Tracking the criminals in the mortgage industry

Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed Miami Herald reporter Jack Dolan, who has been writing a series about criminals in the mortgage industry in Florida.

Here is an excerpt:

TA: I like the matter-of-fact tone in this series. You guys called a spade a spade when you found wrongdoing or gross negligence. I think this is part of what’s been wrong with newspapers in years past, was that when they found stuff they too often made their readers read between the lines.

JD: We’ve all been beat reporters and done dailies, and you don’t know the answers often. You’ve got what this guy said and what that guy said and you’ve got to try to balance it. If you spend eight months and looked at 200,000 criminal backgrounds, by the end of it you know the answer. You’ve presented your findings to everybody who’s gonna get named and had long, sometimes contentious interviews with them.

My editor is a guy named Mike Sallah. I’m a much more flowery writer than he is, and he just said “No. Just tell it.� Like a sledgehammer. And we fought over that a lot, but I think he was right.

Read more here. And here is a National Public Radio interview with Dolan from back in July.