On Monday, a five-part investigative series published in the East Valley Tribune won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize, the top award in the journalism and literary industry, for local news reporting. The piece, titled “Reasonable Doubt” and published last July, focused on the effects of the illegal-immigration enforcement plans executed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
In the articles, reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin focused on the costs of Arpaio’s aggressive and well-publicized campaign to crack down on illegal immigrants, including “slower response times on emergency calls, a dropping arrest rate and, for a time, excessive overtime costs.”
The committee that awards the Pulitzer applauded Gabrielson and Giblin, who spent nearly six months on the articles, for “their adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff’s focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety.”
While the committee could not save its praise for the two Tribune reporters, it unfortunately also could not save the East Valley Tribune from crumpling into a shadow of its former self.
Suffering the all-too-common fate of a secondary major-market newspaper (along with the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer), the paper was backed into a corner.
In October, the Tribune announced that economic realities stemming from lost readership and advertising revenue would force them to have their third set of layoffs of 2008, letting go of 142 workers — 40 percent of the paper’s staff at the time. They also had to reduce publication to four days a week, withdraw from covering Scottsdale and Tempe and serve only East Valley communities.
Giblin, now a Pulitzer Prize winner, was among the Tribune reporters laid off.
To make matters worse, the Tribune revealed plans last week to lay off 13 more workers, cut back to only three days of publication and eliminate one suburban edition altogether.
Over the past five years, the Tribune has lost almost half of its former 100,000-subscriber base. Once a mighty contender in the realm of local news, the paper, in spite of its Pulitzer-worthy investigative journalism, has fallen to a point of near-irrelevance.
So where does that leave us as Valley citizens? In a very dark place.
As news organizations cut back their staffs, the lack of money and manpower is putting investigative journalism at risk of dying. With the Tribune running the gamut from Pulitzer-recognized to pulverized, the transition to a community with fewer hard-hitting, in-depth pieces does a disservice to Arizona.
The bottom line is: Unless you, the reader, decide that investigative journalism is important, it won’t be. At its core, journalism exists to serve its community. The stories we write are intended to, at the least, stir discussion and, at best, expose corruption and contribute to the public good.
But the thing is, journalism that is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize has no real value unless you, as a reader, decide that it does. So with all of our attempts to “save journalism,” the only group with that ability is you. Unfortunately, ways of tangibly showing this are limited — there are only a few options, which run the gamut from subscribing to a newspaper to donating to nonprofit groups such as ProPublica. But ultimately, it’s clicking the mouse, commenting on a news stories and watching the primetime news that will get the message across.
If we continue on this path, the slow and painful death of local investigative journalism will produce further consequences beyond layoffs and production cuts; it will show up in our schools, in our politics and in our communities.
Without dedicated reporters working with a newsroom full of resources, scandals fly under the radar. Without good, ambitious, investigative reporting, the area’s corrupt will go unchecked in their actions.
There is no replacement for the work done by a well-trained staff of reporters looking to uncover crooked dealings and the crooks themselves.
Whether it comes in the form of a newspaper or an online story, we believe that investigative journalism is an integral service to the community. But it doesn’t matter what we believe. It’s up to you to decide.
