West Region report: Dogged Watchdog journalism Nov. 17, 2010
You've filed your FOIA request, but keep waiting for the information.
The officials claim they're clean, that anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
So, what's next?
"Find the victims, the people who are getting the short end of the stick," said Frank Mullen, senior reporter/investigations at the Reno Gazette-Journal. "What makes the narrative is the people."
Perhaps those are athletes in non-revenue sports at the big school, or female athletes if it's a case involving Title IX. Maybe it's the university that was spurned by the big JC football star (see Mississippi State).
"Recruiting and coach scandals, academic malfeasance … the more you dig, the more you find," Mullen said.
Speaking to the sports editors at the APSE West Regional meeting Nov. 8 in Reno, Mullen told tales of some of his past investigations, such as the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles sending out past-due insurance notices and collecting from many who had already paid their fees, a munitions dump that broke seemingly all of its own rules and caused a high rate of cancer among families who lived downwind, and a fuel pipeline whose leaks caused dozens of cases of lymphoma among young children in a small town.
No matter how many daily assignments were piling up on his desk, Mullen made sure to find time for each story.
"Persistence means more than inside sources or documents to me," Mullen said. "If you pick your targets, it's still possible to pull this stuff off."
Mullen said he tries to keep keep it simple.
"What's going on? Not what the goverment or a press release or the university says is going on. What's actually going on?" he said.
"There's what we know, what we think we know and what we can publish. You try to get the first and second categories into the third category."
