"You can't kill a story by killing a journalist"

On Wednesday, March 24, The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication welcomed five reporters of the celebrated Chauncey Bailey Project to the McGill Medal Round Table Discussion.

For 75 minutes, Grady’s Drewry room was silent as reporters Bob Butler, Mary Fricker, Thomas Peele, and Josh Richman, along with editor Martin Reynolds, spoke to current and past McGill fellows of their experiences as members of this hard-hitting, unlikely-matched investigative news team that was seeking justice for one of their own. The Chauncey Bailey Project is a collaborative news investigation of the murder of Oakland Post reporter, Chauncey Bailey, on August 2, 2007, in Oakland, California. The goal of the Project, as the five journalists constantly stressed, was to not just report on their peer and friend’s murder, but to finish the work he had started.

“You can’t kill a story by killing a journalist” was the mantra repeated over and over during the discussion, and it is instantly obvious that these reporters really mean what they say. As the conversation progressed, the reporters explained how they had jumped into this project showing relatively no fear or hesitation—as Bob Butler said, their fearless resulted from just being too busy to have the time to sit back and really consider the dangerous situations they were in. Be it a remarkable level of journalistic dedication or a slightly naïve eagerness to tell the story, this attitude undoubtedly seems to have been the thing that spurred their efforts on. If they had not been so free and fearless in their reporting, it is likely that they would not have been able to take the risks needed to capture the story and expose the terrible crimes of the Bey clan.

The four reporters of The Chauncey Bailey Project were invited as the honored guests to the McGill Medal Round Table Discussion to impart wisdom about journalistic courage. The group received the 2010 McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage in a ceremony later that evening. The award is awarded annually to “working U.S. journalists whose careers have exemplified journalistic courage.”

'You Can't Kill a Story by Killing a Journalist,' Two-Year Award-Winning Reporting Project Demonstrates

John Greenman (l), Carter Professor of Journalism, talks with slain journalist Chauncey Bailey's sister, Lorelei Waqia. Greenman oversees the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage, which was awarded Wednesday to a team of four journalists who produced The Chauncey Bailey Project.

By Melanie Turner

On Aug. 2, 2007, Chauncey Bailey was shot down while walking home from his job at the Oakland Post, in Oakland, California. A little over two years later, four of the reporters that finished the story he had been writing sat around the conference table describing their experiences with the Chauncey Bailey Project in the Drewry Reading Room of UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Project received the McGill Medal for Journalist Courage on March 23 from the McGill Fellows. These journalists were selected because of their involvement with research that exposed the corruption in the Oakland Police Department and the Your Black Muslim Bakery, the organization connected with Bailey’s murder.

The project started a couple weeks after Bailey’s death with the help of about three-dozen volunteer reporters, editors and community members who’s goal it was to finish what Bailey started and to prove the project’s mantra, “You can’t kill a story by killing a Journalist”. The dozens of volunteers spent about two years in all, pouring through police reports, public documents and talking to sources. During this time, they wrote over a 100 stories about the murder, Bailey’s assassin and the police department’s failure to pursue the case. The four reporters, Thomas Peele, Josh Richman, Mary Fricker and Bob Butler, stressed that the key to their reporting was their use of public documents. Through these documents, they found mountains of evidence and verified information from sources. The documents, mostly untouched by local police detectives, revealed multiple types of fraud, the use of child labor and polygamy.

The four also emphasized that courage is necessary to reporting, not just for instances like the Chauncey Bailey Project, but for pursuing any difficult lead in a story. Mike Oliver, another project member, summed up their opinion. “A good journalist is one that won’t be intimidated, that won’t take no when they believe that the information should be made public.” They discussed how, without courage, they would not have been able to pursue leads with members of Your Black Muslim Bakery, and police department. This courage opened the doors for the Bakery and its members to be convicted of their crimes and the Oakland Police Department to reform their homicide department.

Although they never expected their work to last more than eight months, the journalists also never expected to discover the numerous stories they did. They took the years of dedication and the long hours the project required in stride and believe that it was the only way to honor Bailey’s life and work. “We simply did what we had to do after a friend and colleague was slain for his work. If a story dies along with the journalist, the journalist died in vain; letting that happen was never an option.” Richman said according to the Chauncey Bailey Project website. The journalists succeeded at just that, the memory of Bailey’s courage never died, it lives still today in the stories and hearts he impacted.

The McGill Medal Bios

Josh Richman is a father of one from Queens, N.Y. As an active journalist of 18 years he currently works for the The Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group in California. Richman received his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from University of Missouri while also studying a minor in political science. He began work for the Oakland Tribune in 1997. He has achieved many accomplishments throughout his journalistic career, but considers the Chauncey Bailey Project the biggest story he has covered. Richman’s most memorable work includes stories arising from terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He also recognizes a story he covered on Oakland Police Department’s reaction to antiwar protestors in 2003, which won awards.

Like Richman, Bob Butler also recognizes the Chauncey Bailey Project as the highlight of his career. Although the project has received The McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage, among other awards, Butler makes it clear that his satisfaction comes from the fact that criminals were indicted in the case. Butler has been in broadcast reporting for 31 years. As a native of Chelsea, Mass. Butler describes himself as a navy brat who finally settled in the Bay area of San Francisco when he landed a job with KCBS. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from San Francisco State and continues to work independently in the field.

McGill Medal recipients discuss investigative journalism

By Mitch Blomert

The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia welcomed five members of an award-winning investigative reporting project at the McGill Medal Round Table Discussion on Wednesday in Grady College’s Drewry Room.

The five journalists, from various publications based in the California Bay Area, discussed their responsibilities and duties in the Chauncey Bailey Project, an investigative report surrounding the death of the former Oakland Tribune reporter and Oakland Post editor-in-chief the project is named after.

The two-year project has won numerous awards for its influence on investigative journalism, including Best Practices Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, as well as the Knight Public Service Award and Investigative Journalism Award in the Small Site Category by the Online News Association.

The project has also been recognized by Columbia University and now the University of Georgia, who awarded the journalists with McGill Medals for Journalistic Courage following the discussion.

“It’s very flattering and very surreal just to be invited to this,” said Josh Richman, a reporter with the Bay Area News Group and a member of the project.

Richman was joined by fellow Bay Area News Group reporter Thomas Peele and project editor Mike Oliver, as well as independent journalists Bob Butler and Mary Fricker.

The journalists were asked questions by McGill fellows, made up of University of Georgia undergraduate and graduate Journalism students, as well as Grady College faculty. Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia, and her son, Nasim Tindall, also attended the discussion.

The project, formed in 2007 following Bailey’s death, investigated the reasons for his murder, which subsequently uncovered an organized crime service being operated through an Oakland bakery. The murderer, Devaughndre Broussard, was found guilty of murder through the journalists’ evidence.

“We believe that our reporting resulting in indictment,” Butler said. “It reaffirmed belief and really educated people about investigative reporting.”

Loreli Waqia (l), sister of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey, chats with McGill Fellow Devora Olin. Olin, a master's student in the Grady College, researched the nomination of the four journalists whose reporting on The Chauncey Bailey Project earned them the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage.

McGill Medal Awarded to Thomas Peele and Mary Fricker

A ceremony was held Wednesday, March 24 for the McGill Medal awarded to four journalists who worked on the Chauncey Bailey Project. They were honored for their "journalistic courage." Two of the journalists were Thomas Peele and Mary Fricker.

Thomas Peele is a native of New York and now resides in California. He currently works for The Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group. Peele attended Long Island University and received his MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. Peele has worked in several states across the nation and has over 20 years of experience. In those 20 years, Peele has accumulated a number of awards for his journalistic accomplishments. Some of these include 4 national reporting awards, the 2007 Investigative Reporters and Editors' Renner Award for his work in the Chauncey Bailey Project, and now the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage. He still claims that his most difficult, interesting and important case was the Chauncey Bailey Project due to the large amount of flawed information and police evidence that he and his team were able to untangle and ultimately solve a mystery and a murder.

The second medal recipient is Mary Fricker. Fricker is a California native. She was an independent reporter retiring in 2006 from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where she covered business. She wrote a New York Times best-selling book Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans. Other accomplishments include the UCLA Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award and now the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage. Her intense passion for reporting is evident in the fact that she came out of retirement to volunteer countless hours of her time to the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Both Fricker's and Peele's efforts were greatly influential in the Chauncey Bailey Project and its success.

McGill Medal Table Discussion

One Step Closer to a Cure for Type I Diabetes

The 300-person auditorium was nearly filled to capacity. Students, educators and professional biologists listened intently, so silent you could hear a pin drop. World-renowned Harvard professor Douglas Melton, Ph.D., emphasized the importance of research on cell development in order to use stem cells to create a pancreas and recreate human diabetes. “If you watch something develop, it’s very informative of what goes wrong,” he said in his lecture on Tuesday, March 23, part of the Hope Ritter lecture series offered by the UGA Department of Cellular Biology.

Melton, who established his own laboratory at Harvard and conducts research for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, became motivated to find a cure for Type I diabetes after two of his children were diagnosed with the autoimmune disease. He has twice been listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine and for good reason. His research primarily focuses on ways to make insulin-producing cells, otherwise known as pancreatic beta (b) cells, which Type I diabetics do not have. He cited a statistic that made clear why his research is so important: 0.5 percent of newborns in the United States will be fully insulin-dependent by age 18.

Melton wasted no time delving into the lecture. “I’m going to give you an intro to the pancreas – just for fun,” he said. Snickers echoed throughout the audience as he described early thought on pancreatic function. Scientists in the 16^th century believed the pancreas functioned solely as a cushion for other internal organs such as the stomach. Just 100 years later, scientists knew that pancreatic enzymes were involved in digestion. Today, researchers have divided the pancreas into two main components – exocrine cells and the islets of Langerhans.

The pancreatic beta cells that Melton’s research focuses on are located within the islets of Langerhans. He said that there are two main problems that need to be resolved. There is a loss of beta cells, so researchers must figure out how to make more of them. Researchers must also figure out how to stop the body’s immune system from attacking and killing its own beta cells.

How do scientists create more beta cells? “We should plan for success and try to do this in a way that is clinically relevant by using chemicals that tell cells what to do,” said Melton. The process of creating beta cells began by determining which genes were turned on or off during different stages of cell development. By manipulating these genes with chemicals in a lab, Melton has successfully differentiated cells to create definitive pancreatic cells.

Melton believes that within five years, scientists will have the capability to make “buckets” of any kind of cell. “The nucleus in these cells still has the capacity to go back to the beginning. You can erase it, in a sense, and let it start over,” he said. Using this concept, Melton has been able to “reprogram” pancreatic exocrine cells into expressing genes that are essential in beta cell functioning. These new insulin-producing cells closely resemble beta cells, and insulin expression remains strong and permanent over time. The process is fast and efficient – it takes only three days, and fully 20% of the reprogrammed cells become beta cells.

What does this mean for diabetics? This is when Melton addressed the second problem – how to stop the immune system from attacking beta cells. The body can only make new beta cells by replication. All new beta cells must come from preexisting beta cells, so a Type I diabetic has lost all capability to create new beta cells. The entire audience laughed as Melton “quoted” what the body of a diabetic would say if simply injected with new beta cells. “Thanks! I recognize those cells. I’ve been killing them for a long time. I’m going to keep killing them!”

A major key, then, to cracking the code on Type I diabetes is figuring out why the immune system does not recognize the pancreas as “self” but rather treats it as an invader and tries to kill it. Melton next plans are to study the development of diabetes in mice. These mice are genetically modified so that the cells and tissues are actually human in nature. In this manner, Melton and his research team can find out which type of cell affects the onset of diabetes and how many different ways there are to develop the disease. “If that doesn’t work, I really don’t know what I’ll do,” he said.

Perhaps most relevant to diabetic patients today is finding out what triggers beta cells to divide, however. Melton cited an experiment in which a mouse cured itself of diabetes after having most of its beta cells killed in a laboratory setting. The residual beta cells boosted replication so that the mouse could cure itself.

“We’re very keen on finding signals for beta cell replication that could be useful in newly onset diabetes to boost replication and increase tolerance,” said Melton. Recently diagnosed diabetics often experience a “honeymoon period” in which the body still retains some capability to produce insulin before all of the beta cells have been killed. If scientists can keep the body from killing beta cells and induce replication before the cells are all gone, it is possible that the patient may regain the ability to produce insulin.

Douglas Melton began his lecture with the words, “I wasn’t certain I could do science.” He has clearly proven that not only can he do science, but he can also make a difference and inspire hope in the lives of millions of people.