Getting the Story Behind the Story

A state government insider tip turned into juicy front-page investigations on overpriced school renovation contracts paid to a company conveniently owned by the state superintendent's old college buddy.

The occasional wire story mentioning safety flaws in the Ford Crown Victoria sparked a two-day series delving into how those flaws caused the deaths of more than a dozen cops.

A reporter's back-of-the-mind realization that Wal-Mart was inching onto the daily beat grew into a three-part body of work on the retail magnate's reach from your next-door neighbor's wallet to a multinational corporation's revenues.

The first, by Scott Finn and Eric Eyre at The Charleston Gazette, won the Gerald Loeb award this past year.

The second, by Jennifer Dixon at The Detroit Free Press, was named Best in Business for projects last month by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

The third, by Nancy Cleeland, Abigail Goldman and Evelyn Iritani at The Los Angeles Times, earned the Pulitzer Prize this spring for national reporting.

So how did these reporters spin award-winning stories from a seemingly invisible thread of an idea? Easy. Untiring legwork, reliable sources and an instinctive seesaw that swung from patience to persistence.

The underlying qualities that make stories like this come alive are truly that simple. These stories may create magic, but it doesn't take magic to create them.

It does, however, take some doing to follow them. Finn thought the school contracts investigation would last no more than two weeks. He and Eyre ended up chasing the story for two months. Cleeland began making calls on what she thought would be a month-long status story on Wal-Mart. It turned into a 10-month project.

"We didn't know where we were going when we started this," Cleeland said.

And that's OK. One of the greatest things about reporting is the unexpected paths it unearths. They may detour from your first roadmap for the story, but be open to those twists and turns. Some may lead to a dead end, but some can put your story on stronger turf. Remember, Cleeland's unexpected reporting paths led her straight to the Pulitzer.

For these reporters, some of their first -- and best -- sources couldn't talk. Yet they managed to blab much of the story. They were documents. Internal memos, annual reports, state contracts, police reports, incorporation records, personal property tax records, lawsuits that confirmed Wal-Mart wages and Crown Victoria-related injuries.

That's the treasure map AND the treasure, all on one sheet of paper. Or, in the case of these reporters, on foot-high stacks of paper. They confirmed numbers, provided statements and, all in all, proved the truth.

Unlike the he-said, she-said story, which has too many holes to hold up your piece alone, analysis doesn't operate in double-speak.

"Documents don't lie," said Finn, who foraged for records showing the college-pal contractor's personal wealth after a spate of overpriced state contracts rose from a 13-year-old Plymouth to a brand-new Mercedes. "They can't be disputed."

Now take your document, wave your hands over them and whisper some magic words, then take a second look. OK, so the hocus pocus is just for effect, but you'll see that your document is transformed into a most-powerful source list -- you'll find names for someone who got sued, someone who did the suing, someone who signed off on a report, someone who registered a complaint, someone who pocketed big bucks and the someone who paid every penny.

Just don't wait until your ninth reporter's notebook to start hunting down those documents. Dixon found that her Freedom of Information Act requests alone would take months at a time. You may have the freedom to ask for those documents, but they have the freedom to take some time in giving it to you.

"Get the ball rolling on your documents early," Dixon said. "It can take a while."

Once you got them, those documents may sit at your desk, but that doesn't mean you should too. Simply put, face-to-face interviews go a lot further than a phone cord can (even when it's untangled).

Finn strolled inside the schools he wrote about, stopping and talking to janitors who described how perfectly fine kitchen equipment would get lugged to the garbage dumpster out back. Dixon flew to Phoenix to chat with mechanics personally, staring at the underbelly of a raised Crown Victoria and watching as they pointed out the mounting brackets and gas tank. Cleeland spent several hours at a Wal-Mart, ambling up and down aisles and scribbling on her notepad dozens of products made by an American manufacturer, but still boasting that tiny gold sticker that read "Made in Honduras."

Then she flew to Honduras. Seriously.

While The Los Angeles Times is more apt than most papers to send their reporters to Central America and South Asia to ferret out more sources, there's something to be said about being there. You are a part of the experience and can write with more authority. Plus, people respond more to a smile on your face than a tone in your voice.

"You're not just a voice at the other end of the phone," said Dixon, who received a report in hand by a source she met in person. "You're on their turf. People seem to open up."

Of course, journalism is never quite that simple. Cleeland, Dixon and Finn each still woke up to days when they never thought they'd put their stories to sleep.

Cleeland was trying to find the new angle on a corporate commander that had already graced front pages of much of her competition. Dixon found herself pursuing a story that she knew had to be written, but would be tough on her community's largest, and most loyal, employer. Finn, realizing his story's main character wouldn't talk to him, ended up writing an entire profile on the college chum without a single interview with him.

In each case, they brought wide, amorphous stories down to eye level by focusing on people -- the workers, the factory owners, the contractors, the cops -- and their relationships to numbers they found in documents.

They also answered to the mammoth companies they covered. Dixon's tack was to give a 25-inch sidebar strictly to Ford's side of the story. Cleeland and her team fact-checked each detail of the series with Wal-Mart a few days before publication. Both said part of their success is due to refusing to hide behind friendly, but false, story pitches.

"Be very honest from the beginning about what you're doing," Cleeland said. "We never implied from the beginning that this was going to be a puff piece. So they knew they had to take us seriously."

Instead, what intimidated these writers more -- as any writer will know -- was the writing. They each had to wring free a story or series from dozens of notebooks and piles of papers. For Dixon, it helped to create a timeline of events: When a state trooper sent an accident report to Ford, when Ford responded, when an attorney general wrote a memo.

"It helped me to see how everything unfolded," she said. "Every tidbit I'd get, I opened up my timeline and put it in there."

Cleeland spent hours talking to her editors for days. Her team would have meetings dedicated to how the story would flow -- "we talked a lot and argued a little" -- and relied on the fresh eyes of a newsroom writing coach to debate each word and slice the fat out of a story that clung tightly to its focus: Wal-Mart as a symbol and driving force of the national economy. As a result, entire retail stories became a few telling graphs. The second story's lede became a quickie sidebar. And the entire series was stronger for it.

And then each of these stories was published. For the reporters, their projects were finished. But for us, the opportunity to learn from them begins.

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