Steve Andrews WFLA

Steve Andrews, Senior Investigative Reporter with WFLA, spoke with our class about his experiences with investigative reporting. Andrews has worked on multiple stories and told our class about a few of his most interesting stories.

Andrews started off by saying, “the game has changed.” He was referring to the media world. At WFLA, they are not just TV news, but they are TV, print and online. Although WFLA still takes part in the print world of news, Andrews said, “the newspaper is gone…it’s a dinosaur.”

One of Andrews’s investigative reports was about a bay area reservoir. The reservoir had multiple cracks along the edges, and through his investigation, he realized the cracks expanded throughout the entire reservoir. When Andrews first asked about public documents to begin research on the reservoir, he was given a run around. Andrews persisted and received a stack of paperwork to discourage his investigation. Andrews looked at the paperwork as a gold mine. He took the papers and read every bit of detail, realizing they gave him the wrong documents. Andrews again went back to gain the proper documents, and was once more handed an enormous amount of documents. He went through each and every paper, founding very interesting clues to his investigation.

I was discouraged to partake in investigative reporting at the beginning of Andrews’s testimony. If I were to receive a large some of documents that were something completely different than what I requested, I wouldn’t have wanted to pursue the story. After seeing the excitement and the accomplishment Andrews expressed about his investigation, it made me realize how rewarding in-depth reporting could be.

Becoming a reporter requires investigation and request of public records. If I learned one thing from Andrews it would be that, “if you get a public record, make sure you sit down and read it! Each story is it’s own animal, and it could take 18 months for a story to change.”

I now have a greater appreciation of investigative reporting, and the reporters who take on the responsibility.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2007/sep/05/report-says-reservoir-safe/