We’ll take you behind the scenes for the week’s biggest stories

Journalists tell the best stories. Not just the ones you read in print or online every day, but the stories behind the stories: How they got the interview. The number of records requests filed to get to one important fact. Where they slept (tents, cars, floors) while covering floods, hurricanes and fires.

Each week, I’m going to share some of our best work. But I’ll also tell you the stories behind the stories. I want you to know how our journalists bring you the details, the descriptions, the images – the truth.

Let me know what you think, about these stories or anything else on your mind. Let’s make this a conversation. Because at the end of the day, we exist for you.

A security empire deployed guards with violent pasts across the USA. Some went on to rape, assault or kill.

G4S, the largest private security company in history, sells its armed guards as a high-quality, low-cost alternative to police. The company has made billions of dollars in contracts with federal, state and local governments around the country, as well as with private businesses of all kinds.

But with growth, violent guards, disgraced cops and people with mental illness have been hired onto the payroll. In some cases, these guards have beaten or raped the people they were supposed to keep safe.

Investigative reporters from USA TODAY and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spent a year reviewing thousands of police reports, court files and internal company documents. The reporting took our staff across the nation as we spoke to hundreds of employees and people impacted by the violence across the G4S operation in the United States. Reporters identified a pattern of shortcuts and oversights that have, in some cases, led to tragedy.

We tripled the size of our investigations team with this goal in mind: Be the champion of real people, and influence positive change.

I was a free/reduced-price lunch kid.

So at our morning news meeting, I brought up that nearly 1 million lowincome students could lose automatic access to free school lunches under a proposal from President Donald Trump’s administration that aims to limit the number of people receiving federal food stamps. And advocates believe even more could lose free meals. The Trump administration says the concerns are overblown. The deadline is Friday to comment on the proposal.

Growing up, I vividly remember having a different color lunch card from all the “normal” kids. (I sure hope that has changed.) And I worried about what would happen if my mom couldn’t pay the $7 a month for the reduced-lunch program. Food insecurity is a real problem in the United States, and this is a story worth watching.

White House calls let Kayla Mueller’s parents know their daughter wasn’t forgotten.

This week we got the news that terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a special operations raid. In his announcement, Trump spoke often of “Kayla.” Kayla is Kayla Mueller, a 26year-old aid worker who was taken hostage in 2013 as she left a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria. Al-Baghdadi reportedly had been her captor and rapist. She was held hostage for 18 months before militants announced her death in 2015.

Since that time, Arizona Republic reporter Karina Bland has worked with the family on stories and kept in touch in between, when there was no news and no hope. Monday, Bland called Kayla’s parents, Carl and Marsha. They told her about her nearly 20-minute call with Trump and how stunned they were to learn the raid had been named after their daughter. Bland got the interview because she had earned their trust, Marsha told Bland: “When Carl said it was you (on the phone), I was willing to talk. I haven’t been willing to talk much today.”

On deadline, you do what it takes.

With raging fires, high winds and blackouts, California is living a disaster movie. Is this the “new normal”? USA TODAY national correspondent Marco Della Cava was reporting on the fires.

Problem was, power to his Marin County home had been cut off Saturday as part of mandatory power shutoffs. Internet and cell service was out.

Della Cava grabbed his laptop, MiFi and Enzo, his English springer spaniel, and started driving. He parked in the first lot after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and spent the next two hours filing his story. He wrapped up just before his laptop battery died, and he headed back home to complete darkness.

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