A reporter’s work can still move mountains

One day in January, Andrew Gomes had stacks of paper spread out on the floor next to his desk. There were so many documents, and he needed the extra space to organize his research. Those pages were filled with dense legal terms, tiny but crucial points on maps, long genealogies that he read out loud to himself to better understand.

Gomes’ painstaking reporting led to the story that took on one of the richest men in America and triggered immediate changes and long-term repercussions. Gomes was the first to report on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to use what is known as the quiet-title process to compel owners of kuleana land parcels within his 700-acre Kauai compound to sell their land to him. All those documents. So many phone calls. Big, complicated concepts he had to figure out and then write about in a way that made sense for readers who might not have a grad-school understanding of property law or Hawaiian history.

And when his story hit the front page of the paper on Jan. 18, along with a follow-up piece later that week, it set off a tsunami of reports, repackages and reactions across the globe. The story of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits against Native Hawaiian landowners was covered by national and international news outlets including Forbes, CBS, Vanity Fair and USA Today. Facebook was inundated with protests. People who didn’t know they had claim to the kuleana parcels found out because of those original stories.

A clip from Al Jazeera Media Network on Facebook takes Gomes’ original reporting and repackages it with great drone video behind Zuckerberg’s now infamous stone wall and interviews with angry kuleana landowners. It has been viewed more than 3 million times. It never mentions where they got the story, though there are brief shots of a few pages of documents. The reporter would have no story without Gomes’ reporting.

This isn’t a criticism of the media, because this sort of thing happens constantly. Nor is it an attempt to “give credit where credit is due.” For his part, Gomes isn’t bothered by all the stories that were built upon his work:

“I would just say that while my stories helped inform all these folks who then did their things in protest and mobilization, I don’t think it’s a big deal that they don’t credit my work or our paper. When people march or rally against this or that cause, they do their things but don’t typically cite the first media reporting that got them involved,” he said.

It is also important to note that all of the outcry sparked by that story caused Zuckerberg to drop the lawsuits and pledge to work more amicably with the community. It also inspired a more critical look at the quiet-title process.

We are often asked to speak to students about what it means to be a working journalist. In the last two months, there has been a significant spike in invitations to visit classrooms and requests for help in setting up high school journalism programs, no doubt due to the national discussion of fake news, bias and flippant reporting.

Not every story requires the kind of hardcore document-dig that this one did, and not every story has the impact that Andrew Gomes’ story has, but it is an example of why newspapers still matter and what classic journalism can still do.