If we’ve learned one thing here at California Watch, every week seems to present an entirely new way of doing business.
Our Sunday story, produced in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, is just the latest example.
Program fellow Ryan Gabrielson, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter, produced a startling project about the rising number of cars seized at sobriety checkpoints – many of them from minority motorists. He found that departments up and down the state are far more likely to seize a car from a sober, unlicensed motorist than arrest someone for driving drunk.
Gabrielson and the program’s legendary director Lowell Bergman began working with us late last year. At the same time, Bergman – himself a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting – got the New York Times and PBS NewsHour interested in the story.
The Times wanted it for their Bay Area edition, so Gabrielson produced a focused, regional story for the Times. KQED Radio will air a segment of "The California Report" with Gabrielson today. The PBS NewsHour segment airs tonight.
At the same time, California Watch worked with Gabrielson and Bergman to edit two statewide versions – one about 1,800 words and one about 3,600 words. The full-length version appears on our Web site.
We also added four Multimedia pieces based on data we organized, including a map that shows the rate at which vehicles are impounded compared to DUI arrests at checkpoints across the state and a graphic that highlights the cities that impound the most vehicles. We also have two charts that show how money is spent on police overtime and how a UC Berkeley program administers checkpoint funds. Gabrielson's methodology sidebar offers a glimpse into how a very complicated reporting endeavor came together.
Our condensed statewide version went to partners including the Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Stockton Record, Bakersfield Californian and La Opinion. We also distributed the story through New America Media, which works with a network of hundreds of ethnic media organizations. La Opinion again translated the story for us into Spanish. Huffington Post picked up the story and our traffic on the Web started going nuts.
We hope that the interactive map and charts prompt other news organizations and citizens to use our data to either do their own stories or use the information to inform the debate within their own communities. Making this kind of data and information available to others in an orderly and timely way is another goal of California Watch.
The multi-level collaboration on the checkpoint story created a new dynamic. And I suppose we should be used to that by now. It seems like every week we’re doing something entirely new. And our partnerships are allowing us to reach far greater audiences than we might otherwise. I hope to write more on the blog later this week about how the DUI checkpoint story came together.
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