and the seafood industry and failed schools for minority students. this is about one hour and 40 minutes. >> good morning, everyone. i'm tom patterson, the interim director of the shorenstein center. this is the follow-up to last evening's goldsmith awards program. event this part of the where we have a finalist for the goldsmith investigative reporting award take us a little bit behind the story. how they came to it. some of the difficulties they faced, and then we can all have a conversation about these stories and investigative reporting generally. i would like to thank the greenfield foundation which underwrites the goldsmith awards. they have supported it through its 24 years unveiling way -- unfailing. it would not be the type of program it is without that marvelous family. what i am going to do, i will introduce you to the panelist. i think i will do them one at a time when you are up, rather than going down the line. by the time they come up, you sometimes forget which one they were. so, i will attach a little biography to the introduction. we will start with robin mcdowell, who was the goldsmith part of the team that won the goldsmith investigative reporting award last night from the associated press for their terrific story "seafood from slaves." it documents the extensive use of slave labor and the harvesting of seafood in an area of southeast asia. oft resulted in the fraying more than 2000 -- freeing of more than 2000 enslaved fishermen as well as arrest, legislative action and the like. robin is representing that team afford -- of four. 20 years in southeast asia, covering virtually every country in that region, not only looking into abuses of this kind, but also the difficulties of for instance -- in myanmar, the transition to civilian rule governing tsunami. the whole range of things in that region of the world. robin: -- tom: give us insight. of livinguess as part in that region for such a long time we had heard stories and seen stories for a long time about the fishermen who had gone and basically been abused at the -- sea. it was so common to these he -- to hear the stories, it was something we almost did not want to look into. it is like looking into the mafia or something. everyone knows this, it has been written about. decidedtain point, we -- like, ok, this is such a common story. everyone in southeast asia knows about it, why is there no outreach? that is pretty much where we started. -- felt likeelse if we do not look into it and try to make the world care, we were not doing our jobs as journalist. that is where it started. we started talking to -- my colleague, margie mason said what if we link it to the american dinner table? that seemed like an eb -- easy, obvious way to do it. as soon as we started talking to groupsup -- labor rights and people who had been working with the fishermen for years, they basically said it is really almost impossible. everybody knows that this is probably linked to the u.s. government -- but because the documents were falsified -- if you found someone on a slave put onto aship is refrigerated cargo ship at sea that with clean fish. that fish goes to the market and get auctioned off. one fish and find say, that fish is actually -- so. it was kind of a slow process of trying,ep trying, keep and i don't know how much more you want to go into this. end we found an american company that said there was a specific species of fish that, while they pretty much felt they control the product that was ending up in the -- in america, they were concerned about this one particular species. whichai fishing fleets were notorious for their use of slave labor had control of the waters where the fish -- the migratory pattern of that fish. our goal at that point was to find someone catching the fish, and then we can probably make the link. that kind of fell to the wayside. i spent the first four days interviewing guys who had been horrifically abused. my main question was, did you catch that fish? certain point we realized, a, they were catching pretty much every fish. eventually we were able to track it to thailand. through custom records to america. tom: thank you. another of the finalist last night, one of the finalist last night was the guardian u.s. for the counting. after the killing at ferguson, it became clear that coming by data information on police killings was very difficult. the official records were spotty. there was not, in fact, a good record on these killings. the guardian began to put the data together. database to a document these killings -- the circumstances of them. that reporting along with similar reporting by the washington post prompted the fbi and the justice department to --nge the way that there they are collecting data in this important area. representing the guardian team is john swain. he joined the guardian two years ago. before that, seven years with the daily telegraph. mostly in the u.s. reporting from new york and washington. john? john: i arrived a few days after michael brown's death. really i wanted -- catherine is in the u.s., she is the editor and chief of the guardian, she was disturbed by the fact there was no records of these deaths. she said if the government is not going to do this, we should. it was a daunting task. i didn't think we could do it. we set off at the start of 2015 recording -- reporting the death. the project became bigger. the problem was wider than no database. claims by detectives that police were racially biased cannot be tested against statistics. there was no comparison available between death rates in different cities, states, counties. this live debate is going on national be of great importance was restricted to speculation and wild claims from either side. we started this project. we recorded account. by the end of the year we felt we had an accurate rate of death caused by law enforcement in the u.s.. we told stories of people who died in troubling circumstances and the officers who kill them. we presented analysis exciting trends in the data on who was killed, how they were killed, and wife -- why. by the end of the year we had a tally of more than 1100, about 2.5 times the total reported by the fbi volunteer program. director, came in october, said in light of these findings, said it was unacceptable that we at the washington post had better data than elected officials. we agreed. he and two senior staff announced by the end of the year that they would overhaul the system and begin counting more than just shooting deaths. the justice department euro of justice statistics, which is a little-known division of the department of justice said they a separate program that would draw on our data and other public data and follow our methodology that differed drastically from the government. the fbi system, as it had been, was voluntary. it relied on every department in the country, if they chose, reporting deaths caused by officers that your. many did not. -- officers that year. many did not. instead, we had a proactive system. media, publiccial records, we made calls to coroners and police averments and found the death -- police departments and found these deaths ourselves. the new department of justice would proactively contact these regional authorities to confirm deaths they themselves had spotted. rather than relying on the voluntary system. weding the 1100 deaths produced investigatory articles to go with the project. analyzing the soundings -- the findings -- there were troubling trends. 30 people by the time we had reported, shot dead in moving cars, despite contemporary police. experts saying, that is not what you do. there is no need to shoot into a moving car if you're a police officer. you can get out of the way. it is not worth shooting a burglar or a car thief. officiallyngs were ruled suicide, despite actually having been shootings by officers. this was a contingent -- conditions area, but not explored properly. manufacturers insisting it is almost impossible to die after a casing -- tasing. these trends were emerging from data that had not been collected before. we found that all of these issues around the use of lethal force by police were worthy of more examination than had been given before. a lot of these trends were showing racial disparities. by the end of the year we found that young black men were killed -- killed at nine times the rate in 2015. once you adjust the violation size of other americans, they were twice as likely as white people in the database. each entry in our system presented crucial contact information on whether the person killed was armed and what threat they pose. we decided this needed to be outlined. the challenges faced by police are considerable. one and five in the database was unarmed. obviously those stories gather more headlines. another one in five shots of their own officers. six innocent bystanders were killed, eight police officers were killed by colleagues. at the end of the year we identified tara county, california with the county of the highest rate of killings by law enforcement. we produced a five-part series examining. another examination of how it was being investigated, we found were investiged by prosecutors who usually work for the officer involved. article -- we persuaded the district attorney of omaha, nebraska to produce information to the public. through this project which lasted for a year and continued into 2016, we just wanted to provide solid information. findings to aer debate that was heated and ongoing. it had reached the top of american policymaking. the fbi and the department of justice has promised to implement reforms. while we are waiting we will continue to hold this down. tom: thank you. inside climate news was a finalist for a series, "exxon, the road not taken." they reported that exxon, with their internal scientific study found evidence confirming or supporting the time of change pieces, but what it did publicly -- change -- climate change thesis. but what it did publicly -- >> representing the team will be lisa song, who has been with the organization for five years. she reports on climate change, and buyer until, natural gas drilling, she was part of the team that won the pulitzer in 2013 for work in this area. please. aboutso this story came at the beginning of 2015. we were at a staff retreat when our publisher, david sassoon, was very excited and decided to pitch a story idea. his idea was to look at oil companies come and see if any of them had known about climate change science before they started funding various efforts to undermine the certainty of that science. which oilto see companies had known about climate science, and when did they know it. the way he got the idea to do this was back in 2014, he had been to a conference where daniel ellsberg was a speaker. daniel ellsberg was encouraging the journalist in the room to look for was a lowers, -- look for whistleblowers, instead of waiting for them. by the time he pitched this idea, we thought it was impossible. we had no idea where to start. we did not have connections in the oil industry. we sort of went out there and try to see what we could find. thatually we figured out exxon was the best place to start. my colleague, david havemeyer found a retired federal scientist who had worked. he said that the federal government had worked with exxon in the early 1980's on climate change research. this was pretty puzzling to us because the general public did not understand, or had never even heard about climate change and to the late 1980's. exxon had been tracking the science 10 years earlier, that was significant. nila found a document showing that a exxon scientist had appeared at a conference of the aaa s the american association for the advancement of science in 1979. that was a meeting about climate science. the point of the meeting was to get top experts together and try to understand the current state of climate research. exxon scientist, henry shaw, was the only representative from industry. everyone else was from the government or university. with those clues we started seeing what we could find about exxon in those years. it was a lot of shoe leather reporting. was calling people, driving around, meeting people at their homes. she tracked down a lot of former exxon employees from the time. many of them had passed away. there were still some alive and willing to talk. eventually she found the key documents. we got thousands of pages of internal exon memos and letters so through1976 or 1986. those documents showed that in the late 1970's and mid-1980's exxon had a very good in-house climate research program. they started out by putting sensors on one of their supertankers so they could measure co2 in the ocean and in the air as the supertanker was going around the world. after a while they even partnered with columbia university on that project. they really wanted to get -- do good science, and they were working with some of the top spurts -- some of the top experts. eventually they cut funding to that research and started doing her own climate modeling, which was cheaper. they recruited scientist from academia. they recruited a scientist from harvard and some from nook -- new york university. they were doing computer modeling. they got the same result as the scientific consensus of the time. while independent scientists were protecting that doubling co2 in the amateur would lead to a one degree to three degree warming, exxon research showed the same result. i thought one of the most interesting memos that we saw was a letter from their manager around that time saying, our research shows the same result as that of independent scientists, but if we publish our results in a peer-reviewed literature we might get bad media attention because everyone knows that fossil fuels are converting to the problem. -- contributing to the problem. he told his scientist, we have to publish anyway because scientific integrity is very important. this is what the exxon research team was back -- like back then. they were doing quite good research. by the mid-1980's, that program, again, a cut funding. a lot of people left. -- they cut funding. a lot of people left. they turned around and they were undermining efforts to under -- they were undermining he certainty of the science. they turned around and did something completely different. tom: lisa, thank you. another finalist was "beware of the fine print." it was a new york times series that looks at the fine print in consumer and employee contracts. they seriously disadvantaged those that fine those contracts, that forces them into arbitration, often loaded, and also prevents class-action suits. that particular series has led introducedion being that will stop some of these practices. representing the new york times team is jessica silver greenberg who is a reporter and covers banking and consumer finance. she was the pulitzer rise finalist for her series on debt collectors and a finalist in toy 14 for her series on how the nations largest banks prey on older americans. sorry, our story started when my colleague, michael corkery and i were howing on a story about military members whose homes and cars have been illegally seized by banks were finding, when they went to try to do something about it, when they went to sue under this key federal law, they were blocked from court. systemre sent to this among which at the time, we had no idea about this thing called, arbitration. it seems harmless enough, it seemed boring, in fact. you say you want to do a series on arbitration and people literally go to sleep in front of you. we started trying to look at what this private system was. what is alternative to court was. at the beginning of his challenging to figure out what happened in arbitration. in part because the system is designed to be incredibly secretive. that is one of the advantages for the companies who bring cases there. nothing may do or that happens there ever makes it out to the public. even if it is a case of wrongful death, which we found cases that went to arbitration over wrongful death. people dying in nursing homes over neglect, or actually somebody who was murdered in a nursing home by her 98-year-old mate. -- room even those cases do not make it out. michael and i looked around to try to figure out what happened in arbitration. by doing a lot of legal research to see who was trying to appeal decisions that had happened in arbitration, we started to get a glimpse of the nature of the cases that went there. what we found initially was shocking. there were things like nfl cheerleaders who are bringing labor cases against the nfl for unfair working conditions whose case was in arbitration, going to be heard by the commissioner of the nfl. we heard of plaintiffs who brought cases who were -- who lost and were told to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other side's legal fees for things like private plane travel and hotels. there was a story that developed simultaneously. we wanted to assess -- it was not enough just to do and anecdotal -- and anecdotal look at arbitration in these horror stories. we wanted to see how people fared in comparison to court. they are not public arbitration records. we went to all arbitration providers. we asked for the data. of course they would not give it to us. that's a lot of calls. we would be shuttled from -- someone would be like, we will get that right away. i would get a telephone number that was not their legal counsel at all. it was -- one person sent me to a fishing company. to get data. we eventually got what amounted to about 25,000 arbitration records. we had no idea what to do with them at that point. that is when my other stepped in and, started analyzing how many people went to arbitration against various companies. that is when a second story started developing. that was not just about what happened in arbitration, it was also about the nature of certain claims not going to arbitration at all. we started looking at say -- sprint. a company with 65 million customers. in four years only for people went to arbitration against -- 4 people went to arbitration against sprint. we had to imagine there was more people. that is when we started realizing that the arbitration systeme varying -- a slanted against plaintiffs, was almost beside the point. arbitration causes, which are the fine print -- clauses, which are the fine print, which all of you, if you pulled out your credit card right now, it says become but he can elect to take you to arbitration instead of court. you signed it away, without realizing your constitutional right to a civil trial. in that clause there is an even more powerful thing -- a vehicle. the clause says you cannot file a class-action lawsuit. for any of you who have gotten in the mail, that coupon that says you have been enrolled in a class-action lawsuit, here is toy dollars for that -- $20 for that checking account or something, you might not realize the real power of eliminating your ability to file a class-action lawsuit is. all the corporations that put those clauses in their do -- there do. what a team of corporate lawyers realize was by banning class actions you pretty much disable lawsuits. most people will not go to court over -- certainly not over a $10 practice.predatory they will abandon the case altogether. once you get rid of class actions, you pretty much disable all threats. what we saw was, and what we had to go about trying to figure out was how these businesses, how corporate america had basically written themselves out of the legal system altogether. they had done it with these seemingly innocuous clauses that are in, as i said, everyone's while. -- wallet. we basically had to go to law school to figure it out. my colleagues and i puzzled about it for days and weeks. was we started to realize without really anyone noticing, , workingp of lawyers for a credit card company had engineered one of which really think amounted to one of the most audacious coups in corporate america. they wrote themselves out of the legal system. they did it in such a complex, legalistic way that anyone who had tried to figure out what they did have been dissuaded from going into it at all. -- it was not drama on the high seas. the cuvee did was not on a battlefield, it happened in a bunch of boardrooms, starting on park avenue and washington dc. trying to getout people to tell us on the record, how they had done it. , inhow they had basically trying to exempt themselves from the court system, gone all the way to the supreme court and gotten the blessing of the supreme court in 2011 and again in 2013. almost no one noticed. we set about trying to do that. yeah. that is it. [laughter] there is a lot more. tom: good. jessica, thank you. was "failureist factories." the tampa bay times discovered that a county in florida had starved the black schools of resources to the point where they were awash in violence and academic failure. tot reporting led substantial changes in the handling of those schooled in that county. additional resources. special oversight. major change. representing that team will be michael laforge a, a reporter at the tampa bay times. part of their investigative reporting team in 2014. he was part of the team that won the look surprise -- pulitzer prize for local reporting. michael: our story arose from questions that came out of the education beat. principally questions that were surfaced by my wife, the education reporter at the newspaper. she was going over standardized test scores year over year since 2012, when we started at the paper. she realized that african-american kids in ellis county were doing worse at reading and math then african-american kids in any other county in florida. she covered schooled in four other school districts and had another -- had never seen anything like this -- these ratings of failure. it is a large, relatively affluent county. the crime rate is about average. the rates of poverty, single-parent homes, reliance on food stamps, it is all about the middle of the road when it comes to florida counties. there was no good explanation for why it was happening. it made us want to dig in as a team into the story with the other education reporter. i have to tell you, if you have never teamed up with your husband or wife -- [laughter] on an intense 18 month-long reporting logic, i don't know what you're waiting for. [laughter] it is not to be missed. we are still married. [laughter] one of the things that made what we did a little different from how other people that approached the story in the past, we focused not on the phenomena in itself -- phenomenon itself, but on the policy decisions that led to it and the people that made those decisions. afterwas a vote shortly federal oversight that had stemmed from a desegregation lawsuit dating to the 60's expired. there is a moment where the school district and the school board had to decide how they were going to assign students to schools. how do they dictate the moment patterns -- enrollment patterns. previously there had been racial quotas and busing. they had a decision to make. they could continue doing a system of choice and make an effort to keep the schools integrated, or they could revert to a note -- neighborhood goals model -- schools model, which would amount to de facto segregation. they opted for that. that is where we began the story, at that moment, in 2007. we traced the difference decisions and policy failures that the school board made over the subsequent years. some of the challenges there -- it is a big, broad topic. zoning andm school the intricacies of analyzing student test score data to discipline. rates of suspensions for african american kids versus non-african americans could -- american kids. two teacher personnel records -- to teacher personnel records. the results of every teacher certification exam and the state of florida. we knew how many times the teachers and the schools had failed basic teaching test. we were able to use that is one measure of the quality of teachers the kids were getting. waslso looked at data that generated as a result of assignment to special programs like magnets and some of the most desirable schools in the county. african-american kids were basically shut out of the best schools in the county. --a result of our parting reporting, three of the five schools have been singled out to be turned into magnet programs. the u.s. secretary of education at the time, arne duncan came down and accused the school board of educational malpractice. they hired an administrator and put him in charge of the five schools that we focused on in an effort to turn around. the state department of budget anient had an ad -- had investigation on the use of federal funds if they were using the money properly or using it to spend global money they should not end. -- spend. tom: thank you. they last finalist is the washington post, "fatal shooting by police." b ferguson shooting as it did at the guardian, triggered the post into action, pretty much on the same mission. that was to tabulate these killings. post iserence with the that they made an effort to capture them in real-time so the data would be as accurate and complete as possible. the reporting of the two organizations propped up fbi and the justice department to alter the way that they are collecting the data. from thekenji washington post will talk from that team. she is a national investigative reporter from the post. she has been there since 2008. we have one of the billionaire of these papers here in boston, john henry, kimberly has worked in newspapers associated with two of them. ,ne of the post with jeff bezos before the she was there she was at the orange county register. part in that had a newspaper. kimberly: thank you. by now you know what our project was and as a result. i think what i will do is cut out some of what i was going to say and skip right to how we do it -- did it and the challenges. as was mentioned, one of the things that we wanted to do was do it in real-time. i should start with what the biggest challenge was. no one had ever done this before. it was not as if we could look around a newsroom or look to some other newspaper and say, they did a project like this, we will model this after that and start from that. we started with having no notion of how we were going to do this. with this huge challenge of trying to do it in real-time. wasway that it really began our researchers julie tate and jennifer jenkins -- they started searching every single day on websites and other places to try to learn about every fatal police shooting. fortunately we live in an era in which an officer shoots and kills somebody, there is usually some sort of media mention. rarely was there a lot of details. what they would do from there , and thent -- log it see if the police department has released additional information. one of the big challenges here was that things did not come rushing out. there was not all of this information out there. one of the things they had to do was, keep going back because information would get leaked out a little bit at a time. was the person armed? sometimes they would say, sometimes they would not. obviously with michael brown and him being unarmed and that an outrage to many people, that was something we wanted to know. sometimes they would say they were armed with a gun, turned out sometimes it was not a gun, it was something that looked like a gun, replica, a toy. those researchers were continuously going back and checking the record and seeing what new things are coming out. onthe same time three new, average, three new shootings were happening a day. imagine this -- you are building a database, constantly trying to the same time,t things are marching forward and you're like, we didn't know this. the fbi was not doing it. there is really an average of three shootings today? while they are doing this, the reporters are taking a look at what they are tracking. ultimately they tracked more than a dozen details copperheads ugly about every single fatal police shooting. dozen details, comprehensive about every single fatal police shooting. as we went about, we would see things like, it looks like a lot of mentally ill people are dying. we thought, we should track that. 300, we finally are like, we should be tracking that in a comprehensive manner. they would have to go back and check and see what each of those old cases whether or not a person was mentally ill. they did this for every single thing that we wanted to, that we thought should be a major finding. that was one of the latest challenges. -- greatest challenges. doing that, overcoming the obstacle that investigative reporters -- the way they tend to turn to things, they try to do things comprehensively is, you file and then bug people. in the year, 2020, when you have the information, you can tell people what happened in 2015. the minute we decided that was not going to cut it, all of these challenges i just presented were what we were wrestling with on a daily basis. it was ugly. we had to constantly realized we needed to reevaluate things. police officers would say, this person was driving a car and he tried to kill the officer with it -- were they armed? with a armed with the car? were they not armed? these complicated ways -- things that you need to wrestle with and understand and tackle so you can have a data set that is everyle, something where single killing you are tracking things in the exact same way. in a way in which police can challenge you, and it can hold up. the aclu can challenge you, and it can hold up. these are the things that by the end of the year, we were exhausted, that we felt like we had really that our jobs. it produced some great things. we talked about the fbi and the bureau of justice statistics stepping up and saying, this is embarrassing. you and the guardian are doing a better job than us. finally coming around and saying they would do it as well. that was fantastic. it was fantastic last month when police chief met at a national conference and pointed to the post work and said, this is valuable. we need to know this information. we need to know how these incidents again -- begin. we need to know how often people are armed, and what they are armed with. we need to take a deep look at why things are going sideways. we need to look at our training. what are preventable? thankfully we saw something that we were seeing -- baseball something we were seeing, this is not only dangerous, the lack of proper training and handling some of the situations properly, it is not just dangerous for civilians, it is dangerous for police. a darku chase a guy in alley, by yourself, and you had no idea what they did, they jus ran away, you are endangering yourself. not just that person, who you might need face-to-face at a dark corner. you may be think you see a gun, and you don't. that was an actual case. someone was shot, he was unarmed. the officer got face-to-face with the person, by himself, in a dark alley, it happens a lot. some of our findings that were -- that probably change -- prompted change, we found that a quarter of the people shot and killed were mentally ill. we found that most of the departments that shot and killed someone who was mentally ill were not using state-of-the-art training that can help them de-escalate the situation and bring people in safely. a quarter of the suspects were fleeing in a car, or they were running. sometimes they were shot in the back. sometimes officers were shooting into moving cars, turning them into multi ton metal missiles, unarmed, shooting into traffic. we found that one in 10 people were unarmed. of course we wanted to find out, and get a realistic idea of what it looks like. michael brown was unarmed. reallyedia accounts that got a lot of attention, people were unarmed. how often were people really unarmed? most of the time they were armed. we also wanted to take a deep look at what the unarmed population look like. -- looked like. unarmed black men were seven times more likely to be shot than unarmed wightman. men.hite we wanted to make sure that we were balanced. we wanted to look at the dangers that officers face. we found that a majority of time, officers, at the time they pulled the trigger, were under attack. it is a dangerous job. we wanted to make sure we were fair. i think that is why the fbi and police chiefs have come around. we understand they will have better public discourse and training if they realistically can explain to people, the dangers, and separate out the shootings that are justified, from the ones that are unjustified and change things. the last thing i would like to say is that we are going to continue to build our database in the next year. we will continue to have growing pains because we are talking about how to expand the data set so we can tell deeper stories and continue to shed more light on what is -- when things are going sideways, why they are going sideways. looking forward to rolling out some more stories on that in the coming year. tom: kimberly, thank you. i think, as i mentioned at the start, this is the 24th year of .he goldsmith awards program i think this is the first time ever we have had two finalist with such similar reporting projects as the washington post and the guardian. that when tell you they finalist were looking at all of the submissions for the goldsmith award, there were a number of other submissions that were triggered by what happened in ferguson. together, i two think we would be remiss if we each of you, when did you find out about the other news organization's program. did that lead you to speed things up? did that lead you to make adjustments in the way that you are collecting data -- were collecting data? >> we did not know it would be similarly national or perhaps regional, or if it was going to be like, are there shootings or deaths? we did not coordinate. people asked if was a joint enterprise, it coincided. tom: any changes? any speeding up? >> a little speeding up. we published our first story off the data before they did. they pushed out their database before we did. kimberly: i think that we were kind of neck and neck in terms of pursuit. it only helps because that the guardian was on this as well. you can maybe dismiss one media organization, but when two take something like this on, and they both prove that in some measure this is doable, it is harder for authorities to look the other way. i feel like it was fantastic that we both did something. things slightly differently. i don't think we changed anything we did. the only thing that i would note that we did that was similar -- smaller, we had a smaller data set. it was triggered by a question from ferguson. one question was, how often does this happen? what do these situations really look like? that led us to build similar data sets. another question was, what does it take for an officer to be criminally charged when they fatally shoot somebody? more and more we are seeing videos surface where people feel like you're looking at a shooting unjustified. we decided to build a database looking at that. looking back at officers who had been criminally charged going back a decade. at the end of the year, going back and looking at that database was really interesting to see a difference. post ferguson and what is happening with officers being criminally charged. because we got the database in the beginning of the year, we knew that on average only five office is, we now know it is about 900 plus, if last year's is to be a standard, 900 plus are being shot and killed every year. five officers on average are criminally charged over the last decade. by the end of the year, when we look at 2015, compared to the prior nine years in the decade, it was 18 officers charged last year. we are seeing a real change in terms of prosecutors feeling pressure to really look at these cases. they try to hold -- try to hold officers accountable. we are seeing video play a huge role in challenging and providing an alternative narrative to what the officers say. that changes in that dynamic as well. tom: -- john: i think she is right. one thing our database does that is slightly different is each status.ts the whether it is under investigation, and indictment, whether the officer has been reprimanded by his or her department. that actually proved, surprisingly to me, one of the most difficult things to keep track of. as can really set, each death usually stimulates a media message -- mention. keeping track of the case is a different matter. thatially cases in which might be less noticed by media, it is hard to keep track of let out thes and message whether the officer has been charged. that, more than anything else perhaps took more calls to regional authorities. just to get information out as to what happened with the case. they were so reluctant in many cases to actually say, we have actually quietly cleared this officer, but we did not announce it. here is the information. several times we had come across cases where the officer has been cleared and the investigation finished, no one noticed. that was a concern. , there is a sort of flash of media interest, and then nothing. to keep track of that was the thing that we found -- we continue to do now. our database is real-time as well. both databases were updated every day with every case that coming to our attention each day. as can really said, about three a day. reedley of you touched -- briefly on your over you -- overview of some of the challenges he faced in the stories. i'm wondering if you could kind of go a little bit deeper for us in what was for you the major obstacle or challenge, problem that you faced in getting to the bottom of your investigation. robin, do you want to start? robin: i think i test a little bit on that it was really that there was no, it was very difficult to prove that the particular fish that was being caught was ending up in america. -- finding menng -- i would sayy a second thing is finding men who are actually, instead of people who had been a -- then rescued or escaped, were actually slaves. they were currently being forced to work. that was something that we did not set out to find a slave island. but that is kind of what we did. was that point, in a way it almost easy. from that point you had a huge group of men who were so incredibly desperate and so eager to tell their stories. a lot of times when you meet they are afraid to tell her story, or they want to have their identity protected -- their story or they want their identity protected -- but these guys felt like they died already. they had been stranded on this island, some of them for 20 years. some of them for five or 10. they had no contact with family. they were left for dead. they had no contact with the outside world. when there was a journalist there, their stories were pouring out. guess, in a way one of the biggest challenges than was -- here are these men who are being incredibly rave telling our stories, willing to risk their lives. in cages. graveyards with their friends who have died. how do you honor the bravery of these men and use those names, and use those videos, and use those cases, but at the same time protect them. because we -- we did not want to use their names and faces and video and then have them be killed because they were with their abusers and we were no longer there. so i think the main challenge for us was how do we do both. how do we hold on to the power of the story by using their own voices. and protect them. and fortunately we had a very good source with the iom, my colleague, margie mason worked with them closely. we showed him the video of the guys in the cage. we told him what we were -- what we wanted to do. he recognized the importance of it. basically we gave him a list of the eight men that we use on video, or whose quotes we used in the stories. police to getthe them off the island before we published the story. that was kind of -- i kind of think -- at the same time we had the new york times on her tell ils as well.a there was the competitive nature. , thewhen you went there people there, the people in control of the slaves must've been suspicious of what you are up to. s there any sort of sense that you were there and could harm them and could therefore you felt endangered? >> in the beginning they had been doing it for such a long time that there -- they were not afraid. when we initially went, it was myself and an indonesian everyman and photographer -- cameraman and photographer. we told them we were doing a story on the fishing industry and how rich the marine life was. they were happy to show off the fishing. business --fishing it was a big fishing business that had been there for about a decade. in the beginning they were happy to show those guys around. they constantly had a government minder. you can look at the factory, but we will come with you. i kind of broke off at that point and pretended like i was more interested in teaching english at the school or visiting the market or going around the island. i was free, and they were stuck with the government minder's. at a certain point when my colleagues wanted to follow up what i had come across with the graveyard and would disappear for a few hours. the government minder's would get nervous and angry. off --sically kick this us off. i was left alone and my burmese colleague came. we were ok for a few days, but after a while, they hated us. that is when they kind of chased after us in the boats and threatened us. john, problems, difficulties? john: our biggest challenge was, compared -- the small team we had -- the department of justice team that are now doing the same thing is 20 people with too soon -- two supercomputers. my colleague and i started it together with a researcher. later we hired an intern, a brilliant young reporter to allow us, as a trio to do the investigative articles. really that was it. it was a small team. we work day in, day out, all year. weekends, late nights, to match institutions and organizations. to keep up in research with not just the new cases each day, but the cases that have already happened. to examine, and i mentioned, to keep up with the status of each case. the motherthan just is a new case today, there is a new case today. thes just the weight of information, so many different cases. with google alerts, calls to a look -- calls to authorities, to keep the information coming. as a small team we -- we thought, why are we doing this? we sort of got through it. tom: lisa. lisa: one of the challenges was fining people still alive and willing to talk. there were some -- finding people still alive and willing to talk. there were some fun employees still dependent on tensions -- n employees some exxo still dependent on their pensions. we had four people keeping the website alive. we were willing to put in a lot of resources. virtual news jessica: we had two primary challenges. i mentioned to supreme court decisions. both received no attention. because they were dense, legalistic decisions that basically said -- premised on the idea that it was fine to ban class actions and say you cannot go to court. you are waiving your right to file a class-action, and that is ise because there arbitration, which is a perfectly fair alternative to going to court for people to kind,e disputes from any small dollar or larger, and that had been largely untested, so this incredibly important basis for these two decisions, no one had gone about determining whether arbitration is a fair alternative to court. there are a couple of reasons why. one, there is no federal requirement that arbitration ,ecisions be disclosed publicly so no one had looked at how many people were actually going to arbitration. that was the first thing. who my colleague, between 2010 and 2014, about 500 people went to arbitration for disputes of $2500 or less. that millionsion of people could fairly resolve their disputes through arbitration, we started to see that was incorrect, i huge challenge to get to the point where we could quantify the number people going to arbitration. that was the first thing. what i reporting showed is that we ended up with this idea that corporations had killed the class-action, but it wasn't enough to just stop there. the next huge challenge was trying to figure out the way they did this, because as i said, this amounted to a huge power-play. you as a corporation can get out of the legal system entirely, opt out, but how did you do this? the reason that i think people had not figured this out was a very technical process, so what had happened was about 10-20 years ago, state court judges when they were getting cases where companies were saying you can't file a class-action, they were saying they will strike the clause and overturn it and allow you to go to court because this amounts to having a get out of jail free card. they actually said that. company, ifdit card you ban people from forming a class-action, you are exempting yourself entirely and getting out of jail free. that state court judges were striking down these causes, and then suddenly that changed. , whatate court judges happened was a case where a state court judge in california had struck down a clause made it all the way to the supreme court , and the supreme court said to the state court judges, you are overstepping your authority and have no right to strike down these clauses. we will uphold them. we set out to try to figure out how that happened. in order to do that, we needed tolearn the law, and also win the trust of the architects of the arbitration clauses, who were a bunch of corporate lawyers who had no interest in telling us how they had engineered this incredible coup. the big challenge was learning the law homeless better than they knew it or as well as they knew it, to go to them and say, look, i understand the genius of what you did. regardless of whether we think class actions are good or bad, we can disagree on that, but we can both agree that you have killed them. by saying that to them and then actually walking through with these various lawyers how they that this isying the legal argument that you , andeered in this instance this is the one you made to the appellate court in new york, and this is the one made to the appellate court in california, that began to help us, because we were winning the respect of the people that had done this. to just say to them, look, i know what you did and i think it is rather remarkable was a powerful thing. learned in the course of reporting that one of the key players behind the scenes and his legal coup was john roberts, who we now all know as the supreme court justice, but when he was a hevate litigator, represented discover bank in a case that the supreme court refused to take, but the basis arbitration was should be allowed to ban class actions. this was a contentious idea. this a print court did not grant certs, said they did not agree to take the case. fast-forward eight years, justice roberts is no longer a private lawyer. a supreme court justice, and suddenly the supreme court agrees to take a case involving the very same kind of issues it had previously denied to take, so we knew he had made this legal petition on behalf of discover to get the supreme court to make thi to take this . i went to talk to one of the lawyers who was an architect of the decision and asked him what he made of john roberts now being on the court. toseems like it would be your advantage since he had written this brief in 2002 petitioning the supreme court to take the very same case they ended up taking eight years later, and i think the lawyer i was talking to was so shocked that we even knew about this that he was thrilled to talk about it, so he was like, yeah, no, we thought we had a really good shot of winning the supreme court case because actually, you know, i helped john roberts craft that brief, and he helped us later on. that was a remarkable turn for us, because it showed just how concerted this effort had been and how it had involved the highest levels of the supreme court, said that to me was one of the biggest challenges. >> michael? michael, just wrangling the data that went into producing these task.s was a pretty big it was the most intensive data-type work i have ever done on a project, and basically we took databases on test scores, student discipline, teacher , we had possibly four different datasets on teacher quality, and data on assignment to special programs for kids, and we analyze them in a way that if we had wanted to, we could have produced five separate investigated projects. we rolled it all into one. knowing what to leave in and take out took a long time and had to think a lot about. the other thing i would say is a mindset was a challenge, the mindset of the officials we were dealing with, and even the reporters and editors at the paper. the first part of that is when you have something like poverty school, it is tempting to just write it off as this beautiful, unchangeable, true that exists in the world, and to avoid looking at how it tolved and became this way obscure the accountability that you could bring to the situation. if you just ask the questions, white is the situation exist as it does today -- when a group of disadvantaged kids does well in school it is because the school district did a great job. when they fail, it is because they come to school not wanting to learn or have bad parents. convincing people that that was not the case with a challenge for us, but at the end of the day i think we pulled it off. >> kimberly, before you start, we will open it up for questions from the floor. if you have a question, we have a microphone here and a microphone there, and if you would walk up to the microphone if you would like to ask the panel a question. kimberly? surprisingly i lack of resources was a problem here as well. it looked like we had a huge number of people, and on some stories we did. we had a group of people doing amazing things like videos and graphics, but when it came to writing the stories, i will give you an example of how alone it felt at the time. we needed to do something on body cameras, like the truth behind them, because they were being promoted as these tools of transparency and accountability and i had a sneaky suspicion that that was not what was really going on, and so i started to do some digging and decided that the best way to do this was to identify every single case in which there was a body camera video and go to the department and ask them not only for the video, but asked them to tell me exactly what their policy was on release. with a release immediately after the event? was it not until the investigation concluded? what investigation? the administrative investigation of the criminal investigation? take also wanted to look at all the body camera bills that were being introduced in state legislatures, because i the police that unions and the police chiefs organizations were strongly instead on these, and of them being tools of transparency and accountability, they were changing the language in the bills so that they would be exempt from public records laws, so i had to call 50 police inartments multiple times order to get the data for the analysis on what was really going on with release. . had to analyze over 200 bills i had the help of one person who called 20 departments because i thought a was going to drown, but otherwise i do that all on my own. the post had a lot of resources on it, but at the end of the day y it was one of five investigative stories i did last year. basically at 6:00 a.m. when my boyfriend would week up, he would see me staring at the computer and say, are you already at it? thankfully he likes to watch sports on the weekend. when he was watching sports, i was working. i worked all year long last year. it was worth it, but the lack of resources and the lack of wasurces, the pain it shared, so hard to get anything from the police departments. you did not just called them and they gave you something. you called and called and e-mailed and e-mailed and went to the city council and county council. you did everything you could've put pressure on them to squeeze a little information out. dozens, hundreds, of departments. have had 100 people and they still would have been working all the time. lack of resources, please not answering your questions, those were the obstacles. >> we will take some questions. >> if i had a hat, i would take it off. it restores my faith. i thank you all. would you identify yourself, please? >> i used to be an investigative reporter. my question is brought. it goes to all of you. we live in a different political tomate and i am wondering what degree that change of political climate affected your reporting in terms of either the sources of the problems you look at, the accessibility to officials, the responsiveness, their attitudes trust the press, the willingness and appetite to ,ollow on the judiciary gubernatorial level, congressional oversight, workver -- how was your changed by that change in the american political climate, i guess that is what i would ask. you don't all have to respond. >> i will make a brief response to that. maybe one of you can go into it a little more. that a lot ofis investigative journalism in the past was looking for things that are even legal, and now you're looking for things that are legal. abuses and things that have been legalized, so that was the case situation, and it sounds like a lot of you have the same, aside from the exxon story maybe. climate change is now a huge partisan thing. it's hard to find anyone in the republican party who believes in the science. that ir story showed was can the 1970's and 1980's when exxon was doing this research, it was not a partisan issue. exxon really cared about doing the right signs because they wanted a seat at the table when regulations came down the line, and they were expecting that. after our series came out, we had many politicians commenting on it. hillary clinton and bernie sanders both said they thought this warranted some sort of department of justice probe. the attorney general of new york has started an investigation into this, and perhaps also california. the california attorney general as well. there have been democratic members of congress calling for a probe into this, but with the elections coming up in just how sensitive this issue is, i am not sure if the department of justice is eager to get into this, but there has been a lot of pressure on them to try to get them to look into this, the same way they looked into big tobacco years ago. i think that that is one of the biggest challenges we are constantly writing about, things that are legal. almost all of the shootings have all consed justified, of things that people have seen for themselves with their own eyes, and people are starting to realize, well, that is legal, what they are doing is legal. is legal.ca uncovered and so your first challenge is going to your editors and , i was enough with the police shooting stories, but with other stories, explaining it is outrageous even though it is legal, then you have this huge threshold with readers explaining why they should be outraged even though it is perfectly justified under the law, and that seems to be over , one of thein challenges with investigative reporting these days. has been affected by the political climate, i think. proposed by senators boxer and senator booker, there is very little chance of either passing because the republican majorities seem to think it is too much to ask to mandate please departments to report this information. that is all this bill is asking for, to make it a requirement for police departments to report this information rather than making it voluntary or making the department of justice have to find these cases themselves, and i think that is perhaps quite surprising. this is not a bill demonizing police. this is not a bill that claims all please shootings are not justified. ofre is very little prospect the reform passing, so the fbi and department of justice have been able to work around that with actions of their own. for us waspart of it trying to understand that the alleme court, which we would like to believe is free of , but since justice scalia's death, i think we can all agree that is not true, but you have the roberts court -- e begun to show a court that is very pro-business, and its arbitration decisions, even though there was this huge uproar about citizens united and this move towards thinking about corporations and giving them rights as if they were individuals, the arbitration decisions somehow escaped that analysis. they weren't looked at as if they were -- for what they really were, which are these really big gifts to corporate america. is of the challenges i think that we had to show that this was a very political decision, both of them, 2011 and 2013, and that really came down to showing what the value of the class action is, and i think he gets a minized, even by -- villainized. i thought of ambulance chasers who follow product liability cases that have to do medical malpractice or something like that, so it was a challenge to show that for a whole range of cases, class actions are the only method of bringing them, so whether those are sexual harassment cases, unfair working mission cases, denial of minimum , wherentitrust cases people are trying to fight a monopoly, we had to show that by eliminating class-action, it is a big advantage you give to business, and so i think to show it was a very political entity. what kind of came down -- what part of reporting in this climate. so that was one of the challenges. recent ginsburg in a decision cited our stories in her dissent, which i can basically die now and i will be totally fine. [laughter] next question, please. >> thank you. my name is henry and i am in a reporter. i would like to thank the guardian and pose for your work, because i have used it in my reporting. it is good for society and good for journalists, and i think it's great that you both and nominated as well. that one did not preclude the other from the nomination. my question is related to something that you talked about today, the issue of competition with other outlets and you're competing with other outlets. i will be the first guy to bring up spotlight today. one of the interesting things from that is the debate that they had back in 2003 about when wereblish, and they competing with another news source and had to decide when they have the story and when it was best to go with it, and i just wanted to ask all of you sort of when did you think you have the story and when did you think you didn't have the story and were worried about publishing too soon or too late? running a little short on time, so if we could keep the responses fairly brief, please. the first was the safety, but the second was the actual link to the american dinner table, because that was very, very complicated process that my colleague concentrated on, but for a few weeks we thought we could only link it to the domestic market in thailand, and so it was, do we go with it or wait while we have other competitive pressures and make that until we connection get the links. i think we very early on were determined to publisher database once we had several months of data so as to avoid misleading occurrences of trends and things like that. so once we had five months worth of data, we launched it on june 1. of days beforele that had published their first story on their findings, and i guess you could say that we could have that evening rushed out a similar thing, but decided that we would carry on. the database came out on june 1, and so the story followed in july. it is always a challenge to know when to press the button, but we feel like we did the right thing. basically had the key documents by may or june and wanted to work as quickly as possible. one of our considerations was with the paris climate talks in december 2015, we wanted our stories to come out before that so that they would not get lost in the noise of the paris coverage, and we ended up publishing in the middle of september. about a month after we published, the los angeles times released their own story that basically came to the same conclusions. they had partnered up with the of journalisml and had used documents from public company archives, and it was pretty interesting. i had per se not known that they working on that project at the same time we were. it was nice to see these two independent projects reach the same conclusion using different documents. >> i don't think we had competitive pressure. nobody really wanted to look and arbitration. [laughter] so this national regulator had put out proposed rules, basically a draft of rules, that would prevent financial companies from banning class actions in their contracts. -- being theut crazy reporters we are, we did a small news story about it, about , and i wasd rule afraid that that was going to .pur a whole host of coverage my editor assured me i was being crazy, and i was, but the thing i had not been in the paper for a while because i was working on this, and i got a lot of e-mails from people saying that 500 word story was your investigation? what if you been doing? [laughter] >> i was like, it's not. >> in terms of knowing when to set the trigger, we did not out to write a story about resegregation. the longest serving reporter on our team had been at the for threehad dinner years. we were short on institutional knowledge. we were looking at the student test scores and notice there was a precipitous drop in reading and math scores in 2008 and 2009, and so we started scratching our heads and saying maybe something happened around this time, let's check the clips. we went into the archives, and sure enough there was a decision by the school board to revert to neighborhood schools, so that is how the story came about. a similar thing for us at the guardian. after we had a few months of data, we felt we had some trends that were reliable. we started planning the story, and i started spending a lot of database,ng at that which was pretty primitive at that point. after several weeks of staring math ond doing my own pieces of paper and stuff because it had not been built out as much as it had -- eventually was, it became pretty clear that half of the cases were incidents that involve behavingo were erratically because they were on drugs or mentally ill, and maybe half of them were like legitimate criminal stuff going on and officers were showing up to robberies and stuff. once i spotted those trends, we knew how we would write it and pull the trigger on the first story. that -- of think course, when there is competition, you are worried about it, but i don't think anybody cared who got it first. i just think that america is super glad that there were people who were taking a look at it and publishing stories and putting pressure on authorities so they would start tracking it. i am pretty sure that there is the two people between organizations that really cared about who did it first, and the rest of america does not really know. >> we started a little bit late, time.is closing i would take one more question. it would be great if it would be where we could get a thoughtful soundbite answer from our panelists. so, final question. investigative reader, if anything. >> i want to thank you for your courage, dedication, hard work, putting your marriage is online. i had two questions, but will limit myself to one. how do you keep your motivations going? i could redo the title of a book in 1967, death at an early age, the distraction of the minds and hearts of negro children in the boston public schools. this is 1967, and we are still fighting the fight. had you keep your motivation going when you know the best you can do is maybe a short-term result? how do you do it? >> i can say that i began working on the story in march of 2014, and basically just stopped working on it within the last couple of weeks, and for once, this is the one story i have worked on that i never got tired of doing. it was just that important. there were so many facets and so much nuance to the different things we were bringing to light that there was an endless supply of stuff to keep you interested. plus, it was just an outrage. that this was going on in our community and was being allowed to continue with nobody raising any questions about it, so in this case it was not hard to stay committed to it. >> it is a really good question. down an entire state agency because it was such a boondoggle, and i was super proud, then i moved away and it is up and running again. [laughter] >> you can get really discouraged. it longe been doing enough, you know the most you will be able to do is create some small change, and then you hope that it holds and that some of the reporter comes along and some more small change happens, ,hen it continues and over time maybe we are all dead before you can look back and see that 50ause of 20 reporters and activists and because of all this work people have done that constantly put pressure on important moments, that over time things changed and improved. certainly it is discouraging what you just said when you think about what michael has done and what he discovered, but maybe if you look back at the educational system and what it looked like nationally a long time ago, maybe you would find a must every school district that looked like the one that michael wrote about. unlike thatthat state agency, that it holds. >> i mean i think that is perfectly said. you are part of something much broader. it is why it is such an honor to be among so many journalists trying to do the same thing. because kimberly said it so articulately, i don't think i need to go into why i am heartened by other people's work, but another thing that sustains you and keep you going is your crazy kind of family within the paper. editor andilliant amazing colleagues, and it is also just going home and talking to your friends and having them tell you that you are not going to go totally crazy. also, just our families. michael's parents are here today, which is awesome. -- i think i'd drop a lot of sustenance from people who are around me and who believe in the project even when i forget to. [laughter] >> its axon. exxon.'s -- i would say for the story, it was easy to stay motivated because the documents were so exciting. we knew that we were the first people outside of exxon to ever see them, so it was great. had been reporting on climate forever, and if he was completely shocked by these documents, then the rest of his new that we had something really it was very easy to stay motivated, and we haven't stopped and have some follow-up stories planned as well. it was seeing the reaction from readers. at the end of the day, we do this for people who read the work, and we had such an overwhelming response -- i should have said earlier that we have thousands of people sending in tips and information about people who had died -- just to have people saying that we are reading what you are doing and it is important, please continue. there is nothing more really. >> this one was kind of easy. i think covering a lot of and interviewing people who have been abused again and again and again, are you can say to them when they , isasking about your story it going to help me, we hope over time that it will do something. in this particular case when we saw that men and we staggering level of desperation, i really felt confident being able to tell them that we will get you off this island. you will not get stuck on this island. ofwas kind of a mixture fortuitous events that the fisheries minister was this kick-ass woman who would not let this happen on her watch. stories,lot of great like, send our guys back. [laughter] >> good. you know, this morning's panel demonstrates why we have the goldsmith awards program for investigative reporting. this is really important work. this is inspiring work. to me it is also somewhat evil often work. i kept hearing words like data analysis, data collection, data gathering, and so on. maybe 10 years ago that word would have been less prominent, so the method may be changing, but the goal is the same. i would like to congratulate again all the goldsmith award finalist, the ap, guardian, inside climate news, new york times, tampa bay times, , and particular to robin, john, lisa, jessica, michael, and kimberly for representing not only your organization so well, but the whole investigative reporting field. thank you. [applause]