex issue like the prevalence of domestic violence in their state.
Their major goal was to analyze the characteristics of this murder plague, illustrate it with cases, and propose solutions. The paper’s archives helped them calculate a total of 330 women killed in the last decade. In breaking down elements of the crimes, they found that 70 percent involved firearms—a statistic that raised special controversy in a state where gun rights are often considered sacred. “Having the data was the backbone of the project,” said Pugh. “We didn’t make a value judgment saying 70 percent of these murders were with guns. It was just the fact.”
A second goal was for the reporters to think like their readers. “I’ve lived here for twenty-some-odd years, and Doug and Glenn have too. We’re familiar with this state,” said Hawes, originally from Chicago, who was assigned to do most of the victim interviews. “But from the perspective of native South Carolinians there are few things more repugnant than a Yankee coming down here and telling them all the things wrong with their culture and way of life. We had to take a nuanced approach; we talked long and hard about the phrasing of things.”
Merry Christmas
Later in September, as Pardue and Hawes were seeking to understand the reasons for the state’s bad record, they stumbled onto the series’ eventual headline. During an interview, the director of a women’s shelter noted factors that included South Carolina’s extremely rural population, poverty, and strong gun culture. In a strange way “it has to do with love,” she added, “and then there’s that religion thing.” Pressed to elaborate, she described how fundamentalist Christian men often consider themselves totally dominant in a relationship. “Till death do us part,” the director added. “That phrase kind of hung out there,” Hawes told me. “And Doug and I thought, Well that’s it.”
8Still, progress was slow in creating a database and finding women to interview, mainly victims of near-fatal attacks. Then, a Christmas present: the nonprofit, Emeryville, California–based Center for Investigative Reporting had received a six-figure grant that included a provision for aiding South Carolina journalism.
9 As Mitch Pugh remembered it, the CIR director Mark Katches called one late December day and asked the editor, “Can you help us spend this money?” Sure, Pugh answered, and the two agreed that the
Post and Courier’s domestic violence project—in need of a sophisticated database—was a good candidate. By midyear the grant would pay tens of thousands of dollars for training in California with CIR data experts and editors.
Meanwhile, Natalie Hauff kept assembling domestic-violence data, and Jennifer Hawes developed her interviewing approach. “To me that’s the strength of any story: the humanity of it. Here we were finding victims everywhere, horrific story after horrific story, and all different on some level. Some were poor, some rich, some black, some white,” Hawes said. The diversity of victims and killers became part of the theme.
She started with relationship building. Interviews succeed if women feel “they can trust you, and your motivation is just to share it, and not paint them as something they’re not, and not to sensationalize,” Hawes said. “You’re holding their sacred story in your hands.” She learned early that brutalized women didn’t want to be called victims. “I referred to them as survivors.” She often worked through an intermediary—a pastor or friend—to avoid the feel of a cold call and to “give women the room to say no.”
A major barrier was the embarrassment that survivors felt if they had been in abusive relationships for years and couldn’t explain why. “There is an inherent accusation there, especially if there are children involved,” Hawes noted, and she tried to factor that into her questioning. “I’d often go the route of asking, ‘What is it that people don’t understand?’” Sometimes that produced insights: that a boyfriend controlled her money, or that leaving a husband could be more dangerous than staying—for the woman or for her children. It helped them to know they wouldn’t be alone in the story. “Having multiple people involved with interviews gave them comfort in numbers,” said Hawes, and some eventually formed survivor groups.
Interviews filmed for online use would be especially compelling. Natalie Hauff, who had come to the paper from the Charleston ABC television affiliate, helped Emory Parker and videographer Chris Hanclosky produce clips with the polished look of movie trailers.
Pardue and Smith’s story drafts began to take shape—they often passed copy from one to the other for tweaking—and Pugh and managing editor Rick Nelson edited. The first story’s opening was seen as critical, and an anecdotal beginning quickly gave way to the idea of laying out the extent of the murderous drama going on in their state. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we just come right out of the box with this and hit people over the head, rather than bury it?’” Smith said.
When the team traveled to California for a June visit with the investigative reporting nonprofit, with the CIR grant taking care of travel and training expenses, Katches was impressed. “These were some of the best first drafts I’d seen come my way, the work of a well oiled team,” he told me from his office at Portland’s Oregonian, where he became editor in mid-2014.
Still, fine-tuning helped. An original draft had started; “More than 300 women were slaughtered by their loved ones in South Carolina,” according to Katches’s notes. (The Post and Courier reporters already had decided against using “slaughtered” after getting negative reactions from women on the staff.) “My suggestion was to replace that with all the forms of death: they were shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, or burned to death by men in South Carolina,” said the editor, who was one of several CIR experts to review drafts. And no longer were the killers called “loved ones.” The CIR database senior editor Jennifer LaFleur worked closely with Hauff, giving the project another lift. While there, Hauff came up with the idea of a separate story to examine how state legislators were killing reform bills. A powerful series element began to take shape: comparative timelines that tracked the dates of negative actions in the capital against the mounting statewide death toll, murder by murder.
The Netflix Model
When staffers returned to Charleston, interviews and data collection took on a new energy. An August run date for the series was planned. Digital editor Gaton and interactive editor Parker helped integrate the data and video into a powerful seven-part package with interactive material that went beyond the developing five-part print series. The decision was made to release the entire online package before the opening print article would run in Charleston. Using what they called a Netflix model, Gaton said, the entire series was released in one interactive package that let the online audience read each piece at will. The early release meant that
Buzzfeed,
Huffington Post, and other outlets ran the news, with a link to the
Post and Courier website, before local print subscribers saw it—something that in the past would have been seen as breaking a cardinal rule of print publishing. “Now it’s becoming the standard,” Gaton said. “Everything starts with putting it online first.” The move paid off in online readership, helping build eight million page views for August 2014, a 60 percent increase over the same month the year before.
After reading advanced drafts, Katches remembered, he told his CIR associates that the work was worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. He was prescient. Meeting in February 2015, the Pulitzer public service jury nominated the
Post and Courier as a finalist along with the
Wall Street Journal and the
Boston Globe. When the full Pulitzer board named it the 2015 winner, the Charleston paper had its first Pulitzer since winning for editorial writing ninety years earlier, when it was known as the
News and Courier.
10The Pulitzer jurors hadn’t paid attention to how the newspaper released the project early through social media, an approach that seems to be gaining popularity in the pursuit of national recognition for major projects. But the jury did admire its collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting. “We all thought the paper was smart to invite the CIR to help train and advise it, and the digital database of those killed was an important reporting tool,” said the jury chair Scott Kraft, deputy managing editor of the
Los Angeles Times. The paper’s Pulitzer entry wasn’t hurt because the series led to no changes in the law, said another juror, Josh Meyer, with Northwestern University’s National Security Journalism Initiative. “It had a powerful impact,” he added, “in the sense that it took what had become an accepted part of life and turned it into a problem that could no longer be denied.”
11As it happened, several weeks after my May 2015
Post and Courier visit the legislature passed, and Governor Nikki Haley signed, a bill that reflected many of the recommendations in the publication’s series, including taking guns from convicted wife-abusers.
12 Then in June, the
Post and Courier again showed that a new voice of the South had emerged—with extraordinary coverage after a young, white, racist gunman massacred nine black Bible study participants meeting in a historic Charleston church. In the ninety-ninth awarding of the Pulitzer Prizes, once again the gold medal had gone to a news organization that was making a difference.
2015—The
Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C., for “Till Death Do Us Part,” a riveting series that probed why South Carolina is among the deadliest states in the union for women and put the issue of what to do about it on the state’s agenda.
13