A prestigious national journal heaps praise on the Free Press for "How Detroit Went Broke," its in-depth dive Sunday into six decades of Detroit financial mismanagement.
"Every reporter covering government finance will benefit from studying this package," former Free Press reporter David Cay Johnston writes in Columbia Journalism Review.
Free Press business reporters Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher pored over more than a half-century of city financial records, building their own database from more than 10,000 pages of documents.
But then they did what matters most—the hard work of turning a jumble of complex and subtle facts, financial jargon, and economic concepts like the time-value-of-money into a smooth-reading narrative with solid organization, telling details and just enough numbers to make their points.
Johnston says the presentation, which filled more than half the front page and four inside pages, is "a superbly reported, written and illustrated investigative project." He also compliments editorial page editor Stephen Henderson for "smart insights" in a related column.
He places Sunday's journalism in the context of "a Free Press tradition of mixing shoe leather, document analysts and computer-assisted reporting that dates to 1967 . . . [when] Philip Meyer, with help from two University of Michigan researchers, exploded the then-current myth that the 1967 Detroit rioters were 'the uneducated.' ”
Johnston, a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner while at The New York Times, worked at the Free Press from 1973-76 and covered a state senator named Coleman A. Young from the paper's Lansing bureau. He's now a visiting lecturer at Syracuse University's College of Law and board president of the 4,200-member Investigative Reporters and Editors group.
Columbia Journalism Review is published by Columbia University in New York.
