montanajournalism Events, Graduate, J-School, Student

Biogeochemistry Professor and J-school Collaborate through NSF Grant

When University of Montana biogeochemistry Professor Cory Cleveland begins a new project in Panama this summer, a young journalist will be coming along for the ride.

Cleveland will build on his long-held conviction that “a fundamental piece of good science is to communicate it effectively,” when he embeds a graduate student from UM’s Master’s program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism with his research team to document their fieldwork at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

A lift-out quote reading “It’s an innovative model of collaboration between journalism and the sciences that we hope will serve as a model for other research efforts at the University of Montana.” Scientists often struggle to convey the meaning of their work to the general public. Cleveland says the approach of bringing in a journalist from the beginning helped his proposal stand out and get funding from the National Science Foundation in a highly competitive application process. It will allow him to focus on his research while at the same time helping to create better communication. “I’m never going to do as well at that as someone who’s an expert and a professional journalist,” he said.

The collaboration benefits both sides. For the School of Journalism, the opportunity to document all phases of the research will allow a student to produce compelling stories about a rigorous scientific experiment that has large potential impacts on humanity, said Associate Professor Henriette Lowisch, the UM J-School’s graduate program director, who collaborated with Cleveland on his proposal.

“This will be a huge challenge for an emerging journalist, who will be able to practice all they’ve learned about making complex research accessible to the public,” Lowisch said. “It’s an innovative model of collaboration between journalism and the sciences that we hope will serve as a model for other research efforts at the University of Montana.” Together, Lowisch and Cleveland will select a journalism graduate student to accompany the research team.

In Panama, Cleveland will be testing whether tropical plants are able to get more nutrients from the soil than scientists have previously thought. Tropical forests are among the most productive on Earth, and remove significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The plants use CO2 as food to grow, but their growth is ultimately limited by the presence of other nutrients, such as phosphorous, which is scarce in tropical soils. Cleveland’s NSF grant will allow him to study whether tropical plant species have evolved novel ways around this limitation.

The research not only questions conventional wisdom about what plants are capable of, it also carries implications for a world coming to terms with climate change. If Cleveland is right and tropical forests are able to match growing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere with phosphorous and other nutrients in the soil, they’ll act as better carbon sinks, which could help mitigate the effects of burning fossil fuels.

It’s a good story for an up-and-coming journalist, but how to cover it will be a choice the graduate student will make on the ground in Panama. The result will go beyond the traditional press release that tries to explain scientific research to the public, and instead use story, the craft of journalism, to showcase science.

Both Lowisch and Cleveland said that the project leaves the journalism student room to tell the story as he or she best sees fit.

“We’re just going to say here’s an opportunity, come do something,” Cleveland says. “Hopefully that benefits them and they can tell something interesting about what we’re doing, or maybe not. There’s no agenda.”

Lowisch said that part of the reason she is excited about doing this collaboration with Cleveland is exactly that understanding. “Both journalism and science are disciplines of verification, and to be able to do that you need to be independent and Cory Cleveland has understood that.”

Adapted from UM news release by Andrew Graham
montanajournalism Feature, J-School

UM J-School Professor Publishes Hard-Hitting Investigative Report On Medicare Fraud

Before Assistant Professor Joe Eaton joined the faculty at the University of Montana School of Journalism, he was an investigative reporter at the Washington D.C. based Center for Public Integrity, where he specialized in sifting through data to find stories of things gone wrong with America’s health care system. Today he passes his skill at investigations on to his students, but he hasn’t given up chasing his own stories.

photo of article layout in magazine
Above: Eaton’s article as it appeared in print. Photo by Andrew Graham.

This January, a story by Eaton about the government’s inability to stop widespread Medicare fraud ran on the front cover of Pacific Standard, a magazine with national distribution that is based out of Santa Barbara, California. To get the story, Eaton relied on sources and knowledge from ten years of covering the topic.

Eaton knew that scamming Medicare is relatively simple, given the scope of the program and the porousness of the review process for insurance claims. An expert Eaton quoted in the story estimated that the medicare fraud rate could be as high as 20 percent, of a program that spends $600 billion. When a 2010 bill passed through congress and mandated that Medicare follow the lead of the credit card industry and use big data tools to prevent fraud, Eaton’s ears picked up. “I wanted to take everything I know about Medicare and do a big story,” he says.

When the government contracted the creation of the fraud detection system out to Northrup Grumman, a company better known for building airplane parts, Eaton suspected that he would soon have a story. Sure enough, when he later reached out to old sources in Medicare from his time at the Center for Public Integrity, they told him that an evaluation of the anti-fraud program had come back showing it was underperforming wildly. Eaton went to work.

He wrote a story pitch in the hopes of attracting a publication – often the first step in a freelance journalist’s writing process. The pitch, he said, along with the story itself, seemed pretty dense for the kind of broadly read magazines Eaton had in mind. While he framed the story with the idea of Wired Magazine in mind, they didn’t bite on the pitch. New York Times Magazine liked the story but thought it wasn’t right for their audience. The Atlantic wanted it, but didn’t offer him enough money for the time and effort he knew it would take to write it. Finally Pacific Standard accepted the pitch, for the right price.

Eaton started working on the story at the end of the 2015 spring semester. Writing and reporting it would take him all summer. As a long time investigative reporter, Eaton places high value on off-the-record sourcing, which can be essential for a story that casts doubt on the system and exposes mistakes by people’s employers. For this story, he said, there were twice as many sources behind the scenes as those whose names would eventually appear in the story. Many of them were sources in law enforcement, or amongst congressional staffers, who he has used over the course of his career.

While the story follows the colorful narrative of an Armenian-American crime ring responsible for a large and lucrative Medicare scam, Eaton did all the reporting from his office. “You can write a narrative without going anywhere,” he says, “you just have to report for it.”

The result would grace the cover of Pacific Standard’s January issue. The magazine is a bi-monthly publication. It was Eaton’s first magazine cover story. Today, he remains in front of a class room, beginning a new semester with classes in editing, public affairs reporting and freelance journalism. He still keeps his nose to the ground for new stories, and is working on an expose of businesses scamming the elderly into buying gold that they may never see. That story will eventually run in AARP The Magazine. Eaton says it may be on the cover.

By Andrew Graham