55+
profile
Digging Deeper Behind the scenes with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston, a Brighton resident By Mike Costanza
P
ulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author David Cay Johnston has always been drawn to writing about subjects that others have ignored. “My entire career, since I was 18 years old, has been built around covering things that either were not being covered well, or were not being covered at all,” says Johnston, who calls the Rochester suburb of Brighton home. Down through the decades, Johnston’s investigative skills, desire to dig into subjects and issues, and lucid reportorial style have taken him to prestigious newspapers around the country. Along the way, he has exposed the ways that rich companies use the U.S. tax code to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, detailed abuses of police power, and helped a man avoid being imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The 65-year-old is also a wellknown speaker and columnist and 20
55 PLUS - January / February 2015
a contributing editor for Newsweek, and has appeared on MSNBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. Born in San Francisco, Johnston moved around California with his family until they settled in Santa Cruz, a city that sits about 80 miles south of his birthplace. By the age of 10, he was working part-time to help his family make ends meet. “My parents were poor,” he explains. By the age of 13, Johnston was working several jobs, including four paper routes. When he reached his senior year of high school, he began writing a column about his school for a local weekly newspaper. “Almost immediately, they asked me to cover meetings of the school board, city council, various things at night,” he says. Instead of accepting the figures that school administrators and government officials released at face value, he checked them by hand — calculators hadn’t been invented.
Johnston’s reworking of the numbers turned up information other local journalists had missed. “My editors asked why other reporters didn’t have these things,” he says. “I immediately recognized there’s an opportunity.” Johnston began covering stories for a second local weekly, and ceased taking high school classes during the day. Instead, he took night classes at a high school for adults until he’d acquired his diploma. Shortly after turning 18, he did his first investigatory story. “It was about cost overruns at the new county courthouse in Santa Cruz,” he explains. The piece caught the eye of a San Francisco radio station, and the young reporter found the story he’d broken out on the airwaves. “That really got my attention,” he says. “It has this transformative effect of, ‘holy mackerel!’” The story also “ticked off a lot of people,” according to Johnston,