Veteran investigative reporter and longtime IRE member Pat Stith retires today from the The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. John Sullivan, who worked with Pat in as a young reporter, recalls the man who helped shape his career.
“How much experience you got?” he asked, his drawl so thick, I began to panic, fearing that my Midwestern ears would somehow misunderstand his questions.
I eagerly told him about the story I’d broken as an intern at the Chicago Reporter, and the two years I’d spent at NICAR learning computer-assisted reporting. I laid out a few slick programming tricks I’d learned, mentioned my graduate-level mapping class, and sat back awaiting his reply.
Silence.
“You don’t have any experience, do you?” he asked.
Appreciating that I was talking to Pat Stith, the Pulitzer-Prize winning CAR pioneer who’d cut down corrupt politicians when I was still sucking on a bottle, I replied:
“No sir, I don’t.”
“You ever do any real work?” he asked.
I blurted out that after high school, I’d worked for four years in an upholstery shop with two sibling owners who liked to drink and assign me the worst jobs they could imagine.
“That sounds like real work,” he said.
He told me about working in his father’s coat-hanger factory during sweltering Southern summers. When editors at the former Charlotte News asked him to go and get them egg sandwiches, all he could think of was how the building had air-conditioning.
That’s what makes Pat Stith one of the most formidable journalists of his time. Every day he comes to work, he can’t believe his good fortune at getting paid to do something he loves. While reporters gripe about the state of the industry, he just focuses his glare on the next story. Journalism isn’t hard work. Working in a tire factory or a coal mine? Now that’s hard work.
Knowing he could have it worse is part of what gives Stith his awesome capacity to log 80-hour weeks, and I do mean log. Stith keeps track of his work hours in a notebook.
But what really sets him apart is that he just hates to get beat at anything. Ever.
Just play hearts with him if you think I’m joking.
The smarter the competition, the more he wants to win.
He simply overwhelms them by working harder.
He reads everything. Every email. Every manual. Every law.
By the end he usually knows more than anyone else.
“Then,” he said, “you have the high ground.”
One way he got the high ground in the late 1980s was by looking at something reporters and officials seldom saw: computer databases.
In the time since, he’s taught countless reporters about using data to uncover a story. He put together the first IRE-run CAR conference, in Raleigh. He was a member of the IRE board.
When I worked with him in Raleigh, he spent hours with colleagues before and after work, or over a basket of hushpuppies at Clyde Cooper’s Barbecue, passing along all he could about investigative reporting.
Through his groundbreaking work in computer-assisted reporting and his willingness to share what he’s learned in his 40 years as an investigative reporter, Stith has led us all to the high ground.
Thanks Pat.
John Sullivan is a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He worked with Pat Stith at the News & Observer from 1998 to 2002.
See what Sullivan means about learning from Pat Stith by checking out his numerous stories, tipsheets and IRE Journal articles in the IRE Resource Center.
If you’d like to add a retirement message for Pat or share a favorite memory from his career, please leave a comment.
