Investigative Reporting Resources

Mark Horvit – Executive Director, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.
Sure. I think the key is the depth at which the reporting goes, and the fact that the reporter is looking to uncover information that otherwise wouldn't be available to the public, or that somebody in government, in business, somewhere in the system would rather the public did not know. So it's the idea of taking a story—it doesn't have to be—it can be in depth, it doesn't have to—it doesn't have to take a long time to do. The projects can be big, they can be small to my way of thinking, but what signals true investigative reporting is digging to find information that people need and that they otherwise wouldn't have access to.

George Kennedy
Do investigative reporters always seek to turn up evidence of criminality?

Mark Horvit
Not necessarily. I mean exposing wrong doing is an essential tenant of journalism of course, and of investigative reporting. But sometimes good investigative reporting can shine more light on a situation, can give context or meaning to a situation that it didn't already have, can give the fuller picture of things. So while oftentimes looking for cases of wrongdoing is at the heart of investigative reporting and many times if journalists don't do it, nobody will, but that doesn't mean it's the only way a reporter can go to provide that sort of depth that people need.

George Kennedy
I've heard it said that all reporters, at least all good reporters, are investigative reporters, is that true?

Mark Horvit
Well, that's exactly right, and I think so. And that's why I tried to say earlier that being an investigative reporter doesn't mean that you take six months to do a story, or that the project that results could fill several phone books. The idea is more—part of it’s a mindset. It's having that state of mind that makes you ask for the document that proves what people are saying; that makes you get the data that backs up what someone's pointing out; that makes you dig beneath the surface to see, is what they're telling me and what they're telling the public really true? Is this the way things really are, and then asking the question, is this the way things should be? And if not, why are they this way? And that could be-- you can have a really aggressive good beat reporter who's doing investigative reporting all the time because of the way they dig in and the way they cover their beat.

George Kennedy
Okay, that sounds important. It also sounds pretty difficult. How does one get to be an investigative reporter anyway?

Mark Horvit
Well, again, it goes a little bit to what you asked earlier. To be an investi—I feel like for most of my own career I was a beat reporter. I was on projects teams a couple of times, but my mindset never really changed, and I think that's true for a lot of journalists. It's as much how you approach the job as anything and I don't believe—it's not more difficult than other kind of reporting, sometimes it takes drive, it takes sort of having that doggedness that you're not just going to accept the quick answer, but you're going to keep looking. But it's not so much—there are skills you can learn, absolutely, there are skills that some reporters have that are essential to doing this kind of work, but as much as anything it's a desire to know, a desire to tell people what they need to know and sort of the refusal to take no for an answer.

George Kennedy
One of the things that has changed about journalism, certainly in the last few years, is the technology. How much has the rise of the computer, the use of databases, the ubiquitous nature of the internet, how much has that affected investigative journalism?

Mark Horvit
Well, I think it's affected journalism period. It's provided new tools for reporters and for investigative reporters. Computer assisted reporting is something that's been around for several years, and all that really means is using computer programs to get data, to analyze it, to look at numbers, to once again dig beneath the surface and see, they're telling me this is true, I want to look at these numbers for myself and see is it really so. The internet has revolutionized things for reporters, just as it has for everybody else. It is so much easier now to get government documents, to background individuals, to look into connections between people. If you know how to use the web as a reporting tool, it opens up all sorts of avenues that we didn't have several years ago.

George Kennedy
Investigative reporting can be done, I gather, at newspapers, broadcast stations, or probably by individual bloggers.

Mark Horvit
Oh absolutely, absolutely. The size of the organization doesn't really matter. For example, this year the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism was won by a young journalist at a small newspaper in Bristol, Virginia, who saw a problem in his community, learned the skills and the training to look into what he needed to look into, spent his time while he was doing his regular beat and regular reporting, and ended up digging up a story that made a huge difference in his community and won a Pulitzer Prize. So it's not about the size of the organization you work for, it's really about, again, it's about the mindset of the reporter, the willingness to learn the skills that you need to find information, and then the doggedness to continue until you get what you need.

George Kennedy
Excellent. I introduced you at the beginning of this chat as Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., so maybe I ought to ask you, what is IRE anyway, and why should a journalism student for instance, care?

Mark Horvit
Oh absolutely. IRE is a membership organization. It's been around more than 35 years. We've got several thousand journalists who are members in the US and around the world, and those are investigative reporters, they're beat reporters, they're bloggers, they're broadcast journalists, print journalists and many student journalists. What we have is we provide-- we provide training in many of the skills we've been talking about. We also have many resources available to our members on our website and other places that can allow you to do in depth journalism more quickly, more efficiently, and better. And so a lot of students are members of IRE because, for example, if they get a new beat at the student paper, they're going to tackle a story for an internship, or for an assignment for class, they can come to our website and instantly get a tip sheet, for example, that tells them how to look into the criminal justice system or how to look into disaster or something along those lines, what to do when a plane crashes if you're trying to find information on deadline, all those sorts of things. So it allows you to do your job more quickly and more in-depth by relying on the expertise that hundreds and hundreds of journalists have voluntarily given to be shared over the years.

George Kennedy
Mark, thank you very much.

Mark Horvit
Thanks.

George Kennedy
That IRE website once again is www.ire.org