Turning your investigations into books

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2004 by Weinberg, Steve

Writing a book has been - and always will be- the ultimate goal for some IRE members.

Still, it's not always an easy task. For those in newsrooms, coping with the demands of a full-time job while trying to hammer out a book can be very difficult. For those who freelance, spending months, or even years, on a book, can seriously cut into time needed to finish work for paying clients.

What to do? Many journalists have found the answer to these problems by using material they have already developed for other stories as a jumping-off point for a book. For example, the months spent covering environmental hazards on a beat is terrific fodder for a book, while freelancers can look to magazine pieces as a beginning point for a book.

IRE members seem to have used that strategy well in books this year - some even garnered IRE Awards.

Specifically, an IRE Award went to David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich-and Cheat Everybody Else (Penguin Group), which was developed from his New York Times work. Johnston has covered taxes, nonprofits and other financial-related beats for decades.

Fellow New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton followed a similar path to Johnston's with their City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center (Times Books/Henry Holt). It followed publication of about 200 newspaper pieces in the wake of Sept. 11,2001. Glanz and Lipton thank Times reporters and researchers who helped them with the in-depth story "102 Minutes: Last Words at the Trade Center," which became the core of the book's chapter nine.

In contrast, New York Times editor David Stout wrote a book unconnected to his work at the newspaper - Night of the Devil: The Untold Story of Thomas Trantino and the Angel Lounge Killings (Camino Books). In 1977, Stout accepted a reporting job at the The (Bergen County, NJ.) Record. His coverage area included Lodi, where a convicted murderer, Trantino, remained in the news because of his attempts to win parole and his publicized prison paintings.

Stout found his curiosity tickled, but did not think about writing a book. He departed The Record and had spent 17 years at The New York Times when, unexpectedly, a book publisher approached him about taking another look at the Trantino murder conviction. Intrigued, Stout expressed surprise that nobody had written about the sensational crime.

"There had been so many rumors and myths. And so much time had gone by. Maybe, it was suggested, I could peel away the years to find out what had really happened," Stout recalled

Todd Oppenheimer, a San Francisco freelancer, started with a magazine assignment about changes in the ways schools instructed students. The assignment came from William Whitworth al The Atlantic Monthly. Six years later, Oppenheimer completed the book version, The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can be Saved (Random House), an IRE finalist this year. Jonathan Karp recognized the value of expanding the magazine feature into a book. Interestingly, Karp is one of the relatively few book editors from a major publishing house who has worked as an investigative journalist - at The Miami Herald and Providence Journal.

Like print journalists, broadcast journalists can turn their daily reporting into books. Carolyn Johnsen of Nebraska Public Radio began covering the swine industry in 1997.

"On a beat that encompassed both agriculture and the environment, I naturally paid attention to the growing storm in the countryside," she says.

At a town hall meeting in Crete, Neb., she found "the lines were clearly drawn between those who saw opportunity in factory-like hog production and those who predicted the death of the family farm and the contamination of precious air and water."

Even after airing more than 100 stories, Johnsen wanted to continue: "It became clear to me that there was much more to the story than was possible to tell in 10 or 100 five-minute radio reports," leading to Raising a Stink: The Struggle Over Factory Farms (Univeristy of Nebraska Press).

Johnsen wanted not only to learn what she could when unhampered by daily deadlines, but also "to create a permanent record."

That permanent record would encompass more far-reaching issues than Johnsen could have imagined.

It is "a struggle pitting property rights against the right to clean air and water, about rural people's desire to protect their way of life from the impact of big pork producers seizing an opportunity for profit, and about policymakers coming to terms with the need to regulate one of the state's most important economic sectors."

Writing a book allowed Johnsen to transcend "referee journalism, where reporters merely give equal space to the sides of an issue - a 'he said, she said' approach to reporting. Instead, I was interested in using narrative techniques to trace the history and progress of the story, including the incremental decisions that led to where Nebraska is today.'"