The Traits of a Good Reporter

Woe to officials who want to make public decisions in private. Jim Shoop, a reporter on the old Minneapolis Star, found out about a secret meeting of Twin Cities mayors who were discussing setting up a metropolitan sales tax; he arrived early and curled up inside a portable bar in a corner of the room. He got the story.

Sometimes it's important just to hang out and build trust. Post Metro reporter Josh White was trying to find a stripper with drug problems befriended by the rogue FBI agent Robert Hanssen before he was caught spying. White visited most of the strip joints in town and got a lead that sent him to Columbus, Ohio, where he knocked, unannounced, and met her mother and toddler. After three days, the stripper came home to find White on her couch with her son in his lap watching TV. She gave him the story.

Good reporters know how to get access to people and documents; in the old days, a fifth of whiskey to the right janitor could get you a report lying on a city hall desk. Now a cadre of Post database and investigative reporters plows through mounds of hard-to-obtain government documents, looking for stories of fraud, patronage, waste and wrongdoing; they create spreadsheets and do the painstaking work of looking for patterns. The ability to sort out conflicting information is one of the hallmarks of good reporting.

Metro reporter Keith Alexander, reporting on the case of two girls who were found murdered and stuffed in a freezer in their home, spent days going over court files to find why their mother, accused of killing them, had been allowed to adopt them. The files told him the sad stories of their biological families; he was able to track them down and tell a deeper story of the tragedy.

A reporter's first commitment is getting the story for readers; it trumps almost everything. That's the reason they sometimes miss their wedding anniversaries or their children's birthday parties and keep on reporting until they are wheeled into surgery (see Shadid) or delivery rooms.

Reporting is a calling. If reporters didn't have it (along with good editors), how would you know what was going on in your communities, the nation and the world?

A longer version of this column appears online. Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or ombudsman@washpost.com.