INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING

Investigative Reporting provides a step-by-step approach for tackling any investigative story,

teaching reporters the skills they need to overcome common obstacles during investigative work.
Experienced reporter and instructor Marcy Burstiner offers readers guidance on how to identify
story ideas, craft a premise, seek out human sources and documents, file public records requests and
analyze data. Including tips and advice from student and professional reporters, this comprehensive
textbook also offers strategies for conducting interviews and for organizing information into a
compelling story or series of stories that engage the reader through multimedia storytelling.
Highlights of the new edition include:

• Updated examples and anatomies of news stories.

• Extensive discussion of data reporting and analysis for investigative projects.
• Guidance on how to request public records using state public records acts and how to
appeal denials of public records requests.
• Instruction on the use of free, collaborative tools for organizing, sharing and analyzing
information.
• A new chapter on creating a fact-checking system.
• A section on careers in investigative journalism.
• Interviews with student investigative reporters from colleges across the country, with
professional investigative reporters from non-profit news organizations, emerging
journalistic outlets and advocacy publications, and with staff and freelance reporters who
produce stories for mainstream radio, television, print and online news organizations.

Marcy Burstiner is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at Humboldt State

University, USA, where she teaches beginning and investigative reporting and advises the student
newspaper. She is a member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, Inc. and Journalism and Women
Symposium (JAWS), and co-founder of the Humboldt Center for Constitutional Rights.
She jumped into her professional journalism career as an assistant editor for The Multinational
Monitor, a non-profit magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Before joining the faculty at Humboldt
State, she was an assistant managing editor for financial magazine The Deal and a senior writer
for the online financial news site TheStreet.com. In 2018, the Society of Professional Journalists
Northern California chapter presented her with a James Madison Freedom of Information
award for her journalism teaching. She is a graduate of Union College, USA, and the Columbia
University School of Journalism, USA.
INVESTIGATIVE
REPORTING
From Premise to Publication
Second Edition

Marcy Burstiner
Second edition published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Marcy Burstiner

The right of Marcy Burstiner to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

First edition published 2009 by Holcomb Hathaway, Publishers, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burstiner, Marcy, author.
Title: Investigative reporting : from premise to publication / Marcy Burstiner.
Description: Second edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004483 | ISBN 9781138572157 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138572164 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780203702307 (ebk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Investigative reporting.
Classification: LCC PN4781 .B785 2018 | DDC 070.4/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004483

ISBN: 978-1-138-57215-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-57216-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-70230-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Interstate
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Visit the eResources at www.routledge.com/9781138572164

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsvii
Prefaceviii

PART I  GETTING STARTED1

1 What Is Investigative Reporting?3

2 Finding the Story17

3 Setting Up the Investigation26

PART II  GATHERING INFORMATION41

4 Finding Human Sources43

5 Documenting the Investigation56

6 Public Records71

7 The Interview Process91

8 Finding and Using Data111

9 Building Your Own Database126

PART III  WRITING AND PUBLISHING THE STORY139

10 Analyzing a Big Story141

11 Writing the Story153

vi  Contents

12 Legal and Ethical Considerations169

13 Bulletproofing the Investigation189

14 Pitching the Story196

Appendix205
Index256
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The methodology in this book came out of a class on investigative reporting that I have taught
at Humboldt State University for more than a dozen years. So I need to thank first off every
student in JMC 326 and 480. They all taught me.
For this second edition of the book I need to thank all the amazing investigative reporters
and others who willingly gave me time, let me prod them with questions and gave me permis-
sion to reprint their work. In particular I need to thank Brian Bienkowski, Paul Nicholas Boylan,
Jonathan Capriel, Lily Casura, Matt Drange, Lola Duffort, John Flynn, Lisette Garcia, Thadeus
Greenson, Nick Grube, Amy Julia Harris, Craig Harris, Lisa Khoury, Peri Langlois, Nancy Cook
Lauer, Myron Levin, Iain Oldman, Adam Playford, Marcelo Rochabrun, Ronny Rojas, Zoe Saga-
low, Alejandro Fernández Sanabria, Melissa Segura, Hank Sims, Paige St. John, Shoshana Wal-
ter, Sarah Wolstoncroft, Jie Jenny Zou and the great Rita Henley-Jensen, who passed away
before publication. In addition, I need to thank the following organizations, which provided me
with information and resources: Journalism and Women Symposium, Investigative Reporters &
Editors, Inc., Gimlet Media, the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, the Report-
er’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the National First Amendment Coalition, the Sun-
light Foundation, the Poynter Institute, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, Student
Press Law Center, the Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica, FairWarning, the Center
for Public Integrity, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, San Jose Inside, the Spot-
light team at the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Univision, The
Princetonian, Eugene Weekly, Capital News Service, the College of Journalism and Mass Com-
munication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Spectrum at the University at Buffalo,
Barbara Kingsley and the Daily 49er.
It was Mark Larson at Humboldt State University who first hired me to teach a class on inves-
tigative reporting, though I had no teaching experience. I should also thank that teacher in 11th
grade at Roosevelt High School, whose name I don’t recall, who first told me I could write.
PREFACE

All Good Reporting Is Investigative Reporting

I find it surprising that many journalists don’t see themselves as investigative reporters. Some
think you need a thicker skin to do that kind of in-depth reporting. Others think it requires
you to spend months or years reading through tedious documents, something they don’t
want to do. Some people think you have to like forcing people to answer questions they don’t
want to answer. But really, all good reporting is investigative reporting. That’s because inves-
tigative reporting is simply asking questions that aren’t being asked and following through
to get answers. Most aspiring reporters have questions in their heads they know are worth
investigating. But often they push them aside; they don’t know how to go about getting those
questions answered, and they lack a system for carrying out an investigation over a long
period of time.
Other reporters fail to identify themselves as investigative because their attempts at investi-
gative projects have been unsuccessful. It might be they couldn’t find the right sources. Or they
gathered so much information, they lost the story in a confusion of threads. Or they couldn’t
find enough evidence to prove what it was they set out to prove. So the information they gath-
ered stayed in notebooks or in computer files, and never made it to a news page.
I don’t believe in investing significant time, energy and thought into a story that won’t get
published. This book shows new journalists how to overcome the obstacles that appear when
doing investigative stories—mental blocks on sourcing, what to do with a massive amount of
data, how to handle contradictions, how to maintain passion for a story over a long period of
time and how to change direction when the story reporters find is not the one they set out to
report.
What makes most investigative reporters effective is that they are methodical. Investi-
gative Reporting: From Premise to Publication shows reporters how to apply a methodical
approach to their stories. It teaches approaches and techniques they can use to get their
questions answered and stories written. This book explains how to conduct an investigation
in an organized manner that allows for careful analysis, prevents stories from breaking down
and leads to publication.
 Preface  ix

The Investigative Story

This book looks at investigative or “big project” journalism, a term often used for a story or a
series of stories that take time to report and require substantial space on a news site. Although
methodology and organization are useful tools for all good reporting, they are essential in
investigative reporting—in both the information-gathering and the story-writing process. These
stories require interviews with many different people, document discovery and data analysis
to make connections and establish patterns. Readers will learn how to do all of these steps by
carrying out one big story in the process of using this text.
This book focuses on the big story because when done right, the big story commands atten-
tion and spurs action. Consider that in 1905, it was an investigation by the Chicago Tribune into
deaths and injuries at college football games that led to the creation of the Inter-Collegiate Ath-
letic Association, which evolved into the NCAA. It was an investigation in 2007 into the treatment
of injured U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center by Washington Post reporters Dana
Priest and Anne Hull that led to a wholesale reorganization by the military of how it treats return-
ing vets. And it was the relentless work of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in the New York Times
and Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker in 2017 that exposed alleged decades-long sexual assaults
by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and led to a national reassessment of how women are
treated in the work world. In this text I introduce readers to reporters from mainstream, non-
profit, independent and college news organizations and show how they employed techniques to
produce stories that effected change. I also provide examples of complete investigative stories
published by college and professional news organizations, reprinted in their entirety.

How This Book Is Organized

Investigative Reporting: From Premise to Publication is organized in three parts that parallel the
investigative process. Part I: Getting Started discusses how to find stories, plan an investiga-
tion, anticipate multimedia content and do preliminary research. Part II: Gathering Information
covers information gathering, including interviews, documents and data. Part III: Writing and
Publishing the Story goes over components of investigative stories, possible story formats and
alternative storytelling forms, legal problems to watch out for and methods for verification.
There is also a chapter on pitching the story to news organizations.
Each chapter ends with questions designed to reinforce knowledge of concepts and tech-
niques. The book is designed so that a student can undertake an investigation over the course
of reading the text: Each chapter introduces a step or series of steps designed to move readers
forward on their own big story projects. The process will work for both team and solo projects.
This step-by-step approach includes the following:

• Finding a story idea (Chapters 1 and 2)

• Setting up the investigation (Chapter 3)
x  Preface
• Gathering information (Chapters 4, 5 and 6)
• Interviewing (Chapter 7)
• Working with data (Chapters 8 and 9)
• Analyzing a big story (Chapter 10)
• Writing the story (Chapter 11)
• Bulletproofing the investigation (Chapters 12 and 13)
• Publishing the story (Chapter 14)

This plan presumes that readers have little experience with investigative reporting. They may
be straight out of a beginning reporting class, or primarily deadline reporters. Investigative
reporting requires a high level of critical thinking, analysis, organization, patience, persistence
and long-term focus, qualities that are emphasized throughout the book.
The first edition of Investigative Reporting: From Premise to Publication included references
to tools and information available on the Internet. But because apps and links disappear and
new ones appear at such a rapid pace these days, in this edition I have tried to reference Inter-
net tools more generically by what they can provide and show readers how to search for these
tools, rather than specify particular ones that might no longer be applicable by the time the
reader picks up this book. My goal is to show how to incorporate ever-changing technology into
the information-gathering and analyzing processes and how to use new tools to tell and present
stories in compelling ways.
This book demonstrates the benefits of using a spreadsheet program in information gather-
ing and during analysis. Spreadsheets are among the most useful and basic tools investigative
reporters rely on. My examples and walk-throughs reference Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets,
but the information applies to other spreadsheet programs as well.
The book ends with examples of investigative stories cited within chapters. An instructor’s
manual and other classroom material are also available to instructors who adopt this book. In
addition, an eResources page has been created at www.routledge.com/9781138572164.

How to Use This Book

I like cookbooks. I like nothing better than to toss ingredients into a pot, little by little, tasting the
stew as the flavors simmer and blend. I almost never follow a recipe to the teaspoon. Instead,
I imagine the final creation. Then I consider the ingredients, proportions and method of prepa-
ration as general guidelines. They help me choose my ingredients and determine the steps I will
take to produce the result I envision. Sometimes what turns out is quite different from what
is described in the book. That’s how I hope readers will use this book: as a guide for building
something original and significant.
To help readers do that, the book encourages them to come up with their own story ideas.
It demonstrates ways to find stories but does not dictate the story to do. It presents an overall
strategy that can be applied regardless of the story topic.
This book’s step-by-step approach teaches not only how to find an investigative story idea
and how to do investigative reporting, but what to do with the resulting information. Not all
 Preface  xi
investigative stories result in action, but one thing is certain—an unpublished investigation won’t
spur reader action or political change.
Too often, published investigative stories are poorly organized, tedious to read or both. In
trying to make sense of the various points and data, reporters sometimes sacrifice clarity and
readability, even though these qualities are as essential in good journalism as accuracy and bal-
ance. This book shows reporters how to keep stories on track and how to produce results that
will interest and enlighten an audience.

The Time Is Right

In 2006, George Washington University Professor Mark Feldstein argued that investigative
reporting goes through cycles: At some points in our history, journalists produce story after story,
digging up and exposing political and economic wrongdoings. At other times, it seems that the
investigative reporter is part of a small and lonely group. Feldstein argued that this ebb and flow is
natural, and that a “more docile journalism” tends to prevail unless political, economic and social
turmoil intersects with the emergence of new technologies and journalistic competition As I write
this new edition, the world is in the midst of conditions that Feldstein said produce the greatest
supply of and demand for investigative reporting. Political, economic and social challenges inter-
sect with technological change and increased competition. The Internet gives journalists all kinds
of new tools to help them collaborate to gather information, analyze it in new ways and distribute
their stories to both wider and more targeted audiences than was possible before. At the same
time, the Internet offers an unprecedented choice of content and is thus causing intense compe-
tition for readers and viewers. In order to gain attention, news organizations will have to produce
and publish information that is creative, original and relevant to people’s lives.
This book is intended to nurture the investigative journalist inside every beginning reporter.
It demonstrates that investigative reporting is not a mysterious process; instead, it is a system-
atic method for satisfying a reporter’s natural curiosity in a way that results in a publishable
story or series of stories that matter. With this book, I hope to enable budding reporters to
realize their potential.

To the Student
Here is a little information about the book to get you started.

Building a Story
Each chapter in this book ends with exercises and a feature called the “Big Story Project.” The
exercises help you apply and review chapter content, while the Big Story Project will help you
initiate and follow through on an investigative story of your own. The Big Story Project steps are
intended to be followed in order, though you or your instructor may modify steps or add more
steps, according to the needs of your project or class. Using the Big Story Project steps, you
should be able to build your own investigative story, from premise to publication.
xii  Preface

Appendix
In the Appendix there are seven complete investigative stories written by students, proving that
excellent investigative reporting can be done from the very beginning of your career. As you
read through the text itself, you will come across cross-references to these stories, and reading
the full text of each story will allow you to see how each example works within the larger piece.

Student Website
We’ve created an eResources page to accompany Investigative Reporting: From Premise to Pub-
lication to provide additional resources for your investigative stories. You’ll find the site at www.
routledge.com/9781138572164.
PART I
Getting Started
1 What Is Investigative Reporting?

Most investigative reporters don’t fit the image we see in movies where the reporter holds
hushed conversations in an underground garage. Many carry no special title. Many news orga-
nizations do investigative reporting but have no “investigative reporters” on staff. In the 1930s,
the San Francisco News sent reporter John Steinbeck to document the desperation and starva-
tion of migrant workers. The great novelist started out as an investigative reporter.
In 1972, Bob Woodward covered daily news stories on the Metro Desk at the Washington Post
when he began following up on a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
His reporting, with reporter Carl Bernstein, would lead to the resignation of President Richard
Nixon and spur a generation of journalists to become investigative reporters.
In 2017, a man phoned Alex Goldman, a producer of the podcast Reply All. The caller told
Goldman his computer had been hacked and offered to fix it. Goldman sensed it was a scam,
but, if so, he wanted to see if he could track the company behind it. He ended up tracking down
one man behind a massive international phone scam operation. See Box 1.1 for a portion of the
dialogue from the show.

Box 1.1  Reply All: “Long Distance”

In Episode 102 of Reply All, titled “Long Distance,” reporter Alex Goldman and Damiano
Marchetti explain to their co-host, P. J. Vogt, how Goldman traced the phone scammer to
the website of a company called Quick Pc Resolve.

GOLDMAN: We looked up the Whois record for Quick Pc Resolve. And we found
a couple of names associated with it. And when we checked to see if
those people had any other websites, we found this whole great con-
stellation of scammy tech support websites that looked exactly like
Quick Pc Resolve.
VOGT: Got it.
GOLDMAN: But there was one that was associated with these guys that was
different.
4  Getting Started

VOGT: Which was?

DAMIANO: It was this website called accostings.com
VOGT: Accostings? Like to accost someone?
GOLDMAN: It’s a weird name for a website. Even weirder name for a company.
VOGT: Yeah.
GOLDMAN: The company is called Accostings Infotech Private Limited.
VOGT: Okay.
DAMIANO: And when we go and look at the website it’s so different than the other
ones we’ve seen. It says very clearly that it’s a call center. And it has
what looks like a real address on Club Road in New Delhi. It has a real
Indian phone number.
GOLDMAN: Not a 1-800 hundred number like all the other ones have.
DAMIANO: And so we’re like, “Is this like the parent company? Like is this the place
where all of these scams are coming from?”
[PHONE RINGS]
THEM: Hello?
GOLDMAN: So in order to figure that out I just called the number on the Accostings
website.
GOLDMAN: Hi, I’m trying to reach technical support.
THEM: Yup. How can I help you, sir?
GOLDMAN: Uhhhh. Just to be clear, this is Quick Pc Resolve?
THEM: Yes Yes. It’s Quick Pc Resolve, sir. Absolutely correct.
GOLDMAN: Thank you very much.
GOLDMAN: And so then I went to all the other websites. I called all the other 1-800
numbers and asked them if they were Quick Pc Resolve. And they all
said yes. It doesn’t matter which one of these websites we go to. It
doesn’t matter which number we call. They’re all going to the same call
center. It’s the same company. It’s this company Accostings.
And so we started researching Accostings, and there was this one
name that kept popping up over and over again. This name Kamal
Verma. And I was like, “Who is this guy?” So I just started calling the
call center and asking for him.

Excerpted with permission from Gimlet Media

What Is Investigative Reporting?

Journalism organization Investigative Reporters & Editors, known as IRE, defines it as “the
reporting, through one’s own initiative and work product, of matters of importance to read-
ers, viewers or listeners. In many cases, the subjects of the reporting wish the matters under
scrutiny to remain undisclosed.” To win an award in IRE’s annual contest, a submission must
“uncover facts that someone or some agency may have tried to keep from public scrutiny.”1
 What Is Investigative Reporting?  5
Sometimes investigative reporters tackle problems that affect too many people to be consid-
ered secret. In exposing and documenting these problems, journalists force governments and
powerbrokers to address them. In 2017, stories in the New York Times and New Yorker magazine
about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein caused an avalanche of sexual harassment accusa-
tions that resulted in the dismissals of top players in Hollywood, the news industry and the U.S.
capital.2 Many of the accusations had been “open secrets” for decades.3
Here, we define investigative journalism as: reporting that involves the systematic gathering
and analyzing of information to expose problems, identify the causes and propose solutions. For
common characteristics of investigative stories, see Box 1.2.
Investigative reporting is public interest journalism. In his book Democracy’s Detectives, author
James T. Hamilton did a case study of the work of one investigative reporter, Pat Stith, a long-
time investigative reporter at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.4 The study showed
that Stith’s stories led to the passage of one new law for every year he worked as an investigative
reporter. Hamilton studied 12,000 IRE story submissions over three decades and found that each
dollar invested by a news organization in an investigative story could generate hundreds of dollars in
societal benefits. Thousands spent on a story could generate millions in benefits for a community.5
Lily Casura was a graduate student when she started investigating how the U.S. government
takes care of its female veterans. Her investigation resulted in a series of stories published on
Huffington Post.
“I had been sharing the stories with the folks at the VA who work with homeless veterans,”
Casura said. “The director of the VA center there wrote back and said you have really got our
attention, this is being discussed and distributed at the highest levels and you will see changes
going forward because of this. You could not get a better outcome than that. I had wanted to
move the needle on this.”6
San Francisco business reporter David Dietz once said that investigative reporting rattles
windows; it wakes up the sleepy citizen and policy maker. “This kind of reporting takes time,
demands the resilience of a prize-fighter and likely won’t give you a good night’s sleep,” he
wrote. “But it gets answers and makes change. And it’s what we’re here for.”7

Box 1.2 Characteristics of Investigative Stories

Whether broadcast on TV or radio or published in magazines, newspapers or online,
investigative stories share characteristics.

1 They go beyond basic facts.

2 They acknowledge many sides to a story.
3 They provide depth and context by exploring a problem’s scope and history and by
looking at patterns and connections.
4 They focus on problems hidden or ignored.
5 They take time.
6 They explore big issues like pollution, inequity or corruption.
7 They aim to spur action or change.
6  Getting Started

Investigative Techniques
Investigative reporters employ various methods to carry out their investigations. Here are a few
techniques.

Immersion Journalism
To investigate private prisons, which incarcerate more than 100,000 people, Mother Jones
reporter Shane Bauer worked as a prison guard for four months. In immersion journalism,
reporters investigate something by taking part in it, sometimes publicly, at other times under-
cover. Bauer wrote that it was the only way he could get the information he sought:

As a journalist, it’s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system.
When prisons do let reporters in, it’s usually for carefully managed tours and monitored
interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren’t
subject to public access laws.8

Figure 1.1  Mother Jones Cover

 What Is Investigative Reporting?  7
He didn’t try to hide that he was a journalist, but no one asked about his background. You can
see the Mother Jones cover of the issue that featured his story in Figure 1.1.
There is a long history in journalism of immersion reporting. In 1887, Nellie Bly got herself
committed to Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in New York to expose the abusive treatment of
mentally ill people. Nellie Bly is pictured in Figure 1.2. In 1950, Marvel Cooke went undercover
as a cleaning lady in New York to write about the mistreatment of black women by the white
women who would hire them off the street. She published her story, “I was part of the Bronx
slave market,” in a white newspaper.
In 1963, women’s rights advocate Gloria Steinem took a job as a “bunny” at a Playboy Club,
a chain of nightclubs for men that featured cocktail waitresses in skimpy bunny outfits. Her
exposé in Show magazine detailed how the clubs underpaid and exploited the bunnies.9

Collaborative Reporting
As news budgets shrink, so does the world. Corruption and exploitation cross borders and seas.
Teams of reporters from across news organizations collaborate, sometimes across countries
and oceans. That’s how the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) works. It

Figure 1.2  Nellie Bly

8  Getting Started
is an organization of some 200 reporters in 70 countries. Together they pored through millions
of pages of documents and analyzed data for a series of stories called the “Paradise Papers,”
which showed how wealthy people across social and political strata avoid taxes by moving their
money offshore. Among the things the ICIJ found in the Paradise Papers were more than 100
universities allegedly with offshore investments. See Box 1.3 for a list of some of the universities
identified in the Paradise Papers.10

Box 1.3 Some Universities in the United States Named in the

“Paradise Papers” Offshore Investments Investigation

Abilene Christian University

Amherst College
Babson College
Bentley College
Berea College
Boston University
Brown University
Bryn Mawr College
Carleton College
Carnegie Mellon University
Claremont McKenna College
Clark University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Davidson College
Denison University
DePauw University
Drew University
Duke University
Fordham University
George Washington University
Gettysburg College
Harvey Mudd College
Haverford College
Howard University
Indiana University
Johns Hopkins University
Kenyon College
 What Is Investigative Reporting?  9

Knox College
LaSalle University
Lawrence University of Wisconsin
Lewis & Clark College
Loyola Marymount University
Loyola University of Chicago
Marquette University
Miami University
Michigan State University
Middlebury College
Monmouth University
Mount Allison University
Mount Holyoke College
New York University
Northeastern University
Norwich University
Oberlin College
Old Dominion University
Oregon Health & Science University
Pepperdine University
Pitzer College
Pomona College
Princeton University
Purdue University
Reed College
Robert Wood Johnson University
Rutgers
Saint Louis University
Santa Clara University
Smith College
Southern Methodist University
Swarthmore College
Syracuse University
Temple University
Texas Christian University
Texas Tech University
The Ohio State University
The University of Montana
The University of Pennsylvania
The University of Rochester
10  Getting Started

The University of San Francisco

The University of Tennessee
The University of Texas
The University of Vermont
The Washington University
Tufts University
Tulane University
University at Buffalo
University of Alabama
University of California
University of Chicago
University of Cincinnati
University of Delaware
University of Denver
University of Houston
University of Kentucky
University of Minnesota
University of Oklahoma
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
University of Richmond
University of Southern California
University of Texas
University of Toronto
University of Vermont
University of Wisconsin
Washington State University
Wellesley College
Willamette University
Williams College

The Running Investigation

In 2016, Arizona Republic reporter Craig Harris wrote about a school teacher battling breast
cancer who lost her job after taking too many sick days. His reporting, in a series of stories
published over a year, documented massive firings of state workers without cause as part of an
effort to slash the budget.11
This kind of investigation is done bit by bit, usually as part of a beat. The initial story can
encourage people to come forward, which is what happened in Harris’s case. The Washington
Post’s investigation of Watergate was a running investigation.
 What Is Investigative Reporting?  11

Real Time Investigations

In 2014, The Big Bang Theory was the most watched TV series. The most listened to show was
a podcast called Serial produced by reporter Sarah Koenig. It investigated the case of a man
convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 1995. In each episode, Koenig took listeners through
the case as she reexamined the evidence and interviewed witnesses. The series won a presti-
gious Peabody Award, and its episodes were downloaded more than 80 million times.12 In a real
time investigation, journalists report information as soon as they gather it. But some journal-
ists had ethical qualms with Serial. In the interviews the public heard, sources said things that
were speculations that might be countered or refuted later.13 Reporters tend to spend weeks or
months on investigative stories before reporting to be sure of the truth of the story, and they
can’t be sure without seeing how pieces fit together.
Bill Allison is a reporter at Bloomberg News. When he was at non-profit journalism organi-
zation Sunlight Foundation, his team conducted real time investigations for several years. Sun-
light’s reporters focused on getting government documents and updated readers in real time as
they got them. But he noted that documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act
protect individual privacy in a way that human sources do not.14

Crowdsourcing
In a crowdsourced investigation, you ask your audience to help gather information. In 2015, The
Guardian launched “The Counted,” to collect and count the stories of people killed by police in
the United States. In 2017, the non-profit news organization ProPublica launched “Documenting
Hate.” It enlisted the help of readers and organizations to document incidents of hate crime.15

Data Journalism
At the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, reporter Robyn Doolittle came across a study
that looked at rates at which sexual assault cases were deemed “unfounded” by police and
dismissed. She’d never heard the term. She discovered that the government stopped tracking
those cases. So she sent public records requests to every police jurisdiction in the country and
compiled a database that showed that police in Canada dismissed four out of every five sexual
assault complaints.16
Some data journalists collect numbers themselves. Others get datasets from government
agencies. Sometimes they write programs that “scrape” the data off a government website.
They then analyze the data for patterns and inequities. We will look more closely at finding and
using data in Chapters 8 and 9.

Who Is an Investigative Reporter?

Many more people do investigative reporting than those who hold the title of investigative
reporter or producer. They incorporate investigative techniques in beats covering crime, busi-
ness, technology, even sports. Often, they don’t start out doing investigative reporting. Craig
12  Getting Started
Harris, of the Arizona Republic, started out covering sports. Diana Moskovitz, an investigative
reporter at Deadspin, wrote that she started out as a general assignment reporter covering the
night shift. “I was a below-average interviewer when I started out,” she wrote.17
Jie Jenny Zou, an investigative reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, went to college to
be an engineer. “I took a basic journalism class probably to fulfil some requirement they make
you do in college and I loved it,” Zou said. “As a sophomore I realized what I liked most about
journalism was the accountability aspect of it. And I think in investigative journalism all you
need is that interest. Because a lot of it is just being careful. Triple checking your facts. Going
back to the person one more time just in case.”18 Though investigative reporters come from
different backgrounds, they seem to share similar characteristics, as you can see in Box 1.4.

Box 1.4 Characteristics of an Investigative Reporter

Investigative reporters seem to share some common traits. They are:

Curious. Every answer they get leads to more questions.

Proactive. Investigative reporters don’t wait for press releases or announcements.
They go after information.
Persistent. When they can’t get the information they seek, they don’t give up
easy.
Methodical. They gather information systematically.
Storytellers. Investigative reporters try to tell stories so compellingly that readers
will push for change.
Truth seekers. They weigh information against a sense of fairness, justice and common
sense.

Careers in Investigative Reporting

Since this book was first published in 2009, the journalism landscape has changed dramati-
cally. After the 2016 presidential election, donations poured into non-profit news organizations.
Within one month after the election, ProPublica reported that it had raised more money through
small donations than it had in all of 2015. Other non-profit news organizations reported similar
windfalls. Investigative reporting became sexy. Amazon even signed a deal with the University
of California Berkeley School of Journalism to fund investigative reporting projects in exchange
for movie and TV rights. Investigative reporting also began to seem less like a money-sucking
part of a business and more as a way for news organizations to attract and keep readers, and
ultimately subscribers.
Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron told New York Times columnist James B.
Stewart in 2017 that investigative reporting was proving crucial to the paper’s business model.
“We add value,” Baron said. “We tell people what they didn’t already know. We hold government
 What Is Investigative Reporting?  13
and powerful people and institutions accountable. This cannot happen without financial sup-
port. We’re at the point where the public realizes that and is willing to step up and support that
work by buying subscriptions.”19
After years of layoffs, news organizations started hiring again. This time, they were looking
for reporters who could file public records requests and dive into data. General news orga-
nizations needed people who could report on complicated topics in the fields of health, sci-
ence or technology and tell compelling stories. That requires the ability to find stories, conduct
research, find sources, documents and data and out of all that tell compelling stories. That’s all
part of investigative reporting.
One effect of the massive layoffs in the journalism industry that took place in the first decade
of the new millennium was the founding of non-profit news organizations. Myron Levin, for
example, left a longtime job as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times to found
FairWarning, a news site that focuses on investigations about health and product safety, with a
grant of $250,000 from the Charles Evans Foundation.20 You can see a screenshot of the Fair-
Warning website in Figure 1.3. The Institute for Nonprofit News now boasts member organiza-
tions in every state in the United States, with more than 120 in all. Many of these organizations
produce stories that then get published on mainstream, for-profit news sites and television
and radio programs. Many reporters see non-profit journalism as a refuge away from profit
motivations that push for quick, superficial stories. But Jie Jenny Zou, of the Center for Public
Integrity, said these organizations have a harder time reaching a wide audience. “We aren’t a

Figure 1.3 FairWarning
14  Getting Started
destination website,” she said. “That makes partnerships even more important. Not only do you
have to convince your editor that this story is important and worth doing we have to convince
someone else at another news organization that this story is worth doing and worth publishing.
It is an additional layer.”21
Some investigative reporters work independently. Lily Casura was a graduate student when
she started investigating how the military takes care of its female veterans. After her initial
research, she applied for a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation, which gave
her about $20,000 to pay her expenses as she traveled across the country to interview people.
The Investigative Fund, an organization connected to the Nation Institute, will provide small
grants for freelancers to cover investigative costs, and it will also help reporters fight public
records request battles and with fact-checking.22
On one random day in November 2017, a search on journalismjobs.com yielded 83 open posi-
tions that had the word “investigative” as some part of the job requirement. They ranged from
internships to positions for senior reporters and producers.
You can see a summary of the skills and characteristics news organizations look for in candi-
dates for investigative reporting opportunities in Box 1.5. It is an ad that appeared in 2017 for a
job at the Tampa Bay Times, a newspaper with a reputation for award-winning journalism.

Box 1.5 Tampa Bay Times Job Ad

The Tampa Bay Times is Looking for a Dogged Reporter to Join our
Investigations Team
You must:

• Have a fine-tuned sense of fairness that drives you toward stories about real people
being harmed.
• Be able to dissect complex systems with shoe-leather, records, data, basic math and
an awe-inspiring number of interviews.
• Know how to trace what went wrong back to the people or institutions at fault, and
then tell that story so clearly that readers take notice and demand change.
• Point to published investigative stories that demonstrate these attributes.

On the investigations team, we prove our work rigorously, with data. We believe that
great stories take many drafts and that great journalism obliges us to be relentlessly
innovative. You should not be opposed to telling a great story in any form—a graphic,
listicle, video, 3,000-word narrative. You should be opposed to doing any of the above on
stories that are boring or unimportant.
 What Is Investigative Reporting?  15

You will work alongside the Times’ data team, which includes experts in analysis and
interactive storytelling. Our investigative reporters are newsroom leaders who steer
some of our most ambitious journalism. They are expected to be able to turn a story in a
week or to dive into a topic for months, and need to be as even-keeled when mentoring a
colleague as they are confident with a flack trying to sell a falsehood.
Bonus points for clips that demonstrate any of the following:

• Digging records and sources out of recalcitrant government agencies.

• Obtaining, analyzing or writing with data.
• Artful storytelling in any form.
• Creative thinking that cuts against the grain.

Chapter 1 Exercises
1 Go to the website for the journalism organization Investigative Reporters & Editors at
http://ire.org/extra-extra. Pick one investigative story that is spotlighted on that page.
Answer these questions:
a What is the focus of that story?
b What are some ways the reporters might have seemingly “stumbled onto” the story?
c Is there a way the story could apply to your school or town?
2 Go to the membership directory of the Institute for Nonprofit News at http://inn.org/mem-
bers. Find a member located in your state and then go to the website of that organization.
What is its focus?
3 Go to JournalismJobs.com. Put into the search engine the word “investigative.” What jobs
are currently available? What kinds of characteristics are employers looking for?
4 Go to LinkedIn.com. Plug into the search engine the term “investigative reporter.” How
many people come up who have that as part of their current job title? What organizations
do they work for? Do any of these organizations surprise you as places where one would
find an investigative reporter?

Big Story Project

1 On paper or computer, make a list of the last five books you read for pleasure and the mag-
azines you read or documentaries or fact-based dramas you chose to see in the theater or
on television in the past year.
2 Out of this list, which topics seem to interest you enough that you would seek out a diverse
range of materials about them? What do you naturally want to find out more about on an
ongoing basis?
a Narrow down one of those wide subject areas to a topic to investigate that you could pic-
ture as a documentary or series of articles or podcasts that could spur positive change.
16  Getting Started

Notes
1 Investigative Reporters & Editors. See the IRE FAQ. https://ire.org/awards/ire-awards/faq/
2 See Kantor, Jodi and Meg Twohey. “Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades.”
The New York Times. Oct. 6, 2017. And Ronan Farrow. “From aggressive overtures to sexual assault:
Harvey Weinstein’s accusers tell their stories.” New Yorker. Oct. 23, 2017.

3 Ronan Farrow. “From aggressive overtures to sexual assault: Harvey Weinstein’s accus-
ers tell their stories.” Newyorker.com. Oct. 10, 2017. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/
from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories
4 Hamilton, James T. Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. Harvard Uni-
versity Press. 2016. pp. 10 and 223.
5 Hamilton. Democracy’s Detectives. p. 10.
6 Casura, Lily. Phone interview by author. May 12, 2017.
7 Dietz, David. Email correspondence to author. Nov. 1, 2006.
8 Bauer, Shane. “My four months as private prison guard.” Mother Jones. www.motherjones.com/
politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/
9 Steinem, Gloria. “A bunny’s tale.” Show. May 1963.
10 The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “What is your university doing in the Para-
dise Papers? Help us find out.” Dec. 1, 2017. www.icij.org/blog/2017/12/project-alma-mater/
11 Harris, Craig. “Arizona fires teacher in the midst of her breast-cancer fight.” Arizona Republic. Aug. 10,
2016.
12 Hesse, Monica. “Serial’ takes the stand: How a podcast became a character in its own narrative.” The
Washington Post. Feb. 8, 2016. https://thinkprogress.org/the-complicated-ethics-of-serial-the-most-
popular-podcast-of-all-time-6f84043de9a9/
13 Goldstein, Jessica. “The complicated ethics of serial.” ThinkProgress. Nov. 21, 2014. https://thinkprog
ress.org/the-complicated-ethics-of-serial-the-most-popular-podcast-of-all-time-6f84043de9a9/
1 4 Allison, Bill. Text message communication to author via LinkedIn. Nov. 3, 2017.
15 ProPublica. “Documenting hate.” https://projects.ProPublica.org/graphics/hatecrimes
16 Doolittle, Robyn. “How the globe collected and analyzed sexual assault statistics to report on unfounded
figures across Canada.” The Globe and Mail. Feb. 3, 2017. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/inves-
tigations/unfounded-sexual-assault-canada-data-methodology-claims/article33891819/?ref=www.the-
globeandmail.com
17 Moskovitz, Diane. “14 things I wish I knew before I became an investigative reporter.” Cosmopolitan.
Feb. 23, 2013. www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a54095/investigative-reporter-career/
1 8 Zou, Jie Jenny. Phone interview by author. May 26, 2017.
19 Stewart, James B. “Washington post, breaking news, is also breaking new ground.” The New York
Times. May 19, 2017.
0
2 Levin, Myron. Email correspondence to author. Nov. 15, 2017.
21 Zou, Jie Jenny. Phone interview by author. May 26, 2017.
22 The Investigative Fund. “Frequently asked questions.” www.theinvestigativefund.org/about/faq/