Cormier and Caitlin Johnston walk a street that may give way to an expanded interstate highway.
By DEVIN RODRIGUEZ
USFSP Student Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – Tattooed on one forearm in thick black letters is the word “Comfort.” And on the other, “Afflict.”
When asked what they mean, Anthony Cormier smiled wryly. “Journalists are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” he said.
Cormier is an investigative reporter for the Tampa Bay Times who loves his work. He said that he couldn’t see himself doing any other kind of journalism.
“This is the one place where we can really help the public and, in some small way, nudge the world in the right direction,” he said.
Last year Cormier and two colleagues gave a forceful nudge to the state of Florida, exposing horrific conditions in its six primary mental health hospitals.
The yearlong investigation by Cormier, Leonora LaPeter Anton and Michael Braga showed how $100 million in budget cuts led to acute staff shortages, patient neglect and violence against both patients and staff.
Stung by the disclosures, the Legislature this spring added $16 million to the mental hospitals’ budget and $42 million to community programs geared toward mental health.
And in April the three reporters who did the nudging won journalism’s highest honor – the Pulitzer Prize – for investigative reporting.
“If winning the Pulitzer does anything, I hope it creates awareness for Florida’s mentally ill,” said Cormier, 37. “The prize is an incredible honor, but my focus is on the work, on continuing to do important journalism. That’s been the goal all along, and it hasn’t changed.”
Cormier’s credo is inscribed on his forearms: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
The prestigious prize capped a vagabond-like personal journey for Cormier that is typical in the newspaper industry.
When he graduated from Florida State University in 2000 with a degree in creative writing, Cormier said, he couldn’t find a writing job.
So he tended bar and delivered papers for the Panama City News Herald.
When the News Herald needed a stringer to cover a feature story, Cormier got the assignment. That, in turn, helped him land a full-time job at the paper as a sports writer and, later, a cops and crime reporter.
Several years later, he wrote a story titled “Files Wide Shut” about how government, school district and law enforcement officials in seven Florida Panhandle counties violated the state’s Public Records Law. That won a first place award from the Florida Society of News Editors and helped him land a job with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in June 2006.
In Sarasota, Cormier had the time and freedom to find, write and edit in-depth stories about police misconduct, profligate city spending, gang violence and a man whose Ponzi scheme bilked investors out of $162 million.
He also earned the admiration of Herald-Tribune executive editor Bill Church, who called him “our newsroom’s version of a gym rat, someone who studies the nuances of other journalists and shows he’s got game, too.”
Cormier moved to the Times in May 2015 to continue reporting the mental health hospital investigation that the Herald-Tribune was conducting in collaboration with the Times.
The unusual partnership between a large, independent newspaper – the Times – and a midsized chain paper – the Herald-Tribune – led to the explosive findings that ran in both papers. The series was titled “Insane. Invisible. In Danger.”
In the months that followed, Cormier has continued to collaborate on enterprise stories.
A two-month investigation with Alexandra Zayas and Steve Contorno led to a story called “Safe, Then Sorry.” The reporters disclosed problems at the Spring of Tampa Bay, a shelter for domestic violence victims that is run by a much-admired charity and funded in part by tax dollars.
A 5-year-old girl who was living at the shelter with her mother said she had been molested by another resident, an incident that exposed a bigger issue – the shelter’s policy to not run background checks on the women the agency serves.
Because three reporters worked on the story, Cormier said, it brought newer and broader perspectives to the table.
“Our team is very specific,” he said. “We have the time to make certain that we are as precise as possible. In this job we don’t raise questions – we answer them.”
On his current project, Cormier is working with Caitlin Johnston, the Times’ transportation reporter.
At issue is the Tampa Bay Express project, a plan by the Florida Department of Transportation to add toll lanes to busy stretches of interstate highways in Pinellas, Hillsborough and Polk counties.
Under the plan, the state will have to acquire and knock down more than 100 homes and businesses along Interstates 275 and 4.
On a recent Wednesday, Johnston and Cormier went door-to-door to speak to people whose homes lie in the path of the project. Many of the people seemed unaware of the plan and the procedures the state will follow in taking homes.
The reporters knocked on doors for most of the day. Many residents were upset. Many were away at work.
“This is a story that we have to play straight down the middle,” Cormier said. “The Transportation Department doesn’t have a lot of options, and people just don’t know what’s coming.”
Cormier also offered this advice to journalists who work on similar shoe-leather stories: “Get comfortable shoes you don’t care about; you’ll destroy them doing this work.”
Cormier said he will continue searching for stories that are important to the community. One emotion helps drive him.
“To do my job, you need a healthy dose of anger,” he said. “If you don’t have a deep well of skepticism and anger, bad guys are going to make you feel like you don’t know what you’re saying. You need to come at them with anger.”