Spivack, a longtime investigative reporter, shows how local journalism empowers everyday citizens to expose secrecy, access public records, and push for accountability and reform in her new book Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back (The New Press 2025).

In conversation with Jennifer LaFleur, Assistant Professor of Data Journalism at UC Berkeley Journalism.

Miranda Spivack

Miranda S. Spivack is a veteran reporter and editor who specializes in stories about government accountability and secrecy. She spent 20 years as an award-winning editor and reporter for the Washington Post. She is a former Fulbright Scholar in the Balkans, where she worked with independent journalists. She has taught at several universities and was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the McClatchy newspapers and USAToday. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and holds a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School. She is the author of Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back (The New Press 2025) which she began working on while she was a Logan Non-fiction Fellow.

About the book

Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home—from their governors, mayors, town councils, school boards, police, and prosecutors. In fact, deals shrouded in darkness are regularly made at the state and local levels, often the result of closed-door discussions between governments and industry without any scrutiny whatsoever from the public. Too often, as this groundbreaking new work of investigative reporting reveals, residents are intentionally kept on the outside, struggling to get information about significant issues affecting their communities—from car crashes and dirty drinking water, to failing safety gear—until the backroom deals are done and it’s too late to challenge them.

A work of riveting narrative nonfiction based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards tells the story of five “accidental activists”—people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn’t protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved. The secret deals, lies, and corruption they uncover shake their faith in government but move them to action.

Praise for Backroom Deals in Our Backyards:

Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize

“An enraging exposé of a nationwide culture of corruption.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Miranda S. Spivack has written the Unsafe At Any Speed of our time, highlighting the corrosive secrecy of increasingly powerful local governments. Beyond identifying an under–covered problem, to her enormous credit, she offers a deeply reported look at accidental activists who became Davids that beat Goliath. Based on their experiences, she offers a playbook for how citizens can effectively fight back against abuses of power in their own communities. With local reporting in decline, and more power being delegated to states, we’ll depend increasingly on individual watchdogs like those featured here to expose wrongdoing and force change.”
—James Hohmann, The Washington Post