Project work has never been easy for me. As a practiced daily reporter, more than once I have mistakenly tackled a project with this admittedly poor strategy: report, write, fret, procrastinate, rewrite, lose sleep, and hope that a giant typo doesn’t creep up in a headline or graphic between my final draft and publication.
At the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Miami earlier this year, I was glad to hear some of our industry’s most respected editors and reporters discuss the behind-the-scenes strategies that helped more than one investigative project deliver bulletproof journalism with impact.
Dallas Morning News Deputy Managing Editor Maud Beelman said her approach begins with this formula: “Creativity minus structure equals chaos.” Editors can guide a project by offering effective and regular communication coupled with structure. Beelman breaks the process into three sections:
- Research and planning.
- Reporting and writing.
- Editing, fact-checking and legal review of the layout and print and online components.
Beelman’s tips:
Create benchmarks for the investigation. Decide how you will judge the project’s successful progression. One oft-repeated tidbit throughout the conference was that at the front end, journalists conduct an honest cost/benefit analysis. Example: “At its very best, this project will reveal that the mayor has embezzled millions and law enforcement has repeatedly looked the other way. At its worst, it will show the mayor has been involved in activities involving no-bid contracts that raise serious ethical questions.” It’s the “at its worst” that can best show what this story will deliver based on what you already know, even if none of the other leads pan out.
Meet regularly to help pace the investigation with mini-deadlines. Keep these meetings brief — just long enough to allow reporters to compare notes and leads and assess progress.
Editors, take note. In meetings, reporters often talk “in the moment” about the best information they’ve come across in their recent reporting. If editors take notes, they capture these tidbits, which can serve as reminders of detail or color “that might get lost as the reporter labors under the long write.”
Editors should interview reporters, even informally, about their findings, problems and strategies. Reporters often need to talk individually with their editors outside of group meetings. These discussions can be more helpful if editors write themselves memos that can be useful later to help jog memories.
Outline the project, the stories and the online presentation. An early outline helps build themes and gets editors, photographers, graphic artists and Web folks to buy in, while also showing you what you have and don’t have.
Build time lines that can reveal connections and holes not easily detected otherwise.
Write memos. This is especially helpful in a team project involving several reporters. Reporters should share memos about the material they’re getting, written in publishable format with quotes, titles and details. “Team investigations,” Beelman said, “are like compounded interest — when individual knowledge is shared and leveraged, the overall effort is strengthened.”
Reporters should write as they go. If they don’t, they can quickly become overwhelmed and lose sight of important and spontaneous information.
Reporters should be able to summarize their story in 25 words or fewer. If they can’t, they probably need to do more reporting.
Moot court it. (I really liked this one.) Gather colleagues from other departments, present the premise of the story and methodology of the investigation, and ask them for scrutiny and feedback. This shows what needs tweaking and can bolster the team’s confidence about whether they’re on the right track.
Confront early. Don’t wait until the last minute to interview any subject that might be shown in a critical light. More often than not, these interviews, when conducted early, give you insight that can substantially strengthen the story while also guarding against allegations of one-sidedness.
Make the methodology clear. Be transparent about how the analysis was conducted. Consider posting the database that served as the analytical foundation for your report.
Contain chaos, but allow failure. While using all these tools to help keep the project on track, editors should allow reporters to take chances with the risk of failure. It’s OK to let them go down the rabbit hole, Beelman said, as long as an editor is close enough to pull them out if needed.
