Pulitzer winner Ken Armstrong on the importance of storytelling in investigative journalism

 What I found is that stories stick with people in a way that information doesn’t. People remember stories. They remember being surprised, feeling outraged. They remember relating to someone or feeling for someone. They remember having their heart broken. And if memories from reading a story are attached to meaning, to a sense that something important is broken and needs to be fixed, then it’s not just a story. It also has a takeaway. To my mind, if a story sits at the middle, it will be remembered, and it also can make a difference. And that’s what we want. 

We put a lot of work into our stories, into our reporting. We want it to make a difference. And a story makes it easier for people to give a damn than a bullet point with information.

You know, I probably haven’t written a bullet point in many years. In fact, I often don’t even write a nut graph. You know, I would rather write a story and let the reader understand the takeaway from the story itself. I often think that that’s more powerful. You have to get buy-in from the newsroom and the editors, but I’ve been lucky enough to get buy-in on multiple occasions to write very long stories that don’t have a nut graph.

 It was a learning experience, and a delightfully fun one, I have to say. My home right now is filled with stacks of graphic novels I bought last year, including classics like “Persepolis,” to more recently published ones, so I could sort of learn the form and how people manage to do what they do. We had an editor at Bloomberg early last year who challenged us to think about different story forms and in particular how we might be able to use illustration more effectively to tell stories.

And when she made that challenge to us on the investigations team, we happened to have a story in progress that suited the challenge beautifully. Natalie Obiko Pearson, who is an investigative reporter in our Tokyo office, was working on a story about digital scams in India. And another editor realized that this would be a terrific pairing, that taking the challenge to do an illustrated piece and matching it with Natalie’s story was the way to go.

The story takes place in the digital realm, in the psychological realm. You’re inside the victim’s coerced imagination. It’s the kind of story that would be difficult to capture in photographs or in video. But when you have the liberty of illustration, it just seemed to suit it because we could get inside the victim’s life, head, imagination in a way that would have been difficult in other forms.

The one condition I asked when I took a job at Bloomberg was that I not be a manager. I would be terrible at it. I’d be unhappy. I don’t want to supervise anyone. I want to work with people on stories... It changes the dynamic. It changes the relationship.  I’ve spent almost the entirety of my career as a reporter, so it’s very easy for me to relate to what reporters are going through because I’ve been there many times.

You’ve probably talked with other reporters on the podcast who tell you what a head-spinning experience it is. There are few things that are more likely to bring out every kind of anxiety that we have than doing investigative reporting in the form of long-form storytelling, right?

We question everything. Is this still a story? Why did I ever start this? Why did I go into journalism? Why didn’t I go into architecture? What am I doing? Will this ever end? All of those questions come into play, and since I’ve had all those questions, I think it’s just easier for me to relate to what reporters are going through at particular points in the process and perhaps help encourage, support, whatever might be needed at any given time.

And it’s easier to do that if you’re not the supervisor, but you’re a colleague.