Hurricane Season IRE Awards Warning Signs Lessons from covering A look at the best investigative How alarm systems failed during Harvey, Maria and Katrina reporting of 2017 California wildfires and mudslides The Investigative Reporters & Editors Journal Second Quarter 2018 COVERING NATURAL DISASTERS A guide 2 The IRE Journal IRE Journal SECOND QUARTER 2018 2 Director’s Note A look at IRE’s diversity efforts and how you can help 3 IRE News + Ask IRE Pulitzer winners, broadcast initiatives and tips for learning to code 28 IRE Award Winners Learn about the best investigations of 2017 WEATHER INVESTIGATIONS 36 FOI Files How the first year of Hurricane Guide Trump’s presidency Lessons from Hurricane Harvey 4 shaped FOIA — and what’s on the horizon Uncounted deaths in Puerto Rico 10 37 Tips for reporting on uncertainty 16 Collected Wisdom Rana Sabbagh on why Arab investigative journalists need our California wildfires & mudslides support Alarm systems failed during natural disasters 18 On our website Climate change Learn how the Asbury Inside a 50-state investigation 22 Park Press investigated police misconduct across the state of New Jersey. Read our Q&A with Flooding reporter Andrew Ford at bit.ly/NJcops. 10 tips for finding high-risk dams 26 Second Quarter 2018 1 DIRECTOR’S NOTE MASTHEAD VOL. 41 | NO. 2 MANAGING EDITOR Diversity strengthens Sarah Hutchins ART DIRECTOR journalism — and IRE Larry Buchanan CONTRIBUTING LEGAL EDITOR Sam Terilli Women made up nearly half of the 340-plus speakers this year at our national CAR Conference in Chicago. We’ve come a EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Taylor Blatchford, John Sadler long way, indeed. Remember when the “ Women of CAR” could fit at one long table in a restaurant? As we celebrate that progress, we recognize that IRE and IRE the news industry itself have work to do in achieving diversity IRE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR in all facets: gender, race, geography and more. Our full-time Doug Haddix IRE staff, for instance, is comprised of seven women and four Doug Haddix BOARD OF DIRECTORS PRESIDENT men, with women holding several key leadership positions. Executive Matt Goldberg, KNBC-TV Our progress on racial diversity has not been as strong. While Director of IRE VICE PRESIDENT one training director is African-American, the rest of the staff and NICAR Cheryl W. Thompson, is white. The George Washington University For NICAR18, our staff worked intentionally to tap talented [email protected], TREASURER women and journalists of color as speakers. Nonwhite speak- Andrew Donohue, 573-882-1984 or Reveal from The Center for Investigative ers made up 30 percent of our Chicago roster. on Twitter Reporting Our IRE board and staff are committed to enhancing diver- @DougHaddix SECRETARY sity. These are some of our new and notable efforts: Ellen Gabler, The New York Times • We’ll soon be making race/ethnicity a required piece of EXECUTIVE MEMBER information for member profiles on the IRE website. One po- Lee Zurik, WVUE-TV tential answer will be ’decline to disclose,’ but we hope you will EXECUTIVE MEMBER help us get a more accurate baseline. In the past, two-thirds of Sarah Cohen, members skipped this category, so IRE has never known the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism racial diversity of its members. • Last summer, our board of directors added several jour- OTHER BOARD MEMBERS Matt Apuzzo, The New York Times nalists of color to key committees. We’ve also diversified our Ziva Branstetter, IRE Awards screeners, contest judges and regional planning Reveal from The Center for Investigative committees for national conferences. Our 13-member board Reporting has only one journalist of color, so efforts are ongoing to re- T. Christian Miller, ProPublica cruit a more diverse pool of board candidates. Steven Rich, The Washington Post • Thanks to Knight Foundation, IRE will provide 10 fellow- Jill Riepenhoff, Raycom Media ships annually for members of the Ida B. Wells Society for In- Nicole Vap, KUSA-TV vestigative Reporting to attend our conferences. Phil Williams, WTVF-TV • To train more journalists of color, we’ve expanded part- nerships at our Watchdog Workshops and conferences. Recent partners include the Asian American Journalists Association, The IRE Journal (ISSN0164-7016) is published four times the National Association of Black Journalists, the Nation- a year (Feb., May, Aug., Nov.) by Investigative Reporters al Association of Hispanic Journalists and The Association of & Editors, Missouri School of Journalism, 141 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211-0001. Periodicals postage LGBTQ Journalists. paid at Columbia MO and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The IRE • Generous donors have worked with IRE to establish di- Journal, Missouri School of Journalism, 141 Neff Annex, versity scholarships (bit.ly/irescholarships). If you’d like to Columbia, MO 65211-0001. support these efforts, consider a donation (bit.ly/iredonate). U.S. subscriptions are $70 for individuals, $85 for libraries and $125 for institutions/businesses. International Write “Diversity Fund” in the check note field or in the “spe- subscriptions are $90 for individuals and $150 for all cific fund” box online. others. Contact: 573-882-2042. Email: [email protected]. If you have suggestions on additional ways to diversify IRE, Contact IRE © 2018 Investigative Reporters & Editors, Inc. please reach out to me directly. We’re making progress, but [email protected] we’re nowhere near the finish line. w 573-882-2042 2 The IRE Journal ASK IRE IRE NEWS Q: I want to learn IRE members win 2018 Pulitzer Prizes Winners include Clare Baldwin of Reuters, John Archibald of Alabama to code. How do I Media Group, and the staffs of The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Press Democrat, The Washington Post, The Arizona Republic and USA To- get started? What day Network, and The Cincinnati Enquirer. Several members were also recognized as Pulitzer finalists. For a full list should I learn first? visit bit.ly/IREPulitzer18. A: Find a newsroom project that writing code can help you accomplish. Want to make a data visualization? Au- tomate some repetitive task? Scrape and analyze some data? Finding the right tool for the job can help you figure out which programming language is the best fit. “ Writing a Python script to clean this cam- IRE partners with Knight paign finance data so I can answer my re- Foundation in local TV porting questions” is, in my experience, a better approach for beginners than “I want training initiative to learn how Python works.” If you want to build a data visualization, Regional television watchdog workshops, for example, you might start with HTML, data boot camp fellowships for local TV journal- CSS and JavaScript. If your focus is data ists and a digital TV watchdog portal will be part analysis, you might look into R or Python. of a three-year project of Investigative Reporters There are a ton of online resources to help and Editors and the John S. and James L. Knight Save you get started and a large community of Foundation. the dates programmer-journalists who want to help The $390,000 grant to IRE is part of $2.6 mil- Don’t miss our 2019 conferences! you succeed. Definitely subscribe to the lion in new funding from Knight Foundation to NICAR-L listserv and check out the News five organizations. In its February announce- 2019 CAR Nerdery and Lonely Coders Club Slack ment, Knight Foundation said the initiative CONFERENCE teams. would “help strengthen quality journalism and March 7-10 in Another thing to consider: Are there innovation in local television newsrooms across Newport Beach, people in your newsroom who already use the country.” California a particular programming language? May- Other partners include Arizona State Uni- be start there — you’ll have a built-in sup- versity’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, 2019 IRE port network as you learn. Emma Bowen Foundation, Radio Television News CONFERENCE Directors Foundation and The Carole Kneeland June 13-16 in Cody Winchester, Project for Responsible Television Journalism. Houston, Texas Training Director Learn more at bit.ly/KnightTV. Second Quarter 2018 3 LESSONS FROM THE On Tuesday, managers started sending out emails: pack a bag, bring it with you. Hurricanes and tropical storms are something the newsroom STORM watches closely, but we don’t make those emer- gency plans until it really solidifies. Dave: We went through a similar process. Flooded buildings, frozen public Before I was at the Tribune I was at the Austin American-Statesman as a reporter and editor, so I’ve been through this drill a bunch of times records and finding sources: with hurricanes coming to the Texas coast. Like Brandi was saying, there’s this 48-hour window Three journalists reflect on where you’re watching the storm track, you’re starting to prepare. In my old newsroom, we had a list of supplies that reporters needed to covering Hurricane Harvey have ready to hit the road and cover a disaster. When it was obvious that it was going to make landfall and it was going to be a powerful storm, we sent two people to Houston a couple of days ahead. Fortunately, we got folks in early enough that they could start reporting as soon as they were able to leave their hotels. As I think anybody who’s covered these things knows, if you don’t get there ahead of time, you’re probably not going to hen Hurricane Harvey hit Hous- By Taylor Blatchford, get there. You’ll get stranded or you won’t be able ton in August 2017, it didn’t just IRE & NICAR to get into town. affect thousands of homes — it Lise: We had a ride-out crew here because we also took a toll on newsrooms knew our office was going to become cut off.