Secrets of an investigative reporter

Interviewed by the Columbia Links students
Edited transcription by Natalia Yarbrough
Photo by Elizabeth Jones

Scene: Classroom at Columbia College. In the hot seat: Tim Novak, award-winning investigative reporter. Expose: A few of Novak’s trade secrets. Under fire: Novak tells it like it is.

What I do is kind of a specialty at my newspaper. There aren’t many people that do this. What I’m going to talk to you about is my philosophy on how to do these types of things and try to bring it down to a level that would work for you guys. I hope that doesn’t sound too demeaning or pejorative, but it took me a long time to get to the level that I’m at.

Secret #1: Every story is an investigative story. Or should be. But every story that every journalist does really should have some sort of investigation to it, no matter what that story is. It just depends on the depth and level of investigation that you do. If you wanted to do a story on how your school decides its curriculum, that would be a form of investigation. How the teachers select the classes that they are going to teach. Do we use this book or that book? As you investigate that, you talk to people. As you gather your information, that’s the fundamental principal of investigative reporting--gathering information. You learn new things and you’d be led to other things. Someone would say this and that would cause you to ask additional questions based on some information you got from somewhere else.

Secret #2: Be a curious person. I really don’t know how to tell you to be that; you just have to be that. You have to have curiosity to learn things. That’s really what the field of journalism is about. It’s one of the nice things about the job; you are always learning something new no matter how old you are.

Secret #3: Don’t be afraid to ask questions that people don’t want you to ask them, and that’s a hard task. Sometimes you ask somebody a question that you know they’re not going to like. You just have to be able to do that. When you’re asking those types of questions you have to come up with a strategy. You have to figure out what you want this person to tell you, and what’s the best way to get them to answer the question.

Secret #4: You have to find ways to coax information out of people. You can either be nice or you can be, I don’t want to say threatening but, not nice. And if you figure which is the best way in the situation, you’re in.

Secret #5: You have to be resilient. Some of the most successful people in our business don’t give up. In other words, if someone won’t give you information, keep going back to them until you get what you want. There are always multiple ways to obtain information. There are very few things that only one person knows or can help you with. So you need to figure out how to gather the information that you want. You have to not only be persistent with people, but you have to be persistent with what you’re working on. You owe it to the story to report it the best way you can. You have to do things that you might not want to do, or that people might not want you to do.

Secret # 6: You have to have a thick skin. It is not easy to have people upset with you. People are upset with me all of the time. It’s not any easier even though I’ve been doing this for so many years. It comes with the job.

Now the tough questions in a Q&A with Tim Novak:

How did you get into journalism? Did you always want to do that, or was it something that just happened?
I was in high school when I decided that I wanted to be a sports writer.

How soon after did you realize you didn’t want to do sports anymore?
It was never a question of not wanting to do sports; it just kind of ended up this way. I don’t work like most journalists. I don’t go out and cover things; I don’t go to events. Brenda had said she didn’t know what I looked like and I prefer people not to know what I look like. I don’t go to press conferences. I don’t cover things like that. My job is to uncover stories. The stories that I write aren’t stories that someone is going to tell me at a press conference. They’re stories I have to come up with on my own. I find my own stories.

After you find your story, don’t you have to go out and investigate it? Don’t you have to go somewhere, interview someone, do something?
Sure, but it’s always me and that person. Nobody else is around.

Are you discreet about the things you do?
Yes.

Is there a reason? Is it because you hang out with the people that you write about and you don’t want them to know it’s you talking about them?
I don’t hang out with the person that I write about. That’s a cardinal rule. It would be hard to write about them then. Most people that I write about do not want me to write about them; therefore, they do not want to be my friend. Most people that I write about have very negative reactions towards me.

They don’t even know what you look like, because you said you don’t go to press conferences, so how do they know that it is you writing about them?
Let’s just say I’ve never met the mayor, but the mayor knows who I am, so he would not want to be my friend. I do think the mayor knows what I look like, and that’s just the way it is.

Is it wrong to put in your opinion about what you feel? If it’s your story, can you put in whatever you want? Like if I was writing a story about a girl that I didn’t like and I said, “She’s just an idiot and I don’t like her” is that not journalism?
No, that is not journalism. My stories do not contain my opinions. Although I am sure that the people I write about would disagree with that.

Did you go to college? How long and which one?
Yes. I went to the University of Illinois for four years.

Has there ever been a time that you were writing a story that tied in to another one you’ve already done?
Yeah, most of my stories do that.

Has there ever been a time when you have been harassed for an article you wrote?
I’ve never been harmed physically or anything like that. I’ve been yelled and screamed at. People have called my bosses. But nobody has done anything I would consider the bounds of human decency.

Have you ever received hate mail?
Yeah, I’ve gotten hate mail.

You had said earlier that you developed certain skills? Can you share those skills with us?
Some of them might just be luck, although sometimes you make your own luck, so I’m not really sure the difference between luck and skill. I do seem to have an ability to find a good story.

Can you give us an example of when you were walking down the street and just found a story?
The most successful observation story that I’ve had was that I observed a truck parked by my house every day for about 10 years. During those 10 years I always figured I would eventually write about it. And finally one day I said, “I need a story and I think it’s time to do the truck.” So I started to investigate that truck and I found 400 more trucks like it across the city. I spent a long time on that story and when it was over 48 people had gone to prison. And all that was from an observation.

How do you feel about stories saying, “SOURCES say…”? Are you that source?
No, I’m never that source. I actually try not to use those types of things. It can sometime get in the way of the story and have people thinking, “Who’s saying this?”

Is it hard to write those long papers for college?
It gets easier.