racheltachel

Paul Huntsman bought the paper well after we'd begun the series, so the train was already down the tracks. I think we all felt a little bit of apprehension — not just about this story, but about a lot of things; it was going to be a big change to go from uncaring corporate ownership to being owned by someone involved in the community. But one of the first things he and his father said, in my recollection, when they came in to meet the newsroom was how important the BYU stories were and how they wanted to support us continuing that kind of journalism.

One clear response to the issues raised in our work were the sweeping changes at BYU, including the adoption of an amnesty policy. I'd say the number of people who accused The Tribune of reporting on these issues because it is anti-Mormon was small.

Although Erin Alberty was accused a few times on Twitter of writing the stories because of anti-BYU football allegiances.

Every story is different, of course. Erin Alberty can talk about how she contacted about a dozen women for the first BYU story. After that, we put out a form on our website asking about people's experiences at BYU with sex assault — whether they reported or didn't. From that, we got about 60 responses, which led to other stories.

For the Utah State story, we used a combo of police reports and social media to find women who'd filed reports and asked if they'd be willing to talk.

And in some cases, individuals have reached out to us.

We also handle each person's story uniquely — depending on how or whether they want to be identified. Some people want to have their story shared widely; others want to contribute to a wider story but don't want themselves to be featured prominently.

In 2016 particularly, we did a lot of reporting on sexual assault on college campuses, from somewhat-dry explainers about Title IX and campus discipline, to stories that ended up being part of our Pulitzer submission. Reporting we'd done on one story quite often helped inform reporting on future stories, and I think we definitely saw instances where someone saw one of our stories and felt comfortable sharing their own experience, or directing us to look into something similar.

​

Also, a story I did this year about sexual assaults on missions came about because one of the women left me a voicemail in 2017 after getting my contact from someone I'd talked to at BYU the prior year.