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Departmental Assembly March 3

GUEST SPEAKER: CHICAGO TRIBUNE REPORTER, SAM ROE

Sam Roe, investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, was the invited speaker for the departmental assembly which took place on Tuesday, March 3.  He is a member of the Chicago Tribune team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism for a series entitled “Hidden Hazards.”  The team also just won the prestigious George Polk Award for consumer reporting. 

Below is a bit more about the “Hidden Hazards” series published in the Tribune, followed by links to a few of Mr. Roe’s stories.

The newspaper’s accounts of children suffering injury and death from exposure to dangerously designed magnetic building sets, lead-tainted toys and defective cribs led to massive product recalls and heightened public awareness of the dangers posed by these widely sold items. To document the extent of the hazards, the newspaper funded testing and conducted research and investigations that extended from government offices in Washington, D.C., and the home of a stricken child in Washington state to toy factories in China. Its seven-month series of articles and editorials drastically changed American import behavior and held accountable the federal agency that had failed to protect the nation’s smallest consumers.

The Tribune's series on hazards for children pushed Congress to pass the broadest reform of consumer-product safety laws in a generation and prompted massive recalls. The series won the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting in 2007 and has continued throughout 2008.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-112308-allergens-whole-foods-nov23,0,241722.story
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-bassinetaug28,0,6401002.story