Investigative Reporting

From Premise to Publication

Marcy Burstiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351333054
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 organizations 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 starvation 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 constellation 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.
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 readers, 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

Sometimes investigative reporters tackle problems that affect too many people to be considered 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 accusations 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 longtime 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.

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 undercover. 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

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 chai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Getting Started
• Part II Gathering Information
• Part III Writing and Publishing the Story
• Appendix
• Index