The keys to high-impact reporting are collaborating on impactful project stories and promoting them in the right channels, according to panelists at a recent webinar hosted by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW).
The session featured the journalists behind some of SABEW’s 2024 Best in Business award-winning stories: Danielle Ivory of the New York Times, Maddy Simpson of the St. Louis Business Journal, and Brittany Wallman and Ben Wieder of the Miami Herald. Scott Wenger, the World Bank Group’s senior economics editor, moderated.
“We don’t really see journalism as a lone wolf expedition,” Ivory said. “The best projects that I’ve worked on have all been like team sports, where you have a lot of people and a lot of brains that all look at the world in different ways and different skill sets and different talents, and the stories are better as a result.”
Coordinating across departments
The panelists discussed how they approached working with colleagues to deliver stories.
Ivory and fellow New York Times reporter Steve Eder first started digging into staffing agencies acting as middlemen between migrant workers and the corporate world. They talked to an advocate who said another New York Times journalist, Marcela Valdes, spoke to the advocate a year earlier about the same topic.
Ivory and Eder did not know Valdes previously because she was a reporter for the New York Times Magazine, a separate entity from the New York Times newsroom, but they reached out to her and got her on board.
“Steve and I were pretty much on the same page about wanting to work with Marcela from the get go,” Ivory said. “We just arranged the reporting so that she could continue working on the stories that she was already assigned.”
Figuring out whether the “Migrant Pipeline” investigation would be a magazine or newspaper story was the next challenge, requiring Ivory’s editor and Valdes’s editor to talk to each other.
“I kind of think of all of it as one body of work, even though some of it was in the newspaper and some of it was in the magazine,” Ivory said. “We just felt that they worked better as newspaper stories, just the way that they were constructed.”
Reporters Ben Wieder and Brittany Wallman of the Miami Herald worked together for the first time on their award-winning investigation “Rigged” and said their “complementary strengths” helped them collaborate.
Wallman explained that building the right team unexpectedly helped her land an interview with the “fraudster” attorney Brad Ira Schandler, whose manipulation of the court system lies at the heart of the investigation.
Wallman took the Miami Herald photographer Al Diaz with her to the auction, having no expectations of being able to interview Schandler because he had been avoiding her.
“But when he saw Al Diaz, he instantly was like, ‘You’re Al Diaz. You shoot the photos for the Miami Dolphins,’” Wallman said. “He was like, starstruck with our photographer, and he said that if I would bring Al with me after the auction, he would sit down for an interview.”
Working in a 10-person newsroom like the St. Louis Business Journal means having fewer departments and resources, but Simpson said she clues in the photographer and graphic designers early to help brainstorm the best ways to present a story.
“In a newsroom like ours, it can be easy to, you know, just go with the weekly process of like, okay, here’s the story, here’s the data, blah, blah, blah,” Simpson said. “But when you include people much earlier thean they have the opportunity to really take ownership and start thinking about the best way to present it.”
Leveraging social media to reach wider audiences
Ivory’s reporting partner filmed a vertical video to help readers digest the story as part of the New York Times’ push to create video content that could be easily shared on TikTok and Instagram.
“All these things are sort of part of the normal process for us in investigations,” she said. “The idea behind it is to reach a greater audience of people, people who would like to consume news through video, people who are already consuming news through video on other platforms.”
For the Miami Herald investigation, Wallman reluctantly filmed a video for TikTok and Instagram, acknowledging the importance of visuals to capturing readers.
“If I’m asked, then I will be dragged in front of the camera,” she said. “But in general, my thought on the visuals and social media is I think the more the better, especially with the visuals, because it sends a cue also to the reader that this is something that we have invested in. This is something that we consider important.”
Wieder noted that Instagram is particularly popular in Miami, so posting news content on there draws a wider audience than the typical Miami Herald readership.
“We probably hit people on Instagram that aren’t necessarily going to go to our website,” he said. “We generally have a fairly hard pay wall on our website, and so it’s a way to kind of get the stories out to an audience that maybe aren’t already subscribers.”
Simpson said her colleagues hop on the St. Louis Business Journal’s podcast to discuss their reporting as an alternative way to engage with audiences, and the newsroom shares stories on Facebook and LinkedIn.
“I’m not really in charge of analyzing reader engagement numbers, but I do know that some of the stories that I won the award for were shared widely on LinkedIn,” she said.
Wieder observed that the “trail of impact” of his investigation with Wallman helped the Miami Herald write follow-up pieces that gained even more traffic on social media than the initial story.
“Some of the follow-ups sometimes get vastly more traffic than the initial story,” he said. “It’s an argument for continuing to track a story, and treating each of those follow-ups as not just kind of checking off a box, but as an opportunity to engage with someone who hasn’t seen this story in the first place.”
The panelists also discussed how winning awards like the Best in Business helps stories become visible to stakeholders who can tackle the problems, but also helps newsrooms justify their existence amidst funding cuts.
“Great content can take care of itself, and if you’ve got the great content, that’s truly what wins the awards,” concluded Wenger, the moderator.
