Report Accurate Stories With Sources, Documents, Interviews and Writing

Accurate reporting rests on three kinds of evidence that check one another. The first is people who saw or took part in events. The second is the documents they left behind, and the third is your own visit to the scene. With patience and fair interviewing, they give you the best obtainable version of the truth (the most accurate account that can actually be established), even about powerful people.

How to Build a Story on Evidence That Holds Up

• Start every assignment with a written list of about twenty people who witnessed or took part in what happened.
• Ask every source for the memo, the notes or the tape behind what they remember.
• Go to the scene yourself, because a visit can correct what sources and paperwork got wrong.
• Keep political opinion out of your stories and your conversations with sources, so readers trust your facts.
• Put your toughest question in the middle of an interview, then let silence draw out the rest.
• Test every theory of a story against common sense before you commit to it in print.
• Correct your mistakes openly and quickly, in a plain and apologetic tone.

Why Power and Surprise Make the Strongest Stories

The strongest stories show how people with authority use their power and how they abuse it. A small local tip works the same way as a national scandal. If someone reports that the city is repaving the mayor's driveway, you find the paving company, learn who ordered the job and who paid, take photographs, and put the question to the mayor. If the mayor approved the work at public expense, you have a concrete case of public power used for private benefit.

Surprise is the second mark of a great story. Editors at The Washington Post (a daily newspaper in the United States) called these bacon cooler stories, pieces so gripping that a reader at breakfast forgets the bacon on the fork until it goes cold. Being ready to drop a planned story matters too. A reporter sent to Libya to interview Muammar Gaddafi (the country's ruler at the time) slipped out of a guarded hotel and learned that two students had been hanged for writing slogans against him. That discovery showed readers that dissent there was not merely impossible but fatal, which mattered far more than any interview.

How Neutrality Earns Readers' Trust

Readers trust fact-based reporting when they can see it is not a crusade. Reporters who investigate facts and then offer political verdicts on television make readers wonder whether the digging was driven by opinion. The fix is to leave crusades to the editorial page and bleach personal opinion out of both the written story and every conversation with sources. During Watergate, the two lead reporters avoided even saying the word impeachment in their newsroom for about a year, so colleagues would not think they were campaigning.

Be the same person to every source. Mocking a leader to one person and praising that leader to another leaves both unsure where you stand. Good newspaper work often means going your own way in the field. Push hard for information, but never break the law.

Finding Sources Who Will Help You

Most people will talk to a reporter, because they like to talk and want their own side known. The work is reaching them. Start with a written list of about twenty people who witnessed or took part in the events, then build outward from whoever could have seen what happened. Establish quickly what each person actually knows and how they know it, which saves you from chasing theories with no basis.

Starting at the bottom often works best, because the reason to conceal grows with rank. Interview a mayor's aides first and learn the budget and the pressures, and the aides will often tell the mayor he might as well talk to you. Sources rarely volunteer, so recruit them with private numbers and patient follow-up. Telling people you need their help to get the facts right produces cooperation that surprises most new reporters.

Using Ground Rules to Protect Sources

Clear ground rules let people tell you things safely. On the record means the person is named with their position. Background means the information can be used with a loose description, such as a well-placed official. Deep background means you may use the information to shape the story but attribute it to no one at all.

Unnamed sources place the duty of checking squarely on the reporter, which is why careful reporters often get better information from them. Protecting identity can mean meeting in parks, using throwaway phones and encryption, and telling nobody except perhaps one editor. The Watergate source known as Deep Throat (a secret informant inside the FBI) was protected until he chose to come forward in 2005. That record later reassured other sources that their names would also be kept safe.

Getting the Documents Behind Every Story

Almost every significant story has a document somewhere behind it, whether a memo, a set of notes, tax records or a diary. Documents matter even more when many readers distrust the news, because paper shows exactly what happened. Most documents arrive because a reporter asks. When someone recounts a meeting, ask whether notes, a tape or a memo exists, and explain that you want the account to be exactly right.

Paper and people belong together, because a person almost always provides the document. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act (a law giving public access to US government records) can help. One set took 20 or 25 years and came back heavily redacted. Keeping your own files in date order matters just as much. Memory is unreliable. A former court clerk once swore on his children's lives he had never apologised for a draft, until a copy of his own handwritten apology arrived.

Going to the Scene Yourself

Direct observation is the third layer of verification. It catches errors that sources and paperwork miss. A health inspection report once gave the Mayflower Coffee Shop (a restaurant in Washington) the worst score in decades of records. A short walk to the famous Mayflower Hotel (a landmark hotel nearby) showed it had no coffee shop at all. The report's address belonged to the Statler Hilton (a different hotel), whose coffee shop shared the name. The story was corrected before it blamed the wrong business.

Preparing Interviews That Get Real Answers

Take people as seriously as they take themselves. Arrive knowing their current work and even an article they wrote twenty years ago, cited by page, so they can see you have done the research. Long, specific written questions sent in advance let staff dig out the records, and they never stop you asking something new. Choose a quiet setting, identify yourself honestly, and never record anyone in secret.

During the interview, follow a timeline of the key turning points, because people live their lives in date order and it helps them place themselves. Keep a quiet face and never nod at something you believe is untrue. Put the hardest question in the middle, reached through context rather than hostility. Then stay quiet after an answer, because the urge to fill a silence often draws out the most revealing part.

When a subject says something that seems wrong, present the contradicting evidence instead of calling it a lie, which keeps the conversation open. Judge an interview by its transcript. A charming subject can feel important in person and read as empty once typed up.

Testing Your Theory Against Common Sense

A theory of the case (a reporter's working view of where a story is heading) is useful until you become wedded to it. Certainty is no protection. In 1974, President Gerald Ford (Nixon's successor) pardoned Richard Nixon (the president who resigned over Watergate). The reporters who had covered Watergate saw a corrupt deal. Twenty-five years later, Ford explained that he had rejected an offer of a pardon in exchange for resignation. He pardoned Nixon to spare the country years more of Watergate, so apparent corruption turned out to be courage.

Common sense is the check on any pile of evidence. Prosecutors argued that low-level operatives ran the Watergate burglary with no higher-ups involved, yet it never made sense that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign cash without anyone approving it. Following the money pointed the same way as common sense, toward the top.

Writing Stories Readers Can Follow

Good writing is driven by information rather than inspiration. Midway through reporting, write a premature draft (a rough summary of what you know so far) to expose the gaps. List roughly six key elements, including the lead, and talk them through with anyone who will listen, which shows you where the story stands.

In a news story, state exactly what happened in the first paragraph and answer why in the second, leaving history for later. Precise dates such as Wednesday, November 4, 2007 anchor readers in time. Active verbs bring a scene to life, as when a flat "awoke" became "snapped awake" in a famous opening line. Avoid absolutes like never unless you are certain, and print, reread and mark vague passages before anything goes out.

Publishing Sensitive Stories Responsibly

Publishing well means weighing the public interest honestly. When someone has been formally charged with a crime, the story should run even if a family begs otherwise, because the community needs to know. A reporter must never trade stories by dropping one sensitive piece in exchange for another. When secrets touch national security, the deciding question is the actual impact of publication rather than a gut feeling, and it should be put to editors, lawyers and the government first.

That process lets careful reporting reach readers. In 2009, a classified assessment by General Stanley McChrystal (the US commander in Afghanistan) warned of mission failure in Afghanistan without 40,000 more troops. It was published after officials asked for only three words to be removed.

Owning Mistakes and Staying Careful

Every reporter makes mistakes, and admitting them openly keeps readers' trust. Corrections should say plainly what went wrong and apologise, rather than complain about being picked on. The worst failures are moral before they are journalistic. A young reporter once invented an eight-year-old heroin addict for a story that won a Pulitzer Prize (a top award in US journalism). The editors had failed to put the child's welfare first and ask who he was.

Even trusted sources must be checked. The assurance that the case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was a slam dunk sat beside a warning that there was no smoking-gun intelligence, and that warning deserved more weight. The lasting lesson is simple and demanding. Be really careful, because feeling on the right track is not the same as being on it.

Go deeper with what matters to you

The source works through each of these practices in fine detail. It follows the Watergate reporting step by step, from the burglars' address books to the secret garage meetings with Deep Throat. It also holds an exchange-by-exchange analysis of interviews with Donald Trump and Barack Obama (both US presidents), including which answers should have led the story and which questions deserved better phrasing. The precise ground rules, the question lists and the steps for deciding whether a sensitive story runs are all there.

If you are working on a story of your own, bring a specific problem to the chat, such as a source who keeps refusing to talk or a document you cannot obtain. You might also ask how to phrase a difficult question for a powerful subject. The chat will draw the relevant parts of the source together into an answer shaped around your situation.

Where these ideas come from

These ideas come from Investigative Journalism, released as an online course in November 2017 and taught by Bob Woodward. He is an associate editor of The Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who, with Carl Bernstein (a fellow Washington Post reporter), broke the Watergate story. He has written 19 number-one bestselling nonfiction books. Across 46 years of reporting as of 2017, he covered the CIA, the Supreme Court (the highest court in the United States) and several presidents. If you would like to experience that original work in full, it is well worth seeking out directly.

What you read here is our own source, an independent work built from those ideas. Every concept has been studied and then rewritten from scratch and reshaped so it can answer your questions alongside other refined sources. Nothing from the reference work has been copied. The knowledge has been transformed, not reproduced, and the reference is named clearly because the ideas deserve proper credit and because it stands on its own merits.