 If you're just joining, my name is Cynthia Gordigua. I'm ProPublica's marketing director. Welcome to how to account how our journalism made a difference in 2020. So a lot of ink has been spilled about how we're living in a post-truth era and that journalism can no longer make an impact in the face of that. Without ProPublica, that's certainly not the case. Our work continues to affect real world change. And as you may know, that's one of our chief goals here. Today, we'll talk about some of the stories that spurred major impacts this year from reforming harmful policies and practices to righting wrongs in the criminal justice system. And to guide us through that, we'll hear from some of the editors of this work. With us today, we have Steven Engelberg, ProPublica Editor-in-Chief, Manny Garcia, Senior Editor of the ProPublica Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, Louise Kiernan, ProPublica Illinois Editor-in-Chief, Charles Ornstein, Managing Editor Local, and Tracy Weber, Deputy Managing Editor. So I wanna just get into it with a set of stories about the justice system and the aftermath of those investigations. And I wanna start with Tracy and a series that actually published in 2018, which was called Blood Will Tell by Pamela Koloff. So this project looked at a forensic science call or forensic discipline called Bloodstain Pattern Analysis in which so-called experts report to study bloodstains of the crime scene to draw conclusions about the crime. So Pamela investigated the accuracy of this practice and how it sounds scientific, but in reality is quite shaky and circumstantial. But at the heart of the story was a man named Joe Bryan. Can you tell us a bit about Joe Bryan and what your story revealed about his case? Sure, most fun for editors talking about impact. And sometimes that takes a little bit longer to happen. Pam had been looking, if anyone knows Pam, she does a lot of the finest criminal justice reporting around, but she'd always been looking for a case that would allow her to get at something pernicious that happens in courts and prosecutors have a case that's kind of weak and shaky and they bring in a forensic expert, someone who purports to be a specialist in a sort of dubious forensic scientist and they throw out a bunch of jargon and they wow the jury and they sort of cast doubt on using a patina of science. So when Pam heard about the case of Joe Bryan, she thought she had her way into looking at Bloodstain Pattern Analysis. Joe Bryan was this well-loved high school principal in this town outside Waco called Clifton, Texas. He and his wife, Mickey, who was an elementary school teacher, were just well thought of throughout the town. You could always see them walking at night, hand in hand. They gave money to kids who couldn't afford school to field trips, well loved. And so when Mickey was murdered one night in their bedroom and Joe was 120 miles away at a teacher's conference, everyone thought Joe could never have done it. And no one believed he could have done it. But the local authorities came up with this case and they built a case, even though there was no physical evidence, no motive. And they had almost no sort of evidence to type their case. They went ahead with this case against Joe Bryan. And in court, the case was sort of shaky and it didn't seem like they had enough to make the case until they brought on this local cop. And the cop had taken a forensics course and blood spatter analysis, a week long course, and suddenly he was an expert. He had no science background, but they brought him on the stand and he convinced the jury that there was a scientific basis for Joe's guilt. Joe is convicted, he has sent away to prison and everyone in Clifton turned their back on him. So Pam comes along, she sees this case as the vehicle, but then Pam decided to do something extraordinary. If you look at most ProPublica stories, or many of them, they have kind of a dual track. They have a case they're looking at, but they also have a separate sort of track that's the point of the story. In this case, it was Joe's guilt or innocence, but it was also blood spatter forensics. So Pam came to me and said, I would like to become a blood spatter expert. So, and I would like to take the same course that the expert in Joe Bryant's case took. And so one of the glorious things about ProPublica is I could say, sure. So Pam paid $700 and drove to Oklahoma where she and 20 cops took a week long blood spatter workshop. And I can still remember her sending me pictures of her with a bloodied axe, swinging it all over and then measuring the blood spatter. But Pam proved a great point, and this was a crucial part of her story. She was now a blood spatter expert with the same training as someone, the guy who put Joe Bryant away for 30 years. And she could talk in the story, in the language of the forensics they used, and she could dispel the sort of magic that that forensics held in the story. And so it was a sort of a crucial way to not only unravel the case of Joe, but also unravel the forensics that underlay it. Okay, so after that first story published in May of 2018, a few things happened. First, the Texas Forensic Science Commission gets an independent expert to reexamine the analysis used to convict Brian or Joe, we'll call him Joe. It's his first name, Brian's last name is confusing. And then after that review, the commission found that the prosecution's bloodstain pattern testimony was, and I quote, not accurate or scientifically supported. And even the prosecution's own bloodstain pattern expert in that case came forward and said that his conclusions were wrong. So it seems like this is a clear pathway for the release of Joe Bryant. This was two years ago, but that's not what happened. He was in prison for more than 30 years. Even after the story came out, it took longer to get him out. So can you tell us what actually happened and also tell us about your experience of this long winding road to justice where it seems like the impact should have been immediate, but in reality took longer? So impact is a funny thing. And we talked about a lot at ProPublica. You have the clear impact would be Joe getting out. And then you have a bunch of stuff that we don't really appreciate that is pretty substantive impact. Charlie Ornstein was on this panel with me. When we first got to ProPublica, we wrote a project about the California nursing board failing to hold dangerous nurses to account. And the next day, then Governor Schwarzenegger fired most of the nursing board. That almost never happens. Most stories we do sort of trail out over time. Criminal justice stories typically take a really long time to show impact. But in the context of that, in the context of the slow moving criminal justice system, Joe's case had a bunch of surprising impact that turned out over time. First off, Pam's story had 12,000 people signed up for a newsletter to follow Pam's story. And when they had a hearing in Joe's case, hundreds, people drove hundreds of miles from out of state and it was standing renomally at his hearing. Lawyers from across the country were sending us letters saying, they were using Pam's story in court hearings to debunk the blood spatter forensics experts on the stand. They were citing it in court cases. It is being used by the Innocence Project to sort of help them, help attorneys, debunk the forensic experts on the stand. But also that case had laid dormant for 30 years. No one cared about Joe Bryan. Everyone who had once loved him had turned their back on him. Suddenly that case was the talk of Texas. There was a renewed interest in his case, but also in what they had allowed, how they had allowed this forensic science to infiltrate the justice system and the impact of that. So suddenly you have the Texas reconsidering who can be a blood spatter expert and what they should be able to testify in. Pam's ability to become an expert caused a lot of people to rethink what exactly that was around the country in a bunch of different forums. They teach it now in a lot of law schools. And I can't underestimate how unusual it was to have at a hearing the now retired local cop who took the stand and testified about this blood spatter forensics to come out of retirements, write and sign an affidavit that said he was wrong and that what he had testified to was not right. Val, that is really rare. We were focused on Joe's fate, of course. He had a health condition. He was uncertain how he was doing and then there was illness in the prisons and such. We think that a win and after a story like this is they're out, they're exonerated, they're cleared. That's a Hollywood ending that happens in some cases, but rarely. In this case, Joe's case went all the way up to Texas's highest criminal court and they're very conservative. They almost never favorably review these cases and they didn't in Joe's case. But it did convince the parole board who at seven times had turned Joe down. And after the stories and the renewed interest in it, they reconsidered in the interest of justice and he was granted parole on his eighth time. So for Joe, if you think about this, he got out and he is going to celebrate with his family Thanksgiving this week for the first time since the Reagan administration. And that's what we take home as a really great bit of impact. Thank you, Tracy, and great work. So next I wanna ask Louise about a story that ProPublica Illinois published this July by reporter Jody S. Cohen. But so I wanna take a step back because I know that as reporters or as journalists, people reach out to all of our editors with desperate stories on a daily basis. And the fact is you can't tell all of the stories even if they're very compelling. So Louise, I wanted to ask you how did we learn about a 15 year old girl in Michigan who we called Grace to protect her identity and what made your team decide to tell Grace's story? Well, this story, like many stories, started with a telephone call out of the blue. One day Jody Cohen, the reporter got a call and on the other end of the line was a woman whose first question to Jody was, is there a ProPublica Michigan? Well, at that moment, there wasn't a ProPublica Michigan. Now we're very excited that we're gonna be able to expand our work so that we can more regularly cover Michigan and other states in the Midwest. But at that moment in time, this spring, we were just ProPublica Illinois. But Jody being the intrepid reporter that she has listened to this woman's story anyway. And as it turned out, the woman who called us was Grace's mother and she wanted to share what had happened to her daughter, which is that Grace, who was 15, a sophomore in high school, had been placed on probation for earlier charges involving theft and assault. She had taken a cell phone from a kid at school, which was returned shortly thereafter. And she'd been involved in an altercation with her mother that prompted a neighbor to call police. So she had been placed on probation for these charges and had just been sent to a juvenile detention center for violating her probation by not doing her online schoolwork after her school had, like schools around the country transition to remote learning during the pandemic. So as Jody listened to this story and as she later related to the rest of us, I think she was struck by two points. One was in the midst of the pandemic when schools everywhere were scrambling to figure out how to manage remote learning. I think anyone who had direct experience with the challenges of what that entailed, particularly for children with special needs, which is the case with Grace, it was really hard. And the idea that you could be sent to detention for that, I think was very striking to us. And then secondly, I think the story really spoke to us because we were facing a cultural moment of racial reckoning sparked in part by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others. And Grace's case spoke to the question of racial injustice in the juvenile justice system. Grace is black. She's black in a school that is predominantly white and a county that is predominantly white and was in a juvenile justice system that federal data shows in prisons, black kids at a rate four times that of white kids. So all of those factors, I think spoke very immediately to us as they would, once we published this story to people all over the country and effect around the world. And so we just plunged in, even though it wasn't technically within our borders and we published the first story about Grace's case on July 14th. That story almost immediately went viral. It was covered by news outlets across the country and abroad, more than 300,000 people signed an online petition to demand her release. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to Janelle Monnet was asking that she be removed from detention. And then it just grew from there. So as you just described, after the story, there was this big national outcry. But despite all of that, the judge in the case still upheld the decision and she remained incarcerated until the Michigan Court of Appeals ultimately ordered for her release. But so between ProPublica's story and Grace's release, that was two and a half weeks. But the thing is, the story still didn't move the heart and mind of the judge. It moved all these other people. And in that process, Grace kind of became a celebrity. She, even as you were very careful to protect her identity and protect her privacy, there was still all this attention on her. So my question is, as an editor who helped shine a spotlight on her case, did you feel protective of Grace and all the new found attention she was getting and how did that attention change her life after she was released? When a story goes that viral, that quickly, it tends to take on a life of its own and it moves out of your control. For example, I saw people posting photos on social media of young women they claimed were Grace in juvenile detention, they were not Grace. I saw factual errors in other media coverage of the case and we tried to correct misinformation where we could but we really focused on continuing to do our factual and thorough reporting on the case. And of course throughout that we were very conscious of not creating harm for everyone involved in the case and most of all, for Grace, this 15 year old who was at the heart of it. Interestingly, Grace while she was in detention didn't know that much about what was happening outside. Her mother had limited the amount of information she told her about this viral campaign to free her because she didn't wanna erase her hopes. They were not allowed to watch television in the detention center, to watch news on television but they were allowed to listen to the radio and Grace had her radio tuned to NPR one night and heard a story about the case and realized that that was her. It was not until she was released on July 31st as you said, less than three weeks after the initial story ran and went home and her mother began to share with her hundreds of letters that people had written to them about the case and to share some of the social media with her about it. But they've been rightfully so very protective of her and her identity. They've had many, many offers to appear on television programs or through other media and turn those down. In fact, the only time Grace has really spoken publicly was at a conference for a nonprofit organization that advocates for black girls and she spoke at that conference with the video turned off. But she is back at home with her mother. She is attending a new school where she's doing well. She actually had her first part-time job this fall where she was out canvassing voters for the election and she's doing well. Hey, thank you so much, Louise. So I wanna turn to Manny next. And by the way, Manny leads ProPublica's Texas reporting initiative with the Texas Tribune and he formed this team at the beginning of the pandemic. Most of them have never even met in person. They've never shared office space but they're still producing incredible journalism. So kudos to Manny for managing that under such extraordinary circumstances. So one of your stories in July, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune expose the practices of Opportune Inc. An installment lender that caters to Latino immigrants and reporters Ren Larson and Kia Collier found that Opportune was continuing to sue borrowers even after they lost their jobs because of the pandemic and therefore, you know, missed payments. So Manny, there were a number of lenders across Texas, across the country that were also doing this. They were suing borrowers during the pandemic. How did your team come to focus on Opportune in particular? Thank you first. Thanks for the shout out for Team Texas. So Kia and Ren had done a story earlier in the spring that looked at debt collectors who were putting folks at risk by garnishing their pandemic checks. So therefore a very important story based on that, Kia and Ren asked themselves a question. So which debt collectors are filing the most lawsuits in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic, which we know has left over three million Texans without jobs. So you'll enjoy this chess game and I'll walk through all or everyone on here if you follow the Queen's Gambit, you'll see some steps here in our game. So we asked a hard question, who's filing the most lawsuits? So the next steps is like, how do we get there? So it's twofold. Who are the people, the experts in the industry or the folks who are advocates for those who are suffering at the hands of these debt collectors? Who do we talk to? Second of all, what records do we need to try to determine who is the largest file or lawsuits? So then we had, it's the hurdle in the workaround. So it's critical thinking skills in a sense that the hurdle is like Texas has 800 justice of the peace courts. Think of it as small claims courts, even smaller, all of them are fiefdoms. So the record keeping is very chaotic and some courts replicate records and others, you're not. So then the decision is, how do we determine is there a sample size we can do to test our theory? So then it's keep it simple. We were fortunate because in the counties that are for Houston and Fort Worth, the records are public. So Ren was able to obtain with Key obtained the records and create like a sample size. And what that revealed was one of the largest debt filers, the filers of lawsuits in Texas was a small publicly traded company called Opportun. So now we have these two counties. Now the question is, can we scale from that sample size? So that's when we decided we're gonna look at the state's seven largest counties across the state where we have records available and then we build our database of records. I'm keeping it very simple, but you'll see how this goes up. So based on that, we were able to determine we have this larger universe. However, because doing that opportunity as a publicly traded company, we know where all of their retail locations and kiosks are located where they do business. What we had as a blind spot is, in many locations where they operate, we don't have quick access to their records. So again, that was a lot more time intensive of trying to secure records from say some of these smaller counties or municipalities and from these justices. So Ren ended up scraping five years worth of court data from seven of the largest counties in Texas. We end up with at the end is a record universe of 1.45 billion court records from 62 justices courts from January of 2015 through June 30th of 2020. And what we know as more than 50% of the population in Texas are within this universe, as well as 80% of opportunities retail locations. So we feel now we have a very, very good plan to go after this. So what we learned from this reporting is that opportunity from their own public statements, they prided themselves as being a very humane and affordable lender to the Latino community. Yet from Ren's work and Kia's work, they sued thousands of borrowers after they lost their jobs and mispayments. Second of all, the company had marketed a hardship program because of folks who had lost their positions jobs because of COVID. Our interviews showed that many of the folks who talked to us, they had never been told or heard of a hardship program. The third point is what was quickly, quickly appeared to us. And from our interviews, opportunity was filing lawsuits to intimidate borrowers to keep them refinancing their high interest loans. Okay. So one of our saying that pro-couple has no surprises. The subjects that you cover shouldn't be surprised about what's in the story when it comes out. So as part of the regular reporting process, Ren and Kia, or maybe it was someone else, it was you, Annie, submitted questions to the company. And before you could publish the story, opportunity announced that it was dropping the lawsuits and they also announced a cap on interest rates for new loans. So like it's, you had pre-impact before the story came out. And my guess is that opportunity thought that they were getting ahead of the story and taking the wind out of your sales by doing the right thing before you could publish and maybe they expected you to kill the story. But of course you proceeded. Explain why opportunity changing course and dropping these collection suits did not harm your story in any way and why it wasn't important to still publish it. Right. So in part of the interview process, I'll take you a step back really quickly. It's a small industry, everybody talks. So because there was so many lawsuits filed in Texas, it just stood out there. The publicist for opportune reached out to Kia and says, hey, we know you're looking at us. If there's anything we can do to help, let us know. So we promise to stay in touch. Then to your point in late July, the opportune CEO announces on a blog post, we're dropping all the lawsuits against our bars, capping the interest rates and we're gonna help anybody who fall behind and we're doing this because as a company and as our board of directors, it's the right thing to do. So of course we're sitting here. I talked to Charlie Rornstein and says, well, how do you think we proceed on this? And it was clearly an attempt to get ahead of our story but what it doesn't do, it didn't undercut our story. In fact, what it did, it confirmed our findings and merited more scrutiny because what they've done now is confirm what you're looking at. What we still needed to do was we needed to answer the why, why so many lawsuits and why were customers treated so differently when the company had a hardship program that they were promising. So what, again, our reporting determined, as I mentioned earlier, that they were filing these lawsuits to get people to either make a payment or refinance and there was the company that promised so much empathy was actually just hammering, hammering folks causally with phone calls. To your point at ProPublica, we believe in no surprises letter. Kia and Ren wrote a very long document of questions, very detailed questions to the company. As we normally do, we ran it by our general counsel, Jeremy Kutner, for review. And we sent it off to opportune and says, we'd like to give you a chance to respond. This is our deadline. Here's where it gets tricky in a sense. Opportune said through its publicist, we're going to offer you a statement but we're not going to comment further. So in essence, what you're getting is like, here's your statement. We're willing to talk to you on background. You can't quote us, but we're not going to help you out with any more clarity. So that leaves you depending really on your reporting so in your data analysis. On our side, we're fortunate that we have a very rigorous process for checks and balances. And at the end of the day, it's what I like to call in journalism and within ProPublica in the Texas Tribune, iron sharpens iron. So Ren's data work went through a Ryan Gortzowski-Jones, our data editor, and Chris Essay at the Texas Tribune who went back because we wanted to double check that our data was pristine, which it was. And also our stories go through a series of editors but the most important step to us because think about we have data is we need to put data to people. So almost everybody interviewed in the story, they only spoke Spanish. So Perla Treviso came in who's fluent and went out and did interviews with individuals who basically stood up our story and became the protagonist for the story. So where it ended was the company didn't respond. I called the P, I called the publicist at one point and said, hey, listen, are you sure you don't want to talk to us? He says, our statement is what you're going to go with. So we published our story was airtight, we had the receipts and the result was exactly what you want. The company dropped, has dropped every lawsuit in Texas against every individual. Thanks, Danny. So I'm gonna turn to Steve next. Most of the stories we've discussed so far involved like, I mean, I just got into like some really intense data work, deep research, in some cases, like Bud Wiltel took an entire year of reporting but sometimes for a public who dives right into the news to hold public officials accountable. And that was the case this year when reporters Robert Badirechi and Derek Willis investigated former Senate Intelligence Chairman, Richard Burr. In May, they reported that Burr, who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee sold off up to $1.7 million of stock after receiving early intelligence briefings on the health threats of COVID-19. But at the same time, Burr was reassuring the public that the government had things under control. So how did ProPublica find the story and why did you think it was important for us to expose it even if it was a quicker hit than the long form stories that ProPublica is traditionally known for? Hi, first of all, welcome to everybody. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, this was a fascinating little story. We had begun the year in the time before time Robert Badirechi is a very fine reporter on our staff and he was gonna look at this sort of interesting phrase, congressional ethics. Does it exist? And in the course of trying to figure that out had spent an enormous amount of time reading the forms filed annually by congressmen and senators. He's very familiar with the fact that some of these guys have a very kind of plain vanilla financial picture. Some of them have a complicated picture. Some of them own stocks, some of them own lots of companies, all kinds of complexity. And so he gets up one morning and he hears on NPR because a lot of times we journalists learn things from other journalists, not at all any shame in that at all. And NPR had reported that there was something, a club it was called the Tarheel Circle. And in that club, just sort of a strange idea, you pay $10,000 per member and these were generally investors from North Carolina, some other powerful people. And then the club would bring in insiders, company executives, members of Congress, whatever, to give sort of private briefings. And so this gentleman Burr, Senator Burr had from North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee had come in and given a briefing in which he was quoted by NPR as saying, and this was in February when he gave the briefing. He said, well, there's one thing I can tell you about this. It's much more aggressive and transmission than anything we've seen. We're akin to the 1918 pandemic, he said. Companies might have to curtail travel, schools could close, military might have to compensate for overwhelmed hospital by being mobilized. Well, that all sounds actually, as it turns out, pretty accurate. Not what the president was saying at the time, but there you go. It was with the intelligence community was telling the Senate Intelligence Committee members. And so Robert had a question, just a single question in his mind, which was, gee, he's in essence telling these well-heeled people they probably might wanna change their stock alignments. Airplane companies not good. I wonder if this guy had sold any stock. And so he just pulled up the publicly available disclosure form. Why not? And to his and Derek Willis's surprise, it turned out that there were 33 separate transactions totaling somewhere between 600,000 and 1.7 million in which he had indeed sold most of his stocks. And he had done so again at a time when the public was being assured by the president and by others that this was really not so bad. We were gonna get through this unscathed that was more of a China problem. And so with that, we published a story and there was a lot of attention paid. And ultimately, Burr. Well, ultimately Senator Burr found himself in a lot of difficulties. I mean, the way it broke out at first, because in journalism, we all copy each other. So since we pulled Burr's files, other people started pulling other people's files. And there were several other people, members of Congress who had sold off their stocks suspiciously in about this timeframe. So they were sort of follow on stories about members of Congress selling things. And then we started looking into Senator Burr more because the disclosure reports contained all sorts of things, including if you buy or sell property. And it turned out that he had sold his house to a lobbyist at a price the lobbyist had set. So that made another little interesting story. And then the next thing we did, we know one day we wake up and the FBI is serving a search warrant at the good Senator's house, pulling all of his records. And then shortly after that, he was no longer chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now he is still a member of the Senate as of today. So that investigation is ongoing. I haven't heard much about the FBI investigation of the senior Republican from North Carolina during the Bill Barr Justice Department administration, but I would not be shocked if after January 21st or so, we might hear some more about this. Okay, thank you, Steve. So I wanna stay on the topic of the federal response in the beginning stages of COVID. And I'm gonna get to Charlie in a minute, but going back to Tracy, I want to talk about a story that you edited in March and April of this year, Patricia Callahan and Sebastian Rotella investigated how a US subsidiary of Royal Phillips, which is a Dutch appliance and technology company had received millions in federal tax dollars years ago to deliver a low-cost ventilator for pandemics, but they never actually did it. And then despite that, they struck another deal with the US government for $646 million or $646.7 million, four times the price of what the ventilator should have been. So walk us through what happened there exactly and how you got this tip and what do you think it says about the early stages of the federal response or what it says about the federal response in the early stages of the pandemic? So sure, to set the scene with this, you gotta remember that in March and April, there was this, at least in New York, in the East Coast and a couple other spots in the city, this sort of desperation that people were flooding the hospitals. And at that time, everyone really thought putting the most, the serious patients on ventilators was this life-saving move. And there's this desperation for ventilators and why didn't we have any in this national stockpile that's supposed to be prepared for pandemics? And Steve, see, even when you're editor-in-chief, you still get tips. Steve got a tip from someone that he passed along to us that we should take a look at this deal that had been struck to put ventilators in the stockpile, what had happened to it, because it had never been fulfilled. So the reporters, which also included Tim Golden, they decided to go dive into this world that they knew nothing about of contracting for things in that, and what they discovered is what you oftentimes discovered, that the story, the tip that Steve had gotten was like a good interesting thing, that deal had died out, but there was another subsequent deal that was actually the really bad deal that we should take a look at. So the reporters dove in and found out that years ago under Obama, they had actually contracted with Phillips and said, hey, what we really need is a portable, low-cost, easy to use ventilator that we can make a bunch of them and put them in the stockpile. So they paid Phillips to design just such a ventilator, and they agreed on a price of $3,280 each, and they wanted 10,000 of them. So they paid the company to design and manufacture these. Then when the pandemic strikes, everyone's like, well, where are those ventilators? And it turns out they hadn't actually delivered those ventilators yet, but with some sleuthing by the reporters, they were able to discover, oh, but they were selling, Phillips was selling, and I almost virtually identical ventilator produced in Pennsylvania, shipping them all around the world, but they had not shipped the ones to the stockpile. So this produced a bunch of outrage. They write this story, people are like, what the hell what's going on here? And then, so we published the story and then the Trump administration, and this was the sort of shocking thing, agrees nevertheless to a subsequent deal with Phillips in which it agrees to buy all these ventilators at the same ventilator and the same design at four times the originally agreed upon cost. So they spent, the contract with them was for the one, as you noted for 647 million, and at the time that was the largest coronavirus contract for anything. And so we had written that story and we put that story out there. There was a lot of outrage. And ultimately, they backed out of- Well, so it happened exactly as we all totally love it to happen, where members of Congress smartly jump on our good work and investigate this thing and find out that they, and they are able to get all kinds of documents in which that we could not get. And they actually published their investigation, they find evidence of fraud in the deal and they fraud, waste and abuse and that the Trump administration had paid up to $500 million too much for the ventilators and that Pete Navarro, who struck the deal had been gullible and agreed to pay $15,000 for each of the ventilators. And then the federal government backed out of the deal and before Phillips had delivered a third of the order and saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, it was a win, so. Thank you, Tracy. I know that was a lot to summarize. I know, but it was basically underneath it was like one of those rolling investigations where everything you want to happen is happening right as you go along and the impact is a win for everyone. So, that was a good one. So I wanna turn to Charlie next to talk about at least one of our local reporting stories this year because it's not just the federal government with this kind of influence over things. State government also requires scrutiny, of course. And Charlie, you had mentioned earlier like in a conversation just us that since the pandemic reporting on non COVID stories in local government has decreased dramatically. And for local reporters who wanna tell these other stories it's been a bit more challenging for them. I'd like to hear more about that through the lens of our work this year with the Maine Monitor and their series looking at how Maine is the only state in the country with no public defender system and instead legal services for the state's poorest defenders are left to private attorneys who are contracted by the state office that doesn't properly supervise them. So tell us about the challenges that the Maine Monitor reporters, Samantha Hogan and ProPublica data reporter, Abnel Phillip faced as they put this on in the age of COVID and what they were still able to uncover. Yeah, Cynthia, I mean, you're exactly right. The underlying problems that are going on in local and state government and not even government but just in regions across the country haven't just disappeared because COVID has arised but the ways of getting at them has really changed. Courthouses are closed, city councils aren't meeting in person, many communities you can't go into city hall. It's harder to get records. Some states have said that they're not even processing records or requests because of the COVID emergency. So if you're a local reporter trying to cover what's going on locally behind the scenes it's really hard to do that. That was the case in Maine. Folks who are history buffs may well remember a US Supreme Court case about 60 years ago Gideon versus Wainwright that established that every person accused of a crime had a constitutional right under the Sixth Amendment to the assistance of a lawyer. And states are required to provide one if you're too poor to hire your own. In many states that entailed setting up a public defender system where the state had an office that it funded with public defenders who took care of this. Maine, believe it or not, is the only state in the country that does not have a public defender system but instead pays for private lawyers who are contracted by the state to basically provide a defense to them. So we looked at the agency in Maine which is called the Maine Commission on Adigent Legal Services as part of our local reporting network. So Samantha Hogan is a reporter at the Maine Monitor and ProPublica is really proud of having a local reporting network where we are able to support local reporters who stay on staff of their local news organization to spend a year working on an important project for their community. And so Samantha had been writing about problems with indigent defense in Maine last year and felt that the problems ran even deeper than she had reported. And what she reported on this fall is that the state as part of the MCILS, this agency had hired attorneys who themselves had had disciplinary problems for professional misconduct that these people were being hired to defend the indigent in Maine. So just to give you an idea, the commission lawyers in Maine represented about 15% of the lawyers who were practicing attorneys in Maine but they were 26% of the lawyers who were disbarred, suspended or reprimanded in the past decade for professional misconduct. We found attorneys, one lawyer is a registered sex offender convicted of possessing child pornography. Another one was found to have exposed himself to a client. There were other folks that had other criminal backgrounds and then went right back to defending people who were accused of crimes and in many cases it ended badly for those people. So Samantha published this and very immediately this led to impact. The executive director of this commission announced that he would retire this year. The board of the commission recommended to Maine's governor that she double the budget for indigent defense in Maine. It's unclear if she'll actually do that but the commission board recognized immediately how serious these problems were. And I have no doubt that it's in no small part a function of the reporting that Samantha did and frankly, with all these reporters who are focusing on COVID right now and rightly so. I mean, I too am inspired by the work that Tracy talked about and that you heard Louise and Manny talk about but there's not enough reporting that's going on in other areas and we need to create, we need to ensure that that's happening. Those underlying problems are not going away and in fact, people who are doing bad things may see this as a perfect moment to keep doing those bad things. Thanks, Charlie. So I'm actually going to move to some of the questions from our viewers now. And we may go back to my questions if we don't have that many. But as a reminder to the audience if you'd like to ask a question just click the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen to type it in. So our first question comes from Brooke Baldwin. I'm not sure if it's like the CNN Brooke Baldwin or same name, but anyways, she says as journalists doing work that exposes people doing things it shouldn't be doing you yourselves can become targets or can you come targets? So to the degree that you're comfortable sharing how do you have to think about protecting your communication and other aspects of privacy do you continue to be able to do this work? So like how are some of the ways that we just keep our communication secure and how do you protect yourself and other and your subjects? Well, you really look there's a limit in the modern world to how much you can do but we certainly try to take the basic precautions. You know, every one of our reporters is adapting the use of things like signal where you can send messages through an encrypted app and make sure those messages disappear either immediately or within a day. So, you know, this is a way of, you know covering some of the more obvious things but the truth of the matter is, you know in the modern world, it is really hard to have dealings with people and not leave behind some kind of electronic breadcrumbs. And so, you know, depending on who we're dealing with or what we're doing, you know you certainly take a bunch of precautions particularly say in the national security arena but, you know, it's actually a challenging thing with, you know, the cell phone location data and all the rest of it, you know we, you know, invest money and time and securing our networks and professionals have sort of looked at what we do and made it better but at the end of the day I've no doubt that a very, very determined adversary could find a way to hack darn near anything. I'm curious if my colleagues have any other thoughts on that. So, we have a whole page sort of devoted to how you can contact us securely and give us information securely. COVID has been a real problem because a lot of times you might actually avoid any kind of phone or electronic altogether and meet someone in person. We are still doing that. We have reporters that have gone out and reported socially distant and can gather information in ways that won't leave that electronic trail. We are very good about using signal, using WhatsApp, using various ways in which the conversations can be protected and the identities of folks can be preserved and that people can get information to us in ways that are secure or as secure as we can possibly achieve. It is challenging and I feel like there's sort of a one-up game of keeping things private but we are really dedicated to it. Great, thank you. So, our next question kind of deals with this idea of being in the post-truth era. This is an anonymous question they ask. Given how widespread disinformation has become and how vilified credible investigative journalism has been by some in our society, how do we renew and reinforce people's trust in the fact-based reporting that you do? And are you finding that you're getting like a lot of pushback in the face of your facts? I mean, is this something that you're kind of grappling with and how have you grappled with it as journalists? I don't mind stepping in and answering that. I think one of the things that we try to do and that ProPublica is known for doing is bringing the receipts and Manny mentioned this but I think it's incredibly important that when you report that something is broken or you report that you found something, we try as best we can to share what we found with the public that often means sharing the documents, the data, case studies, snippets of decisions so that people can read for themselves. I think when Tracy and I worked together on investigations, we always felt that in addition to asking people to trust us, we should let them see for themselves and then come to their own conclusions and when you do that, the level of trust that people have in you only increases. If I can add to that, Charlie, I like to think that transparency is the foundation of trust and that the more that we are open about how we do the work that we do, the better able we are to grow trust. I think as a profession, we tend to assume that people know a lot more about how we do our work than they actually do and that making sure they understand the way that we go about it, that for example, an anonymous source is not anonymous to us. We know who that person is. There is a whole process through which news organization goes through to accept an anonymous source and there are dozens of other examples of the way that we approach our work thoughtfully and with accuracy and fairness in mind that we just need to be much more open about that with the public. Our next question comes from Darlene and it's kind of about the time that goes into this work. Anyone, can you give an example of how much time elapsed from the green lighting of a story to its actual publication? Like what's the longest time it's taken from a story being green lit to like when it finally comes out and do you have an example of a really fast time as well? Well, I'll jump in here and just say with respect to the questioner, one of the things I as an editor usually delete from any story draft that comes in and by now our staff is so accustomed this hardly ever arrives this way is that sentence that begins in an 11 month investigation pro-publica has learned. I don't think readers actually care deeply how many months we spent on it. And so that is sort of in a sense our problem. Stories can take days, they can take weeks, they can take months. And the demand of pro-publica is that we do hopefully original research to do stories that wouldn't otherwise be done. And that can take a little time or a lot of time. Perhaps Manny could talk a little bit about from the time he green lit, the first look at the border wall construction to the time we had a story and then how long it took till we got like even more stories. Yeah, so that's again, let me back up and just reiterate what everyone has said. The readers really want and these are not your critics. These are also the folks who support you. Think about us in our tomb whom much is given, much is expected. And so our supporters wanna know how we did these stories. In the border wall stories, this was Jeremy Schwartz who came to us from the Austin American statesman very sourced in. He got a call from one of his old sources and says, you gotta look at this border wall that was built here in South Texas. A lot of taxpayer money, private money from this organization called Rebuild the Wall went into it from good supporters. The thing is ready to topple over. And so initially, Jeremy was balancing several balls and he sent me this tip. I sent it to Charlie and said, hey, listen, this sounds promising. Well, Jeremy's chasing this other lead. I'm just gonna have Perla make some calls because Jeremy and Perla worked on it. Perla makes some calls and it is indeed, indeed turned out to be a story. And so the timeframe, because to support our reporting had to be, we believe that this is shoddy construction using public money, but as well a large share of money from private donors who both just believe in this project. But how do we show that it is indeed falling apart? So the green light came from talking to enough experts in engineering, water flow, et cetera to say, yes, there is a big problem down there. So I would say that was maybe a couple of weeks and then to make sure we pitched it to Charlie. And then Charlie's point of view, okay, how do we best tell the story? And of course, one of the big home runs here happened to be actually with a Texas Tribune that Miguel got a drone pilot to fly over this thing and show just what a message is because you could write, but there's nothing more powerful than pictures. So I think that was probably a couple of weeks to talk to the experts to get a green light. But then over the course of the first story was maybe about, I think maybe Charlie may remember like about under the month, but what was incredible about it, the president of the United States on a Sunday has read that a storm passed and the wall started just clearly, it was not going to do well in the long run. The president sends out a tweet basically disavowing any knowledge of anything related to this thing, considering one of the key founders of the We Build a Wall group is Steve Bannon, who was one of his chief campaign strategists, who subsequently he and other We Build a Wall members were indicted in a case of looting the charity. They're allegedly charged with looting the charity. So you see the product that you see really is many steps in laying the groundwork for publication and that's that rigor that we apply. Okay, we have so many great questions and not a whole lot of time. This might be the last one. Can you talk about the benefits and challenges of reporting and doing investigative journalism as a nonprofit organization? I don't know if you have thoughts on this, like do you feel like there's particular challenges or benefits of being a nonprofit? Just to jump in very quickly there. I think the biggest benefit potentially, first of all, the work is done at the same kind of level that any other sort of top news organization is. I would say the biggest benefit is that we are built around the entire thing that this hour has been about, which is impact. So the biggest benefit that we have is that we can choose stories where we're potentially gonna have impact rather than having to get massive number of clicks or even stories so fascinating that anyone would give us $800 a year to subscribe. By the way, if anybody wants to do that, that's great. We have a donate page come on down but if you're not moved to give us $800 a year, we'll do it anyway and we'll do it for the impact which is what we've been talking about here. And I think for me as someone who grew up in for-profit news organizations, that is a completely different mindset. Okay, and I'm gonna take another question and before I take that last question, a note from our president actually, Casey earlier was talking about a page that gives you lots of information on how to securely share stories with us or information. And that page is pro-publica.org slash tips, T-I-P-S, okay. So our next question comes from Jenna. She says, there's a fine line between activism and journalism when the result is political or legal impact. How do editors delineate the two within pro-publica to make sure motivations are purely journalistic? Take it. Tracy, you were, do you want me to take it? Okay, I think that people who come to us may have a whole array of motivations to tell their stories just like in the real world. People are motivated by doing the right thing. People are motivated to stop what they see as wrong to their colleagues. People may have other motivations as well. What we have to make sure is that we screen all of that out to make sure that at its core what we're telling is truthful is accurate not only in the small letter accurate but in the capital A letter accurate in the sense that it is in the spirit and in the letter exactly what is taking place and that we aren't doing it to advance somebody's own motive but rather to advance the truth. Steve and I had a conversation a couple of years ago in which we talked about whether investigative journalists were inherently pessimistic or optimistic and we were doing this as we were awaiting a plane in the Idaho, Boise, Idaho airport and I was certain the plane was gonna be delayed and I said to Steve, well, journalist, investigative reporters were inherently pessimistic and he said, I beg to differ with you. He said, journalists are inherently optimistic in the sense that investigative reporters when we see a problem, we are optimistic that people who of goodwill when they see the same problem will try to fix it and it obviously left an impression with me because I'm repeating it now but I think he's exactly right and I think it sort of goes to the heart of this question which is that we at our core believe that if you show that something is wrong and we have validated it and determined that we're telling us factually and truthfully that people of goodwill will wanna fix it and I think that's what this is all about. Very well said, Charlie, thank you. That's actually our time for today and as a reminder to everyone today's event was recorded and will be uploaded to ProPublica's YouTube channel and if you haven't already, you can get more invitations to events like this by signing up for a big story newsletter at propublica.org slash newsletters. Thank you so much to our speakers and for everyone watching from all of us at ProPublica thank you for joining us. Have a great day and we'll see you next time.