Written in 2017

In 2003, Ian Urbina, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, abandoned his doctoral dissertation after completing a small journalism internship with an investigative reporter, which gave him a taste of reporting.

That taste landed him a job at one of the largest news media outlets in the US, a handful of awards, and a few investigative pieces that were turned into feature films.

That’s where his love of journalism has culminated over the past 14 years. 

A Fulbright scholar who worked and lived in Havana for three years, he was enrolled in a dual degree program with majors in cultural anthropology and history. He received a degree in history from Georgetown University in 1995. 

Urbina wasn’t expecting to find himself with the platform he has as a writer. Things just happened that way. He says his life gets weirder the deeper you go.

“I’m kind of an oddball, and so my day-to-day is pretty different than the norm,” he said.

Urbina’s typical day as an investigative journalist consists of long hours. Currently on book leave, he sDCs his days at home near The New York Times’ Washington, D.C., Bureau. 

He wakes up at the crack of dawn, around 4 in the morning, because that’s when he feels he works better. He has one main editor he works with in DC.

Urbina has his own office conveniently in the backyard. 

“I am a bit distractible, and do much better in kind of a deprivation chamber,” he said.

Urbina credits luck for his position at the Times. Little by little, he worked his way up the totem pole through freelancing. A stint with Think Tank is the moment that changed Urbina’s life, thrusting him into a mainstream career as a journalist. He learned everything there is to know about journalism “on the fly” at the DC Bureau metro desk, because he was clueless.

“I knew how to string together a sentence and make it occasionally somewhat polished, but I didn’t really know newspaper writing and all that entails,” he said.

After a year and a half at the metro desk, Urbina moved on to bureau chief. He managed an area from Kentucky to Ohio, noting that it was a challenging job because it was not a local paper — this was a paper on a national scale.

One day, Urbina asked his editor if he could take a break from the news rat race and spend a year researching documents for an article.

His editor said Go for it.

Urbina’s most recent piece, “Outlaw Ocean,” was not only his longest stint at three years, but it was also a dangerous and stressful assignment. It’s currently being turned into a book and a movie project. 

His editor was not a fan of the series, which also added to the list of obstacles surrounding the completion of his research.

Investigating overseas requires taking several precautions, including ensuring that you have a reliable translator. Without one, a journalist is entirely out of luck. No matter how good a writer you are, without a translator, nothing will be done properly, Urbina says.

Violence was a common occurrence while reporting in other countries.

The things he saw included murder on camera, sex trafficking, slavery, and arms trafficking.

Urbina says that spacing out trips, along with knowing who you hire, helps with the investigative process abroad.

“The difficulty (with reporting overseas) is the reporting itself,” he said.”You’re chasing really bleak stuff.”

His findings on fracking in 2011, in a series called “Drilling Down,” helped show the US how dangerous the government’s want for natural gas really was. Before Democrats were against the practice, fracking was seen as a gold mine, while few questioned whether it was detrimental to the government. Urbina, however, questioned it.

“That series was tough, it was aggressive, and we got really strong pushback from the (oil) industry,” he said.

Urbina felt that the documents surrounding the fracking piece were some of the craziest things he had read as an investigative journalist.

“So like, everyone knew there was radioactivity in the waste coming out of these wells,” he said. “But no one knew how much radioactivity.”

The fracking, which caused drastic leaks that seeped into sewage treatment plants, was utterly unknown to the nation until it was investigated.

 It took hours of poring over documents and piecing together each part of the puzzle little by little, but in the end, it worked out for him. That’s one of the key things to being a journalist–sifting through documents.

“If you can name the monster, you can beat the monster, and that’s true with document hunting,” he said.

Urbina had a team compile an extensive archive of the documents found, still accessible on the Times today. There have been no corrections made to the database, which contains approximately 500 pages of documents.

“Drilling Down” took at least four months to report, Urbina says. As far as requesting documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Urbina typically expects a response within at least a year. 

A beat, data, documents, and spreadsheets are the tools for any journalist’s future. It’s also essential to consider distribution afterward. A reporter’s job is to break news, not follow it. 

What is key to investigative reporting is finding a new way to tell old stories, or new stories. 

That’s the space that Urbina lives in.

“You’re not done when you finish the story,” he said. “Don’t just put it in your paper.”