Chapter 10
How Prosecutors Work: Story Ideas
By Steve Weinberg

Story idea are embedded throughout the chapter narrative. Ideas for stories also jump out from the Web sites listed and the books cited. All that said, the most fruitful way to find story ideas about prosecutors is to study what newspaper, magazine, television, radio, and online journalists have previously published. Those stories can then be adapted to your local prosecutor or nearby federal prosecutor.

Although most news organizations cover prosecutors poorly much of the time, an accumulation of stories worth emulating over the decades can be culled from a variety of sources. Naturally, the libraries of news organizations can provide some of the material online or via snail mail. Investigative Reporters and Editors (www.ire.org) offers in-depth projects from its Resource Center, which has been aggregating such projects since the late 1970s. Electronic databases such as Lexis-Nexis make sense to search. The Monday through Friday summary disseminated by Criminal Justice Journalists (http://cjj.mn-8.net) usually contains at least one story about prosecutors.

Many of the stories revolve around an individual case, and frequently involve allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Other stories show patterns of behavior—some exemplary, some troublesome—within one prosecutor’s office, or across multiple prosecutor jurisdictions. Some of the most significant stories are mentioned in the book-length study “Harmful Error: Investigating America’s Local Prosecutors,” available from the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org) in Washington, D. C.

In-depth profiles of district attorneys and U. S. attorneys often show up in monthly city magazines and city-based alternative weeklies. Those profiles are often, but not always, admiring.

Joseph Neff’s series about prosecutor Mike Nifong appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer April 14-17, 2007. www.newsobserver.com/1537/story.

At the San Jose Mercury News, reporter Fredric N. Tulsky wrote a series that appeared January 22-26, 2006, with the overall title “Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice.” The newspaper later published the series in a unified broadsheet newsprint format. Along with the various Chicago Tribune series and individual stories by Maurice Possley, Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong that started appearing during 1999, the Tulsky opus is among the best available from any news organization.

Bill Moushey at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (www.post-gazette.com) reported and wrote what is almost certainly the most comprehensive journalistic investigation of federal prosecutors. The series appeared in the newspaper during 1998 under the overall title