A legacy of public service journalism
Shines light on injustice, need for reform
Shortly after taking his first steps as a free man in almost 18 years, Robert Mcclendon stopped on the street and looked up at the clear blue sky.
Wearing a “Hello Truth” T-shirt, he wiped away tears, and pointed at two Dispatch reporters.
Mcclendon was freed after being convicted of a rape he didn’t commit, following the newspaper’s Test of Convictions investigation that found deep flaws in the state’s DNA testing and evidence retention systems. The newspaper helped arrange DNA testing for 30 inmates who claimed they were innocent.
“I’d still be in that cell if it weren’t for you guys,” he said that day in August 2008. “The newspaper gave me my life back.”
Mcclendon would be followed by six others. The men served a combined 138 years in prison.
State lawmakers also approved a wrongful conviction law that has prevented an untold number of others from having their lives taken from them by the justice system.
Mcclendon, who celebrates the 12th anniversary of his release this week, said he and the other men are living proof of how newspapers can change the world for the better.
“I will forever be grateful for the Columbus Dispatch,” said Mcclendon, who lives on the East Side of Columbus.
“I know the newspaper has fought for regular people for a long time. “
That fight has been part of the Dispatch’s history since it was first printed in 1871.
The newspaper’s commitment to investigative and enterprise projects, especially in the past few decades, has exposed injustices, prevented abuse and corruption, held people in power accountable, and saved lives.
Sometimes those stories are done in a few days and other projects continue for years. Sometimes the work is done by one reporter and photographer, but more often it involves a team of journalists who combine their skills to handle the reporting, writing, editing, visuals and presentation.
They can involve reviewing databases with millions of records or using information to create one. Sifting through tens of thousands of paper documents. Inserting a reporter in someone’s life for a week, a month or a year. And interviewing dozens or even hundreds of sources.
The work requires a commitment, an investment of time and money, that starts with the publisher and top-level editors.
As the newspaper continues to celebrate its 150th anniversary, Mcclendon and many others are a reminder of newspaper’s legacy and continuing mission to public service journalism.
In just the past five years, in-depth Dispatch stories have had a profound effect on its local community as well as people around the state and country.
They include reporters from the Dispatch and other Gannett newspapers uncovering millions of unserved criminal warrants across the United States. That effort, just in Ohio alone, led to reform of the statewide warrant system that has helped law enforcement find and arrest suspects wanted for serious crimes.
The newspaper illuminated life on Sullivant Avenue, an area plagued by poverty, crime and prostitution. The project helped city leaders see the need for more investment to improve quality of life.
It exposed a local scam where companies and individuals preyed upon foreclosed homeowners who were cheated out of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The stories led to several administrative reforms to protect vulnerable people from being scammed and led to one man being indicted.
It investigated the alarming rise of prescription drug costs and the hidden forces that control those costs. The three-year investigation has led to numerous changes in how Ohio Medicaid officials administer prescription drugs, and to one of the largest lawsuit settlements in state history that serves as a warning to pharmacy benefit managers taking advantage of the public.
It exposed the rising number of firefighters around Ohio and the nation who were diagnosed with cancer from the carcinogens and toxins they face on the job. The project was told through they eyes Mark Rine, a former Columbus firefighter who has terminal melanoma and has spent years warning other firefighters of the cancer risk. The project led to hundreds of departments upgrading protective equipment and changing their procedures.
“It’s helped lead to a culture change among firefighters,” Rine said. “It saved lives, it will continue to save lives.”
This year, the newspaper examined spending at the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, where taxpayer money accounts for about 20% of the annual budget. The investigation found that the top two zoo officials used resources for personal gain, including allowing family members to live in zoo-owned houses for below-market rents and using tickets paid for by the zoo for family and friends to attend events.
The investigation led the two top zoo officials to resign and sparked several investigations that are still ongoing.
And most recently, Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine signed a new law that will make serious hazing a felony beginning this fall. The law was introduced as a result of an audio series called Broken Pledge that detailed the hazing-related deaths of two central Ohio college students.
“These wrongdoings have real effects on residents, whether it be their health or their homes,” said Dispatch Managing Editor Kelly Lecker, who oversees the newspaper’s projects work. “The staff takes the responsibility to shine a spotlight on these misjustices very seriously.”
When Michael Berens walked into the Columbus Dispatch newsroom as a copy boy in 1981, there was already culture of investigative reporting in place.
He would learn from talented reporters who specialized in unearthing powerful stories in a pile of public records, cultivating sources who helped them expose corruption and identifying wrongdoing or broken systems that led to long-term investigations.
But it was Berens, who would become one of the best investigative reporters in the nation, that took the Dispatch’s investigative projects reporting to a higher level.
His first major investigation started in 1988 and culminated with a rolling series of stories in 1989 that exposed Columbus narcotics detectives who were owners of rental properties that were operating as crack houses. The officers weren’t directly involved in the drug operation, but knew their properties had been transformed into drug houses. The stories also detailed questionable tactics and actions by drug informants used by the narcotics division.
The reporting led to many changes in the police narcotics bureau, ranging from how raids were conducted to the gathering of evidence, and eventually
led to the police chief retiring following the scandal.
“It was a turning point for the Dispatch within our community in that we showed we would hold anyone accountable,” said Berens, who now works for the Thomson Reuters news organization as an investigative reporter.
Berens would later be named a Pulitzer finalist in the Beat Reporting category in 1995 following a Dispatch series called “Cash Register Justice.” The investigation exposed how Ohio’s municipal court system had created modernday debtor prisons where cash could buy freedom. The series focused on how the poor were locked up for crimes that are not legally punishable, drunken drivers paying up to $1,500 to keep convictions off their records, low prosecution rates for domestic violence and how alternative sentencing often wasn’t used.
He would then go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for the Seattle Times in 2012.
“The Dispatch has always punched above its weight with projects and investigative journalism,” Berens said. “It continued to give a voice to the people and hold people accountable long after I left.”
When Berens left the Dispatch for the Chicago Tribune, then-dispatch editor Michael F. Curtin wanted to continue the paper’s legacy of profound projects.
But he wanted a leader who could arm more of the Dispatch staff with the computer assisted reporting skills and other investigative tools that often anchor the newspaper’s signature work.
Curtin found that leader in Doug Haddix, who joined the Dispatch as it’s projects leader in 1998 after working at newspaper in Scranton, Pa., which was about a third of the Dispatch’s size.
Curtin, who would go on to become the Dispatch Company’s president and chief operating officer, said the paper had resources to devote to reporting. “And I wanted to invest some of that money into a project infrastructure that would position the paper to produce that kind of work for decades. And Haddix was the kind of smart, team builder who passed on the fundamentals to many talented journalists.”
Haddix spent his first six years creating different teams of beat reporters for individual projects based on the topic and their expertise.
He then created a formal projects desk with dedicated investigative reporters beginning in 2004 until he left the Dispatch in 2008.
The many public service projects published under Haddix watch included a 1999 series called ‘Appalachia: Hollow Promises’ that showed how the state had failed Ohio’s most poverty-stricken areas and prompted reforms; a 2005 series titled ‘Brokered Dreams’ that exposed the eventual national foreclosure crisis years before the mortgage industry collapsed; an investigation called ‘The ABCS of Betrayal’ that uncovered how teachers with who had histories of abusing students where still in the classroom and reforms started within days; and the 2008 DNA series that helped free innocent men.
Aside from the long-term projects Haddix led the effort for the newspaper to collect data or create original data sets from public records that would be transformed into searchable databases from Dispatch.com. Among the first were an agriculture subsidy database that showed farmers weren’t always benefitting the most and a state employee salary database where, for example, women could use to the data to prove the were underpaid compared to men in similar jobs.
Haddix left the Dispatch in 2008 for the Investigative Reporters and Editors nonprofit journalism organization where he was a national trainer for three years and it’s executive director for four years.
Despite the financial troubles and downsizing of news organizations around the U.S. Haddix said it’s vital that the powers in journalism continue investing in in-depth investigation and enterprise work.
“Shining a light where powerful people don’t necessarily want the light is the only way in a free democracy,” Haddix said. “It’s how the public can find out what is happening and what they can do about it to make real change for the better.
The ideas for the for Dispatch projects and investigations can come from reporter’s beats or coverage areas, readers, or lawsuits and public records.
Reporters who had children immersed in youth sports spent most of 2010 documenting the physical toll and injury risks, the chase for scholarships that don’t exist for most, the financial burden on families and pressures that ultimately cause kids to quit playing. The series helped lead to a new law aimed at protecting children who may have suffered concussions.
Reporters covering education in 2012 discovered that officials for the Columbus City Schools had erased millions of student-absence records to improve attendance rates and proficiency test scores and boost the amount of state financial aid. The in-depth reporting went on for almost two years, prompted investigations and resulted in many district officials being disciplined.
And the idea for a 2015 project called ‘Silent Suffering’ began years before, when the newspaper published a brief about a man who killed himself by jumping off a downtown building. It eventually led to a series that documented the suicide epidemic around Ohio, the need for improvements in the mental health system and the stigma around talking about mental health problems.
Shortly after the series was published, the newspaper held a community forum at Ohio State University that was standing-room only, filled with people eager to share their own stories.
Alan Miller, the Dispatch’s executive editor, was standing in the back of the room when a woman who had driven 12 hours to attend, told him she hadn’t spoken about her son’s death until reading the Dispatch stories. She had also considered taking her own life.
“Thank you for saving my life,” the woman told Miller.
It was a moment that often reminds Miller why it’s important that the Dispatch and other news organizations continue its mission of public service journalism.
“We were told our journalism helped save lives,” Miller said. “I can’t think of a more-powerful reason to ensure we continue the legacy of that kind of reporting.” mwagner@dispatch.com @Mikewagner48