AIDAN POLLARD
News Editor
In 2001, David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his work investigating the U.S. tax code. Now, he’s coming to Fredonia to speak at the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) conference on Saturday.
The event will be at 11 a.m. in the 103 rooms of the Williams Center, where three other speakers will have talks, after which the conference will converge into Johnston’s keynote speech.
The other three speakers will be WKBW-TV News Anchor Jeff Russo, Buffalo News Columnist Sean Kirst and Buffalo Bills Associate Producer Andrew Meyer.
Johnston’s current work includes investigative pieces into the Trump administration.4
“He’s a hardcore news reporter,” said Elmer Ploetz, Fredonia journalism professor. “He won a Pulitzer for his writing about the federal tax code and how corporations were abusing it. So, I mean, anybody who can get a Pulitzer out of writing about taxes has to be a fairly intense, serious reporter because that’s a really difficult topic to write about just because the tax code itself is so monstrously confusing.”
Johnston will begin speaking at noon.
He’s also a co-founder of the journalistic website DCreport.org, which calls itself “a unique, non-profit news service that reports what the President and Congress DO, not what they SAY.”
The site says it was founded on core-investigative journalism principles like research, fact-checking and reporting in plain English. It aims to plainly state how its readers and their families are directly affected by the actions of the government in Washington.
The conference doesn’t want to appeal to only journalism majors. The information journalists can offer may be useful to anyone interested in staying informed.
“If you are someone who is intimidated by news, or intimidated by journalism, but you know it’s your civic duty to be informed and educated on what’s going on, then there’s no reason why you should shy away from something like this,” said senior journalism major and SPJ Treasurer Eriketa Cost. “Because .people that have been in the industry, been talking to people, been trying to figure out all the corruption — they’re the ones you want to be informed about so that you can start to learn about how journalists actively find ways to deliver news in a credible way. So, once you learn how they, kind of, analyze news and deliver it in a way that they know they’re not giving you false news — it helps you become a journalist yourself.”
Cost went on to say that the conference will be valuable for students in learning how to fact-check the news that they see every day.