Gary Cohn, Shipbreakers - Covering the Green Economy

The Shipbreakers

Shipbreakers: From Baltimore to Brownsville to Bombay
A Step-by-Step to taking your local environmental story global

Anatomy of an investigative story
Learn the fundamentals of reporting and writing – and you can do groundbreaking investigative environmental stories

Getting started
An editor’s key question – How does this industry operate everyplace else?
What would you do? Where would you start?

The workers – the heart of this story

The workers: obstacles we faced
How do you find workers and persuade them to talk on the record

An ethical dilemma
Balancing the need to get workers to talk on the record
versus
A desire to protect them from being fired for speaking out or deported

The Shipbreakers persuading them to talk

Getting the Navy to answer our questions
What to do when someone won’t talk to you
An alternate strategy to get answers from the Navy

Public Records
Court records – Mendoza case in Brownsville
Bankruptcy Court records – underlying economics of the shipbreaking industry
FOIA
OSHA records

The key economic issues
Understanding the economics of the shipbreaking business was a key to cracking this story.
Public records, revealing sources

The Asbestos Issue
The issues, the science

The Asbestos Issue
Finding and talking to victims – how we found the men who built these Navy ships decades ago
The two key questions to ask yourself when looking for hard-to-find information

The Regulatory Issues
Who was responsible for overseeing the Navy’s shipbreaking program – and why the regulation was a failure
Practical tips for reporting on the regulators in environmental stories

Taking the local story global
How we learned about the US Navy’s plan to send its old ships overseas for scrapping

Reporting in India
Strategies for reporting environmental stories overseas

How to deal with obstacles overseas
Stringers and fixers
The language problem – and the use of interpreters

The Writing Process
How we decided what stories to tell
Pulling the project together
Importance of clear and compelling writing when telling an investigative or complex business investigative story

Impact and follow-up
Congress holds hearings
The White House prohibits the Navy from sending old warships to the Third World

Why was this a good topic for an investigative story
Told readers something they didn’t know
Revealed a systemic wrong
Possibility of reform

A tough balancing act
How you can successfully cover your beat – and also pursue big stories
Tips for convincing your editors to give you the extra time you need

Questions

Summary
You can do groundbreaking investigative work if you master the fundamentals of reporting and writing

Gary Cohn, Shipbreakers - Covering the Green Economy

by Reynolds Center for Business Journalism on Jun 24, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

Gary Cohn, Shipbreakers - Covering the Green Economy — Presentation Transcript