With an award-winning staff, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism offers students a crash course in research and reporting.
"Its purpose is to actually do investigative reporting because of the budgetary climate and the crisis in journalism that's been created by the Internet," said Florence Graves, who founded the institute on the Brandeis University campus in 2004.
"They are not writing the stories but they are learning how to. Hopefully they will walk away from it with an appreciation for investigative reporting and preserving our democracy," she said.
The institute hires six students a semester to perform research and learn the craft of investigative news coverage.
Although associated with the university, the institute is not governed by Brandeis. The students have to apply for a position and do not receive course credit, Graves said.
A longtime investigative reporter, Graves said she also founded an investigative magazine in the 1980s called "Common Cause" and worked for the Washington Post.
At the Post, she said she and a colleague broke the story about U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood's sexual misconduct, which led to his resignation.
"I pretty much have covered government and corporate abuses of power," she said.
Recently Graves and her student researcher assistant, Haydar Sayfan, and E.J. Graff, a senior staff member, received two awards for investigative reporting.
On Feb. 24, Graves and Sayfan won first place in the second annual Cushing Niles Dolbeare Media Awards for the story "First Things First," which appeared in the Boston Globe in June last year. The piece focused on an initiative to end homelessness.
"'First Things First' was a really deep examination into a proposed solution to homeless individuals. The belief in society had been for a long time that chronic homelessness would always be with us and there was no way to resolve it," Graves said. "It turns out there has been a radical new approach that is being tested around the country called Housing First."
Graves said the program involves taking homeless people off the street, providing them with a home and services to treat the problems that led them there.
"It sounded too good to be true. It just seemed like how is it really possible to take people off the street and give them a home of their own," she said. "It would be cheaper or not cost anymore than putting them in a shelter."
Graves said a few weeks after the article was published, the state launched a commission to explore the initiative.
"We really dug deeply into it. We really interviewed a couple of dozen experts, people and practitioners," she said. "We read academic studies related to this and tried to sift through the many pros and cons that had been made about Housing First."
On March 24, a second staff member was recognized at the Council on Contemporary Families as part of the sixth annual Media Awards. Graff won a special honor for excellence in reporting on the media for her article "The Opt-Out Myth," which appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review.
"That article really got a lot of attention. The article is about two-thirds, or 66 percent, of children are growing up in homes where all adults work," she said. "The news media loves to run trend stories that woman are leaving the work force and staying home with their babies and that's so counterfactual. The statistics have been showing that it's not the case."
Graff said her research uncovered a media trend that has been occurring for half a century.
"Those stories have been running for 50 years," she said. "Why does the news media portray that women are making a private decision to go home when most children are growing up in households where all the adults are in the work force?"
Graff said since the publication of the article, she has spoken about her research at several universities and the message of her work has spread across the Internet.
"We have had a lot of discussions. More than 100 blogs blogged about it. I ended up at three institutes speaking engagements or panel discussions talking about underlying issues," she said. "We're going to do another panel discussion on May 8 at the Brandeis women's studies research center."
Graff is directing the institute's gender and justice project.
She said the project focuses on issues about women and children that are "under-covered" by the mainstream media.
"We're doing in-depth research and placing articles or broadcasting in a variety of news outlets, where they can have the greatest impact and inform public policy discussions."
Graff said students are often surprised to discover the amount of effort that goes into investigative journalism.
"We give them a really full immersion as to what it's like to work in investigative journalism," she said. "They are always shocked to know how much work goes into it."
Jeff Gilbride can be reached at 781-398-8005 or at jgilbrid@cnc.com
