Telephone Tip Rings Up Lengthy Investigation and Award Recognition

When business reporter Sam Kennedy received a telephone call questioning the academic policies of a local college, he had no idea the tip would spawn a lengthy investigation.

Kennedy, who writes for The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., embarked on a six-month investigation into the for-profit education industry, its recruiting practices and the interest-rate loans many students are struggling to pay back.

His investigative work paid off on the local level with an overwhelming positive reaction from the community. And it garnered recognition on the national level when Kennedy took home honors in the small newspaper category in the 2006 Gerald Loeb Awards.

BusinessJournalism.org recently asked Kennedy about the evolution of the story, the challenges he encountered and the business journalism lessons he learned as a result of his award-winning coverage.

How did you begin to uncover the details of this story and realize how many voices this story would ultimately include?

It wasn't immediately obvious that the story would be as comprehensive as it became, or that it would require the dozens of sources I eventually interviewed. The story began with a telephone tip from a former instructor of Lehigh Valley College. He was concerned mainly with what he described as unacceptable academic standards. He believed some instructors had been fired because they had called attention to this matter. But as I spoke to additional sources, other potential problems -- such as misleading recruiting tactics -- emerged. And each such issue necessitated its own independent sources. Initially, I thought I'd be able to turn this story around in a couple of weeks. The actual time turned out to be closer to six months.

Was there a document or source that became the driving force behind this investigation? If so, how did you go about landing this document or source?

Our investigation consisted of two main stories published about a month apart. For the first story -- a comprehensive look at the for-profit education business model -- our initial tipster was crucial in pointing us to additional sources. And those sources, in turn, pointed us to new ones. For the second story, which honed in on the high-interest Sallie Mae loans to which the college was steering its students, we relied mainly on the students. Their financial aid paper work provided the broad outlines of what had transpired. Then, insiders, including many former school employees who had contacted me after the publication of the first article, filled in the details.

What were the main challenges that you faced? For instance, how forthcoming was LVC's president and how did you overcome potential roadblocks?

The primary challenge was making sure we had multiple sources backing up every single accusation -- big and small, overt and implicit -- in the stories. Finding all these sources took time. Fortunately, my editors gave it to me. Then there was the problem of presenting this rather unwieldy body of information in a way that would be digestible for the reader. We made an effort to make it as anecdotal as possible.

LVC and its parent company Career Education Corp. were, indeed, a challenge to deal with. Sallie Mae, to a lesser degree, was too. Much of what they said stood in total contradiction to what current and former school employees and students were telling us. When writing about big, powerful businesses, you'd rather go to print with some sort of general acknowledgement from them that what you're saying has a degree of truth. But we didn't get anything like that. So to get beyond he-said-she-said journalism, we layered on one real-life example after another so there could be little doubt about what was going on. In our second story, we wove together the experiences of 10 students saddled with high-interest loans. With 10 students, we figured readers would be persuaded that we weren't making up this stuff.

What has been the overall community reaction to the story?

The reaction has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly positive. I've gotten hundreds of emails and phone calls, mostly from former students thanking The Morning Call for its work. More than a year later, I'm still getting the feedback. Just last week, I got two emails from former students. They wanted to know more about the ongoing state attorney general's investigation into the school and the class-action lawsuit against it.

Did your stories force LVC to change its policies in any way?

I've gotten contradictory reports from sources. Most have told me the school has taken steps to do things differently. Some have told me little has changed.

What did this investigation teach you as a business journalist?

There's a big push in this business to do computer-assisted reporting and to file Freedom of Information Act requests. CAR and FOIAs are certainly powerful tools. But investigations that happen not to involve CAR or FOIAs don't seem to get the same kind of respect as those that do, at least in certain quarters of this industry. My concern is this might inadvertently discourage another very practical way of discovering and documenting important issues in our communities -- that is, by stepping outside the newsroom and talking to people. In my case, I feel like I was able to dissect a rather complicated subject and get at something approximating the truth by gathering such a large and diverse body of first-hand accounts.

What did the recognition through the Loeb award mean to you and The Morning Call as a whole?

The Loeb award was a real boost. All along, my editors and I believed this was a subject with national importance. The Loeb award gave us outside confirmation. And, more importantly, it put our stories on a national stage. It extended their life. Since winning the Loeb, I have been repeatedly contacted by other media outlets and academics about our work.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism