Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions?

One thing I've discovered is that I never think of something that didn't work out as just "something that didn't work out." I think so often with investigative work, things that initially look like failures wind up leading to your biggest stories.

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.

I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.