Q&A: Louise Kiernan, Editor in Chief @ ProPublica Illinois
This week, The Idea spoke with Louise Kiernan. Before joining ProPublica Illinois, Kiernan spent six years as an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, where she led the program’s social justice and investigative journalism specialization. Prior to that, she worked for the Chicago Tribune for 18 years, serving as the newspaper’s enterprise editor, urban affairs team editor, and special projects team editor and reporter, among other roles. She was the lead writer on a project that won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and was also individually a Pulitzer finalist that same year.
Could you describe ProPublica Illinois and your role as editor-in-chief?
ProPublica Illinois is the first regional operation of ProPublica, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative newsroom based in New York. ProPublica has been around for 10 years, and we launched our office almost exactly a year ago this month.
I’m editor-in-chief, which means I run our office here. We have an editorial team of 12, which includes five traditional reporters, a data reporter, a news applications developer, a web producer, an engagement reporter, and a reporting fellow. In addition to that, we have three business side staff members — a communications director, a development director, and a part-time office manager. So we’re a fairly small staff.
Our mission is to bring the kind of in-depth, high level investigative reporting that ProPublica is known for into a local, regional, and state arena where we have seen the collapse of local news occur most dramatically.
Why start this model now (or a year ago), and why start it in Illinois?
The reason we’re starting it now, or started it recently, is that we really are seeing the struggles of the news industry play out most dramatically at the local level, and because there truly is a need for more of this kind of work that is based within a community.
Illinois was the place that we chose to launch the operation for a number of reasons. The first is we knew that there would be a lot of investigative stories to be done here. We’re a state with a national reputation for political corruption, among other qualities.
Secondly, because our model is collaborative — ProPublica does most of its work in partnership with other media organizations — we wanted to launch in a place that still had a strong enough media ecosystem that would allow us to do that.
The third reason that we’re here is that our goal is to be completely locally funded within two to three years, so we were looking for a place with a strong tradition of philanthropy, and that’s also true of Chicago and Illinois.
As you mentioned, partnerships are key to ProPublica’s model. Can you talk about how you go about identifying those partnership opportunities and what that looks like when you’ve decided who to partner with?
When we’re thinking about partnerships, we’re looking really to answer three questions. This first is, what do we want to achieve with a particular project or story? One of the key elements of our model is that we’re focused on creating journalism that sparks change, so from the beginning we really try to think about what change would we like to see from a story.
Second would be, what is the audience that would help us achieve that goal? Then third would be, who can help us reach that audience to achieve that goal? That’s a set of thinking that we bring to the partnership process, but it also can evolve in many different ways.
Some of that is serendipity. For example, we did a big project earlier this year that we published in partnership with Mother Jones on how Chicago’s ticketing practices are driving thousands of black low-income drivers into debt and bankruptcy. Chicago has the highest rate of Chapter 13 bankruptcy in the country, and much of that is due to unpaid ticket debt.
After we published that story, a reporter for another news organization in town reached out to our reporter and said, hey, I’m also interested in this and I have a lot of ticket data, and they decided that rather than trying to compete with one another, they would like to work together. So we have, in partnership with WBEZ, done a series of follow-up stories, and in fact this morning the two of them are at the city council meeting together covering the latest development in that story.
So it can often just happen because two reporters know each other and they want to work together, or because they discover that they’re working on similar ideas, and that by teaming up, they can create a more powerful story than trying to beat each other.
The whole point of partnerships and the thinking behind collaboration, which I think some legacy media organizations are still trying to get comfortable with, is by working together you can create a better story. So it makes sense, within the framework of that thinking, to look for partners who bring different strengths and different audiences to the work.
There are a couple of other ways partnerships tend to work for us as an organization. One would be where a reporter for another news organization comes to us and says I have this great idea, but I don’t have the resources to do it, and we jump in and we either help them or take the lead on the story.
The other type that’s probably most common, at least for us right now in Illinois, is our reporter will do a story and then we’ll offer it to the partner media organization.
You were at the Chicago Tribune for 18 years, working in a number of roles. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned while reporting there?
One of the things I loved about the Tribune, and one of the reasons I stayed there as long as I did, is that I had an opportunity to explore all kinds of different roles of journalism within one organization.
I started there as a three-month intern and eventually got hired on as a full-time reporter. In the course of the time I spent there, I did everything from working as a reporter on a suburban bureau to being a reporter and editor on our projects team to helping run our opinion section. I was also the paper’s writing coach for a time.
At the time I left, I was the enterprise editor, so I ran a small team of reporters who were doing in-depth stories. I also got to do some travel writing for the paper, I wrote for the Sunday magazine, and I ran the urban affairs reporting team, so it was a really wonderful opportunity to explore all facets of journalism. What it taught me was bits and pieces of all those different worlds.
How has investigative or enterprise reporting changed in the last 20 years and where do you see it going?
I think investigative reporting now is in a really exciting place. I truly believe in my heart that there is not a better time to be a journalist than this particular moment, because there is so much meaningful work that we can do. I feel exceptionally fortunate to be working at an organization that is at the forefront of thinking about how journalism works and how it can reach people and how it can create change.
I think some of the ways that we see investigative journalism moving in the future involves three main areas:
One is transparency. I think that at a time when trust in the media is very fragile and frayed, being open about how we do our work is critical for us to begin to regain that trust.
At ProPublica, we’ve long had a tradition of transparency. We post the data that we use in our stories on our website so people can dive into it and do their own analyses. We publish regular reports about what we do and the impact we’ve created. We post our 990s on our website. I think that is even not enough at this juncture, and so we’ve been making a number of efforts here in our office to be even more transparent about how we do our work.
Our weekly newsletter often focuses on behind-the-scenes stories from the projects that we do, and reporters will share information about how they found sources, for example, or what the fact-checking process involves.
We also launched an occasional column — we found there was a great deal of interest in journalism. As journalists, we often assume people know more about our work than they do. I had an encounter last year where someone thought an anonymous source was anonymous to the reporter as well — that we did not know the identity of people we used as anonymous sources.
That didn’t strike me as gosh, this person is really ignorant; on the contrary, I thought, why would we assume that people would understand what that means? So we launched this column where we answer readers’ questions about journalism, and we’ve covered everything from how do you keep bias out of your stories to how do you identify fake news to a question we got this week, which was how journalists use Twitter.
I think being more transparent is one key piece of where I think investigative journalism needs to be and where it’s moving in the future.
I think the second is data and data analysis and creating tools that people can use on their own. As I mentioned, we publish our data. ProPublica’s long been known for its skills in that particular arena of journalism.
Now we are also building tools that people can use themselves to look up information that is of interest to them. Our national office released a tool a couple weeks ago called Miseducation that allows you to compare opportunities in school districts for children from various backgrounds and ethnicities. We created here in our office a tool called The Money Game that tracks how much money is going into our governor’s race, which is the most expensive political race in history — it’s up to $282 million as of yesterday, mostly self-funded.
Being at the forefront of acquiring information and creating tools with it that people can use to answer questions they care about is another really valuable trend in investigative reporting.
The third area is engagement, and by that I mean really bringing in the communities impacted by your reporting to help drive that work.
Speaking of data analysis and data tools, can you talk more about any cool ways you’re using tech or data reporting in your newsroom?
We have a news applications developer named David Eads. He came to us from NPR. David is the one who built The Money Game widget, and one of the cool elements of that widget is that anyone can take that and embed it in their website. We’ve made it available on our website and it’s also on Twitter, so you can follow the Money Game and see what’s happening every day. We’ve also made it available to news organizations and anyone who’s interested in the state, so a number of local newspapers use it and run it on their website.
I think that speaks not just to the usefulness of these kinds of tools, but part of our mission is also to help strengthen the media ecosystem here in our state. That’s one small example of where I think we can bring some expertise we have and put it out into the world for anyone who wants to take advantage of it.
At the moment, David is also building a news application from all the ticket data that we’ve acquired, which is a lot. It will allow people to look up whatever they want to know about tickets in this city, so ideally they’ll be able to see what blocks people are most likely to get a parking ticket on. There are all sorts of different ways to take this data that we’ve acquired, cleaned, and analyzed and make it useful to people in the ways that they want to use it.
Looking towards the future of ProPublica Illinois, is there anything that you want to do or learn more about?
One challenge for us, because we are so small with just five reporters, is to figure out the best way to report about the areas outside Chicago — to really be ProPublica Illinois — and to do meaningful investigative work throughout the state.
We’ve tried several different ways to begin that process. We did a really great partnership beginning last year with a local theater company, Free Street Theater. This is an engagement grant that we funded, and so we traveled to different places throughout the state and conducted performance workshops that allowed people in those communities to talk about the issues that were of concern to them, with the idea being not only reaching out to these places and fostering conversations, but also hopefully surfacing some ideas for stories.
We’ve also funded four reporting projects, the first of which we’ll publish in the next couple of weeks, that are investigative stories focused on communities outside Chicago. We put out a request for proposal for stories, and we funded three freelancers and one news organization to go out and report stories. Those range from environmental stories to criminal justice to municipal ordinances. So those are beginning points for us, but that remains one challenge.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen recently from a media outlet other than your own?
There was an essay that ran earlier this month in Nieman Reports, the publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, called The Great Disconnect. It’s a piece I keep thinking about because it smartly identifies issues that I think all of us are encountering.
The author argues that we’re creating these two separate worlds of journalism — one is national, digital media and the other is local news — and that they require very different skill sets, set different priorities, and are increasingly disconnected from one another in a way that was not the case in the past. I think it’s a really smart piece and one that has been sticking around in my brain.
