For as long as there have been reporters working for our company in Michigan – and in some of our traditional communities, that’s nearly 200 years – there has been a need and a demand for investigative journalism.
We look into fishy situations, dig up records and track down elusive people in our quest to hold those in power accountable and right wrongs on the behalf of our communities and our readers.
“We have a mission statement of sorts – who is being harmed, is there hope, and what can be done about it,” said John Counts, editor of MLive’s investigative reporting team.
The desire to fulfill that mission is in journalists’ DNA, and based on readership numbers we track, and letters I get from you, there is a strong appetite for more investigative reporting.
That’s why MLive this year has moved to bolster investigative reporting by doubling the number of reporters on our investigative team from two to four and making leadership of the team Counts’ full-time job.
“A few years ago, we were starting to get some traction with some good investigative pieces, but it was more like on an ad-hoc basis. We would see something wrong and so we would go investigate,” said Sara Scott, senior director of news for MLive.
That led to strong journalistic packages around sexual assaults at the Faster Horses and Electric Forest music festivals; profound enrollment challenges at Michigan public universities; record profits by hospital systems during the COVID era; and “weed wars” in Michigan border towns Up North. Those stories were largely the work of investigative reporters Gus Burns and Matthew Miller.
“We thought if we got more strategic and organized about the way that we approached investigative journalism, we could build something really great,” Scott said. “The most important thing is impact – I want us to tackle tough issues and to right some wrongs.”
So recently MLive Vice President of Content Kelly Frick and Scott reorganized staffing to add two reporters to the beat and focus Counts on leading the team. His primary role had been as a local editor for The Ann Arbor News.
Joining Burns and Miller on the investigative team are reporters Simon Schuster and Rose White. Counts joked that it now resembles the old TV action show “The A Team,” which featured four soldiers of fortune whose various specialties formed a formidable unit. Call ours “The I Team.”
“Gus Burns has crime; Matt Miller's got education and health care; Rose White has economy and business; and Simon Schuster has a political background,” Counts said. “That covers a lot of your basic newsroom beats right there.”
Those additional reporters already have made an impact this year. Schuster dug into the background of controversial former Ottawa County Administrator John Gibbs, and White has published deeply reported pieces on the 10-year anniversary of a one-day window when same-sex marriages were legal in Michigan and on a rare, fatal brain disease that sprung up in a concerning cluster in west Michigan.
“This allows us to take the time to get all the documents and to go out and get those hard-to-secure interviews with family members and officials who don't want to talk,” Counts said.
Sometimes the investigative reporters work independently, and in other instances they team with local reporters in our eight newspaper markets. One great example from February was Burns pairing with Bay City Times reporter Cole Waterman to dig into citizen complaints against Michigan State Police troopers in urban cities.
This team’s territory is the entire state of Michigan and their focus is old as our profession.
“We're looking for bad actors throughout the state, right?” said Counts. “The old journalism credo is to root out chicanery and skullduggery and corruption and all that kind of good stuff. We'll go to wherever the big story takes us.”
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Have a story idea or tip for our investigative team? Contact John Counts at [email protected]. | 