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Christina Jewett is a reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting. "You really learn the value of what you do when you get feedback from people who feel vindicated by your work."

As the health and welfare reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif., Christina Jewett, BAJ’02, says her job is not so much about the people she’s writing about, but the people she’s writing for — the readers and viewers whose lives are affected by her investigations.

Take a story Jewett wrote last year about a Chicago physician’s habit of overprescribing medication manufactured by a drug company to which he had questionable ties. After the story ran in the Chicago Tribune, Jewett’s editor received a tearful call from the mother of one of the doctor’s patients. The article, the mom said, gave her hope that someone understood her plight.

“You really learn the value of what you do when you get feedback from people who feel vindicated by your work,” Jewett says. “The caller was so grateful to have her situation brought into the light of day.”

News audiences don’t feel that kind of connection when they consume stories focusing on celebrity gossip, says Jewett, who previously worked for ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting shop in New York. That’s why many in the business feel that investigative reporting is still, despite the Twitter-ization of the news, the heart and soul of journalism.

Although the Center for Investigative Reporting began more than 30 years ago, it has pushed to keep up with the digital curve. And while Jewett is a full-time investigative reporter in the classic Woodward-and-Bernstein sense, she’s not stuck in the 1970s. Twitter tweets are a key way she stays in touch, and her job entails frequent blogs on topics in her subject matter areas of expertise. It helps in any medium, she says, to be “platform agnostic” because you never know what format your work will end up in nor what type of medium you’ll wind up working for next.

Jewett learned news judgment and a sense of what’s fair from her journalism school classes — especially the media law courses — and as a reporter for and then an editor of the Indiana Daily Student. At the Center for Investigative Reporting, she puts those skills to work.
And it’s likely where she’ll stay, at least for the foreseeable future, because she enjoys the legwork of hands-on investigative reporting.

“There’s a lot to investigate in California,” Jewett says, “and a million reasons to love it here. I couldn’t be happier where I am.”

Reported by Russell Jackson, BA ’83, a West Hollywood, Calif.-based freelancer.

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