Investigative journalism event highlights reason for commitment to the craft.
Some of the most important stories ever told in journalism fell into a reporter’s lap in the least sexy of ways.
Mind-numbing hours spent barreling through spreadsheets, examining public records and grooming data on a reporter’s end can mean criminal investigations, federal fines or legislative changes on a public figure’s end.
It’s a process that’s been made more glamorous, or at least more well-known, by cinematic events like Spotlight — which chronicled the reporting The Boston Globe’s investigative team bound through to uncover a child molestation cover-up by the local Catholic Archdiocese — and by events similar to those hosted through Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College, The Kennedy Lecture Series, The Post and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism this week.
To backtrack, Will Drabold, The Post’s director of editorial initiatives, brought three of journalism’s investigative big-leaguers — Jim Neff of The Seattle Times, Ellen Gabler of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Jim Schaefer of The Detroit Free Press — to a crowd of eager journalists both in and outside of The Post’s staff on Monday evening.
The conversation, of course, surrounded both the stories those journalists had told (hard ones, important ones and award-winning ones) and why young journalists such as ourselves should be striving for something similar. It was appropriately dubbed “The Future of Investigative Reporting.”
But why do we need telling twice that this caliber of reporting matters, especially when we’ve seen direct impact as a result?
That brings me to another unsexy reality of newsrooms: financing.
The era where journalists can pour expenses into opening up Freedom of Information Act cases to release records — or into years of research while still receiving a paycheck — is dwindling. Journalists might have to pay for records on their own dime (I spent a good chunk of my birthday cash paying off fines to PACER.gov, where you can access federal and district court dockets), or find themselves working off-the-clock to adequately report their laborious research.
Knowing that, it never hurts to be reminded why we shouldn’t put down our pens and shut our laptops indefinitely.
It’s not that reporters want to be Batman, or that we believe our jobs are to find negativity in an otherwise positive world – it’s that we want to find the truth, and that some reporters have changed lives by doing just that.
Emma Ockerman is a junior studying journalism and editor-in-chief of The Post. Want to talk to her? Email her at eo300813@ohio.edu or tweet her @eockerman.
