If you have an investigative story to suggest or a tip about wrongdoing, email investigate@ajc.com or contact the appropriate reporter by using our staff directory at http://www.ajc.com/staff/.
In case you missed the stories
Georgia for-profit schools enjoy lax policing: http://on-myajc.com/1sXy9km
Lee hired off-the-books attorney for Braves deal: http://on-myajc.com/1ljFKrg
Vets seeking care died in VA limbo: http://on-myajc.com/1p0CawF
When I meet readers and tell them about my role leading investigative reporting for our newspaper and websites, I often get the same question: How do our investigative reporters get their ideas?
It’s a great question. There are almost as many answers as there are stories, but a handful of paths lead to most of our investigative reports. Each of those is demonstrated in a strong run of recent investigative reporting.
• When something goes wrong in the news, we dig deeper to watchdog the oversight.
That’s what happened in Janel Davis’ and Chris Joyner’s recent report on state oversight of for-profit colleges in Georgia.
“The idea was spawned by the collapse of Corinthian Colleges, operated locally as Everest College,” Joyner, a state government investigative reporter, emailed when I asked about the genesis of the story. You may recall recent news about Corinthian Colleges’ financial problems and its announcement closing or selling most of its campuses, including four Everest campuses located in metro Atlanta.
“Janel had discovered the state’s regulator of these private, for-profit college, the Nonpublic Postsecondary Education Commission, had not referred a college to the AG’s office for investigation in at least five years. We wondered what, if anything, they did to protect students?”
As it turns out, not much, Joyner noted.
The agency regulates 300 private and for-profit colleges and has signed off on some with such shaky finances that a strong warning flag should have been raised to protect students. It has also failed to raise concerns about the shoddy education at schools that others characterize as diploma mills.
To get the story, Davis, our higher-education reporter, and Joyner examined thousands of forms. Not much was standardized in the records, which were often handwritten and annotated in the margins, so it was difficult work. The review of records revealed flaws in the commission’s ability to judge if a school was providing a valuable education, or just taking advantage of students and taxpayers.
As a result of the reporting, Gov. Deal has begun restructuring the board and Davis told me state lawmakers are planning committee hearings on the state’s for-profit college industry and the state commission.
- When we are following a continuing story, one angle leads to another.
Dan Klepal, our Cobb County watchdog reporter, has been closely following plans for the new Braves stadium. Our research shows high interest in that story; one of the important roles we play is to provide scrutiny of huge community projects involving significant government spending.
Klepal was reporting on a lawsuit challenging the stadium funding when one of the attorneys involved mentioned something he had seen in a draft between the county and the Braves organization.
That piqued Klepal’s interest because drafts had not been turned over to us during a previous request under Georgia’s Open Records Act.
Klepal’s review of the documents — some 30 versions of the memorandum of understanding between Cobb and the Braves — led to the discovery that Commission Chairman Tim Lee had secretly engaged a private attorney to negotiate on behalf of taxpayers, without a contract or payment. That’s a red flag, because the attorney apparently expected — or at least hoped — his firm would receive work as bond counsel for the deal, a job that could ultimately pay more than $4 million.
As Cobb County Attorney Deborah Dance noted in Klepal’s story, that’s not the way multi-million dollar projects are usually handled. There are oversight processes and bid procedures in place to protect taxpayers. Lee says the attorney was not promised work, and Dance ultimately intervened to route the work to bond attorneys previously selected by a bid process.
- Our reporters' curiosity is piqued by a report, audit or government document.
That’s the genesis for today’s front page story by investigative reporter Alan Judd.
When I asked Judd about the article, here’s what he wrote me in an email:
“Several months ago, I happened to look at the website of the Board of Pardons and Paroles (for reasons I don’t recall) and came across information about how convicted felons could have their gun rights restored — allowing them to buy, sell, carry or simply own guns, as if their crimes had never happened.
“This intrigued me, largely because of the frequently repeated talking points of gun-rights advocates — that the best defense against a bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun. Allowing felons to legally re-arm themselves seemed to make that picture a lot murkier.”
I won’t go into the findings of Judd’s reporting here, since you can read them on the front page. But I want to note the extraordinarily difficult work he did to bring you this report, including building a database from 1,400 pages of documents about the pardons, reviewing scores of court files and police reports and researching the laws of other states for context on Georgia’s numbers. Not to mention weeks of tracking individuals featured in the three-day series. If you think knocking on the door of a convicted felon to tell him you plan to write a tough news story about him isn’t difficult, you haven’t thought much about the work investigative reporters do. The story subject wasn’t home and Judd ended up connecting later by phone because making the connection was essential to fairness.
• Another path to stories, and one of my favorites: whistleblowers and others who alert us to wrongdoing and trust us to expose it.
That’s what brought about investigative reporter Brad Schrade’s important revelations in last Sunday’s newspaper that the Veterans’ Administration for years failed to fix a backlog of hundreds of thousands of applications for VA health care access.
As is often the case, the story grew out of a previous report detailing allegations by whistleblower Scott Davis, who works at the national VA enrollment and eligibility center in Atlanta.
Schrade has continued to develop sources at VA and whistleblowers familiar with problems at the center. He acquired internal documents, emails, minutes and reports that showed a backlog of pending health applications that the center knew about for years, but failed to address. One internal VA analysis Schrade acquired from a whistleblower showed thousands of veterans who died while on the pending list.
Our investigations often rely on people deep inside government bureaucracies who have been waiting years for someone to dig into problems that have been ignored or covered up. The next big story often starts with an email or phone call from readers who see our commitment to this work every day.
