 Hey everybody, welcome. We're so glad to see you all tonight. My name is Robin Sparkman. I'm ProPublica's president, and we're just thrilled to have you all here. We'd love to nerd out on our work and talk about our stories, and that's what we're going to do for the next hour. We're just going to give people a little bit of time to show up and log in. For those of you who haven't been a part of this before, every year we'd like to do a roundup of ProPublica's big stories of the year and talk about our impact. As I hope you all know, our mission is all about using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur change, and that's what we're going to talk about tonight. We have three big stories in particular that we're going to discuss, and you'll hear from the reporters and the editors who are involved in putting those stories together. You'll hear about trained country, you'll hear about the work on home vesters, and you'll hear about our work on healthcare denials, all very ripe and timely stories. A quick note that this event is being recorded, and a link to the video will be emailed to everyone who registered. Close captioning the program is also available. And if you can, if you want to click on the closed caption option on the bar toward the bottom of your screen, you should see the closed captioning show up for you. Now, we love to make this a very interactive process. Many of you sent questions in advance, we will try to get to them. And you will also probably hear questions that come when you listen to the reporters and so please put those in the chat. We'll do our very best to get to them tonight. Okay, looks like we have enough people to get started the numbers keep ticking up but we should get started soon. If you're just joining us. I'm Robin Sparkman, I'm Republic as president, and I'm delighted to have you all here tonight to hear from our reporters and editors about three big stories from the past year. And just a reminder, the event is being recorded and a link to the video will be emailed to everyone who registered. And we also have closed captioning available. Please click on the closed caption option on the bar toward the bottom of your screen. Okay, so now it's my pleasure to introduce our editor in chief Steve Engelberg to come on and share some of his thoughts about our impact this year. So let me turn it over to Steve. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. It's, first of all, a great pleasure to be with you, since you are the people who make this possible. What you make possible is a unique journalistic organization in which everybody at ProPublica gets up in the morning and says, how can I begin researching a story, which if it pans out and is brought to public attention could really bring change. And that sounds like a tall order and it is people you're going to hear from today have been remarkably skilled at doing just that. But I want to emphasize how, you know, incredibly unusual this position is to be able to do journalism that brings change, you know, other news organizations, reporters are given a quota at the beginning of a year and so well you need to hit 500,000 page views today for your stories. And they're told is the year goes on while you're falling behind and the temptation to start writing about celebrities or various other things that will get you a page view is inevitable because if you don't hit your mark well who knows you could be laid off. So public is the exact opposite the question we ask is, are you going to do work that's going to make a difference. We have some wonderful stories here today I also just want to allude to a couple of recent pieces of impact. Yesterday, not one but two major stories broke the Supreme Court for the first time in its 234 year history is adopting an ethics code. A number of journalism organizations have been involved in looking at the court this year. I'm proud to say that we have led the charge. And I believe we even encourage a few of our colleagues and competitors to join. And so I think this is very much a triumph of journalism, investigative reporting. We now are going to know more than we did before, and there's going to be some clear rules and road for the court. One thing that I would mention is working with one read the podcast company, we focused on some events at Columbia University where ecologist had done severe misconduct involving women patients, perhaps as many as 6500 Columbia yesterday announced that 100 million dollars on to compensate the victims so those are two great examples that journalism, if done well, and if the seats are brought and if it's persuasive can actually make a difference. And with that, I would like very much to introduce our first group. Zayas is for public as deputy managing editor she runs a team of reporters overseas senior editors, we've been covering global health, global public health and visual storytelling. We also have Topher Saunders, Sanders joining us for this conversation Topher previously covered race and equality and the justice system and he is now focused on real rate road safety, which as you've seen from our stories is a very, very important story. Over to you, Alex. Thank you, Topher. Freight rail safety has gotten a lot of attention this year as we all realized in February that when trains carry hazardous materials sometimes they can derail and unleash awful things on a community as they did in Palestine. And a few other reporters had been quietly investigating the industry for for a few months several months before that derailment happened because you had a sense that you knew some of the problems that were that were just endemic to the industry and so can you talk a little bit about what that investigation entailed. Absolutely. So we actually started looking at the rail industry from the perspective of employees, we were interested to learn whether or not the injuries that employees said that it was suffering while working on the railroads. Did the government have an injury report to making their way to the government. Did the government have a real tally, a full understanding of how safe it was for railroad worker to work in the railroad industry, and as we dug deeper into a lot of government in terms of how workers fair while working in industry and touch base touching base with attorneys that work in that space, looking at some of the lawsuits filed in that space, but quickly learned that there was a new business model that was driving the newest and latest activity philosophy in the rails called PSR precision scheduled railroading and it was changing a lot about how railroad was being conducted, but an emphasis on speeding cargo through through the network, making trains as fast as possible. And that was touched as few times as possible, making trains, much longer than they had been before, and that was creating safety issues for workers and for communities. And so we started to look very closely at what happens when you have extremely long trains going through communities that necessarily aren't built for the physics of that geography. What can that happen what can happen to a community, and then Ohio happened. And a lot of people became very interested in the railroads, and we so happened to be working on a story about a very long train that derailed in a small community in Pennsylvania, and forced an evacuation of an entire town. And so it was very clear to us that not only were we in the right space working on the right issues, but that there was a hungry public ready to read this work. So the two stories that are very public facing that published earlier this year one on that long train horrible derailment that happened years before this other horrible derailment. And then a story about blocked railroad crossings that which is probably the way that the public is more most broadly impacted right by by this issue. Absolutely. So as they made trains longer. There have been communities throughout our country that have always dealt with having trained traffic and they've always had to figure out. Oh, you know, the crossing at blank is going to be blocked for 1050 minutes and I have a reroute I'll go this other direction. But as they started making trains longer, not only were they blocking one crossing. They were blocking two crossings three crossings, cleaving whole communities and have and making it impossible for not only, you know, the community to get back and forth go to the grocery store, go to pharmacies, but also for first responders to get calls, police and fire ambulances to get to get to a hospital. And so we started tracking the incidents that were where communities were were screaming to the rooftops. Hey, these block crossings are making life, a living heck for us in our community. So we started making some calls started learning where the hotspots for this what communities are really being impacted by the length of these trains and these block crossings. We learned about a little community in Indiana, named Hammond. And so it had all the same issues. The police and fire would have problems with the block crossings, some ambulances would have problems with block crossings first responders, but also public school children weren't able to walk to their school because of the train. And they wouldn't sit there for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. It sat there for hours, five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours. Children would encounter a train going to school, have an entire day's worth of school happened, get out of school and encounter the same train sitting on the tracks going home. And they had to go over under those trains in order to get to or from school. So we went to Hammond, we saw it with our own eyes. And we knew it was a story that had to be written immediately. I love being on the ground in Hammond you're a dad with elementary school age middle school age kids and you're seeing kids with frozen backpacks and you know Ninja Turtle backpacks climbing over and crawling under trains and parents sometimes putting them over the straight just to get the kids to school. Did you believe did you believe your eyes like what did you think when you saw that you know and what were your next reporting steps. Yeah, when we saw it, it's impossible not to have your own personal human reaction to what you're seeing. And as a parent with little kids that walk to school. I instantly thought about, you know, how I would not want my children to have to encounter this train have to make the decision. Well, do I go to school this day, or do I, you know, go home because I don't want to walk. I want to call over under this train. And another thing just for in this space and we're talking about, you know, reporters and how we do our work. It was a real moment for me where my privilege, but was frightened center for me that in this community, where these families had to make the choice to either send their kids to school by going over under train. They're not a wealthy community. And I'm not wealthy, but I have the ability to live in a community where my kids don't have to make that choice. And so as I sat there and watched I said, this is a problem this community has decided that they just have to live with. And it has been decades that these trains have blocked these kids from going to school. And it wasn't until someone showed up with fresh eyes that didn't live in the community that kind of an urgency was there for me and the other reporters. There was something that we had to share with the rest of the world and country and see if a fix could be to be found. That's what public it does be partnered on this story and with great television, which is a chain of local TV stations and it was very important for us to have video of this and that video actually, you know, made a huge impact and, you know, among among the people who were kind of shocked and outraged by this were eat Buddha judge transportation secretary who gave you an interview. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of that video and of the block crossings work at large. The video was critical. We're all very capable reporters. We're all very good at writing a strong sentence and a beautiful story, but some things you just got to see. And it was one of this is one of those moments where we wrote up the description of what we watched we took some pictures with our camera phones. But at the end of the day, when we got back as a group of reporters, we knew that this was something where the power of television in our, in our, our television colleagues are reporters on the television side. They would be able to show the world this issue in a way that even our written word wouldn't capture. And so I think that the video was transformative for the story, and for the Hammon community, because when you look at that video online and people can see it, and they saw the little young lady with the pinkish red jacket crawling under the train, and then having to reach back under the train to get her book bag dinner water bottle. You know if you're writing a script for a movie. The editors will tell you it's either the book bag or the water bottle it's not both. But in reality, it was both and each time she straddling the rails, and the train started moving at any time it was going to be horrific. And that's what they do, or did every day in Hammon, until you know the reporters showed up and we wrote the stories that we wrote. So can you get into a little bit of what has happened after that and we're going to show a few of these clips as, as you're talking. A little bit, what happened as a result of this reporting specifically. Yeah, we published our story on a Wednesday, that same night in Hammon, there was a discussion about these intersections and a few other intersections related to the trains, because it was an ongoing effort to build an overpass overpass is going to be very helpful for first responders, and for, you know, people in the community just trying to get to and from the community. It wasn't going to help the school children. So we published the story that day, they had the public meeting about this potential overpass that night, the night that we published. And our story was really the centerpiece of the conversation that night at the public meeting. And the mayor was super annoyed with ProPublica with me with the TV people with everyone because we brought all this attention to this issue that was happening in his community in Hammon, and it was a lot of conversation at the meeting that night. The next day, the mayor of Hammon had never had a conversation with Norfolk Southern CEO. That's the, that's the company the railroad company is principally in Hammon. The next day he gets a phone call from Alan Shaw to talk about fixes on how to prevent these children from having to interact with the train this that way. And I called him that Thursday on Wednesday he was super annoyed with me and angry at him. And on Thursday, he couldn't say enough nice things about ProPublica and the work we had done, because it moved the needle in a way that had never happened in him. So, and at large the FRA, the Federal Railroad Administration which oversees real safety they have put several advisories out in the wake of our reporting. So, I've got one more question I've got time for one more question I'd love for you to please plug our story today, because it is it is part of that month long work before East Palestine coming to fruition we still have at least one more, at least two more stories, but please plug plug our story today and what you found in it. I'm very proud of the story that we published today. As I said earlier we started this work looking at worker injuries and how it is for the employees of these railroads in the wake of PSR and all this new, this new economic philosophy and kind of operational philosophy that the railroads are using. And so today we published what really is kind of the first fruit of all of that work we went through 10,000 federal complaints, going back to 2009 to get a sense of what this space looks like, what how people are getting injured, what what happens to people who raise safety concerns. And that's the core of today's story will have an injury story coming subsequently, but today's story is all about the whistleblowers the people who try to flag the thing that's not that safe on the rail yard and what happens to them. What we've learned is that, if you have the audacity on one of these rail yards to raise a safety issue. You could find yourself, not only being disciplined, harass intimidated, ultimately you could find yourself fired sitting at home without a paycheck, because you were willing to say hey that's not safe we should fix that. And what that does to the rest of your colleagues is when you saw Bob get fired two weeks ago because he was raising safety issues, then you as an employee no longer want to speak up when you see things on the rail yard. And so it creates an environment where our first our first eyes of safety on the rail yards are not willing to speak up, and, and we are all less safe for it. Thank you Topher as a close closing out. I'd love to just cue the video clips. I think I'm kicking this back to Steve now. Thank you Alex thank you. And I just want to emphasize watching those very powerful clips. They have over the last several years significantly invested in video and visual journals and all sorts of ProPublica. The internet is a visual medium and the offer is so right those, those videos shown to the Secretary of Transportation, you know, brought an instant, an instant impact and an instant response so very cool. So we turn it over now to our home vesters team was going to take us behind the scenes of the famous we buy ugly houses campaign. You know, one of the things about journalism is where do you get your stories I think honestly that story was steering us on the face for a while. The team includes Michael Spires who is ProPublica Southwest editors is joining ProPublica in 2021 his team has investigated the disproportionate impact of child welfare enforcement and communities of color. Other regions historic drought is changing water policy and the slow repatriation of indigenous human remains and other topics. We could do a whole session on any of those. And Jeanette Damon on this story is a reporter who focuses on government accountability prior to joining us in ProPublica. She worked at the Reno is that journal and us a network is a government watchdog reporter and regional investigative editor. And by our Duncan is an engagement reporter ProPublica before joining us he spent seven years at reveal from the Center for investigative reporting he and team of other reporters investigated Amazon's high rate of worker injuries Michael over to you. Steve. So, as Steve mentioned this team investigated homebusters which builds itself as the largest cash home buyer in the country. And when he says it was a story starting us in the face that's literally true. And let's have and why don't you talk a bit about why you were interested in pursuing this investigation, and, and some of the findings, some of the reasons why or what you set up to find. Yeah, just to jump on the train of our subspeak of the service during this in the face in neighborhoods across the country across where I live. You see these signs will buy your house for cash we buy ugly houses, and it always just in the back of my head what is with that like who who is, is that even a good deal like who calls this phone number what happens when you do call the phone number. And we had a pro public how we join in these issue groups or across the organization all of our different teams can kind of brainstorm and talk about what we're seeing and there are other people in that call they're like yeah that those signs with those signs. And so we thought well let's let's try and dig into this a little bit and my corporate or buy or put in a records request to the FTC just to kind of see well what are people's experiences dealing with these companies. We very quickly got back a wide range of complaints from people that we're dealing with these companies, and we spent the next year investigating that so finding homeowners who had dealt with the home investors identifying the more than 1100 franchise owners that were going out and buying these houses. And we found that while the company likes to say that they, they help people out of ugly situations or ugly homes. Often their practices target people in very vulnerable situations and use of vulnerable situations as leverage against them to get as low a price for the houses, as they possibly can. And we found that the company used a giant advertising apparatus to establish a brain, a brand name and homeowners heads, much like a box of Kleenex you reach for that we buy ugly houses phone number if you're having a thought about me to sell your house quickly. And on that they train their franchises to partner with nursing home administrators with divorce lawyers with probate courts, as a way to try and find people in vulnerable situations, and they drive the neighborhoods looking for signs of distress, in order to target them. They then engage in a very aggressive sales technique even though they're trying to buy your house they're kind of selling themselves to you very aggressively they they come to your house. They offer a price they push hard to get a contract signed at that moment. And I think one of our findings that surprised me the most was just the extreme difficulty it is to get out of that contract. And, you know, the franchise owners are trained in ways to make that even more difficult we found many homeowners who are actually sued by the company when they tried to back out of the contract people that were fighting these lawsuits from hospital beds, homeowners who actually passed away while fighting the company. Can you talk a bit about maybe a moment or individually you met while you were reporting this story that that stuck with you. Fair I think, probably the, the best place to start on the moments that kind of push the story forward would be when we got our hands on the internal training materials for home investors. The reporting that I contributed to was building sourcing within current and former franchisees of the company. And so to be able to get a window inside the, the actual training materials, the, the lessons that they were imparting while they spoke externally about helping people. And I think one of the key things we found in the training materials was this idea of as engine that kind of went into this idea of the way they put it is find the pain, you know, every person's distress, every home sellers potential home sellers distress is viewed as an opportunity in home investors. As you can see here on this slide, you know, there, there are examples of circumstances that might sort of grease the wheels for a seller to take a basically take a lower price. If they're just trying to offload the house fast and you'll notice that one of them is my child needs an operation and I need to sell this house for cash. So it's a one of the breakthrough moments was just getting our hands on these materials and really getting a window inside of how they conduct their affairs. Another person, I think that kind of helped propel the story forward would have been David Casanova, whose mother who's now deceased, Kareem Casanova had dealings with Southern California home investors franchise. When she was near the end of her life, and had well documented dementia signed over her home to this franchise. Immediately regretted it sought the sought help from her adult son her adult son has spent years now trying to fight this company. Meanwhile, as engine that mentioned this company resorted to a lot of familiar home investors tactics did not back clouded the houses title and attempt to enforce the contract and is still actually seven, seven years later almost eight years later still locked in illegal battle with this family. So I should talk a bit about what was the company's response when you went to them with some of the things that we had found about their own company. Did they know that this was going up. Yeah, you know as we're, we're conducting investigations oftentimes we try and do that quietly at first we don't necessarily want to tip off the subjects of our investigation what we're looking at. But we, we have, as we had gotten farther into the reporting we knew that the company knew what we were doing. First of all, we were asking for the public's help in a call out the buyer grit had written and was distributing so they probably saw that and then we got word back that, you know, some of the people that we had reached out to for information that had reported back to company leadership. So at that point like okay let's try and get an interview. The company declined the interview they had actually hired a kind of a crisis communications specialist to deal with the story that they knew was coming. The interview was denied we did, we went through our process or no surprises process where we write a very detailed letter, describing all of our findings, and making sure one that we're accurate, and to that, you know the company had as much time as possible to respond to all of our findings to make sure that there wasn't additional context or anything else they wanted to say. At that point they engaged they answered, you know to the credit they answered all provided an answer I should say to all of our questions. And after that, after that letter went out. We got a tip back. Someone wrote in and said hey we want to talk to you a little bit about what the company is actually saying about your story. And if I was to talk about that. Yeah, so this tip came in when, as Internet said when we were close to the conclusion of our reporting getting close to publishing our first story. With some knowledge of what was going on in the moment around home vesters and their reaction to our reporting or I should say their preparations for our reporting, going out into the world. We learned that they had recently called an all hands meeting with all their 1100 or so franchisees to basically debrief them on what to expect from our story, how to react to it and also lay out their plans for, quote unquote, burying the story with ad buys and SEO. Here you see David Hicks the now former CEO of home vesters talking about, you know, different techniques that they were going to resort to to try to make sure that our story didn't see the light of day or didn't really take off. One strategy that he suggested was if the story comes across your radar you a home vester's franchise, don't click it because that will only help things along. They were going to turn it into a PDF and distribute it SEO to answer that question there is a search engine optimization it just means using some Google tools to help somebody searching for the phrase home vester's find their their website more easily and not find our story and you can kind of spend a little money to you know try to juice your own results on Google. I think we can hear that fire from the CEO himself I think we have the audio. When this article comes out. I want to encourage you please don't click on. We will go post the article on the internet. We'll post other articles where they've been printed so you can see them. But if you click on it you will drive the their on the SEO. I guess we can give the sort of the ending of that story that people did click on the article in fact, millions of times, and, and as a result, there was a lot of impact. Maybe engine let us come back to you what were. I think the, the nation's top consumer watchdog. You mentioned this us senators and some other things and as buyer mentioned the CEO ends up stepping down but could you summarize, like what you see as the impact of your reporting your buyers report. Yeah, I think first of all the company itself, put out new rules to their franchises that they should not engage in the kind of legal tactics that we had identified as being predatory so you know, making it a common practice to sue people that wanted out of the contract shouldn't be done, or this clouding of title which makes it difficult to sell to anybody else shouldn't happen. But regulators and lawmakers also took, took notice on beyond just the company, the director of the consumer finance bureau testified before a Senate committee saying, asking you know the nation's attorney generals to pay closer to this, a letter went out from two US senators again to states attorneys general, asking them to be better watchdogs for their, their citizens on on this issue, and more local city city councils and municipalities are looking at ways that they can pass more consumer homeowner type protections from from these practices. Thank you for your work and we'll send it back to you Steve. Thank you very much Michael. That is really, really quite a story. The last thing we want to look at here today. People ask us sort of how do we pick pro public the stories. And we are always looking for stories that affect a lot of people, and the next story is one that I think has effects literally scores and scores of millions of people around the country and it is about health care denials the health care companies, reviewing claims from many, many people and deciding which ones to pay and which ones to reject so our team involves T Christian Miller, who is a reporter with extensive experience in public records freedom of information and data driven reporting in more than 25 years as a professional journalist and foreign correspondent T covered four wars and presidential campaign and reported for more than two dozen companies. Sorry, Maya Miller, no relation is an engagement reporter and pro public a working on community sourced investigations is collaborated across and beyond the newsroom on series about aggressive medical debt collection practices housing and evictions, as well as toxic air pollution And I point out this is a new field in journalism and Maya and her colleagues on the engagement team are pioneering how we use the internet to not only stories read but also to learn things and to find sources and to expand our reporting. Finally, David Armstrong is reporter for public a specializing in health care investigations before joining us he was a senior reporter enterprise reporter for stat where he wrote about abuses and the addiction treatment industry the rise of fentanyl and the recruiting of college football players with histories of questions to take it from here. Thanks so much Steve. Hi everyone, my name is T Miller and I'm a reporter and editor here at ProPublica. I want to echo some of the things that folks have said earlier, in terms of how much we appreciate you guys in funding the work that we do. We appreciate it. We know that we rely upon people who are interested in the news, and who are donating to our cause to help us be able to do the stories that we do And I want to take a moment to kind of say thank you for that. So the series that we did this year that we've been looking into is, as Steve mentioned something that's almost universal. And that is when you go to get health care, and you ask your health insurance for treatment, you might get denied might get denied treatment and this happens hundreds of millions of times a year, all over the United States. What our project sought to get to is sort of find out what lay at the bottom of all these denials, can you give us the inside story of what happened when I got a denial and what kind of tools can we put in the hands of consumers, so that you guys can find out better and fight for your right to health care. So, there's a team of reporters who have been dedicated to us we call the series uncovered, both as the idea that you can be uncovered by insurance company, and that we are uncovering the behind the scenes look at the industry itself. So I'm going to have it kicked off with David arm from David if you could tell folks a little bit about some of our findings in the series, and then a little bit about kind of how we got into the work. Sure to you maybe I'll flip that a bit and tell you a little bit about how we got into this work. And interested in this in this project. As many stories do this one started with a source. This is somebody who had some firsthand information about how insurance companies go about evaluating requests for care, and how they make decisions about whether or not your care is going to be covered. And it was the kind of behind the scenes information that you rarely get. And it's really hard to uncover. So we, we wanted to first of all make sure that we understood this source who they were, what they were about one information they had. And one of the first things we did was give this source a code name as we often do. I can't tell you what that code name is but we refer to this person by this name so often that sometimes I forget their real name. And we had a great partner in this project in the capital form and a terrific reporter named Patrick Rucker, and Patrick and I traveled on several occasions to meet with this source. There was a chance for us to let the source know about us and how we work and get them comfortable, and also for us to understand the source and where they were coming from, and to evaluate their information and see if it checked out which which it was in this case. And it was a learning curve this is a hard industry to understand. It's bureaucratic as you might expect. It's an acronymistic in a lot of ways, you know, still a lot of stuff gets done by fax machine, which is one of the surprising things to us. And so it took us a long time to dig in and have a fundamental understanding of how this industry worked and one of the great things about pro public as you get the time to do that. So I started in on this in the second half of last year. And we didn't start publishing stories until this year. So as team mentioned we're really trying to get behind the curtain and understand how these decisions get made. We started cold calling people in the industry, particularly the doctors and nurses who work for insurers and make these decisions. We made, you know, more than 100 of these calls. Most health plans have a provision is probably in your health plans provision that treatment must be quote unquote medically necessary. And that decision is made by insurance company doctors who never see the patient and go against the discretion and advice of the treating physician in these cases. And what we learned to answer the second part of that question was the shortcuts are often taken and the cost was central to many of these decisions, which is perhaps not surprising. We also learned that millions of Americans are denied care every year. The data suggested as much as I think 10 to 20% of claims are denied. And this has real consequences. It can drive people into debt drive them into bankruptcy even, and some people just for go care because they can't afford it. So we really want to get to that human side of the story as well. And then we did something that's still pretty unique pro public and my will talk more about this. We engaged our engagement team. And we asked the public to share stories of their experiences with insurers in particular having their, their care request denied. And the response is really overwhelming we knew we had hit a nerve here just by the response we got before we ever published a story. And it was somebody who saw our appeal for stories. And that resulted us to the case of Chris McNaughton. And that became the first story in our series Chris is a college student with a crippling life threatening case of all sort of colitis. His care is very expensive. And he had to, at times drop out of college when his disease was at its worst, it had a real impact on his life, someone in his early 20s. He had to be hospitalized. And what happened was United Healthcare rejected a treatment plan crafted by a doctor at the Mayo Clinic one of the world's leading experts in this disease that sorry about that. It was really expensive and a bit risky for Chris himself but this is something Chris wanted to do. And what was amazing about this case, and allow us to report it in really incredible detail was that through a lawsuit the Chris filed he obtained audio recordings, emails and other information of the behind the scenes activity United about his case and we'll play you one of those clips in just a minute. And for some reason United help didn't try and protect this information or have it sealed in some fashion. And there was one thing in particular that really struck me when I first heard it and this was an audio recording of two officials that united sharing the news that the company was going to reject his care. The officials burst out laughing. And it was so cold and heartless that I'll always remember the first time I heard it. And maybe we could play that now. Hello, this is Dave. Hi Dave this is Victoria. Sorry to bother you I have some updated news for you though. Okay. I got a medical review back from the gastroenterologist and he states that it's not medically necessary treatment. I knew that was coming. I did, I did too, but I thought maybe they saw something I didn't do because I'm not a doctor. So, you know, there's lots more things like that including the fact that an outside expert hired by United determined that the care was medically necessary and united literally through it in the trash bin. So with that I'll turn it back to T. Okay, now let's let me turn it over to Maya Miller Maya's an engagement reporter with us and a Steve Engelberg mentioned earlier it's kind of a very new field and she's done some really exciting things on this project, both to bring in the community of people who are affected by insurance denials, and also to kind of provide some tools to fight back so Maya do you want to tell us a little bit about your work on this project and some of the impact that you've seen. Absolutely and thanks all just echoing teeth thank you for supporting our work and enabling us to be here today. But yeah so as has been said I'm an engagement reporter which is essentially like a data reporter in some ways, you know we do the day to day reporting but we really work with communities who are impacted by the harm that we're investigating to collect receipts and then use that to hold, you know whatever institution company agency accountable. So with this project, like David had said you know we put out this call out when David and Patrick came to me I think it was in August of last year. We put out a call out and you know I've been working at ProPublica for four years now and we got, I haven't quite seen this robust of a response I'm sure if I asked folks on this call to put a hand symbol up or right me in the chat who've had experience with insurance denials we we've got a couple dozen of folks. This is really something that touches everybody. And yeah so we got that response and something that came in, you know we read everything we interview people help shape our reporting. And I think something that was really unique that came in around February right after the story that David had mentioned, someone wrote into us a patient who had submitted, you know he had a chronic disease and he was facing a denial and someone had told him you can actually get your claim file from your insurance company. That's all the records that they've used to kind of assess when whether or not to deny or approve your claim, or deny your claim. And he got that and he saw internal calculations that his insurer was SIGNA so he saw internal calculations SIGNA made, and they found that if you know his treatment plan was switched which he really needed to sustain his day to day. So he would save $98,000 around that amount of money, and then he started getting denials and so he was able to use that information to fight back. And you know when he wrote into us with that we were like whoa, you rarely get this look underneath the hood of a health insurance company to really understand why these, you know, critical decisions are made. And so we ended up putting out a guide on how to request a claim file and then last week we put out, we had heard from dozens of people since then who had filed claim file request showed us what they got helped us understand better what's going on within insurance companies but we also heard that insurance companies were actually not complying with the federal law on this and not turning over the records people needed. So that actually came to be an accountability story of their own. So, you know we ended up finding that insurers weren't complying we sent insurers the information that we had crowdsourced from people so people sent us the responses they got from insurers saying you need a subpoena for this which isn't true. And then we had a couple insurance companies be like oops my bad you know we'll change our policies now to make sure we don't make this mistake again. We're going to retrain our staff and so, and then last week we published a claim file helper with our news apps team, where you can it helps you input your information and it generates a letter that you can send to your health insurance company. It's propublica.org slash claim file if anyone's interested in checking it out. But that kind of shows the loop and now I'm working on outreach so one other thing our team thinks about is, you know, not we want to make sure this work reaches everybody just folks who are pro publica supporters and so working hard to send out, you know, conflicts kids posters to doctors offices, you know patient support groups to make sure that people have these tools. And that, you know, both that will make them be able to work with this process even better but also that will enable us to investigate insurance more so. All right, thanks Maya, I appreciate that. And folks we still do have want to write in and have your own insurance problems we are still collecting information about all that. So again thanks so much for reading so thanks so much for contributing I'll turn it back over to an audience q amp a session. Okay, we have a few minutes left for questions here. So let's get started. This is good work in the public find a full list of tips and help from the engagement team Maya. That's a great question. Yeah, we have a get involved page at pro publica where all of our call outs are active so we often turn to the public for help because we recognize that we, you know, don't have the lived experiences that everyone who's been in these harms have and so that's where you can find out how to help us investigate more and be active participants in some of this work. And then we do have guides across all of our projects I'm not sure if they're in one place but we should think about putting them in one place, if they're not already there. Okay, I want to ask a question to various panelists here. What are all of you at predicting how often our stories get impact and just jump in I mean, are you, is it normally work out the way you expect or how does it, because we're talking here in this conversation about impact so does it work out the way you expect I'm going to call on somebody Michael Squires. I would say 5050 maybe I think we always go in with a lot of optimism and we choose areas that where we think there can be improvement, but oftentimes there are logical changes that our reporting show should happen that don't happen. But in the case of homebusters I would say, like there we did a good investigation, and it was, like, I, we can't verify whether the company really did this but they were acknowledging that these are problems that these investigators have found this is good reporting, we need to change things. To me that's, that's what we set out to do, you know, so in that case it was good impact but yeah can we predict it not always. Alex, you 5050 or better, I would agree with Michael I'm a coin flip. What I would say about impact is I think there might be misconception or that it sort of falls from the sky and people like to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, but at ProPublica and you know an investigative journalism interview, we employ techniques to try to make impact happen we reach out to stakeholders while we are doing our investigation to clue them in for our reporting we asked them specific questions after we've reported about possible solutions and say hey, what do you think about this idea, we try to bang a drumbeat of stories that iterate on our work so you know sometimes impact doesn't happen when I think but we, we are working behind the scenes to try to make impact. And Alex while you're there I'm going to ask you another question we have a question from the audience. How does ProPublica work with other news organizations and investigating and disseminating its findings. We, we, we work very well with the we we sort of invented the model didn't we Steve. You know, sometimes these are reporting partnerships in which a reporter from ProPublica and a reporter from another outlet end up partnering together and reporting the story together. Sometimes these are co publications in which we find an editor at, for example, a magazine, or, you know, another outlet, and they brought they work with us and do a version of their own story that we have reported. And often we make these decisions based on impact. Will this outlet help our story get impact. So, impact is always baked into how we work with our projects. Okay. So here's a good question for all of us. I think I'll throw this to Ann Jeanette and toker being a truth teller can be emotionally draining as journalists. How do you maintain a sense of well being after being in the trenches for long stretches of time. Why don't we start with the tofer and then engine. I'm sorry, a little bit of my lighting happened I was facing the natural light and went away. So, for me, I kind of have a secret baked into my life. I have three little children who are quite active and have a million different activities. And so when I disconnect from work, I really have to be present for that ballet recital or for that soccer game, in order to kind of just kind of connect with my family and be there for for my children and so I realize that's a cheat code and everybody but that is that is what kind of keeps me balanced and allows me to disconnect from what can be some some really hard work. So great question. Yeah, it's a good question that is difficult and I've been doing this now for more than 20 years and I'm still trying to figure that out. So one is grown and sometimes it was a little more stress than relaxation although it's great. I think I try. It's hard when you're you're just immersed in a lot of painful situations not to mention the stress and pressure of the job itself. So just finding ways to take myself out of that once you're one and kind of have to force yourself to take that outside perspective. And going outside is exactly what I do I spend a lot of time in the mountains. Just is the perfect place to stop thinking about about all of this so try to find healthy. I'd love to throw that question to Maya whose job requires her to sift through a larger than normal amount of very very sad material. What do you do Maya. Yeah, that's a good question. I actually I like to go for runs and we actually have a little pro public a run club started that I will be, you know trying to escape for an about an hour so that's good and then therapy is also good and then I work with the Dart Center, which is a group out of Columbia University and they've, they work in trauma reporting specifically and they've come to pro public a couple times to give us some training sessions on how to kind of deal with second secondary trauma and one of the main things is, you know, sharing it with other colleagues can be really helpful so if you have a call that's quite difficult, or are spending time reading through, you know, I'm already been reading through some of the experiences you all have been dropping in the chat and but talking to other people, particularly other journalists about what you're going through or what you're feeling or you know etc is a helpful tool that research has shown helps with this stuff to. Yeah. Thanks Maya. I have a question for Robin. Robin, what percentage of total for public of course, do we spend on legal, given the growing trend of people to file lawsuits to get back a journalist they don't like. We spend a few million dollars a year on legal costs, you know, on a $42 million budget. You know, and we have a great in house legal team that does a lot of work and we also get as much pro bono work as we possibly can for all of our state and federal records requests. It's, it's a great comfort to know, as an editor and reporter that we have people literally, you know, a phone call away on speed dial for me sometimes who can give us really high quality advice. And importantly, I should say, our legal team like the best legal teams in the business is working hard to help us get stories published. It's easy to be a lawyer, the journalism world and just say never say anything tough. Our lawyers figure out ways to get our findings in front of in front of the public. Good question here which I think I'll throw to first to T Christian Miller because he's been an editor and a reporter and a quite successful in both. T how do you select your topics. That's a great question. Actually, they come from all different sorts of places. The best place usually and I think Steve would agree with me is from a source from a person who's in the trenches has seen something go wrong, may have tried to expose it. And then they turn to us to help them shine a light on a specific issue in their company in the in their government program or agency. Those are the folks whistleblowers, who often give us kind of them the most compelling stories. And so that's the point of working a beat sometimes, like we cover many different beats here at ProPublica from health to race relations and working that beat is what gets you and publishing stories about it is what gets you responses from people who say, Hey, I can help these guys out I can I can help that store that particular story out. And I would say that that is, you know, we're always looking for for tips from folks. Then the other the other place they come from is like the store our home besters you're sort of walking around and you see just something that just looks odd, or you want to kind of know more about it. And being very engaged and kind of having an investigative mindset at all at all times to say like, I'm very bad at a party because I meet somebody and the first thing I asked them is like well so what goes wrong with you like what's what's bad. And we're always kind of having an investigative mindset in to kind of try and find a new source and then the final thing I would say is, we're always looking for a good story, a good story that is a narrative piece that can really draw you in as a reader that can really communicate a problem through one person's lens or group of people's experiences, because those tend to be the stories that people remember the most, a story that is really told, like a good old fashioned narrative. Thanks to Bayard, how about you, because you've been at this a while yourself, how do you, how do you find stories. To what he said, you know, I think. If you if you're focused on one sort of issue for long enough, there will be little branches that come off of it sources that have ideas about other things you should, you know, investigate. For me, over the course of my career, it's been everything from, you know, really trying to go after one particular idea I did a story about a couple of twins that were graduating from high school, after the Bayard ice fire in California and had gone to high school for the basically their high school year began when the fire started and what was it like to leave a second time because they had evacuated in 45 minutes. And that was like, I knew I wanted to do that exact story but which family you know which family was right for it versus. I was on a Oregon County, several years ago that had basically chosen low taxes over police, it preferred to pay lower taxes so they let their police force just kind of completely dissolve. And I actually got a tip for that story from a professor at the University of Oregon when I was at dinner with him, after a conference, and he was like, there's this crazy thing happening up north, and I was like, and then a year later I got a 4,000 word story about it so yeah it comes from all angles but I mean with engagement reporting. The main, the main point is to not only sort of be able to provide back to the community that's informing your reporting. These tools like Maya mentioned these service service journalism that will kind of like help teach them sort of the key points about the issue but also build sort of thing. That people come to you and they trust you and the next big thing or if they have a friend who mentioned something to them, that will sort of feed up to you and so you have that broad level of sourcing that is not just for us but we can sort of help spread to the proper people in the newsroom. All right by thank you. We have a tradition here of closing on time so I'm going to do that but I'm going to try to get one last question in which is, how do you see the future of independent journals and develop developing over the next few years. I think it's a very important question and a tough one. The economic model of journalism is in a state of advanced collapse. And we have yet to persuade everybody to be as the people are in this call which is willing to underwrite independent journalism journalism for so long arrived on our doorstep. This is the result of economics of monopoly. You know, there were only newspapers and they sold the ads and people paid what they wanted charge them. We don't have that anymore. And Americans are not yet willing to see entirely the work of journalists and journalism as something that can be supported like the ballet or the symphony or the dance company. And we're just closed by saying the future is evolving and thanks to folks like you. It will continue to evolve and please do spread the word that this is how independent journalism comes about thank you all. And good, good afternoon or good night depending on what time going in here.