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Local Coverage
often have to do, because we believe
the next bright, shiny light is where
we should head.
This year’s work on this story
might be more significant, frankly. I
have focused on legislators working
in the system and the connection the
two-year colleges have to the state’s
politically powerful. As a dear friend
and former boss of mine who died a
few years back used to say, “Now you’re
meddlin’.” The result has been not so
much praising us for our work, as was
the case last year from elected officials
and their friends who patted us on the
head with that “attaboy” compliment.
Now, as a result of more scrutiny into
the system’s political infrastructure,
we’re part of a conspiracy, they like to
say, to undermine the electoral process,
to help unseat those who couldn’t be
beaten at the ballot box.
The partisans are on attack, and
their bloggers are taking aim. But all
of that is to be expected. Just like the
small-town paper that dares to write
about the mayor’s wife receiving an
interior design contract from the town
council, the News is under fire for
raising questions about politics and
patronage and for writing about it.
Unlike the small paper, though, the
News can afford to take the hit and has
maintained its commitment to cover
this subject regardless of the politics
that erupts around it.
How can we afford not to This is,
after all, our community. We cannot
allow political campaigns to intimidate
us. And we cannot allow those campaigns
to discourage us. We just need
to continue doing the job we set out
to do, with the same motivations to do
good journalism that inspired us to do
the work in the first place. That sense
of community, of purpose, of relevance,
of readers is the deciding factor that
distinguishes newspapers from other
media. The commitment to local reporting
is how we prove it.
Brett J. Blackledge is a general assignment
and special projects reporter
at The Birmingham News. His
reporting won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize
for Investigative Reporting, with the
judges citing “his exposure of cronyism
and corruption in the state’s
two-year college system, resulting in
the dismissal of the chancellor and
other correction action.”
Investigative Reporting Stays Local
‘The local stories are the toughest. They matter more to readers ….’
By Ken Armstrong
Reporters at The Seattle Times
kept saying the same thing: I’m
writing about this person, or
that company, or this public agency,
and some judge won’t let
me see court records that
I need. Some lawsuit goes
right to the heart of my story,
but I can’t read the file—or
at least not the parts that
matter.
Hear that enough, and
it’s time to ask, “What’s going
on here”
That’s what Justin Mayo
and I did. But getting the
answer took lots of time
and money.
We could have gone
broad—writing about
sealed records on a national
level, pulling anecdotes
from hither and yon. Or we
could have gone local—trying to find
every sealed lawsuit in King County
Superior Court; recording every plaintiff,
defendant and judge, and pulling
Files sealed by the King County Superior Court are stored out of public
view in a locked room at the courthouse. Photo by Mark Harrison.
every sealing order to see the reasons
provided for secrecy and whether the
law was followed.
National offered scale. Local offered
depth. We decided to
go local.
The clerk’s office in
King County didn’t keep
a list of sealed cases.
So Justin, a specialist
in computer-assisted
reporting, figured out a
way to search the court
system’s massive database
of electronic dockets,
looking for codes
or key words that suggested
a lawsuit might
be sealed. I took the
thousands of civil suits
that Justin’s searches
kicked up and entered
each case number into
8 Nieman Reports / Winter 2007