by Steve Suo

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The question was a simple one: Had Nike, the athletic apparel brand dogged by sweatshop allegations more than two decades ago, truly become a beacon of environmental stewardship and fair labor practices, as it claimed?

As editor for ProPublica’s Northwest team and a longtime Oregonian, I was as eager to know the answer as the Portland-based reporter who posed the question, Rob Davis.

Nike is woven into Oregon’s fabric. It’s one of the Portland area’s largest employers and one of the state’s few Fortune 500 companies. Nike’s headquarters in the Portland suburbs is a 400-acre complex of buildings, running paths and sports fields where fashion design and athleticism meet. At the University of Oregon, alma mater of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, buildings across the campus bear his name or the names of his relatives.

The trouble was that the answer to Davis’ question primarily lay across the Pacific Ocean. Although ProPublica is undaunted by stories that take time and, yes, money — see recent reporting by reporters Josh Kaplan and Brett Murphy from Gambia, for example — Davis first needed to prove to editors that an overseas trip would bring us a story that broke new ground.

One of our most important decisions early on was to partner with reporter Matthew Kish and his editors at The Oregonian/OregonLive, where Davis and I worked previously. Kish has covered Nike for more than a decade and knows the company as well as perhaps any reporter in the country.

Kish and Davis started reviewing public reports that Nike had put out over the past two decades and every news article they could find about the company’s efforts in the realm of social responsibility. Davis spoke by phone with labor advocates around the globe. He even found a few factory workers in Asia willing to talk in late-night (for them) video calls about their working conditions.

The nut that Davis and Kish couldn’t crack was Nike itself. The reporters told Nike’s public relations team about their interest. Might Nike staffers share what they were finding in factory audits or how they were ensuring compliance with Nike’s code of conduct? The PR people at various points provided some background........

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