Long Island is home to two of the largest police forces in the country. Divided into Nassau and Suffolk county departments, the forces have thousands of officers designated to protect three million Long Islanders.

For decades, thanks to a specific statewide law, the disciplinary files of these departments were shielded from public view. But in 2020, the law was repealed.

Newsday’s investigative team immediately went to work filing Freedom of Information requests to the departments. The departments rejected and delayed those requests, and much of what they provided was heavily redacted. Despite this, Newsday has been able to report in greater detail stories of neglect, assault, and abuse of power, supported by personal accounts from inside and outside the forces.

Uncovering misconduct

In one case, a 781-page file revealed one department charged 11 police officers, one detective, and two sergeants in connection with the murder of a young mother at the hands of her gang member boyfriend. We confirmed their punishments amounted to little more than docked vacation and sick time and retraining for one officer. The story was driven by strong portraits, family photos, and documents, along with a documentary and strong storytelling.

In another case, a police officer sexually assaulted a prisoner inside a police precinct and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour, serving one year in prison. His partner, who broke the rules that were meant to protect her, was never punished. This story required thoughtful programming and sensitivity, so we used the survivor’s photo as a marker for readers to know she was speaking. 

In these cases, strong writing, pull quotes, videography, and photography combined with annotated records provided enough visual storytelling cues to help pull readers through the lengthy stories. In others, we had to try something new.

For example, for a story on the department’s decision not to use body cameras, we had obtained security footage of the beating of a civilian by an officer, who was later acquitted by a judge. The security footage was clearly the strongest entry point to the story for readers, so we turned it into an animation for use on the top of the story and on our homepage.

Discovering what works

While our ability to grab audiences was an overall success, we also learned more about our readers’ habits from some things that didn’t work out.

For example, we knew from previous testing and industry discussions that it’s difficult to get the audiences to click on a landing page and then click a second time into a story from that page. At newsday.com/casestudies, we used a different design, attempting to make the case studies as compelling as possible to prompt a second click.

In the first two days of featuring the package, it had more than 14,000 unique visitors, but 91% of those were to the main story. Very few readers were committing to that second click and reaching the individual case studies.

Anticipating that our experiment might not work, we had a backup plan. So we then rolled out each of the four case studies one by one on our homepage and in newsletters — all with strong, conversational headlines and visuals. Over the course of a week, the package had more than 24,000 unique visitors, with close to 50% of that traffic coming from the individual case studies.

Lessons learned

We learned a lot from this series in 2021 and continued to do so as it wrapped up in 2022. We’ve come to a point on our team where we’re more comfortable pushing for thoughtful experimentation, even while juggling deadlines. 

We’re not just asking ourselves broad questions anymore, like, “What can we do that we’ve never done before?” We’re backing up those ideas by asking, “Will a newcomer to the topic understand this headline? What visual rest stop can we add? Do we need an interactive topper, or can we achieve the same results with a strong image? Does this video make sense at the top, or will we increase engagement by placing it in a certain section?”

In putting the reader first, we help them see the value in our work. If reporters and editors are spending a year reporting on a story, we should be committing as much time as possible to helping readers understand and digest our work once it’s published.

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