Finding Real People -- How Barlett & Steele Award Winners Did It

Gary Cohn and Darrell Preston wrote a piece for Bloomberg Markets magazine investigating the fees that AARP collects on members’ insurance policies. The article won the silver award and $2,000 in the Reynolds Center’s third annual Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism this week.

The story leads with Arthur Laupus’ story:

Laupus stumbled onto something that many members of the world’s largest seniors’ organization don’t know: The group, formerly called American Association of Retired Persons, collects hundreds of millions of dollars annually from insurers who pay for AARP’s endorsement of their policies.

The insurance companies build the cost of these so-called royalties and fees, which amounted to $497.6 million in 2007, into the premiums they charge AARP members, according to AARP’s consolidated financial statement for that year.

Darrell says he got the tip about the AARP fees while reporting on another insurance industry story. He and Gary teamed up, did some comparison-shopping and then realized the hard part: finding people, Darrell says.

While at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Gary learned from Don Barlett and Jim Steele -- for whom the award is named -- that you need to bring the impact of investigative stories home with human examples.

“It’s important to have all of the good details,” Gary says. “Also, it’s really important to have real people in stories. That’s what takes a lot of extra time.”

Today’s Tip: Use LexisNexis, a searchable database that many media outlets pay to access, to find sources in the “Letters to the Editor” section of publications.

Darrell and Gary searched LexisNexis for letters from people complaining about AARP. Many of the authors were listed in online phone directories.

Darrell says they also talked with brokers who knew of clients who’d comparison-shopped for insurance. They found Laupus through a source and learned that he had kept voluminous records, Gary says.

“He was the perfect case study because of the interviews and the detailed paper trail.”

For a tip from The Miami Herald reporters who won the top gold award in the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism, please click here. For more information on Barlett and Steele, as well as advice from last year's winners, please click here.

Tracking criminals in the mortgage biz -- how Barlett & Steele winners did it

Miami Herald reporters Jack Dolan, Matt Haggman and Rob Barry produced a series called, “Borrowers Betrayed,” in January that “found that the state had licensed over a thousand convicted felons as mortgage brokers and had allowed two thousand felons to work as unlicensed loan originators.” That series won the top gold award and $5,000 in the Reynolds Center’s third annual Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism this week.

Part One of the series says:

State regulators allowed thousands of ex-convicts to enter a profession that gave them access to the most sensitive and personal financial information: credit cards, bank accounts and Social Security numbers.

Those criminals went on to commit nearly $85 million in mortgage fraud, the newspaper found. They stole their customers' identities. They stole their money. They even stole their homes.

The team’s eight-month investigation started after visiting a mortgage broker. The broker bragged about being able to sell all types of loans, and his backroom call center raised red flags for Jack and Matt.

“We half-jokingly checked his criminal background,” Jack said. The check revealed drug and financial crimes, which led the two to ask: “If he can get a license, who else can?”

That revelation, plus a designation for Florida as the No. 1 state for mortgage fraud, made them want to pursue the story.

"A lot of reporting had been done at the top of the food chain on Wall Street, but we wanted to get to the bottom,” Matt says. “The mortgage-broker people were coming face-to-face with the victims.”

Jack says, “The database [of 222,844 Florida mortgage professionals] was the world’s greatest tip sheet, but it took a tremendous amount of shoe leather.” Some of that leather was worn while tracking convicted bank robbers late at night, they say.

Today’s Tips: Realize that once you have the data, there’s still a lot of reporting to do, Jack and Matt say. Also, make sure all of the reporters on a project can work together as a team.

The trio worked together on the reporting, and each wrote one installment of the three-day series. Each part carried all three bylines.

Tomorrow: How did Barlett & Steele silver award winners Gary Cohn and Darrell Preston of Bloomberg Markets magazine investigate the endorsement fees charged by AARP that resulted in higher insurance costs for seniors?