‘Republic’ wins SPJ award for investigative reporting

The Society of Professional Journalists has given its Sunshine Award to an Arizona Republic and USA TODAY collaborative investigation into how special interest groups write copycat legislation at statehouses across the country.

The two newsrooms and the Center for Public Integrity were honored for their work on “Copy. Paste. Legislate.”

The Sunshine Award recognizes individuals and groups for making important contributions in the area of open government.

Judges said the work represented the first attempt to unearth and put a number to the bills debated in statehouses nationwide that are substantially copied from those pushed by special interests — and cast considerable amounts of sunlight onto a decidedly in-the-dark process.

The news organizations also won the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, one of journalism’s most prestigious honors.

The project began with two parallel, yet separate, investigations into the phenomenon known as model legislation. When legislators propose new laws, they don’t always write the bills themselves. Corporations, interest groups and lobbyists often write fill-inthe-blank documents and then offer them to state lawmakers.

One effort, started by reporters and editors at the Arizona Republic and USA TODAY, involved identifying how successful groups have been in pushing this legislation in statehouses. A team obtained model bills from special interest groups and measured how often language from those models ended up in real bills and laws across the country. They found them in all 50 states, with more than 10,000 copies in all.

The second approach, started by reporters at the Center for Public Integrity, involved analyzing legislation itself to organically identify suspected copies of bills. The two newsrooms joined forces to increase the impact of the investigation and reach a wider audience.

As part of the nationwide review, reporters identified legislation that had been copied from special interests, including laws limiting lawsuits by asbestos victims, expanding socalled heartbeat abortion restrictions and helping car dealers escape consequences for deadly defects.

Teams also identified and interviewed the legislators who most commonly sponsored special interests’ legislation. People in various states called for legislation to require more transparency about the origin of bill language.

Republic investigative editor Michael Squires helped lead the effort over more than two years. Republic data investigative reporter Rob O’Dell and USA TODAY’s Nick Penzenstadler wrote the lead story; a team of dozens of reporters, editors data analysts, graphic artists and others across the country contributed to the project.