Jeffrey Timmermans, Director of the Reynolds Center, sits down for an interview with award-winning journalist James B. Steele, half of the namesake for the Barlett and Steele Awards. Steele shares how he got started in business journalism, how his long-term partnership with Donald Barlett began, and the value of having a “document state of mind.” He also gives young journalists tips on how to find and write award-winning investigative stories.
With the 2024 Barlett and Steele Awards ceremony right around the corner on November 20, 2024, we’ll be sharing interviews with some of this year’s winners on our podcast. Stay tuned!
For more information about the Barlett and Steele Awards, visit our awards page.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Jeff Timmermans: I’m Jeff Timmermans, Director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism. I’m here with multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Steele for a conversation about his experiences as an investigative business journalist and his advice for young journalists.
So Jim, you’ve been investigating things for years now. How do you find the documentary evidence? How do you find where all this stuff is written down, and how do you know it’s been written down?
Jim Steele: One of the things I learned early in my career was to never assume – never assume the simple things, maybe how somebody’s name is spelled. And later on, when I got into more deeper projects, like business journalism, I then learned: Never assume where you’re going to find something. People think because I’ve done this work for so many years that I know where everything is, but I don’t, because what I have to do each time is I have to imagine, where can I find that? Where might that information be? So, many years ago, Don Bartlett and I came up with a term called “a document state of mind.” We just assume that something is out there until we’re proven wrong. It’s true over and over again. You look at court cases, you look at obviously SEC filings, so those things are repeat documents that you use over and over again. But beyond that, there’s a whole world of other documents that you may use once in your career and never use it again.
Timmermans: You mentioned, you know, assuming that documents are there. And this is one thing I think that makes business journalism such a fertile ground for investigations, because companies – if they’re public companies – are required to produce tons and tons of details on their operations on a regular basis.
Steele: Absolutely. And I can’t believe even though a lot of journalists know about it today in a way they didn’t years ago, it still amazes me how many people don’t realize what’s out there, and people are intimidated by the documents. I mean, the SEC filings of any public company are enormous, but if you simply look at the 10k, the annual report, and look at one particular phase of it – just look at litigation alone to see what’s been filed against the company or what they’re contesting, what those issues are – those alone are very, very important. The other area with documents that is very often overlooked is just do a comparative thing. You know, what are the sales this year versus last year? When we did the oil industry thing, we showed where they were drilling this year versus 10 years ago, and it showed that a corporation that had once been, let’s say US-based, was suddenly of international scope. That’s what that comparative documentation will show you. You don’t have to know trigonometry, algebra, you don’t have to know those things. Just comparative numbers alone will put your story into a different league.
Timmermans: So comparing and asking questions – it sounds like you know that’s key journalism, that you don’t need necessarily advanced math, like you said.
Steele: You don’t need advanced math. I think it doesn’t hurt, I think in the journalism we see today that people at least understand some more about accounting, at least what’s going into it. They don’t have to be accountants – I mean, people forget the Enron accountants missed the hidden numbers that brought down that company. So nobody expects you as a journalist, to be in that league, but at least to look at things from a comparative standpoint and to see where things have been and where they’re going. It sounds so fundamental, but it’s amazing how few people sometimes do that.
Timmermans: Your career has overlapped kind of this amazing shift from the analog age to the digital age. And you know, the access to information, potential access to information, is so much greater now, and the analytical tools we can bring to bear. Tell us a little bit how your methods have evolved.
Steele: Well, it’s a great question, because I can’t tell you the number of young reporters come up to me and say, ‘How did you do this in the old days?’ Like it was like 1890 or something like that. Well, you did things by hand, you looked at things, and then you compared things. That’s the wonderful thing about our era. This is the golden age of reporting because of what’s happened digitally. You can search for all kinds of things that before you had to go through mammoth stacks of paper to find that particular information. The congressional record today is all online. Congressional hearings are online. The records of every federal agency are pretty much all online. All of those things you had to examine physically in the past.
So the information is the same, but the speed with which you can do it now, that’s what’s important. And the motto that’s always governed me is: Never assume where you’re going to find something. Never assume where a particular document may or may not exist. Just try to think where it might be. What is it you need? And go from that starting point to see where that might be. There’s no manual out there that will tell you every place to go. Now, it’s true: We all look at SEC documents year in and year out. We may look at property records, mortgages, loan agreements of that sort. We look at various court cases, and court cases remain, in many ways, alongside SEC documents, the single greatest area where you’ll find information. What you may be looking for is not what that lawsuit is filed about, but you’re going to look for the depositions in it, you’re going to look for the exhibits, you’re going to look for the declarations – all of those kinds of things that shed light on whatever you’re looking at that may or may not even be related to what that lawsuit is about. So that’s the thing I tell people, just never assume where you’re going to find something. Think where that information might be and then try to see where it exists.
Timmermans: You didn’t start out as a business journalist. How did you wind up being the investigative business journalist with Don?
Steele: The first big business project that Don and I did together was the international oil industry – charting trends, how the industry had expanded abroad, how it maintained its supplies, where it was doing its drilling, where it was refining, all of those kinds of things were kind of the first big business project. And we didn’t sit down and look at each other and say, ‘Well, this is a fertile area,’ but I think we realized at the time that this was an area that was not covered much by most of the press. I mean prior to really the ea rly 70s, so much business journalism, BusinessDesk would get handouts from companies on their earnings, the appointment of a new president, mid-level, managers, anything of that sort, and they would run those releases. But the idea of looking a little deeper to see exactly how that company or that industry was functioning was really very rare at the time, and I think what we learned in our investigation, really the oil industry at the time, just showed us what an incredible area it was, and basically an untouched area.
Timmermans: So how did you and Don team up?
Steele: We teamed up on one project at the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1971. It was to be one project, by the way, which is typical of journalism. And in a way, there really was kind of a business factor to that as well. It had to do with inner city housing. We ran across some evidence that a federal program that was to encourage home ownership among low-income people Philadelphia and elsewhere – it was all over the country – was being abused. Speculators were buying houses, slapping a coat of paint on them, the mortgage would be insured by FHA, the federal agency. There was a mortgage company out there ready to loan the money, because it was a win-win situation – they weren’t going to lose any money if the people defaulted on their loan. So that was the beginning of the project, and we spent off and on months researching that, and Don and I found that we had many things in common. One is we spent many years in the business where we were sometimes frustrated by not being able to look deeply enough into a topic, and that project gave us the opportunity to do that. We also saw how very often public programs run off the tracks, and this was a perfect example of that. We also had, I think, a sense of fairness, that we were very similar in that sense. We decried the kinds of inequities that you saw both in public policy and with what was going on in the community that we were covering. So all of those things brought us together with a certain similarity of interest. People say, ‘would one of you write, the other report?’ Well, one of the reasons we think the partnership lasted as long as it did was that we each did everything. We each loved to report, and I’ve often said jokingly, neither one of us particularly liked writing, but most people don’t like to write. It’s just so awfully hard. Reporting and research is just so much fun. But that’s to me, normal, so we’re very similar in that sense. And at the end of that project, which we thought it would just be the only time he and I would ever work together, we sort of looked at each other said, ‘Well, gee, that kind of worked, didn’t it?’ And nobody ever came along and said, ‘You were a team, my sons,’ or anything like that. They just kept proposing projects for the next 40 years.
Timmermans: So you say that you and Don both like to do everything. How do you divide up the work? How do you organize in that?
Steele: When we started, and this evolved over time and as it evolved, we never began any project by calling somebody, and that has been another sort of pillar in our approach to these projects. You begin by reading. You read everything you can about the project. Even start with secondary sources to see what’s been done. And then after that, you start looking at official documents. It could be a congressional testimony, it could be a state agency, it could be a city council report – whatever it is. You find out what’s written about, what somebody says exists, to see what the lay of the land is.
There are two reasons for that, in my mind. One is, you school yourself, and what’s there you sort of know then some of the questions to ask once you start interviewing people. And the greatest thing that I think documents give you in that start is that then you know when somebody is lying to you – and in some cases, they’re not lying, in some cases people just don’t know what they’re talking about. And I think in some ways it’s more of that than anything else, they’re so used to providing an answer, sometimes, particularly to electronic media. I mean, the person, the reporter, sticks their microphone in somebody’s face and asks the question. The person ignores it. The guy, turns around, says, ‘Well, there you have it.’ Of course, you didn’t have it. So documents, records, give you a schooling, a foundation, to know a little bit about the topic, to know what to ask, and to know whether people know what they’re talking about, and also to know the areas to move it. And what we would find out: I would see an area that fascinated me, Don would see an area that fascinated him, and then we would each start following those areas, and that would sometimes then divide up into specific parts of a multi-part series.
Or if it was one big story, it would be parts within that story. And that person would follow that area, that subject area, all the way through, down to the interviews. And then we would kick it over to the other person say, ‘Okay, I’ve written this now. What do you think?’ And that person would then put their two cents in it. Say, ‘there’s something you forgot that works perfectly here. So let’s put that in here.’ So that was the partnership before we ever turned it into anybody. I mean, we edited each other quite significantly before anybody else saw the work. And that was the heart of it. We each did the reporting. We each did the writing. We edited each other before we ever turned anything in. And you know, what really bothered us from the beginning with so much of journalism, and still does, to some extent, is how little perspective, how little range is in so many stories. There may be a wonderful anecdote, but is that all there is? Is this related to something larger than that? Give me a bigger picture about this thing you’re writing about, so I can kind of understand what this is, what’s going on here. So from the very beginning, we felt very strongly about that, and we would find wonderful examples of people who had done bad things – or good things, both sides of the run – but we tried to relate these things to the larger issue involved there, whatever that industry was, whatever that corporation was, whatever that government program was that had been driven off the rails for the wrong reasons. We tried to look at the big picture as to what all of this meant.
Timmermans: And how it affects people.
Steele: Absolutely, exactly. We tried in almost every story to have that human component. When we wrote America: What Went Wrong for the Philadelphia Inquirer back in the early 70s about what was happening to middle-class Americans, that story dealt with the broader currents of taxation, corporate debt, things of that sort. But it also went down to the lower level, to the lowest level to showing human beings who had been affected by those policies. And that’s the thing we also tried to do when it was feasible, to just show that there’s a human consequence to these things that have happened, and here they are, meet them.
Timmermans: And the people that are involved in making these decisions and running these companies, running governments, they’re human too.
Steele: Absolutely.
Timmermans: What do you say to someone who is intimidated by interviewing Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, or has an interview with the finance minister of Japan?
Steele: Right, well, that’s a very good question. And in a lot of the teaching and mentoring I do today with younger journalists, I get that question, because interviewing is an unnatural act. I mean, you’re injecting yourself into somebody’s life or their professional life. They’re busy on a whole range of other things. I mean, some people obviously want to talk to you, but I’m talking about the ones that don’t. How do you deal with that? And I made a lot of mistakes as a young reporter, because I would sometimes come right up to somebody and just hit them with a question, and basically they would either just freeze me out or walk away. And I realized later, you see the same kind of thing on TV today, on some of the news programs, where suddenly somebody is hit with that question, and they blurt out something, and the average young journalist says, ‘Wow, that’s the way to do it.’ Well, that’s not the way to do it. What you need with most interviews is you need to walk people into this process. You need to find out a little bit about them. Talking is almost like a muscle, and you just get people going. And if it’s somebody in such and such office – How long have you been here? How has it grown? What attracted you to this field? Where were you before this? – You have to get people talking in a whole range of ways so that they’re more comfortable talking to you before you lead up to some of these questions that may be difficult questions. So interviewing is its own art. And the other good thing, there’s a lot of great really books out there and journalism about interviewing that, again, didn’t exist when I started out, and none of the seasoned reporters in my first paper put their arm around me and said, ‘Jim, this is the way you do this. You don’t just go up and hit that guy between the eyes and expect him to talk to you like I did.’
Timmermans: Well, now I know how to interview you, this is great. This is very helpful. [laughs]
Steele: Exactly, exactly. But where were you when I needed you back then? [laughs] But again, now there’s a lot of training, and there’s a lot of stuff written about this in a way that really didn’t exist then.
Timmermans: Is there one book or piece of journalism that really made a huge difference to you personally in terms of your craft and your career?
Steele: I think that’s a good question. I don’t think there’s one. I think a whole series of things over time, the Investigative Reporter’s and Editor’s Handbook remains I think pretty good. A wonderful book on numbers by Sarah Cohen, who was with IRE and is on the faculty of faculty at Cronkite, coincidentally, her book on numbers is still to this day an excellent primer to understanding that. And I think anybody interested in business journalism should read that one, because it’s very lucid and very clear. And I think, really, I don’t think many things come along that’s done that any better than she did. So there are a whole range of things like that. The other thing I tell people, and – this isn’t my quote, it’s William Faulkner’s quote – because writing, and whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you’re a carpenter, you’re trying to learn how to do something. And Faulkner had a great line. He said, when people ask him how to be a writer, what to do, he said, ‘Read, read, read, read the good stuff, read the bad stuff. Be a carpenter and try to see how things are done,’ and that’s never changed. And again, as part of this golden age, I’m talking about, any young journalist today can go online and look at everything from the Pulitzer Prizes to the Barlett and Steele Awards now to investigative reporters and editors to a whole range of contests. And you can go to the links that show you what these winning entries were and what the runner-up entries were, and you can see how people do certain things. Doesn’t mean you copy them, but the best writers and the best reporters all learn from each other. Everybody learns from each other, and you just see how things are done to develop your craft. So that’s the other great thing I tell people, there’s no one book on anything, but just see how other things, how they put it together. You know, what was this process like? And you learn, I think more that way than maybe any single thing.
Timmermans: What did the Barlett and Steele Awards mean? What is their purpose and why are they important?
Steele: Well, needless to say, we’ve always been deeply honored about the creation of these awards, because from the very beginning, they were to mirror the kind of reporting that Don and I thought was so important and which we tried to achieve, which is in-depth reporting. So much reporting, so much in journalism, all media is, frankly, truncated. Almost every topic Don and I delved into over the years had previously been somewhere in the news, and that’s the thing I tell people. People say, ‘where do you get your ideas?’ They’re all around you. Just watch television, listen to the radio, look at documentaries, read magazines, newspapers – the subjects are all there. There’s no mystery about them. But give us more than that. Look more deeply. Tell us why this happened. Tell me something I don’t know. That’s what’s so important about the awards and year in and year out, that’s what they achieve. And I never cease to be amazed every year when I see what the winners are, when I see what the runner-ups were, all of these subscribe to that basic philosophy. Because many of these topics have actually appeared in the press in one way or another, but these stories go beyond that. They delve much deeper into it. They show you the nuances. They show you the subtle things about how a government has failed to enforce things here, or how there’s some other failing in our society, in our governmental setup, that is failing the public. And almost all of these do have that public quotient. I mean, that’s what we as journalists are all about: We are serving the public. We are telling them something they don’t know, giving them the tools to change something, to show that something needs to be changed or corrected. Enlighten them in a way that conventional stuff has not been able to do.
[Outro Music]
