Welcome back to the podcast, bribes,windle, or steel.

I'm Alexander Rogge, and for today's podcast, we have the presentation given by David Jackson earlier this summer at the Trace Prize for Investigative Reporting in Vancouver.

David is a senior reporter with Injustice Watch.

His work is exposed corruption and prompted legislative reforms and law enforcement indictments.

At the Trace event, he spoke to how local news uncovers local fraud.

Here's David.

My name is David Jackson.

I'm a reporter at Injustice Watch.

We are a small nonprofit in Chicago that covers the local courts,

seven investigative reporters, two editors,

and a very, very small support staff.

Each of us comes blinking awake into a world we didn't create.

We adapt to technologies we never could have invented, and we reckon

with appalling inherited injustices, slavery, human trafficking, and their legacies. I was born at what was then

called Chicago Lying In Hospital at 61st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in a great American city known for its

glittering skyline and for its corruption and murders. I adapted to the world around me by

becoming an investigative reporter at my big, brassy hometown newspaper. And my colleagues and I

scored victories again and again.

As crooked officials were hauled off to prison, weak state laws were rewritten, and our reporting

helped protect society's most vulnerable people and rinse some of the crud from City Hall.

Local newsrooms are uniquely positioned to expose graft and venality that government agencies and well-funded advocates simply cannot address, usually because they're tangled up in the status quo. And the reach of local news investigations often becomes international, because these reporters start with cases of actual harm and then follow the facts

wherever and however far they lead.

...