Steve Andrews, what a character! This man has really exposed some people in the most sinister ways. The reactions to his stories range from getting people fired to getting people killed.
Andrews has been an investigative reporter for News Channel 8 for 25 years, exposing government waste and crime. He said he has always made an effort to make it fun and interesting despite being driven by public records.
A point he made was that most of his big stories came from phone calls. He then told his story about his exposure of former state attorney Harry Lee Coe of abusing his power to feed his gambling addiction. It all started from a simple phone call.
Andrews got to the bottom of it by digging through public records, dealing with Coe destroying evidence on the computer, and filtering through lots of lies.
After his story aired, Coe ended up killing himself. An ironic fact: Andrews was the one who found Coe's corpse. Andrews quickly got his camera to film - though the producer told him not to film anything at all - the scene of the suicide before the cops showed up to prove a rather powerful point: "How would this look in court?"
It was a good lesson in journalist etiquette. He made a point that it is much more professional to a jury to film the subject walking away from the camera saying "no comment" instead of chasing the subject while badgering for a response.
Another good lesson he taught us was that we should make a checklist of follow-up questions we want answered. That way we can still stick to the story in case someone answers a question and starts going down a tangent from the original story.
Andrews was a great presenter, he is definitely a role model for aspiring journalists. He simply told the story and told the truth.
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