“The Environment Story” is bigger and more important than ever, and it will only grow more so in years to come. [Journalists] recognize professional challenges in cracking the complexity of environmental issues, overcoming the pitfalls of fragmented reporting, and making important concerns more audience friendly.
—FROM THE STRATEGIC PLAN OF THE SOCIETY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISTS, FOUNDED IN 1990
Stories dealing with environmental issues and the natural sciences—or in two cases nature’s fury and how Americans cope with it—dominated Public Service Prize-winners in the 1990s. Still, the business story was here to stay, and much of the coverage that was honored continued to have a corporate flavor. For one thing, reporters examined more closely the changing environmental attitudes within industry and governmental agencies.
On a smaller scale, news organizations were facing up to a serious environmental and health problem
internally. As regulations spread from state to state, publishers gradually banned that ancient crutch of deadline writers and editors everywhere: smoking. Suddenly newsrooms were not only quiet, they were cigarette-, cigar-, and pipe-free—an amazing contrast for anyone who had known the noisy, smoky newspaper offices of the 1960s or 1970s. Of course, the same anti-smoking rules applied to every business, not just journalism. But the change particularly shocked reporters, many of whom were convinced that nicotine and caffeine were every bit as important as newsprint and ink to getting the news out each day. (It will be left, perhaps, to the next generation to witness ink and paper vanish as necessary elements of the daily press.) Somehow, though, reporters and editors managed to continue turning out great journalism in the twentieth century’s last decade, even if the newsroom tab for coffee skyrocketed.
Blood and Water
The 1990 Pulitzer board picked both the mighty
Philadelphia Inquirer and North Carolina’s tiny
Washington Daily News as gold medal winners, the first time in twenty-three years that more than a single Public Service Prize was awarded. One winning story involved the business of water, the other the business of blood. But both had the simplest of origins. For the family-owned
Washington Daily News, which claimed its first Pulitzer Prize, it started with the editor puzzling over the small print on his home water bill. For the
Philadelphia Inquirer, continuing its long string of Pulitzers under Gene Roberts, the genesis was a reporter’s pensive moment during a Red Cross blood drive in the office.
1In Washington, North Carolina, Bill Coughlin noted a new statement on his water bill. It said that the city was testing for chemicals in the water system. As editor of the 10,500-circulation
Daily News, he asked one of the paper’s four reporters, Betty Gray, to look into it. Her digging turned up forty-two chemicals in the water, each of which she discussed with state and private toxicologists. One chemical, she was told, was a carcinogen far in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe level. She then obtained memos showing that the state environmental agency knew the city’s water was contaminated.
2Gray built her knowledge to prepare for an interview with the city manager, which came on the morning of Wednesday, September 13. (An afternoon paper, the Daily News had a noon deadline.) She learned that the federal act eliminating unsafe drinking water did not cover communities with less than ten thousand residents, like the Daily News’s city of Washington. Actually, it turned out, there were fifty-six thousand water treatment plans in the United States that were unprotected by the EPA.
After a few minutes with the reporter the city manager interrupted the interview, promising to get back to her in time for deadline. He then rushed to the newspaper with a legal notice that described the town’s water as having “levels of certain chemicals which exceeded EPA recommendations.” The notice was too late to run, but it became part of Gray’s front-page story for the next day. Gray later confirmed that the city’s knowledge of carcinogens in the water went back eight years but that there had been no regulations requiring a mayor, city manager, the state, or the EPA to inform the public.
Next Wednesday, the paper ran a report on a second cancer-causing chemical that was combining with the first to increase hazards so severely that the water plant might have to close. As the coverage continued, the mayor complained that the city was in “turmoil” because of the reports and said that the “citizens are ready to hang us.” Though he protested to the paper’s owner, the stories kept running—and the situation got worse. Within ten days, in fact, the state told residents not to drink the water, wash dishes with it, or even shower in it. Soon the U.S. Marines had set up a water distribution network for the city. “The scene was like conditions in some third world country,” the editors of the Daily News wrote.
Repercussions started locally but spread nationally. In the next month’s election, the mayor and most of the city council were defeated by others who made clean water their issue. Stories of other North Carolina communities with tainted water began appearing, and state and federal regulations were changed to prevent a recurrence of the North Carolina situation. The EPA also moved to extend safe water assurances to small communities. Publisher Ashley Futrell Jr. took special pride in the small paper’s ability to prompt changes in federal standards. But it had been a mixed triumph. “When our town suffers, we suffer as well,” Futrell said. “We live here.” Editor Coughlin died in 2014.
3
1990—The
Washington (N.C.)
Daily News for revealing that the city’s water supply was contaminated with carcinogens, a problem that the local government had neither disclosed nor corrected over a period of eight years.
4
“We Don’t Have to Tell You That”
The
Inquirer business reporter Gilbert M. Gaul was donating blood when he had the idea for what he thought might be a “fun little business story” about what happens with the blood after it goes to the Red Cross. “I was lying there as the blood was running out of my arm, and it dawned on me that I didn’t know a damn thing about what happened to my blood after they took it,” says Gaul, now a
Washington Post reporter in Philadelphia. He suggested a story to business editor Craig Stock, another loyal blood donor, and he liked the idea. Gaul started a file.
Gaul, a five-year
Inquirer veteran at the time, had made a name for himself at a small but feisty Pennsylvania journal, the
Pottsville Republican. There he had been on a team that uncovered the looting by organized crime of the locally based Blue Coal Company. Gaul and reporter Elliot G. Jaspin won the Local Investigative Specialized Reporting Pulitzer in 1979, and Gaul then won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. He found himself in great demand among metropolitan dailies and chose Gene Roberts’s
Inquirer. “It was everything you could possibly want in terms of journalism,” he said of his new surroundings. “If you found something promising, you were encouraged to pursue it. It didn’t matter where you were or what desk you were on. It didn’t matter if you were 23 years old or 55 years old. You would get the time to see whether there was a great story there.”
5Gaul started as a beat reporter covering medical economics for the Inquirer’s business desk. His early stories looked at hospitals, doctors, Medicare, and Medicaid. He also wrote some stories about how nonprofit medical corporations worked, which first put him in touch with the not-for-profit American Red Cross; although he didn’t think much about it at the time. Then came blood drive day in 1988 at the Inquirer offices and the origin of his “little story.” The first step seemed like it should be an interview with the local Red Cross head. Gaul’s interview brought him up short. He had just started through his list of routine questions—How much blood is in the bank? What dollar value do you place on the blood?—when the director stopped him. “Why are you asking these questions? We don’t have to tell you that,” he said.
“I was taken aback, and my journalistic antennae went up,” Gaul recalls. “I came back saying, ‘You know, Craig, this is weird. They don’t want to cooperate. They say we don’t have a right to know anything. They won’t even talk about the basic cost of a unit.’ And so I began to poke around. I knew a lot of hospital people, and I asked them if I could talk to the blood banks in their hospitals. The lab people told me, ‘this is what we have to pay for a unit of red cells, or for platelets.’” As he pieced together a reporting structure, he says, “I approached the story with my framework in business, which is something I still do today. I put together some spreadsheets—this was pre-Excel—and I began to see there were things that you just couldn’t answer from the data that was available.”
During his early research the Philadelphia area had an emergency blood appeal, which put Gaul on several new trails. He began to look at the ties between blood shortages and supply management, including widespread trading of blood stocks and the ethics of blood bank administrators. Basic questions sometimes led to deceptive answers. When Gaul asked a local Red Cross doctor to explain the shortage that led to the appeal, he blamed it “on donors not showing up in sufficient numbers. It happened every year following the Christmas-New Year’s holiday…. Donors just didn’t keep their appointments.”
According to Gaul, “The answer didn’t sit too well with me. I was ready and willing to give blood. Yet no one from the Red Cross had bothered to call or send me a postcard. When I pressed, the doctor acknowledged he didn’t know why donors weren’t coming. Management had never fully investigated the issue. It occurred to me that were this any other business, the blood bank would be down in the federal bankruptcy court. Instead, management turned to the media and declared an ‘Emergency Appeal’ for blood, which cost them nothing.”
He built his database to include about a hundred blood banks around the United States. He interviewed administrators, noting which centers bought and which sold. Eventually he was able to track a half-million pints of blood around the country, watching them change hands several times. For additional information he turned to Internal Revenue Service Form 990s, tax returns for nonprofit corporations like the Red Cross. He remembers thinking it was particularly interesting that 61 percent of their business was blood when Gaul had thought its big business was disaster relief.
As a business beat reporter he kept working on other things, he says, but soon he was making both regional and national calls. Some of his findings about this blood business were startling. “Red cells are really a commodity and they’re sold that way,” he says. “And there’s this whole secret black market for brokering blood, which on its face was not illegal. But it raised a lot of questions, like what happens to the cost of blood as it moves along, and what happens to the safety of blood as it moves along.” While he had not started out thinking about AIDS—still a relatively unexplained phenomenon when he started—it emerged as a huge element as the reporting continued.
Gaul had promised himself that he would only allow on-the-record sources in the story, although he would listen to sources who insisted that they be interviewed confidentially. “Due to the sensitivity of the subject, it absolutely had to be this way,” the reporter says.
Eventually it was time to test the Gene Roberts system that was supposed to free reporters for big projects. “When I needed to be detached, I was detached,” he says, noting that he was taken off the beat to pursue the blood story. Not that everything went that smoothly. At one point, Gaul was unhappy about the initial editing of his drafts, which he calculates had been cut in half. He asked his colleague, investigative reporter Don Barlett, to take a look. Barlett backed Gaul’s longer version and showed the originals and the edited drafts to Roberts. A new editor was assigned, former national editor Lois Wark, who continued on the job through the end of the series.
Well into what would eventually become forty separate Freedom of Information Act requests—a total of about twenty thousand pages’ worth of documents—Gaul produced a March 1989 story on one particularly woeful blood bank in St. Louis. The five-part series that made up the bulk of the Pulitzer entry ran in September. That series started with a piece on blood brokering, the overarching theme of the story. Subsequent pieces studied such elements as the role of the FDA. “It had been basically co-opted by the blood industry,” says Gaul. “Their oversight was just abysmal.” He also tackled the AIDS question in the blood distribution system. “As the reporting had begun, I knew AIDS was getting into the blood supply,” he says. “I didn’t even want to go there, because I was viewing it as purely a financial story.” Soon it became clear that AIDS was too important to be played down, especially with Food and Drug Administration oversight so weak in the area.
Gaul used a number of editors as sounding boards along the way. He remembers flying the series past editor James Naughton for a comment. The reporter had been agonizing over a simple way to express the complexity of the transporting of blood supplies from station to station as it was being sold and resold. Naughton took one look at the story and said, “Oh, a chain of blood.” The image stuck through the series.
FIGURE 20.1 Atop a desk, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Gil Gaul responds to staff acknowledgment as the paper learns it has won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Photo by the Inquirer photographer Sharon Wohlmuth. Source: Used by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Roberts contributed an organizational eye after Gaul and Wark laid the stories before him in the order they proposed. “Roberts looked at them and said, ‘Why wouldn’t you want your stories to go from the strongest to the weakest?’” according to Gaul, affecting his best North Carolina drawl. The FDA material was strong enough to carry the second day, they agreed, with the AIDS element moved up to third. “You get fixed ideas early on,” says Gaul. “That’s why you need editors.”
As a result of the series, new certifications were proposed by a congressional committee and more inspectors were authorized, among other reforms—some of them related to the increasing threat of AIDS to blood supplies. The FDA also changed its monitoring system for foreign blood. And donors can get more information today about what happens with the blood they donate.
After all he learned, is Gaul still a blood donor? Absolutely, he says. “The point of this series wasn’t to harm blood donations, but to explore an area of medicine that is at best little understood.”
1990—The Philadelphia Inquirer for reporting by Gilbert M. Gaul that disclosed how the American blood industry operates with little government regulation or supervision.
Rape and the Media
The story of Nancy Ziegenmeyer’s brutal November 1988 rape—by an assailant who jumped into her car as she waited in a Des Moines parking lot—became the center of national debate in February 1990. That was because the
Des Moines Register, with Ziegenmeyer’s full support, ran a five-day series that named her as the victim and detailed all that had happened to her before and after. Among journalists, the series generated discussion about why newspapers generally do not identify rape victims. More broadly, it focused attention on how underreported the crime of rape is in the first place. “The fundamental issue was, Do we have a crime that is way under-covered, compared to its prevalence in society?” says Geneva Overholser, the editor of the
Register at the time. “And that raises the question of whether it is under-covered
because it is so faceless.”
6Overholser had sparked the entire issue with a column she wrote reflecting on a recent Supreme Court decision supporting a Florida weekly that had published a rape victim’s name without her permission, in violation of state law. Overholser weighed on one side the unfair stigma of rape against the journalist’s commitment “to come as close as possible to printing the facts as we know them.” She asked, “Does not our very delicacy in dealing with rape victims subscribe to the idea that rape is a crime of sex rather than the crime of brutal violence that it really is?” While she supported newspapers in withholding victims’ names, Overholser wrote, “I believe that we will not break down the stigma until more and more women take public stands.”
The column was read by Ziegenmeyer and her husband, who lived just east of Des Moines in Grinnell. For three weeks she considered whether to take up the column writer on what Ziegenmeyer saw as an invitation to identify herself as a rape victim and to use the newspaper in a good cause.
With the debate about naming rape victims unresolved even now, the series that eventually ran in the Register is still a useful journalism tool. Yet the story behind the paper’s handling of the series is almost as intriguing. Indeed, decades after the gold medal was awarded, reporter Jane Schorer was still feeling that there was too little acknowledgment for her contributions when the Register claimed its Pulitzer.
A Teary Phone Call
Overholser distinctly remembers how close this Pulitzer came to never happening. “I’m sitting at my desk one lunchtime and my secretary is gone. The phone rings, and I pick it up,” she says. “On any other given day I would not have picked up the phone.” And had her secretary been there, “she wouldn’t have passed it along, probably, because it was this teary woman saying, ‘I just want to come in to talk.’” But with Overholser on the line, the caller continued: “I’m Nancy Ziegenmeyer and I’ve been raped, and I want you to use my name and use my picture, because your argument is exactly right.” Ziegenmeyer wanted readers to understand, too, the harm that the legal system causes victims. Perhaps with one unvarnished case—her own—things could change, she said. Overholser decided to give the story to her feature department for assignment, to run when the assailant’s trial ended. It would use Ziegenmeyer’s name.
Jane Schorer, who would later write for the
Register’s custom publications with the byline Jane Schorer Meisner, was a gifted but relatively new reporter who was formerly a secretary on the editorial page. She began interviewing Ziegenmeyer on August 2, 1989, the first of more than fifty meetings and telephone conversations the two would have over seven months. From the start, Schorer felt uneasy with how some editors treated her—debating whether “we need to have a real reporter do this,” for example. But when she dove in, it was for good. Schorer did other assignments while staying in close contact with Ziegenmeyer. For her editors, still waiting for a verdict, “it was pretty much forgotten and on the back burner,” she says. But the story preoccupied her as the months passed. “The only way I could do it was make a diary of it,” she says. It seemed to work.
“When I finished the first one or two parts, I took it to Geneva and I asked if she remembered this project. I laid it down on her desk,” Schorer recalls.
7 Alone in her office, Overholser read. “First of all, my jaw dropped because it was so compelling. But second, I thought this is a very non-traditional piece for us,” says the editor. It would take special handling in the newsroom. Overholser went to the small writing room where Schorer was working. “Do you have any idea what you have here?” Overholser asked, leaving the writer speechless for a moment—until she realized that her boss loved the story. “From that minute on,” says Schorer, “Geneva took charge.” A top editor at the
Register, Mike Wegner, was assigned to handle the series. Schorer was impressed with the five-part draft that emerged starting on February 25, 1990.
Part one began:
She would have to allow extra driving time because of the fog.
A heavy gray veil had enveloped Grinnell overnight, and Nancy Ziegenmeyer—always methodical, always in control—decided to leave home early for her 7:30 a.m. appointment at Grand View College in Des Moines.
It was Nov. 19, 1988, a day Ziegenmeyer had awaited eagerly, because she knew that whatever happened during those morning hours in Des Moines would determine her future. If she passed the state real-estate licensing exam that Saturday morning, she would begin a new career. If she failed the test, she would continue the child-care service she provided in her home.
At 6 a.m., Ziegenmeyer unlocked the door of her 1988 Pontiac Grand Am and tossed her long denim jacket in the back seat. The weather was mild for mid-November, and her Gloria Vanderbilt denim jumper and turtleneck sweater and red wool tights would keep her warm enough without a coat….
The fog lifted as Ziegenmeyer drove west on Interstate Highway 80, and she made good time after all. The digital clock on the dashboard read 7:05 as she pulled into a parking lot near Grand View’s Science Building. She had 25 minutes to sit in the car and review her notes before test time.
Suddenly the driver’s door opened. She turned to see a man, probably in his late 20s, wearing a navy pin-striped suit. He smelled of alcohol.
“Move over,” the man ordered, grabbing her neck.
8
“What Kind of Weird Journalism Is This?”
“When I picked up the paper on the first day, I said, Wow!” recalls Schorer. Together with the story, spread across page one, were two columns headed “How this story came to be” and a reference to another article by Overholser. Getting to “Wow” had not been easy. “The Des Moines Register was a very traditional paper,” says Overholser. “It was big on sports, big on agriculture, big on politics, big on agribusiness. It was certainly not a very soft and squishy paper.” Schorer had assembled her account from Ziegenmeyer’s own story, from her friends, from police officers, from prosecutors, and from the defense attorney. It contained emotional details unusual for a newspaper story of the time. And for some editors at the Register, it crossed the line of reporter familiarity with a source. “The cardinal rule is that a reporter never gets emotionally involved. I got emotionally involved, and I make no bones about it,” Schorer says.
But the 1990s were becoming a time of experimenting with new forms, even at the Register. And Overholser felt that the paper’s approach needed to accommodate the close relationship that Ziegenmeyer and Schorer had formed. It took two weeks for a final decision on whether to run it and in what form. Some editors, says Overholser, were uncomfortable not because of the sexual frankness—although it graphically described Ziegenmeyer’s rape—“but because it was so edgy.” The editors asked, “What kind of weird journalism was this?” she recalls. Telling a story about what the victim was thinking, some argued, was not serious journalism. But Overholser and other editors persisted. It was, she adds, “a piece of narrative journalism before we really knew the name.”
The decision was to stay with the five-part story and to keep its descriptiveness intact. “If Nancy Ziegenmeyer is coming to me and saying, ‘Tell my story,’ then we were going to tell it with honesty,” says Overholser. She remembers looking over the copy editor’s shoulder and noticing that the term “after he had ejaculated” had been changed to “when he had finished.” Overholser stopped him. “This is a crime of sex,” she told him. “And if she’s willing to say ‘after he had ejaculated,’ then we should say it. ‘After he had finished’ sounded like he’d had lunch or something.”
Another element required careful treatment: the assailant was black and the victim white. That was rare considering rape statistics, says Overholser. Most attacks are intra-racial and involve people who know each other. The Register’s managing editor, David Westphal, proposed that an editor’s note explain some of the unusual features of the series, including “how loath we were to contribute to that stereotype of interracial rape,” Overholser says. “I felt then, and I believe now, that the extraordinary opportunity to be able to focus on rape was worth it. You just don’t get that opportunity. It’s impossible for young women to realize how little rape was written about back then.” The editor, who later built a career in journalism education, believes the series’ greatest success was putting the crime of rape on the national agenda.
That happened instantly and with deep controversy. Invitations arrived in Des Moines for national interviews, for Ziegenmeyer and Overholser mostly but also for the novice feature writer. “It totally caught us off-guard by getting so much publicity,” says Schorer. “At the time it began we had no idea it would be a big story.” Overholser also found the attention unsettling. She turned down several appearances but accepted others. Media attention grew, though, when the William Kennedy Smith case made the national news. Smith, Senator Edward Kennedy’s nephew, was accused of rape by an alleged victim who was named by the media. (The case against Smith was dismissed.) In October, the Register editor was on the cover of Working Woman magazine.
FIGURE 20.2 A dramatic photograph helped Jane Schorer’s first story on rape victim Nancy Ziegenmeyer come alive in the Des Moines Register series that began on February 26, 1990. The story grew from a column about rape victims written by editor Geneva Overholser. Source: Used by permission.
“Geneva was being watched as one of the first female editors of a major newspaper. People were waiting to see what she would accomplish,” Schorer says. The writer thought that some acclaim for the
Register series was misdirected though. “There was plenty of credit to go around,” she says. “Nancy deserves all the credit in the world for coming forward, and Geneva deserves all the credit in the world for having the idea in the first place, and for making the finished product so outstanding.” But, says Schorer, “it would have been fair for me to have the credit for presenting it the way I did.”
The nature of the gold medal—going to the Register and not to the reporter—rubbed a raw nerve, even on the joyous day when the Pulitzer Prize was announced. Schorer says she wishes that the work had won for feature writing, where the Register had also nominated it. In that case the prize would have been in her name. “Public Service is more noble,” she says, “but I would have liked to get the personal recognition.”
Overholser understands her irritation. As a reporter, Schorer “absolutely took this story and made a miracle out of it,” she says. Michael Gartner, who preceded Overholser as the
Register editor, adds, “What made it work was that it was a compelling story. She was really a good writer.” Gartner, then the president of NBC News, was also on the Pulitzer board that year, although he was out of the room for the discussion.
9Overholser was also out of the room when the gold medal was decided, of course. But she did have something to say when she re-entered the room and learned that the board was preparing a citation that excluded Schorer’s name. “They said the paper was winning, and I said, ‘That’s great, but you’ve got to name Jane,’” says Overholser. Schorer’s name was inserted.
1991—The
Des Moines Register for reporting by Jane Schorer that, with the victim’s consent, named a woman who had been raped—which prompted widespread reconsideration of the traditional media practice of concealing the identity of rape victims.
10
Covering the Sierra Without a Parachute
The
Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson had once worked at the
Des Moines Register as well and in 1985 had won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting there for a series on the dangers of farming. “It was a neat place to start out as a young reporter,” says the reporter, who credits editors like Geneva Overholser and Mike Gartner for helping him. He later moved to the
New York Times but eventually became frustrated with the style of reporting there. “I found myself visiting many places, but not knowing hardly any,” he says. “They call it parachute journalism.”
Switching to McClatchy’s
Sacramento Bee, he was chosen to open a Sierra news bureau, based in the town of Truckee. “The idea was to cover this part of the Sierra as a beat, with the forests, the watersheds and what have you,” Knudson says. “I jumped at the opportunity and threw a kayak on top of my Jeep and just took a little bit of a road trip. Of course, I fell in love with the geography, as everybody does. But then I began to stop in community after community, talking with people about what are the issues, what are the concerns.” Knudson recalls that there was some resistance in the newsroom to his covering the Sierra. It could have been jealousy, or a feeling that the paper was being too lenient with him. Fifteen years and a Pulitzer Prize later, he says, “I guess it’s been laid to rest.”
11When journalists cover the environment, they do well to look past the jurisdictions that governments create. “Water, air, wildlife—all these resources and individual components—they don’t pay attention to boundaries,” Knudson says. “Everybody was looking at their own backyard, but nobody was looking at the gem that is the Sierra Nevada.” Stretching for 450 miles across dozens of counties, national forests, irrigation districts, and other divisions, he says, “this region has been ‘piecemealed’ to death.” It was that observation that prompted a project on the plight of the Sierra. “The magic of the series,” says Knudson, “was that I was able to go out and look at this huge region as a beat, and write about it as a single mountain range.”
Knudson brought a fresh set of eyes to the Sierra. He traveled across the range looking for issues that arose over and over again in different settings. “If livestock raising is causing problems in one part of the range, and you find that it is in another part of the range as well, you can put two and two together,” he notes. Many interviewees didn’t quite know what to make of his mountain range focus. When a reporter is on an important story, the reporter says, “sometimes people know that, and they clam up faster, or they speak up more than they might.” But to most people the Sierra seemed a nonstory. Knudson knew that it was anything but. “To see that there were all these forces leading to a general state of deterioration struck me as a pretty compelling story.”
Air, Forests, Water, Wildlife, Soil, and Mankind
After eight months of investigation and two hundred interviews, the series was ready to run on June 9, with the headline “Majesty and Tragedy: The Sierra in Peril. From mining to malls, onslaught takes toll.” Part one began:
John Muir said it best.
The Sierra Nevada, the naturalist wrote a century ago, “seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen.”
Remember those words. Savor them like old wine. Share them with young children.
For Muir’s words no longer hold true.
Today, California’s Sierra Nevada—one of the world’s great mountain ranges—is suffering a slow death.
Almost everywhere there are problems: polluted air, dying forests, poisoned rivers, vanishing wildlife, eroding soil and rapid-fire development. Even Muir’s holy ground, Yosemite National Park, is hurting: Much of its forest has been damaged by ozone.
Remarkably, the problems have drawn little attention, masked in part by the enormity of the range.
That sixth paragraph served almost as a table of contents. Part two focused on air pollution, part three on forests and wildlife, part four on streams and mining damage, and part five on the plague of growth. The last part also contained a prognosis and suggestions for how to turn things around.
Because of the project’s size and scope, other reporters helped Knudson with basic research. But
Bee editor Gregory Favre preferred that it be largely a one-man effort. Collecting data had been hard because much of the information was broken down by county or by district, requiring extensive travel among county seats. Computer-assisted reporting was still a few years in the future, the reporter notes. The editor working over the stories with Knudson directly was Terry Jackson. The photography ranged from breathtaking to disturbing. It showed the ravages of development. “There was pressure to cut stories,” Knudson recalls, “but I don’t remember too many knock-down-drag-out disputes with editors.”
By creating the feel that time was running out for corrective measures, Knudson’s series got the immediate attention of legislators. A “Sierra summit” was convened to address some of the problems the Bee cited. Congress also took an interest. On its own, the U.S. Forest Service, whose policies were treated harshly in the series, conceded that the new perspective was valuable. Said a forest service spokesman: “I think there may be some initial hard feelings or concern. There were a lot of vested interests that were obviously challenged. But that’s the name of the game. What matters is what happens to the Sierra. This could be a real vector for change.”
Other finalists for the public service award were the
Washington Post for a study of gun violence in its city and the
Dayton Daily News, which examined national workplace safety issues—variations of themes that would recur in public service competitions ten years later.
12
1992—The
Sacramento (Calif.)
Bee for “The Sierra in Peril,” reporting by Tom Knudson that examined environmental threats and damage to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
13
The Big One
There was no question mark on the headline. On Monday, August 24, 1992, a banner with “THE BIG ONE” across the top of the
Miami Herald told readers that Andrew was sure to be no ordinary storm; marked “Special Hurricane Edition,” the day’s paper was a public service in itself. But—far more than the
Herald staff suspected—it was only setting the scene for what was to come over the rest of the year.
14“Hurricane Andrew, the biggest story ever to hit this newsroom, was the one story none of us wanted to see,” wrote managing editor Pete Weitzel in the paper’s cover letter for its Pulitzer entry in public service. “A stunned and dislocated population, much of it deprived of shelter, water and electricity, with little or no access to sources of information, needed the news, needed help, needed guidance.”
15 Five years later, that description would apply as well to a second disaster-related gold medal awarded to another Knight Ridder paper, the
Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota.
For the Miami Herald, planning to get staffers into the right place made a huge difference, says Weitzel, who after retiring from the Herald took over leadership of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. “It’s very difficult to get around after a hurricane, so you needed to have some critical people positioned before the storm hit.” In a way it was like preparing for an invasion in wartime. The Herald sent some reporters to the Homestead area, where they stayed in a motel the night before the full fury of the storm hit. It hit in Homestead.
“DESTRUCTION AT DAWN,” read the Tuesday paper’s banner. To allow for more organized placement of hurricane reports, the paper eliminated the Local section and concentrated Andrew-related news in section one, an approach it would use for weeks. Some 110,000 copies of the Tuesday paper were distributed free to shelters, hotels, and the few distribution boxes still in operation. The hardest-hit areas got forty thousand free copies for three weeks. “It built an enormous goodwill toward the paper,” says Weitzel. The Herald published neighborhood-by-neighborhood damage surveys, along with daily updates on the basics: food, water, power and telephones, and street clearing.
As it provided vital information, the staff learned from its readers too. “Almost from the first day we began to realize that some of the traditional stories you begin to file in the wake of a big disaster—a fire or anything like that—didn’t really serve the need here. Survey stories of the damage didn’t serve concrete needs for people to know, What happened on my block? What happened in my neighborhood?” says Weitzel. “That created a tremendous challenge.” The overview reporting, even if it was beautifully handled, lacked the specifics that readers needed. That problem could only be solved by sending the reporters back with orders, as Weitzel put it, “to get more nitty-gritty.”
One surprising twist was what happened when the
Herald created a phone bank to take incoming calls. “We asked clerks and secretaries to staff the phones to handle an unexpectedly heavy volume of calls from people seeking storm-related information, and also to take notes,” he says. In this pre-Internet time, the
Herald news staff found it was getting fast feedback about the real problems in the community and where they existed. “My secretary was helping run the phone bank,” says Weitzel, “and she said that we were getting all these tremendously poignant calls from people. Can we help them locate a friend, or locate a relative?” The secretary, Bert Alberti, had the idea of putting together a “bulletin board” feature in the newspaper to help them connect. It would eventually take up several full pages each day.
Comparing the 1992 Herald feature to the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” which had its genesis in handbills passed around Ground Zero after 9/11, Weitzel says: “The Portraits, those little anecdotes, were one of the most brilliant things I’d ever seen. And this bulletin board feature had been the same kind of thing for us. It just mushroomed.”
The Herald itself was working wounded. Three distribution warehouses were destroyed and the roof of its main building sustained heavy damage. Sixty newsroom employees had severely damaged homes. “All of us were going through the same experiences of the people we’re writing about,” says Weitzel. “We really were on the same page. And that’s not always the case.”
On Sunday, August 30, the paper had the beginnings of a scandal to report. Its headline read “Shoddy Construction Left Homes Vulnerable to Storm, Engineers Say.” The next Sunday another headline proclaimed “Older Is Often Better for Dade Homes, Experts Say.” The Herald stories reported that local building codes were either insufficient or were not being enforced. There were also signs that much construction was shoddy under any code structure.
The Herald’s analysis of why Andrew damaged certain buildings more than others answered a key question. Readers wanted to know why a community that had prepared so well for a storm could still be so devastated. In a story that same Sunday headlined “Why Help Took So Long,” reporters Jeff Leen and Sydney Freedberg wrote:
It was as if the emergency disaster planners wrote a super Act I—the evacuation—then forgot to script Act II—the recovery.
What went wrong?
Mobile hospitals and bulldozers arrived late. Vital phones and radios jammed. Food deliveries and National Guard units got snarled in traffic. Roadblocks turned away volunteers. Police didn’t control intersections. City managers pleaded for help. Nobody activated the Army.
To be sure, thousands of good people labored heroically, monumentally, to establish order from a type of chaos that no one had ever seen before.
But for 100 critical hours after Andrew struck, governments reeled, and no one was in command. No hurricane czar, no Norman Schwarzkopf.
Sydney Freedberg had helped win a public service award for the Detroit News nine years earlier. Jeff Leen would later become a Washington Post investigative reporter and editor, helping it win gold medals in 1999, 2000, and 2014. Hurricane Andrew “was probably Jeff’s statistical baptism,” says Weitzel, allowing Leen to develop skills for detecting patterns that teams could use in their investigations.
The paper hammered the building construction theme. One story noted that the devastating 1960s hurricane Donna had prompted a major storm study that had specifically warned that building codes needed to be properly enforced or storms would continue to cause far more destruction than necessary.
The Pulitzer Public Service jury commented on the
Herald’s “awesome commitment of resources.” Specifically, the jury noted the
Herald’s successes identifying “the economic & political decisions of the past in the form of lax zoning, inspection and building codes that had made them so vulnerable.”
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1993—The
Miami Herald for coverage that not only helped readers cope with Hurricane Andrew’s devastation but also showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the destruction.
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Wrestling with “Boss Hog”
For Raleigh, North Carolina’s News and Observer in 1995, discovering how heavily pork producers had become concentrated in North Carolina had been the first revelation. It had happened almost out of the public eye and so had the pollution problem that came with it. “Actually, the story got started when two reporters, Pat Stith and Joby Warrick, worked together on stories about malfeasance connected with the State Fair,” says Melanie Sill, who was just back from a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and had become the editor of the Sunday paper while also running special projects. Eventually the two reporters uncovered the case of the state veterinarian taking gifts from pork producers.
“Nothing had been reported about this industry,” Sill says. “It had been growing quietly in the state, and they’re not huge employers.” But the deeper the reporters looked, “more and more the questions developed.” Soon enough, water-quality issues caught the reporters’ notice. “By the time the series got into print, the veterinarian story went by the wayside,” according to Sill, now the paper’s editor.
The reporters and their editor met once a week and read each other’s notes, she says, but three months into the project the focus still was unclear. “We were down in our humble office canteen, and I said, ‘What is the story really about?’ And Pat said, ‘It’s about who’s in charge here.’ The industry was writing its own ticket.”
18 The journalists agreed and with the basic line of the series finally established, the story came together more easily in the remaining two months of investigation.
The reporters documented evidence that waste pits were leaking into ground water and creeks. One story analyzed how Wendell Murphy, a former state senator and a major hog farmer, had thwarted government regulation. A sidebar was prepared on the most noticeable issue for any readers who came close to a hog farm: the odor. “We thought about doing a scratch and sniff to run with the series,” says Sill with a laugh, noting that they gave up on that idea quickly.
Metro editor Marion Gregory came up with the Boss Hog rubric that would run with the series. As often happens late in the editing process, the five parts were juggled fairly close to the late February days when they were to run. At first the story on Murphy was to lead the series. (The headline “Murphy’s Laws” seemed to fit.) But as they refined the drafts, the environmental impact story seemed a better opener. Editor Sill had Warrick root through a stack of discarded story openings to find one that she recalled and loved from an early draft. Opening the first day’s story under the headline “Boss Hog: New Studies Show That Lagoons Are Leaking,” the story by Stith and Warrick began:
Imagine a city as big as New York suddenly grafted onto North Carolina’s Coastal Plain. Double it.
Now imagine that this city has no sewage treatment plants. All the wastes from 15 million inhabitants are simply flushed into open pits and sprayed onto fields.
Turn those humans into hogs, and you don’t have to imagine at all. It’s already here.
A vast city of swine has risen practically overnight in the counties east of Interstate 95. It’s a megalopolis of 7 million animals that live in metal confinement barns and produce two to four times as much waste, per hog, as the average human.
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The two then examined the critical debate between industry and environmentalists over how much damage is done to the environment by letting hog manure decompose and then spraying or spreading it on crop lands, as was the approach of the existing agricultural system. The News and Observer cited studies to show that contaminants are getting into groundwater in unacceptable amounts, both through lagoon leakage and through rainwater that carries ammonia gas that the farms produce.
Sill says that when the Pulitzer entry was being prepared, Stith and Warrick told her she should include her name. “I thought, That’s nice, but it’s unlikely that we’ll win.”
1996—The
News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C., for the work of Melanie Sill, Pat Stith and Joby Warrick on the environmental and health risks of waste disposal systems used in North Carolina’s growing hog industry.
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The series that won for the Times-Picayune in 1997—its study of the world’s fishing industry—was a rare case of a gold medal-winner tackling global issues. But it did not start that way. The environmental writer Mark Schleifstein had originally thought about a much humbler fishing-and-the-environment feature aimed at the Gulf Coast alone. In the time-honored tradition of papers everywhere, the Times-Picayune editors had in 1995 launched a process encouraging story ideas from the staff. Their charge: “If you’ve got ideas for a story you want to work on for a week or two, tell us what it is,” he says. Of course, the reporters knew that the two-week guideline was meaningless. It would be longer if the project turned out to be significant. Scrolling through a list of stories he kept on his computer, Schleifstein came across a fishing industry proposal he had dropped earlier. When he had checked to see who covered fishing for the paper and might be able to team with him, he was told that the Times-Picayune did not cover fishing anymore. Upset, he gave up on the story, which would be too big to do alone. It was to have examined the connection between coastal erosion and poor recent fishing results in the Gulf. Too bad.
But with this new mandate, he brought it up again. Editors liked the idea of a look at the problems of Gulf fisheries. There was still no fishing reporter, but he was put on a team with Washington environmental writer John McQuaid and outdoors writer Bob Marshall, with political editor Tim Morris in charge. They were shocked when environmental scientists told them how bad things had gotten in the Gulf—with estimates that all of Louisiana’s wetlands would be gone in fifty years, eliminating the habitat for numerous Gulf species. Further, runoff from America’s heartland down the Mississippi, having been permanently channeled, was creating a “dead zone” for sea life farther and farther out from the mouth of the great river.
At the same time, the Gulf was being overfished, following the pattern in other troubled fisheries like New England and Alaska. But after the team had continued for about five months along that line, it reached a realization: “What was driving overfishing in the Gulf of Mexico was Japan,” the leader of an expanding worldwide fish market. Further, the shrimp industry so critical to Louisiana “was being flooded by aquaculture,” much of it Asian.
21 Editors were asked to let the team redesign the series as a look at a global crisis. And the team made its case persuasively. “There was an utter connectedness,” according to editor Jim Amoss, who approved the expansion. “To do it justice, we had to take a global look at it.” Because the story would be much more expensive to report, the
Times-Picayune went to the Newhouse organization, which approved adding budget.
The first day’s story, by McQuaid, noted how fishermen must deal with changing environments in pursuit of a catch. “It comes with the job,” he wrote. But lately they have been “helpless before the man-made changes tearing across the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a swath of wrecked lives and ecological havoc in their wake…. Part of a global sea change in fishing, the forces include disappearing fish and marshlands, a flood of cheap seafood imports and gill net bans. They threaten millions of livelihoods and the Gulf’s unique fishing culture.” A second McQuaid story that day highlighted the worldwide scope of the series. Headlined “Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?” it opened with a tale from another gulf, the Gulf of Thailand, where shrimp farming had caused coastal erosion and hurt other fishing industries.
The next day, Schleifstein targeted perils that existed for the oceans themselves. Headlined “The Dead Sea,” the story was accompanied by a chart dramatizing how severely fertilizer runoff through the Mississippi deprives the Gulf of oxygen. Stories ran from March 24 to March 31, with the last headlined “The Big Fix,” offering options, none of them easy.
The
Times-Picayune long-timers often date its coming-of-age to the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, when the Newhouse chain decided to use the city’s national spotlight to make a mark for the paper. “We spent a year getting ready for a week,” says managing editor Peter Kovacs. Amoss says of the convention’s impact: “It challenged some key people, and it had a residual effect of raising the bar journalistically in the news operation and making us more ambitious.”
22The 1997 gold medal was something of a surprise to Schleifstein because he had sensed that there was a bias in that particular prize against global stories. Still, he says, “This really was one of those strange times when the morning we went to press, I looked at John and I said, Can you believe what we’ve done? We really thought we had a good chance.”
Amoss, who joined the Pulitzer board several years later, believes that “Oceans of Trouble” benefited by being seen as a regional rather than a global story. “There’s a natural inclination in the American press to reward strong local journalism, and the Public Service award certainly plays to that,” he says. If the series “were just the
Times-Picayune setting out to write about the world’s fisheries, I think it would have been a totally different project, and probably wouldn’t have won.”
23But win it did. The
Philadelphia Inquirer was a finalist again, this time for a project on the widening gap between America’s rich and poor prepared by its team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele. The
Los Angeles Times was back as well for the probe of a murder case that led to revelations of inefficiency and mismanagement in the justice system.
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1997—The
Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its comprehensive series analyzing the conditions that threaten the world’s supply of fish.
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Blizzard, Fire, and Flood; What Next: Locusts?
In 1997, April was the cruelest month for the Red River town of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Indeed, a series of plagues bordering on the biblical swept the area. As editor Mike Jacobs and publisher Mike Maidenberg wrote to readers in an April 20 page-one editorial comment:
Grand Forks has sustained deep wounds, and there will be scars. On Saturday evening, as we write, the river continues its historic rise and fire is tearing at the heart of downtown. Thousands of buildings are immersed. Several of the town’s most historic structures are alight. There is no apparent power that can save them. These buildings were part of our past….
We must have wondered, all of us, whether any community anywhere had ever suffered so much, and yet we know that others have. Miraculously, we have been spared loss of life. Marvelously, we have found friendships we didn’t know about, as strangers came to offer labor, called to offer shelter, reached out to offer strength. Could it have been so in any other town? Yes, perhaps. But never on such a scale in our hometown. And it is in that spirit, from that indomitable strength, that our hometown will go forward. It is going to be a difficult time. Let us begin this morning.
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“We wanted to sound the theme of hope—not to say Woe is me, or Help us, but to look over the horizon and find the opportunity that could come from this disaster,” says Maidenberg. It would set the tone for the news coverage as well. Under extreme deadline pressure, the small staff produced well-crafted news stories that gave readers the information they needed for coping, while being consistently reassuring.
27From time to time staffers had to reassure themselves. The paper had been driven out of its building, first taking up quarters at the nearby University of North Dakota campus and later—when the university was flooded—moving to a public elementary school ten miles from town. For seventy-one days the Herald put out the paper from the elementary school.
In the past the paper had an almost neighborly relationship with storms, naming the state’s blizzards each year the way the National Weather Service names Atlantic hurricanes. It picked women’s and men’s names working up the alphabet. The paper had dubbed this 1997 storm Hannah. It had no idea how hard-hearted she would be. The same April 20 paper—the first published on presses at its Knight Ridder sister paper, the St. Paul Pioneer-Press—carried a lead story by Randy Bradbury under the headline “Downtown Fires Intensify Crisis.” It began:
Water continued to drive residents of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks from their homes Saturday. Too much water, and too little.
In Grand Forks, those who weren’t flooded out by the spreading waters of the Red River of the North were put on notice that the city soon would be unable to provide that most essential of services: safe drinking water.
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By the second day, the hopeful tone returned. Under the headline “A heart destroyed; Officials take a first look at the destroyed downtown,”
Herald contributor Monte Paulson wrote: “Clouds of steam rose lazily from the mounds of twisted metal and blackened brick lining Third and Fourth streets on Sunday afternoon as Grand Forks leaders struggled to figure out how their city will rise from the worst disaster it has ever faced.”
29Jacobs and Maidenberg learned one benefit of being part of a chain. Knight Ridder sent people from other papers and contributed $1 million from its corporate fund. The storm-hardened
Miami Herald staffers, particularly, provided ideas to help the Grand Forks paper plan coverage. The bulletin board approach for reaching victims in print—a technique pioneered during Hurricane Andrew—was also used in Grand Forks. Having Miami staffers around “saved us a lot of trial and error,” says Maidenberg.
30Jacobs reviewed the 1997 coverage years later:
I’m a small-town guy. I’ve always worked in small cities. And I had a fairly well-developed notion of the newspaper’s role in a small town. But nothing could have fused those points of view like this crisis did.
I always had thought of the newspaper as the “town nag.” Now I describe it as a friend that’s in a position to make helpful suggestions.
I think we’re a humbler institution after the disaster. We used to be haughty.
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Some lessons were less romantic—like how the honeymoon doesn’t last, even if a newspaper wins immediate public support for its disaster coverage.
Maidenberg calls it the golden time. “During a time of disaster, you and your readers are in sync. Everybody is really happy to get any scrap of news. But as time goes by, the newspaper has to write more critical kinds of things. It has to be a newspaper. When that happens, the golden time begins to ebb.”
It ebbed in a big way during what became known as the Angel Flap, when the
Herald published a story identifying the donor of $15 million in flood relief. The donor, McDonald’s heiress Joan Kroc, had sought anonymity. But the
Herald editors believed that so many people knew her identity already that it would be wrong to leave its readers out of the “secret.” Jacobs felt it was a simple matter: “Never hold the news.” A reporter tracked down the registration from the tail of an unmarked private jet that had flown into the area—the so-called N-number—and identified the visiting plane as Kroc’s. An article was prepared.
“When people found out we were going to run the story we got frantic calls from the mayors of both Grand Forks and East Grand Forks saying, You can’t run that story; she will be offended and we might not get any more assistance from her. I listened to them, and I made the decision that this was news,” Maidenberg says. Talk radio hosts turned against the paper and so did many readers. “People were jarred back to the understanding that newspapers are going to be newspapers,” he says. “Still, some people will always stay with you. They’ll say, ‘I’m angry with this, but I’ll never forget what you did after the flood.’”
32Jurors and Pulitzer board members liked that the
Herald remained scrappy as well as eloquent. From the perspective of James Naughton, then the president of the Poynter Institute and a public service juror that year, there was “an unspoken yet clear understanding that it would have to take something truly extraordinary to deflect us from picking Grand Forks.”
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1998—The
Grand Forks (N.D.)
Herald for its sustained and informative coverage, vividly illustrated with photographs, that helped hold its community together in the wake of flooding, a blizzard and a fire that devastated much of the city, including the newspaper plant itself.
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