Paco Alvarez: So my first question is, how did you get your start in investigative journalism?
Byard Duncan: Back in 2015, I joined Reveal as their community manager. So my first role there was managing their social, doing a little bit of engagement reporting work and handling newsletters, things like that. And even though I wasn’t reporting in earnest at that time, it was a really good beginning education into how investigative reporters operated, and what constituted a really solid investigative story, because I was immersed in the world and reading them all the time and watching the reporters around me work.
I sat right next to a guy named Lance Williams, who was a legend out here in the Bay Area, broke the Barry Bonds steroid story back in the day. And listening to his hour by hour phone calls and watching him dig into spreadsheets, it was a great education. And then across from me sat Will Evans, who was another younger, but really incredible investigative reporter as well. And they had different styles, but I could overhear a lot of their phone conversations and I’d be party to their chats with their editor. And it just kind of began slowly for me to come into focus, like how this gets done. And previous to that, I was really passionate about magazine journalism, long form narrative journalism, but didn’t really have the investigative chops because I was still pretty young in my career. So I began to pick up some lessons just by osmosis by being in an investigative newsroom and hearing these conversations and watching how much more seasoned people worked out stories.
Alvarez: What typically inspires your investigations and how do you decide which stories to pursue?
Duncan: I don’t like bullies. I don’t like when there’s a big entity, whether a government entity or a corporate entity that’s harming people, a lot of people at scale. And on the same token, I’m inspired when I see people from different backgrounds suffering the same outcome. When a company or an entity of some kind is bullying people and the exploitation brings them together in a sense. I think there’s a lot of really excellent political reporting about the left and the right and whatever. And it’s not that I’m agnostic politically, but I feel like my niche is finding the common ground where people from different backgrounds actually have a lot more in common and are united by the exploitation that they suffer. And maybe they’re suffering in silence, they don’t realize that they’re part of a large group. But the latest series of stories in my career has dealt a lot with large crowds of people who are dealing with a problem like this and identifying them and looking for patterns, looking for themes and also looking for the leverage to sort of show that what’s happening to them is not only improper, but it may be breaking the rules, maybe illegal or something like that.
Alvarez: What are your first steps when you start an investigation?
Duncan: Often I’ll look for previous coverage of an issue. I think that’s probably the most important first step is just making sure the story you’re hoping to tell hasn’t been done before. And that was a hard lesson for me to learn at first because often I would see a story and feel so impassioned about it that I would maybe be less rigorous in how hard I would look for an investigation that was five or two or one year old that accomplished much of what I was hoping to accomplish, but that is such an important thing to start with. It seems obvious, but we get passionate about something and we begin to create, just as we learn about it, we begin to create rationales for why I could do this story slightly differently or whatever. So I think it’s really important to just make sure that what you’re digging into has not been dug into before thoroughly by another investigative reporter.
If it passes that test, I think you look for harm, you look for the potential for people to be suffering based on some sort of systematic failure. And suffering looks different in different ways. Are people being physically harmed? Is there money getting siphoned away for a cause that’s not worthwhile, that’s wasteful? Is a government not doing the job it should to protect them, things like that. So looking for the harm and looking for the scale of harm is very important.
And if I can find those two things and feel satisfied with, this isn’t a story that’s been done and there’s some harm happening, the next step is usually to begin kind of looking for as much documentation as possible, whether it’s lawsuits or public records, consumer complaints, statistics. A lot of times I find a great deal of success when looking at private companies. If they’re companies that are in some ways compelled or forced to interact with public agencies, that’s a really useful nexus for learning about the workings of a private company. If it has to file some sort of performance report or monthly data or something like that with public entities like counties or even a state government or something like that, I would then begin looking for the sort of connection points there because those are kind of like little submarine windows. You have a right to get the documentation so you begin to peer in and see whether this company is actually delivering on what it promises publicly.
I think the framework for a lot of my stories is. You know a company or an entity says it’s doing one thing, but is it doing something different in practice and is that thing harmful? So that’s sort of the second step is finding publicly available documentation and then often that documentation leads you to real people to talk to whether it’s consumer complaints that include a phone number and an email address as many states’ complaints will. Or whether you find online communities, either on Reddit or Facebook or something like that, where people have coalesced to talk or complain about a phenomenon or a company. There’s a lot of those still out there. A lot of them are very active and very spicy. So there’s a lot of ways to find, you know, once you’ve got the documentation in hand, and hopefully at that point, it’s pretty clear the contours of what your findings are, and then you’re looking for characters whose stories kind of exemplify the findings that you hopefully by this point have in hand. And then it becomes a question of how big do you wanna go? How much time do you have? How long do you want your story to be? Things like that.
Alvarez: As you talked about, your stories often rely on public records, including I think your stories with Type also relied on public records. How do you approach public records requests? How do you determine what’s available and what you need?
Duncan: It’s always helpful if you can see an example of the kind of record you would like. Sometimes it’s attached in a lawsuit, sometimes it’s described somewhere, or a contract or something like that. For example, maybe if you’re looking at a private company that subcontracts with city or state governments, you’ll notice in a contract that they’re required to submit like a monthly report about how they’re doing and what they’re spending or how many tickets they’ve given if it’s a specific kind of company that issues tickets to drivers, whatever. So you can ascertain that information from publicly available documentation, like court records. But it’s also true that if you’re not quite sure, you can cast a wide net with a records request. I wouldn’t recommend sending one to all 50 states, but you can send one out to a few places, see what comes back. More likely than not, you’ll get at least one example from all the different places of the exact record you’re looking for. Then with that record in hand, you can say, okay, this is what I want. I know you have it. And then you expand your records requesting out for that one record or collection of records or reports or whatever.
Like, so for example, one Type story that I completed recently had to do with call answer times for 911 dispatch centers, trying to determine in the hundred largest cities in America how fast they were able to pick up 911 calls that came in. And I knew that there was a national standard that in some places was the law and other places was just sort of treated as a best practice. I didn’t know how the different dispatch centers maintained this data. So I actually did it wrong on the first pass of records requests. The national standard is you have to pick up 90% of 911 calls in 15 seconds or less, but I had seen a lot of local news coverage in cities that were struggling to pick-up calls fast enough, sort of citing an average answer time of 15 seconds.
And so the first batch I sent out to just a few places was like, the records request basically was like, what is your average answer time for picking up 911 calls? And if it was 15 seconds or longer, I was like oh, maybe we have a problem here. But when I sort of paused and reflected on the data, I was oh, you could have an average answer time that was longer than 15 seconds and still be meeting the standard. So that’s kind of an arbitrary metric. And where it’s shorter, it’s like 11 seconds and you’re failing the standard. So after a quick round of only a few records requests, I was like, okay, I did that wrong, but now I know based on what came back and based on sort of like a re-examination of my process that what I really need to ask for is a breakdown of call volume annually. How many calls were answered within 15 seconds? After 15 seconds? After 30, after 40, after 60, if you have it but at the very least what percentage of calls was answered in 15 seconds or less. And in most places, just about every place I sent a request you did have that metric and that’s the more accurate metric if we’re talking about the actual issue we’re looking at
Alvarez: So, as you mentioned, your investigations are often from a consumer protection angle and you try to focus on people who are actually being failed by business practices or flawed institutions. You talked a bit about this, but I was kind of curious if you could talk more about how you go about developing your sources. Are people open to talk to you or do you have to kind of talk to them some more to convince them?
Duncan: It depends. I have a pretty big roster of consumer advocacy experts that are always happy to talk. And I try to talk to you even if I don’t have a story in mind, just to see what they’re scoping and to keep the relationship going. It’s rare that I walk away from a conversation with one of those experts without at least a little flicker of another story idea and maybe somebody’s already done it or maybe it’s not quite the right fit, but they’re always thinking about the things that I’m thinking about. So those experts are always very happy to talk.
When it comes to what we would call “victims” of these issues or just people who are suffering through some of the consequences of this stuff. It varies and you kind of just have to follow their lead but one thing that is always very helpful is if it’s a you know if again if I’m investigating something that’s happening at scale it’s always very useful to tell them that they’re not alone, that their story is important, their story likely if I’m talking to them. In depth is representative of several different beats of the issue. And there’s different aspects of their story that are compelling and sort of exemplify what’s going wrong. But a lot of people are reassured a little bit when they hear that there’s a great degree of scale behind the problem they’re dealing with and that they’re not the only one. It’s helpful to point to previous work I’ve done that has to do with consumer protection and the impact that it’s had. You obviously want to be careful and not promise someone that your story will change the world or will fix their individual problems, but what you can say is people will want to hear from you about this. You’re not the only person this is happening to. And it’s an important story to tell with a lot of important beats to it.
It’s also very helpful to give somebody a sense upfront, or at the very least when you’re becoming pretty certain you might want to feature them in your story to kind of game out exactly what it will look like. You talk to somebody over the phone, they have a very compelling story. You decide you wanna go meet them in person. Maybe you’re flying across the country. You know I’ll have a conversation that’s like, you know, I would love to meet you in person, I’m gonna fly it, fly out there, we’ll probably spend a few hours together and then I may have follow up questions, maybe wanna get with you the following day and then, I’ll probably go do my thing for a little while but then I’m going to have to call you and check in on a lot of the things you said and kind of dissect them. And also there’s a chance that we’ll connect you with a photographer, somebody to come take your picture and your name and your experience and your pictures will be attached to the story. And before I fly out, I just want to make sure that’s all right with you. And if you have any questions about how that tends to go or how that’s gone for sources for me in the past, let’s talk about it.
And then there’s anonymous sources. We have our own different bars for when to feature them. In general, I try to steer clear of anonymous sources and I don’t have to because I don’t really report on sort of like Washington or it’s rare that I’m sort of faced with navigating anonymous sources, but there are definitely people within companies sometimes that want to talk and want to remain anonymous. And that’s generally fine. A lot of times they’ll want to pass along documentation. And I think that that is useful. People who don’t want their names attached to a story, but who nevertheless want some aspect of the story told you. Of course, you just want to make sure you’re giving plenty of air space to the company itself when you come to them with the documentation you’ve got and obviously not telling them where you got it. Yeah.
Alvarez: Can you talk a little bit about, uh, what it’s like to work on a podcast versus what it’s like to do a story for a print publication. So what does audio allow you to do that you can’t do with print and vice versa?
Duncan: Yeah the first lesson I ever learned about audio when I did my first audio story like 10 years ago was it’s always better to go and do the thing you’re describing versus to just describe the thing, It was a hard lesson for me the first time I went out into the field for audio reporting because I was a little shy, and I was kind of thinking in the back of my mind, like, oh, I’ll describe this this way and I’ll describe this that way, blah, blah. Whereas what you really want is, rather than me describing like a police chief’s office or something, it’s just like, you just wanna hear me walk into the office and observe what I’m seeing in the moment. Rather than saying I went on a ride along with the officer and he told me X, Y, and Z, it’s like, you just want to hear the door slam, me get in. Us, you know, start up the engine and we have the conversation in the car.
There are moments on the radio that speak for themselves. And that’s kind of the beautiful thing about it is – you may in a written story, you may have to tee up certain things and sort of craft your language to convey the significance and the impact. But with radio, there were moments where there are quotes that are so powerful just as they stand on their own and so strongly exemplify what you’re going for, that you can just plug them in and they speak for themselves. And that’s one of the really beautiful things about radio.
But it’s challenging on the same token because you can’t structure a good radio story usually the way you would structure a print story. You can’t write the same way. You really have to strip down your language because we don’t write the way we talk typically. And you have to let others do the talking for you, perhaps more than you’re comfortable doing in a written story. There’s a lot of just quotation, and you’re kind of weaving together with little bits of writing here and there, this scene to this quote, to this character, back to another quote. Your job in radio is to just weave together all these moments that have their own textural and editorial significance. Versus with writing, you’re doing a lot of hand-holding and you’re really walking somebody through an argument. And you have a lot of control and agency over the language. You have to give up some of that control on radio, but what you get back is these moments that just hit the listener really hard on their own.
Alvarez: And my last question, do you have any advice for reporters who want to get started in investigative journalism?
Duncan: Find a mentor. I didn’t have a mentor for the longest time, and so I didn’t really have somebody to bounce ideas off of. I would also say really be diligent in the first phase of your reporting about making sure nobody’s done it before, making sure that what you have is really solid and the harm is really pronounced. Because if you don’t ask yourself those tough questions about your story, and you want that story to appear somewhere, somebody eventually is going to ask you those questions. So you might as well be really tough on yourself at the beginning and have answers ready for why your story rises to the level that you feel it deserves to be published somewhere.
One lesson I learned early on too was like when you’re interacting with records officers in different agencies, the relationship does not have to be contentious. They don’t really know what you’re up to, and they don’t care, so don’t be afraid to call and say, hey, you know, my name is so-and-so. I’m hoping to get this record or this series of records, but I wanna make it easy on you. And I don’t wanna waste your time. So maybe you could tell me a little bit before I send this request. I just did this yesterday. Maybe you could tell me how you organize this information first. We can just have a conversation about it. So I’m saving you time. And I would say, I can’t remember a time when a records officer wasn’t happy to do that. They want efficiency as well. They’re not the gatekeepers that I think you see them discussed, you know, talked about as on Twitter sometimes by reporters who got like a bunch of redacted stuff back. Public agencies are not, they’re not trying, usually, trying to conceal stuff from you. If they’re not giving you what you want in many cases, it’s because it doesn’t exist or you ask the wrong way or it’s taking too long because they just have a bunch of other requests sitting on top of yours. These are people whose entire job and they’re juggling a million things. So call your records agencies and have a conversation with a human and then they’ll think of you as a human as well. And maybe you can get some information about what you’re after before submitting the request so you don’t have to tweak it and resubmit.
And lastly, I would just say read. Read the work of the people you admire, steal their little tricks. If you like a story that somebody did, write to them. They’ll probably write you back; really, really esteemed investigative reporters are not celebrities, typically. They’re people who get emails and like to hear from from people who enjoyed their work and in some cases may even take the time to jump on a 15-minute call with you and explain kind of how they did it. So those would be my lessons for people starting out.
Also start small, if you’re a local reporter don’t you know don’t begin striving for a huge national story. Look for little scoops that are happening at City Hall that are happening at the local level. Write a 1,500 word story about it. And that will get you the rep to begin to build up your repertoire of investigative reporting. And so when you want to go big, you’ll have sort of a framework for, okay, you know, last time I did one of these, I got this one document from this one agency and that was enough to power a 1,200 word story, but now I’m thinking there’s actually something bigger going on and maybe it spans several agencies and maybe you could go 2,500, 3,000 words. So let me try that, see what comes back, step by step. And don’t think you have to go super huge to have an impact either. Because especially at the local level with local reporters, you can find one little document or one little thing that went wrong or one little oversight. And if you push the right buttons, it will create quite a hubbub in your community. And that matters just as much as, you know, federal lawmakers holding a hearing and maybe considering a bill that won’t even pass in Washington anyway.