PANEL: How the Sausage Is Made (Friday, April 13, 2012)

• Floridians At Risk: An investigative series on Florida’s insurance industry reported by Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting)                                                                              
• Alleged Illegal Searches: A two-part investigative series that revealed abuses in the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy reported by Ailsa Chang of WNYC Radio (Winner of a 2012 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.)                                     
• Presidential Pardons: Shades of Mercy: A two-part investigation reported by Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica, published in The Washington Post.
• High Salaries Stir Outrage in Bell: A series of stories exposing officials’ exorbitant salaries and financial misdeeds in the small working-class town of Bell, California, spearheaded by staff writers Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives of the Los Angeles Times. (Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service.)
• Preparing Americans for Death Lets Hospices Neglect End of Life: This investigative piece by Peter Waldman of Bloomberg News explores hospice care, which has evolved into a $14 billion business run mostly for profit.
• Under Suspicion at the Mall of America: An investigation by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting finds that an anti-terrorism program is entangling ordinary citizens with police and FBI. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling reports.

PRESENTATION: The Reinventing of the Center for Investigative Reporting  (Friday, April 13, 2012)

• Changing the World Through Investigative Reporting: 2012 MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions
• Police force’s sloppy investigations leave abuse of disabled unsolved: An investigation by California Watch has found that detectives and patrol officers at the state’s five board-and-care institutions routinely fail to conduct basic police work even when patients die under mysterious circumstances.

PANEL: The Murdoch Effect: The News at Any Price? (Saturday, April 14, 2012)

• Murdoch’s Scandal: In a joint production with the CBC, PBS Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman tells the story of the battle over the future of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s reputation and his family’s fortunes.
• Variety Review of Murdoch’s Scandal: For some a recap, for others a primer, the hourlong production is truly worthy of the “fair and balanced” label.
• As ‘Murdoch’s Scandal’ Unravels, Many Implicated: PBS Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman discusses the upcoming documentary on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross.
• Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond: In the first major investigative story on the scandal by The New York Times, Don Van Natta, Jo Becker and Graham Bowley revealed that phone hacking involved many more people than the company had previously acknowledged and that Scotland Yard closed the investigation prematurely.
• Exclusive: Paper Deleted Missing Schoolgirl’s Voicemails: The Guardian story that blew the lid off the hacking affair. Nick Davies and Amelia Hill report on News of The World’s hacking of the cell phone belonging to missing girl Milly Dowler in 2002.
• Hack Work: In this New Yorker piece, Anthony Lane surveys the hacking scandal as well as the history of various misdeeds at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
• The Dark Arts: Just prior to the Guardian story on Dowler, Sarah Ellison, author of War at the Wall Street Journal, a book about News Corp’s takeover of Dow Jones, writes about the hacking affair.
• News And Its Critics: As the story grew, the Journal lashed out at its “competitor critics” for piling on.
• A Private Investigator Explains the “Dark Arts” of Tabloid News: For decades, private investigator Danno Hanks worked both sides of the law.

PANEL: When the Story Bites Back (Saturday, April 14, 2012)

• Syria Undercover: Reporter Ramita Navai goes undercover for a rare look at the uprising from inside Syria in this segment, which aired on PBS Frontline.
• On the Border: Despite the danger, the Dallas Morning News’ Alfredo Corchado investigates violence and corruption along the border between the United States and Mexico.
• The Case of the Supposedly Sealed Files—And What They Revealed: By Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi.
•  In treacherous Tijuana, editor Adela Navarro Bello’s risks are life-or-death: The co-director of the Tijuana newsweekly, Zeta, fights for truth amid a perilous legacy of assassination attempts and crimes against fellow journalists.
• “Reportero” by filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz: A veteran reporter and his colleagues at an embattled news weekly challenge the drug cartels and corrupt local officials during a wave of unprecedented violence against journalists in Mexico.
• Lesley Stahl, news correspondent/anchor: Stahl talks about her over three-decade career in broadcast journalism includes serving as White House correspondent during the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. presidencies and lengthy tenures as the moderator of Face the Nation and as a correspondent on 60 Minutes.

PANEL: (Financial) Crime and Punishment (Saturday, April 14, 2012)

• Inside Job: Movie website for the Oscar-winning documentary film by Charles Ferguson.
• Diana B. Henriques: Henriques, an award-winning financial journalist, is the author of The Wizard of Lies, a New York Times bestseller about the Bernie Madoff scandal, and three other books on business history. As a writer for The New York Times, she has largely specialized in investigative reporting on white-collar crime, market regulation and corporate governance.
• Did Barclays Help U.S. Banks Get Undeserved Foreign Tax Credits?: An investigation reported by Vanessa Houlder and Megan Murphy of the Financial Times and Jeff Gerth of ProPublica, and edited by Christine Spolar of the Financial Times.
• A Corporate Sleuth Tries the Credit Rating Field: Few people ever penetrate the dark side of money, but Jules Kroll is one of them.

SCREENING: PREMIERE OF PBS FRONTLINE’S “THE REAL CSI” (Saturday, April 14, 2012)

• The Real CSI: How reliable is the science behind forensics? In this documentary airing April 17, 2012, Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman finds serious flaws in some of the best-known tools of forensic science and wide inconsistencies in how forensic evidence is presented in the courtroom.

PANEL: The State of Investigative Reporting (Sunday, April 15, 2012)

• From Outsourcing to Innovation: This white paper, commissioned by the Knight Foundation and prepared by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley explores how Nonprofit/Commercial Media Partnerships Can Help Fill The News Gap.
• If investigative journalists don’t explain the impact of their work, who will?: Eric Newton, senior advisor to the president at Knight Foundation, delivered this talk at the 2011 convention of the Investigative Reporters and Editors.
• How Non-Profit and For-Profit Newsrooms Are Working Together: At a recent roundtable, representatives from the non-profit news industry came together with local for-profit media gurus to discuss collaboration, funding, and how people with money can work best with the people without it.
• Half of ProPublica’s Revenue in 2011 Came From Sources Other Than Sandler Foundation: In its new annual report, ProPublica said it has expanded its revenue sources beyond the Sandler Foundation.
• As NBC partners, pubmedia may expand reporting, visibility: NBC will share stories, resources and content distribution with two public broadcasters, ProPublica and two local nonprofit newsrooms under a FCC agreement.
• Bay Area nonprofit news organizations discussing merger: Two prominent nonprofit news organizations, The Bay Citizen, based in San Francisco, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in nearby Berkeley, are in merger talks.