The Sun-Sentinel , a Tribune Company paper, had a distinguished history of investigative reporting —detailed, meticulous analyses of individuals or institutions with the primary objective of exposing wrongdoing. Sun-Sentinel investigations had yet to win a Pulitzer, but the paper had been a finalist several times—including in 1996 for a series revealing waste and abuse in Florida’s Medicaid system, and again in 1999 for a series about the dangers of cosmetic surgery. In contrast to writers assigned a daily beat, investigative reporters often spent months or years immersed in a single topic, publishing less frequent but longer dispatches. Summarizes Sun-Sentinel investigative reporter Megan O’Matz :

A lot of reporters don’t have the luxury to look under every rock... [What] distinguishes investigative reporting is the depth of the information we get, [and] the amount of records that we look at. ^[1]

In 2001, Sharon Rosenhause became the Sun-Sentinel ’s managing editor. One of her priorities was to strengthen the paper’s investigative department. Despite its good record, Sun-Sentinel investigative reporters had mostly worked independently of one another. Rosenhause wanted reporters to work together on investigations. Her vision was a team “who could work across the newsroom, who could take younger reporters and show them how to do these kind of stories.” ^[2] Further, she thought that devoting resources to an investigative team would demonstrate the high value she placed on public service journalism. “We take the watchdog’s function and responsibility very, very seriously,” she explains. “You... define yourself by the things you say are important to you in terms of your journalism values.”

In mid-2004, Rosenhause hired Joe Demma as investigations editor to lead special projects. Demma had spent most of his career at New York Newsday , where he had eventually risen to lead that paper’s investigative unit. In more than three decades of investigative reporting, he had participated in three Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations. When Rosenhause hired him, he was managing editor of the Modesto Bee in Modesto, California. He was due to arrive in Florida in early October 2004.

The Sun-Sentinel in late 2004 had only one reporter assigned full-time to investigative work: Sally Kestin , who had been a reporter for nearly 10 years when she joined the paper’s social services beat in 1998. She enjoyed investigative journalism, and social services was a “great beat for that,” she recalls.

The premise of the state taking kids from parents because they’re neglected or abused, and then the state putting them in abusive situations, just makes great fodder for those kinds of stories. ^[3]

In 2002, for example, she and Megan O’Matz, then also a social services reporter, investigated Florida’s child welfare division , the Department of Children and Families (DCF). Specifically, they wanted to know why DCF could not locate more than 500 children nominally in its care; Kestin suggested that the reporters simply try to find the children themselves. In a span of four weeks, they found nine of 24 cases they had selected, two in under three hours. Among those children were two long-missing sisters living with their mother, whose number was in the telephone directory. ^[4]

Databases . John Maines was also often involved in investigative projects. Maines worked with departments across the newsroom as the Sun-Sentinel ’s database editor, a position he had held since 1998. His job was to obtain and synthesize large amounts of data in pursuit of patterns and newsworthy numbers. He explains:

If [a reporter] comes to me and says, we want to check foreclosures, how it’s changed over the years, we want to do crime in the neighborhoods, crime in the malls, AIDS cases... that’s where I get involved. ^[5]

Maines had been a police reporter early in his career, but after nearly 20 years as a database reporter, he had come to see beat reporting as “a young person’s job.” He elaborates: “After a while, you’ve seen one car wreck, you’ve seen them all.” He found the pace and uncertainty of beat reporting frustrating—the unreturned phone calls, the refused FOIA requests. “When you’re doing [database reporting] there seems to be a level of clarity about it... You’ve got the data... You’re looking for something that you don’t know if you’ll find, but if you do, it might be great.”

Listen to Rosenhause describe her vision of an investigative team.
Length: 1 min 21 sec