Hummel Celebrates 15 Years

Dear Friend of The Hummel Report,

Fifteen years ago today we launched a groundbreaking operation in Rhode Island: a nonprofit news organization featuring long form investigative stories, with a focus on exposing government waste and corruption. It was the fall of 2009, the economy was in shambles and it’s good we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

I’ll be honest: the early years were challenging, keeping our heads above water financially and trying to reestablish my identity in the Rhode Island media market; After all, I’d been out of work for 14 months following my resignation from ABC6 in the summer of 2008. But our stories had an impact right from the start - including a series of stories on the mayor of Central Falls that prompted a federal investigation and eventually landed him in prison.

We helped remove a corrupt police chief in Rehoboth, took a deep dive into questionable legal work for the city of Providence by the Rhode Island Speaker of The House (who also wound up in prison), and exposed the mayor of Woonsocket, who treated City Hall like a Friends and Family operation. Along the way, producing more than 500 stories, we have given voice to dozens of people who had nowhere to go when government failed them.

I’ve had fun the past couple of weeks putting together a highlight reel from the past decade and a half. You can watch it above.

Over time, I went from many people in public saying: “Hey there’s The You Paid For It Guy” (my franchise as a reporter at ABC6), to “Hey, I love The Hummel Report.”

How did we do it? With a team of “true believers” as our Director of Operations Bill Felkner likes to say - and with your financial support. We believe that investigative reporting can make a substantial difference in our community. And you’ve heard me say many times that we try to change our little part of the world for the better, one story at a time.

Fifteen years ago YouTube was relatively new, so we were converting our video via a system called an FTP (File Transfer Protocol). I would upload the finished video story to a server, Bill would download and convert for the website and then re-upload/post on our Hummel Report website. It was a lengthy and cumbersome process that at times was unreliable. We got a lot of complaints about buffering (remember that?).

Only a few people in our inner circle know that we almost didn’t get off the ground on Oct. 15, 2009. Over the summer we formed a partnership with WPRO, which had promoted the launch for weeks and guaranteed us a weekly segment on Thursday mornings in drive time to promote our investigations. That exposed us to thousands of listeners and drove traffic to the website for those who wanted to learn more. And that early partnership was just the exposure we needed to grow the brand.

But the night before, we were having trouble uploading the first story: a five-minute piece titled “Million Dollar Mistake” about a Woonsocket police officer. Through a maddening loophole in the system, he had stayed home for 13 years collecting nearly a million dollars while being paid for being “injured” on duty. The story included the requisite knock on his door, which he quickly slammed in my face. I had spent weeks in the woods of Bellingham, Massachusetts across the street from his house, getting video of him coming and going (truth be told, he didn’t leave the house that much - apparently having his paychecks from the city direct deposited). I also got a nasty case of poison-ivy hanging out in the woods. Welcome back to the world of investigative reporting, Hummel.

As afternoon turned into evening on Oct. 14th, our team of tech experts was stumped (or so it seemed to me). I had visions of having to call the program director at WPRO, saying: “Sorry, we’re having technical difficulties, can we put this launch that you’ve been promoting for weeks, off a day or two?”

Bill told me to go to bed and that the computer guys would figure it out. They always do, he said. And he was right: I hadn’t slept much and about 1:30 a.m. he let me know that everything was good to go.

We were off to the races, doing a story on a DOT road project the following week, and travelling to Block Island the next. We lived month-to-month financially, while producing an investigation nearly every week for the first decade, which in retrospect seems a little insane. We’ve pulled back on that pace of production; and our partnership with my old employer, The Providence Journal, has brought in an expanded audience, with wider impact from our stories.

With the decimation of newspapers and many TV stations, hundreds of nonprofit news organizations like ours have sprung up over the past 15 years to help combat what has become “news deserts” in many parts of the country. But many of those started with seed money from foundations, and backfilled with individual donors.

We did the opposite, relying on a few deeper pockets to get us going (thank you Alan Hassenfeld and John Hazen White Jr., who agreed to provide seed money during a lunch with Bill and me at the Newport Creamery in Barrington) and building a loyal donor base from the get-go that is the foundation of our budget all of these years later. In fact, we get relatively little corporate and foundation support. It’s your individual contributions - whether they $100 or $1,000 or more - that are the bedrock of what we do.

Longtime supporters know that we are part of INN -The Institute for Nonprofit News - which has run a matching contribution campaign (NewsMatch) annually during November and December, for nearly a decade. We will be part of that again - so hold your donations until next month so they can be doubled (and perhaps tripled - stay tuned for more details).

But our team wants to thank you on this milestone day for standing with us all of these years and for helping us stay true to our mission: producing Investigative Reports That Get Results.

On behalf of the team,

Jim