March 2010 to 15 December 2010Reporting is not a spectator sport (no matter what they teach in college). You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door – not if you’re interested in doing something more than recycling press releases for a living; not if you can begin to understand why the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know. You have to get in there and make it happen; use every last devious ounce of imagination to find ways of forcing the miser to let go of the gold.In the spring of 2010, Alan Rusbridger came up with a neat manoeuvre. Reversing the normal convention under which editors grab hold of stories and keep them for their own pages, he started contacting other journalists to give them our work to encourage them to take it further. Since Fleet Street was clogged with self-interest, he tried broadcasters, approaching senior executives at the BBC and Channel 4. Both decided to make documentaries, for Panorama and for Dispatches respectively; and I briefed the people involved.
