{ "id": "2004-july-august-newspaper-winners-bank-on-car", "slug": "2004-july-august-newspaper-winners-bank-on-car", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-newspaper-winners-bank-on-car.html", "year": 2004, "month": "July-August", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "Newspaper winners bank on CAR", "kicker": "IRE AWARDS", "author_name": "Andrea Lorenz", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "IRE", "summary": "IRE's annual investigative reporting contest highlighted newspaper winners and finalists who used computer-assisted reporting, including investigations into pharmaceutical distribution problems, drug company consulting fees, and military mishandling of assault cases.", "keywords": [ "investigation", "journalism", "databases" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Journalism & Newsroom" ], "technologies": [ "FoxPro", "Access", "Excel", "ArcView", "SAS" ], "full_text": "The May-June issue of Uplink highlighted the television, special category and other media winners and finalists of IRE's annual investigative reporting contest that used computer-assisted reporting. Here we feature the daily and weekly newspaper winners and finalists that used CAR.\n\nSee the May-June issue of The IRE Journal for a full list of winners.\n\nYou can order copies of these stories and related conference tipsheets from the IRE Resource Center. Contact the center at 573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org and provide the number.\n\nSome of the journalists who worked on these stories also recently spoke on panels at the IRE Annual Conference in Atlanta. You can order recordings of these panels from Sound Images Inc. Contact Sound Images at 888-649-1118 or service@soundimages.net.\n\nLargest newspapers or wire service\n\n(More than 500,000 circulation)\n\nFinalists\n\n\"Pharmaceutical Roulette,\" The Washington Post, Mary Pat Flaherty and Gilbert M. Gaul\n\nWhat started as a story about Medicare drug prices turned into a widespread investigation of problems in the drug distribution system. The Post reporters uncovered an extensive network of players including doctors with sketchy histories prescribing the drugs online, felonious middlemen obtaining drugs fraudulently on the cheap, and Fortune 500 companies buying questionable drugs at bargain prices from illegal wholesalers.\n\nThe reporters built databases of Internet pharmacy sales from a variety of sources and obtained physician prescribing data.\n\nThe stories also won Best of Show in the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association Awards and first place in Investigative Reporting, Division A: Dailies over 75,000. (See Story No. 20870. To hear Flaherty speak on the Pharmaceuticals: Prescriptions for investigations panel order recording number IRE04-043)\n\n\"Stealth Merger: Drug Companies and Government Medical Research,\" Los Angeles Times, David Willman\n\nWillman investigated drug companies paying consulting fees to National Institute of Health scientists - a practice authorized by the head of the research institute. More digging revealed the consulting deals were kept private, as employees were not required to divulge payments from other sources.\n\nThe Times obtained data (13,784 pages from the NIH alone) for this series from financial-disclosure statements and other information about public employees. The information was entered by hand to create two databases.\n\nThe series also won the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism. (See Story No. 20867)\n\n\"Betrayal in the Ranks,\" The Denver Post, Amy Herdy and Miles Moffeit\n\nThis series uncovered military mismanagement of sexual assault and domestic violence cases. After battling the military, The Post obtained a database of domestic abuse and sexual assault cases from the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command. Along with another database compiled from U.S. Air Force sexual assault records, the Post was able to profile more than 30 cases of abuse.\n\nThe series won a Denver Society of Professional Journalists award. (See Story Nos. 20697 and 20869)\n\nLarge Newspapers\n\n(250,000-500,000 circulation)\n\nCertificate\n\n\"Crumbling Schools,\" The Miami Herald, Debbie Cenziper and Jason Grotto\n\nIn this series of articles about the Miami school district's botched construction efforts, The Miami Herald found overpriced building projects, delayed jobs, safety hazards and sketchy business deals. The reporters used a database of construction projects, the district's accounting ledger, county and city safety data, as well as paper records to build their own databases. Microsoft FoxPro, Access, Excel, ESRI ArcView and SAS helped them analyze construction costs and delays, contracts, safety violations and population statistics. (See Story No. 20155. To hear Grotto and Cenziper speak on Exposing school system failures panel order recording number IRE04-068)\n\nFinalists\n\n\"U.S. Olympians had failed drug tests,\" The Orange County Register, Scott M. Reid, William Heisel and Tony Saavedra\n\nThe reporters found that more than 100 American athletes were allowed to compete in the Olympics despite failed drug tests. Less than 40 percent of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's tests were given without notice though it is recommended that at least 70 percent be a surprise.\n\nReporters sorted through 10,000 paper records from 9,700 drug tests of 4,600 athletes and entered the information into Excel and Access. They matched dates of drug tests with corresponding sporting events (found through LexisNexis, fan club sites and phone calls) to find whether the athletes attended these events.\n\nThe article won second place in the Associated Press Sports Editors investigative reporting category. (See Story No. 20338)\n\n\"Damaged Lives: Lead's Toxic Toll,\" Detroit Free Press, Emilia Askari, Tina Lam, Megan Christensen, Marsha Low, Hugh McDiarmid, Jr., Dan Shine, Shawn Windsor and Wendy Wendland-Bowyer\n\nA team of reporters investigated the contamination from lead smelters and leaded gasoline. They found government agencies neglecting to clean up lead in neighborhoods and test children for lead poisoning.\n\nThey used Access to analyze a Michigan Department of Community Health database for children tested for lead poisoning and mapping software to show the results of their soil tests. (See Story No. 20369)\n\n\"Shell Game,\" The Times-Picayune, Aaron Kuriloff and Jeffrey Meitrodt.\n\nThis series investigated $2 billion in court judgments against the state in favor of oyster farmers. The reporters found the awards to be either unjustified or excessive. Using tax and harvest records of oyster farms, court documents and sales data, they built tables in Excel to show results of a project initiated by the state to rebuild the coast. They found oyster beds were doing better - although oyster farmers claimed they were destroyed - than before the project.\n\nThe series won the Louisiana Press Association investigative award, and the Associated Press/Louisiana-Mississippi story of the year. (See Story No. 20608)\n\n\"Silent Alarm,\" The Kansas City Star, Karen Dillon and Mike McGraw\n\nThis series provided an in-depth look at the government's handling of the Hepatitis C virus. They used Microsoft Visual FoxPro and Excel to work with some of the data. Spreadsheets containing information about people alive today with the virus contracted through blood transfusions showed the estimated mortality of these patients. Other spreadsheets showed the number of Hepatitis C cases since the 1980s that could have been prevented by the government with a test. They also created a database of medical journal articles about the virus. \"Silent Alarm\" won first place in the Kansas Press Association award for investigative reporting. (See Story No. 20921)\n\nMedium newspapers (100,000-250,000)\n\nMedal\n\n\"Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,\" The Toledo Blade, Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr\n\nThe investigation of atrocities committed by the Army platoon Tiger Force in the Vietnam War brought out details that were buried by the government decades ago. Going through old documents and interviewing former soldiers and Vietnamese villagers gave essential details of the case.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2003-julyaugust-car-gives-contest-winners-boost", "score": 0.436 }, { "slug": "2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners", "score": 0.328 }, { "slug": "1996-may-check-out-the-ire-contest-home-page", "score": 0.291 }, { "slug": "2003-may-june-car-fuels-tv-other-division-winners", "score": 0.286 }, { "slug": "1996-may-winners-use-car", "score": 0.269 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-newspaper-winners-bank-on-car.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-newspaper-winners-bank-on-car.json" }