Ashley Fahey
According to Steve Riley, senior editor of enterprise and investigative reporting at the Raleigh News and Observer, writing with authority is paramount for any budding journalist.
“When I work with reporters in Raleigh, I work with a three-person investigative team and a fourth person writes almost exclusively for the Sunday paper,” said Riley. “You must write with authority, the kind of work that is assertive and confident.”
Riley has been working as a journalist for years, starting out as a sports reporter in Mississippi until he worked his way into news writing and, eventually, sports editor. His current position as editor of enterprise and investigative reporting for the last eight years has taught him a lot.
“Editors are not just there to move your story around,” he said. “I’m there from the very inception of story development and I’m responsible for making sure we don’t go down a lot of blind alleys. The stories we choose have to have high impact.”
And since his tenure at the News and Observer, Riley has been involved in editing and investigating many high-impact pieces, including a five-month investigation into the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), which exposed some corruption and unethical workings. Another big-impact story was investigating former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt.
Steve Riley talks about skepticism and how he applies it to the cases he investigates in reporting.
But he said it is not always easy to go about writing and interviewing for investigative pieces.
“While you don’t expect people to necessarily agree with what you’ve put in the paper, you want to be able to get back to them and feel that they’ve been treated fairly,” said Riley. “When I got through asking Gantt the little questions, it became clear that he had made the government work for him. At least he knew what was coming. You can diffuse a lot of that by being upfront with people.”
Investigative reporting is a league of its own, and Riley gave a lot of advice on what reporters should remember.
“The best advice is to not ever lie when you get caught in something like this,” he said. “We don’t enjoy seeing people suffer, but we have to get to the bottom of something.”
Riley said he gets investigative story ideas from several places.
The State Bureau of Investigation was one of Riley’s biggest series in his career as an investigative reporter.
“There’s no specific system, but the good projects come in a multitude of ways,” he said. “One is from good beat reporting. We also have a lot of tips come in, but we get a lot more tips than what we can look into.”
But the importance of investigative reporting is not to be underestimated. Riley said the time and research that goes into enterprise and investigative reporting can take anywhere from three days to a full year.
“With the SBI series, it was not until six or eight weeks into the reporting that we had a problem,” he said. “The lab was set up to solely help law enforcement and it was doing things to bend science to help convict people that might or might not be guilty. If you get the wrong guy, the right guy is out there somewhere.”
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