One of the nation’s most distinguished organizations dedicated to investigative reporting has released a list of 2009’s best watchdog journalism from around the country.
To see the name “Bristol Herald Courier” sandwiched between The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times is beyond gratifying. In fact, we were the only non-major-metro newspaper on the list for reporter Daniel Gilbert’s 13-month effort to chronicle Virginia’s feeble system for dealing with the mineral rights to our region’s underground methane gas.
The eight-day series, which ran Dec. 6-13 and included five follow-ups later that month, exposed how an obscure but powerful state board has forced landowners to lease their gas rights to energy corporations. Those companies funneled tens of millions of dollars in royalties belonging to landowners into an escrow fund that has not been audited in a decade.
In November 2008, Gilbert set out to trace why $24 million was parked in the escrow account. In probing a system the Richmond Times-Dispatch recently said “verges on state-sanctioned theft,” Gilbert waded into the murky realm of mineral ownership and the previously unexplored consequences of a 1990 state law designed to expand natural gas production in Virginia. For nearly 20 years, that law has allowed the energy industry to profit from gas that belongs to uncompensated landowners.
Gilbert also found that the state has no safeguards and has not devoted enough resources into ensuring that energy corporations pay up. Missing from the escrow account are hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments, and possibly much more.
California Watch, the most recent project of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting, recently ran a blog item from Mark Katches, CW’s editorial director. “Top editors still buzzing about 2009 investigative stories,” the online headline reads.
Katches polled 11 of the nation’s top investigative journalists for their lists of head-turning projects.
“As the comments flowed in, it was heartening to see that, despite our industry woes, strong watchdog reporting is thriving at news organizations large and small – including nonprofit newsrooms,” Katches wrote. “Even though newsrooms have lost some outstanding investigative reporters to layoffs and buyouts, amazing work is still getting done.”
Katches is no slouch himself. He is the former deputy managing editor for projects and investigations at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he edited Pulitzer Prize-winning projects in 2008 and 2009.
The Center for Investigative Reporting bills itself as the country’s oldest nonprofit investigative news organization with a mission to produce impactful print, broadcast and Web journalism.
“CIR is working to ensure that high-quality, credible, unique journalism does not die, but flourishes. Our innovative new model relies on in-depth collaboration with other news organizations, journalists, public policy organizations and universities, and fully exploits new storytelling technologies, to provide citizens – local and global – with critical, actionable information that impacts their lives. Important to this model is our search for new revenue streams that can help sustain high-quality journalism in a digital age.”
The Herald Courier also got a great online shout-out from Al Cross, a Kentucky journalism legend and director of the University of Kentucky-based Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Among other accomplishments, Cross was national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02.
Cross, who helped win The (Louisville) Courier-Journal’s 1989 Pulitzer for the nation’s deadliest bus and drunk-driving crash, linked to our mineral rights series and to the California Watch list.
A friend of mine – a Kentuckian and ex-journalist – saw Cross’s item and wrote me on Facebook: “Al is royalty in Kentucky journalism ... very high praise, my friend.”
Gilbert’s work is a testament to what a newspaper, even a small one, can do when it has the will and finds a way to throw itself into a complex topic of vital community interest.
ON THE WEB
http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/top-editors-still-buzzing-about-2009-investigative-stories
htpp://irjci.blogspot.com/2010/01/bristol-paper-exposes-malfeasance.html
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.
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