Chapter 12
Difficulties be Damned
You can’t write well unless you have something worthy to write about. Good material makes for a good story. It's the grist your intellect needs to mill insight.
Gathering the grist for your writing is called reporting. At its heart, reporting turns on a simple maxim: Asking the right question of the right person at the right moment. Developing that instinct requires years of practice.
Like writing, reporting is more an attitude, a way of being, than an occupation. Good reporters are knowledgeable, resourceful, probing and skeptical. They’ve learned how to find out what they need to know, when they need to know it.
How the best gather information may surprise you. It's rarely accurately portrayed in books or magazines. Reporting well requires wearing many hats. In researching a good story, writers have been known to play amateur therapist or talk show host; detective or diplomat, historian or anthropologist. While writers never behave unethically (at least, the good ones), they’re masters at doing the unexpected and the unconventional.
Let’s look at the techniques used by the best.
A nose for news
Good writers are what I call snoopopathic. They have a nose for meaningful change, trained to sniff out any novel twist in current events. Journalists call this news.
How do budding writers develop that news sense? Training begins with keeping abreast of current events. But news often makes little sense, especially in far off places such as Tierra del Fuego or Ulan Bator. At least not without having a solid grounding in history, politics, world affairs and culture. Such grounding provides the context against which to understand unfolding events. It enables you to recognize that, if Chinese nuclear submarines were to enter Taiwanese waters, it could affect not only U.S. foreign policy but the status of National Guard units across the country. That's being snoopopathic.
Know thy prey
In preparing to write a story, writers follow a simple mantra: Know thy prey. This mantra requires getting to know a person, place or issue as well as the back of your own hand. You do that by playing both historian and anthropologist, learning not only about the past of an issue or event, but its milieu, as well.
If writing about illegal immigration, say, learn how today's influx stacks up against those in the past. Is this the biggest wave or historically average? In writing profiles, get to know a person down to his cuticles. I once read a profile of Martin Luther King that portrayed him as an incurable scribbler, jotting notes down on everything from napkins to the back of his hand. Now that's a meaningful detail.
This is a lot of work, I know. But it's an upfront investment that pays big dividends, not only when you begin to write but after your story is published.
Let me explain.
Good prep enables you to finger the best sources for your story and figure out what are the right questions to ask of them. It helps you discern what's new and what isn't; what's important and what's trivial; what's spin and what's authentic. Know this and you'll be able to write not only with smarts and wit but with wisdom and humor. The ability to make people laugh about an issue - or themselves - represents the highest level of understanding.
A minutely observed story distinguishes it from the pack. That's especially true if you are writing about a big news event or a celebrity. Enrich your story with detail such as Dr. King scribbling historic ideas on soiled napkins, and it will be the one readers remember.
And, last but not least, good prep will save you from looking foolish. Allow me to demonstrate why.
My first writing job was in Monroe, La. It was a place that, for a Yankee boy such as myself, was as familiar as the surface of the moon. I was assigned to cover a mayoral election. That meant attending a never-ending round of fundraisers, political meetings and speeches.
At one late night fundraiser I encountered an unusual punch. It was unlike anything I had ever tasted: Sweetly tangy like Sangria yet with a fiery aftertaste. Could I use this punch to spice up what would be an otherwise bland story?
I asked the political operative staging the fundraiser about the punch. "You like it?" he asked.
"Very much."
"It's a brew particular to these here parts."
"What's it called?"
"Poontang."
I scribbled down the word, head bent over notebook, missing the growing smirk on the operative's face.
I rushed back to the newspaper, convinced I'd found a way not only to punch up my story. I would show off my street smarts, my intimate knowledge of local political culture. In short, I’d cover up my naked "Yankee-ness."
In my excitement, I hadn’t bothered to double check the meaning of "poontang," either with anyone else at the fundraiser or back at the paper.
Not only did I use poontang in the lead. I used this punch with the wonderfully colorful name as a metaphor for the politics of the candidate: Sweet and spicy. My story passed from my typewriter to the desk of a fellow Yankee copyeditor, who chuckled at my clever metaphor. He wrote this headline: "Pol Serves Poontang to Faithful." From there the story moved to a Yankee typesetter.
No one actually from Monroe or even the South read my story until the first edition began rolling off the presses. That's when the managing editor, a Mississippian, usually returned to give the front page a final read. Good thing for me that he showed up that night. "Stop the presses," he bellowed after reading the headline of my story.
Poontang was local slang, all right, but for a part of the female anatomy unfit to mention in a family newspaper.
Do your homework
Getting to know your prey begins with doing some homework. These days that begins on the Internet. A good place to start is with one of the big search engines, Google, Dogpile or Yahoo. Or you might start with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. All will provide basic information, or sources of information, about issues, people and places. That's especially true if they're famous. If you want to dig deep into a person or place’s past, try a site called The WayBack Machine. Named after a fictional device in the the 1960s cartoon series “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” the site archives discontinued Web pages.
Be wary, though, of relying just on the Internet. It’s a black sea of misinformation. Check the source of any information. Is it respectable and reliable? Wikipedia is especially notorious. Representatives of giant companies such as Wal-Mart and Pepsi have been caught editing their entries, substituting unflattering depictions with more supportive material[1]. This is but one example of why it’s better to consider Wikipedia more tip sheet than gospel.
Search engines are just the beginning of any serious prepping for a story. Expand your net to the ever-rising tide of Web sites specializing in issues and topics. There's meta-search databases, too, that enable you to browse most major newspapers in the world or search across medical and scholarly journals. Other great sources include Ulrich's, a list of trade publications and COS Expertise, a compendium of experts worldwide.
Befriend thy librarian, whether at school or in town. Librarians are not only masters of online databases and the Web. They’re skilled at finding obscure information, such as a political candidate’s college graduating thesis or the number of times he’s been quoted in the New York Times.
Prep work should cover more than background. Use it to find potential sources, the best people to interview for a story. In modern commercial writing, real people saying things in real time are the main source of information. If profiling Beck, you’d want to find his rivals and colleagues, friends and family. You’d also want to find independent experts and critics.
Why all the legwork? Because it’s a never-ending challenge to find authentic and reliable sources of information. Many may claim to be experts but, in truth, few people are worth interviewing, including some with big titles and impressive degrees. Research helps a writer sift the genuine expert from the blowhard. And, once you’ve identified your prey, research enables you to understand a source’s point of view and accurately portray it.
Equally important, though, prep work affords perspective. You want to discern what weight to give a point of view or fact. To answer for yourself such questions as: How influential is a person’s work, where does he stand within the pantheon of his discipline? Is he liberal or to the right of Bill O’Reilly; representative of the conventional wisdom or an outlier?
Prepping well also serves as a reality check. It enables you to gauge whether someone is telling you the truth or just a part of it. Don’t be surprised at how many sources you’ll catch, if well prepared, in telling half-truths or outright lies. That includes professors, CEOs, even public interest and consumer advocates.
Sometimes people are just mistaken or forgetful. Other times they’re engaging in self-denial or a cover-up. At times lying is part of some inside joke - on you and your readers. In his autobiography, Bob Dylan crows about making up fanciful stories about his past to mislead publicists and reporters. He considered his past private property. Trespassers beware.
Be as wary of numbers and statistics, too. A skillful manipulator of numbers, and there are many such people today, can make them dance to his tune. Consider Hollywood, that master of disinformation, as an example. In 2007, the major studios proclaimed that the all important summer movie-going season had been the best ever. Gross ticket sales hit $4 billion.
But was it really? A close look at the numbers suggest otherwise. When adjusted for inflation, 2007 summer box office sales were $3.79 billion, well below the peak of $4.39 billion in 2002. Even the number of tickets sold in the summer of 2007 were lower, 606 million versus 653 million five years earlier. The truth was that the big screen movie industry continued its long slow decline in 2007.
Hollywood’s self-serving manipulation of its summer box office sales proves a warning issued more than 100 years ago by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “There’s lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.”
If this all sounds depressing, take heart. There’s little more thrilling than catching an officious, manipulative pol or chief executive in a whopping lie. It’s one of the simple joys of good reporting.
[1] New York Times, 8/19/07
Follow the paper
I.F. Stone is the greatest journalist you never heard of. Stone never made a video of himself on YouTube; nor appeared on the Daily Show. He never worked for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate nor CNN. Nor did he ever break a big story relying on anonymous government insiders. Not once did he have an exclusive interview with a sitting president, a fallen tyrant or a reigning film idol.
In fact, all of the above would have shunned him. Little wonder, given that he was an outspoken supporter of the former Soviet Union for a brief moment in the 1950s and long accused of being a KGB agent. To his critics, Stone replied: “You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive."
Although shunned by the potentates of his day in government and Hollywood, Stone broke some of the biggest stories of the 1950s and 1960s. He caught some of the highest officials in outright lies and deception. His biggest scoop came in 1964, when he exposed how President Johnson’s administration had staged a phony attack against U.S. battleships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify sending American combat troops to Vietnam.
Government and newspaper muckety-mucks alike considered Stone the anti-christ of mainstream media. In effect, he was the Matt Drudge of his day, only far more credible. Stone published his exposes in what back then was the equivalent of a blog, a weekly newspaper named after himself. It never had more than 70,000 subscribers.
Stone may have never been popular but his work changed journalism. He pioneered what we today call investigative reporting. All today’s best investigative writers copy the techniques Stone pioneered. Not a bad legacy for an old Lefty.
If Stone relied neither on anonymous nor official sources, what was the secret of his success? It was deceptively simple. He was a diligent and meticulous reader of public records: court transcripts and depositions, the congressional record and hearing testimony, filings with Securities & Exchange and bankruptcy records, divorce and civil suits. No document was too obscure nor tedious for his inspection. He read everything, especially addendum and footnotes. In short, he did what most of the big shot journalists of his day considered either too unglamorous or too tedious.
No longer. The best writers now recognize that public records are an invaluable tool. People are often unreliable sources. They frequently misstate, misconstrue or misdirect. Then there’s the outright lying. It’s a sad truth that prosecutors and police often use the media to further their own agendas. For too many law enforcement officials, the news media is the vehicle through which to test case theories, attack political opponents or promote themselves through publicity of a sensational case. Sometimes public records provide the only true account of what they really think and do.
While valuable, public records are not an easy tool. Document reporting requires herculean intellectual effort. Assembling a story from documents, especially documents officials want hidden, is not unlike putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Clues are scattered across documents. It’s up to a writer to figure out how to piece together the clues into a coherent story line.
Still, document reporting can reap a bountiful harvest. Consider the example of Robin McDonald, a longtime court and police reporter in Atlanta. She has used public records to spot trends and even solve murders. In the 1990s, McDonald wrote a cover story for Atlanta magazine that refuted police assertions that there were no serial rapists in the South’s largest metropolis.
How could McDonald see what the police said they could (or would) not? She skillfully mined police records. Using Georgia’s Freedom of Information Act, McDonald gathered 3,500 rape reports from jurisdictions across metropolitan Atlanta. She closely read these reports, documenting disturbing similarities in both how and where women were attacked. Her research showed a clear pattern that a handful of men were indeed committing the lion’s share of rapes in Atlanta.
McDonald’s story also illustrates the protective power of public records. It’s difficult to refute a story that’s documented in real estate deeds, bankruptcy filings, divorce settlements or police records. In effect, McDonald used the police’s own data to make her case. Not surprisingly, the police didn’t try to challenge her conclusion, although they were most unhappy about it.
Financial records are an especially rich place to find good stories. I uncovered the largest financial scandal in U.S. history (as of 2006) by reading the footnotes in the government financial filings of former telecom WorldCom. Those footnotes revealed caveats that raised serious questions about the credibility of the earnings WorldCom reported to Wall Street bankers and government regulators. It wasn’t that I was any smarter than these financial experts. They, too, could have discovered WorldCom’s $11 billion fraud - if they’d read the small print of the company’s financial filings.
The value of public records as a reportorial tool as only grown with the Internet, which offers instant access to databases, records, blogs and chat. Better yet, little, if anything, posted on the Net is ever erased. It’s only a matter of figuring out how to find something.
One Net miner who’s found gold is Brian Grow, a investigative writer at Business Week magazine. He taught himself how to plumb the Net’s vast resources, using it to write one big story after another. Rarely does Grow need to visit the cluttered, dusty confines of a court or government record office. From his desktop computer in Atlanta, for example, Grow was able to comb through 30,000 emails that were part of a federal case concerning the counterfeit manufacture of prescription medicine. Grow found an email overlooked by federal prosecutors: A complaint from one counterfeiter to another, who felt his rival was besting him.
Plumbing records can reveal more than scandal and crime. Government and court documents are a mother lode of gritty detail, whether a writer is trying to recreate the scene on the day of a sensational murder or depict the true wealth of a tycoon. Posted on the Web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, for instance, is the weather of any locale, on any day at any time. Divorce and bankruptcy records can reveal whether a tycoon owes more than he makes, say, paying thousands of dollars monthly in alimony to ex-wives.
Many of us make a mess of our lives. Much of that mess is documented in courthouses, government regulatory agencies and city halls. A skilled writer plumbs these sources to ferret out life’s sad truths.
Hear all, see all
There’s much more to reporting than mining records and asking questions. The best reporters try to hear all, see all. No detail is too small if it reveals character or meaning.
If interviewing a mayor, notice whether he’s wearing cologne and, if so, what brand? Are his shoes scuffed or polished; his nails manicured or bitten down? What does his staff say about him in the hall; when he enters a room do they rush to greet him or scurry away?
Once media mogul Ted Turner jumped into the back seat of my beat-up Toyota Camry after a groundbreaking ceremony for a new corporate campus. Turner asked for a ride back to his downtown office.
He was using me, all right, but not as a taxi. As I tried to pull out of the parking lot, Tom Johnson, then head of CNN, and another top executive jumped in front of my car. Their faces were wet with fear. Turner chuckled at their frightened pleas for him to get out of a reporter’s car.
That incident said more about who Turner was as owner and boss than anything he could have said. Clearly, he loved to keep his top executives off balance, ever fearful of what he might do next. If he’d jump into my car, what might he reveal about his executives or the inner workings of the company?
The lesson here is to report with all your senses. Pay attention to how people smell, look and, most of all, act. It’s what people do, not what they say, that often reveals meaning.
Cultivate sources
Cultivate people, especially those in a position to know the inner workings of a company, government agency or charity. It was through cultivation of an offbeat, but highly knowledgeable source, that I managed to write a story about housing inspectors on the take in Buffalo during the late 1970s.
The quest for the story began with my befriending a mob attorney. I would visit his office to do nothing but listen to him brag about how he was smarter, richer and more important than his fellow mobbed up attorneys. Never did I take notes, let alone write a story. This went on for months.
Then one day, while I was walking down a narrow street with friends, a black stretch limo pulled up beside me. A door opened and a husky voice said, “Haddad, git in da car.” My friends watched with furrowed brows as I disappeared inside the black limo with tinted windows.
Inside the limo my mobster attorney tipped me off to housing inspectors on the take. They were being paid to ignore code violations in buildings under renovation by mob-controlled union contractors. The attorney should know. His client was the one paying them off. The problem was, the inspectors weren’t staying bought, but instead selling out to rivals bidding higher. Now the attorney wanted to punish the inspectors for their disloyalty.
The lesson here is to invest in relationships. Patient nurturing of a key source takes time, but if done right, it will bear fruit. My story also illustrates that it pays to cultivate informed outliers as sources. They are more likely to speak candidly than those with big stakes in the establishment. But remember, outliers, like my mobbed up attorney, have agendas. Find out what they are and let that knowledge temper and guide how you use of a source’s information. Be nobody’s tool.
Think critically
It’s not easy to resist being drawn into the blinding white light of Steve Jobs’ charisma. His mere presence can send a hall-full of Mac aficionados into delirium. So when Apple’s high wattage CEO declared that the iPod would serve as the bait to hook new users of the Mac, most writers believed.
I wasn’t one of the believers. While facts often speak more softly than charismatic CEOs, they speak more truthfully. I listened to the facts. What the Apple's financial data said was this: The iPod was indeed attracting some new users to the Mac, but not nearly enough to lift the Mac’s worldwide share of the desktop PC market out of the low single digits. In fact, the iPod soared on a trajectory all its own. Its percentage of the fledgling market for portable music players rocketed to more than 70 percent. In contrast, the Mac’s desktop market share hovered between 3-5 percent.
Jobs and company weren’t happy about my coverage and complained bitterly to my editors. Why wasn’t I writing what everyone else was? My defense every time was the facts, which Apple could not refute. Time proved me right.
I wasn’t prescient; I just reported what others had chosen not to see. Too often writers find it more comfortable to run in a pack. Resist this temptation. It will lead you astray.
Mop up
Your reporting for a story doesn’t end with the last scheduled interview. That just marks the beginning of the final stage, the mop up. The mop up consists of four parts: verification, assessment, update and the elimination of doubt. This stage is no less important than preparation, building trust and drawing people out.
A source may swear he climbed the Eiffel Tower as a teenager but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Even the most respectable of people will shade or embellish the facts - or lie.
Consider this example. In 2000, WorldCom Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan was the darling of Wall Street. He’d persuaded investors to give him billions of dollars to buy up rivals. That acquisition binge turned a piddling Mississippi telephone operator into the world’s second largest telecommunications firm.
I covered WorldCom in the early 2000s for Business Week, and I began to hear concerns about the company’s finances. In an off-the-record conversation, Sullivan told me such concerns were merely the griping of envious rivals. Later, in trying to verify what Sullivan had told me, I documented how he’d orchestrated $11 billion in forged earnings at WorldCom. The company collapsed into bankruptcy and was eventually sold to a rival.
Verification, then, is an important part of any interview. That’s especially true if developing a relationship with a new source or working with one experienced and skilled in talking to the media.
In fact, verification begins during an interview. It’s a good idea, to paraphrase comedian Stephen Colbert, to test a source’s “truthiness.” Is he telling the truth as best he knows it? Or is he offering only a self-serving portion of the truth, or worse, lying?
Here’s a good way to test a source’s “truthiness” or reliability. Ask him some questions to which you already know the answers. Again, preparation proves invaluable. Find a couple sensitive things about a source - say age with a woman, a dismissal with a man - that he or she might be tempted to shade or lie about. Sprinkle these sensitive questions throughout an interview, disguising any pattern or intent. If a source lies about her age then a writer knows to be wary of any answers she gives.
Fact checking should continue after the interveiw. Try to confirm what a source has said through records or documents. Ask other sources who are in a position to verify. The Internet, with its vast repository of databases, government records and printed material, is an invaluable verification tool.
You can scale back fact checking as a source proves his reliability, but make him earn your trust. The reliability of some sources, though, should remain forever suspect. Examples include political operatives for any party, elected officials and celebrities.
Verification goes for opinions, too. They are only worthy of note if rooted in fact, not in unsubstantiated assumption and supposition. A vegan may assert that people will thrive forever if they eat only raw vegetables. History, however, suggests otherwise. For thousands of years, humanity lived on whole grain and fresh vegetables yet few people lived past their 30s. See the difference between fact and supposition?
Think of it this way: A house made of cards is not the same as one built out of brick and mortar. The first will collapse at the slightest probing. Ditto with opinions. Ones that are based in half-truths, misrepresentations or fabrication easily fall apart upon close examination. Don’t let yourself be used to promote or prop up a specious argument.
Verifying information helps you with the next step in the mop up, assessment. How much weight does a source’s research, life story or opinion deserve; where might it fit within a story? Others can help you here. Bounce one source’s viewpoint off others. Do they think he’s an outlier or part of the convention wisdom?
It’s not uncommon for events to buffet the original theme of a story, especially one that requires an extended period of research. Resist sailing blindly along the original plotted course of a story. Instead, tack with the buffeting winds. Circle back to ask sources if events change what they originally thought and said. Keep a story as current as possible.
Death to all doubt
There’s nothing wrong in leaving an interview with a head full of troubling questions: “Did I hear that right; can that really be true?” What would be wrong is to let those doubts linger unquestioned. A wise writer never lets hubris prevent him from asking a stupid question in the pursuit of accuracy. There’s no dumb questions; only writers too dumb to ask a stupid question.
Never feel ashamed to call back a source and admit you may have misheard or misunderstood something said. Such humility serves a writer well. Let me recount a couple of my own horror stories to drive home the point.
As a young police reporter in St. Louis during the early 1980s, I accidently killed off a big time drug dealer. He’d been shot up so bad that the police assured me he couldn’t possible live through the night. I took the police prognosis as gospel and never called the hospital.
The dealer not only lived through the night. He lingered for days after I’d pronounced him dead in the newspaper. His eventual death saved my career, killing the family’s lawsuit against the paper.
I liked to say that this was my biggest mistake, but it wasn’t. I went on to make an even bigger one at Business Week. I once let go unchallenged a small but critical change to the wording of a brief item. My editor changed “considering bankruptcy protection” to “filed for bankruptcy” in a story about HealthSouth Corp., a troubled owner of rehab hospitals. I ended up having to apologize to half of Wall Street for the error. The mistake was mine, not my editor’s because I had failed to satisfy my doubts about the change. A simple call to the company would have caught this egregious mistake.
That close call taught me an invaluable lesson. Never take a fact for granted, no matter how small. In fact, it’s the small ones that tend to have the biggest bite.
Misspelled names. Incorrect addresses. Three zeros after a number instead of four. A continual stream of such mistakes will deflate your credibility like a slow leak in a balloon. Inch by column inch, story by story – until no one believes what you write anymore.
When I mull over my own mistakes and those of others I see a disturbing pattern. We permitted doubts to linger, shrugging them off because we were almost certain. Almost isn't good enough in the quest for accuracy. And all writers, fiction and nonfiction alike, strive for precision and accuracy.
I learned this lesson from one of the biggest pains in the ass I ever knew. He was also the best editor I ever had. This editor was a fireplug of a New Yorker who I used to introduce as our “small” business reporter. What Henry lacked in physical stature he made up for in tenacity when pursuing factual accuracy.
Everyday, Henry nagged me, “are you sure that’s how his name is spelled, did he really say that, do those numbers really add up to that total?” To this day Henry's nagging voice lives on inside my head. It's not pleasant, true, but it has saved me from making many an embarrassing mistake.
Henry taught me that, when doubt comes calling, pay attention.
Copyright© 2006 by Nec Aspera Terrent
All rights reserved.
Barking Dogwood Press, Atlanta, GA
