Investigative Reporting Seminar: How the Sausage Is Made.
Children for Profit "Cashing In On Kids" is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report by Raquel Rutlegde of the Milkwaukee Journal Sentinel on child-care scams in Wisconsin.
The 3-day Logan Symposium now in its 5th year, serves a number of key constituencies. Culling together a group of dedicated investigative reporters, academics, philanthropists, media experts and graduate students, the invite only event is an industry must. Once a humble commitment to host an annual lecture in the name of its benefactors, the Logan Symposium quickly rose in popularity as "one of the most influential events of its kind," according to the Seattle Times. Covered and attended by a veritable ‘who’s who' in investigative reporting, the conference dissects controversial topics in the field, hosts internationally renowned panelists, and examines key factors of change in investigative reporting.
Bio
George Dohrmann
Senior writer George Dohrmann is the last sportswriter to win the Pulitzer Prize. He earned journalism's top honor in 2000 while at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Pulitzer board cited his "determined reporting, despite negative reader reaction, that revealed academic fraud in the men's basketball program at the University of Minnesota."
Among other honors: Dohrmann has earned the Associated Press Sports Editors investigative honors award (1995, 1996 and 2000) as well as an APSE award in feature writing (2000). He joined SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in 2000, and his primary beat is investigative reporting. He has also covered college football, college basketball and high school sports for SI and SI.com. Dohrmann is the author of the book, Play Their Hearts Out, an expose about youth basketball published by Random House in October 2010. It was selected as the top sports book of the (and one of the best 100 overall) by Amazon. A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review called it: "one of the finest books about sports I've ever read."
Marcela Gaviria
Marcela Gaviria is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker with RAINmedia. Over the last 10 years she has produced over 20 documentaries for PBS FRONTLINE, including five films on post-war Iraq and four hours on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Working with veteran FRONTLINE producer and correspondent Martin Smith, Gaviria has earned nearly every major award in broadcast journalism. She is also the recipient of the 2008 Peter S. McGhee Fellowship award, which honors an individual whose work reflects excellence, intelligence, fairness, passion and scholarship. Gaviria first worked for FRONTLINE in 1994 with renowned producer William Cran on The Godfather of Cocaine, a film about the drug baron Pablo Escobar. After the production of that hour, she stayed on in her native Colombia and continued to field produce scores of documentaries for PBS and the BBC. In 1997 she was awarded a MacArthur grant to set up the first natural history filmmaking unit in Latin America. In 1999, she returned to FRONTLINE to work on the four part series, Drug Wars.
She is currently producing a one-hour film on Private Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. Gaviria was born in Bogota, Colombia, and obtained her BA from Brown University and her MA from Columbia University.
Mark Katches
Mark Katches is the editorial director for California Watch.
Previously, Katches built and ran investigative teams at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Orange County Register. He was the primary editor of Pulitzer Prize-winning projects in both 2008 and 2010 and has edited or managed three other stories that have been Pulitzer finalists since 2004. Projects he has edited have also won two George Polk Awards and two Scripps-Howard National Journalism Awards as well the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Sigma Delta Chi Award and the National Headliner Award. In 2001, he was part of a reporting team that won the Gerald Loeb and IRE awards for a series of stories detailing the rising profits from the human tissue trade.
A former adjunct professor at USC, Katches served on the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors and still oversees the IRE mentorship program. Katches also serves on the advisory board of the Texas Tribune.
Richard Pienciak
Richard T. Pienciak is the national investigative editor for The Associated Press. He heads a national team, helps oversee four regional investigative units and often runs investigations tied to breaking news. Pienciak was an editor and reporter on the AP's Gulf Oil Spill coverage that won the 2010 George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting. He is a former assistant managing editor for investigations, metro editor and investigative reporter for the New York Daily News. Pienciak also is the author of three nonfiction books. Before working at the Daily News, he was a member of the AP's National Reporting Team.
Raquel Rutledge
Raquel Rutledge is an investigative reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Watchdog Team and has spent the past two years uncovering widespread fraud in Wisconsin' child-care subsidy program. Her recent series "Cashing in on Kids" exposed a trail of phony companies, fake reports and shoddy oversight costing taxpayers millions of dollars. The stories prompted sweeping reforms of the program, new laws and a crackdown on unscrupulous child-care providers . Regulators cut public funding to more than 200 providers suspected of cheating the program and several have been sent to prison. The "Cashing in on Kids" series won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting as well as a George Polk Award, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and others.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rutledge joined the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel staff in 2004 from the Colorado Springs Gazette, where she spent nearly seven years covering education, the military and city hall.
Kara Scannell
Kara Scannell is the US regulatory correspondent for the Financial Times. She covers US financial regulation and enforcement, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Department of Justice and state attorney generals' offices. She is based in New York. Prior to joining the FT in 2010, Scannell served as a Washington-based SEC and financial regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered Congress' passage of the financial regulation bill and probes into Goldman Sachs Group, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide and Galleon Group. She has also served as private equity reporter and white-collar crime reporter for the Journal, covering criminal trials such as Martha Stewart, Enron and Tyco. She holds a BA in media studies and economics from Fordham University.
Dina Temple-Raston
Dina Temple-Raston reports about counterterrorism at home and abroad for NPR News. Her reporting can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines. She joined NPR in March 2007 fresh from a two year sabbatical in which she completed two books, learned Arabic, and received a Master's Degree from Columbia. A long-time foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News in Asia, Temple-Raston opened Bloomberg's Shanghai and Hong Kong offices working for both Bloomberg's financial wire and radio operations. She also served as Bloomberg News' White House correspondent during both Clinton administrations.
Temple-Raston is an award-winning author. Her first book, entitled A Death in Texas and about race in America, won the Barnes' and Noble Discover Award and was chosen as one of the Washington Post's Best Books of 2002. Her second book, on the role Radio Mille Collines played in fomenting the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was a Foreign Affairs magazine bestseller.
She has written two books related to civil liberties and national security. The first, In Defense of Our America (HarperCollins) written with Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, looks at civil liberties in post-9/11 America. The other, The Jihad Next Door (Public Affairs), is the story of the Lackawanna Six, America's first so-called sleeper cell, and the issues that face Muslims in America after 9/11. Temple-Raston holds a Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and a Master's degree from the Columbia University's School of Journalism. She was born in Belgium and French was her first language.
California Watch editorial director Mark Katches and NPR's Dina Temple-Raston share tips on how to pitch a story to an editor. Katches is more inclined to take a story that is already partially developed, and Temple-Raston agrees that advanced work can "guilt" an editor into accepting it. "You've already done so much work that the editor feels kind of bad if he doesn't give it a good hearing," she says.
Collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through media such as pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, and books. The term was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but in the late 20th century it came to include electronic media as well. It is sometimes used to refer to writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation. Colleges and universities confer degrees in journalism and sponsor research in related fields such as media studies and journalism ethics.
