J260 Investigative Reporting Seminar

This is a team-taught course by staff at IRP lead by David Barstow. Sessions will be mostly shepherded by IRP staff including Bernice Yeung, Garrett Therolf, Christine Schiavo, Yasmin Rafiei, and IRP fellows.

Investigative journalism, when done right, can set the world on a different course. It can rewrite policies, send people to prison, exonerate the innocent, protect the vulnerable and change the way we think about our communities. It can save lives. In this course, we will work together to set you on a path to committing fierce works of investigative journalism. We will probe exactly what investigative journalism means, and we will discuss techniques for finding and evaluating story ideas. Journalism is a trade as much as an intellectual pursuit, and so we will tackle in-the-field challenges such as getting people to talk to you, tell you things they’re not supposed to, and leak you documents. We will take on when to start writing, how to start writing, and when you’ll know you have “the goods.” Finally, we will talk about an experience so baked into investigative journalism that it might as well be bread: Anxiety, self-doubt and the path to tunnel through it.