From sourcing to SEC documents: Tips from a veteran storyteller

Photo by Dreamstime

Julie Wernau of the Chicago Tribune is a gold mine of reporting tips. I spoke with her last week about her coverage of an electric car maker in Elkhart, Ind. She gave me so many good nuggets, I’ve decided to bullet point them so you don’t miss any.

But first, the background. Julie received a pitch from an electric vehicle maker starting a plant, she says. She called a year later, but the company wasn’t as receptive so she started doing some research.

Julie Wernau

“I got obsessed with the story because this was supposed to be the wave of the future,” Julie says. “The company didn’t want to do a tour so I drove out there and rang the doorbell.”

Lucky for her, the two people who worked there let her in. Her reporting found plans for more than 400 jobs had failed, along with an undisclosed amount of tax breaks and incentives. “Instead, the Hoosier state’s big bet has been a bust,” her first story says. 

Her second story focused on the company’s ties to a Russian investor. She learned of the connections to Russia from a reader email. Though getting 1,000 emails a day isn’t unusual, she says she makes it a priority to look at reader emails.

“The second story came from my mantra of I will get back to people as much as I possibly can,” Julie says. “You want to find the person who’s more obsessed with the topic than you are.”

Some other great tips from Julie:

• Talk to people first and then gather documents. “If you go through documents first, the story will take forever,” she says. Talking to people helped her determine what she needed and how to find it.
• Do full-text searches on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website to see where a company name appears. That helped her find the connection to the Russian investor. “A lot of times, business reporters give up, but there is so much information about private companies in SEC filings,” she says.
• Use the Federal Data Procurement Data System to search for contracts. Simply type the company name into the “ezSearch” field. Also check the USASpending.gov site to calculate how much is spent on certain industries.  “These two websites were awesome and helpful for the story,” Julie says.