Collier Prize for State Government Accountability
Collier Prize Showcase
Our first in-person and virtual event, the Collier Prize Showcase, happens Feb. 13, and you can register to attend now. Here’s how it’s shaping up: – The team that won the 2024 Collier Prize, from the Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, will share reporting steps and strategies that exposed the tragic mishandling of the active-shooter tragedy at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Panelists include reporters Lomi Kriel, Zach Despart and Lexi Churchill. – Neil Chase, chief executive officer of CalMatters, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on state issues in California, and his team will share the features of Digital Democracy, a searchable portal that uses technology to provide journalists and the general public with quick and easy access to a vast amount of information on how and why state decisions are made. – Representatives from CalMatters, ProPublica and Texas Tribune will discuss the ins and outs of investigative partnerships. We’ve seen many of these efforts lead to impactful work across the country, but without proper front-end planning, there can be major bumps in the process. – We’ll hear from David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, who will highlight features of the Secrecy Tracker, a new tool that is expected to go live in January. The Tracker can provide, for free, honed searches of legislation in any state. Brechner staff applied their expertise and insights from state FOI coalitions and other experts, to train the model to avoid false positives and increase accurate catches of bills that may not even share keywords but will still be on target. Also, Secrecy Tracker allows analysis of trends going back to 2011 as well as a 50-state look for national context. If you can’t join us in Gainesville, the showcase will be live-streamed and recorded for on-demand viewing. Stay tuned for more details. Meet our panelists:
Lexi Churchill is a research reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative. Before joining ProPublica, Lexi interned at CNBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Columbia Daily Tribune, and KCUR 89.3, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate. Her reporting on the University of Missouri’s Title IX appeals process won the GateHouse Public Service Award for 2018.
Zach Despart is a politics reporter for The Texas Tribune. He investigates power — who wields it, how and to what ends — through the lens of Texas government. An upstate New York native, he received his bachelor’s degree in political science and film from the University of Vermont.
Lomi Kriel is a reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit. Previously she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle covering immigration, often focused on the Texas border. She received the 2019 George Polk Award for national reporting, in part for her continued work on family separations. Kriel, who was born and raised in South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1998. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University and speaks Afrikaans and Spanish.
Neil Chase is the chief executive officer of CalMatters. He was previously executive editor of The Mercury News and East Bay Times, where his team won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Coverage. Neil worked as an editor at The San Francisco Examiner, The Arizona Republic, CBS MarketWatch and The New York Times and was an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
David Cuillier, Ph.D., is director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project. Before joining the University of Florida in July 2023, Cuillier taught access to public records, data journalism, and other courses at the University of Arizona School of Journalism for 17 years, where he also served as director of the school and director of graduate studies. He served as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2013-14, as well as SPJ FOI chair for five years, was president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition 2019-2023 and served as head of the Communication Law & Policy Division for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.