- There was a time in the United States not that long ago when local newspapers played an undisputed positive role in holding people in authority to account.

Today's guest is a journalist practicing his craft in that great tradition.

He's Daniel Golden, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Daniel Golden, a senior editor and reporter for ProPublica.

His most recent book, "The Ransomware Hunting Team" is out now.

Dan, thanks so much for being with us today.

- My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

- You know, I take a look at the long list of projects that you've been involved in, reporting that you've done, and I'm a little envious because you've been able to dive deep into so many different issues.

Can you tell us what drew you to journalism in the first place?

- Well, that's certainly what's been part of the fun of my career is dealing with all these different topics and I got into it because I was intellectually curios and wanted to write, and I've been able to do that.

I once calculated, I've published something like 2 or 3 million words on all manner of subjects.

I'm probably best known for my right investigations of college admissions and preferences for the rich.

But I've written about politics, I've written about sports, I've written about finance and criminal justice.

And at one point at ProPublica, they asked me to be the tech editor 'cause the other editors knew even less about tech than I did.

And that's where the ransomware book came from.

- So Dan, bring us up to date or give us your background, how you get into journalism, where you started, the places you've worked, and bring us up to ProPublica.

You've had a very distinguished career.

You've won a Pulitzer Prize, you've been a part of two other Pulitzer Prizes.

Let's hear that background, the road you've traveled to ProPublica.

- Well, I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, so my parents were both professors at UMass.

I then, in the summers there, I worked on the Amherst paper, "The Record" during college.

And after college I worked at the "Springfield Daily News," a long defunct afternoon paper for a few years.

Then I worked at "The Boston Globe," then "The Wall Street Journal," then a place called "Conde Nast Portfolio," a business magazine that's bolded.

And then Bloomberg and now ProPublica.

So I've been at a lot of places, but I've always really done the same kind of thing, which is in investigative, in-depth enterprise journalism.

I never liked kind of being with the crowd and writing about whatever everybody else was writing about.

I always tried to find my own topic, my own angle, and by and large, I've been able to do that.

- You know, so you legitimately cut your teeth in local journalism.

I wonder if you have thoughts about the current state of local journalism in the United States today?

- Well, that's absolutely right, and I just wrote this piece for ProPublica, which was a kind of reminiscence of my years from 1978 to '81 at the "Springfield Daily News," which as I say, was a long gone afternoon paper.

And it was the heyday of local journalism.

You know, it was "The Daily News" and the morning paper, "The Union" together had a circulation of something like 150,000.

Today, they've, you know, they've long since merged into one paper that has about 14,000 readers.

But back then, you know, we covered all the towns of Western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut as if we were the London media covering, you know, a king's coronation.

It was so thorough, every meeting that the cemetery commission, parks and rec, the selectmen, the assessors.

And it got, you know, if anything we overcovered local angles.

One story was when I was working there was when there was the Mount St. Helens volcano eruption in Washington state, 3,000 miles away.

And the editor called me in and said, you know, "Could this happen here?

We wanna find a local angle."

And I called around, I found a geologist who said, "Of course this couldn't happen in Massachusetts.

We don't have any volcanoes."

And I told the editor, and I expected that would get me outta the assignment, but he said, "Oh no, that's fine.

Write that up."

And I ended up having to write 1,500 words about how the Mount St. Helens eruption couldn't happen in Springfield.

And it ran under this headline, "It Can't Happen Here" with a huge photo of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

And, you know, that was typical of the time.

Everything had to have a local angle, everything had to be local.

And now, you know, those local papers, many of them have closed, others are a shell of themselves.

"The Springfield" paper doesn't cover a lot of those towns anymore.

Part of the building I used to work in is now a marijuana dispensary.

So, you know, I have a lot of nostalgia for that period when local news was in its glory.

- Well, in its glory.

And we've talked a lot on this show about the way local newspapers can really hold public officials, local public officials to account.

How does this track with your own sense of sort of the evolution of American democracy?

You're still working, you're still doing important investigative reporting.

But I think about, you know, a city like Springfield or you know, the town I grew up in, Hartford, you know, or other cities that have seen sort of the widowing of those local newspapers of record.

What does that mean for public accountability in those places?

- Yeah, I think those newspapers did perform a very important function of accountability.

But, you know, as having worked on one, my memories are a little more mixed in that "The Springfield" paper at the time, and I don't think this was atypical, the publisher who was a Newhouse executive saw his role more as guiding the city's leaders rather than a kind of adversary Watergate type approach that I would take.

I mean, he was the publisher of the paper.

He was also head of the downtown business redevelopment organization.

So at times we were, you know, cozy with the local, you know, establishment and maybe went too easy on some of the politicians.

But in general, yes, it was very important for local papers that the coverage they did do.

And it was certainly helpful to create an informed electorate.

And I think today with less local coverage, people are much more naive about government.

I mean, you know, the secret is that sometimes government actually works pretty well.

It's not always awful.

We investigative reporters focus on the bad parts, you know, the abuses of power.

But, you know, it's just like, not everything is death and crime in the world, but you'd think that from the nightly news.

And so when people don't have those local papers covering the government, both in what they do well and what they do badly, and giving people a sophisticated sense of them, you really lose an awful lot.

- So Dan, the story you wrote was called "Local Newspapers are Vanishing.

How should we Remember them?"

And in that you've noted that the staff of the newspaper, "The Springfield Daily," did not reflect the ethnic diversity of the city.

Talk about that.

I mean, the city was about a quarter Black and Hispanic, but staff members did not reflect that.

Is that correct?

- That's absolutely right.

And, you know, I didn't think maybe that much about it at the time, but looking back, it stands out because we did have a good bit of gender diversity.

There were quite a few female reporters, although very few female editors.

But in my time at "The Daily News," there was only one Black reporter on the staff who I reconnected with for the story.

And I think that, you know, at the time it was diversity was not the kind of, you know, foremost consideration in hiring that it is today.

And that's a pity.

And as I mentioned, the paper was somewhat cozy with the power brokers of Springfield who were generally, though not always white.

And I think that perhaps the lack of diversity in the staff may have, you know, contributed to this kind of focus on the politicians at the expense of maybe the community and the neighborhoods.

- You also write that there was friction between, you know, the young new reporters such as yourself and people who had been there a much longer time.

And I think that again, is the story of many newspapers of the era.

Just talk a little bit about that.

- Yeah, I think that's definitely true.

I mean, I was a child of Watergate.

You know, when I was a teenager was when the Watergate scandal happened.

And it spurred an awful lot of people like me to wanna be investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein.

You know, we all saw the movie, "All The President's Men," and walked into this newsroom, or as I say, it was not really a adversarial approach that the paper took toward the power structure.

And there were, you know, old timers there who would kind of learn newspapers in a different era and had a different approach to them.

And so, you know, there's a bit of a generational clash.

You see the same, I mean, there's kind of a generational clash today too, between younger reporters and newspaper management, sometimes over issues of diversity or over issues of coverage.

And it feels a little bit like history repeating itself.

I mean, newsrooms are very susceptible to generational divides.

- You know, Dan, we've mentioned you're now at ProPublica, which is a remarkable news source.

For folks who might not know what it is though, do you wanna tell us a little bit about it?

- Sure, ProPublica is maybe a a dozen years old, 15 years old.

And it's a investigative media outlet for website that's a nonprofit.

It's funded by, you know, donations and grants from foundations and things like that.

It's grown like crazy.

So we have more than a hundred journalists, considerably more.

We're US focused and we have reporters all over the country.

The headquarters is in New York.

And the mission is to investigate wrongdoing, abuse of public trust.

And, you know, we do a terrific job I think.

You know, this year ProPublica has got a lot of attention for leading the way on the coverage of Justice Thomas and the vacations and benefits that he accepted from billionaires and Republican donors and so on.

But, you know, we lead the way on a whole lot of issues.

We've had great coverage of health insurers and how they don't pay for sometimes life or death procedures.

You know, coverage of, you know, ransomware as I mentioned, and tech issues.

We've had coverage of problems with railroads and train accidents.

I mean, it really runs the gamut.

Immigration, criminal justice, health, education.

And we also have done our bit to help local news in that we partner through something called The Local Reporting Network with local outlets around the country that don't have the resources to do investigative reporting.

And what we do is essentially they send us a project idea, and if we like it, we fund the reporter for a year to do the project, we co-edit it, and then we co-publish with that local paper.

We do a lot of co-publishing with local papers and also with very eminent, prestigious national outlets like the "New York Times," "The New Yorker," and "The Washington Post," and so on.

And that's a big part of our mission too, and that helps spread the brand.

- You know, I'm curious.

Why does this model work for something like ProPublica?

Why can a place like ProPublica continue to do the kind of long form deep investigative reporting that has for so long been the hallmark of great American journalism when local papers are losing the resources?

Well, you know, what's, I guess, what's different about ProPublica?

- Well, of course it's a different business model.

So the local papers were dependent on advertising that has dried up as readers have migrated to the web.

And, you know, I'm not an expert on web financing, but I guess you can't raise the kind of money from ads there that you could in print media.

And in our case, I said, we're dependent on the generosity of donors and foundations and, you know, the quality of our work in turn attracts more and more donations so that we've been able to grow and flourish.

And it's not just, you know, ProPublica is not the only example of this.

I mean, nonprofits have sprung up around the country to do journalism.

I work with a couple of them, or I have.

There's one in New Bedford, Massachusetts, there's various investigative centers around the country.

The nonprofit model has probably been the most successful of the various kinds of attempts to replace what the local newspaper used to do, and in some cases still does.

- And of course, at The Pell Center we have Ocean State Stories, which is a website, you know, a nonprofit news outlet such as what you're describing.

Do you see that model, and again, we're looking at the local level, not the national level, like ProPublica.

Do you see that model as the future or a big piece of the future as, you know, newspapers continue to go away or become ghost papers?

- I mean, it does certainly seem to be a big piece of the future.

And as far as I can tell at ProPublica and the other places that, you know, I've worked with for partnerships, it does seem to be working very effectively.

I mean, I think there's always questions about are there enough donors to go around?

Are there enough grants to go around?

And, you know, what are the potential conflicts of interest?

I mean, just like in newspapers at a local paper, you always had to be worried about, well, if this guy, you know, pays a lot of money for ads, maybe, and I have this story that makes him look bad, are we gonna publish it?

You know, theoretically at a nonprofit, you could face some of those issues when you come across something that reflects badly on a big donor.

So, you know, that issue's kind of endemic to any kind of journalism.

But I do think that so far it's been very successful.

The quality of the journalism at ProPublica and some of these other outlets is extremely high.

And I think one of the benefits is the fact that we have an investigative focus so that, you know, and many of the others do.

They'd rather do in-depth stories.

Whereas, like I said, the local papers covered meeting after meeting, after meeting, after meeting, but maybe they didn't have as much time to really dig into something.

And the new nonprofits seemed to prioritize that kind of digging under the surface to find out what's really going on.

- You know, we've mentioned already that you're recently published "The Ransomware Hunting Team" in paperback built on your, you know, developed from your reporting for ProPublica.

How extensive a problem, how extensive a challenge is ransomware, and what did your reporting show?

- Ransomware's an incredibly pervasive problem.

You know, it's probably the defining, you know, cybercrime of our era.

And it's exploded, you know, in the last 10 years.

And even since my co-author Renee Dudley, who was pro-public reporter, who did the initial research that I edited.

Since we started working together on the book several years ago, it's just gotten worse and worse.

You know, the way ransomware works is, you know, the hacker penetrates the website of a university, the computers of university or a business or a city or a police department, or an individual or any number of other entities, and puts ransomware in there that essentially freezes the files so you can no longer access your files.

And then they say, "Pay us in order to unfreeze the files."

And the ransom demands have gone from typically a few hundred dollars 10 years ago to now millions or tens of millions of dollars.

The targets have gotten much bigger, the quality of the ransomware has gotten better.

It's a huge, huge problem.

And our book is about this group of dedicated volunteers, about a dozen people around the world who are, they're poor.

Many of them didn't go to college.

They have difficult life circumstances often, but they're brilliant technically.

And what they do is they crack the ransomware code that the hackers put in the computer so they can get you your files back in many cases without having to pay the ransom.

And they've saved millions of people, billions of dollars in ransom and been extremely effective and completely unheralded.

But they've filled a gap that has been left by government law enforcement agencies, which have been totally incapable of dealing with ransomware.

The ransomware hunting team is really the most, and even only effective force against this major cyber threat.

- So Dan, we wanna talk about some of your other work.

Tell us about the newest college admissions play.

Paying to make your teen a peer reviewed author.

That really caught our attention.

- Well, that's, you know, as I say, I've written a lot about college admissions and how it favors the rich, and it's sort of the gift that keeps on giving.

And this was one of these latest twists.

I mean, in college admissions now, some of the traditional criteria are kind of falling by the wayside, right?

In that, you know, many colleges no longer require the SAT or the ACT, you know, affirmative action has been banned by the court.

So what are they going to look at?

And, you know, rich kids go to college counselors, they hire their own, who will say to them, you know, for an extra few thousand bucks, I can make sure that you're, if you do a research paper, I can get it published in a peer reviewed journal.

And it looks like, you know, and then they tell the school, I'm a published researcher in a peer reviewed journal.

It looks very good.

Actually, as I kind of detailed some of these journals, peer reviewed has kind of a ambiguous meaning.

Sometimes the whole journal may be peer reviewed, but they have a place where you could just post anything you wrote, whether it's good or not.

And then you say, I'm in a peer reviewed journal, but your article was not peer reviewed.

And various kinds of little trickery and strategems like that.

But it's yet another way that kids with families with resources can get an edge in the admissions process.

- So yeah.

One of the things that strikes me, Dan, is that a lot of your reporting, there are some through lines, right?

So you've written previously an acclaimed bestseller about admissions to colleges.

You've also written about sort of the interest of the intelligence community, the US intelligence community in colleges and universities.

You've got another recent piece about why Russian spies really like American universities.

What did you learn?

- Well, you're right, there is a through line and, you know, my writing about education is sort of all focused on the idea that universities are too concerned with making money and not enough concerned with the quality of education.

So that was the point of my admissions work and has been how the admissions process, which should be based on merit, is tainted by money.

And then I looked at spying on college campuses.

And what I portrayed was that it's a two-way street that essentially with all the foreign students and professors that we have, yes, some of them are spying on our colleges and universities and trying to recruit people for their side, but the FBI and the CIA and our intelligence agencies are also trying to recruit these foreign professors and students and then send them overseas to get information for us.

So there's sort of a quiet spy war going on there.

And the money angle was that I argued at least in my book, that this isn't really appropriate for universities to be doing this.

That they know they're being exploited.

They know there are spies on campus of both sides, but they look the other way because today they get huge amounts of funding from the US intelligence community, and they also wanna get those foreign students and open foreign campuses and things like that.

So they have financial reasons for looking the other way as there's this kind of spy war on college campuses.

And the Russia piece was a commentary on that.

It was about how, you know, Russian spies, just like spies from other countries, sort of take advantage of universities because they're relatively open spaces where you can get near to somebody.

You know, like a professor who may be doing important research.

And you know, that professor may end up being, you know, secretary of state or secretary of defense, in which case it's hard to get access to them.

It's a lot easier to cultivate them when they're just teaching on campus.

And obviously the spies would use a cover, you know, and they might hire the professor or a student to write something and then pay them.

And then in spying, once somebody has taken money from a spy agency, they're kind of compromised.

And so that, you know, that's kind of the tactics that are often used and that's what I was writing about.

- So Dan, this was the subject of one of your books published a few years ago.

Does this continue to today?

I mean, what you've wrote in your book and what you've written on ProPublica were exposes and you would think that there would be some change?

And has there been?

- One of the things I've found over my career is no matter how persuasive the evidence you bring forward to document a problem, if it's in everybody's interest to continue, you know, they don't see it as a problem and it's in their financial interest to keep going, then it's hard to accomplish a lot of meaningful change.

I mean, I documented conclusively in my admissions book 20 years ago that, you know, there was a huge advantage for rich kids in college admissions, but very little, you know, has been done about it.

And in the spy thing, yes, that also goes on because, you know, it's kind of a convenience for all concerned.

I mean, the foreign countries wanna know what's going on in the US and our secrets.

We wanna know their secrets.

And a lot of times, you know, we can't send a spy into a country without them, you know, having difficulty or possibly being unmasked.

It's easier to use foreign nationals.

So for example, one of my chapters in my book was about how the CIA sets up all these fake academic conferences around the world.

You know, because conferences are great places for spies.

You get all these experts together, they know all about technology and warfare often.

And, you know, spies undercover will go there and cultivate the professors there.

My particular focus there was relevant, is still relevant today in that when Iran was developing its nuclear powers, you know, we couldn't get spies into Iran to get the Iranian nuclear scientists to defect.

So we set up conferences, we set up conferences in sort of foreign countries, invited the new Iranian nuclear scientists, they got permission to leave the country, they'd come to the conference and then we'd pressure them to defect.

So, you know, that's, obviously the Middle East is still a cauldron and we're probably still using that tactic.

- Yeah, Dan, how do you get a story like that?

It's absolutely fascinating and riveting, but it's kind of James Bond-y kinda stuff, right?

How do you get a story like that?

- Well, you know, it's not easy.

I mean, sometimes you just have to have sources and, you know, if you're researching a book and you spend months and months and months on it, somebody will suggest talking to somebody else who will suggest talking to somebody else.

Sometimes you'll get documents.

One example, one of the chapters in the book was about how this Chinese graduate student had stolen invisibility research at Duke University.

There was quite important research on how to shield a building that you know, how to make, or a potentially a weapon, a tank or something by diverting, you know, waves.

How do you make it invisible?

And this Chinese grad student had stolen it, taken it back to China and was building a business with it, making a lot of money.

And there I got it through a public records request to a group called NSHE, which was a government group of college presidents and intelligence personnel where they would meet and talk over things together.

And I got the agendas for those meetings.

And in one of them it said that a Duke professor would speak about how a Chinese graduate student had stolen his invisibility research.

So, armed with that, I began to do my research.

I looked at who the different graduate students were.

I identified who the likely person was.

I began talking to former people in the lab.

Eventually I chatted with the professor himself.

I went down to Duke.

And, you know, I nailed every aspect of that particular scheme.

And so it just takes a lot of work in digging.

- Dan, it's hugely important work.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

He's Daniel Golden with ProPublica.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

We can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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