Tips from Bob Woodward on Investigative Journalism

one of the questions that persists in journalism is where do we get our information and there actually three tracks and I think they apply to any Story the first obviously is people but that doesn't mean just going into one person or One Source it means checking everything talking to half a dozen or even a dozen people for a day story if it's something longer you want to totally surround and saturate at the subject second track is documents I have not really ever seen a story in a newspaper or on television or even on radio that

couldn't be enhanced with some sort of documentation that would support or add more detail to what uh the story is about and the third often if you ask people well what's the third they don't get it and I would tell an anecdote from my early supporting career to illustrate the importance of the third track I uh in the first months I started working at The Washington Post in 1971 uh I had developed a source in the Local District of Columbia health department and they were doing inspections of restaurants uh many of the famous restaurants in

Washington and closing them down for sanitation violations and we were doing front page stories on this and one day the source called me up and said we have the worst score that any restaurant in the district of Colombia has ever received and I won't go through the gross details about what was floating in the food and so forth so I went and got the document and uh at a newspaper even then they like to get early copy so I wrote out the story about lunchtime or maybe even before lunch and the story said the um

and the document made it clear that the coffee shop the Mayflower coffee shop as it was called uh was uh the uh restaurant that had been closed down with a score of less than 50 points uh and I wrote up the story based on the document the coffee shop at the Mayflower Hotel one of the famous restaurants in Washington and handed it to the city editor and he said here's early copy and he was delighted and he said wow this is a front page story uh wow that's awful series of violations uh and then he

said have you been there and I said no I got the document no it's authentic he said well uh it's 2 and 1/2 blocks away get your ass out of the chair and and get over there so I went to the Mayflower Hotel and asked to visit the coffee shop everyone there said we don't have a coffee shop we have a famous Jean Louie or something restaurant we have a buffet but no coffee shop so I looked at the address of the Mayflower coffee shop and it turned out not to be in the Mayflower Hotel

but in The Statler Hilton hotel which was a half a block away from the Washington Post so I went over there and found the Mayflower coffee shop and they had a big sign saying closed for repairs uh the man who ran the restaurant happily but reluctantly acknowledged yes they'd been closed down for all of these violations and I went back to the post and asked the editor for the copy back and I said I had a few minor changes to make and if we'd run the story without me getting my ass out of the chair

and going to the scene we probably would have had to run a front page correction also I I think there will always be investigative or in-depth uh reporting clearly the newspapers uh are going through a convulsion now it may last a long time uh but young people are going to develop new business models uh everyone all age groups realize it's important to have good data good good information about what government does but I asked Ben Bradley who was the editor of the post what he thought and he said look with it's going to change but

then with great Passion uh he said there will will always be a group of people a Band of Brothers a band of sisters a band of brothers and sisters working to get to the underlayer of what's going on and they will find it a way to public or broadcast or convey what they believe the truth to be