I love investigative journalism. Dare I say, learning about its nuts and bolts makes my heart beat faster. Here's a great lecture Steve Coll gave about his journalistic approach. Take notes. "How to Investigate a Closed Corporation"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50eCHCaKNqY
You gotta give credit where it's due, and today it's the New York Post. The paper dug up something interesting about a relatively minor Bronx politician and Albanian organized crime. Two guys who donated a few thousand bucks to Bronx Assemblyman Mark Gjonaj's political campaign in January landed under indictment this summer. The pair, Xhevat Gocaj and Martin Shkreli (no, not the infamous jerk. He apparently has a namesake.) were named in a federal indictment in July for money laundering, drug dealing, and arms sales--we're talking anti-tank rocket launchers and machine guns.
According to the Post article, the two were working at the behest of a guy named Andre Veliu. Veliu allegedly told people that his cousin was Alex Rudaj. I wonder if they actually are cousins.
Rudaj is supposedly the godfather of Albanian organized crime in New York. Sure looks interesting.
Sunshine Week is upon us. Perhaps you've never heard of it. It celebrates the public's right to know what the government does in its name. In honor of the week, The Center for Responsive Politics, which runs OpenSecrets.org, has posted a new database online: Foreign Lobby Watch.
Back in 1938, the U.S. Congress passed a law that required people and organizations who received foreign governmental funds to report the particulars of what they were doing for their clients. to the U.S. Justice Department. That means that, if Russia hired a DC lobbying firm, the firm would have to tell the Justice Department exactly what it was doing for the Russians. The law, called FARA, was supposedly a response to Nazi propaganda in the U.S.
Good use of this database could reveal some meaty stories hidden in plain sight. Open Secrets has published some interesting tidbits already, for instance, An Egyptian intelligence agency hired public relations firms Weber Shandwick and Cassidy & Associates to improve its image.
The Center for Responsive Politics is now working on a second phase of the project, that will add functionality and allow users to connect the data to other datasets.
At seven o’clock last Thursday, a clerk planted two bottles—one Coca-Cola, one water—on the table of a stage on the third floor of The Strand Bookstore. Five or so minutes later Gay Talese strode in through the back entrance, dressed as usual in a hand-tailored suit. He walked on stage and sat down to chat with the evening’s moderator, Robert Boyton. The next hour flew by. Talese wrote what many regard as the greatest long-form magazine article of all time, “Frank Sinatra has a cold,” published in Esquire in 1966. But Talese didn’t stop there, he published a slew of other exceptional pieces. He was at The Strand to promote a new collection of his stories: “High Notes.”
But he needed little prompting to expound to a rapt audience of 50 or so about the craft of journalism. I sat in the crowd, furiously scribbling notes into my reporter’s pad. Here are some of the highlights, but they’re not verbatim, and there are a bunch of stories he recounted and advice he gave that I don’t mention:
-In talking to people, you have to know how to get the door open, how to knock and make people feel okay enough to initially crack open the door. Then you’ve got to know how to make your pitch. To that end, he thinks about why he wants to know what they do. He ends up telling them, “I think what you do is representative of the time,” and explains why he thinks so. Maybe the person isn’t famous, but they represent values other people say and think.
-A good reporter has to have genuine curiosity, and ask himself, how am I different from the people I’m writing about. It’s paramount to try to understand people and see things from their point of view. You’ve got to think: how did they grow up? Where did they come from? Unfortunately, he said, he doesn’t see that happening so much anymore. Later on, he referenced how the American media covers Vladimir Putin, who Talese thinks has been somewhat demonized.
-He wondered aloud how freelancers earn a living nowadays. When he reported, “the Frank Sinatra piece,” as he called it, he stayed in a luxurious hotel for 33 days and ran up an expense account of $3,000. And this was in the ‘60s. He also dished out that, until he landed back in New York, he didn’t think that not talking to Sinatra would actually make for a better story.
-“You need a storytelling mentality,” he said. In his case, it came from reading John Cheever stories, “somewhere between high school and college.” Talese wanted to write non-fiction short stories, scenically, dramatically.
-His father’s hometown in Calabria, the region that occupies the toe of the Italian boot, left a deep impression on him when, as a young man in the army, he went to visit. “It was 1955, but it could’ve been 1555,” he said. Farm animals wandered into the houses and lived beside the town’s inhabitants in abject poverty. And he and some of these people shared a surname. His father never returned to the town once he’d left.
The town sprouted out of the side of a mountain, and mules were the only transport. Many of the town’s residents had no idea what life was like beyond the next village. And, he recollected, there he stood, wearing an American military uniform that he didn’t feel entirely comfortable in. “I saw myself as a farmer, as a guy whose father didn’t make a nine-day boat trip,” he said.
-Next, he was onto his reporting process. He begins by trying to make himself and the other person both feel comfortable. He compared it to a first date, saying, “I want to know that person, but without interviewing.” Rather than get a specific answer to a specific question, he’d rather have a sense of the person. He doesn’t parachute in and out, he sticks around. “You’re not going to get everything you want on the first try,” he told the audience.
-He always feels a responsibility toward the people he’s writing about. He always tries to act respectfully and to never knowingly do anyone any harm. He doesn’t like, “gotcha journalism.” People, he explained, can be easily misunderstood or say something they don’t mean. So you’ve got to ask yourself, “did I treat them right?”
-Toward the end of the hour, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cardboard sleeve. He had jotted down the name of a young reporter who had just written a long piece in The New York Times. He would’ve proud of the piece, he said, had it been his. He implored the crowd to check out the article, written by Caitlin Dickerson.
-A young journalist asked him about confidence: How do you get it? “You get to be confident because you are satisfied you did your best,” Talese replied. “What gives me confidence and satisfaction is that I never did anything that I was ashamed of. I always felt I had to be honorable about my work.”
“If you believe you’ve done your best, and that doesn’t give you confidence, nothing will,” Talese said. What a quote to end the night.