COM students power two investigations for Online Journalism Awards wins

Reporting on disparities in state lottery systems and labor trafficking led to national awards for investigations assisted by Boston University journalism students.

Two projects won separate Online Journalism Awards, recognizing excellence in digital journalism worldwide in small and large newsrooms for a variety of categories and mediums, and sponsored by the Online News Association.

“Mega Billions: The Great Lottery Wealth Transfer” brought together students from BU and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland to investigate state lottery systems, revealing how they targeted low-income communities to spend more on lottery tickets. The Howard Center funds student-reported investigative data stories.

The story won the first place Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award for a Small Newsroom.

Guided by COM Associate Professor of the Practice in Computational Journalism Maggie Mulvihill, in her JO 521 Data Journalism course last fall, students looked into buying patterns in Massachusetts. They found that in contrast to other states, in Massachusetts there are more white, middle-class ticket buyers than minorities. But the student reporting led to a new angle: the ethics of allowing Massachusetts check cashers to also sell lottery tickets. Check cashers have long been criticized as preying on poor people who don’t have traditional access banks.

“Everybody worked really hard in the class on that story, and we were working with a lot of data,” Mulvihill said. “Then you just figure out what was the most newsworthy information that we have that we can contribute to the overall project.”

“The check cashing angle was good because the Howard Center didn’t have that as part of the main project,” she added.

Mulvihill recalled sending students out in the field to cash checking stores on Good Friday, when they realized that the Massachusetts’ angle of the story would be different from the original pitch the Howard Center had shared.

“We used the project to do data analysis,” Mulvihill said. “And then the students visited check cashing companies and interviewed people who were buying lottery tickets at check cashing companies and tried to interview some of the owners.”

Mulvihill’s data journalism class has contributed to three Howard Center projects since 2020, leading to several national and regional journalism awards and publication in outlets such as the Washington Post and the Associated Press. Reporting is underway for another potential Howard Center collaboration in the spring.

A separate project, “Trafficking, Inc,” a collaboration with Boston NPR affiliate GBH, won the Excellence in Social Justice Reporting, Portfolio, for the work of students in former COM Professor of the Practice Jenifer McKim’s JO535 Investigative and Project Reporting course.

“I was very gratified that it won a national award for social justice because I think it is an important topic,” McKim said. “The students’ involvement made it a much richer project, so I’m really proud and glad that they were part of it.”

After her investigation for GBH of sex trafficking of boys, McKim wanted to look into labor trafficking and the forced labor industry, a topic that is less understood. She brought the idea to class, and her students were tasked with researching labor trafficking court cases and finding and interviewing victims and advocates to find where this was happening in the state throughout the semester.

“They were a great group of students, and they were very dedicated to the topic,” McKim said. “They interviewed with me sometimes, and sometimes on their own interviewed different sources, including some trafficking survivors.”

Their investigation found that there hadn’t been a forced labor trafficking case to succeed in Massachusetts since a law to help victims prosecute their perpetrators was passed in 2011.

Once the semester was over, McKim used the work students compiled with other GBH reporters to produce the four-part radio and web story, with the first two parts including student contributions: the first part of interviews of forced labor victims and the second on the flaws of T-visas, a type of visa for trafficking survivors.