MINNESOTA
Twin Cities Daily Planet
By Emily A. King, Minnesota Women’s Press
July 11, 2014
Madeleine Baran isn’t used to being in the spotlight. The Minnesota Public Radio reporter is more comfortable asking the questions and listening to others’ stories.
But when she took the lead on an investigative story about sexual abuse by local Catholic priests, she started getting noticed. Her use of documents and interviews shed light on coverups and inaction by top-level church officials and prompted legal authorities to dig deeper into allegations.
And that, Baran said, is a victory for her profession.
“It shows the value of journalism, because here’s a story where the public did not know about it, and it was important and it required journalism – it required doing interviews, knowing how to fact-check things” and analyzing documents, she explained. “People want investigative reporting. It resonates with people. It’s what people think that journalists should be doing.”
Baran, who mostly grew up in Milwaukee, has a master’s degree in journalism from New York University. She was drawn to journalism because of “curiosity about other people and the way things work,” she said. “I know it’s kind of cliché, but it’s true that as a reporter you have this really amazing excuse for coming and asking people questions about their lives.”
She landed at MPR News in 2009 – doing online and radio pieces – but she has been a part of several other hard-hitting investigative stories, including pieces about the St. Paul police crime lab, the FBI files on the late Sen. Paul Wellstone and Minnesota’s mental health system.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.