CHAPTER 9

THE TRADITION SURVIVES

2011–2012: Return of the L.A. Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer

It’s given us our mojo back.

— SHELBY GRAD, LOS ANGELES TIMES CITY EDITOR

It is hardly the proudest memory from Ruben Vives’s Los Angeles Times reporting on corruption in the city of Bell, California: when city manager Robert Rizzo, at their first meeting, told him that his annual salary was $700,000 a year, Vives let out an involuntary “Jesus Christ!”¹ Still, Vives and investigative partner Jeff Gottlieb relish recounting that very human reaction when they speak with journalism classes. Without fail, students are fascinated to hear how the celebrated reporting pair helped the Times win the 2011 Public Service Pulitzer Prize for exposing Bell’s widespread abuses. (Rizzo’s salary actually turned out to be closer to $800,000 and a later Gottlieb and Vives story eventually established that benefits pushed his total compensation to more than $1.5 million.)

The Times’s Bell reporting, like so many Pulitzer-winning efforts, involved extensive collaboration of editors and reporters, building the initial disclosures into a solid, clear platform for corrective action. But along with enlightening readers, the Bell coverage had major internal impact: giving an embattled newspaper—owned by a Tribune Company that since late 2008 had been operating under bankruptcy protection—a rare reason to celebrate. “We had just gone through three or four top editors, and a lot of layoffs. The newsroom morale was low,” says Kimi Yoshino, who together with fellow assistant city editor Steve Marble and city editor Shelby Grad was instrumental in designing the paper’s months of Bell coverage. “But this story really had an outrage factor that captivated people’s attention, both the public’s and the newsroom’s.”²

Across the country, the Philadelphia Inquirer—like the Times, a publication with a long tradition of public service but lately under the control of an owner in bankruptcy proceedings—felt a similar sense of staff renewal after winning the next year’s gold medal. The Inquirer’s 2012 Pulitzer was for a deeply reported study of the culture of high school violence in Philadelphia, leading to better community understanding and corrective policies.

Indeed, the two cases illustrate a truth that increasingly applies in the struggling media businesses these days: there is nothing like a great story, well handled, to deliver a much-needed lift.

“Is a City Manager Really Worth $800,000?”

Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb got their first real break on the Bell story in June 2010 as they explored the announced plan of a struggling neighbor city, Maywood, to outsource its municipal management to the ostensibly healthier Bell. Turning their focus from Maywood to Bell, the reporters dug up indications that part-time Bell city council members were making in the area of $100,000 a year—far above the stipend of $5,000 or so that one would expect in one of California’s poorest cities with fewer than forty thousand people.

For more than a week, officials stonewalled the reporters before finally arranging a Friday meeting in a conference room at a Bell city park. It was there, surrounded by other administrators, that Rizzo mentioned his salary—getting the surprised response from Vives—and delivered some documents the reporters had requested. What they heard at the meeting and read later suggested a dozen new Bell story ideas to the pair.

Assistant city editor Marble called in Gottlieb to team with beat reporter Vives after Vives filed his first stories on Maywood. Marble saw the Maywood-Bell angle adding a complex element to the story that a seasoned reporter like Gottlieb could help Vives develop. Vives, only in his third year of reporting, was no stranger to Times investigations; he had served as a translator for the reporting team that led the Times to its 2005 gold medal for its King/Drew reports exposing medical problems and racial injustice at the hospital. Over the previous thirty years Gottlieb had done investigations for four California papers. (He left the Times early in 2015.)

Vives remembers being upset at first that he would be sharing a story like the Maywood-Bell relationship, which seemed to have juicy possibilities. But the two reporters hit it off and began producing stories together that got the notice of both readers and editors. As the possibility of a Bell scandal developed, the pair knew the way the Times would typically treat it. “I wondered if this was going to be a project: a five-part series,” says Vives. That would be similar to the approach that John Carroll, the Times editor at the time of the King/Drew series, took six years before. But instead the editors chose to play the Bell story in “a very un-L.A. Times way,” says Gottlieb—developing it one disclosure at a time. The result “was that it built momentum,” Gottlieb says approvingly. “People would pick up their papers and say, ‘Okay, what happened today in Bell?’ It became very episodic, almost like a soap opera, with the Bell guys as the bad guys, and us as the good guys.”³ And the scandal built.

Marble, who devised the coverage plan with Yoshino and city editor Grad, says, “I don’t think there was ever a point where we thought about slowing down and doing this as a multiple-part series.” The editors wanted the salary element to run out right away, making a strong online splash and then perhaps winning a place on the front page. After several weeks of articles by Gottlieb and Vives, the editors would plan to call in other veteran Times reporters for other angles of the story, aiming many of those for the front page too.⁴

After seeing Gottlieb and Vives’s first story on exorbitant Bell compensation, managing editor Davan Maharaj agreed not to approach developments in the city with a planned series. On July 15, the Times published a stand-alone story—under a front-page headline asking “Is a City Manager Worth $800,000?”—accompanied by a prominently displayed graphic showing the sky-high pay of Bell officials, starting with Rizzo. Maharaj had asked Michael Whitley, assistant managing editor for design, to create a graphic. Whitley did more than highlight Bell’s range of high salaries and demographics; he also wrote the headline, which Maharaj loved. “This is a very effective headline,” the managing editor told the copy desk. “If you can beat it, go for it.”⁵ They couldn’t and the headline ran.

Especially in recession times, the story of overpaid officials in an impoverished city resonated with readers. And on the merits of the online version, the story quickly spread around the country, prompting news organizations to dig up salary statistics for their own local officials. The Times top editor, Russ Stanton, knew the story was resonating nationally when he was visiting Pittsburgh a few days after the first Vives-Gottlieb story and saw “a story on Bell on the front page of the Post-Gazette.” Meanwhile, follow-up coverage by his paper “took its natural, rightful course; it wasn’t a project we spent two years on,” according to Stanton, who adds that “these are my favorite kinds of stories [because] they come off of beats.”⁶ Within weeks, other Times stories followed: about tricks the Bell city council and administrators played to allow a jump in their pay, including secret approval of special benefits for officials. Rizzo, it turned out, had won vacation and sick leave benefits that totaled more than twenty-eight weeks a year.

Among the dozen or so reporters brought in to contribute Times stories was Kim Christensen, veteran of a Pulitzer-winning project a decade earlier at Portland’s Oregonian newspaper. “The first thing I was asked to do was make sure we’d gotten all the public records that were available,” says Christensen. Then, working with reporter Paloma Esquivel, the two of them focused on the city’s broader financial issues. “While those guys were raking in big bucks,” he says, “they were cutting city services” and still boosting the property tax rate.⁷

One of the Times’s premier writers, Christopher Goffard, was also assigned to write a December 28 article on Rizzo’s eighteen-year conversion from “an obscure civil servant into what a prosecutor called an ‘unelected and unaccountable czar.’” The piece was designed to wrap up the Bell experience for readers—and, perhaps not incidentally, would cap the paper’s Pulitzer entry of sixteen separate stories. It began:

FIGURE 9.1 The Los Angeles Times front page from September 22, 2010. The photo by Robert Lachman shows former Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo being taken into custody, charged with misappropriating millions of dollars of city funds. Source: Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

The new boss kept his office Spartan and impersonal, the wall stripped of photos, the desk conveying no hint of his life beyond the red-brick walls of City Hall.

It was 1993, a bleak, recession-bit year, and Robert Rizzo arrived in Bell trailing the vague whiff of scandal. His last city administrator job, in the high desert city of Hesperia, had ended badly, with accusations that he’d steered city improvement funds toward salaries.

But the Bell officials who hired him did not dig deeply into his past. They needed someone fast, and Rizzo, then 39, came cheap. His starting salary was $78,000, which was $7,000 less than his predecessor had made….

Now Rizzo and seven other Bell leaders past and present are charged with looting more than $5.5 million from one of the county’s poorest municipalities. It is a hydra-headed scandal that has spawned several federal, state and county investigations and transformed a forgotten suburb into a synonym for rogue governance. It has resonated as a morality tale in which Rizzo is cast as a greed-crazed, cigar-chomping puppet master who cheated his way to an $800,000 salary and a 10-acre horse ranch.⁸

Times editors note that the Pulitzer Prize entry package they submitted contained both analytical pieces and reports from the beat with no fewer than fifteen names appearing in the bylines. “You had the greed of people taking big salaries. And then you had this second tier of reporters discovering that there was something more heinous going on: this wholesale bilking of some of the poorest people in California” over about a decade, says city editor Shelby Grad. “That’s what made this a prizewinner.”

In journalism circles, the lead writers who got the scoop made the Bell story particularly appealing. Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives made numerous appearances discussing their work and when the Pulitzers were announced, the focus was on them, even if they were not individually acknowledged in the citation. In a Los Angeles Times column headlined “An Unlikely Duo Wins Pulitzer for Bell Coverage,” media writer James Rainey called them “perfectly cinematic … a pair of mismatched bookends, both raised in Los Angeles but from worlds apart.”⁹ (The Guatemala-born Vives had to fight at an early age for a green card and then eventually won a translator’s job at the paper, while Gottlieb attended Pitzer College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism before beginning his career.)

The Bell stories were also popular among readers, Grad believes, because they served as a reminder of how hard it can be to find out information that politicians want to hide—especially when data like municipal pay is supposed to be readily available. The failure to catch the Bell abuses earlier in regular beat coverage weighed on some editors at the Times. “What happened in Bell is also an indictment of us,” says Marble. “This is an area we used to cover; we’d go to all the meetings.” But mainly because of staff cuts, “we just stopped doing that…. And the city became like a fortress.”

FIGURE 9.2 The Los Angeles Times Bell reporting and editing team in the Times’s lobby. Front row, left to right, Robert Lopez, Ruben Vives, Jeff Gottlieb, and Paloma Esquivel. Second row, Richard Winton, Steve Marble, Kim Christensen, and Hector Becerra. Third row, Kimi Yoshino, Christopher Goffard, Shelby Grad, and Corina Knoll. Not pictured: Paul Pringle. Source: Photo by Mark Boster, Los Angeles Times. Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

While Times municipal coverage had indeed become far thinner in the years prior to the Bell investigation and both the staff and the actual newspaper had shrunk in size, Shelby Grad says that the paper’s culture always remained focused on the kind of in-depth reporting represented by both King/Drew and Bell. And he ticks off several major stories—in between those two Pulitzers—that either won prizes or were in contention for them. “You see how much smaller [the newspaper] is, and the struggle that it’s had,” he says, “but I do think there remains very much a culture that’s focused on that kind of work. That’s the reason Bell happened.”¹⁰ The 2011 Pulitzer gave the Los Angeles Times its sixth gold medal, one more than its longtime rival the New York Times.

2011—Los Angeles Times for its exposure of corruption in the small California city of Bell where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, resulting in arrests and reforms.¹¹

“Assault on Learning”

Any newsroom fallout from the bankruptcy of the Los Angeles Times’s Chicago-based owner rates as minor compared to the chaos that faced the Philadelphia Inquirer on its path to the 2012 Public Service Pulitzer. In July 2010, the Inquirer editor Bill Marimow had green-lighted a major project proposed by investigative reporter John Sullivan studying widespread Philadelphia school violence in hopes of trying to reduce the plague of attacks. The deputy managing editor for special projects, Vernon Loeb, would edit. But in October Marimow was abruptly demoted by order of the publisher, making him a reporter again. While the Inquirer staffers felt bad for Marimow, they also wondered what would happen to the nascent school violence project for which Sullivan was teamed with higher education beat reporter Sue Snyder and school district reporter Kristen Graham. Executive editor Stan Wischnowski, named to succeed Marimow, made up his mind early; the project would continue with a five-reporter team. He added database reporter Dylan Purcell and general assignment reporter Jeff Gammage. The management turmoil continued when Loeb left for a job at the Washington Post. So Wischnowski pulled Mike Leary out of the Inquirer managing editor’s slot to edit the project.¹²

Throwing those resources into such a difficult project “wasn’t an easy call,” says Wischnowski, noting that some day-to-day reporting had to be suspended for lack of staff. And keeping Snyder off her higher education beat, for example, meant someone else from the already-short staff had to fill in—in one of the top cities in the nation for universities. “But I just had a gut feeling it was the right decision” because the project seemed so important and the Inquirer had the right personnel for the job.¹³ The reporting, he knew, would fly in the face of the widely accepted claim by Philadelphia school administrators that schools were actually becoming safer—a claim Sullivan and his teammates believed to be a self-serving lie bolstered by bad data.

Wischnowski felt the passion that the team brought to the subject. Sullivan, who had a rough upbringing, had followed the gut-wrenching world of youth violence in the city for years, including spending a summer in an emergency room following gunshot victims. The reporter felt strongly that school disciplinary systems needed an overhaul, with more proactive treatment strategies getting a chance. In the past, school violence had been presented in largely racial terms. Readers still recalled the Inquirer reporting from 2009 that had studied the case of African American students attacking Asian Americans. But this story would focus on overall student violence, including blacks fighting blacks—who make up the majority in Philadelphia’s public school universe. Sullivan felt that the project was an opportunity to meet broader needs of the community by looking at the educational benefits that would come with reducing violence. He had been able to persuade Marimow and now he persuaded Wischnowski.¹⁴

Snyder and Graham’s preliminary reporting added evidence to the case that violent incidents in schools were worsening, not easing, and it also built a source list for use on the project. “That was crucial, because between the two of us we knew thousands of teachers,” says Graham. The school district had claimed a 30 percent reduction in violence in recent years, but what teachers told the newspaper was that “reported violence was down thirty percent, but the level of under-reporting was just astonishing.” Teachers were increasingly afraid in their classrooms, she adds, no matter what the school district’s statistics said. And they told Snyder and Graham about their fears. Sullivan turned to Temple University to produce an independent survey for the newspaper’s project and those results also challenged the school district’s numbers.

Especially exciting for Snyder and Graham was their first shot at an Inquirer-style team investigation, part of the newsroom culture since the 1970s when legendary editor Gene Roberts built the paper into an investigative—and Pulitzer-winning—machine. (After his arrival the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, then sixteen more over fifteen years, including two involving Marimow as a reporter. The paper had won for public service in 1978 and 1990.) “I loved being part of that Inquirer tradition,” Snyder says. “A lot of it was casting this wide net to get everything we can” about school violence. Another element, often part of the beginnings of an investigation: “We didn’t know where we were going.”

The Holy Grail

The two reporters’ net also turned up one dramatic case of violence that would become the project’s lead example. “Very early on in the reporting, I was at a meeting at the city Human Relations Commission,” recalls Graham. “This teacher was testifying, and weeping, about how she had been administering a test to a student, and a group of fifteen or twenty students were going from classroom to classroom, looking for this young girl, to attack this student.” The teacher had testified, “This is what’s going on. People are being attacked in our classrooms.” Graham had heard lots of stories about school violence, but “this mental image was so strong” that she took the teacher’s phone number, following up later and eventually finding the victim of the attack: student Teshada Herring.¹⁵ Finally sitting for an interview with Sue Snyder, Teshada told in graphic detail about her beating by schoolmates at Audenried High School who, as part of a fighting ritual, had smeared Vaseline on their heads to protect their skin from scars and to keep their hair from being ripped out—the way Teshada’s would be. Teshada’s mother added significantly to the family drama.

Snyder told Sullivan about the interview. “As soon as she talked about the Vaseline on the faces, I knew instantaneously that this was the lead of the story,” says John Sullivan. As editor of the project, Mike Leary agreed to design it around that opening. “We wanted to take readers inside schools, to show them what was really happening,” Leary says. “This needed to be a series of strong narratives; this wasn’t a numbers story.”¹⁶ Leary also knew there was a security tape from inside the school showing the attack, and he pressed the reporting team to find it—thinking it would be a huge benefit for the online presentation. As the reporters and editors planned for what would eventually become a seven-part series, creating other narratives to bolster the account of Teshada’s beating in part one, Snyder and Graham saw the security video as “the holy grail.”

Sullivan had a special attachment to the segment he had proposed for part five, turning the focus away from the victims of school violence and toward the perpetrators—students who had often been let down by a school disciplinary system offering little hope of ending the cycle of violence. Just as the narrative story approach created sympathy for those who were attacked, Sullivan’s plan for part five was to help readers understand how the mentality of the assailant develops and the importance of effective intervention to help turn their lives around. A youth deciding to attack others is a “complicated, subtle, and elusive story,” wrote Sullivan, who as a youth himself had had run-ins with official discipline, helping inform his reporting. Editor Leary saw part five as one of the project’s best components, to be followed by part six’s examples of success in other jurisdictions and part seven’s prescriptions for change in Philadelphia. (The other editors were Rose Ciotta and Avery Rome with multimedia editor Frank Wiese leading the online team.)

But even as the story progressed, the Inquirer newsroom felt more and more like it was being torn apart in a battle for control by rival teams of owners. Union troubles pitted one set of staffers against another and reporters and editors worried about large-scale layoffs or perhaps even a closure of the paper. Marimow, having been demoted by a new publisher, decided to leave and take a teaching position at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. (He had stayed on as an Inquirer reporter for a time, even working on some school-related stories. And he confesses to being conflicted about it. “First of all I love reporting. And I knew from the time the company went bankrupt that if another group of owners came in I would be vulnerable,” he says.) At the head of the investigative team, Sullivan—who was also facing family challenges—compared the interoffice strain to what he had experienced reporting for the Inquirer in Iraq, where one sometimes didn’t know who was the enemy.

Snyder was worried about the story. And they both recall an emotional meeting in which Sullivan bared his concerns to her. This is Sullivan’s account: “We went up to the cafeteria and she asked, ‘What is going on with you?’ I said, ‘I’m distracted.’ And she said, ‘I need you now; this story can’t happen without you.’ We both cried at that table.”¹⁷ Sullivan suspects that some of that emotion carried through to the part-five story he was writing at the time.

For her part, Snyder says that his finishing that story added a key element to the series: “It was about how the school district was failing to help students who were in trouble, and who were acting out. He was able to bring that story to life.” For the entire team, she adds, “There were times when we got dejected and down. But hearing the stories from the kids and their parents, it was so emotional. We knew how important it was to keep going. So we did.”

It was Snyder who finally found the holy grail: the Teshada beating video. When the reporter was repeatedly told by her sources that they did not have access to the security tape, Snyder just pressed them for suggestions about who might—coming up with this list of possibilities. After many fruitless calls, finally one person blithely told her, “Yes, I have it. Come on over.” Snyder took Sullivan with her to pick it up. “It was so exciting to be going out there,” she says. They then gave the video to multimedia editor Wiese for inclusion with part one of the series.

Writing that first part was also a struggle, says Snyder, because she, Sullivan, and Graham all contributed. “We all had our writing styles, and we all knew that with that first story it was so important. But somehow we did coalesce.” The three wrote for the top of the story paragraph-by-paragraph in an exercise that felt like a modular, Lego-style project until Mike Leary got into the editing. The story began:

FIGURE 9.3 The Philadelphia Inquirer front page, with a dramatic still from the video of a beating, opens its “Assault on Learning” series on school violence, March 27, 2011. Source: Used by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For Teshada Herring, the action was unmistakable: The girls smearing Vaseline on their faces and fitting scarves to their heads were preparing for a fight.

The ritual—well-known in Philadelphia schools—is intended to keep skin from scarring and hair from getting ripped out.

As Teshada passed the group on her way to class at Audenried High that morning, the events of the previous week flashed through her mind—a fight she had witnessed, Facebook posts warning that someone from her neighborhood would be attacked, a text blast to her phone that all but named her as the intended victim.

She wondered: Would they come for her? …

Suddenly, a band of more than a dozen girls and boys—captured on video roaming the halls and looking into classrooms—barged through the door.

The group converged on Teshada and began to beat her.

In less than a minute, they vanished.

“It was like a tornado,” her teacher would later say. “They went one way, then they went the other way.”

In Philadelphia, schools are no sanctuary.¹⁸

Leary notes that the paper was careful about protecting student identities during the series, holding many discussions about what photos to hold back and what photos to run. But for the video of Teshada’s beating, he says, “It was real life. And there was a news reason to show it.” A still from the video also helped add to the first day’s graphics on the front page. Because of staff cutbacks, Leary says, “the paper was stretched thin in a lot of ways, and some reporters ended up taking some photos for the series, adding to those that the regular staff photographers produced. A critical component of the series was a database that readers could search online to see the number and type of violent incidents at each school along with video narratives.

By the time the Inquirer’s Public Service Pulitzer was announced—for school violence narratives and videos that, according to the Pulitzer board, stirred “reforms to improve safety for teachers and students”—John Sullivan had left, taking a teaching position at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism soon after the series was written. (He returned to the newsroom to celebrate with teammates when they heard the announcement from Columbia University.)

Marimow by then was back as well—and again sitting in the editor’s chair. He had been rehired just weeks before the Pulitzer announcement, after yet another ownership change in what seemed to be developing as a perpetually unstable situation.¹⁹ His return created a peculiar job shift for Stan Wischnowski, who resumed his executive editor’s role with Marimow’s return. “It was a wild range of emotions,” says Wischnowski. After getting a tip that the Inquirer might win the Public Service Pulitzer, “within a span of seven to ten days I was also getting the news that I would no longer be the editor. I don’t know another situation when an editor is told he may win the Pulitzer, and days later hears he’s out.” Next came an institutional hit from owners: selling the downtown building that had been the paper’s home for seventy-five years on top of another downsizing to accompany the office move.

In that strange confluence of announcements, however, the thrill of the prize still overwhelmed everything else. “For us to win our first Pulitzer in fifteen years, in this city,” says Wischnowski, “was a true ‘Rocky’ story.” Wischnowski and Marimow, as the two top editors, were working closely together through the first half of 2014 when yet another change in ownership control took place.

Marimow, in comments quoted in the Inquirer’s own story, added the perspective of an investigative reporter whose career spanned the paper’s four glory decades: “To me, a Public Service Pulitzer also is a sign of sustained excellence over the ages. There are only two other newspapers in America—the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times—that have had three Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service in the last thirty-five years. So we’re up there where the air is rare.”²⁰

2012—The Philadelphia Inquirer 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.²¹