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Editor’s note: Legendary journalist James B. Steele was one of the first to join IRE after it started in 1975 and has stayed active throughout the years in the organization, serving as a mentor for countless young journalists and participating in dozens of conference sessions, among other roles. A former contributing editor at Vanity Fair and editor at large at Time magazine, Steele and his longtime reporting partner, the late Don Barlett, won two Pulitzer prizes and dozens of other awards for their comprehensive data analysis and investigations into wide-ranging public issues. They also wrote nine books, including two NYT bestsellers. Steele teaches at Temple University.
On June 21, 2025, Steele delivered a no-holds-barred, deeply stirring keynote speech at the IRE25 Awards Luncheon in New Orleans, celebrating the organization’s 50th anniversary. This is a complete, unredacted version of his address.
I can't begin to tell you how honored I am to be with you today, to be a part of this great occasion.
I not only feel honored, but I also feel lucky.
Lucky … because long ago when I was starting out I didn't take some advice from one of my elders.
It was in my first few weeks as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. I’d gotten the job in my first year of college, went to school during the day, worked nights at the paper, writing mostly small stuff in the beginning — death notices, fires, car crashes.
One night, after I’d been there a few weeks, one of the copy editors pulled up a chair next to my desk and began to go through a small story I had written. He eliminated the word here, inserted a word there. Nothing major. He then put the story down and looked me in the eye and said,
“Jimmy — you're doing good work.
“But get out while you can.”
Well as you can see I didn't take that advice.
I was already hooked.
Talking to people. Being around police. Watching firemen brave a big fire. Spending time with bereaved families who’d lost a loved one.
All those currents that make us human spoke to me.
I knew what I wanted to do.
But what I faced that moment is something I suspect many of us go through at one time or another.
Do we stay or do we go …
Are the obstacles we face worth overcoming?
What is our future in this field?
What is the future of the field itself?
The challenges change from era to era.
But the question is almost always there: Do we stay or leave.
It’s a personal decision, of course.
But overall the answer for many of us is pretty clear judging by what I see here:
We stay.
We’re in this because there are stories that need to be told
We’re in this because we hope our work will be seen for what it is — in the public interest.
We’re in this because deep down we’re driven by a sense of outrage when fairness is violated by those with money and power who have the wherewithal to run roughshod over everyone else to have their own way.
I think all of us are bound together by a universal truth: that journalism — especially investigative journalism — is a calling.
Yes … a Calling.
And never more so than today.
So I stayed and I learned some valuable lessons.
I want to tell you about one of them because it’s stayed with me ever since.
It’s summed up in 2 words: Never assume
I learned it the hard way. After I’d been a reporter for a few weeks, I came to work late one afternoon, took my seat at my desk and soon after I heard the booming voice of the city editor on the loudspeaker:
“Mr. Steele approach the desk. “
All of us lived in fear of hearing those words because we knew he wasn’t going to say:
“Great story yesterday Jim.”
So I approached the desk with sweat running down my spine. He turned around in his chair and asked me. “Steele: How did Mr. Smith spell his name?” I thought Uh-oh .
So I spelled “S-M-I-T-H.”
“Well that's the way you spelled it, but that's not the way Mr. Smith spelled it.”
From that painful experience to never assume how to spell someone’s name — even the most common of names — I learned over the years that there were a lot of other things that you should never assume if you’re a reporter.
Never assume where you’ll find a document.
Never assume what you’ll find in the document, even if it’s been previously written about.
Never assume if a government official or private individual tells you that a report doesn’t exist — that it really doesn’t exist.
Never assume that you know everything to know about the subject you’re reporting.
And lastly, never assume who will or will not talk to you.
I learned a lot of the basics in that first job.
But you know what I didn't learn? I learned nothing about investigative reporting. And you know why? Because the paper did almost no investigative reporting.
And that wasn’t unusual for the time. Hard as it is for us to believe — assembled together in this great gathering here — there was a time when there was very little investigative reporting in this country.
And what little was done was very often narrowly defined.
I heard this later from veterans that often when an investigative story was proposed, the editor’s first question was something like:
Has a law been broken? What crime has been committed?
If you couldn’t cite something illegal, many editors just weren’t interested.
It just wasn’t considered investigative.
Thankfully, that narrow definition is now history.
Investigative reporting still exposes criminal activity, but now also takes on a broader range of destructive acts by government and private interests that — while unethical and harmful — are quite often perfectly legal even though they sometimes wreak havoc and inflict pain on the lives of millions of people.
The definition began to change during the Vietnam War. The contrast between the tragic, bloody battles in the field as reported by Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam versus the rosy accounts by generals in Washington of how well the war was going exposed the fallacies of American policy, and helped trigger the modern era of investigative reporting.
We began to see how government was lying to us and wasn’t serving the interests of its citizens.
And it was falling to journalists — those reporters in the field — to hold government accountable.
*
One of the earliest investigations that Don Barlett and I did would reflect this approach, though we didn’t realize it at the time..
In 1972, we looked at 1,000 cases of violent crime in Philadelphia to see how justice was being served. The great Phil Meyer saved us by writing a brilliant program that let us analyze this massive amount of data we had collected to see exactly how judges and prosecutors were dealing with cases of murder, robbery, rape and other violent crimes.
It exposed everything from racism to the fickle nature of how decisions were handed down. There was nothing illegal there — just some bad decisions affecting victims and defendants alike, raising questions of fairness and painting a picture of a malfunctioning court system.
But here's why I’m telling this story. Something happened after that series that shows as much as anything I could tell you how far investigative journalism has come to embrace new techniques and approaches, and to be where we are today.
The series won some national awards including one from the American Bar Association, some of whose members we’d raked over the coals.
But it hit a stone wall in the Pulitzer judging. We heard later from one of our editors at The Inquirer that during the judging one juror or board member — I can't remember which at this point — said any article that used a computer in telling a story would win a Pulitzer over his dead body.
Does this tell you far we’ve come?
The use of documents and data has been a huge transformation in our craft that’s made our work more sophisticated, scientific if you will.
Look at the winners in any awards contests today and their influence is self-evident.
This didn’t happen overnight. But the change is momentous.
Investigative reporting didn’t abandon our commitment to expose corruption and criminal behavior which will always be a thriving business in America.
We just added to the ledger by broadening out the definition to show a range of stories of how the public was being ill served.
Stories on programs and policies that were … all perfectly legal.
IRE …. has been at the center of this.
Since we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary this weekend., come back with me to that first convention.
Three hundred of us were packed into a hotel in Indianapolis.
There was tremendous excitement.
We sensed it was a new era.
When I heard I’d be with you today, I went searching and found my file from that first convention.
Yeah. Here it is. (Editor’s note: Steele pulls out thick manila folder stuffed with papers)
Don Barlett and I were subjected to a lot of good-natured ribbing because we seemed to save every scrap of paper.
Our work spaces always looked like they’d just been hit by an earthquake with papers piled high on desks, windowsills, shelves — everywhere.
When Don and I left The Inquirer in Philadelphia to work for Time magazine in New York, TIME generously offered — before it realized what it was getting into — to move all our files to New York.
Well, we’re talking about hundreds of boxes.
Shortly before the actual move a TIME editor called to give us an update on the move.
He said work on our office had been delayed because they were having to reinforce the 45th floor of the TIME-LIFE Building because of our files.
When I looked at my ’76 file, what a revelation. Of the 300 who attended, most were males — white males I should add.
One of the great exceptions to that of course was the amazing Myrta Pulliam, to whom every one of us here owe a debt of gratitude, as one of the primary driving, visionary forces who created IRE.
Like journalism itself, the entry of women and minorities into investigative journalism has been one of the greatest and most positive changes in our craft over the years, making us more reflective and representative of the world we write about.
The panel I chaired in ’76 was called “Precision Journalism,” a name taken from the title of Phil Meyer’s path breaking book of a couple of years before that forecast in startling clarity the future of data journalism to come.
I started with this:
“So much journalism just flies by the seat of its pants. There's no systematic effort to verify information fed to us by governments, corporations, or other interests. We need to develop our own data to evaluate how these institutions are functioning so we can transcend the limitations we face now.”
After that, my panel and others I attended that year were about the nuts and bolts of reporting:
In other words, that first convention was pretty much like the ones we’ve come to expect year in and year out.
The goal was always how — how — do we do the work.
There are always new issues, of course, new technologies, new challenges.
But the bottom line remains: How do we do the work?
From my perspective, this is a straight line with IRE, something that was baked into our DNA from day one.
Similarly the first IRE awards reflect another constant through the years.
Those first winning entries dealt with investigations on toxic substances, threats to the environment, misspent government funds and immigration. Some of this year’s winners include similar subjects, down to and including immigration.
The message out of this for me is clear:
Our work is never done.
Just because something is exposed one year doesn’t mean it’s been corrected or that the reform of the moment is permanent.
One of the most frequent frustrations I’ve heard from reporters over the years is the hollow feeling they get after one of their projects produces no results.
They say, “I worked my tail off. I had the goods on what had gone wrong. There was a huge public outcry. But nothing changed to correct the injustice.”
Folks … I’ve been there.
I know how that feels.
All I can tell you is that the response is beyond us.
That’s another department.
But you’ve made a great contribution to public knowledge of the problem.
And who knows
… down the road …
Something might change.
In any event it’s beyond your power. You did what you could.
You did the work.
IRE gatherings like this — in addition to showing us new tools and techniques — give us something else which to me is of equal — maybe of even greater — value.
When we’re here, we’re reminded that we’re not alone in this work.
Investigative reporting — even when working with a partner — is often solitary work.
Filled with unexpected failures, frustrating dead ends and plenty of dry holes.
I don’t know about you, but for me sometimes in an investigation when things aren’t going right … it can feel like you’re trying to push string uphill.
But at panels and in the halls, where we share experiences, we realize that whatever we’re going through isn’t unique to us.
What may have stymied us … sn’t because of some failing of our own.
It’s because … this work is just very hard, and it doesn’t move in a straight line.
That’s the territory.
And that’s why IRE — the camaraderie, the shared experiences, the bonding — has been so important through the years for generations of us.
It’s the opposite of what I remember as a young reporter when sometimes the guy at the next desk wouldn’t tell you what he was working on.
IRE has fostered a culture of collaboration, shared values, and exchange of ideas.
If IRE had a motto it could easily be “How can I help you do your job?”
So we let each other know that we’re not alone.
And that we need each other.
We may need each other more than ever in the days ahead.
Even though the work of IRE members deals mostly with local or regional Issues, the incessant attacks on the press by Trump and his supporters have unsettled us all and threaten to throw a chill over all our work.
It’s called into question the work we do to a greater degree than anything I can ever remember …
… .questioning the very legitimacy of our profession and its historical, constitutionally-enshrined protection.
We're used to making people feel uncomfortable or to be the object of a lot of criticism for what we’ve aired or written.
People saying we got the story wrong, or half right or was biased …
But this is way beyond that.
You may recall that the Washington Post tabulated that Trump in his first term made over 30,000 lies or misleading statements.
My bet is he will easily top that one in round two.
Making matters worse, we’re seeing that many other politicians and government officials are repeating those lies misleading the public, to curry favor with Trump and to enhance their own power.
I could spend my whole time here reciting those lies, fabrications and tall tales but you know about them. They’re so blatant.
Stories that in the past would have been so patently false and dismissed now get some credence.
It’s not easy to counteract this.
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who supposedly said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
So our job of presenting the news is more challenging than ever.
But I submit to you that facts — facts — are still important.
You can express all the opinion in the world but facts are the real power.
Unless we have the facts to support an opinion, the opinion only goes so far.
Don Barlett and I found that repeatedly over the years.
One could write as we did that Congress had passed a tax law riddled with favors for special interests. But what gave this story power was to quote those specific giveaways.
In a reform tax law, Congress outlawed some flagrant tax shelters in the Caribbean. That was the right thing to do.
But then — guess what? Congress did the wrong thing and inserted scads of provisions exempting people and companies from the reforms.
After lambasting evil tax shelters, Congress then inserted this paragraph:
“EXCEPTION: (The above section B 2) Shall not apply to any income … by 1 or more corporations incorporated in Delaware on or about March 6, 1981 and which have owned 1 or more office buildings in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands for at least 5 years before the enactment of this act.”
Can you believe that’s actually in the law?
It was worth millions of dollars to a California businessman, and we found dozens of giveaways just like it.
Similarly in America: What Went Wrong, our 1991 work showing how Washington and Wall Street had colluded to erode the economic base of the middle class and create income inequality, we had numerous references on how Congress and moneyed interests were shafting average people.
But again what got to readers were the specifics like the paragraph that told how one corporate brigand was paying more for the upkeep of his dog than the pension he was paying to a 60-year-old factory worker he’d let go after she’d worked for him 30 years.
So Specifics. Nothing like them. Facts are the road to the truth.
I’m often asked where do ideas for stories come from?
And my answer is — they’re all around us.
The subject of virtually every major story Don Barlett and I did had appeared in limited fashion in the media.
So many great stories are like that — they’re just touched on and then not followed up.
The late John Carroll when he was editor of the Baltimore Sun noticed an item in the Sun about an old cargo ship being cut up for scrap.
Like the great reporter and editor he was, he was curious.
How often does that happen? What do they do with the scrap? Who does the work?
The result was a compelling expose of a shadowy global industry that nobody knew anything about that ignored environmental and safety standards endangering workers and civilians.
It won an IRE award, a Pulitzer prize and many other honors.
“America: What Went Wrong?”, probably the best known work Don Barlett and I did, had a similar, unspectacular origin. The media was filled at the time with stories about corporate takeovers and restructurings that were supposedly energizing and remaking the American economy.
Sure a few people were losing their jobs. But they’d get another job — the economy was so robust — we were told.
What we found, though, when we looked at individual companies and interviewed people who used to work for them, was that a whole class of people were seeing their earnings, their benefits — indeed — their way of life undercut by these drastic measures that were enriching guys on Wall Street but reducing the standard of living of middle class Americans.
So a story that began as an inquiry into the causes of corporate restructuring turned out to be a warning about the potential demise of the American middle class.
None of this work we do is easy, right?
But then we didn’t get into this work because it was easy.
I know that it’s especially difficult right now for young people coming out of college or who’ve entered the workforce in the last few years.
The chaos. The upheaval seems to be everywhere.
I wish I could tell you how all of this will play out but of course nobody knows that.
My guess is that much of the turmoil we see today will be chronic — just an ongoing fact of our lives.
I do know that investigative reporting will survive, just as journalism overall will survive.
Don’t ask me in what forms, though
It will survive because there is a deep-seated need in body politic for the kind of reporting that we do.
One of the most hopeful developments trying to meet this need is the rise of so many web-based nonprofit investigative sites at the local and regional level.
The Institute for Nonprofit News began almost 15 years ago with 25 members. Today it has more than 500. A substantial number are investigative and are trying to fill the gap left behind by the cutbacks or outright collapse of dailies and weeklies, almost all devoted to local and regional news.
I was generally aware of this but it wasn’t until I became a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism that I came to fully appreciate the extent of these local and regional nonprofits and the vital role they are now playing in investigative reporting.
Most recently a Pulitzer went to one of these — the Baltimore Banner — in a collaboration with the NY Times.
At the Fund, we’re seeing a steady stream of excellent work that one might have seen in your local newspaper or tv station in the past.
Stories on prosecutorial misconduct, shootings of innocent civilians by police because of bogus claims the victims were criminals, failure of local authorities to monitor polluting landfills, covert efforts by deep-pocketed conservatives to take over local school boards, the practice of child welfare agencies routinely taking children away from their parents without due process, how oil and gas companies conceal the magnitude of their pollution discharges to create the false impression they are abiding by air quality standards.
So the messengers may be new today; but what is motivating the reporters who come to us for funding is same thing that has driven all of us for years:
A sense of outrage at how elected officials or other interests are not serving the public interest.
How they’re trampling on individual rights or polluting the land at will.
Or worse — inflicting pain and hardship on people who have no way to fight back.
When you do an investigation, think of the people..
Tell who’s getting hurt …
And tell who’s doing the hurting.
That contrast is one of the most powerful tools we have as investigative reporters so people understand why we do what we do.
To this day the people I remember the most from the stories Don and I did are the ones who got hurt.
Their stories are burned into my memory and soul.
People like Ed Bohl
Ed was a midlevel manager in a shoe plant in a little town in Missouri. He’d worked there his whole life, helped introduce the plant to new technologies, was treasured by fellow employees, neighbors and townspeople for his role in making the profitable little plant such a mainstay, model citizen and pivotal player in the town.
Then one day the plant’s new owners — money boys from New. York who’d borrowed a ton of money to buy the plant’s parent company — shut it down and sold the land to raise cash to cover their big loan. Ed lost his job, health care and half his pension when he took a low-paying job without benefits.
He had no bitterness, only a sense of loss, and bewilderment that a place — a country really — where he’d given so much and played by all the established rules could turn on him like that and change his life.
Or Joy Whitehouse, an ailing wisp of a woman in Utah whose truck driver husband was killed in a trucking accident and then saw his promised pension taken away by his company because of its own mismanagement, leaving her at the poverty line.
“How do you get by?” I asked her.
“I eat a lot of soup,” she said.
When all is said and done, people like them need to have their stories told.
A lot of things have changed
But those people reflect what we in journalism must always do as mirrored in that saying sometimes attributed to Joseph Pulitzer more than 100-plus years ago: “Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable.”
Increasingly nowadays the task of doing that will fall more and more on us.
Trump has axed Inspector Generals’ offices, watered down other enforcement bodies, and put fear into any institution that challenges him.
Americans are counting on us more than ever.
To tell these stories — human and otherwise — puts a lot on all our plates.
But fortunately we now have tools that we didn’t have in the past..
Our ability to access information — data and documents — down to and including people to interview — is breathtaking today — a tidal change from just a few years ago.
Here’s what I mean.
When Don and I were doing the research for “America: What Went Wrong?” we pulled together statistics about wealth and taxes that showed in shocking detail how wealthy Americans were profiting while average Americans were stuck in a rut with stagnant wages and declining benefits.
To get that data we copied decades of IRS’s Statistics of Income, the bible of tax and financial data going back decades. We spent hours in the public documents room of the Free Library of Philadelphia slowly, boringly photocopying those paper reports.
Just as an aside here — A Swedish journalist once wrote an unkind profile of us saying Barlett and Steele were about as exciting as watching paint dry.
But what are you going to do?
The truth always hurts, right?
We then extracted numbers from the copied reports and typed them manually into a spreadsheet program many of you younger folks here may well have never heard of called Lotus 1-2-3. It was a predecessor of Excel. That was the process that let us come up with some genuinely eye opening conclusions showing the drift toward ever greater income inequality in the U.S.
In 2020 we updated the book taking each major conclusion in the 1992 book to see what had changed.
For the tax data, rather than visiting my friends at the Library, I never had to leave my desk.
I downloaded all the necessary IRS tables from the IRS website. So what had taken weeks and weeks of work in the past now was accomplished in just a few hours.
Coming down the pike — actually it’s already here — is another game changer. I’m talking about AI.
We’re starting to see AI being used in ways we could only imagine in the past because of its potential to gather, analyze and summarize vast amounts of information.
The Pulitzer prizes this year took note of AI’s role in three entries — one a winner, two others finalists.
Marjorie Miller, the administrator, said the Pulitzer board sees responsible AI “as a significant component in the increasingly versatile toolkit utilized by today’s working journalists.”
AI isn’t perfect and will require fact checking as of old, but it is undoubtedly a tool that has a future in our work.
So, yes, we have some tools to do our work.
But there’s something more valuable than them.
And that’s you — all of you.
I wish you could see what I’m seeing right now.
This amazing assembly of dedicated journalists from all over.
Working in different mediums.
But all committed to doing what we do — in whatever lane is available to us.
We’re the accumulated result of an idea 50 years ago that is a reality today.
And I believe as surely as I’m standing here right now that somebody will be standing here 50 years from now to say what I’m saying.
Because our work is never done.
Our business may be in constant turmoil with old models crashing, new models forming.
But one thing hasn’t changed and never will.
We will never run out of stories to investigate.
How many professions can say that they’ll never run out of work?
And you know why?
America may be the land of the free but it’s also the home of the hustler, in business and in politics and other powerful institutions
And those people never go away in America.
Because the ability to make a fast buck by any means is almost enshrined in our system.
Our job is to hold them accountable in hopes of creating a more just and equal America that lives up to the promise of our country.
We know what needs to be done
And we know how to do it.
We also know that the road will be rocky
But we are disturbers of the peace
And we must never shirk from that duty.
So … do what we’ve always done:
Expose.
Shine a light.
Show what’s gone off the rails.
And speak — speak — for those who don’t have a voice
I wear a number of different hats these days.
I do some speaking and teaching and mentoring. I judge journalism contests and also serve on some nonprofit journalism boards, especially the Fund for Investigative Journalism that I mentioned earlier.
So I see a lot of what is happening both in this country and elsewhere, and I’m here to tell you that for all the turmoil, all the uncertainty, all the unknowns — all the multitude of threats leveled against us by the fake news purveyors which seem, if anything, even more vicious and wrongheaded than I can ever remember —
— well, I’m here to tell you that for all these challenges, the fire — the fire to tell the truth, to unmask the forces that undermine rule of law and make life harder for average people — those forces are as strong as ever.
I see it in newsroom veterans, I see it in mature reporters and I see it in young people entering the field.
As I said earlier, Journalism is a calling, and investigative journalism an even deeper calling because we antagonize the people in power who would prefer to run this country as a private club where average folks have no say … but pay the bills.
There’s nothing new about this behavior of the rich and powerful.
But that s where we come in —
Where we’ve always come in …
And — I submit to you — where we always will.
So I say to all of you, my friends and colleagues and newcomers to this great assembly: There may be setbacks, there may be reversals, we may find ourselves losing heart from time to time. But don’t give up.
What we do is fundamental to freedom both here and elsewhere.
So keep the faith.
And lastly, do the work.
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