Philip Meyer Award honors three investigations

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Winter 2009

Investigations by Scripps Howard News Service, The Kansas City Star and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been named winners of the 2008 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.

Scripps Howard News Service took top honors for "Saving Babies: Exposing Sudden Infant Death." Reporters Thomas HargOve, Lee Bowman and Lisa Hoffman found administrative inconsistencies in the state and local review boards that examine infant deaths.

Mike Casey and Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star took second place with an investigation into safety issues linked to aiibag failures. They found that nearly 300 people die in the United States each year when airbags fail to deploy.

In third place, an investigation by Mark Fazlollah, Dylan Pureed, Melissa Dribben and Keith Herbert of The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that black citizens were arrested in disproportionate numbers for minor crimes in suburban Philadelphia. Follow-up investigations found more cases of police misconduct.

The Meyer Award recognizes the best uses of social science methods in journalism. The awards will be presented on March 20 in Indianapolis at the 2009 CAR Conference. The first-place winner will receive $500; second and third will receive $300 and $200, respectively.

The award is administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (a joint program of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Missouri School of Journalism) and the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

The Meyer Award is in honor of Philip Meyer, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of "Precision journalism," the seminal 1973 book and subsequent editions that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism.

Here are details on the winners:

* First Place: Scripps Howard News Service for "Saving Babies: Exposing Sudden Infant Death," Thomas Hargrove, Lee Bowman, Lisa Hoffman

Scripps Howard national reporters Hargrove, Bowman and Hoffman did a masterful job in exposing bureaucratic lapses that hinder the search for causes of sudden infant death. Making good use of strong statistical tools, the team analyzed the sharp differences in cause-of-death diagnoses among the states and produced the first rigorous proof of the value of the local and state child death review boards that only some jurisdictions use. A few months after the project ran, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama introduced national legislation that would require medical examiners to conduct death scene investigations in all cases of unexpected infant death.

* Second Place: The Kansas City Star for "Fatal Failures," Mike Casey, Rick Montgomery

Reporters Casey and Montgomery analyzed 1 .9 million records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to uncover NHTSA's failure to consider nondeploying airbags as a significant safety issue. The work suggested that nearly 300 people are killed each year in accidents when airbags didn't inflate that should have. Initially, NHTSA strongly disputed the findings, but it finally did its own analysis and came to the same conclusions. This project combined the best of the techniques that Meyer has championed and the investigative mindset that refuses to take no for an answer when the stakes (in this case, life and death) are high.

* Third Place: The Philadelphia Inquirer for "Too Tough: Tactics in Suburban Policing," Mark Fazlollah, Dylan Purcell, Melissa Dribben, Keith Herbert

The Inquirer's team studied arrest and court data from police departments in the suburbs that surround Philadelphia and found towns where blacks were being arrested in extraordinary numbers for minor offenses such as loitering or jaywalking. Their follow-up reporting uncovered jails where thousands of illegal strip searches were conducted, police dogs were used to control black children walking home from school and traffic citations were filled out in advance of arrests.

The Meyer Award included work published or broadcast between October 2007 and October 2008. Entries were submitted from across the United States and represented work that utilized a variety of social science methods and data analysis. All entries will be archived in the IRE Resource Center.

The contest judges included journalism professors who have extensive experience with computer-assisted reporting techniques and social scientists who are experienced in working with reporters. The judges were:

* Ira Chinoy, professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism and former director of computer-assisted reporting for The Washington Post.

* Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Computer-Assisted Reporting at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and formerly associate editor for research at The Miami Herald.

* Brant Houston, the Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and formerly the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.