Pulitzer-winning team discusses finding stories ‘so obvious we don’t see them’
In the world of investigative reporting, it’s sometimes hard to find the line between bias and public service—especially when working in a state whose murder rate for women is almost double the nation’s average.
So when Glenn Smith, Doug Pardue and Jennifer Hawes of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, decided to bring to light the stories of more than 300 women who were shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned or burned to death over the past decade in that state, they found a need to fix a community so battered by violence.
Smith, Pardue and Hawes detailed this process Monday in professor of practice Tom French’s Behind the Prize class, which bring winners or finalists of top media prizes to Ernie Pyle Hall to discuss their work. The trio’s investigative piece, “Till Death Do Us Part,” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
The seven-part story addressed the staggering number of deaths of South Carolina women in over the past decade. The reporters found that domestic abuse to women in South Carolina was all too common, and residents were complacent about the frequency of deaths.
‘The key lesson to finding your story is that the best stories, best investigations, are so obvious that we don’t see them,” Pardue said. “That’s what happened in this case.”
“One of things that drove us to this was when we were declared the No. 1 state in the U.S. with murders to women and domestic violence,” Smith said.
The team discussed how they went about gathering data to show South Carolina’s lack of action on this issue, as well as shared how they balanced this data with the stories of women who suffered from domestic abuse.
“The fact that there was no centralized data made me realize how low of a priority it was in the state’s structure,” Pardue said. “Nobody was paying attention to it. It became more important to us to build that database of domestic violence.”
While data was central to the success of the piece, one of the more powerful outcomes, according to Hawes, was the community that this story created among the victims interviewed, as well as those within the state as a whole.
“One thing that we did want to focus on was the victims. While this was a data-driven story, we wanted it to come alive with the people,” Hawes said. “I wanted the women to know they were not the only ones going through this.”
The innately human facet of great journalism was a point the three reporters returned to throughout their talk. Pardue told the class about a source who pulled out a photo of his murdered daughter mid-interview and wept, and how this experience helped him realize a story’s need for a human face.
“That little girl’s photo changed the way I report,” he said. “When I started in journalism, I wanted to cover governmental agencies and policy. After that, I just wanted to write about people.”
Beyond simply sharing their story, Smith, Pardue and Hawes said they hoped to leave students with the sentiment that journalism, especially investigative journalism, is above all else a means of social action to bring justice to people whose voices otherwise would not be heard.
Hawes told the class the team had mixed emotions as they set off to receive their Pulitzer at the annual luncheon, because it seemed as if the domestic violence legislation reform the story had pushed for would not pass. Then Hawes got a text message.
“We were standing outside on the steps of a building at Columbia University when a colleague let us know the new bill had passed,” she said. “The stars could not have aligned more perfectly. In many ways, that news was better than winning the prize.”
When one student asked how an investigative journalist writing for public service maintains a balance between being an objective reporter and an advocate, Pardue said the fine line is sometimes worth crossing.
“We’re investigative reporters. We’ve gone out to take a look at something that’s obviously wrong. And we try to prove why something is wrong and how we can go about fixing it,” he said. “I got into journalism to fix things, to make things better. If that’s wrong, well, I’ll keep doing it anyway.”
Additional reporting by Marah Harbison.
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