Maya Dukmasova of Injustice Watch on the Skills, Boundaries and Experience an Investigative Reporter Needs

On December 15, 2021, Study Hall held an AMA with Maya Dukmasova, a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, reporting primarily on judges in Cook County. Before that, she was a staff writer at the Chicago Reader for five years where she covered housing, policing, racial justice movements, and various odd topics about interesting people and places in Chicago. 

On December 15, 2021, Study Hall held an AMA with Maya Dukmasova, a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, reporting primarily on judges in Cook County. Before that, she was a staff writer at the Chicago Reader for five years where she covered housing, policing, racial justice movements, and various odd topics about interesting people and places in Chicago. 

​​Study Hall is offering a series of AMA-style dialogues throughout the year. Subscribers at the Network level can access the AMAs through our Slack forum, where you can engage in informal conversations with writers, editors, and other digital media workers and ask your questions about the media industry, investigative journalism, building online platforms, and book publishing.

Getting started with investigative journalism as a freelancer

Starting investigative reporting as a freelancer was a real slog. I don’t know if it would be accurate to say that what I did on my own in those years was “investigative reporting.” I think it would technically fall under the “enterprise” category. As a side note, I think the “investigative reporting” label is overused and overemphasized in journalism. My colleague and mentor Steve Bogira, who spent his whole career at the Reader likes to say that “investigative reporting” is redundant, because actual reporting is by definition investigative. If you’re not digging deep into documents and data and interviews, you’re not really reporting. But in the industry, “investigative reporting” is generally defined as stories based on government records and data. I think that’s a silly definition, but that’s what it comes down to. It usually “holds power to account” or whatever they like to say.

So my first big story as a freelancer was for the Reader, about a public housing project on the verge of disappearance in Chicago. I don’t think it would be considered an “investigative” story by most of my colleagues, though I certainly did a lot of investigative and historical research, interviews, and reviewed legal filings.

A couple years later I worked with another reporter, Meribah Knight, to do this story as a freelancer, again for the Reader, which I think is considered “investigative reporting.” But Meribah, who was much, much more experienced than me, was the one doing most of the “investigative” side of things, like filing FOIA requests, analyzing data, that sort of thing.

So the number one thing that helped me do “investigative reporting” as a freelancer was actually working with a person who really knew what she was doing. Meribah had had a bunch of jobs in media already, knew how to submit FOIA requests, what kind of questions to ask, and how to develop investigative angles, which made the project feasible in a way that I couldn’t have done on my own at that stage.

How to generate story ideas — is there a process?

Not really, just living. I get tips from people, or sometimes I dream things up on my own. Sometimes a colleague will suggest something, or I come on to the idea through conversations with friends. Being engaged with the world and topics that interest me has helped generate ideas. It’s very important to figure out if your idea is a TOPIC or a STORY and that’s something that takes a long time to master. I’m still not that great at it. A story has narrative and characters. A lot of my article ideas are about situations that require back-engineering a story to make it not just an endless description of something happening in the world.

Do investigative stories have to turn into books? 

I don’t have any ambitions to write a book about anything. It just seems like a miserable process, based on watching people I know do it. I don’t think I can offer anything in a book that would be better or more useful than what I could do in an article. Maybe that will change eventually, but I don’t think writing a book is necessarily the best use of my time or energy.

I also don’t consider writing a book to be a barometer of being a “real writer.” Most books suck and are read by almost no one!

Here’s how Dukmasova tracked and reported for years on James Allen’s story, a man serving two life sentences and an additional 100-200 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for three murder cases. Dukmosova’s most recent reporting on Allen’s case amounted to more than 25,000 words.

I didn’t really have to “sell” the story much, which was one nice thing about working at the Reader — some of the lowest pay in the industry but you can write whatever you want. Once my editor started seeing how much there was to his story and how it wasn’t really possible to fully tell it without getting fully into it, then the length made sense to him, too. I wasn’t aiming for a piece that long, that’s just what it ended up having to be. Perhaps a different editor could have seen ways to make it shorter and faster. But Sujay Kumar and I couldn’t figure it out, so that’s what we got.

The biggest obstacle with James was that I could never really tell how much of what he was telling me about himself was true, and so much of it was difficult or impossible to verify. Plus so many people who could possibly verify details are long dead. I constantly felt like he knew exactly what I could prove or disprove and what I couldn’t, and in those spaces where he knew I couldn’t, I felt manipulated in this way that made me very wary. I don’t blame him for it at all, he’s got to do what he has to do to try to get out of his predicament. But the experience of it is not one I’m desperate to have more of.

How to navigate challenging relationships and obstacles with sources

I’m not sure other than continuing to talk, and trying to ask followup questions when things don’t add up, and reminding them early and often that your job is to ask these questions and get external verification for everything they say. I made a big mistake not drawing those boundaries with James and his friends sooner, so I found myself in this weird position where they felt like I was “on their team” and I was starting to feel like I couldn’t ask certain questions because it would alienate him. I tried to press the reset button on the relationship and he disengaged from me for a while, as I talk about in the story. But I’m glad that I did that because I couldn’t have really done the work if I didn’t set the boundaries.

One mistake I see young people making when they start out in journalism is they get some bit of info that seems like there’s some fucked up injustice happening and they throw themselves into being a champion for the person on the receiving end and they kind of overpromise and overcommit and box themselves into this role of bieng an advocate before they even know anything about the person and the situaiton. You have to remember that when you first hear about a situation you do not really know ANYTHING about it or the person. And so you just have to approach building a relationship with people from the position of: “I’m not your friend, I’m just here to figure out what’s happening, and if I’m allowed to by my bosses (aka editors), I may be able to produce something about this situation. But if at any point you don’t want to do this with me anymore, you can pull out, because this isn’t personal for me, this is my job.”

Distinctions for movement journalists between reporting and organizing 

The way I came to look at it was this: A story doesn’t serve the movement if I don’t have boundaries. My job is to document what’s happening and educate a wider audience about the ideas and actions animating this movement. It actually earned me a lot of trust in abolitionist circles in Chicago, I think, because people saw that I was really trying to understand what they’re about, educated myself on the history and the ideas behind what they were and are doing, and they saw my coverage as an asset. It also meant that I could always ask them the toughest questions and get the most earnest answers because folks knew I wasn’t coming from an ignorant or oppositional place.

Also, as journalists, I think we can play a much more valuable role in public education by just reporting and documenting what other people are doing and thinking. You may be convinced by these ideas yourself, personally, but you’ll do a lot more good if you keep yourself out of it and let the people actually doing the work have the spotlight.

How to handle and vet tips for stories 

Most tips are not actually anything you can do anything with, in my experience. Early on in your career every tip will feel like a possible gold mine, but you’ll learn eventually that most of those are actually snake pits — people are pissed about some situation in their lives and they want to vent, or they think an injustice is happening and it isn’t actually, (or it is but media coverage of that isn’t gonna do anything to fix the situation), or they think someone is screwing them illegally but in reality they’re a jerk and people are giving them the cold shoulder because of it.

At Injustice Watch, I get tips pretty regularly. With a lot of them, there’s just no time and resources to thoroughly vet or follow up. But when I do think there’s enough information that doesn’t sound totally off the wall based on an email or a phone call, I’ll follow up. I just have them walk me through their whole situation. I try to identify the universe of records or data that could back up what they’re saying, and then I try to get them to explain to me why they want a journalist to write about them and the situation. A big red flag is when people want to talk a lot of shit about someone but don’t want to go on the record. Sometimes it’s because they’d have something to lose, like their life or livelihood, or their safety would be compromised somehow, and they’ll explain that to you. But other times people just want someone they’re pissed at to be put on blast and you have to figure out if you want to be the megaphone or if that’s not the best use of your time and effort (and not in the public interest, anyway).

Building your profile 

The best way to build your profile so that you get tips is to show your commitment to a beat. For freelancers especially, I highly recommend developing a beat for yourself — something that will sustain your interest and let you have an edge over staff writers at publications — so that when you pitch stories you can prove you know what you’re talking about, you have the sources to back you up, and you’re the obvious choice to write about a given issue. As you build up a profile of caring about and being educated about your beat, people will see you as a good person to tip. Half the time you should be showing up to stuff related to your beat even if you don’t have a story plan. Interested in housing issues? Go to community meetings related to housing issues, go to talks on housing policy, know who the housing organizers and activists are in your area. The tips will find you!

Fact-checking your own work when a publication doesn’t have fact checkers

It’s not really fact checking if you’re doing it yourself. I feel like lately there’s been this move at publications to “fact check” by having reporters go through drafts and annotate the facts with sources. And that’s great, that’s better than NOT doing it. But that’s not really fact checking. Anyway, the process if you’re doing it on your own is just keep your shit organized from the get go. All documents, notes, tapes, photos, all that stuff that you use to build your story, keep it clearly labeled for yourself and when it’s time to annotate your document to verify and show your work, it will greatly simplify the process. Sometimes I even make fact checking notes on drafts as I go, to make it easier later.

Managing conflicts of interest while freelancing

When I was freelancing, I was actually paying my bills with a side job as an instructor for a test prep company that prepared kids for selective enrollment school admissions. I tutored kids one on one for selective enrollment tests, too. It would not have been kosher for me to also write about the test prep industry or the Chicago public schools selective enrollment process in general. But I was mostly writing about housing issues and police at the time, so no conflict. At one point when I was freelancing, I tutored the daughter of the head of the Chicago police board. Years later, when I was working full time at the Reader and writing about policing, I was contacted by his wife to see if I’d tutor another one of their kids. I told them I couldn’t because I write about police issues and it would be a conflict. Thankfully I also no longer needed the side hustle, anyway.

Tips for doing investigative work as a freelancer

The hardest thing about doing investigative work as a freelancer is that it’s very time-intensive and requires resources that most freelancers just don’t have — basic newsroom stuff like public records database access (LexisNexis), court records access (PACER), that sort of thing.

So if you’re trying to do it on your own and you don’t have much work experience yet:

1. Give yourself time, and be okay with the fact that the story will take a while. That’s not your failing, you’re trying to do something without newsroom resources.
2. Find access to resources like public records databases through public libraries or university libraries.
3. Network your way to resources that otherwise would be available to a newsroom. See if a friend with a job in a newsroom or who’s in college or grad school can hook you up with a newspapers.com account.
4. Research freelancer grants like ire.org to pay for subscriptions to databases you need.

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