Me, reporting the other day on the Bangladeshi migrants who sleep in the woods of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, hoping to avoid a nighttime police sweep. See if you can guess which one’s me and which are the Bangladeshis. (Hint: Look for the notebook.)
Am in the Moroccan capital of Rabat; headed back to the states on Friday.
I interrupt this blog silence to celebrate some excellent news.
Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods as key parts of their probes were named today as winners of the 2007 Philip Meyer Journalism Award…
First Place: The Dallas Morning News for “Faking the Grade,” a three-day series that uncovered strong evidence of cheating on standardized tests by more than 50,000 students in Texas public and charter schools. Reporters Joshua Benton and Holly Hacker followed up on the paper’s groundbreaking 2004 investigation of cheating at the district and school level by analyzing a huge public records database of the scores and answers of hundreds of thousands of individual students taking the tests over a two-year period. The series prompted the state to announce stricter controls over test-taking conditions in Texas schools and to adopt the cheat-detection statistical methods used by the paper.
This is from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which is really the national gold standard when it comes to investigative work. Yay!
Just so the Internet doesn’t forget I exist: I’m writing this from (slightly more charming than the bearish guidebooks would have you believe) Casablanca, in lovely and a touch chilly Morocco. Have been here doing the vacation thing for about a week and a half now, and starting today (with an overnight train ride to “city of fear” Oujda, near the Algerian border) I start some reporting. I love you all dearly, but my eternal quest for the finest in Internet ephemera (for You, The Reader) is taking a little break. I get back to the U. S. of A. at the end of January, when regular posting here should resume.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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