Brief #8: Investigative Journalism

Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, better known as Iowa Watch, published a statewide investigative story in the spring of 2016 on a disparity in how high school science teachers discuss climate change in the classroom. Nearly half of teachers surveyed by Iowa Watch journalists teach climate change “as theory, informing students about the variety of thought that exists.” The rest of the responses fell evenly across a variety of strategies for treating climate change as fact, and Iowa Watch’s work corroborated the findings of a larger national study published by Science that same season.

The Iowa Watch story ran in several prominent state newspapers, including The Des Moines Register and The Waterloo Courier, and prompted concerns that students could complete their high-school experience with an inconsistent understanding of human impact on the environment. The absence of administrative measures to monitor how discussions of climate change play out in science curriculum shocked educators, students, and parents alike.



ICYMI: “She identified herself as a reporter. He then walked behind her and punched her in the side of the head”

But inside that story lingered another. Aside from the light supervision of Lyle Muller, Iowa Watch’s executive director and editor, and Brian Winkel, a journalism teacher at Cedar Falls High School, the piece had been researched and written by high schoolers. Over the course of three months, Tana Gam-Ad, Olivia Fabos Martin, and Sarah Stortz contributed on-the-ground reporting to that initial story (which Muller collected and stitched together), and became the first participants in Iowa Watch’s efforts to produce collaborative, investigative report in high schools around the state. Muller, a veteran reporter himself, saw the program as an opportunity to escort the next generation of journalists into the field, but also as a strategy to cover relevant stories that might otherwise go unheard. In the process of that intensive coursework and reporting, Muller hoped administrators would recognize the vitality and necessity of “extracurricular” journalism courses, and think twice before sacrificing them to frequent budget cuts. He confided his feelings to Columbia Journalist Review: “I wanted to prove that high school students can do this,” says Muller. “I wanted to prove that they were capable of producing reporting that people would pay attention to, and that high school journalism programs are worthwhile and important.”