John Tedesco

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

Express-News Reporter Brian Chasnoff uncovered a serious paperwork problem at the San Antonio Police Department in his front-page story today: 2,300 police reports documenting a wide variety of crimes have gone missing.

Brian wrote:

The San Antonio Police Department has misplaced more than 2,000 police reports ranging from thefts and car wrecks to more serious offenses of rapes and assaults, according to internal police documents obtained by the San Antonio Express-News.

Now, the Police Department is scrambling to “recover and correct the open cases so all reports are properly received, entered and accounted for,” according to an internal memo that a deputy chief sent last week to Police Chief William McManus.

Nice example of local investigative reporting.

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

Ben Popken and Meg Marco at the Consumerist wrote a 3,500-word muckraking blog post examining the business practices of Cash4Gold, the company that pays “top dollar” for your unwanted gold trinkets. The company’s pitch has aired in commercials nationwide — including during the Super Bowl.

Blogs are often viewed as venues that pilfer and riff off the media but don’t dig up original information of their own. Here’s an example that bucks that perception. Ben and Meg tested the company’s claims that it pays top dollar for your unwanted gold trinkets and discovered consumers can actually make more money selling their goods at pawn shops. Cash4Gold has sued the Consumerist, which is owned by Consumer Reports, but it hasn’t backed down.

It’s often more difficult to examine the practices of a company than a government agency. Open government laws apply to — you guessed it — government. Not businesses. So it’s much more difficult to get documents like candid internal e-mails that you’d usually be entitled to read at a government agency.

Ben and Meg relied partly on former employees at Cash4Gold. And they also know the activities of companies often intersect with government — and that’s where you can dig up nuggets of information. Here’s an example where they turned to government records to check the allegations of former employee Michele Liberis:

We also delved into Liberis’ specific allegations. At one point, for example, her post asserted that Cash4Gold “was temporarily closed recently due to health and code violations.” In its blog, Cash4Gold says this is “entirely false.” Yet a check with the Pompano Beach Fire Prevention Bureau turned up numerous citations at Aronson’s business location at 1701 Blount Rd., where Liberis worked. These included having no fire alarm system, fire extinguisher violations, blocked exits, exposed wiring, compressed gas cylinder violations, and items stored too close to electrical panels. Fire inspector Aaron Efferstein adds that they had three fires at the location, including one that set the roof ablaze.

The public values this kind of watchdog reporting. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a blog, a TV station, or a newspaper. Here’s a comment on the post that takes the cake:

I tried to find a more business like way to say I wholeheartedly support you guys for fighting back against Cash4Gold, but I couldn’t come up with one, so here was my first reaction:

“Fuck yeah!”

Thank you consumerist for stand up for consumers rights and not bowing down to legal pressure from Cash4Gold and other companies that deserve to burn in hell.

I love this site and it makes me proud that you guys are standing your ground and fighting for the consumers.

You guys simply reek of awesomeness.

What others are saying about watchdog journalism:

If you were under investigation by both mainstream journalists and bloggers, who would be easier to intimidate: One single newspaper, or dozens of bloggers?

Pulitzer-prize winner Alex Jones says the downfall of newspapers threatens investigative reporting, because papers have the legal muscle to shrug off threats of lawsuits.

Michael Masnick at Techdirt and Tim Lee at Bottom-up say Jones has it mixed up — newspapers dependent on advertising make ripe targets for intimidation. Lee looks at Jones’ example of a newspaper covering a Boy Scout scandal in Idaho:

Jones gets the implications of this story completely backwards. It’s only because newspapers are large, profitable, commercial enterprises that the kind of intimidation techniques he talks about work at all. Imagine it’s 2020 and the Idaho newspapers have all gone out of business, and they’ve been replaced by several hundred bloggers, most of them amateurs. A whistleblower discovers some evidence of wrongdoing by a prominent Mormon official. Is it easier or harder for the whistleblower to get the word out?

Obviously, it’s easier. She can anonymously email the evidence to a dozen different bloggers. Those bloggers don’t have to all prepare long “investigative journalism” write-ups; some of them can just post the raw documents for others to look at. Once they’re widely available, other bloggers can link to those raw documents and provide commentary. The official being criticized has three big problems. First, taking legal action will be vastly more expensive because he’d have to sue dozens of bloggers rather than just one newspaper. Second, many of those bloggers won’t have any assets to speak of, so he’s unlikely to recover his legal costs even if he wins. And finally, if he foolishly presses forward, he’ll discover our friend the Streisand Effect: the fact that he files the lawsuit will cause a lot more people to cover the original allegations.

My take: Newspapers are indeed difficult to intimidate — as long as the people at the top are difficult to intimidate. So Jones’ claim really depends on the caliber of the institution. I’ve had a good experience at the Express-News, where the publishers and editors haven’t been afraid to stand behind a story.

Masnick and Lee overlook the fact there might not be a Utopian world in the future where a dozen bloggers are bird-dogging a story. Maybe it’s just you, Mr. Part-Time Blogger with a day job and a family to feed, investigating the Boy Scouts. What do you do when you get that nasty cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer?

Even if a bunch of bloggers join the cause, following a complex story can be tricky if you have to read a bunch of posts to put all the pieces together. That’s really where newspapers shine — connecting the dots for readers with compelling writing, photos, graphics and resources on the Web.

The truth is, blogs and newspapers both have a role to play in getting information to the public. And blogs and newspapers can both be intimidated. It just depends on the people running them.

(Photo credit: Adrian van Leen for openphoto.net CC:PublicDomain)

What others are saying about watchdog journalism: