Case Study #6- Daily Coverage Key to Hospital Horrors

In the sixth case study of Watchdog Journalism; The Art of Investigative Reporting, Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein of the Los Angeles Times investigate the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, which is located in Los Angeles.  This medical center was one of the cities examples of victory of white oppression and the community was very proud of this.  It had many problems though that the two reporters were looking into and knew they would have to deal with the struggle of not being called racists for criticizing it.  In the process of getting this project done they came across many other “breaking news” stories that they had to decide if they should keep for the project or to go ahead and publish.  Their editor saw the bigger picture and encouraged them to go ahead and publish the breaking news stories.  This is a great lesson for investigative journalists to learn, because as the editor knew, the final product would still get the attention of people and serve the purpose they set out for it to serve, even without some of the interesting breaking news stories that were already out there.  They did not want to have people getting sick of reading about it and then not care when the main project piece comes out.  With a story with this much impact on a community this would not be the case, it is best to go ahead and publish the breaking news as it comes in and is available.  In doing this project Weber also realized how important the daily reporting is during a project and how that can make the project much better than it would be without it.  They had such a huge number of stories and information coming in that at times it would feel overwhelming.  This large amount of information though is what ended up making this story so good.  So much had already been written on it, but they found so much that it could not be ignored and led to fixing the problem and creating a lot of much needed change.  In my own reporting for my story there were a lot of examples of the issue I was discussing and it at times became a struggle to decide which ones should be in the story and whether or not to use them as examples.  Having so many instances however, is what made the story turn into what it was for me, and without all of the daily reporting it would have probably turned out a lot less of a complete story and much more boring.

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