the shipbreakers by gary cohn
DESCRIPTION
Gary Cohn presents "The Shipbreakers" at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism's workshop, "Investigative Business Journalism on a Beat." For more information, please visit http://businessjournalism.org.TRANSCRIPT
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The Shipbreakers
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Anatomy of an investigative story
Learn the fundamentals of reporting and writing – and you can do groundbreaking investigative work
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How a local beat reporter discovered the Shipbreaking story
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Getting started
An editor’s key question – How does this industry operate everyplace else?
What would you do? Where would you start?
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The workers – the heart of this story
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The workers: obstacles we faced
How do you find workers and persuade them to talk on the record
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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
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The Shipbreakers persuading them to talk
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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
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Public Records
• Court records – Mendoza case in Brownsville
• Bankruptcy Court records – underlying economics of the shipbreaking industry
• FOIA
• OSHA records
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The key economic issues
• Understanding the economics of the shipbreaking business was a key to cracking this story.
• Public records, revealing sources
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The Asbestos Issue
• The issues, the science
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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
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Taking the local story global
• How we learned about the US Navy’s plan to send its old ships overseas for scrapping
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Reporting in India
• Strategies for reporting investigative business stories overseas
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How to deal with obstacles overseas
• Stringers and fixers
• The language problem – and the use of interpreters
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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
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Impact and follow-up
• Congress holds hearings
• The White House prohibits the Navy from sending old warships to the Third World
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Why was this a good topic for an investigative story
• Told readers something they didn’t know
• Revealed a systemic wrong
• Possibility of reform
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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
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Questions
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Summary
• You can do groundbreaking investigative work if you master the fundamentals of reporting and writing