Brody Mullins, Rafael Nam and Olivia Evans Transcript — Sept. 18, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00:00):
Among the many unfortunate consequences of our shrinking industry and the shift from newsrooms to remote work are the diminishing opportunities we have to learn from our colleagues. I can’t tell you how much I picked up just from ea eavesdropping on my pod mates phone interviews back at the newsrooms where I worked. So we’ve assembled a talented panel to share some of their best practices with you, Brody Mullins. Brody is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and author of the Wolves of K Street, the secret history of How Big Money Took Over Big Government in two decades. As an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Brody wrote scores of groundbreaking stories about the intersection of business politics, exposing scandals that prompted new laws and regulations for powerful government officials, lobbyists, and Wall Street traders. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Brody won the George Polk Award and was twice awarded the Everett Dirksen Award for best coverage of Congress. Rafael Nam is a senior business editor at NPR overseeing the coverage of finance and economics. He has been with NPR since 2020 after spending the bulk of his career for Reuters in Asia. Rafael started as a stock market correspondent in Seoul and then moved to Hong Kong to cover investment banking for Reuters where he often broke news on major deals.
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Olivia Evans is somebody you’ve probably become familiar with. Olivia is an award-winning business reporter covering Kentucky business and industry trends, Louisville area, major employers, cannabis and other business topics. So welcome to our panel. I’m going to ask each of them to talk about their approach to their work. And I’ll start with Brody.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:02:14):
I grew up in DC when DC was sort of a different place, much more like a small town now it’s a ton more money, ton more lobbying, ton more corporate influence here. I started my journey in journalism through the inside route in DC I feel like there’s two different ways of getting into big time reporting in Washington. One is what I thought you used to do is go work for a regional paper around the country and work your way up and eventually get sent to Washington and then try to get a job at the New York Times When I graduated college and try to do that, that route was hard for me to break into. I applied, I think 200 newspapers around the country. I’m not sure if there are 200 newspapers around the country now, but I applied everywhere and I really wanted to get out of DC because I knew I wanted to end up in DC and I did not want to end up exactly where I’m right now having never left dc but that’s a different story.
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So my path was instead through small trade publications in dc, every single agency in DC regulate some industry from soil to big tech to farming and airlines and whatnot. And every one of those agencies or departments has one or more trade publications that covers those agencies. And my idea was like, let me just go start work at a tiny place. My first job is a place called Communications Daily. They just covered the Federal Communications Commission, and I sort of treated that agency like it was the White House and try to write everything about what that agency was doing. The space, the industry I was covering turned out to be pretty interesting, which is tech. This is sort of pre-internet or start of the internet back when the big buzzword with telecommunications, which I don’t think exists anymore. But anyway, the beauty of being sort of a young reporter in DC is that DC relies on experts and in the telecommunication space, in the communication space, after a year, I was all of a sudden an expert in covering telecom policy.
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And somehow that has a value because the bigger publications want people to cover things who know who are industry experts. So I then went to a place called Congress Daily, which is now called National Journal. They came out twice a day and I really just covered committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill covering energy environment, telecom. And my idea was to really try to break news at the committee level, right about business issues and hopefully get noticed by a bigger publication eventually the Wall Street Journal. So my expertise is really covering committees and subcommittees, which is really fascinating work because it’s where business policies really made, where lobbyists are fighting it out, where there’s a lot of campaign donations and there’s very few people covering committees. I mean, everyone focuses on presidential tweets and votes on the house and Senate floor, but in committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill, there are really great industry fights that no one’s paying attention to. So I sort of made my mark covering business and regulatory issues at the committee level and then got noticed by the Wall Street Journal and started there about 20 years ago, and I left there last year. But I’m happy to help in any way. I’d love to tell some stories later on about good journalism.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:05:26):
We’ve assembled this panel for a reason, Brody, who’s covered Washington for a long time, and Raphael who will pick up the conversation now, who is now an editor and I think could speak from an editor’s perspective on what he’s looking for.
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:05:44):
Sure. Hi. Hi. Good morning everybody. I’m Rafael Nam. I started in Asia for Reuters, as Kevin said, as a stock market correspondent. And then I eventually moved to Hong Kong and then eventually moved to India where I was heading the team kind of similarly to what I do now, but in India economics and finance. And so it’s funny because at Reuters, and I presume that most of you guys are business journalists, but at Reuters it’s, it’s very much investor driven. It’s about the data, it’s about the news, it’s about being speedy, and you don’t need to worry about explaining concepts, financial concepts because your audience, your readers are probably going to know more about it than you do. And it’s a lot about data and numbers. But even when I was at Reuters in India, I kind of always wanted to capture how data, economic data and how the markets impact just regular people and businesses and small businesses and corporations.
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To me, that was always kind of like a weakness in the Reuters coverage. I always felt that it was too much and is oftentimes too dry. And luckily, I think the organization back then was trying to really pivot more to I guess what you call a consumer angle, which is I think what I think a lot of you guys probably do. So I really made it a priority to have my team focus on just how things impact. For example, and I’ll give you an example, in India, they got rid of the big denominations. It’s as if President Trump one day said, starting tomorrow, the a hundred dollars bill is no longer going to be in existence.
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And I remember this, and economically that’s a very big news. They were getting rid of high denominations because they felt that a lot, it was being used for money laundering. There are various regions that I’m not going to get into here, but I remember I was thinking about it very much in the market’s perspective. How are markets going to react? What are economists going to say? What are investors going to say? And I remember leaving my home and heading to work kind of thinking about all the ways we were going to cover the story. And I remember seeing all these people lined up by the ATM machines. I remember long lines everywhere I went, there were long lines of people lined up for ATM machines. And it just kind of really struck me that even though we were all trying to digest the implications of this, and I was trying to do it from me as a perspective, as a Reuters chief correspondent kind of thinking about how is this going to impact markets?
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And I just saw firsthand how people were lined up and people were more worried about, oh my gosh, they’re getting rid of high denominations. They didn’t quite understand what was going on, but they knew this was a big deal. And when as a human, they’re reacted by going to the bank trying to withdraw as much money as they can because they weren’t sure what this is. Modi, the prime Minister Modi, they weren’t sure what Modi was up to and they were just scared. They were just scared for their money. And it just kind of really drilled to me how you can talk about data all you want, but it always has an impact on somebody and on businesses. So when I joined NPR and actually NPR turned out to be a good fit because to me I was already starting to wanting to do more these kind of broader stories about how economics and finance impacts everyday people.
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And NPR very, I know you guys listened to NPR R, but it’s a very kind of voice driven medium, right? I mean, your voice is important. You tell stories through your voices and not just as a reporter. And I’ve done reporting for NPR too, but also the people that you capture, it’s all about what you say. You want good tape. You want somebody to stand human and have emotion. You don’t want some Wall Street economies coming on and sound super dry and very jargony and you’re catering to all. Our aim has always been to cater to everybody across the country, conservative, liberal. I know that we get a lot of flack that for having people think that we have a particular bent, but we really do try to capture people’s voices.
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It is kind of like every business stories that we do. Yes, there are sometimes where we have to do the numbers. Yesterday, the fed cut rates, obviously you got to talk about the interest rates. You got to talk about an economy, you got to talk about how Trump is trying to remake the Fed and the independence of the Fed. Those are kind of what I call more harder news. There’s always there is that harder news, but even then we’re always try to explain it in very simple concepts. The one thing that we hate at NPR in the business desk and I particularly hate is jargon. And I always think that, I mean, we get into debates about this. I mean there’s some editors for example that I disagree with this, but there’s some editors, for example, that don’t like the word consumers. They think it’s too jargony.
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I mean, that’s the extent of the debate that we have in terms of are we sounding jargony? Are we sounding a little bit too, we want to speak. People speak when people gather around their dinner tables, when people talk to their neighbors, they speak in a language, they speak up about the economy and finance, but they don’t speak in jargony terms, right? They don’t use terms like GDP and stuff like that. They talk about the economy. I feel like the economy, I feel like we’re no recession. So we try to capture that and explain this broad economic concepts in ways that make sense. And I think the tariff has given us, I think the tariff, it’s been an ongoing thing. It’s been months now that we’ve been covering tariffs. And one of the things that we always do when we set up that to cover is how it impacts people, how it impacts especially small businesses and how, because we do think that small businesses are the backbone of the economy.
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I know that the big companies drive the markets and everything else, but oftentimes it’s the small businesses that get impacted. And of, if you look through across our coverage at NPR when it comes to tariffs, we always try to talk to business people. What are their concerns? Like small business donors, if there’s a small coffee importer in a city somewhere, how do they feel about the fact that tariffs are super high, especially in Brazil, and how are they coping? What are their concerns? And we try to speak to them in very human terms, not in the way you would talk to a Wall Street economist, but more in terms of what are your day day concerns, what keeps you up at night? And those often make the best stories the way of explaining of difficult economic ideas or complex economic ideas in a way that is human, in a way that people can relate to and understand. So I guess my parting thought is, and this is something I tell all business journalists, don’t get too lost in the data, don’t get too lost in the jargon. I always think about what is the impact on people and businesses. So bring in the human voices, those are the voices that are going to make your stories shine, and they’re going to explain this economic concepts far better than trying to explain, explain it through financial terms.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:13:28):
Olivia, you’re on the street, much like your colleagues here today. Talk to us a little bit about how you approach your work and the all important part of developing sources that you can depend on.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:13:43):
So like was mentioned, I work in Louisville, Kentucky, which is a major metro. But I also, with my role, I do get to cover some statewide elements. And because I’m still a daily beat reporter, I do spend a lot of time with sources. And one of my favorite things that I love to do and have been privileged to be able to do with this work is to truly embed with sources. In 2023, for example, before the Teamsters and UPS started their contract negotiations, I knew that was coming. And for those that don’t know, UPS Worldport is in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s the largest UPS facility in the world. So when there were talks of UPS going on strike or the teamsters going on strike at UPS, it had significant influence not just to our city, but to the global economy. If all that shipping just stopped, and I spent time with the teamsters, I went inside the facility, I saw the work they’re doing, I learned what their concerns are, why I spent time with the company and what the company, show me the facility and talk about why this is good and this thing does work or this new thing that they’re bringing for the workers.
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And then when it came time and things were getting really tense and they were negotiating up here in DC and I’ve still got sources who from Louisville came up to DC for the negotiations and they were able to give me text by text live updates on what’s going on. And then ultimately the Courier Journal is able to break the international news that they had indeed reached a contract before either side put out a press release about it. And those sources, I couldn’t have done that work without those sources having let me into their space and given me the trust and the time to spend with them well before the contract came up. But just be there on the day to day and learn, go and sit through the union meetings, this, that and the other. But then on a statewide level, when I saw a piece of data come out from our Department of Agriculture in late 2022, and the data was shocking because to me at least it said that there’s only like 1500 veterinarians in the state of Kentucky.
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And again, for those who might not know, Kentucky is the horse capital of the world. We have more horses per capita than anywhere else. And some places in some counties in Kentucky, the horse population is actually greater than the people population. And we’re also one of the largest producers of beef cattle east of the Mississippi River. And so we have a ton of large farm animals that doesn’t account for pets or other things. And so when I saw there’s 1500 veterinarians in the state, I reached out to the Department of Agriculture thinking, surely there was a typo in this press release that they sent out. And they were like, no, that’s how much we have. And so then I was like, well, how are the farms working? How is this happening? And I found farmers and I found people that worked with the horses at different racetracks that were willing to come and just let me see their days.
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And so I went and Dr. Stewart Brown, who’s one of the head equine veterinarians at Keeneland, which is one of the largest racetracks, and were the largest sail of horses, happens every year in America. And I went with him and I just for two full days, just shadowed him and saw what his job entails, how many horses he sees, and I was just doing things like keeping tallies, like, oh, we saw another, it’s 6:00 AM we just saw another horse, and I’m just keeping tallies and going through the day and now the races are starting and I’m seeing that process and understanding that process. And frankly, Dr. Brown didn’t actually make it into the final project because for me it was learning and understanding what’s going on. So then I could approach every source after that with a level of insight, especially as someone who didn’t grow up on a farm, didn’t own horses, none of that.
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But I understood the process, I had seen the process, I saw the injuries, I saw the response, and I also got to see the emotional attachment. And that allowed me to tackle that reporting from a way that hadn’t yet to be seen. And it was very interesting when some of the lawmakers in the state of Kentucky went to testify to the General Assembly about why they need veterinarian programs to help with the shortage. And one of them said, who knew that we just needed someone to listen to us? And I thought that was very just eyeopening, the fact that just me being able to be there and take the time to listen and see and then use the skills I have through journalism to tell their story, was able to actually make a real life impact for these people who live hundreds of miles away from me. And
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:18:04):
Before I open it up to questions, I just wanted to give Brody fair warning, Neil Bradley was here during the last session and he urged everyone here to give you a hard time. So I don’t know what that’s about, but we’ll nevertheless start. So,
Maxwell Abbatiello | Dayton Business Journal (00:18:23):
Okay. Hello, my name’s Max. I’m a data reporter for the Dayton Business Journal in Ohio. I guess my question for you guys is in today’s administration, the president just sued the New York Times two days ago, sued the Wall Street Journal back in July, and this is on top of just multiple lawsuits against media organizations cut funding for public media recently. I was wondering, in your guys’ lengthy careers, if you were feeling more pressure today to under your reporting, not just get it right or just that sentiment, but if you guys think about that on a consistent basis and your thoughts on that.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:19:03):
So as an investigative reporter, I spent a long time looking into people and those people, the way the target of who I’m reporting on the way they have reacted has changed in my time. In DC it used to be sort of that big media or the media had all the power. There was no social media, there was no way for the other person to respond. So it’s sort of like we’re writing this story and we’re going to tell the public everything about you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, now people can get on Twitter or social media and attack me or sue me, right? I’ve seen a lot more instances. Another way of putting it, I feel like when I’m writing a story, it’s very likely the person going to try to come after me, and that never happened before. And people use lawsuits and threats of lawsuits way more than used to.
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This is separate from Trump. It’s just how people have realized is a different way of defending themselves against a negative story in the press that can really hurt someone’s reputation and their finances. The solution to that, from my point of view is that everything has to be right. Every fact has to be right, everything has to be fair. A great tactic that we use at the Wall Street Journal that anyone is allowed to use also is before I write a story about you, I tell you everything that’s going to be in the story, even the stuff that’s going to be embarrassing to me or embarrassing to you, stuff that’s going to make for hard conversations. And that way you have an opportunity to refute everything. And during that process you could say, Hey, I didn’t say this, or, yeah, I did say this, but actually I meant it this way.
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And that can often improve his story. It adds context, but also gives you a chance to tell me to sort of be my fact checker. Here are some things that I got wrong and I’ll fix them. If I don’t fix them, then I should be sued. But if the story comes out and every fact is right, and you’ve had a chance to respond to not only every fact in the story, but sort of the gist and the message of the story, then I feel like I’ve done my job and you can’t sue me. But I’ve definitely seen an increase in sort of hostile attacks on the media in that way. What about you guys?
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:21:06):
Yeah, at NPR, we get our fair share of attacks from all kinds of places. I mean, the way we think about it, and it’s not a uniform thing. I mean, bro is absolutely right. The most vital thing is getting everything absolutely right. And we do take that accuracy very seriously. I do also think that we do also, there’s room for self-assessment and there’s room of thinking. Are we capturing not only we want to capture voices from across America, not just voices from different groups, but also just conservative voices too. We want to really capture those voices. And sometimes I feel like we need to, as journalists, really self-assess and think, are we really capturing people’s voices? Because when people, sometimes a lot of the attacks are unfair, but sometimes some of the techs may have merit and it takes a lot of self, I dunno what the right word is, but it just takes some, sometimes I do think as journalists, we need to self-assess, am I being really accurate? Is the person who’s attacking me completely bonkers? Or do they have a basis for which they’re attacking us because they think that our story is too liberal? And I do think that oftentimes journalists get defensive and they’re like, oh, but everything is accurate. So you’re obviously incorrect when talking to critics. But I do think there is something to be said about the approach.
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My wife’s side of the family is very, very conservative, just kind of very sort of MAGA conservative. And every time I’m with them, I just kind get a completely different perspective that there is this entirely different side. And my brothers-in-law are very, one’s from Stanford, one’s from I think the University of Michigan, I think, to remember, these are good schools, they’re very smart people, and one of them works for a big tech company and they have this very inaccurate views, but they believe them. They do believe them. I always thought, and this is the ongoing debate that we have when we are editing stories, I just really don’t want to, it’s just debate. And I’ll be honest about it, it’s in the media that we have about, especially this divide, about how much of yourself do you bring in as a journalist? Two stories, right?
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That’s an ongoing debate that we’re having. And Ena, I don’t have the perfect solution for that, but it is something that I think we need to think about and we need to be open-minded about it. And I just kind of urge people just to be willing to, I know that we are all going to strive to always get our facts, but do think, am I really capturing people’s how the diversity of this country, and not only in terms of whether in some minority group or in terms of some particular L-G-B-T-Q group, but also in terms of the wide ranging voices, political voices and social voices in this country. And that’s something that I think about quite a bit. And it is an ongoing debate. And at NPR, we’re certainly having it.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:24:27):
Do you have anything? So as a local daily reporter, I’m not faced personally with as much concern from the administration or from concerns from that regards into legal issues. But one of the things that I do is one of the employers I covered, they have before said, do you have time to be in court? And this employer, as I’ve continued to do investigations into them, what I’ve done with my coworkers who we’ve reported on this together is we just sit down with our company lawyer, and we are fortunate that we do have a local lawyer in our area who represents us, but we sit down with him and we just go literally line by line and it feels so tedious and so overwhelming. And sometimes in the moment, especially after we feel like we’ve done our fact checking, we’ve done this, that and the other, we’ve inferred with the records and all of this, and there’ll be times that he points out small language things and he is like, well, it could come across this way to them.
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Is there another way we can say this? And while it might feel like a drain to me as the reporter, and I’m like, I’ve done it. I did it right. I do appreciate those moments. And I saw the fruitfulness of that tedious recently when I was at an event with this company, and they told me that our story, which is headlined chemicals, mold, and broken bones, that when they saw the infamous bat story, because there’s a lot of mention of a bat infestation in that story, they were really upset and they sat down with their comms department and their legal department, and they were going line by line. They knew we had messed up somewhere, and then they weren’t able to find anything. So it was the reassurance I needed to be like, okay, we’re doing the right thing, we’re on the right path in regards to how we go about being very tedious. And for that particular story, we actually ended up pushing the publication date back by a month just so we could continue to go through it over and over and over again to make sure there was nothing that they could come back at us. And they even said we tried.
Rowan Hetzer | Dayton Business Journal (00:26:24):
Hi, I’m Rowan also with the Dayton Business Journal. So something that I’ve noticed across the, sorry board is readership is down, and the way search is working is completely changing. Social media is actively a lot of times putting down our stories and not showing it to people. I was just wondering, because you guys have a wide range of perspectives from international to national to local, how are you guys adapting to that and what are you either implementing into your stories or not implementing into your stories anymore? How did you adapt to overcome that if you’ve even found a solution?
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:27:05):
So one of those questions that we are all kind of dealing with, right? Even at NPR, I mean, it is well known that our numbers are down and I guess is across the board. And so there’s always this tension in think newsrooms like NPR, where you have people who just want to do reporting regardless of whether people read it or not, they just want to get their stories out. And we have people who are saying, no, no, we need these stories because this is trending and we need to capture that. We need to capture those data. And so I just feel as sometimes we’re just kind of realizing that we need to, we’re trying to find the balance between doing stories that are kind of clickbait, that are hopping on a trend and sometimes unnecessarily, and whether to not chase that particular trend and give up those clicks that we know we would get if we did that story.
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And we try to, it’s a balance that because we can’t ignore the business reality. And one of the biggest lessons I learned from when I was starting out is somebody who said, oh, what’s the news? Why are we all news people? And we all said, ah, because we want to talk about the truth and we want to uncover things and all that. And the guy just said, no, the news business, it is a business. We are all here all to make money for our employers. And I’ve always, I know that sounds kind of very, very stark, but I’ve always learned that because it is a business, we all want to be employed. And if we all want to be employed, then we all have to figure out how are we going to write news that also matters and also write news that may not get as many clicks or readers, but that are important.
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So it’s a balancing thing. And yeah, unfortunately, I don’t think any, I mean there’s very few news organizations I think that have found the right answer. We certainly haven’t. And I’ll admit that we’re still grasping for that. Trying to find the balance between not always being click BA and chasing serious news, but also minding the fact that our audiences are critical, that we do need to make money. So we’re doing a lot of, right now, I think we’re at an experimental stage trying different things, trying to see what works, what doesn’t work, and both in digital and also in radio, and we do things like going to shorter pieces, for example, we realize that the audience responds better for with shorter pieces. So it’s a balance, but for us, it’s kind of existential. It’s kind of like we all acknowledge that at the end of the day, we do need to do things that get readers and listeners. And finding that balance is just never easy, I guess. Sorry, that’s not a completely, it’s just an honest answer, but it’s not like I don’t have the solution and we’re all grasping for one,
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:30:31):
I would say for myself, I certainly have company assigned metrics and goals and got to hit these numbers. We need this much by the end of the month. I certainly have those things. And I think the thing that’s proven most fruitful and for me this year has allowed me to be ahead of pace for my goal is to just truly keep it simple. And I am always answering the question in my head for every story. Now, what does it mean for me? And I take the me as me living in rural eastern Kentucky, me living in rural western Kentucky, me living in very affluent neighborhood inside of Louisville, Kentucky, what does it mean for me? And I’ll use the veterinary shortage project as an example that I talked about earlier. But with that one, actually, our executive editor was very unsure at the time of if that was going to be worth the time that it would take for me to actually report it.
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And she kept asking and pushing and pushing me to think more. And that’s how I arrived to this point of what does it mean for me that I lean into now? But I realized the largest producer for the largest processor for Costco’s pork is in the city of Louisville. They have to have veterinarians on site, and if they don’t have veterinarians on site to get the pig from being whole to slaughtered and packaged, you don’t get bacon on the shelf at Costco. And that’s Costco all across the country. And once I could be like, this is why it matters. People like to eat bacon at breakfast. And if I can tell the country that if we can’t keep these veterinarians and if we are struggling and these people aren’t able to pull over time, these people can’t. We don’t have new veterinarians coming into this field.
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And if they stop, this factory legally has to stop producing and processing, and there will be no bacon, there will be no country ham. There will be, you don’t get your deli meat at Costco. And that’s how we came to the what does it mean for me? And then a sillier story, but still on the farming realm is someone had mentioned to me, Hey, there’s a shrimp farm in Kentucky. And I was like, I’m sorry. Are we growing shrimp in the Ohio River? What do you mean learn? That’s not what’s happening. But it was the notion again of what does it mean for me? Well, it means for you that you can now buy locally grown shrimp that you can see truly from shrimp baby to full shrimp on your plate. You can see its process. You can go out there and you can meet the shrimp before they end up on your dinner table and in your shrimp boil, you can go meet the farmers and see what they’re doing, experience it, what are the chemicals that they’re using in their water, how they’re keeping things green and processing all you can go see it.
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And for some people, that element of being able to get close to their food, that really matters to them.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:33:11):
So I don’t think I have a great answer for this either because the industry is trying to figure this out, but my personal strategy was always just look for the best story that you can write and write it. And really good stories tend to be read by a lot of people. And sometimes they’re, sometimes you write a really good story or really good series, and not many people read it, but it’s important. It leads to changes, it leads to reforms. I mean, yes, it’s a business, but if the goal was to make money, we’d all not be in journalism. We’d be in business, we’d have a different job. We all know that journalism isn’t the highest paid profession, but it’s the most fun and maybe the most impactful and something where in your twenties you can make an impact. You don’t need to wait until you’ve been at some big paper or some publication for 20 years.
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You can write stories right now that have an impact. You can go right now, get your congressional press pass and go talk to your local member of Congress about whatever you want. And so to me, yes, it’s a business, but it’s also about making an impact. And some of the stories that you write won’t be read, but by that many people. But if you are constantly writing really good stories, your numbers will eventually be up. And I should say during my 20 years of the Wall Street Journal, I never looked at those numbers. I don’t want to know if people are reading ’em because I don’t want to start writing stories. I think people are going to read. I want to use my own instincts and write stories that I think are good, and sometimes they’re not. But you know, try your best to follow up.
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:34:41):
Brody makes a really good point. I get into this debate with reporters all the time about, I have some reporters who kind of look at the numbers all the time and they’re like, oh my gosh, this story didn’t do so good. And I’m like, but it was a good story and I should be proud of the story. And honestly, mta, because I’ve done my fair share of reporting, I’ve done stories that didn’t get clicks, and that’s fine, but you know what? It got read, it got read by people and it got read by the right people. And when you do enough of the stories, then I think people do kind of notice you, and that leads to bigger stories and bigger scoops down the line. So I always tell my reporters, don’t get too discouraged. You just write the story you want to do. I mean, there are some times where we have to kind of accommodate our SEO team and just kind of talk about do we need to do this? And we kind of do our own approach to it. But yeah, I say, don’t get discouraged by, don’t be looking at the numbers all the time. I tell my reporters,
Collin Huguley | Charlotte Business Journal (00:35:41):
Hi, I’m Collin Huguley with the Charlotte Business Journal, and I just wanted to ask if y’all have tips or best practices on how to maybe convince hesitant key sources to go on the record when they might otherwise not want to. I know there’s obviously situations where maybe if they’re the subject and the story’s unflattering, you do so much reporting and you take it to them, then they feel like they need to defend themselves on the record. But just otherwise, if you feel there’s a key source that won’t go on the record, maybe what are your best practices and convincing them to do so? Are you talking about a hostile
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:36:15):
Source or friendly source? As in, are you writing about someone that you’re trying to,
Collin Huguley | Charlotte Business Journal (00:36:20):
Either one could be a hostile source, could be maybe an observer friendly who’s just maybe fears retribution of some kind if they went on the record.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:36:28):
I feel like a couple of different answers. The first one is sort of a longer term reporting strategy is for everyone is just to create long-term relationships, meet as many people as you can, talk to ’em about their families, their lives, how they got there, your family, your life. It’s almost sales. You want to create a bond and a friendship so that what you don’t want to have is every time you call, you’re like, Hey, tell me what happened yesterday or why did this happen? You don’t want to be that annoying person. You want to create trust. And when you create trust, people trust you and they’ll give you information, especially if you know that your career is going to be five years or 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. You’re not trying to get the scoop today. You’re trying to build a relationship with someone so that maybe in 10 years, literally in 10 years, they’ll know you and they’ll trust you with something when they see wronging or something you may want to report about.
(00:37:16):
If you’re talking about the target of a story who’s not talking to you, there’s the thing that has helped me the most is sometimes the best stories are about people who don’t talk to you. In fact, I’ll give you an example. So in our book we wrote about a guy named Tony Podesta. Tony Podesta was the maybe at one point the most powerful, influential, non-elected democrat in Washington. His brother was the chief of staff to Barack Obama and the chief of staff to Bill Clinton would’ve been the chief of staff to Hillary Clinton. And Tony Podesta became a lobbyist. So we wanted to write about him in our book. He’s one of the five characters we wrote about. And I knew he wasn’t going to talk about us, we were going to write a bad story about him. He was not going to come across well in the story.
(00:38:04):
So for years, we reported on our book and we talked to his ex-wives and to his employees and his former employees and his college roommates and his former friends we’re calling around all over the place. And he’s hearing, Hey, Brody just called Hey, Brody’s called Hey Brody, maybe this is the Neil Bradley story. So he’s hearing that we’re reporting. So in the beginning of a story, if I go right to Tony Po say, Hey, tell me about all the bad things you did. He’s going to say Screw you, I’m not talking to you. But once he knows that we know all the bad things, he wants to talk to us. So we report on for years and years and years just because the book takes a long reporting process. And then I remember I texted him one day once, we were basically done reporting and about to start writing this section about him, and I texted him, I said, Hey, Tony, my name is Brody Mullins, my brother and I writing a book. It’s partially about you. You’re not going to like the book. There’s lots of things you’re not going to like about it, but you’re 80 years old, you’re retired. I didn’t say this, but you probably have no friends.
(00:39:07):
And I did say, no one’s ever going to write a book about you again, and I’d love to talk to you. And he texted right back and said, come on down to my house, his 10 million house, by the way. So the point is that he knew he had to talk to us because everyone has an ego and everyone wants to defend themselves, and no one is really, truly evil. The person who you’re talking about may have made bad decisions, but they made bad decisions for what they thought were the right reasons. And if you approach ’em correctly, they’re going to want to explain that to you. They’re going to want to say yes, all the things you’re saying are right, but here’s why I did it, to try to justify what they did. And that makes your story better because then you have their point of view and why they did these things. So I think a lot of it is trust, but also it’s almost like power With Tony EZs, the only reason he spoke to us is because we had him and we had him because we talked to everyone. And he knew that
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:39:56):
That’s a great way to make a source come forward. But Washington is the capital of anonymous sources in addition to the capital of the country. And I wonder if Olivia and Raphael could talk about a little bit about how hard you should push back when sources don’t want to be identified rather than giving them that shield of anonymity.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:40:21):
So for me, I’ve run into several cases largely as it comes to reporting. In that series I talked about with my coworker, chemical mold and broken bones, we came across a lot of people who were employees at this company or are still employees at this company. And a lot of them were like, I want to be anonymous. And I certainly could understand and hear where they’re coming from and their’s concern and their general fear, especially because that company is located in a really tiny town and it’s small, rural Kentucky. And we could hear that concern. But the pushback that we gave and ultimately the pushback that our editors walked us through was that for this story to resonate and for our readers that are going to pick up this story and see it in the physical paper or see it online, that for them to actually buy in and for them to understand that this company that’s getting a lot of taxpayer money and is supposed to be bringing 5,000 jobs and 6 billion to the state for its workers to be diagnosed with mold conditions after exposure to the facility for workers who have broken their hips, for people to have been a bat wrangler because they’ve had no choice but to chase down bat during an infestation, we needed to put faces and names with this experience.
(00:41:40):
And we talked through because I think my coworker and I interviewed over a dozen people like real workers in this situation. And we went back to all of them. Most of them asked to be anonymous. And we were like, listen, you are not alone in this. And when we had that conversation individually with these dozens of people that we talked to and went to the tiny town multiple times to tell them, you’re not alone. We’ve heard this same thing from 11 of your other coworkers in different areas of the plant, in different job capacities. It was eyeopening to them. And they were like, I’m not. And then once one of them was like, you know what? I’m glad I’m not alone. Yeah, I’ll go on the record. Then we could tell the next one, another person, so-and-so has agreed to go on the record too.
(00:42:27):
You’re not alone. Your experience, what you’ve told us, we’ve heard it elsewhere. And it started to build and amplify. And then eventually it was everyone wanted to be on the record. Everyone’s coming to us and they’re like, you’re the people who told this story and this thing happened to me. And after that story published, we had grandmas and grandpas and parents or kids emailing us and being like, my dad works at that place and he got his finger cut off, or My mom works there, you should talk to my grandson and all of that, because they were actually able to identify, the readers could identify like, oh, these are real people. And all those real people that we talked to that then went on the record, came back, most of them came back to us and have given us additional tips and continued to help us continue reporting on this now months long series. Or they’ve come back to us and been like, you know what? One person opened an EEOC complaint, and they said that the EOC actually pulled the reporting from our story into their case file. And that was something that their lawyer said was helpful to them for their case. So I think it’s just encouraging people that your voice matters and you have a more significant impact than what I have as the writer. It’s your story, your voice, you matter.
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:43:40):
It’s also, I’ll give you an example of, so when I was in India, I was the chief correspondent, and I had been hearing rumors that the people, there was a lot of insider training through WhatsApp messages, and there were a group of traders that were sharing information of corporate earnings. They were getting the corporate earnings from the CFO before the company released the earnings and making quite a bit of money out of it. And eventually I found this trader, and this took me months to investigate, but eventually found this trader who I just really hit it off with. Sometimes you hit on it off with a source and you’re just kind of doing well. And I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t need the guy to go on the record to say, Hey, this is going on. I needed his WhatsApp messages, that’s what I needed. I needed the documents. Sometimes people forget that documents really or make are very powerful evidence.
(00:44:37):
I literally had to, we went out coffee drinks quite a lot. I just kind of really, and we got along well. I mean he was a really good guy. And eventually I realized I don’t need him to go on the record. All I need him to do is share all the WhatsApp messages that he has on his phone. And eventually we clicked and then he started sharing his messages. And then I was also kind of talking to other traders who also shared their messages. And that’s how I uncovered this because I had the evidence, I had the screenshots of all how people were communicating. And in the WhatsApp messages, not everybody, but most people have their full names. So it was good. So don’t forget the documents. Sometimes getting physical evidence can help you avoid that. Having somebody on the record and getting them to talk a question.
Omar Mohammed | The Boston Globe (00:45:30):
Hi, Omar Mohammed from the Boston Globe. I’m curious about your process of reporting and organizing your reporting, especially when it comes to long-term enterprise stories. So I was just wondering if the three of you could talk as specific as you want about how you go about your process, especially when it comes to long-term enterprise reporting. And then as just a very brief second question, are there stories about the economy right now that you think are undercover and what those stories are, please? Thank you.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:46:12):
On the first question, I try to stay as organized as possible. I mean, the problem with journalism and the the world today is it’s just chaos, right? There’s so much information coming at you, so many things going on. If you wanted to write a story every five minutes or you could run into a story every five minutes and try to write something. And to me, a lot of those are distractions. What I try to find is what is the good long-term story I’m working on and try to ignore everything else? And I sort of make a list of the people I want to talk to today, but more importantly, I have an old school printed out calendar. Here’s what I want to accomplish this week. Here are the big things I need to get done this week. Because if you’re not constantly moving toward a goal, I find myself, I get distracted and lose focus and never get anything done.
(00:46:55):
So I try to have a goal for the day goal for the week to keep moving in the right direction, whether it’s tracking down a set of data or talking to 10 sources or looking up old stories on a topic. But my idea is that if you lay a brick each day or each week, then eventually you build a house. You can’t just build a house, but you got to focus on each brick. And if you skip a day or skip a week or skip a month, then you’re not going to get there. So my idea is just to stay slow focused and sort of methodical
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:47:28):
For myself. I’m honestly still learning how to do the organizational element of my long form reporting. So far what I’ve done is typically, I think about when it came to the vet project or when it came to the chemical molds in Broken Bone, I think about, okay, there’s definitely a main bar. There’s something here that is the central crux that’s going to be my through thread for everything else. And then with the vet shortage, I was like, well, I want to take people behind the scenes and let them see the fact that so many of the veterinarians that are still in practice are over the age of 70. And that’s kind of crazy, especially when they’re working with these massive animals. That was mind boggling to me. So it’s like, okay, I know I want to do something with that. And then with that project specifically, I was like, there’s real tangible solutions that I’m hearing from people in the field or things that I’m seeing that data alludes that could create solutions.
(00:48:19):
So I need some form of a solutions piece. I don’t want to want the readers to walk away empty handed. And with the other one, it was like, okay, well I know I’ve got these thousands of pages of records. I’ve got people who have shared tips with me. So there’s the main bar, and then I know there’s going to be, well, what is this business? Why is it in Kentucky? Just some of those general questions. Why here? What is this big thing doing here? And then there’s also, for this one at least, there’s all the continued follow-up reporting of all the things that keep coming in or keep happening or, well, there’s a labor component because now the UAW has gotten involved, so what does that mean for this? And so I’ve sort of at this point just bucketed it off into the two, three, or four concepts.
(00:49:00):
And those aren’t all thousand plus words. Some of them are like five to 800 words. And it’s like, this is something that I know it’ll be a shorter piece, but it’s still part of the larger story. So I sort of mentally map it out or storyboard it at this point. And then on the reporting part, the closest thing I do to stay in organized with my reporting is when I do an interview, I try to go through the audio file within 24 hours because I find that at least for myself, if I wait longer than that, I’ve just wasted that interview and I won’t remember what was important. I’ll have to sit there and listen to it all again. And so I just try to go through the audio at least and pull what I want. And I just, same with records, when my records requests do come in, I try to go through them in the first 24 hours. Sometimes that’s not realistic when I get thousands of pages, but I try to pull out the highlights or look at the way things are labeled and see what I think is the most important and just hit it quickly while it’s fresh.
Rafael Nam/NPR (00:49:54):
Yeah, I think as an editor, when I have a reporter working on a long-term project, there is something such as going down a rabbit hole. And I’ve seen this happen all the time where suddenly they talk to a reporter, ends up talking to too many people and has way too many, many documents and they’re swimming in it and they just can’t quite make what to do with anymore. And they get hazed, they get just lost. And I think it really does help to talk to an editor and say, this is what I have. Because I think the editor has that outside perspective that can be like, no, that doesn’t matter. I know that it sounds very so in the thick of it that it sounds super important, but that doesn’t matter. And there have been several times where I’ve had to tell our reporter, you have enough people we can go with this.
(00:50:44):
Sometimes the reporters goes, I, no, I need to talk to that other person and get that other document. And you’re like, no, no, you don’t. You got it. It is good enough to go. It’s just time to kind of sit back and just kind write it all out. So yeah, I think Olivia and Bar says stay organized, absolutely essential. But it is also sometimes good to just talk with an editor, say, this is what I have, explaining what you have. And somebody with a fresher perspective that’s not into the thick of it can be like tell you genuinely whether you have enough, not have enough. And as to your second question, in terms of under-reported stories, this is one thing that actually we wrestle with. I think as journalists we often, especially NPR, we try to always, I dunno, I always have a feeling that we always try to talk about people who are in people who are having a hard time.
(00:51:46):
For some reason, we as journalists often think that people struggling make better copy and which often they do. But sometimes I think I just don’t want us to perspective that there are good things about the economy, the positive sides of the economy, and those are the stories that I kind of always want to try to do. I think at NPR, we have this thing called every day. We are always looking for the fun and joy. The one thing that will bring people’s smile is because sometimes the news can get pretty bleak, especially these days. So sometimes finding that positive story, sometimes finding that positive trend in the economy, that success story, I dunno, those stories do do well because it’s not all bleak and it’s not all about people who are struggling. I mean, those are good stories for sure. But yeah, just be balanced I think is kind of what I tell my reporters.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:52:46):
I just want to add one piece. You should always talk to your editor, but sometimes you should ignore what your editor says. And I have a great example. So about 10 years ago, so I cover lobbying and influence in DC for the Wall Street Journal. And I heard in 2015 or 16 that a young up and coming democratic lobbyist for the company called Genentech was found dead on a golf course with a bullet hole in his head. And I thought like, holy crap, I cover lobbying. This guy’s a lobbyist, this is the story. So I ran over to my editor and my editor said, this could be a story, but we’re the Wall Street Journal. We’re a big national business newspaper. We’re not covering local crime. And unless this guy’s involved in something else, it doesn’t sound like a story for the Wall Street Journal.
(00:53:35):
And I thought, he’s completely wrong on this Now he’s my editor so I can’t just fully ignore him. So I kept working on things with him, but on the side, I kept looking into this guy looking up land records. I learned that he was incredibly successful lobbyist for Genentech, which is a big biotech company. He made a ton of money. He spent a ton of money. He had his and her Porsches. He was buying 5 million houses with cash, and he owned a $400,000 custom made mahogany speedboat, and I found out there’s only one company, the country that makes custom made mahogany speedboats. It’s called the Hacker Craft Company in Lake George, New York. So I called up the company and got the president on the phone. It’s like a five person company, and I started trying to subtly ask this guy, I’m the Wall Street Journal, I don’t want to scare this little guy or this regular business owner.
(00:54:25):
Why is the Wall Street Journal calling him? So I was trying to subtly ask questions, and he called on me right away and he said, I know what you’re calling about. You’re calling about this lobbyist Evan Morris, and when the FBI called me, I gave him everything I know, and I’m not talking to you when you hung up on me. And then I knew, then I ran back to my editor. I was like, the FBI’s look at this guy. And the editor’s like, great. It’s a story. So my point is, you got to use your instincts. You know more about what a story is than your editor is. Your editor is sitting, no offense, sitting in a cubicle or an office thinking big thoughts. You’re on the ground talking to people. You’re actually talking to people about what’s going on. You should know more about your editor, about what’s a story and what trends are than your editor is just reading things. You’re actually talking to people. So anyway, no offense to editors.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:55:10):
I think a lot of the things that I look at for in this particular moment in time is I really wish to look at what are people saying? This is really, really silly. But I go to Facebook a lot. I’m in a lot of, again, especially as a local reporter living in my community that I’m covering on a daily, I’m in a bunch of the Highlands Neighborhood Facebook group or the Jeffersontown neighborhood Facebook group, and I want to know what Sally and J Town has to say about the daycare that’s being closed at the church and why that matters to her. And maybe her Facebook post doesn’t become a story. Maybe it’s not anything. But I think that’s one way and that’s proven fruitful, not just for myself, but for our newsroom at large at times, is when myself or other colleagues are in these different community groups or someone’s super involved in a church or something, or super involved in a gym, and people at their gym are saying things and they’re like, oh, I’m at the gym and I heard from someone that their husband got a severance offer from big name company.
(00:56:11):
And I’m like, oh, okay. Let me reach out to big name company. And then they’re like, yeah, we’re doing buyouts. Sure, we’ll get you comments on that. And it’s like, oh, well, had no idea. One of our largest employers was going to do buyouts. And so I think just as a local reporter, being in the spaces where regular people are living their lives and communicating about their lives shows the things that could easily become under-reported because I don’t live in that portion of the city, or I’m not doing, not taking my kids to the church daycare, or I am not at that gym. So I think that’s how those things that could become under-reported, at least how I go about trying to see them the best I can. Time for one more.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (00:56:57):
Okay. Ashley Murray from States Newsroom Brody, you talked about talking with the subjects of your investigative stories and going through everything that’s going to be published and giving them a chance to respond or say that was taken out of context. I didn’t mean that way. So I came up in defensive newsrooms who were like, oh, they don’t want the story printed. Screw them. And I was trained to never let your sources see your copy before you publish it or see a version of the story story. But when I got on investigations, we would send a no surprise email just saying, this is what the story’s about, this is what’s coming out one more time. Do you want to respond? And so I’m just wondering, do your sources see your copy? Are you just going through major points with them?
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (00:57:59):
So what I do is take the whole story and literally sentence by sentence, take the sentence that’s in the story and just rewrite it. You were born on this date and you went to this high school and it’s facts that are in the story to put ’em as facts. And so no, they don’t see the actual copy. And then I try to sort of put those facts. So stories are usually not written chronologically. You start here and you move around. So I’ll write this note in a chronological way just so they can’t see the structure of the story also. But yeah, so I feel like a lot of reporters treated as sort of an antagonistic relationship, which it is. But every time I’ve done the no surprise email, we call ’em no surprise. Also, it helps the story. Either they catch something that’s wrong or they explain, Hey, the way you wrote that sentence makes me look like an asshole.
(00:58:52):
Let me explain what I was doing, and then your story gets better. So it’s always a difficult exercise. It’s always something I do not look forward to. Back to Tony Podesta. When we sat with Tony Podesta one, he told us a bunch of things that we thought were right, that were wrong, and then he told us these great stories that we never would’ve heard about. For example, everyone remembers, no, you guys are too young. The presidential campaign of Senator Muskie, Edmond Muskie was a Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, he went up to New Hampshire. He gave a speech because a New Hampshire Union leader had written an editorial criticizing his wife or something like that. And he’s giving this speech at the beginning of the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, and he’s defending his wife, and he got emotional and started to cry or potentially cry, and it was snowing. There was a big debate of whether he cried or not. At the time, 1972 men were men and presidential candidates were strong, and this guy was crying and it literally destroyed his campaign.
(00:59:55):
Tony Podesta, the lobbyists that were writing about, was his driver that day, and we never would’ve known that. And he was like, yeah, I saw the whole thing happen. Then he got in the backseat of the car and Musky says to his 20-year-old driver, how do you think that think it went? And he said, your campaign’s over. It was such a cool anecdote, but it only happens because we went to him with that no surprises email. Here’s all this bad stuff we’re going to say. And he was like, ah, come on in. He opened the door and you get this great stuff. My point is that every time you do the no surprises email, your story gets better.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (01:00:27):
You have these difficult conversations, you say, where you’re sitting down with the person, but do you always,
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (01:00:35):
I didn’t mean that. I meant we give them the no prize email. Here’s everything we’re going to say. And sometimes they say, oh, come on, let’s come in and talk about it. Like Tony Best. Other times they just say, this is wrong, that’s wrong. Or you’ll hear from my lawyer or whatnot. Or either way, it’s not always like, Hey, now we’re going to have coffee together, but you just need to know, and our lawyers need to know that we have given them every opportunity to respond. And if we basically said, if you’re ever in front of a judge, which I’ve never been, you can tell the judge, Hey, we gave him the whole story and he didn’t say anything is wrong. This story comes out and he says It’s wrong. How are we at fault there? We’re not.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (01:01:13):
Okay, so you always have a paper trail.
Brody Mullins/Author & Former Investigative Reporter (01:01:16):
It’s not for a paper trail, but I guess it does create a paper trail. I guess the judge says, did you really do this? We’d say, look, well, here’s the email. But I never thought that far down in advance, but yeah. Okay.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (01:01:25):
Thank you.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:01:29):
Anybody else want to add to that? Okay. These hours go by too quickly and we’ve left a lot of hands in the air, but I can’t think of three better journalists to put a capstone on. So please join me in thanking them.
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