Following Up on Old Stories: Why Investigations Take Years

Every journalist has that one story that haunts them. Not because it’s unresolved, but because it took years to get right.

When I first heard whispers about irregularities in Lincoln’s Tax Increment Financing districts, I filed it away as a potential story. That was 2014. The investigation didn’t publish until 2023. Nine years of waiting, gathering documents, building sources, and—most importantly—waiting for the right moment to strike.

Nine years is an unusual timeline, and I will not pretend that patience alone explains it. Part of it was judgment: knowing when a story was not yet ready, and knowing when continuing to wait was the right call rather than the easy one. But part of it was simply the nature of the work, which moves at the speed of documents, court schedules, and people’s willingness to talk.

Why Investigations Take So Long

The public often wonders why investigative pieces take months or years. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Sources Need Time to Trust You Breaking news is about speed. Investigative journalism is about trust. Sources won’t hand you documents that could end their careers unless they’ve seen your work, understood your motives, and—frankly—gotten to know you as a person. That takes time.

2. Documents Don’t Come Easy Public records requests can take months. Sometimes years. I’ve learned to file requests early, even before I’m sure I’ll use the information. The beauty of journalism is that you often don’t know what you don’t know until the documents arrive.

3. The Story Changes Initial assumptions rarely hold up to scrutiny. What starts as one narrative often transforms into something completely different once you have the facts. That’s not failure—that’s the process working.

4. Legal Review Takes Time Publishing explosive claims requires careful legal review. I’ve had stories cleared by lawyers only to need additional fact-checking. The burden of proof for investigative journalism is high, and it should be.

The Notebook Problem

The hardest part of a long investigation is not the reporting. It is the remembering.

Over nine years, a single story touches dozens of people, hundreds of pages of documents, and at least a dozen court filings. I keep a working file for every project, and it is the least glamorous part of the job. Every source gets a name and a phone number. Every document request gets a date and a status. Every contradiction gets a note explaining why it might not be a contradiction.

I have learned that the file is the investigation. The reporting is what goes into the file.

When colleagues ask why I will not simply start fresh on a story, the answer is that starting fresh means starting from zero knowledge. The file is what lets me return to a question after two years and know exactly which thread to pull.

The Moment to Strike

There is no formula for knowing a story is ready. What I can describe is what it feels like.

The documents tell a consistent story. The sources who can be protected are protected, and the ones who cannot be contacted have been located or definitively ruled out. The key facts have been verified against a second, independent source, not merely against the document that made them interesting. And I can state the claim in a single sentence without qualifying it into uselessness.

On the TIF investigation, that moment arrived in 2023. It did not arrive because a document landed in my inbox on a particular Tuesday. It arrived because a decade of documentation had narrowed the story down to the set of facts that mattered, and everything else had been ruled out.

What Readers Can Watch For

When I say an investigation took years, I do not mean the reporting was invisible. Along the way there were smaller stories—contracts, budgets, meeting minutes, hiring decisions. Each one was a piece of the record, and each one was published on its own merits, with the caveat that the larger picture was still developing.

That is one of the most useful things a newsroom can do for its readers. Instead of a nine-year silence followed by a flood, the public gets a running account. Readers can see which claims held up and which did not, because the smaller stories are still there, dated and public, years later.

The TIF investigation we published led to reform legislation. It changed how Lincoln handles developer incentives. That is the kind of impact that makes years of work worthwhile.

The Cost of Waiting

I will not romanticize this. Long timelines carry real costs. Tipsters move on. Sources lose jobs, or leave the state entirely. Records get destroyed on a retention schedule, and no request I can file will bring them back. I have had sources tell me plainly that they would have talked sooner if they had thought the story would ever run.

There is also a personal cost. A nine-year investigation is nine years of attention you did not give to the other stories. Some of those stories were good, and some of them deserved a reporter who was not mentally filed in a drawer waiting for a district’s developer to make a mistake.

The honest accounting is that a long investigation is a bet that this one story matters more than the several you could have published in the meantime. Sometimes that bet is right. Sometimes it is not, and the only correction is the discipline to cut your losses and publish what you have.

What I Do Differently Now

If I could tell my 2014 self anything, it would be this: write the story you have, earlier, rather than waiting for a version of it that may never arrive.

Some of the smaller TIF stories I published along the way were, in retrospect, as useful to readers as the final investigation. They established the pattern. They showed the public what normal development deals looked like next to the ones that were not. And they gave me an audience that trusted the eventual conclusion because they had watched me check the details in public, one story at a time.

That is the practice I have carried forward. Not patience for its own sake, but the discipline to keep publishing while you keep digging.

And when the next one starts, as they always do, I will open the same kind of file and begin again with the same patience.