Small stories turn big

Keeping the beat

By Roy J. Harris Jr. | April 5, 2008

AS THE slide of advertising dollars and readers has forced newspapers to slash newsroom budgets, the natural targets for cuts tend to be the most expensive operations. Foreign bureaus went first. Lately, buyouts of seasoned reporters are raising new questions about the future of the historic backbone of great papers: "project" reporting, the type usually associated with Pulitzer Prize recognition.

To replace those homegrown investigations, one model about to be tested is a kind of "outsourced" reporting represented by such groups as Pro Publica, being set up by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. (Others include the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and soon perhaps, Global News Enterprises, a US-based international-reporting operation.)

In a study I've done of nearly a century of great American journalism represented by the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service — one of three original journalism categories created when the prizes began in 1917 — I found many great team projects, including the Globe's clergy sexual abuse investigation. But at least as often, the best public-service work of the year has resulted from young beat reporters, driven to pursue a "small" story that took unexpected, dramatic turns. They came up with their stories-of-a-lifetime only by sticking with it and testing the patience, and pocketbooks, of their editors and publishers.

Such cases of great reporting bubbling up from the beat are certainly evident over the last 50 years of Pulitzer winners. The Washington Post's 1999 prize grew from a police story, after several reporters followed up on a statistic that showed the city had by far the highest number of civilians shot by officers in the course of their duties. Their exposé revealed flawed training procedures and the use of a hair-trigger sidearm, and managed in two years to help slice the annual number of civilian fatalities from 32 to one.

In 1989, Philadelphia Inquirer medical-industry reporter Gilbert Gaul, while giving blood in an office Red Cross drive, became curious about what happened to the fluid after it flowed out of his arm. After pitching a modest feature story to his editor, Gaul set up an interview with a local Red Cross official, where the reporter's basic opening questions were met with the response: "Why are you asking these questions? We don't have to tell you that." Gaul's antennae sent off signals that didn't cease until he had uncovered a story that laid open one of America's stealthiest commodities markets, and eventually led to new regulation of the blood industry.

Five years earlier, Fort Worth Star-Telegram defense reporter Mark Thompson had his interest piqued by a trade-press report of an accident involving a product built by the city's largest employer, Bell Helicopter. Only through basic legwork did he unearth a serious design flaw, since repaired, that turned out to have cost the lives of nearly 250 American service personnel.

And let's not forget the two young Washington Post reporters in 1972, who were unencumbered by big-project notions as they covered a "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate complex. Encouraged by a demanding editor, they followed leads that were being ignored by the vaunted Washington press corps. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led to connections between the White House and a national campaign of political spying, among other crimes.

Beat reporting, too, is endangered by today's newsroom cuts. But the good news is that funding this daily, incremental reporting doesn't cost as much as underwriting big projects. And throwing more resources into beat coverage has the side benefit of keeping readers informed about basic courtroom, police, and city hall news.

Roy J. Harris Jr., a senior editor at CFO magazine, and former Wall Street Journal reporter, is author of "Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism."