Investigations via the Internet

By Kelly Carr
April 21, 2008 09:23 AM

Before the Internet, Jim Steele and his partner Don Barlett traveled the country to track down documents for their investigative stories.

Steele would board an airplane to grab bankruptcy records from courts in Kansas City or New York. If faxing wasn't an option for Federal records, the shoe-leather reporters would head to Washington D.C. to get the documents themselves.

But technology has changed their travel patterns.

The investigative duo now uses popular Web search engines to track down leads and find records without leaving their chairs. The time saved allows the famous investigative reporters to pound pavement for details and interviews, instead of using an entire day to pick up documents.

Barlett and Steele say technology advances are a bright light for today's reporters committed to in-depth work. The Web has created endless reporting possibilities and more opportunity for investigative efforts.

Scouring the Internet led to the pair's recent Vanity Fair article "Billions over Bagdad," which detailed the story of billions of dollars intended for Iraqi people that disappeared after the U.S. invasion.

By simply typing a post office box number into a search engine, the reporters discovered that the box identified with a company in San Diego, which was hired by the Pentagon to keep tabs on the money, was the same box tied to a fraudulent activity.

That connection cracked their story wide open.

Without the Internet, Barlett and Steele, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporting team, say they could have never made a link like that.

"We coined a term years ago that you need to adopt a document state of mind, now we have changed that to a Web state of mind," Steele said. "We just assume the information is out there and the trick is to find it…There are opportunities out there that are new and fresh and didn't exist years ago, so let's take advantage of them."

To discuss the benefit of technology for investigative reporting, the pair recently penned an article for Nieman Reports called, "Reporting is only Part of the Investigative Story."

In the piece, Barlett and Steele suggest the perception that investigative reporting always was a powerhouse in newsrooms and now is endangered, is not true. Steele said there has never been enough investigative reporting. The battle inside newsrooms today for this type of work, even with tightened resources, is not new.

"None of this is to minimize the problems in the industry, but at the same time, we can't romanticize that there was always this type of work in the past," Steele said. "This has always been a struggle, but there has always been a way to get this work out."

Although newspapers are facing tough economic times, Steele said we must remember that technology has provided reporters the best climate for investigative reporting. Things used to be a lot different. Consider what it was like before the Securities and Exchange Commission had a Web site jam-packed with documents.

"If you wanted to write about a public corporation, you had to ask the corporation to send you their annual report," he said. "The ability to get information is so much easier now than it has ever been. Today you can go onto the site 24/7 and the cost is the paper in your printer. This is a tremendous change in a really short time."

* Information on the 2nd Annual Barlett and Steele Awards

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism