When New Mexico Watchdog reporter Jim Scarantino posted a brief story titled "Obama stimulus creates new congressional districts" describing White House claims to have saved jobs in districts that didn't even exist, he had no idea what would happen next.
Within hours, the story about phantom congressional districts went viral on the Internet and was being repeated, localized and expanded upon by mainstream media outlets across the nation, from broadcast operations like ABC News and CBS News to daily newspapers in dozens of states.
FactCheck.org even picked the phantom-districts story as one of its 10 biggest political whoppers of the year.
No wonder when asked about his organization's biggest accomplishments, Jason Stverak instantly responds: "The phantom congressional district story -- we broke that."
Stverak is president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, an Internet-based nonprofit started only months earlier in 2009 to aid transparency in government by focusing watchdog journalism on state capitals across the country.
The phantom-districts story generated national recognition for Franklin's venture into investigative reporting soon after its inception due in part to its hiring veteran reporters with traditional muckraking skills, as well as the group's 24-hour welcome sign for sharing information among competitive colleagues.
For instance, said Grant Bosse, editor for the New Hampshire Watchdog, the phantom congressional district story began when a Franklin reporter shared what he found on the federal Recovery.gov Web site with Franklin colleagues, who then checked their own areas and in turn found similar phantom districts.
"By sharing that lead through the Franklin Center," Bosse wrote, "other reporters were able to discover the same thing and we ended up exposing a major problem in the Recovery.gov Web site."
Such quick sharing is a key to Franklin's success -- a collaborative approach to investigative journalism that touts a mantra -- "Steal our Stuff" - quite unlike the jealously guarded scoops of older newsrooms.
"We don't directly have a wire service" like AP, Stverak said, "but we do have a 'Steal Our Stuff' policy, so if you want to use our stories, we want you to. The end goal for us is no matter where you are, we want to get the information into the hands of the people."
Franklin opened in January 2009 with a goal of hiring and where necessary training reporters in investigative techniques, to offer credible high-impact stories to other publications at no cost, and to help like-minded groups expose official corruption, mismanagement and the like.
Besides statehouse investigative reporting, Stverak said, Franklin offers training to its journalists on the latest investigative strategies and partners with various news organizations on reporting projects.
The training includes a Computer-Assisted Investigative Reporting boot camp taught by Examiner editorial page editor Mark Tapscott, who is a Franklin advisory board member.
"We have more than 30 watchdog sites, and our investigative and capitol and statehouse service, we're in about 23 states. ... We work with reporters in over 40 states. We do training, give legal support, help them start a Web site," Stverak said. "We work with organizations that we've hired or contracted with to produce great investigative pieces."
The majority of these organizational partnerships are forged with nonprofits of conservative or free-market bent. But Stverak says dismissing Franklin Center as a "right-wing group news site" is no more justified than ignoring ProPublica as a "leftist" media outfit.
ProPublica was started in 2007 with financial backing from wealthy liberal activists like Herb and Marion Sandler. Stverak, a former North Dakota Republican Party executive, praises the group's 2010 Pulitzer Prize recognition.
"With any news organization, you have to judge them on the news content," he said. "Any organization that puts out content, that's how the organization should be judged. We only have one bias here and that's for a more open government. We don't care if there's a Republican or a Democrat in office. We care about the people."
Franklin's goal, like any news organization, is to grow, he said. So far, it's headed in the right direction: Franklin Center reports have been featured in segments on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and included in stories by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Stverak said.
"It's been a period of large growth," he said of the past 18 months. "That's more in response to our producing good content and watchdog reports. We live by the model that every reporter is an investigative reporter ... and [a one-year goal] is the same as it would be for any other news organization, The Examiner, Fox News, whatever. It's to be seen by more and more people as somewhere you can go to get great news."
Stverak said readers are hungry for solid investigative news and in-depth coverage of state legislatures. Because of declining circulation and advertising, traditional news organizations have devoted far less attention to such reporting in recent years, which creates a need for groups like Franklin and ProPublica, he said.
"We ask the tough questions. When we push our reporters, when we train them, we tell them, 'You are not a stenographer.' I believe in an aggressive and honest Fourth Estate," Stverak said. "I also think that it's mainly because of a lack of resources that people are not getting the content and quality in news they want. We cover state and local governments, and people aren't getting enough in-depth reporting on that. We do that on a daily basis."
Reporters interested in Franklin Center training -- which includes instruction in starting and maintaining a Web site, using Twitter and social media, requesting documents via Freedom of Information Act laws, and investigating campaign corruption, for starters -- can e-mail the site at info@FranklinCenterHQ.org for information. The training is free; the travel and associated costs are personal.
"We're no different than Investigative Reporters and Editors, or [the Society of Professional Journalists," Stverak said. "We try to provide instruction in how to do reporting, how to do Web sites ... the main thing is to provide for the readers, so they have the information they need to make the best decisions possible."
Examiner contributor Cheryl K. Chumley was a 2008 Phillips Fellowship award winner.
