Inside the Newsroom

When the phone rang at the The New York Times on a Saturday afternoon 40 years ago, I picked it up after a couple of rings.

"Foreign desk," I said. 

There was an excited, agitated man on the other end: "I need to speak to Neil Sheehan, I need him right away, and it's urgent. I have to talk to him."

Ariane Wu/Center for Investigative ReportingRobert Rosenthal worked with The New York Times team on the Pentagon Papers series in 1971.

I was on the periphery to one of journalism's most important moments. The Times was a few hours away from printing the first installment of the Pentagon Papers in the edition of June 13, 1971.

And for weeks, I had been part of the team secretly cloistered at the Hilton Hotel. I knew where Sheehan, the lead reporter on the project, was, but I wasn't about to say where.

"Who is this, please?" I asked.

"This is Daniel Ellsberg, and I need Sheehan. It's urgent...

California WatchInteractive screen shot

California Watch's investigation of seismic safety in public schools featured an interactive database identifying campuses that are home to hundreds of buildings with structural flaws and potential safety hazards. Our interactive now features more potentially risky construction projects at campuses across the state.

Our "On Shaky Ground" series, led by reporter Corey G. Johnson, found state regulators had routinely failed to enforce the Field Act, California's earthquake safety law for public schools. That failure allowed children and teachers to occupy buildings with structural flaws and potential safety hazards reported during construction. At least 20,000 projects – from minor fire alarm upgrades to major construction of new classrooms – were completed without receiving a final Field Act certification.

This week, we added more than 5,500 projects to our interactive that were denied Field Act certification for failure to file important documentation verifying the safety of the construction. It wasn't clear what the safety status was for those projects...

Today, the Center for Investigative Reporting is making some big leadership announcements. We’re elevating Mark Katches to editorial director for all of CIR and naming Chase Davis our director of technology.

One of our goals at CIR is to align the story and the technology. What does that mean? For us, it means how we maximize and create new forms of storytelling for evolving platforms with the three-pronged strategy of building audience, growing revenue and engaging as many people out there as possible.

The promotions of Mark and Chase are an important step as we manage this strategy and deal with what we call "opportunity on the run."

Previously, Mark, who just turned 48, had overseen our California Watch newsroom. Before coming back to California, he served as the primary editor on two Pulitzer-winning projects and three other Pulitzer finalists, all since 2004. His promotion will solidify and integrate our CIR and California Watch operations. Mark will continue to oversee California Watch as well as CIR projects and editorial initiatives.

Chase, who will turn 28 in a couple of weeks, has been an investigative reporter on our California Watch team, but he’s also helped develop new websites and tools, including our first iPhone app MyFault, which locates earthquake faults and seismic hazard zones...

Investigative reporting is difficult work. It takes unique skills. You don't just say to a reporter find out what's wrong here. It takes sources, digging and time to peel back the layers around a systematic failure. It also takes a certain type of bull-headed, persistent reporter. It takes luck, support and many other ingredients, some obvious, some secret to the sauce. And it takes the skills to tell the story so that it is accessible, understandable, fact-based and fair.

The series launched tonight by the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch project about seismic safety in schools throughout California is a story that fortunately does not have any victims.

It was one of the first stories we embarked upon when California Watch started 19 months ago and reporter Corey G. Johnson joined our staff. It has been an arduous process, supported by others, but Johnson’s tenacity has been admirable and painstakingly thorough. Many other reporters, editors and producers have played critical roles bringing this series home.

We believe this is an important series of stories because it reveals problems and issues before a school is badly damaged in a quake and a child or teacher is hurt or killed.

Johnson and the rest of the team of reporters have been asking the types of questions that other news organizations would be asking...