Steve Coll Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk a little about investigative journalism. How would you characterize that kind of work?
That's a good question. What I tell my colleagues at the Post these days is that an investigative reporter ought to be doing, first of all, the stories that other people don't do, won't do. You have to walk away from the crowd first. Second, you have to think about classes of vulnerable people who are not otherwise having their questions and concerns addressed in our society. Who are those people? Who is standing unspoken for, and what concerns can an investigative reporter look into that would be of public interest? This usually involves investigating the exercise of power of some sort -- not always, but it may involve typically governmental power. It can also, increasingly in our society, involve corporate power. You have to keep querying your subject matter from these points of view.
The other thing that investigative reporters can do, should do, that other journalists don't have the time or the resources or the support to do, is to take on the most difficult subjects, the hard targets that require time and persistence in order to break them down. That can involve interviewing, persistent interviewing, but it may also involve taking advantage of our open society's habits of record keeping and pushing into public records documents and data to see patterns or to reveal abuses.
So, it sounds like, when we're doing a skill inventory here, you need patience, you need perseverance, you need to be a digger, so to speak.
You do. There are lots of different kinds of successful investigative reporters, I've learned over the years. They tend, as a group, to be kind of iconoclastic, not always the easiest people in the world to manage. They're very passionate about their work when they're good. Many of them also are just patient and persistent and determined to get to the bottom of things, driven to get to the bottom of things. In terms of skill sets these days, in journalism I think one of the most neglected opportunities, even outside of long, persistent investigations, is the use of public records and publicly available data to clarify or hold to account the actions of governments or corporations. We live in a society -- and I know this now from having worked in a lot of countries around the world -- that makes available an extraordinary amount of material about the way governmental power is exercised, but you have to go dig it out. It's not offered up in the course of an ordinary day at the newspaper; you've got to go to courthouses, you've got to go to real estate records. These days, with the amount of material that is digitally available and available through the Web or Web equivalent sources, you can use computers to clarify the world we live in, in ways that were not possible when I was starting out in this field.
It sounds also like you need a hypothesis or a theory -- or does that come after you've dug into the information that's out there? One of the problems we're confronting now is that there's so much information. How do you see what is important and what you need to emphasize?
It's a good question. I think it goes back to these broader principles that you have to wrestle with in this field. One is, who's the victim, what problem are you addressing, and is this a problem that other people are neglecting that matters? What can you report about that nobody else is reporting about, that also matters? I look, for instance, at vulnerable populations: mentally ill, people who are disenfranchised in one capacity or another, people who are dependent on government or corporations, that class of vulnerable populations, however you define it. It may just be people who live exposed to toxic environments, or in the developing world, refugees, stateless populations, migrants, the disenfranchised. Vulnerable populations can be very broadly defined, but that's a place to begin because there's usually sound journalism to be done someplace in their midst. If you stand in their shoes and look out at the world that they experience, and ask how is this world coming at this vulnerable population, what are its obligations, and then how is it actually delivering the services or the responsibilities that it's charged to deliver, there are usually some useful questions that journalists can ask from that posture.
Another thing to ask is what exactly are powerful decision makers doing outside of public view? You can ask that question about governments at every level. Some government is fairly transparent. Much of government is not transparent and it requires journalism to make it transparent. Otherwise, it simply would not be. Occasionally, opposition political parties or others can make government transparent when it wouldn't otherwise be, but journalists have an important role to play. You have also private power, which is often more difficult to penetrate from a journalist's posture because a determined corporation that simply doesn't want to make its work known can shut down some of the avenues that investigative reporters normally rely upon; but that just calls for all the more persistence and clarity of thought.
It sounds like, as one gets into this process, interviewing must really be important, that is, finding the right people, talking to them, having them trust you to give their account of the story, whatever it is.
Yes, it often is crucial. It's very interesting: if you sat around a table at the Post with, say, our ten most accomplished investigative reporters and you asked them, how important is public records work, how important are documents, how important is interviewing, you would hear ten different versions of the answers. Each reporter has their own experience and their own strength and methodology.
Bob Woodward, for instance, is all about interviewing. He famously says, "Don't waste your time with documents. Someone you interview will give you a useful document, maybe, but don't circle around your subject, go right at the principals. Go to the principals and try to pick their pockets. Just go up and push through the front door." That's his approach. It's been very successful for him. Of course, he has a leverage and a profile that many of his colleagues don't enjoy. It's not so easy to call up Cabinet members if you're not Bob Woodward and say, "I would like an interview, please."
On the other hand, we have very successful investigative reporters in our shop and elsewhere who have developed a method for working from the ground up that starts with documents, and then the documents lead to interviewing, and the interviewing leads back to public records, and so there's kind of a ping-pong effect. But in both methods, interviewing is absolutely crucial. You have to come at it from lots of different angles simultaneously. There's no single needle to thread.
Now you, most recently, were Managing Editor of the Washington Post. What is the most difficult aspect of that job? You're essentially orchestrating not only investigative reporters but also the whole symphony orchestra, so to speak.
Yes. The hardest thing is using an office like that to create great journalism, which is the goal, after all. You can do that by protecting and creating space for great journalism, making sure that people who are driven to do work that matters have the space and the resources and the support that they need to get to the end of their work, and that they're thinking ambitiously, and that they're not being cut off early, and so on. So that, I always thought, was the most important thing that I could do with that office, because ultimately people will answer to your office if you insist, "Let's keep going, let's keep pushing."
The hardest thing, though, in a room the size of the Washington Post, with 800 journalists, is having enough contact with all of the different sources of potential in the newsroom, all of the reporters, all of their ideas, all of their sense of what's possible, so that you can help them get to the work that matters and push past the routine and the convenient, and the rest of it. In a big organization with so many people, and a big, old, fat newspaper to put out every day, it's hard to keep the conversation about the work that matters alive in people's daily experience. It's a grinding and demanding profession that can lead a lot of people just to say, well, good enough is good enough, let's move on now.
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