Matt Doig lecture

Matt Doig visited the class today to share some advice on using public records.  Doig is an investigative reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and was the force behind exposing the real estate fraud "flip" scheme in Florida.  So he had some good words to share.

One of the points he mentioned was the importance of getting people to talk.  Getting the story isn't only about digging through records and finding the hard evidence.  It's also about talking to people, the subject, the subject's close ones, relatives and co-workers.  When a reporter goes to a source for information, every detail could be important from the decorations of the room to the way his subject's secretary looks at him.

Someone in the class asked him how a reporter would get someone to talk, and I really just wanted to answer that one myself, but Doig answered it pretty much the same way I would have.  Doig told him he just needs to talk to people, establish a common ground, or what sales people would call build rapport.  The person isn't going to talk if they're not comfortable.  It's up to the reporter to make their interviewee feel like they can tell them anything.  I fortunately have a knack for getting people to open up to me.  It probably comes from a lot of practice talking to strangers.

After class was over, I approached Doig with the same question in mind to see if there could be anything I could improve upon when it comes to getting people to talk.  I don't have much experience talking to people as a reporter but as a regular schoolgirl with no title or news organization.  So I asked him what else gets people to talk to him.  He said, "Be a good listener."  He also told me he was actually antisocial which surprised me because I am too, yet I'm very good at one-on-one conversations.  

What I learned from Doig's lecture today was that good investigative reporting includes not only finding the records and going through the databases, but also talking to the people involved in the story.  As my professor called it the "yin yang of interviewing and researching," there really needs to be a balance of those two aspects in a good investigative report.

I'll leave this with a link to one of Doig's responses to his hate mail.  It's pretty good reading if you ask me.

http://www.poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=9175