Friday, May 2, 2025
Become a Patron!Hey CNFers, it’s the Atavistian time of the month, so there are some saucy details about this month’s story titled “All That Glitters: His alleged victims say he bribed New York Police Department officials, stole millions in diamonds, and persuaded Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Kim Kardahsian to shill for scam cryptocurrency. So why is Jona Rechnitz still free?“
This gives us a chance to speak with Miranda Green, (@randi_green) an investigative reporter, about this piece.
OK, let’s hear what lead editor, Jonah Ogles, experienced from his side of the table. Lots of good stuff about having this story handed off to him farther along in the process, writing good pitches, and what information to withhold and what to put into the piece.
Miranda Green is an investigative journalist based in LA who focuses on politics and climate change. She previously worked at Huffpost and Floodlight News. Her interests focus on the intersection of dark money, the fossil fuel industrial complex and the manipulation of news to spread misinformation. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal.
With the Atavist piece, we talk about how she earns trust, how she navigates background, the structure of the piece, and finding the harm in an investigative story. Great chat.
You can follow the show on Instagram @creativenonfictionpodcast.
Link to a mostly accurate transcript of Ep. 4651
Jonah Ogles on framing a better pitch …
I would encourage writers to write the pitch, step away from it for however long they can manage it. If it’s two days great, if it’s a week, awesome. But then come back to it and think about it as a story that they’re gonna tell to somebody. If they were sitting down to have a beer or a coffee, what’s the story you would tell?
On making sure you provide enough information in a pitch …
I can’t tell you how often I send pitches back to writers saying this isn’t done yet. I feel bad asking writers to do more work. They they find just enough to get really excited about it. And they’re like, ‘Oh, I can see where this might go.’ And they want to pitch it, but we want to know where it is going to go and and feel pretty confident about that. So we want sources lined up. We want to know, even if we don’t know exactly how it ends, we want to know that it’s ending that somewhere in this general vicinity. We’re either going to find the guy or and it’ll look like this, or we won’t, but here’s how we can still sort of wrap it up in a way that feels satisfying to readers.
Miranda on procrastination…
Procrastination, for me, especially on stories like this, is that I just go down the most ridiculous rabbit holes instead of staying on top of the next thing that needs to be addressed.
On killing quotes …
I had a professor of mine who said to me, ‘The reader never misses the quote that doesn’t make it in.’ You’re the only one who’s dying to keep that quote in because you love it so much. But it’s really rare that the reader ever knows that there is a quote there that they’re not reading. And so that is something I’ve had to remind myself over and over again when I allowed Jonah to kill some of my darlings, because it’s really about the story.
On finding the harm …
With investigative reporting, the best stories are bulletproof. You want to be able to prove the rumor you heard or the document that you got handed. You want to know that it’s real. You want to be able to prove it’s legit. You want to be able to nab the details, but then you also want to be able to tell the story of why this matters and who’s harmed by this, and finding the harm is oftentimes the hardest part of investigative reporting. Sometimes things happen and they’re nefarious, and no one’s written about it, and it’s a scoop, and it definitely is deserving of being told, but it’s not as impactful if nothing really happened because of it.
On money …
If I really broke this down per hour wage, I think I’d cry … I do think that’s a reality that a lot of reporters who try to do this kind of reporting face, that not a lot of people talk about, that it really isn’t sustainable. A lot of freelancers have to take on content work on the side to make freelance journalism sustainable.
On earning trust …
I was really persistent and I was really consistent, and that’s probably the number one thing. I made it really clear that I wasn’t a flash in the pan here. I was digging into this, and I was staying on this story.
On her routine …
I don’t really have a routine. I wake up in the morning. I tell myself I’m gonna work out. It’s about 50-50. I make myself coffee. That’s 100%! Then I sit down at my desk and I will myself to get to the next task ahead.
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- Should you choose to cite this transcript, check it against the original audio as these are not 100% accurate, despite my efforts at cleaning them up. And please cite me and the podcast linking back where possible. ↩︎
