The Importance of Investigative Reporting

Business journalist Jesse Eisinger, who won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for his work for ProPublica, was interviewed by Morgan Watkins of Quill magazine about his reporting tactics and the importance of investigative journalism.

Here are some excerpts:

How have public records helped you in your work?

I don’t do a lot of reporting on government, so I haven’t done a lot of public records requests and things like that. I rely a lot on SEC filings, so to some extent that’s a public record of a company — a regulatory mandate to put information out. And those are valuable. We need those. We need them to be clear and transparent, and they could be better, but they’re very good. I think everybody needs documents, and those are the ones that I rely on.

Have you ever faced roadblocks in getting people to talk to you about sensitive information, and how do you overcome them?

You find roadblocks all the time. You don’t overcome it. You call someone many, many times and you email them and you contact them through social media … and they either talk or they don’t. I try to convince people that I’m willing to hear them out, to listen to them, to be extremely fair and accurate, to strive for accuracy as my highest goal. That I’m not just there for the cheap quote or quick hit, but I’m really there to do right by them. I’m very clear and up front with people, and I lay out what I’m working on very clearly to them. I have an excess of disclosure and explanation of what I’m doing with them to reassure them that I’m serious and careful. And I think that persuades people. I think that they have a bad idea of what journalists are up to, and if you emphasize and then show them that you are extremely careful and you want to be fair and accurate, I think that builds trust with them even if they know that you’ve got evidence of things that don’t make them look good.