Digital First Media’s Connecticut newsrooms did some old-school watchdog reporting in their Sunshine Week project this spring. But they took a digital-first approach in planning and executing the project.
This post is mostly going to be a guest post by Viktoria Sundqvist, investigations editor for the Register Citizen and Middletown Press. Vik and Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, investigations editor for the New Haven Register, led the project, published in March. They started planning the project and did the reporting while I was in Connecticut working on Project Unbolt and I made a tiny contribution.
This was a traditional watchdog reporting project in many ways:
- The project held local police accountable, checking how well every police department in Connecticut followed the state’s Freedom of Information law.
- The work involved shoe-leather reporting, with reporters from DFM’s newsrooms visiting every police station in the state to ask for records that should be public (I checked the town of Plymouth).
- The reporters wrote a big newspaper story about their results.
- The project had impact, forcing changes by police departments that were revealed to be violating the law.
Here’s how the project took a different digital-first approach: (more…)
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