We’ve been very aggressive in hiring young talent. I wouldn’t say we target Pulitzer winners, but it doesn’t hurt to be one, since we’re looking for the best people.
—REBECCA BLUMENSTEIN, WALL STREET JOURNAL DEPUTY EDITOR IN CHIEF
Usually it is a team that propels a news organization’s Pulitzer-winning public service. Often a single seasoned reporter leads the way. How rare then that both the 2009 and 2010 gold medals rewarded the drive of individual reporters not yet in their thirties on their first major investigative projects. How inspiring, too, for the crowds of college students who still see journalism as a way to change society for the better.
Alexandra Berzon was twenty-eight years old and not long out of the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism when the
Las Vegas Sun managing editor Drex Heikes tempted her with a job offer—and a story. Why, during the $32 billion building boom along the Las Vegas Strip, Heikes wondered, did there seem to be a fatal construction worker accident about every six weeks? Berzon, who in late 2007 was seeking reporting challenges after briefly working for a technology magazine, was not sure Las Vegas was the best place for her. “She took some persuading,” recalls Heikes. “Then I toss the story idea out there, and her eyes get this big,” he says, making binoculars with his hands.
1What soon intrigued Berzon almost as much as the quantity of accidents were the lame excuses for them that casinos, regulators, and even union leaders gave. The most common responses were that construction was “innately hazardous,” and “the workers just make mistakes,” she recalls. Berzon innately knew one thing: “It wasn’t true that people had to die.” To her it seemed “an attitude issue.”
2So in January 2008, with nine workers dead in just over a year, the newly hired Sun reporter began exploring construction site conditions, union and casino supervision over the jobs, and the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) bureaucracy. She got to know the families of accident victims. And by late March she produced (and Heikes edited) the two biggest of what would grow to be fifty stories on the subject that year—work that would win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the 180,000-circulation Sun. A financially struggling paper with eighteen reporters, it was distributed inside its rival Las Vegas Review-Journal as part of a joint operating agreement between them.
Vertical and Horizontal Reporting
Outside the newsroom Berzon had few allies on the story: not among the powerful casino industry or the regulators, both of which bore some blame, nor among union leaders, who were slow to speak up about hazards that plagued their members. But at the Sun she was quickly identified as a star. “Oh my God, she’s the fastest, smartest investigative type I’ve ever seen,” says Heikes, who had been recruited from the Los Angeles Times, where he edited that paper’s magazine.
Heikes was particularly amazed by the high energy level displayed by Berzon, known in the office as Ali, from the moment the assignment was hers. “She comes back to me in two weeks, and she says, ‘You know what? I think it’s there, Drex,’” he recalls. At that point, “We just cut her loose, and in about six weeks she’s got her hands around most of the guts of the story, what I call the vertical reporting: the hard facts.”
Heikes remembers how one day two boxes of OSHA accident case documents arrived for Berzon. “She takes them in the conference room, and she comes out in four hours and she says: there’s this, and there’s this, and there’s this. All smoking guns. That was the minute I knew we had a great story.”
Then there was the unique rhythm of her interviewing. “You would hear her on the phone with people, and she was like a prosecutor. Very sweet; very respectful. And then, ‘Well, but didn’t you say a week ago—I have it in my notes …’ And she’s closing the circle around these public officials and oversight people.” The editor suggests that Berzon likely came by that style naturally; both of her parents are attorneys and her mother is a judge of San Francisco’s U.S. Ninth Circuit Court.
Getting the story “horizontally,” as Heikes describes it, involved weeks of painstakingly scoping out the stories of victims and their families. By the first week of March, drafts of her first two stories were ready for the editor’s touch in what developed as a one-on-one relationship. The lead of her March 30 story introduced Harold Billingsley, “walking in his brown ironworking boots on uneven temporary decking” fifty-nine feet up in the superstructure of the MGM Mirage CityCenter—one of the biggest construction projects on a Strip then teeming with towering cranes.
He was heading to pick up extra bolts for his crew, his family believes. He stumbled.
Ordinarily, he would simply have fallen onto the decking. But at this exact moment in that exact spot, the decking contained a 3-by-11-foot hole that state investigators later said should not have existed.
Ironworkers wear safety harnesses for times like this. An attached cable is supposed to stop a plunge. Billingsley’s was not attached.
Safety regulations called for a temporary floor or netting no more than two stories down, a last chance to break his fall. None existed.
The man friends called “Rusty” for his fiery red hair fell to his death.
His was the fourth construction fatality at CityCenter, adding to what had already become a disturbing trend up and down the Strip. In the shadows of the cranes, steel and concrete upon which Las Vegas has pinned its addiction to growth, a body count has emerged.
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Among those at the
Sun most impressed with the product Berzon and Heikes turned out was managing editor Michael J. Kelley. Over the years he had designed the
Sun to be a magazine-style newspaper, free of “paper of record” responsibilities, and he sees Berzon’s collaboration as a prime example. “I think Drex envisioned it would be a couple of big stories…. But the more Ali kept digging around, and kept digging, it got legs,” Kelley says. He gives credit as well to editorial writers David Clayton and Matt Hufman, whose work helped win related congressional hearings and worker safety reforms.
4 “In a way it’s not something you want to celebrate and whoop and holler about, when workers have died,” Clayton said on the day of the Pulitzer announcement. “But workers are safer today because of what [Berzon] did and what this newspaper did.”
5 Kelley, who had hired Heikes, notes that after twelve construction fatalities, the
Sun’s stories seemed to wake up the community, bring about reforms, and get the sites cleaned up. “Winning the Pulitzer is fabulous, but the fact that this series stopped people from dying on the Las Vegas Strip construction projects is the most important part of what we did.”
As attuned as Berzon was to the construction story, the announcement of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize took her completely by surprise. Unaware even that it was Pulitzer Day, she was returning from an assignment when a receptionist blindsided her with congratulations. “It seems like it came out of the blue,” Berzon recalls. “I didn’t think we had a chance” in a year when there were so many huge national stories, including a historic presidential election and a financial meltdown. Among the finalists the
Sun beat out in winning its first Pulitzer was a
New York Times entry “setting a standard for depth and sophistication” covering 2008’s economic collapse, according to the Pulitzer board.
FIGURE 8.1 Reporter Alexandra Berzon calls her parents to share news of the Las Vegas Sun’s win of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing a high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip, at the Las Vegas Sun offices in Henderson, Nevada, on Monday, April 20, 2009. Source: Tiffany Brown/Las Vegas Sun.
The board especially noted Berzon’s “courageous reporting”—an adjective she calls an exaggeration. “I’m not going to say my life was at risk,” she says, although “there were some threats from union officials.” To which Drex Heikes replies: “She was naïve about the risk” in a town where tough guys rule in a tough gambling industry. (He remembers sending three people along with her as she covered one union meeting.)
The public service jury chairman, the
St. Petersburg Times executive editor Neil Brown, thought “the degree of difficulty on the story for a small paper was high,” although “small paper or no, we did not rate it on a curve. The work stood up well against all comers.” Fellow juror David Boardman, then executive editor of the
Seattle Times, praised the work for taking on “so many of the significant powers in the community: the casinos, labor unions, and both the state and local governments.” In addition, Boardman considered it among the best-written works in the category that year.
6In the Pulitzer celebration at the Sun office, Berzon flashed on her time spent as a reporting intern at the Anchorage Daily News, a publication that prided itself on having won two Public Service Pulitzers, one in 1976 on the power of the Teamsters Union in the state and one in 1989 for its study of problems with alcoholism and suicide among Native Alaskans. Said Berzon of the journalists she remembers from the Alaskan paper, “I know what a big deal that was for them. It’s amazing to think that this prize could do the same thing for the Sun.”
Berzon would soon leave the Sun for the Wall Street Journal, which saw her as a plum of a young reporter and moved her west to Los Angeles, where the gaming industry became one of her beats. “Alexandra, in addition to covering Las Vegas, is now doing more of a corporate investigative beat,” says Rebecca Blumenstein, the Journal’s deputy editor in chief. “She’s a good dive-bomber, and we’ve employed her in a number of areas.”
From Los Angeles, Berzon has watched sadly as the
Sun has come close to folding in recent years. Publisher Brian Greenspun has experienced what he calls a “family implosion” among the Greenspun family owners that has left the future in doubt. Poor financial results in part have been tied to its joint operating agreement with the rival
Las Vegas Review-Journal, where the
Sun was appearing as a supplement distributed inside when its Pulitzer-winning stories appeared.
“Certainly, the prize is a high water mark that shows you’ve been doing something great,” he says, remembering that on the day of the Pulitzer announcement it “meant at least as much to me as a son as it did as a publisher.” He was thinking of his father Hank Greenspun—who was famous for opposing Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist demagoguery, among other campaigns—even though this was the paper’s first Pulitzer win.
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2009—
Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon, for the exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip amid lax enforcement of regulations, leading to changes in policy and improved safety conditions.
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Turning Methane Into Gold
Daniel Gilbert did not start reading newspapers until he left home in Manassas, Virginia, to attend the University of Chicago. He liked them—so much, in fact, that he joined the student Maroon publication in his junior year, eventually becoming the news editor. After his 2005 graduation he chose a newspaper career, eventually settling at the rural south edge of his home state, near the Tennessee border.
The job for the
Bristol Herald Courier involved covering courts, but editor J. Todd Foster had said it would come with an investigative mandate. After “experiencing the isolation of the place, several hours away from any major city,” Gilbert remembers of his first visit, it struck him that investigative journalism in such a locale could offer a test of his ability to succeed “anywhere, including at a small paper in Appalachia.” Thus he thought the job “a pure test of my reporting and writing abilities.”
9 In April 2010 the Pulitzer board gave Gilbert and the 30,000-circulation
Bristol Herald Courier the highest grade possible. The Pulitzer for Public Service recognized his ability to penetrate the complex world of natural gas royalties: tens of millions of dollars owed to thousands of homeowners in an industry-dominated environment monitored only by a bungling state agency.
It took a while for Gilbert—twenty-six when he joined the Herald Courier in late 2007—to get used to a part of his home state so unfamiliar to him. With a median income less than half that of the rest of Virginia, and with a poverty rate that was twice the state’s, there were “two Bristols,” he says. “Rusted-out husks of manufacturing plants testify to an industrial economy that shriveled long ago, though there are pockets of opulence” tied to the rich seams of coal still lying buried under the Appalachians.
FIGURE 8.2 The Bristol (Virginia) Herald Courier reporter Daniel Gilbert talks to the staff. The page announcing the paper’s 2010 Pulitzer is behind him. Source: Photo provided by Bristol Herald Courier.
Reporting his court stories, Gilbert encountered angry citizens who were due mineral rights to oil and gas companies but had not been paid royalties for two decades. The reasons behind the nonpayment were so complicated that other reporters had given up trying to explain them. And Gilbert’s pursuit of the mineral rights story took him away from the basic court stories Bristol readers needed to get from him, making time spent on it hard to justify. Esoteric rules determined how the amount of methane gas production from coal seams was being measured, and that was supposed to be part of the basis for the payments that were due rights holders. And following the regulatory issues, by traveling the thirty-five miles to the mountain town of Lebanon, was always unsatisfactory because he came away with numbers that did not add up.
Gilbert was good with databases, but what he found did not seem to help much. Some tables hinted at the actual production levels for gas, while other tables suggested that about $25 million in industry payments to the state were being bottled up and made unavailable for the citizens. Gilbert came to think of the system as a “money prison” that kept money from the rightful recipients. “I knew that I wanted to take a good, long, comprehensive look so readers wouldn’t get lost and then forget about it,” he says. But the complexity threatened to baffle him as well. “It honestly took months for me to understand what the controversies were,” he says—including whether industry was being conscientious in making escrow payments.
Printing out the 1990 Gas and Oil Act in the Virginia Code, he “dissected whatever I didn’t understand and started looking for answers.” He read a law school text on mineral rights and boned up on legal opinions. He sensed a powerful story about state and industry obfuscation, but proving it would depend on whether the gas-production database could be cross-referenced with the monthly escrow royalty numbers.
Red Bull and Vodka
Because those kinds of calculations were beyond even his skills, in November 2008 Gilbert proposed to editor J. Todd Foster that the reporter be allowed to attend a computer-assisted-reporting seminar held by the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization, based at the University of Missouri in Columbia. (IRE had its origins in 1976, when a group of journalists led by
Newsday’s Bob Greene—himself the leader of teams that won two Public Service Pulitzers—joined together to probe the murder of the
Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.) At a seven-reporter enterprise like the
Herald Courier, though, attending the IRE class was a tough sell. In addition to Gilbert’s time away from reporting in Bristol, travel and registration costs would total about $1,200. Plus there was less of a Bristol angle than his editors usually liked. And, of course, there was no guarantee of success from the class, even though he did a great job of explaining the unfairness of the system if it turned out Gilbert was right.
“I became very excited, but I told him, ‘We’re going to have to take on a very complex issue and deal with people in the middle of it,’” says Foster, who knew that two previous managing editors had spiked escrow payment stories. Those earlier reporters had not been able to get to the bottom of the issue. “Gilbert is the smartest twenty-something person I’ve ever seen in a newsroom,” adds Foster, who dearly wanted to see what the CAR course in Missouri could produce. So with the help of some liquid encouragement, Foster found a way to win over publisher Carl Esposito to the idea of paying for Gilbert’s training. “I took some Red Bull and vodka over to the publisher, and I told him, I’ve okayed a week at the University of Missouri. He said sure. Then he called me the next day, when there was no vodka flowing, and he said, ‘Please tell me it’s worth it.’”
10It was. Gilbert learned that he could indeed cross-reference the two databases—for production and for escrow payments—creating a chart in which the Herald Courier would ultimately show readers precisely how much was bottled up in those individual accounts and not being paid.
“They gave me a lot of leeway in working out the story,” Gilbert says of his time back at the paper after he took the IRE class. “But the leeway wasn’t carte blanche. There was no ‘freeing me up just to do this.’ Part of the arrangement was that I would bring something else back”—other stories on his court beat, unrelated to the oil and gas issues at the heart of the methane project.
Gilbert’s mineral rights stories, beginning on December 6 and running through the end of 2008, discussed the fund’s “obscure, untidy legacy” but began to give a clearer picture of how individual payment amounts flowed into the escrow accounts. It shows the amount of disbursements that were made and the amount that remained bottled up. It put him in touch with individual Virginians in the mineral rights program and their frustration. “I spent months searching for people who hadn’t received royalties, many of whom were reluctant to talk about it or to share their personal records with me,” Gilbert says. “These voices gave emotional resonance to what would otherwise have been a dry story about the vagaries of mineral law and inadequate government oversight.”
What he came up with was a people story as much as a mineral rights story. And his writing showed an uncanny ability to let people express their reactions to being wronged. Told of the thousands she was due from gas rights, one woman simply exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my word.” Gilbert worked especially hard to make sure he did not “just give people a whole lot of zeroes” in his stories. In one, he wrote that the 1.2-cubic-feet-per-second daily methane flow from one family’s property is “enough gas to satisfy the heating and cooking needs of an average American family for more than a year.”
The seven Pulitzer public service jurors especially liked the results the
Herald Courier produced: the state legislature began to act; the Gas and Oil Board was audited; and royalty money began to flow to deserving landowners at last. “The wheels are turning,” the
Cape Cod Times editor Paul Provonost said after the board named the
Herald Courier the winner. “Especially in public service, showing some sort of impact is vital…. I tried not to have a soft spot for a paper that is small, but small papers really do have a hard time” when they try to carry off a major project like Gilbert’s, Provonost adds.
11“The gas industry is not a particular fan of mine,” Gilbert said the day the Pulitzer was announced. “Some of them complained that the series was biased and didn’t include all the good things the gas companies do and all the people who
are getting royalties. My response was, Okay, but that’s not what I was writing about.” The gas industry had to learn to deal with Gilbert, though, in the job he later accepted—as a colleague of Alexandra Berzon’s at the
Wall Street Journal. There, stationed in the Houston bureau, says the
Journal’s deputy editor in chief Rebecca Blumenstein, he was put “in the middle of one of the biggest stories around: the natural gas boom.”
12The legacy of the gold medal lives on in Bristol, where the new owner, billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s company, took over two years after the paper won the Pulitzer. In rural Virginia, the
Herald Courier was one of sixty-three papers in the financially struggling Media General operation purchased by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corporation. And since then, says new publisher James Maxwell, the
Herald Courier has added ten members to the newsroom staff, an increase of more than 50 percent, and was building a new display case for its gold medal. Maxwell, while working at Oregon’s
Medford Mail Tribune twenty years ago, learned about the tradition of the Public Service Pulitzer when that newspaper put the prize that it won in 1934 on display. “That was a moment I’ll never forget,” he says. The publisher has plans to make this newer gold medal a Bristol resource. “The prize belongs to the newspaper, but to a certain extent also to the community. The opportunity to hold it is something everyone in town deserves,” says Maxwell.
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2010—
Bristol (Va.)
Herald Courier for the work of Daniel Gilbert in illuminating the murky mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to thousands of land owners in southwest Virginia, spurring remedial action by state lawmakers.
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