How to bulletproof your story before it’s too late
Bulletproofing your story:
Mark Horvit, executive director, Investigative Reporters and Editors
Rick Brooks, deputy Money & Investing editor, The Wall Street Journal
Or this NICAR 2010 (Computer Assisted Reporting Conference ) session could have been called ‘How not to get sued.’
Brooks outlined the methodology by which the WSJ begins an investigative story, documents it and then records what they did and publishes that for the public. The example he used was a package published in October 2009 which outlined why Wall Street was on track to award record pay to their employees.
As part of the package of stories, the WSJ published the methodology used in assessing the compensation at 38 major financial firms. It began:
“To estimate compensation and benefits at major Wall Street firms, The Wall Street Journal reviewed financial statements by publicly traded companies classified in their
A look at the WSJ's compensation tracker
Securities and Exchange Commission filings as brokers or dealers of securities and commodities, invesment advisers or exchanges. “
and included:
“When such line items weren’t available in a company’s financial statements, the Journal used the closest approximation, such as “personnel” costs.”
“At the Wall Street Journal, nobody will read anything about themselves in the paper or online that they didn’t already know,” Brooks said, explaining the culture of the paper.
Horvit then talked about the editor-reporter partnership and passed along some specific tips on gathering and using data.
“Reporters need someone to help walk through a project, step-by-step,” Horvit said. And when the story got to the editing stage, he said he would read stories with a marker to “circle anything surprising. Anything that looked like an outlier, I questioned.” He said the problems that come up during close vetting of a major project are the difference between “Pulitzer or lawsuit.”
Specific tips from Horvit included:
