In this episode, host Megan Calcote shares a conversation Katherine Fitzgerald and Eddie Keller had with Pat Beall of The Palm Beach Post. Her award-winning investigation, Dying for Care, won the 2015 Bronze Award in the Barlett and Steele Awards for the best in investigative business journalism. Beall shares some of her advice for young journalists, what sparked this investigation, and why she enjoys her work.
Transcript
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Megan Calcote: How to Cover Money: Inside the 2015 Barlett and Steele Bronze Award-winning investigation, Dying for Care.
Pat Beall: A lot of investigative reporting consists of sitting in a small room falling into a computer screen, looking at endless reams of data for weeks on end, not knowing if anything is going to come of it, not knowing if you’re going to write about it. If anything will happen. It didn’t say glutton for punishment sort of thing. I think it’s great. That’s why I keep doing it.
Calcote: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We are coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Megan Calcote, host of the How to Cover Money podcast. Today we go behind the scenes of the 2015 Barlett and Steele Awards with a look into the Brnoze Award-winning investigation, Dying for Care by Pat Beall of the Palm Beach Post. Pat’s investigation examined the effects of Florida’s decision to privatize inmate health care, and she made some shocking discoveries. Soon after privatization, inmate deaths spiked to a 10-year high, and the number of prisoners sent outside prisons for care dropped by 47%. Catherine Fitzgerald and Eddie Keller of the Reynolds Center sat down with Pat to discuss her award-winning work.
Eddie Keller: Alot of new and young reporters have trouble, like going through all this data and coming through the data, especially when there’s a large amount of it, and they might not even necessarily know exactly what they’re looking for. So like, what kind of tips do you have in your experience for people in situations like that?
Beall: Well, I think first of all, one of the things that’s crucial is that every reporter needs to know their way around an Excel spreadsheet. Great if you know MySQL too, but definitely you need to have just a feel for just being able to handle the spreadsheets to begin with, and you’d be surprised how many people don’t. As for what you find in the data, I think that’s such a great question, because I’ve had young reporters come into The Post and ask me about this. I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it. I know that’s so backwards, but we really didn’t know what we would find when we got the data. For all I knew, the data would show that there was no increase in mortality, or there might have been an increase in mortality in certain prisons, which would lead me to a different aspect of reporting. William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term “cyberspace”, also has a phrase that isn’t as well known, called “pattern recognition.” And really what you want to do is you want to be looking for patterns. You just don’t know what they’re going to be. But that’s really what we’re talking about, is pattern recognition.
Katherine Fitzgerald: So when you’re finding these patterns, but then also getting the personal stories from people who you’re talking to. How do you balance both of those when they’re kind of shaping your report at the same time?
Beall: I don’t think I do when I’m doing my reporting. I don’t think they’re balanced at all. I think, you know, sometimes I’m going to have all this data and I have no people, or I’ll have all these people and I’ll have no data, and obviously that’s not a story. I have to have both. You can talk all you want to about the numbers of people dying in Florida prisons, but if you don’t have that entryway into the story that’s really about a human being, then you know, you don’t, you don’t get very far.
Calcote: All this might sound familiar to those of you who tuned into the last episode of the podcast where we heard tips from Glenn Hall. As he discussed, if you have data, you need to find the people behind it who are the victims, the heroes and the villains in your story. In Pat’s case, she had plenty of data, but convincing the people involved to tell their stories was difficult.
Keller: What did that mean to you, and what kind of impact did you see from that when people finally opened up and were willing to share their stories and their information with you?
Beall: Well, you know, I have to tell you, first of all, this is podcast, so you can’t see my white hair, okay, but I will tell you I have white hair. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I did not think that there was anything I could read or research about something that a corporation might do to a human being or another human being might do to another human being that would surprise me. Maybe shock me, but not surprise me. The stories particularly taken as a whole, and particularly when I sat down and talked with individuals and more frequently, surviving family members of inmates who would die. It was devastating. It was absolutely devastating. I still have a very difficult time wrapping my head around the thought processes of people in a medical field who would ignore agony. I understand this diagnosis. I understand that, you know, that prisons are difficult places. I understand that inmates can be highly manipulative and that many of them are mentally ill, and that they are a very difficult population to deal with. I don’t get medical personnel who could watch people die, lingering horrific deaths, and write it off. This was an eye-opening experience for me. And again, you know, white hair, I thought that I was kind of past a lot of profoundly eye-opening experiences, but maybe not.
Fitzgerald: Now looking at the impact that this had, what does it mean to you to just see changes have started to happen because of your reporting?
Beall: Oh, it’s incredibly gratifying. I didn’t think anything would happen. I thought that the best we could do would be to raise awareness, and really that’s all you can do with investigative reporting. You do your best, you put the truth out there, and then people make decisions. DOC itself is, like most prison systems, a sprawling government agency that’s highly resistant to change. And also, I don’t think that very many people care about prisoners. You know, it’s very, very easy to lock somebody up and throw away the key. In fact, all of the Barlett winners this year were talking about invisible populations. So no, I had I had no hope. I had no hope, but I was just, I was astounded and and just very, very happy. And it doesn’t mean that all the bad things have stopped. It doesn’t mean that privatization still isn’t problematic, but at least it shows that there is concern and and that’s that’s really good to know.
Calcote: When Eddie and Catherine asked what it means to be an investigative reporter, Pat shared this advice.
Beall: There are so many different types of reporting, and each one of them has its own appeal to individuals with certain knacks and skills. You know, a lot of investigative reporting consist of sitting in a small room, falling into a computer screen, looking at endless reams of data for weeks on end, not knowing If anything is going to come of it, not knowing if you’re going to write about it, if anything will happen. It is a glutton for punishment sort of thing. But, you know, I do think that curiosity is great. I think that it’s important to have a capacity for outrage, because you never want to be jaded. And I think that, yeah, I think it’s great. That’s why I keep doing it.
Calcote: Thank you Pat Beall for spending time with us discussing your award-winning business investigation, and thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of the How to Cover Money podcast. If you’d like to read Pat’s investigation, Dying for Care, and I highly recommend it, make sure to visit businessjournalism.org. We’ll include links to Pat’s award-winning stories in the show notes for this episode, and if you’ve written a piece of great investigative business journalism, the Reynolds Center is now accepting submissions for the 2016 Barlett and Steele Awards for investigative business journalism. The awards feature a Gold Award of $5,000, a Silver prize of $2,000, and a Bronze Award of $1,000. Submit your work today by visiting businessjournalism.org and clicking Awards and Fellowship at the top of the page. Applications must be received by August 1, 2016 and submission is free. If you are in need of more business journalism training, the Reynolds Center can help. Visit businessjournalism.org to find articles and self-guided training, download our free eBook: Guide to Business Beat Basics, or sign up for our weekly newsletter. The newsletter will keep you up to date on training opportunities from the Reynolds Center year round. If you enjoy the How to Cover Money podcast, make sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud, and while you’re there, we hope you’ll leave us a rating or a review to let us know what you thought about this episode. Support for the How to Cover Money podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Join us next time for more tips from Glenn Hall on how to build a winning business investigation.
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