Selden Ring Winner: The Story Behind the Story
By Tania Valdemoro
"Call it legislated greed. It’s all legal. And it’s bankrolled by you, the taxpayer.”
Those words began an investigative series running from Sept. 21-29, 2003, that ultimately prompted New Jersey voters to oust several lawmakers from office on Nov. 4 after they learned how much the elected officials had been “profiting from public service.”
The call to action won The Ashbury Park Press and seven other Gannett New Jersey newspapers the 2004 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Journalism. The award was created in 1989 by the late Selden Ring, a California developer and philanthropist who believed, “Only good investigative journalism can save the Republic.”
Unlike other journalism prizes, recipients have to prove their work has made a tangible difference. The Selden Ring Award is administered by the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. It’s worth $35,000.
New Jersey voters did more than oust their “ethically challenged” lawmakers. They took out the kingpin, incumbent state Sen. John O. Bennett (R-Monmouth), who turned the practice of using his political connections and clout into a “high art” of rewarding his own law firm with state contracts, said Paul D’Ambrosio, investigations editor of The Ashbury Park Press. Voters also made ethics the No. 1 issue before and after the midterm election, he said.
Lawmakers responded to their outrage by embracing governmental reform. They introduced more than 50 reform bills and clamored for a special session in Trenton, the state capitol, to discuss ethics, Skip Hindlay, executive editor of The Ashbury Park Press, told a gathering of journalists at a Western Knight Center seminar on campaign finance.
The state Legislature then passed three separate laws to ban nepotism in state offices and no-contract bidding, to limit the size of gifts lawmakers can receive, and prevent them from having more than one health care benefit plan per job, said Michael Symons, a statehouse reporter in Gannett’s Trenton bureau.
A 25-point government reform bill proposed by Democrats is being seriously considered, he added.
“I guess some politicians will always be pigs, but they’ll have to live in a clean sty,” one reader wrote to Hindlay.
The Gannett team beat out 88 other entries, including such finalists as a 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning series covering the atrocities to civilians and prisoners committed by an elite Army unit in Vietnam by The Toledo (OH) Blade, and a Wall Street Journal series that exposed how the health care industry overbilled people with no insurance more than anyone else.
“There have been many stories over the years about individual incidents of corruption in New Jersey. This series distinguished itself by focusing on a system that made the outrageous legal. The newspapers buttressed their reporting with strong editorial support, and voters responded,” wrote the award’s judges.
“We are honored and humbled to have won the Selden Ring Award,” Hindlay told the gathering during an awards luncheon.
Getting the Story
The story of the systemic corruption within New Jersey state government started with a local investigation. Bennett had recommended a friend, Matthew V. Scannapieco, to a state post - the mayoral job in Marlboro Township, said D’Ambrosio. The job paid Scannapieco $105,000 a year. In turn, he appointed Bennett to become the township’s attorney, since Bennett’s legislative job in Trenton was part time (as is all New Jersey state lawmakers’ jobs). Bennett earned $116,000 as the township attorney in addition to revenue from his other state posts.
With quid pro quo corruption staring them in the face, Gannett’s editors and reporters asked, “What led to this and how could this be legal?”
It quickly became clear to them that this wasn’t going to be a boilerplate political story.
It would not be about who was running. Nor would it be about Democrats and Republicans per se, although both parties gave Gannett a lot of information about the other due to their mutual suspicions.
Rather, the story was about how tax money was spent, how it engendered a corrupt system, and how that system affected all of New Jersey, said D’Ambrosio. The overarching goal was to influence debate among voters before the Nov. 4 midterm election, said Symons.
Many lawmakers told reporters that they didn’t see a problem with the status quo, D’Ambrosio said.
The “Profiting from Public Service” series addressed issues readers were concerned about, like property taxes, government waste, and inefficient services, he said.
“As lawmakers ride the gravy train, Jersey residents pay the freight,” read the series’ first headline. It encapsulated the big picture of corruption, a grim portrait the series would reinforce and expand through using a combined micro and macro approach of storytelling to look at a social problem, said D’Ambrosio.
The macro approach focused on the history and scope of government corruption while the micro approach used vivid anecdotes about the people whose stories were told - a device intended to affect readers by personalizing the issues.
For instance, the series first introduced readers to Robert DeLeonard, 46, a fisherman from Seaside Park who had to pay more than $70 for a parking permit at Island Beach. That’s because state parks like Island Beach needed to collect $1.3 million more per year in fees to pay for spending increases that ultimately led to political kickbacks, the paper documented.
The Gannett team also framed stories so they would create a cascading effect for impact. Each day, the series offered a big story along with other local stories that were reported by staffers from Cherry Hill to Tom’s River. “Each newspaper was free to choose from among the stories, but we had mandated certain stories, one main and two sidebars,” Hindlay said.
Finally, the series led readers to The Ashbury Park Press Web site, where they could find lawmakers’ campaign disclosure forms and other resources.
Before and during the five-month investigation, Gannett made a substantial investment in the series. Among its expenditures was $5,500 for a Public Employee Retirement System database that contained information about lawmakers’ various state jobs. Hindlay said the publisher of The Ashbury Park Press allowed 38 open pages to be reserved for the series.
Human efforts were even greater. Dissatisfied with the murky financial disclosure forms reporters and editors had to parse, the team devised its own form that 55 out of 238 lawmakers filled out and returned. They put 1,500 pages of financial disclosure information into one database while they created another to house 3,000 bond issues in the state worth $54 billion over five years, said D’Ambrosio. The team created a third database of lawmaker profiles. Finally, they interviewed more than 100 experts and other people for the series. Overall, 44 people from seven papers contributed to the series.
The result? Personal satisfaction at knowing they spurred change. Reporters told the gathering at an awards luncheon that there were not as many pigs in the trough as before, though some are still around. Some lawmakers haven’t been able to get second, third or fourth state jobs to pad their legislative job, said Symons. And the FBI is investigating Bennett, said D’Ambrosio.
And staffers say they are pleased that the Selden Ring Award has introduced their newspapers to news professionals outside New Jersey.
“Professionals we admire were coming up at the awards luncheon and saying, ‘That’s great journalism. We’d like to do something like that. How did you do it?’ “ said Symons.
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