The editors timed the appeal to anticipate both an upcoming City Council meeting—scheduled for Monday, July 17, 2006—and the release of a construction audit the city had commissioned from the firm Kessler International. To their surprise, the solicitation yielded results within 24 hours, when a confidential source contacted the paper and offered to leak them the full audit in advance of its presentation to the City Council. ^[1]

Hayden received the leaked document on Saturday morning, July 15. He, Cull, and Ruane spent the weekend reading and distilling the 80-page report to produce a summary for news-press.com. The audit contained numerous allegations of wrongdoing—ranging from lax oversight to possible bid-rigging—on the part of both the City of Cape Coral and utility project manager Montgomery Watson Harza (MWH).

The leak transformed the standard reporting equation. Ordinarily the News-Press, in covering such a damning document, would seek comment from those affected before publishing its claims. But the crowdsourcing technique seemed to demand that the paper share crucial information with its readers immediately upon receiving it. Further, whereas the space constraints of the print newspaper would have restricted it to publishing a summary of the report, the website allowed editors to give readers the entire document. In effect, the News-Press was now in a position to give Cape Coral residents access to the audit as soon as, or even before, the City Council saw it.

That Sunday, July 16, editors and reporters gathered in the newsroom to discuss what to do with the audit and how to take their crowdsourcing experiment further. They were unanimous that Kessler’s report, as a public document commissioned by the city and paid for with tax dollars, should be freely available to the citizens of Cape Coral. But when, and in what context? Could the newspaper post the report and still maintain its objective journalistic stance, in effect contending that although it was publishing the audit, the News - Press reserved judgment on the document’s conclusions? What effect would such a move have on other sources the News-Press had hoped to cultivate—those coveted insiders at City Hall or MWH who might now view the paper as an adversary?

Metro Editor Wells argued for posting the complete audit, allowing all readers, including city officials, to react to it on news-press.com forums. “It’s up to the entire audience to make things balanced,” Wells says. “We [would be] saying: ‘Here’s what we’ve got. It’s not complete. It’s not all there is. But here’s what we’ve got right now.’” Executive Editor Marymont and Managing Editor McCurry-Ross agreed. “As a public document, paid for by the taxpayers, reporting back to the taxpayers... I can’t think of any reason not to share that with the public,” Marymont says. As consensus emerged around the table, the question that remained was not whether to post the audit but when.

The editors decided to post the full audit the following morning, Monday, July 17, at 8 a.m., along with the story Cull and Ruane had produced highlighting the report’s major points. The article concluded with a set of questions under the heading “What We Don’t Know.” “What’s the relationship between Cape officials and the contractor?” Cull and Ruane asked, citing emails between city employees and MWH that mentioned golf outings and parties. “Did residents get what they paid for? For example, did the city pay for 1,000 feet of water pipe and get 1,000 feet of water pipe?” ^[2] They listed numerous other gaps in their knowledge and encouraged readers to respond.

Almost immediately, Cull recalls, “all hell broke loose in Cape Coral.” City officials were irate that the News-Press had released the document before they could respond publicly to its contents. “And the citizenry was very upset with the allegations, which were many, involving corruption, possible fraud, waste, abuse of taxpayer money,” says Cull.

At the Council meeting that evening, the eight-member City Council voted unanimously to halt work on the project until August while they investigated Kessler’s allegations. The next day, Tuesday, July 18, the Cape Coral City Auditor’s office issued a point-by-point refutation of Kessler’s report, pointing to a 2005 internal audit that had found no mismanagement.

As it had with the leaked Kessler audit, the News-Press posted the city’s refutation. The paper’s editorial board, meanwhile, issued its position. “In sorting out this mess, the first step is to replace the people responsible for it,” the July 18 editorial read. “Heads simply have to roll.” ^[3]

Listen to McCurry-Ross describe posting the audit.
Length: 1 min 10 sec