The story led to an investigation by South Carolina’s Attorney General a federal judge sentenced Johnson to a year in prison, and eventually, Johnson was disbarred. In 2018, a team of Post and Courier reporters broke the news that a South Carolina prosecutor named Dan Johnson had spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on parties and personal luxuries: home plate seats at a Minnesota Twins game, a stay at a deluxe hotel in the Galapagos Islands, high-end Uber rides. If we write a story and you’re more interested in doing something a little more narrow in your area, you can absolutely cite our findings and do your own story.” “We can either come in and work alongside you to report the story. If you don’t, no worries.” Their model is flexible, Glenn Smith, the project editor, adds.
“We kind of tentatively said, Look, we’re gonna do these stories, and we’re gonna give them to you for nothing. Having experienced parachute reporting from national outlets in the past, the team was wary of stepping on local reporters’ work, Tony Bartelme, one of the paper’s lead investigative journalists, says. This year, the Post and Courier team started reaching out to local community newspapers and offering support on corruption stories: reporting resources, FOIA funding, offering fully-reported stories for free. When so many local newspapers started to go belly-up amid the pandemic, it only made sense to spread the resources across the state. The project is called “Uncovered,” and it devotes Post and Courier resources toward reporting in communities that no longer have access to robust accountability reporting of their own. Now, the Post and Courier-South Carolina’s largest newspaper and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021-has launched a project intended to fill in some of the gaps. “Unfortunately, The Union Times could not survive the COVID-19 Virus and the havoc it has wreaked upon the world,” one editor from Union County wrote in his farewell note. The same was true for many publications across the country, where the pandemic exacerbated the attrition already plaguing many community newsrooms. In 2020, ten South Carolina newspapers closed.
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