This week How To Cover Money kicks off Season 2: Tips from Top Journalists. Co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard caught up with Michael Grabell of ProPublica to talk about his recent investigative reporting series on the dangers temporary workers face in the United States. Grabell’s series was awarded the 2014 Barlett and Steele Award. This episode offers some tips on data journalism, taking on big stories, and organizing your work to include investigative work in your daily reporting schedule, even when you’re not a full-time investigative reporter.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from top journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money, data journalism and how to investigate the big stories.
Michael Grabell: We were trying to figure out if temp workers do face greater risks at work than regular workers.
Maynard: Welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard and with me is my co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a reporter and anchor with KTAR News in Phoenix and an alumni of the Cronkite school. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hello Micki.
Maynard: Today we’re kicking off series two of our podcast, and we want to thank everyone who joined us for Series 1. If you missed any of those episodes, you can catch up on iTunes and SoundCloud. Series 2 features tips from top journalists. We’re talking to a variety of journalists to get ideas for our listeners on understanding how business journalism works, and some suggestions for how you can do your jobs better. Mark, tell us about today’s guest.
Remillard: To kick off our second series here, we’re talking with Michael Grabell, a reporter with ProPublica, that’s the nonprofit investigative reporting center that’s won a number of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Michael was the 2014 gold medal winner in the Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism. Those are the awards that are overseen by the Reynolds Center. And Micki, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Barlett and Steele.
Maynard: Don Barlett and Jim Steele are the famous investigative reporting team. They won several Pulitzer Prizes at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They also worked for Time Magazine and most recently, at Vanity Fair. Every year, the Reynolds Center gives out awards for investigative business journalism packages and stories. And in fact, the entries for the 2015 awards are now open, and you can find the application on our website, businessjournalism.org. Michael and his team at ProPublica won the award for a pretty dramatic series on the dangers faced by temporary workers.
Remillard: Yeah, we asked Michael to explain why the team decided to look into the problems faced by temporary workers, and actually, we found out that temporary workers are not just office workers and people employed by Kelly girls. They’re a big factor in manufacturing across the United States, and they actually get hurt quite often.
Grabell: We were trying to figure out if temp workers do face greater risks at work than regular workers. This is something that you can’t get from federal statistics, even though you can get safety data on pretty much every industry in the country. Temp staffing is not one of them. We saw that temp workers are a far greater risk than regular works to get injured on the job. It was about 50% depending on what state you looked at, 50% higher rate of being injured. In every database we looked at amputations, temp workers were three times more likely to suffer an amputation on the job than a regular worker.
Maynard: The project that Michael worked on reflects one of the biggest trends going on in journalism these days. It’s called data driven journalism.
Remillard: Yeah, basically, you do a really deep dive into different kinds of data, and you try and find trends and story ideas from it. Michael told us that this project came from a conversation with his editor.
Grabell: If you look at the trend in industry for the last 20 years, the injury rate has been going down. When we looked at the data for temp work, it was actually going up. So this started out as a data project of something we wanted to really analyze the data. And in the meantime, I went out and did some reporting, and was just sort of surprised by what I saw. And wanted to, you know, we decided we should just document it. We went about and asked the 25 largest states in the country for their databases. Many of them told us that we couldn’t get the data because it was health information, and therefore it wasn’t public, or they didn’t track industry. They didn’t track the data, essentially in the way that we needed them to do it, where you could identify a temp worker.
Maynard: So they had to go with a number of states where they could get the data, and what they found in that data was really horrifying. You can see everything from Michael’s project on our website, but I have to warn people that these are some pretty terrible stories.
Grabell: We have gotten additional files of really gruesome horrible situations. A man being pulled into a hummus grinding machine, the man being buried alive in sugar. In cases where these weren’t just accidents that happened. These were the sugar factory had removed the lid that removed the safety device 13 days before this man’s death.
Remillard: Which I feel like, if you came across something like that, as you’re doing this data and you’re compiling it. If you came across something and saw that a man died 13 days after someone removed a safety device, I feel like that’d be such a smoking gun, you know, looking at this. But it’s got to be so difficult as you’re compiling all these datas, and he did a lot of work in California and Florida, partly because that’s almost 50% of the U.S. population right there to look at. So he could get a pretty good idea. But if you’re looking at all that, I mean, you’ve got stacks and stacks of data, or spreadsheet after spreadsheet, probably of data on your computer. And so going after a project like this has just got to be absolutely daunting. So we asked Michael to give us a few tips on some of the best ways to get into it. And here’s what he told us.
Grabell: So number one, you would need to get the data. You need to see that the problem that you are, that you think, exists. You need to find out what data exists. That I can prove this? And can I prove this is a growing trend, a trend that people don’t, maybe knew about but don’t realize the scale of. Number two, you need to get on the record victims. And the third tip I guess I give is write early. Some of the first drafts of the stories that I wrote came the minute I got back from a reporting trip. I sat down and wrote down everything I saw. And that, I think, kept it with a sense of urgency that I wouldn’t have had if I had waited nine months later to remember what it felt like to be similar.
Maynard: You know, that tip about writing early runs counter to what a lot of us learned in our careers, that you don’t want to write early because you don’t want to give away what you’re doing. You know, you don’t want to leave breadcrumbs that somebody else could follow. But my sense is that the package that Michael wrote is just so complicated and so involved that, you know, maybe he could have written one story about a guy being buried in sugar, and everyone would have said, “Gosh, that’s terrible,” but they never would have known that this big situation with temporary workers was lurking out there.
Remillard: Right exactly, they would maybe see that as one isolated event and not really extrapolate that into this broader issue that’s going on with temp workers in general. That’s certainly something that could happen. And I think also you’d have a huge head start if you’ve been compiling data from these two states for so long, and public records or requests take forever, sometimes months, sometimes years, honestly, depending on how much they want to withhold that information. But yeah, so it can take a long time. So he might have, you know, 15-month head start, potentially, or maybe more.
Maynard: Right. And the whole idea of getting people on the record to talk about this, that’s one of the hardest things you can do. Because a lot of times we get emails, you know, people should know that reporters get emails all the time from folks that want something investigated. And right now, I’ve been getting bombarded with emails about the Rothschilds. Well, I’m in Phoenix, and I cover business journalism, and I’m not really the person who’s going to go investigate something to do with the Rothschilds, but people will throw these things out there, like darts at a dartboard, hoping it will stick with somebody. The best stories are not like that. They’re not stories that people are giving away to you, and you have to go find people to interview, and sometimes you have to spend weeks and months talking them into going on the record. And then, obviously, when you get them to go on the record, it’s a huge victory, and it can be the turning point in your story.
Remillard: Yeah, that’s a really hard thing to do is because you have especially. a victim, you have to come across so subtly, and so appealing to their obviously, maybe sensitive nature, that they are a victim, and it’s really hard to get someone on the record. And I think the best thing you can do is just trying to open up your empathy and, you know, try and get them to trust you, that you’re going to represent them, you know, fairly and whatnot. Obviously you can’t be saying, “I’m going to represent you good or represent you well,” but fairly at least, you know. So I think that’s that’s a hard thing to do, but it’s necessary.
Maynard: One of the things that I’ve really treasured about my year as director at the Reynolds Center is the opportunity to get to know Jim Steele. And Jim Steele if, when you speak with him, you feel like you’re the most important person in the world while you’re talking to him, and I have a feeling if he uses that tactic with everyone he speaks with, that’s why he’s won the Pulitzer Prizes and the awards that he and Don Barlett have won. And we asked Michael to talk about what it meant to win the Barlett and Steele Award, and also the kind of philosophy that an investigative reporter has to have going into a big project like this.
Grabell: Well, if we’re going on this route, we can’t just throw up our hands and say, globalization, income inequality, these big forces and phrases that nobody can define and nobody really thinks we can control. And what Barlett and Steele did was, that they were kind of the first to show that these things that were happening were not just these amorphous forces that we’ve come to accept. These were policy decisions.
Remillard: It can be really difficult to do something like this, such a big data project like this that takes weeks, months, you know, maybe years, to put together this kind of information. And I think that a lot of young reporters think about wanting to get a story like this where you see impact and you see, like I said, the smoking gun. You look and see this guy died 13 days following the removal of a safety device. That’s crazy to me to do that, and I think a lot of reporters really want to grab those stories, but it’s it can be really difficult, obviously, to just working in the business that we work in now. It’s different than it was 20 years ago. Like for me, I mean, I turn three stories a day, and if I get an hour or two a day to start following up on some public records requests and things like that, it’s really challenging to take on a story like this, unless you’re designated to be this kind of a reporter. But maybe there’s some ways you know that we can, that journalists can do this.
Maynard: Well, I think it’s be persistent. And if you see an idea, I call it gathering string. And I I just think of a big ball of string, and you have to start winding around your fingers, and you might knot on another piece of string, and the ball gets a little bigger. I mean, for me, it’s bookmarking things. When people see me, favorite something on Twitter, you know, I like the story. It doesn’t mean that it’s like my favorite story ever, it means I’m saving this link because it might lead to something else. And the same thing with things I see on Google News, the same thing I see with articles that I read. I’m always collecting things thinking it might lead to something someday. And that’s absolutely what Michael Grabell has done. It’s what the best investigative journalists have done. You just have the attitude that, you know, I will do my day job. I will write one line headlines for the Apple Watch, but at the same time, I would like to work on a project like this. And when you start to gather that information, and it adds up to something, you know, you could end up winning the Barlett and Steele Award someday.
Remillard: Yeah, and if you are like a daily turn reporter like that, and you find something that you think is worth looking into, one just super practical piece of advice, one thing that I like to do is I keep Excel spreadsheets for each story that I’m working on with the contact name of with a page for each contact name, and then I write down what happened when I talked to them. Because it might be two weeks before I talk to them again, just because that’s the next time I get a chance, or that something develops. And just a practical piece of advice, it’s a great way to kind of keep yourself organized, because you had that’s, I think that’s key on a big story like this. After six months, you start forgetting what you did three months ago, and you need to have that written down, or you need to have a way to go back and find that. So I think that’s just another practical piece of advice.
Maynard: The other thing is, too, you know, you can keep an Excel spreadsheet, or you can just write it down. There’s a police reporter in Chicago that Mark and I both admire, named Peter Nikias, and Peter keeps a notebook of incidents day by day by day in Chicago. He can see where crime took place. He can see what kind of crime took place. He can see the time of day the crime took place. And if you flip through your notebook after a few weeks or months, you might see those patterns emerge just as Michael Grabell.
Remillard: We want to thank Michael Grabell for talking with us. Next time, we’ll be hearing from Ben Bergman, who’s a very familiar voice on Public Radio. We’ve done a lot of podcasts talking about the difference between print and radio and covering business for radio, and he’s got a lot of great advice for us on how to do that.
Maynard: That’s it for the first episode of Series Two of How to Cover Money. Support for our podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you’re interested in getting more tips and story ideas, sign up for our daily newsletter. Each morning we’ll send you Must Read Money stories, and you can use those to inspire your own pieces and get a jump on the day. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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