[three_fourth]
inewsource has interviewed many experts for our ongoing investigation into Cory Briggs, including professors, authors, politicians, attorneys, developers, ethicists and law enforcement:
Jonathan Arons
Arons advises lawyers on ethics issues, defense of disciplinary charges, and problems concerning admission or reinstatement to the State Bar of California.
He also advises law firms and attorneys who want to improve their office systems for protecting against rules violations, or who need advice about a particular ethical or professional conduct problem. Additionally, he serves parties nationwide as an expert witness in lawsuits involving questions of legal ethics, professional misconduct, or attorney malpractice.
Arons has concentrated on professional responsibility issues and attorney misconduct defense since admitted to practice in California in 1983.
—http://www.aronslaw.com/
[divider]
William K. Black
Professor Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.
Professor Black recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management.
He teaches white-collar crime, public finance, antitrust, law and economics, and Latin American development.
—http://law.umkc.edu/directory/faculty-directory/name/william-black/
[divider]
John Campbell
Campbell is also a recognized trial attorney. Prior to becoming a full-time professor, in his four years managing a consumer and class action department, the department settled dozens of class actions and individual cases which resulted in tens of millions of dollars in relief to millions of individuals.
Professor Campbell earned numerous awards for practicing law successfully and professionally. He received the John C. Shepherd Professionalism Award, given to one attorney in St. Louis each year for their exemplary behavior and reputation outside the courtroom. He was also the recipient of Missouri Lawyers Media’s Up & Coming Lawyer in 2009 and has been recognized as a Missouri & Kansas Super Lawyers Rising Star every year since 2009. Professor Campbell was voted one of the “Most Influential Appellate Attorneys” in Missouri in 2011.
—http://www.law.du.edu/index.php/profile/john-campbell
[divider]
Linda Fisher
Linda Fisher is a Professor of Law and the James Boskey Research Scholar at Seton Hall Law School. Her recent research, publications, and litigation address predatory lending, the subprime lending crisis and its consequences for communities.
She is currently a Network Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and has been a Bellow Scholar of the Association of American Law Schools. Prof. Fisher teaches Land Finance, Professional Responsibility and the Civil Litigation Clinic.
She has testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Federal Trade Commission. She received an LL.M. from Northwestern, a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Macalester College.
—http://law.shu.edu/Faculty/fulltime_faculty/Linda-Fisher.cfm
[divider]
Richard Hagar
—http://richardhagar.com/
[divider]
Ed McIntyre
–Resume here
[divider]
Vance Welch
Deputy District Attorney Vance Welch has been with the San Bernardino District Attorney’s Office for 14 years, with the last eight years in the Real Estate Fraud Prosecution Unit.
[/three_fourth]
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inewsource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to improving lives in the San Diego region and beyond through impactful, data-based investigative and accountability journalism.
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| All Staff Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns. | Newsroom Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | Business Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | |||
| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
| Women | 80% | Women | 82% | Women | 75% |
| Men | 20% | Men | 18% | Men | 25% |
| Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | |||
| Straight | 87% | Straight | 82% | Straight | 100% |
| LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | ||
| Not specified | 7% | Not specified | 7% | ||
| Speak a language beyond English at home | 33% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 18% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 75% |
| Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | |||
| White | 67% | White | 73% | White | 50% |
| Hispanic or Latinx | 20% | Two or more races | 18% | Hispanic or Latinx | 50% |
| Two or more races | 13% | Hispanic or Latinx | 9% | ||
| Age | Age | Age | |||
| 20-29 | 40% | 20-29 | 45% | 20-29 | 25% |
| 30-39 | 47% | 30-39 | 45% | 30-39 | 50% |
| 60 or older | 13% | 60 or older | 9% | 60 or older | 25% |
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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Transparency is one of our core values. Today, there is a need to build trust with our audience because new media and ways of communicating spread lies and slanted news faster than “real” news. At the same time, this era of new technologies makes it easier than ever for news organizations to be transparent. People don’t just have to believe us, they can investigate our investigations with our source materials.
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Masthead
CEO, Editor and Founder: Lorie Hearn, loriehearn@inewsource.org
Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Mark J. Rochester, markrochester@inewsource.org
Mark J. Rochester began as inewsource managing editor in April 2021, having served as editor in chief at Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Manhattan. He was previously senior news director for investigations at the Detroit Free Press. Both newsrooms, he notes, shared a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their investigative journalism often received national recognition for exposing problems impacting communities of color.
His family looks forward to returning to California, having spent more than seven years in San Francisco where Rochester was a senior manager for the Associated Press. While with the news cooperative, he led computer-assisted reporting training efforts around the West, both inside and outside of AP, and conducted a widely used analysis of the $74 million in campaign contributions that went toward the California gay marriage ballot initiative in 2008. The AP analyzed who gave and why and then made the data available to member newspapers. The resulting series of stories based on the data was AP’s 2009 Pulitzer nomination for Local Reporting.
Rochester, who served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017, also has held senior leadership positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Denver Post, Newsday and The Indianapolis Star. Rochester is vice president of Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., the 6,000+ member international organization dedicated to improving investigative journalism. He also serves on the national advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.
Managing Editor: Laura Wingard, laurawingard@inewsource.org
Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
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Brad Racino….what was it that started you down the path of this investigation? There was a similar –well similar in the sense that Cory Briggs was the subject of the “expose” done a year or so ago by the Voice of San Diego. However, VOSD focused on Briggs method of suing small cities over perceived environmental regulation violations. Many settled rather than go to court. Your series is entirely different. What sparked inewsource interest? Were you surprised at the vigor with which he has been defended in the comments of your articles. Many attacking your journalistic credibility.
Linda,
Thank you for writing. Our investigation began last year, sparked by my colleague’s interest in Mr. Briggs and some of his questionable actions. We decided to spend a bit of time poking around, as we tend to do as investigative journalists. We quickly found red flags and decided to investigate further. That led to all of this.
To answer your second question, no I am not surprised at the reactions. We expected it. No matter the subject of the investigation, there are always people who are angry about our work for whatever reason. By this point, I’ve learned not to take it personally. It’s just part of the job.
Thanks so much. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at bradracino at gmail dot com.
Thanks!
-Brad