I told you what I wanted you to do. You say it’s unrealistic, I say that I wouldn’t think to hold you to a standard I don’t hold myself to.
I’m a blogger and a podcast producer, not an investigative journalist, and I’m paid to focus on internet nonsense, not truly critical, world-saving stuff. But I do my fair share of investigative work. This article is one of my recent high-effort investigations, over someone getting punched on a beach after a long series of ugly subculture drama—a much lower-stakes sequence than the one you covered, but one no less personal or painful for the participants.
The “antagonists” were not particularly communicative, but I reached out to them multiple times, including right before publication, checking if I could ask questions and asking them to review my claims about them for accuracy. I went to the person closest to them who was informed on the situation and got as much information as I could from them. I spent hours talking with my primary sources, the victim and his boyfriend, and collecting as much hard evidence as possible. I spent a long time weighing which points were material and which would just serve to stir up and uncover old drama. Parties claimed I was making major material errors at several points during the process, and I dug into their claims as thoroughly as I could and asked for all available evidence to verify. Often, the disputes they claimed were material hinged on dissatisfaction with framing.
All sources were, mutually, worried about retribution and vitriol from the other parties involved. All sources were part of the same niche subculture spaces, all had interacted many times over the past half-decade, mostly unhappily, and all had complicated, ugly backstories.
I was not paid for this, except inasmuch as I’m paid a part-time monthly salary for podcast production work. I did it in my spare time while balancing a full law school schedule. I approached it with care, with seriousness, and with full understanding of the reputational effects I expected it to have and the evidence I had backing and justifying those effects. What I want you to do is exactly what I would do if I were assigned this task, given comparable timing and hour constraints. No more, no less.
There’s no threshold of hours of engagement. The test I am describing is this: are you receiving, or do you seem likely to receive, new material facts that contradict elements of your narrative? You were, up until two hours before publication, with a promise that there was more on the way. There is nothing unreasonable about saying publication should be delayed in that circumstance.
Anyway, look, I’m not an investigative reporter with experience in the field, much as I LARP as one online. That said, I’m on good personal terms with several and am happy to put my money where my mouth is and check with them. Let me know if the following is an appropriate summary or whether you’d make changes:
Say you were advising someone on a story they’d been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They’d contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours, paying their key sources for the trouble. Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a precise, known-in-advance publication date. Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date. The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit. On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article’s supporting claims.
Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, make a last-minute edit to include the final piece of material evidence, wait another week to review the claimed rebuttal, or take some other course of action?
The above image contains the full text of my message, absent the rest of the copy-pasted hypo. I’ll note in the interests of broad fairness that other involved parties suggested edits, notably that the last-minute evidence was evidence indicating the key witness had lied and that “7 days” is longer than they had to respond to the material claims. I used none of their suggestions. I think the hypo could be a reasonable question across a somewhat broad range of specific factual emphases and think the framing as-is is sufficient to get good answers; in my messages, I did not alter the hypo from the words you chose.
I reached out to three journalists with long investigative track records and have two responses so far. It goes without saying that these are people I have close working relationships, regular communication, or other personal connections with, but I believe the framing and lack of context provided mean they are well-positioned to consider the question in the abstract and on the merits independent of any connections.
The first response (update: from Katie Herzog):
The second (update: from Jesse Singal):
UPDATE:
The third, from Helen Lewis: