How tech reporter Mac kept hammering away at a tip

BuzzFeed senior technology reporter Ryan Mac spoke with the Stanford Daily about his work and some big stories he has covered.

Here is an excerpt:

TSD: Could you tell me about the most challenging story you’ve ever worked on as a reporter?

RM: I think probably the Thiel story [on Peter Thiel financing behind Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker.] I was a junior reporter at the time at Forbes. I had been at Forbes for a couple years but when we got this tip, I thought it was something that seemed so absurd — but I remember exactly where I got it and where I was. It was one of those things where you hear something and you’re like, okay, even if it is true, how do I go about proving it?

But we kept hammering away. I kept it kind of stored away as this idea I had in the back of my mind for a couple months. It just took a lot of reporting, hammering the phone to get that into a place where we were comfortable running with it. I had broken news before like that, but that was a story that I felt was like, holy shit, this changes a lot of people’s worldview on this one topic that has been very newsworthy the last couple months. It was so far out of left field that [that] even gave it more of an impact in a way.

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