Q: How does an investigative reporter get started?

Many investigative reporters got where they are by starting as beat reporters. This is a good way to get story ideas and familiarity with an area.

On "day one," you have an assigned "beat" -- an area of coverage. Maybe it's city government, or the courthouse, or local business. At the WSJ we had reporters covering finance, medicine and healthcare, technology, education, mergers and acquisitions, automobiles, energy, etc. We had a database where most Fortune 500 companies were assigned to exactly one reporter as the responsible person for any news involving that company.

We subscribed to the newswires (AP, Reuters, Dow Jones) and filtered for any news involving our companies and beats. We read the SEC filings.

On "day one," I called my companies and introduced myself as the new WSJ reporter covering them. They would invite me to their HQ to meet the CEO, one or two other executives, and the PR apparatus. Sometimes they would complain in a friendly way about previous WSJ coverage or about too-favorable coverage of their competitor. Sometimes they invite you to visit their factory or meet their customers. They encourage you to attend their industry conference or trade shows.

Some companies will go all-out. When UPS gets a new WSJ reporter covering them, they order the person a brown uniform in their size and have them ride in a delivery truck for a day so the reporter gets a sense of how the company works.

Q: What was the first digital newspaper in the world?

This is a provocative question, and it really depends on what you mean by a digital newspaper.

Arguably any written language formed out of a well-understood dictionary of symbols (like letters) could constitute a digital newspaper, since the signal distinguishing feature of "digital" technology is that a static discipline ensures that marginal inputs can become perfect outputs. This makes perfect copies possible and allowed scribes to preserve our culture for thousands of years, longer than the life of any physical medium.

Under this definition, the earliest handwritten gazettes, or even the texts of ancient civilizations could count.

But a major leap happened when perfect copies became not just possible, but easy and capable of mass production -- so maybe we should focus on the first typesetnewspapers.

Yet another leap happened when news began to be distributed not just in mass-produced digital form (the typeset broadsheet) that could be "easily" copied, but in electronic form that could be "instantly" copied.

Here we would be talking about the rise of telegraphy, which allowed the first stock tickers and the Associated Press and other newswires.

In the 60s and 70s, newspapers began to distribute national and international editions, sending their pages by satellite to printing presses across the country or in Europe. A battle ensued between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times over the appropriate "digital" way to distribute their copy. The New York Times "digitized" its pages by scanning them and preparing a facsimile raster image, transmitting that pixel by pixel, and having it lithographed at printing presses across the country. The Wall Street Journal digitized its pages by coding the contents of each article letter-by-letter and sending that, along with a layout, to typesetters at each printing press who would have to re-typeset the pages before lithographing them. In John Hess's book "My Times," he describes how the NYT facsimile approach proved impractical with the technology of the day and was soundly beaten by the more data-frugal WSJ approach.

The 70s and 80s also saw the rise of electronic distribution to businesses and the public, with newspapers transmitting news copy to databases like Nexis and posting articles on online services like Compuserve and AOL. The 90s obviously saw extraordinary growth in the electronic distribution of news, as newspapers began posting their entire editions on the Internet.

I think if I had to pick one development along this timeline that signaled the birth of "digital" newspapers, it would probably be the invention of typesetting and the printing revolution, which made the mass-produced newspaper possible. It looks like that means I have to pick Carolus's "Relation," whose first edition was published in 1605.

But surely the invention of the telegraphic newswire is also a major, major advance that you could call the first "digital" newspaper.

And I think the anthropologists might point to the invention of written language in the first place -- and what it meant, namely the ability to perfectly copy texts and preserve them for longer than the life of any physical artifact -- as the signal development in our ability to use "digital" means to distribute and preserve our culture.

Q: How do you write a strong lede for an article?

Practice! And read the best stories in print. And read Blundell's "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing." Go look up old stories and see how they were constructed. Compare the NYT, WSJ, Washington Post and L.A. Times on the same story in history and see the choices each one made. More practice.

In straight news, you usually want to give the most important part of the story as clearly and succinctly as possible:

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today. (Tom Wicker, The New York Times, Nov. 23, 1963)

Men have landed and walked on the moon. (John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, July 21, 1969)

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here. (Alfred E. Lewis, The Washington Post, June 18, 1972)

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. (Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times, July 3, 1981)

Enron Corp. filed for protection from creditors in a New York bankruptcy court, the biggest such filing in U.S. history. (Rebecca Smith, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2001)

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2005)

I often found that homing in on the "most important part," especially for a complex story, needed some repose -- sometimes you don't see what's in front of your face when you have been chasing it for two months. Some of our editors were fantastic midwives, helping reporters get to the meat of the story. For me, there was nothing like trying to discuss the story with someone else to clarify my thoughts.

Of course there is also nothing like trying to pound it out at 3:55 p.m. with an editor screaming for copy! That, of course, is also a way to improve.

(And to be clear -- by the time you see a lede on page 1 of a national newspaper, at least four people have had their hands on it, if not eight on a bad day.)

In contrast to straight news, the lede is much less constrained in a feature story. More than a few books have been written about feature writing (Blundell's being one of the best) and it is an art! The best leads edify, amuse, and still get to the point:

To you, it's just a backhoe, a hulking mass of metal with a big bucket attached. But to Harvey Neigum, it's an extension of his soul. So here he is, after years of practice, climbing into his machine with the championship at stake.

It has all come down to this: Can Mr. Neigum make his eight-ton backhoe do the moonwalk? (John R. Wilke, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7, 1992)

Everything is bigger in Texas, even 10%.

Prominently displayed in Shirley Faske's office at Westlake High School is a notice advising students that they must rank "in the top 10%" of their graduating class to gain automatic admission to a Texas public university.

But last year, suburban Westlake crammed 63 of its 491 seniors, or 12.8%, into the top 10th, violating the laws of mathematics -- and of the Lone Star State. (Daniel Golden, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2000)

Here, amid the cracked earth and grizzled acacias of northwestern Kenya, rumors were running rampant about North Dakota.

Dozens of boys crowded around the UN compound where someone, somewhere, held a list of the US cities where they might be offered homes. An older boy asserted that North Dakota is colder than Nairobi, but this was impossible to confirm. Another was enraptured with the idea of Albany, and dreamily repeated the phrase “Albany, New York. Albany, New York,” a spot whose distance he estimated at a million, or possibly 2 million, kilometers.

And a 17-year-old, John Deng, had his heart set on Chicago, having learned that it is home to an abundance of bulls. To the son and grandson and great-grandson of cattle herders from the Dinka tribe — men who still sing adoring songs about the horns of their favorite oxen — Chicago has enormous appeal.

“I see that on some shirts, like Chicago Bulls. We believe that in Chicago we will have a lot of bulls,” said Deng, a young man with a gap-toothed smile who speaks a formal English akin to that of a BBC announcer.

Within hours, however, Deng would be told the name of a place that suggests a landscape without cattle: Arlington, Mass. It would mean nothing to him.

The flights to America are leaving every day now, screaming out of the bush in a huge cloud of orange dust, as the great migration of the group known as the Lost Boys of Sudan gets underway. Heads down, barefoot except for shower thongs, the departing boys file into the aircraft as grave as spacemen, sometimes without even looking back at the friends standing five deep against the barbed wire. (Ellen Barry, The Boston Globe, Jan. 7, 2001)

A bad taste lingers in the mouths of many mall walkers.

''Oh, yes, I can still taste it,'' said Mabel Mickle, 71, a retired financial analyst who for eight years has been walking for exercise in Evergreen Plaza, an enclosed shopping center in this southwestern suburb of Chicago.

There are some 1,500 malls in the United States, and most of them open early each morning to legions of sneaker-shod, hyper-organized and often elderly mall walkers. But Evergreen Plaza tried to go boldly where no mall had gone before. It all started in February when management sent out this notice: ''The mall will no longer be available to walkers."

Bruce Provo, managing partner of a company that owns the mall and the one who ordered its walkers into exile, said in his lockout order, ''We can no longer turn a blind eye to the realities of the world we live in.'' Those realities included mall walkers who muddied freshly buffed floors, hogged prime parking and demanded free Christmas gifts, Mr. Provo said in an interview.

''It got out of control from a standpoint of entitlement,'' he said. ''Predominantly they are seniors, O.K., and seniors are not great spenders, are they?''

Burned by a firestorm of bad publicity, boycott threats and patron poaching from nearby malls, Mr. Provo, 50, has been forced to retreat.

Across the United States, there are mall retailers who regard walkers as marginal shoppers, said Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group based in Manhattan. But with the conspicuous exception of Mr. Provo, most dare not say so in public. Instead, malls from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington State, embrace their walkers in the name of community relations, comforting them with free coffee, shopping discounts and monthly blood pressure checks.

The antiwalker war that Evergreen Plaza fought so aggressively and then lost so pathetically demonstrates one of the hard realities of climate-controlled retail: In a nation that grew up in the mall and is now growing old there, mall walkers rule. (Blaine Harden, The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2001)

THE delicate posturing began with the phone call.

The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.
"He explicitly said, 'I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,' " said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.

The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. "We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately," recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.

"We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did."

Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion - two guys looking at art together - they headed directly to a bar. "We couldn't stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one," said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. "We were purging ourselves of insecurity."

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous. (Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, April 10, 2005)

What time is it when the clock strikes half past 62?

Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable standard, Greenwich Mean Time.

Word of the U.S. proposal, made secretly to a United Nations body, began leaking to scientists earlier this month. The plan would simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours. Right now, that's not always the case. (Keith J. Winstein, The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2005)

ON A SUMMER DAY IN 2002, shares of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. sank to their lowest level in a year. Oddly, that was good news for Chief Executive Jeffrey Rich.

His annual grant of stock options was dated that day, entitling him to buy stock at that price for years. Had they been dated a week later, when the stock was 27% higher, they'd have been far less rewarding. It was the same through much of Mr. Rich's tenure: In a striking pattern, all six of his stock-option grants from 1995 to 2002 were dated just before a rise in the stock price, often at the bottom of a steep drop.

Just lucky? A Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the odds of this happening by chance are extraordinarily remote -- around one in 300 billion. The odds of winning the multistate Powerball lottery with a $1 ticket are one in 146 million. (Charles Forelle and James Bandler, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2006)

Unfortunately, sometimes a lede can be "too good to check" as the saying goes:

Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic book number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!" Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands. Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening--and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you. Then, you can buy the comic book, and then, when you're of more, say, appropriate age, you can buy the car and pornographic magazines on your own."

It's pretty amazing that a 15-year-old could get a big-time software firm to grovel like that. What's more amazing, though, is how Ian got Jukt's attention--by breaking into its databases. In March, Restil--whose nom de plume is "Big Bad Bionic Boy"--used a computer at his high school library to hack into Jukt. Once he got past the company's online security system, he posted every employee's salary on the company's website alongside more than a dozen pictures of naked women, each with the caption: "the big bad bionic boy has been here baby." After weeks of trying futilely to figure out how Ian cracked the security program, Jukt's engineers gave up. That's when the company came to Ian's Bethesda, Maryland, home--to hire him.

And Ian, clever boy that he is, had been expecting them. "The principal told us to hire a defense lawyer fast, because Ian was in deep trouble," says his mother, Jamie Restil. "Ian laughed and told us to get an agent. Our boy was definitely right." Ian says he knew that Jukt would determine it was cheaper to hire him--and pay him to fix their database--than it would be to have engineers do it. And he knew this because the same thing had happened to more than a dozen online friends. (Stephen Glass, The New Republic, May 18, 1998)

Q: In what ways are the US News & World Report rankings for colleges flawed?

About a quarter of the U.S. News formula is an opinion poll of university administrators (presidents, provosts and deans) and high school college counselors about their views on the reputations of the colleges.

One criticism would be, does this really speak highly for the validity of the results, when 23% of the result comes from administrators at competing universities and high school employees? Does a 45-year-old guidance counselor at Evanston high school or a 60-year-old dean at the University of Chicago really have any idea whether you'll get a better undergraduate education at Stanford, Harvard, Penn or Yale if you go there in 2011?

And, of course, can a national university really have a single, unitary reputation score? Surely the kind of student who would thrive at Caltech (the #1 school in the country a decade ago, despite offering no BA degree) is not the same as the student who would thrive studying medieval literature at Yale.

But #2, like all components of the U.S. News formula, there is no margin of error on the results of the opinion poll! The rankings are calculated as if every input -- the competitor and high-school employee view of a school's "reputation," its graduation rate, the average class size -- were absolutely certain. That is not so. 

In addition to statistical error, there's also a substantial systematic error in some of the parameters -- e.g. the "average class size" has a lot of slop in what you count as a class (just lectures? lectures and discussion sections? lectures, discussion sessions, and tutorials?). So does the graduation rate, etc. These figures should have error bars on them too.

I have discussed this briefly with Bob Morse, the guy at U.S. News who calculates the rankings, but he wasn't receptive to the idea that they should put appropriate error bars on all the inputs and propagate the uncertainty to the outputs, marking statistical ties as appropriate. (I suspect these statistical ties might cross substantial swaths of the final rankings, which may partly explain why U.S. News wouldn't be excited to try to sell magazines with that technique -- who wants to announce a nine-way tie for 1st place?) His position was that they assume the data coming from the schools is right, and they don't waste time worrying about what the rankings would be if the supplied figures weren't right.

Q: What are all the terms used when negotiating with reporters about sourcing and attribution?

Forget the jargon -- the important thing is to reach a meeting of the minds with the reporter about the conditions imposed on the interview or information, BEFORE you give the interview or share the information. The reporter needs a chance to agree or disagree with the proposed terms and you both need to have the same understanding so there are no surprises later. A surprise will not be in your favor so it's in your interest to get clarity.

The general rule in American print journalism is that a reporter always has to identify themselves as a reporter, and from that point on, you are "on the record" unless you reach an agreement otherwise. That means everything can be attributed to you by name.

Regarding the terms -- Generally speaking, information delivered "on background" might be directly quoted (meaning a verbatim quotation inside quotation marks) and attributed to "a source close to FooCorp" or "a FooCorp executive." Information delivered "on deep background" might be paraphrased and attributed to "people familiar with the matter" (this is a favorite Wall Street Journal phrase) or "according to various estimates" or simply inserted in the article without attribution.

Information that's "off the record" isn't supposed to appear in the article at all unless given by another source -- but without a firm understanding otherwise, the reporter may use the "off the record" information to try to pump other sources to confirm it. This could easily make it known to the other sources that you were the original source of the information.

Every reporter and publication has a slightly different understanding of what is and isn't permissible with "background," "deep background," "not for attribution" and "off the record" material, so again, better to get a real meeting of the minds than to use the jargon and be surprised later.