As California Watch ramps up distribution of its work, we are experimenting with different ways to reach the California public.

Our goal is to distribute our stories as widely as possible, in as many media formats as possible – in the hope that we will be able to spark a conversation on critically important issues affecting many Californians.

Typically, we like to give media outlets interested in running a story a heads up of a week or two – or more –  so they will have an opportunity to supplement our reports with their own local reporting. They may even collaborate with us in the reporting.

This week, however, we had to shorten our distribution time frame considerably on a story Nathanael Johnson had been working on for weeks – the near tripling of maternal mortality rates in California over the past decade.

Nathanael discovered that California's Department of Public Health had been sitting on a report written in 2008 detailing this trend.

On January 26, a nonprofit health organization published an alert pointing to similar distressing trends nationwide. The alert was beginning to attract press attention. A story could break at any time that would take the wind out of all the work Nathanael had already done. So we felt that we should release our story quickly to provide a strong California perspective on a breaking national story.

We knew we could put the story on our Web site and hope that it would go "viral."  We considered that as an option but decided even with late notice, we would reach out to other news organizations.

Imagine trying to coordinate publication of a major story with a dozen news outlets, encompassing print, broadcast and online media. With just a day's notice, several media partners responded rapidly, and ran the story on their front pages, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Bakersfield Californian, Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Orange County Register.

Michael Montgomery, who works jointly for California Watch and KQED, prepared a report for KQED's the California Report, which aired on 28 public radio stations around the state. KGO-TV in San Francisco aired a report on its 11 p.m. newscast. New America Media distributed the story to ethnic media outlets. The issue was the subject of a one-hour discussion on KQED's Forum, hosted by Michael Krasny. Alternet also carried the story.

This heartbreaking issue is likely to get even wider attention in the days ahead, as it should. While we would far prefer to give our media partners adequate time to localize our stories, there will be times that we will have to throw out preconceived timetables, and we will have no choice but to move rapidly to get a story into circulation. Being nimble is the name of today's game.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last fall held an "Industry Day" on detention reform as a way to get feedback from current and potential contractors and other interested parties. The event was closed to the news media.

ICE provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting a list of the companies represented, but would not disclose who the attendees were. The event was held at the Julie Myers Conference room at ICE headquarters.

The companies in attendance range from builders to current jailers to the Royal Bank of Canada. Several already have detention-related contracts or are staffed with former ICE or the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials.

Here's the list of the companies, as provided by ICE (with light editing):
1. K4 Solutions, Inc. (past DHS contractors)
2. McConnell International, LLC (an executive was formerly with INS.)
3. The Dozoretz Group, LLC (Nina Dozoretz, formerly with the Division of Immigration Health Service; recently returned to the government to work with ICE on detainee health care.)
4. PSA-Dewberry, Inc. (architects)
5. Proteus On Demand Facilities (builders)
6. Kelly, Anderson & Associates (The company has several former high-ranking Homeland Security officials on its staff, including a former chief of the Border Patrol.)
7. Arc Aspicio, LLC
8. Stanley Associates
9. Pike County Corrections Facility (currently holds detainees)
10. Pike County Commissioners Office
11. Northrop Grumman Corporation
12. Worchester County Jail (currently holds detainees)
13. LCS Corrections (ICE contractor)
14. CACI, Inc. (ICE contractor)
15. Emerald Companies (ICE contractor)
16. Nortel Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
17. Youth Services International
18. Capgemini Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
19. USIS (DHS contractor, background investigations)
20. MGT of America (ICE contractor)
21. The CMC Group (builders)
22. Ernst & Young
23. KeyPoint Government Solutions (Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on board of directors, DHS contractors)
24. The Forest Group, Inc.
25. Community Education Centers, Inc.
26. CCA (ICE contractor)
27. Unique Comp Inc. (CBP contractor)
28. Office of Federal Detention Trustee
29. Management & Training Corporation (ICE contractor)
30. Strategic Business Alliance
31. Health Insurance LLC
32. JJ DeLuca Company, Inc. (construction)
33. NetStar 1 (ICE/DHS contractor, data management)
34. GEO Group (ICE contractor)
35. Global Integrated Security
36. iSECUREtrac
37. Oldcastle Precast Modular & Security (builder)
38. Sundt Construction
39. KIMBALL furniture
40. Royal Bank of Canada
41. Frederick County Adult Detention (ICE contractor)
42. Argyle Corrections Group
43. ManTech (DHS contractor)
44. GEO Transportation (ICE contractor)
45. Volunteers of America
46. Price Waterhouse Coopers (DHS contractor)
47. Correctional Eye Care Services
48. STG International (DIHS contractor)
49. Dun & Bradstreet Gov. Solutions
50. Cornell Companies (ICE contractor)
51. Loredo Lomas Properties (real estate)
52. IBM
53. RTR Technologies engineering
54. Immigration Centers of America (ICE contractor)
55. Nabholtz Construction Corporation
56. Accenture (DHS contractor)

While immigration reform advocates wait for Congress to fix the nation's broken immigration system, the Department of Homeland Security says it’s committed to its pledge to overhaul immigration detention.

But the department needs help. And officials are looking for ideas. The agencies that run immigration detention and detainee health care are turning, in some cases, to the same people, consultants and companies that have been advising or working with those agencies for years.

For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the department’s investigative arm and jailers to some 30,000 immigrant detainees on any given day, in the fall hosted an “Industry Day” event, where agency officials outlined to an audience of mostly government contractors their plans and goals to re-make detention.

ICE officials told attendees that reform is badly needed, and acknowledged shortcomings, some of which have been outlined in a report issued by DHS in early October.

The thrust of the three-hour gathering — which attracted representatives from nearly 60 companies, consultants and detention watchers but was closed to news media — was “to begin a dialogue with current or prospective detention service providers for the purpose of sharing the basic premises of our reform efforts, secure feedback and begin to expand our market research,” according to the event posting on the government contracting Web site FedBizOpps.gov.

Attendees included various former immigration officials now in the private sector, defense contractors, the Royal Bank of Canada, IBM and a host of efficiency experts, builders and other consultants, including a company that has former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on its board of directors.

"This is a pivotal moment right now in terms of immigration, in terms of detention reform," said attendee Nina Dozoretz who until recently ran a health-care related consulting firm. "I’m optimistic – there's a big commitment from ICE to move this forward."

Dozoretz retired in August 2004 as the associate director of the Division of Immigration Health Services after spending 20 years as a public health service official.

In November — shortly after the event and days after she spoke to CIR — Dozoretz returned to ICE to oversee the health-care overhaul for the Office of Detention and Removal Operations. She said that the reform efforts were what brought her back to ICE.

Dozoretz, who also worked as vice president for the detention monitor and ICE contractor Nakamoto Group, recently appeared in a New York Times article on the issue of detainee deaths.

Homeland Security Department officials have outlined the intended overhaul, including more oversight, centralizing contracts and a custody classification system. The pledged reforms are part of a shift from a broad-based, one-size-fits-all, lock-up system toward a more civil approach.

Mike Magee, a Homeland Security consultant who formerly ran ICE’s criminal alien program for state and local prisons and jails, said civil detention is a good idea, but will be difficult to implement.

The goal is to spend wiser and use alternatives to detention, such as ankle-bracelet monitors when detention isn’t appropriate or necessary.

On Monday, John Morton, the assistant secretary for ICE, spoke about the ongoing reform effort, including a forthcoming detainee locator system, at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

But the big money – and big challenges – remain in detaining immigrants, attendees say. ICE has signed several new contracts to build or expand immigration detention facilities in the past year. The agency’s push to track down more immigrants with criminal charges or convictions may also increase the need for detention bed space. Known as Secure Communities, the ICE program helps local law enforcement agencies screen people in custody for their immigration status.

In a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, GEO Group Inc., one of the government’s biggest contractors for immigration detention, pointed toward anticipated growth of federal detention, particularly immigrants. That means more money. From GEO's third-quarter report:

"We believe ICE will continue to emphasize the detention and removal of criminal aliens throughout the country. ICE has been allocated approximately $1.4 billion for this purpose. We believe that this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years."

For years, ICE has said that deporting criminal aliens has been its top priority, but in practice immigration agents New York Times grabbed whomever they could. This new Secure Communities program claims to re-focus its priority.

ICE has plans to roll out the program across the country by 2013, making its database available to every law enforcement agency nationwide. In the first year of its existence, ICE identified more than 111,000 criminal immigrants in 11 states.

But there’s no more money in this year’s budget for major reform, attendees were told. Senior agency officials, among them Phyllis Coven, the director of the Office of Detention Planning and Policy, and David Venturella, the director of Detention and Removal Operations, intimated that ICE will request proposals to build new detention facilities.

Plans were announced for a 2,200-bed “low-custody” detention facility in Los Angeles, but the date to submit proposals has been delayed more than a month.

“I believe these people are all very sincere and have good intentions,” said Peter Michel, CEO of iSECUREtrac, a Nebraska-based company that provides ankle-monitoring technology. “It sounds like they have a pretty big mountain to climb.”

We really had no institutional baggage to overcome when we built our California Watch team from scratch. No voices telling us, “You can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not the way we do it here.” We weren’t weighted down by the kind of intractable culture that has made it hard for lots of newsrooms across America to adjust and adapt quickly enough to a fast-changing world.

We have pretty much thrown out the old rule books. Here editors will write and report and – gasp – reporters will edit. And even crazier than that: investigative journalists are blogging – a ton. Our hard-working staff has generated close to 100 blog posts in a little more than three weeks, on top of some kick-ass stories, terrific multimedia and nearly two dozen searchable databases. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video by Mark S. Luckie about our team and mission.

In our first few months of operation, the staff of California Watch has begun to mold its own way of doing things – one that stresses innovation, ideas, and a can-do spirit. We will try new things, and we will occasionally miss the mark, but you can’t move forward without throwing out antiquated, obsolete rules and challenging the way journalists have operated. It’s one of the endearing things in our little newsroom that makes this an absolutely thrilling place to be.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

A Justice Department investigation of an immigration judge's misconduct in Florida gives a Bahamian asylum seeker another day in court.

The National Law Journal reports that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility found that Bruce Solow, an immigration judge in Miami, "engaged in professional misconduct when he acted in reckless disregard of his obligation to be fair and impartial."

In a 2005 asylum hearing Solow mocked Roscoe Campbell, who said he fled his native Bahamas for fear for his life after reporting to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration corrupt officials engaging in drug-trafficking, according to the article. Solow ordered Campbell and his family deported.

The federal appellate courts have excoriated some immigration judges for their conduct, including Anna Ho, a Los Angeles-based immigration judge.

The fact that the Justice Department's internal affairs office took a look at the judge's behavior is extraordinary, Nadine Wettstein of the American Immigration Legal Council, told the legal newspaper.

Still, there isn't a lot known about the larger issue of judicial misconduct and how the court leadership - and, by extension, the Justice Department - handles complaints. The NLJ writes:

The lack of transparency irritates attorneys and judges alike. The American Immigration Council's Wettstein and other immigration lawyers said complaints against immigration judges to the Executive Office seem to go into a "black hole," and, they added, getting notice of findings made by OPR also seems rare.

Immigration attorneys have also been reluctant, in some cases, to file complaints against certain judges because they may have to argue before the judge again.

As the NLJ article points out, the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, has its own procedure for taking complaints against immigration judges and private attorneys.

The agency would not release information on the number of complaints received nor would it make public its disciplinary actions, citing privacy concerns, according to the story.

The story also makes the point that the Justice Department's process for investigating complaints against immigration judges is "neither swift nor transparent and because of that, it can be unfair -- to aliens, attorneys and immigration judges."

We're interested in learning more about the immigration courts. If you have ideas to share, please contact abecker (at) cironline (dot) org.

Reporter Mark Schapiro was interviewed by Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace on January 20th about his piece in Harper's Magazine outlining how corporations have found loopholes in the carbon cap and trade system, and how to verify those carbon credits.

In the interview, Schapiro explains there are companies that go over their emission caps every month, and know exactly by how much. They need to buy carbon credits in order to not go over their cap. The companies then turn to a developing country such as Brazil, which sells the companies the extra credits they need. All the while, the companies are doing nothing to actually reduce the amount of carbon they are emitting.

Schapiro writes about the people who measure carbon emissions and the reliability of the measurements. What is the United States going to do when we step in?

If you're sipping your mocha at a coffee shop somewhere in California on Thursday, keep an ear out for the furious tapping on the keyboard. It could be one of us blogging or tweeting, building multimedia packages or pounding out the next big story.

Members of the California Watch and Center for Investigative Reporting staffs will be fanning out around the state and working in coffee shops with WiFi access on Jan. 21 as part of our first "Open Newsroom."

Here's how the idea came about: For most of this week, our operations are being disrupted by an office move. We’re packing up and transporting the whole shebang from our existing location on Newbury Street to a beautifully remodeled landmark building on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. Our Internet connection went down Friday at our old location, and we don't have a place to sit in the new space. If you're trying to call right now, our phones are unattended, if they're plugged in at all. After the holiday today, we're mostly going to be working from home until Jan. 25 when the doors open at our new digs.

We figured we should turn this temporary inconvenience into an opportunity. So we decided to set up shop on Thursday at various WiFi hotspots.

The Open Newsroom concept is part of a goal to connect with readers and get out of the office. We’re hoping it will be a regular part of what we do. On Thursday, please stop by to say hello. We're looking forward to meeting you. And if you have any great story tips, we'll be there to listen. 

The locations and hours to find us are on the map below.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

We’ve gotten lots of feedback on our new California Watch site. People are commenting on the clean look and applauding the simple organization. Several readers have complemented us for the array of searchable databases on our Data Center.

I’ve also gotten some really great feedback about the way we’re making our staff more accessible to readers. Carrie Brown-Smith, a University of Memphis journalism professor, commended us for our bio pages, which include each staffer’s list of coverage priorities and some details about what they are working on – even the stories, journals or Web sites they’re reading.

We felt strongly that our reporters, multimedia producers and editors should let their personalities shine through on these pages and that it might help lift the veil on who we are and what we do.

“I just think that is incredibly smart and utilizes the research on credibility as well,” Brown-Smith wrote in an e-mail to me.

We’ve implemented other subtle innovations – including the way our reporters and a couple of other acclaimed investigative journalists have helped organize our Resources pages. Our resources are organized by topic. They serve as a guide for civic-minded citizens, students, bloggers and young journalists to conduct their own basic investigative reporting.

And we’ve also broken the traditional mold of story crediting by adding the names of our editors who work on each of our major stories. (One reader "tweeted" that it was her favorite thing about our new site.) We think it’s a way to increase accountability and credibility – and also to give props to the traditionally nameless and faceless journalists who partner with our reporters and multimedia producers on stories.

Since our site went live on Jan. 2, we've heard excellent criticisms as well. Some have worried that we’re allowing anonymous commenting, which can encourage the lunatics to dominate discussion boards (although that, thankfully, hasn't happened here). Others have expressed hope that we would allow some type of rating system of comments as a way to encourage responsible commenting. We couldn’t agree more, and we want to make this a top priority to add soon. We hoped to tackle that before our launch, but we set it aside. Too many other things needed to get done first.

We’ve also had readers tell us it's way too difficult to register to comment and to e-mail our staff. We agree. Our site was set up so that you have to be logged in as a registered user to connect with our reporting, editing and multimedia teams. We’re going to try to figure out a way to break down those barriers during the next phase of our site's development. And we're not wasting any time. We're planning to start moving ahead with a slate of enhancements and refinements in the coming weeks.

So if you would like to see changes on our site, now is a perfect time to share your thoughts.
 

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

In my first job as a crime and legal affairs reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal, I spent many days searching through dusty records in courtrooms, police headquarters and the newsroom's library to create extensive news reports based on statistics and data. I hadn't yet heard of "multimedia journalism" and even though I was computer savvy, I didn't know how computers could be used to elevate my work. Fast forward a few years later and I am combining my love of online technology and software with my passion for hardcore news reporting.

There are many ways for investigative reporters to use multimedia and digital journalism tools to give the reader a better understanding of the story at hand. The web serves as an all-encompassing platform for publishing interactive maps, multimedia stories built in Flash or other software, video, audio and other forms of media besides text.

As this blog post from Journalism.co.uk about my transition to California Watch points out, news audiences digest stories in several different ways. If investigative reporters tell a single story using various media or use visual media to quickly convey information, the more readers and viewers the story is likely to attract.

My current position at California Watch allows me to help shape investigative reports using several forms of media and visualizations. The responsibility, however, requires the judgment to know which media is appropriate for a particular story. For example, interactive maps are great, but they aren't appropriate for every story.

At the very least, investigative reporters should be knowledgeable about the tools that can help elevate their reporting with web producers or other newsroom staff to create stories that have the greatest impact possible.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting
and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state.
Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12
schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public
safety and the environment.

We’ve published more than 80 blog posts on our two blogs, and our new site isn’t even two weeks old. But one question I’ve been asked lately is how often we will be publishing big investigative stories on our site – stories that will also be distributed to news outlets throughout California.

Nailing down publication dates can be tricky. Years of managing investigative projects has taught me how wildly unpredictable these complex, high-stakes stories can be.

But our sincere hope is to have at least one strong enterprise or investigative story each week. We’ve hit that mark so far this month. Reporter Chase Davis analyzed contribution data for a story about local party committees that funnel campaign money to individual candidates in a way that sidesteps state campaign finance laws. It ran January 3 in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Modesto Bee, the Stockton Record, the Ventura County Star, the Voice of San Diego and the Bakersfield Californian. Last weekend, we distributed a story by freelancer and former Center for Investigative Reporting staffer Will Evans about stimulus grants going to large corporations despite records as environmental polluters and other problems. The Chronicle and Ventura County Star also took that story, as did the San Diego Union Tribune, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News and La Opinion, which translated the story into Spanish. We have an exciting environmental-themed story ready for this weekend. We're working now to shore up our distribution partners for that piece. We should have another strong story the week after that.

And the week after that.

Our philosophy is to distribute and publish stories when they are ready, and not to worry about trying so hard to hit a once-a-week target. Some stories will need more time to cook. When we collaborate with news partners on joint reporting projects, it adds a whole new set of moving parts to the machine. And we have to coordinate with our partners to make sure the machine is both well-oiled and moving in the right direction. It's not as easy as it might look.  

But when I scan the list of our upcoming stories, I see a lot of machines humming along, nearing the end of the tunnel. So I feel pretty confident we'll be releasing a regular dose of the big story.

That’s on top of the aggressive daily blogging. Our target is to generate eight to 10 new blog posts each day. We'll be using the blog to break news. (We posted details and quotes from the governor's press conference on the budget last week before he had left the podium.) We'll also be updating readers on the status of our investigations, offering up nuggets from our notebooks and providing more insights on our two blogs – the California WatchBlog and the Inside the Newsroom blog.

Additionally, we’ll be adding searchable databases in our Data Center – many of them connected to stories we’re producing along our priority topic areas: money and politics, K-12 schools, higher education, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

It all adds up to a site that will be active – a dynamic place we hope readers will want to visit multiple times a day.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting
and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state.
Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12
schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public
safety and the environment.