Alexandra Zayas is a deputy managing editor at ProPublica, guiding reporters and editors on investigative projects. As a reporter, she won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Stories she edited have won two National Magazine Awards, two George Polk Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.
She’s been a regular instructor at Poynter, leading our popular Will Work For Impact: Fundamentals of Investigative Journalism course for five years and teaching here for over a decade. She’s back this fall with an extended course and some fresh tips that even the most seasoned journalists will appreciate. Those who are new at investigations should enroll now and take copious notes.
The course is just $399 for five weekly, 60-minute lessons in October, in addition to learning exercises and an online forum where you can interact with Zayas and get feedback on related stories. Enrollment is rolling, so you’d be wise to sign up now before the spots are all full. (Here’s a little help if you want to ask your employer to cover the cost of training.)
We sat down with Zayas to ask her how she got her start as an investigative reporter, what she’s learned analyzing award-winning investigations, and how she wants people to think about impact. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Barbara Allen, Poynter: Tell us a little more about your background — your upbringing, your education, your professional experience.
Alexandra Zayas: I decided I wanted to become a journalist because I grew up in Miami, which is a very wild news town in a very wild news state. I wanted to have a front-row seat to history. I grew up with a lot of news events, like Hurricane Andrew and the Elián Gonzalez saga. And it was seven years into being a reporter that I realized investigative reporting was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Allen: What led you to that?
Zayas: I never thought that I was smart enough or mean enough to be an investigative reporter. Seven years into doing the job, I came upon a story that I really connected with, and I had an editor who I really connected with. The entire process showed me that you don’t need to be smarter or meaner, you just need to have curiosity and drive. There is a roadmap to doing work like this. … You could actually change the world. You could change lives; you could change systems. And this truly evangelized me. I’m not overstating it when I say it gave me a purpose to my life, and that is what I hope to share with the students at Poynter.
Allen: What was that first investigation? What was the impetus?
Zayas: It was a story (“In God’s Name”) about how the state of Florida had allowed a group of religious boarding schools and group homes to exist without a lot of outside oversight and regulation, allowing them to use forms of discipline and control that were illegal in places that were overseen by the state. I talked to a lot of young people who were frankly not that much younger than me at the time, some of whom had been sent to these places by their parents simply for being gay; others, who had some emotional problems that should have been dealt with in different ways. And they were abused. They were physically abused, sexually abused, psychologically abused, punished in very bizarre ways. And they told me their stories, and they poured into me their trust.
After that story ran, four of these homes closed immediately. To this day, I still get parents reaching out to me, saying that they have spared their kids the same fate as some of the young people that I spoke to. It just truly showed me that I could make a difference.
Allen: When you get communications from a parent like that, what’s your reaction?
Zayas: It just highlights the tiny little micro-impacts that our work has. Making those differences in tiny little ways is just very exciting to think about, because it shows you that the impact that you see is only the tip of the iceberg of the potential impact that you might have.
Allen: Digging a little deeper on that particular story, do you remember an “Aha!” moment or something that really made it click for you?
Zayas: I grew up in a very religious home, and there were aspects of their stories that made me think that it was only by sheer luck that I didn’t fall into the same situation as some of them. The nature of the abuse and the punishments was sort of gendered, so as a female, there was a lot of it that that struck me in a personal way. And it was something that I felt like readers would be very interested to learn about.
Allen: You’ve told me that you analyze past award-winning stories and have determined some commonalities among them. Tell me more about that process, your findings and what drove you to do that analysis.
Zayas: I’m very aspirational. I like to look at the best of the best — the projects and the stories that my peers have said are the most excellent in any given year. The rubric for winning a contest is the same rubric that we strive for for good investigations: it has to be effective, it has to make the point well, it has to be compelling, you need to achieve impact. So I have analyzed different contests for different reasons.
One of the misconceptions about impact is that maybe it falls from the sky, or it magically happens, or people decide to do something just out of the goodness of their hearts. But really, the journalists doing these stories have to push for impact. (Impact) really starts from the very beginning of how you decide to report on your story.
Allen: Impact is obviously really important to you — it’s in the title of your program! What does impact mean?
Zayas: Impact means making a difference. Maybe government leaders start talking about an issue that has been far from their radars, or they commission their own investigation using information you had no access to, to dig even more into the problem.
But every once in a while, the journalist achieves something extraordinary. A few reporters at the Associated Press helped free 2,000 enslaved people. Their work literally freed slaves. A reporter working with ProPublica led a hospital to erase $11.9 million in medical debts, making an immediate and profound impact on thousands of patients.
And just last year, a team at AL.com blew up a predatory police department and prompted four — yes, four — new laws. You have to read the investigation to believe not just the abuse but the swift and tremendous scale of the impact. What I loved most about the project is that it employed good, old-fashioned, everyday journalism techniques. There was no top secret intel leak or data analysis that requires a doctorate to understand. You can learn how to do this.
Will Work For Impact: Fundamentals of Investigative Journalism is enrolling now.
