Early this year, Editor Bobbie Jo Buel asked you to tell us what you want most from the Arizona Daily Star. Nearly 6,400 of you answered, and “investigation of important issues” topped the list.
We already had ramped up the resources we devote to investigative journalism, but we took your feedback to heart and pushed harder to get more watchdog reporting into our pages.
Today, I’m happy to report that we’re making progress. For years, we had struggled to meet our goal of an average of at least one watchdog story per day. But we’ve hit it consistently over the past several months.
That’s partly due to the Star’s investigative team, which includes a data reporter and three watchdog reporters. But credit goes to the entire newsroom — every reporter on every beat is expected to produce watchdog stories, which is why you now see coverage of arts organizations’ finances and the revenue of college athletics in our pages.
Some examples of our recent watchdog reporting:
- In March, border reporter Perla Trevizo and data reporter Carli Brosseau reviewed thousands of records from 13 Southern Arizona law-enforcement agencies. Their investigation revealed a patchwork of immigration-enforcement policies and data so incomplete there’s no way to determine how police are implementing the law, or whether they are committing the systemic civil-rights violations opponents feared when the state law known as SB 1070 was passed.
- In May, investigative reporter Emily Bregel found that local and state housing officials are well aware of serious problems at Tucson’s worst mobile home parks, yet they rarely take steps to clean up the parks — or shut down the most egregious offenders of fair housing and building code standards — because Tucson has no better alternative for its poorest residents.
- In September, health reporter Stephanie Innes examined records and found that the percentage of local preschoolers whose parents opted out of vaccines against infectious diseases like measles, meningitis and whooping cough has quadrupled since 2000 — increasing the risk of outbreaks here.
- Investigative reporter Becky Pallack produces a steady stream of coverage based on public records she requests and reviews each month. To name just a few: restaurant health inspections, fines levied against registered contractors, and professionals who lose their licenses.
Stories like these take time. Reporters must request documents or data, which often requires formal letters and multiple rounds of back-and-forth with government officials who are the keepers of those records.
Watchdog reporting also takes money — we often have to pay hundreds of dollars for CDs or photocopies, and sometimes, when we hit a brick wall in our attempts to gather public records, we have to hire an attorney to fight on behalf of your right to know.
But it’s worth all that, and more. At a 2005 session sponsored by the Poynter Institute, 35 editors and publishers worked to define watchdog journalism. Among their ideas: “journalism that gives power to people.”
For us at the Star, that gets to the heart of the matter. Our role as community watchdog is how we serve our community. It’s how we ensure that all of us understand how Tucson and Pima County — and all their various governing boards, departments and divisions — are serving our interests and spending our money.
The more we all know, the better prepared we are to make Tucson the community we want it to be.
