The Shipbreakers
Shipbreakers: From Baltimore to Brownsville to Bombay
• A Step-by-Step to taking your local environmental story global
Anatomy of an investigative story
Learn the fundamentals of reporting and writing – and you can do groundbreaking investigative environmental stories
Getting started
An editor’s key question – How does this industry operate everyplace else?
What would you do? Where would you start?
The workers – the heart of this story
The workers: obstacles we faced
How do you find workers and persuade them to talk on the record
An ethical dilemma
Balancing the need to get workers to talk on the record
versus
A desire to protect them from being fired for speaking out or deported
The Shipbreakers persuading them to talk
Getting the Navy to answer our questions
• What to do when someone won’t talk to you
• An alternate strategy to get answers from the Navy
Public Records
• Court records – Mendoza case in Brownsville
• Bankruptcy Court records – underlying economics of the shipbreaking industry
• FOIA
• OSHA records
The key economic issues
• Understanding the economics of the shipbreaking business was a key to cracking this story.
• Public records, revealing sources
The Asbestos Issue
• The issues, the science
The Asbestos Issue
• Finding and talking to victims – how we found the men who built these Navy ships decades ago
• The two key questions to ask yourself when looking for hard-to-find information
The Regulatory Issues
• Who was responsible for overseeing the Navy’s shipbreaking program – and why the regulation was a failure
• Practical tips for reporting on the regulators in environmental stories
Taking the local story global
• How we learned about the US Navy’s plan to send its old ships overseas for scrapping
Reporting in India
• Strategies for reporting environmental stories overseas
How to deal with obstacles overseas
• Stringers and fixers
• The language problem – and the use of interpreters
The Writing Process
• How we decided what stories to tell
• Pulling the project together
• Importance of clear and compelling writing when telling an investigative or complex business investigative story
Impact and follow-up
• Congress holds hearings
• The White House prohibits the Navy from sending old warships to the Third World
Why was this a good topic for an investigative story
• Told readers something they didn’t know
• Revealed a systemic wrong
• Possibility of reform
A tough balancing act
• How you can successfully cover your beat – and also pursue big stories
• Tips for convincing your editors to give you the extra time you need
Questions
Summary
• You can do groundbreaking investigative work if you master the fundamentals of reporting and writing