Investigative Reporting Handbook – Chapters 13 & 14

by Kevin Clang

The value of knowing how to report on businesses as really shown itself in the past few months.  With the possible economic recession, President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and the bailouts and bankruptcies of many major American companies, business reporting has taken its place on the front page of many newspapers.  

Like education and healthcare before it in previous chapters, business reporting will always be a necessity in one form or another.  For this reason, it is an invaluable skill to have.

Perhaps the easiest companies t o investigate are those that are publicly traded in the stock market, as there are several laws and regulations that they must follow.  The SEC’s Wed site is a great starting point for any  investigation.  There, one will find all of the quarterly documents and files that every publicly traded company must release.  

With hindsight being 20/20, if today you looked at the reports from Chrysler over the past five to ten years or so, one would definitely be able to see the warning signs long before anyone actually spotted them.  Understanding the terms used in a company’s annual reports is key to doing this.

After paper trails like these, undoubtably the most useful sources any reporter will use are human ones.  Papers give details, but human sources provide necessary insight into just what is going on in any business.  Ideally the major movers and shakers in any business would be honest and forthcoming with information, but unfortunately this often is not the case.  Instead, it is sometimes useful to contact academics or other experts.

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has made a career out of doing all of this.  A  recent Pulitzer Prize winner for his commentary on the economy, Pearlstein investigates America’s most important businesses every week in his column.  

While it would be easy to be all doom and gloom in such a column, especially given the current state of the economy, Pearlstein resists.  Instead, he uses his intelligence and experience to offer constructive  criticism to the nation’s largest conglomerates, and has written many articles on just what the American people have to do in order to save them.  Through his hard work he has earned the trust of not only the American public, but also the businesses that he has investigated.

The story extends much further than the owners and experts  of the business game; sometimes a reporter will have to move into the warehouse.  Stories can benefit from both  white collar and blue collar perspectives, and for this reason it is important to investigate how a CEOs decisions will affect the average Joe.  The Detroit Free Press has done an exemplary job in doing just this while looking into the city’s failing auto industry.

America needs business.  But like everything else, businesses can become corrupted, lazy or poor, so they need a watchdog to keep them in line.  It is a business reporter’s  job to understand the complicated theories and transactions associated with any business dealing.  By doing this, they exercise a check on the amount of power any business has.  If we had been better at looking out for businesses sooner in the  millennium, we may have saved  Wall Street and Detroit.

Investigative Reporting – Chapters 1-3

by Kevin Clang

Contrary to popular belief, stories do not just fall into the laps of journalists. Yes, sometimes a catastrophic national event occurs and causes everyone to stop what they are doing in order to cover it, but more often than not it is the journalist’s job to go out and find their own stories.

There are stories everywhere around us, from somewhere as obvious as the police station to somewhere as inconspicuous as a supermarket. It is up to the journalist to do the investigative reporting: realize the story, find people to talk to, ask them the tough questions, and finally scope the location out. Nobody else is going to do the work for them; the journalist must put in the hours.

The classic example of modern investigative reporting is and will likely forever remain Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post uncovering a Presidential cover-up of break-ins at the Watergate Hotel. The two reporters were the only two to recognize that something was odd about the crime and decided to probe deeper than everyone else.

In doing so, they found “Deep Throat,” a disgruntled government worker who knew privileged information that greatly aided the two reporters in their investigation. With his information, the two compiled their story largely from records and documents that were available to the public, things like meeting minutes and budget reports, things that anyone could take out and look at. Some did, for sure, but Woodward and Bernstein were the only two people to put all of the information together and uncover the epic story.

As the book states, the two reporter’s work towards uncovering Watergate began long before a bunch of crooks broke into hotel rooms. Bob Woodward spent his time working for a couple of small to medium sized newspapers in Maryland and D.C. suburbs, before landing a job at the Washington Post. He worked his way up the ladder by assigning himself to investigate small local scandals, such as a butcher selling fatty meat to customers. These stories not only made the Post notice him, they also provided Woodward with the investigative reporting tools he would need to sufficiently report on the Watergate break-ins and thus change our country forever.

Today we have much more tools available at our disposal than Woodward and Bernstein ever did. Many public records can now be found online, saving the time and hassle it takes to drive down to a public office and check papers out. Primary sources can easily be kept in touch with using e-mail, whereas before a reporter may often fall out of touch with a source after his story is done with.

This also makes it much easier to follow up a story with new information and insight. Articles are archived and cataloged online where they can be easily searched. Sources from all over the world, from newscasts to newspaper stories to blogs, are available at the click of a mouse, giving us nearly limitless access to information. What used to take years to research is now readily available.

While all of this technology makes the job more convenient, it does not make it any easier to do. An investigative reporter will still have to have a keen eye and ask themselves the questions “how should the system work, how well is the system working, and who is benefiting and who is suffering because of the way the system works” if they ever want to uncover the next Watergate. They still need to do their time with small issues at small papers, putting in several sleepless nights if they ever want to work their way up to the big leagues.