Education reporter Rachel Otwell will be able to work full-time for a year on the story after her employer, Urbana-based Illinois Newsroom, received a grant from ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize winning, non-profit news organization headquartered in New York City.
Otwell has been reporting on sexual harassment policies while balancing other duties at Illinois Newsroom, a regional news cooperative that includes NPR stations WILL in Champaign-Urbana and Otwell’s home station, WUIS in Springfield.
Executive Editor Scott Cameron helped write the grant proposal and will be Otwell’s project editor.
He said the grant is about more than just money. ProPublica “also brings a lot of editorial expertise, data access, and digital engagement,” he said. He and Otwell will work with Charles Ornstein, a 2005 Pulitzer winner and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network editor.
“It’s one thing to start investigating something like this,” Otwell said. “It’s another to have ProPublica backing it up.”
The resulting stories will not only reach audiences in Illinois but will be distributed widely through ProPublica’s traditional and digital platforms.
Last November Otwell teamed up with WILL radio reporter Christine Hermann to report on sexual harassment allegations against professors Jay Kesan at University of Illinois and Gary Swee at Lincoln Land Community College.
Both professors continued to teach long after complaints were first made, and in both cases the public wasn’t informed until reporters dug the story out.
Otwell said she felt there was more to the story, particularly complaints that campus policies protected faculty and the institutions more than they protected victims.
Otwell is still feeling out the scope of her investigative project. She said the adequacy of campus policies will be one thread. Another is likely to be the impact of proposed federal guidelines scaling back Obama-era guidance on handling of sexual misconduct.
Otwell’s grant is the second to be bagged by a downstate Illinois news organization. Last year ProPublica freed Southern Illinoisan reporter Molly Parker to spend full time investigating flawed oversight of federally subsidized housing in small and mid-sized cities. You can read the result, “HUD’s” House of Cards,” on the ProPublica website.
ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network grants are an attempt to counter nationwide cutbacks in local newsroom resources, largely a result of the shift of advertising to cheaper on-line platforms.
Investigative journalism is expensive and time-consuming. It’s difficult for economically stressed newsrooms to free a reporter from the routine of daily coverage — “feeding the beast,” as Otwell describes it. The $55,000 grant will allow Otwell’s home station to “backfill” her position, and how that is done is up to the station, Cameron said.
Cameron said ProPublica’s Local News Network is creating excitement among public media newsrooms. Public media are very good at “quick turnaround” coverage as important stories arise, he said, but ProPublica funding enables them “to do more of the deeper dive” with focused, intensive reporting at a level they could not otherwise afford.
It’s part of a larger effort by non-profits to keep investigative work alive at the local level. A roundup by the Poynter Institute lists numerous such funding sources, including the Ethics and Excellence Journalism Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Fund for Environmental Journalism.
Otwell, who lives in Springfield, is a graduate of the Public Affairs Reporting Program at University of Illinois at Springfield and has degrees in Liberal and Integrative Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and African-American Studies. She has tutored Rwandan refugees, and volunteered at a Kenyan orphanage and an elephant sanctuary in Thailand.
She started her public radio career in 2011 and has been with Illinois Newsroom about a year.
Her coverage of a cluster of shootings in Springfield won the Illinois Associated Press award last year for best hard news feature in the downstate broadcast region.
Otwell’s ProPublica grant was one of 14 awarded this year for investigative work at newsrooms nationwide.
Photo credit: NPR Illinois/Matthew Penning