Tips from Barlett & Steele Award winners: Raquel Rutledge, Rick Barrett

A screenshot from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series "A Case of Shattered Trust."

Raquel Rutledge and Rick Barrett of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received the silver award in the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalsim for “A Case of Shattered Trust.”

The series revealed how a firm with a decade of serious regulatory violations of sanitary conditions was allowed to operate while the Food and Drug Administration did nothing. As a result of the stories, the FDA revealed the name of the bacterium that it found in the manufacturer’s contaminated alcohol wipes. Following a permanent federal injunction against the firm, the product is no longer manufactured.

Raquel Rutledge offers these investigative reporting tips:

• Be aggressive: We learned early on that dealing with the FDA is much like dealing with other federal agencies. You have to be more aggressive than usual and stay on top off all FOIA and interview requests.
• Try alternate means: The agency’s response to a number of our requests was incomplete. We had to separately pursue records from the regional offices and hound the press liaisons for interviews with top department officials.
• Stay focused: Keep asking who should be held accountable? Compare how things did (or didn’t work) to how they should work.
• Create a timeline: This can be a great reporting tool, to identify key points and help you keep track of how events unfolded.
• Use DocumentCloud: It’s a great tool for sharing notes and information with other reporters and editors – documents can also be annotated for the public.

Rick Barrett shares his top tips for in-depth reporting:

Tape interviews: Tape recorders encourage lazy note taking but, in some of the Triad interviews, they were essential because the interviews were short and intense. Also, it helps to back up a digital recorder with another digital recorder. The flash card in my primary device failed during an important interview, yet I had no indication it wasn’t working properly. Fortunately, I had a second recorder for the same interview that captured everything.
Review your notes for new leads: When you are running out of leads, go back through your notes and previous stories for fresh angles. Often there’s good material that was overlooked or just needs a little more work to be developed.
Don’t let people drag you off into the weeds: Be open to new facts and perspectives, but remain focused on what’s most important. Some information won’t make it into the story, even a lengthy one, but that’s not necessarily bad.
Write with authority: Over-attribution can mess up the flow of the writing and make it seem as if the writer doesn’t have much confidence in the overall message.
Give yourself enough time for writing: While it’s good to “over report and under write,” don’t wait until the last day to write everything. Write some along the way because it clarifies things in your head and can help