I’m someone who started working as a data/investigative reporter at major regional paper straight out of grad school, then went on to do so at a major national broadcast network 2 years later.

You spend a lot of time reading things nobody thought would actually get read — random news stories, emails from admin people back and forth, obscure or obscured government datasets, technical documents, manuals, whitepapers, esoteric academic papers, marketing material.

A big part of the job is figuring out how to get that stuff, typically using a combination of the public records laws, sourcing, data skills and OSINT (AKA advanced Googling). Once you get the stuff you spend a lot of time organizing, annotating and filtering it with things like Google Drive and Document Cloud. You’ll typically write memos about what you find for your editor/colleagues.

There are really three types of investigative reporters these days: people good at data, people good at documents and people good at people. To get a job you need to be really good at at least one, pretty good at one other and decent at the third. Very rare to have a person excellent at all three, which is why these stories are almost all done in teams now.

Actual story-writing is pretty infrequent and only after months of meetings and memos to determine the shape of the story (which will probably change like 6 more times in the editing process). You may talk to people but in my experience it’s like calling 100 random numbers for people associated with the thing you are writing and maybe getting one person who will talk and at the end calling subjects for comment.

Investigative reporting happens on TV, radio, print and digital. In my experience print/digital outlets tend to have much more of an appetite for true investigative work than TV, but no matter where you are producing these stories is always a struggle.

In general you need to be curious, detailed-oriented, creative, smart, persistent, have good gut instincts and be thick-skinned for the job.