How Pamela Colloff wrote her first book, about a con artist turned jailhouse informant

He conned me. This is actually how I begin the book because I think it's easy to read a story about a con artist and think like, well, I would never fall for that. I'm an investigative journalist. I'm going to visit a guy in federal prison who I know has a rap sheet like a mile long. And when he tells me, yeah, I'll tell you everything. Let's do this. I buy that hook line and sinker. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Neiman Storyboard podcast where we dig into the craft of journalism and storytelling. I'm Mark Armstrong, editor of Neiman Storyboard. This show is brought to you by the Neiman Foundation for journalism at Harvard. You can get updates by signing up for our newsletter. Just go to neimanstoryboard.org to sign up. Today, I'm excited to kick off season two of the Neiman Storyboard podcast with the award-winning journalist Pamela Kohloff. She's a reporter for ProPublica, staff writer at the New York Times magazine, and author of the new book, "Catch the Devil," a true story of murder, deception, and injustice on the Gulf Coast. This is Kohloff's first book, and it tells the story of a con artist named Paul Scalnick, who spent time in and out of jail for a string of crimes. He soon became a frequent jailhouse informant for prosecutors who were looking for confessions from the people locked away in a waiting trial. Scalnick ended up testifying in at least 37 cases in Pinellas County, Florida alone, sending dozens of people to prison, and four who were ultimately sentenced to death. Kohloff's book focuses on one of those murder trials about a man named Jim Daley, who had been linked to the murder of a 14-year-old girl. I've been following Pam's work since the early days of Longreads starting when she was at Texas Monthly. This was my first time getting to chat with her. We talked about her decision to write her first book after years of writing award-winning long-form narratives about the criminal justice system. She breaks down the reporting, editing, and fact-checking process, and she talks about how, quote unquote, "true crime," reporting has evolved over the years. As a note upfront, this episode includes discussion of cases involving sexual assault. Now, here's my conversation with Pamela Kohloff. (upbeat music) Pam, thank you again for being here today. - Thanks so much for having me. Congratulations on the book. It's fantastic. This first began as a story for ProPublica in the New York Times magazine. So tell me about the story, tell me about the journey from the early stages of reporting and how this then turned into your first book project, right? - Yes, this began incredibly back in 2018 when I received a letter from an attorney at Yale Law School named Laura Fernandez. I had just published a story and she'd seen that story and she reached out to me and she said that she was representing a man on Florida's death row who she believed to be innocent. And I get a lot of emails like that. - I'm sure you do. - I'm sorry to say. But the thing that said it apart was, she gave a description about this case and at the end of the email, sort of almost as an aside, she said that the star witness against her client, her client's name was Jim Daley. The star witness was a former police officer turned Jill House informant and that this person had provided the most damning testimony against her client. And I'd been looking for a Jill House snitch story for a long time. To me, whenever I would see cases that had a Jill House snitch, it was like a red flag that something was really wrong. Like if you have the evidence you need in a case, you don't need a guy from the jail to come over and tell a story. So that sort of began this journey and I ended up visiting Paul Scalnick who was the Jill House informant who at the time was in federal prison. And he had led this like very colorful life which when I went to see him, I had read up on. He was a con artist with a long, long rap sheet and he'd been married nine times, nine different women some at the same time. I went to see him just to see if he would participate in the story because to me, if I could get him to talk to me and tell me about the work he'd done both in Jim Daley's case and what I came to find were dozens of other cases that he had done this in. That would be an amazing story. And he told me that he would tell me everything. And he sort of did the thing that like he conned me this is actually how I begin the book because I think it's easy to read a story about a con artist and think like, well, I would never fall for that. You know, I'm too smart. And I'm an investigative journalist. Like this is a story that really needs to be told. Let's do this. I buy that hookline and sinker. I call my editor. I'm so excited. We got this incredible narrative. And long story short, he was just sort of feeding me lines. He didn't end up telling me anything. We had months and months of me trying to come back to see him, of me sending him emails with all these questions. And there was always something. You know, something was going on at the mail room and he hadn't received my last letter or he wasn't feeling well. And so many months into this, I realized that he was not going to tell me anything. And that was sort of the impetus for, OK, I need to find out everything I possibly can. And that was the impetus both for the article and then later at the book. Did you know prior to publishing the story itself that you're like, this is going to be the book? I wish I could tell you that I was strategic in any way with anything. No, the story came out and I just had that feeling. And we've all had this feeling of like, gosh, there's so much more here. I barely scratched the surface with this article. And I have that feeling a lot. But this one was just next level. Like, there were 40 years of an unbelievable story of this man who had hoodwinked prosecutors and police officers and so many different people from Texas to Florida. And even with the article coming out and a year of reporting behind that, I felt like, gosh, there's just so much more I want to know. And there's so much more storytelling I want to do. Tell me about your process and sort of putting those pieces together as you're reporting it out and then thinking about, OK, I'm going to do this as a book, but what kind of book is this going to be? OK, I'm so glad you asked that because I think I always imagine that other writers have it all figured out when they do anything, including sitting down to write a book. And of course, I had a lengthy book proposal. I had an outline that my book editor had approved. I had a game plan. And as so often happens, it all looked good on paper. But there was so-- I mean, years, really of changing the structure of recalibrating what the storytelling was. And so one of the tricky things about this book is it really tells the story of two men with other people woven in. But there's Paul Skellnic, the snitch, and then there's Jim Dele, who's on Florida's death row, mostly on the word of Paul Skellnic. And so how do you sort of titrate? How do you balance how much of each person's story there is, who do you lead with, when do you come back to them? And then there's this sort of tapestry of so many other characters. And so that was a long process. I was very, very lucky to work with an amazing book editor, Hillary Redman, a Knauff, who was just a genius. It's sort of like figuring out the structure. But basically, what we ended up landing on was leading with Skellnic and having that be the entry point for this story, this very colorful. And you don't realize initially how dangerous and how bad of a person he is. He's charming, he's colorful, and that was sort of the way in. And then at a certain point, we break and learn more about Jim Dele, and then we go back and forth. But that was so hard. And I think I would love to listen to writers all day talk about how they figure out the structures of their articles and books, because it's endlessly challenging. But then once you get it right, you can't imagine it any other way. That's the way the story has to be told. I think also one of the things that I realized writing a book is-- I mean, this may sound obvious. But you're asking so much more of a reader. You're asking so much more of their time and their attention. And I tried to make this book both very rich and immersive, but also a quick read, because I kept thinking of someone like me. I've got my job, I've got my book, I've got my kids, I've got a lot going on. And so I'm trying to write-- it's the same thing with a magazine story, but I'm trying to write every sentence so you can't turn away. And I always think about, you know, Most stories at the Times magazine work that I write for are read on your phone. We know this from, you know, data. And when you think about like when you're looking at your phone, all the information that is constantly coming in, right? Like the notifications and the texts and the this and that. And so I'm always trying to write in such a way that you're swiping those away and that you keep reading. And it is a really high stakes way of writing. It's really hard. Right? Like I'm not saying that I actually like pull this off necessarily. But I try really hard to, I'm always thinking of that person with their phone. I'm that person too. You know, my attention span has shrunken over the years. And so I'm just like I'm trying so hard to keep you in. And I did that with the book too. Yeah, it definitely it reads like that and it takes you to a lot of different places with each chapter. So how how did you report this out? The public records are really the foundation of this book. So Laura Fernandez, the attorney I mentioned who contacted me initially from Yale. She had spent years working on a different case that Skellnic was a snitching. And so between what Laura had done, then I filed over a hundred public record requests. So this was police reports, jail logs, anything and everything you can think of connected to this man. And that was really the foundation of the book. And then building out from there with people who had talked to me. And then with people who wouldn't talk to me, there were ways in which I tried to use the public record to tell the story. So John Halliday, who's the lead investigator in Jim Daly's case, to me it was this incredible thing, which is shortly before Jim's trial. When things aren't looking great for the prosecution, he goes to visit the Pinellas County jail in Pinellas, County Florida, and Clearwater. He starts pulling guys out of the pod where Jim was housed. I think it's about 15 prisoners and all. And I should say these are all men who are pretrial. They have not been convicted. They're waiting to go to trial. And he pulls them out of their cells and asks them what they know about this murder case that Jim has been implicated in. But I didn't have access to John Halliday. So I did have access through, I can't remember if this was through public record request or discovery in one of these other cases that Skellent had been in. But I had Halliday's notes that he took that day. I had zero access of his notebook. Oh wow. And you know, it was incredible. It was like all the things that these guys had said to him. And between that and his testimony later about going to the jail, I was able to create, I think, a pretty atmospheric scene of what it was like that day when he went. I was also able to interview one of the men who was there who was being held in the jail. And I had, I had some depositions, I believe, from some of the other men. But so it's written in such a way. I don't explain that to the reader. You know, it's told in a highly narrative way, but it's entirely drawn from documents. Could I have you read part of that passage? Yes. And this, I should say, this initially refers to a man named Jack Pursey who was Jim Daly's co-defendant. He was his housemate at the time and all available evidence suggests that Jack Pursey committed this crime by himself. But he implicated Jim Daly. Nine days after the conclusion of Jack's trial on December 4, 1986, Halliday strode into a small room deep inside the hulking concrete and steel complex that made up the Pinellas County jail. The detectives work on the case was nearly done. A year and a half had passed since he had obtained arrest warrants for Jack and Jim. And his investigation for all practical purposes had concluded. Nevertheless, at his direction, jailers began pulling men who were housed with Jim out of their cell block. One by one, 15 men were brought in handcuffs to the interrogation room where Halliday waited. There was an urgency to his voice as he questioned them. Had Jim ever discussed the case before, ever admitted to anything? And then I give background on how Halliday's done this in many other cases. And then I'll just pick up with the end of this section. 15 men in all were brought out of the cell block where Jim was confined. In a slender, lined notebook, Halliday recorded what each of them told him. Nothing he jotted down after one interview. After others, he wrote, "Said Daly denies charge. Doesn't know a thing. Nothing. Knows nothing. Didn't even know Daly. Stays to himself. Knows nothing. Refused to come to be interviewed." Wish I could have helped you, but it's a little out of my league." Halliday came up empty, but in the jail, the word was out. Jim Daly's case needed a snitch. I think when I was starting off doing this, I wouldn't have had the confidence to write a scene like that. How could I say what had happened? I didn't talk to the central character. I'm lucky enough with the story that there was so much that was well documented that I could draw a narrative out of that, if that makes sense. Yeah, and there's so much in traditional newspaper journalism training we get around attribution, which changes within the genre of narrative nonfiction. Well, it's interesting. At Texas Monthly, I think we had sort of the traditional rules of magazine journalism where you could write a scene like that without an explanation. At ProPublica, and I appreciated this. I remember with my first story, I wrote for them the managing editor at the time said, "How do I know this is true?" I mean, I'm reading this, but how do I know? We ended up, it was a very narrative story, but we ended up putting this box in, and we've done this for a few of my more narrative pieces, and it's called something like how I got the story. And then it's sort of like source notes for a book, and it's actually, I love reading these when ProPublica publishes them, and I love writing them because you can like really brag. I spoke to over a hundred people, and I did this, and I did that in this way that you actually couldn't within the body of a story, but I think it helps to establish that trust with the reader that you didn't just make this all up. And I tried to do that in the source notes for this book. I actually tried to write the source notes for journalism nerds to read. Like, maybe there's some I enjoy a lot of interesting to read instead of just a list of footnotes, which I never really know it to take away from that. Yeah, as a reader, I appreciate just the transparency of how a story comes together, and I think that just only adds to the credibility. I think it helps the writer to make it as bullet proof as possible. Like, I feel like it's on top of fact checking. It's like, you're going to come at me. Okay, like, here's what I've done. I spent this many months on this. I talked to this many people, and I think it's interesting if you think about more traditional magazine journalism, like, you totally hide that ball. You never say that, right? Like, so I think, I think there's some happy medium somewhere. Maybe it's the box of how I got the story. Yeah, I appreciate all sides of it. So that's great. The other little tidbit that I remembered from that chapter scene was that you had a detail about how it a having newspaper articles spread out in the interrogation room as if like, here's your source. Right. I should have explained what we want. Yes. So he calls these guys, you know, one by one into this room, and they recall he has denied that this happened. But four different men gave sworn testimony in 2017 that they remembered walking into this interrogation room, and there were articles from what was then the St. Petersburg Times and other local papers about the murder. So, you know, I sort of let those facts speak for itself that he's saying, yeah, what do you know about this crime? And then there are these newspapers lying there. Again, he denies that there were these papers there. Now, you mentioned also getting to speak with some of the victims of Skolnik. I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about how you work with people who have experienced trauma like that and how you work with victims and how you think about telling the victim's story versus the suspects. Skolnik started off being someone who committed petty crimes, you know, a $50 hot check at the grocery store, and it escalated from there, and he was wiping out widows of their life savings. And then it escalated from there, and so he liked young teenage girls. And one of the, I think most awful things to come out of all of this is that in exchange for his testimony prosecutors let him go free that allowed him to go back out there and commit crimes, and that included the sexual assault of two teenage girls. Well, I should say a 12-year-old, not a teenager, and a 16-year-old. And in the 12-year-old case, Karen Parker, to me, her story was sort of the heart of the book. I mean, Jim Daly's case is horrifying, of course. But what I found so compelling about Karen is she was expendable at the time to police and prosecutors. She reported that he had assaulted her, but he was such a valuable witness at the time that the quickest way I can explain it is that the State Attorney's Office and Clearwater sort of made that case go away and basically found her to be, you know, not a trustworthy witness. And that was back in 1982 and '83. So when I tracked her down in 2019, and I, of course, believed her, I had to piece together from different police reports, what had happened at the time, but there were, just to give you a sense of things, there were, there was not only her statement, her polygraph examination. I should note that a 12-year-old girl was given a polygraph examination while Skalnec, a grown man, was not. I think that speaks volumes. But there were two witness statements. It's extremely unusual in a case like this to have two witness statements, but two friends of hers had seen part of what happened. And, you know, as these cases go, it was actually incredibly well documented. So when I was able to figure out who she was and I should say that in the police reports I obtained, you know, her name was redacted and various identifying details were redacted. And so it took a while to figure out exactly who she was and then she'd been married several times. You know, what was her name now and where did she live, but quite honestly with a lot of this reporting, a lot of it is just feeling your way I found. It's figuring out with each step of the way how comfortable somebody is, it's keeping communication open at all times. I remember in Karen's case before I wrote about in a much more limited form in the article which she had been through. I went to Florida, I met with her in person, I read to her what I had written. I just felt like I had to do that sort of extra layer. And I should add that I thought I knew all the people he had hurt. There was a surprise for me that sort of comes at the end of the book. Someone who's earlier in the book explains to me that she was a victim of his too. So it was very difficult, but very important, I think, reporting. Yeah. And on top of it is there, as he's able to get out of these convictions, then he's not treated as a repeat offender in these cases as well, allowing him to continue to victimize. Exactly. It was sort of the double harm of he's not only able to go back out in the world and do these things, but prosecutors can put him on the stand and he can just say he's had, you know, some hot check rating problems, which is vastly different than molesting a 12 year old girl. This is another passage that I was hoping to have you read from, which is from your interviews with Karen, chapter four. Okay, here we go. Karen Parker was 12 years old during the long rest of summer of 1982 when she paddled her bike down Seminole's familiar streets, longing for the day when she could finally get her driver's license. Always, for as long as anyone could remember, she had been in a hurry to grow up. Her mother liked to joke that she was born with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her closest confidant was a high schooler named Evelyn, who lived next door on their call to sack. Evelyn was four years older, though the age gap was one that Karen, by virtue of her self-assuredness and occasional acts of daring, easily overcame. The Karen's freckled face, fringed with feathered blonde hair that faithfully mimicked feroffossets, still held the soft roundness of childhood. That's how I introduce Karen. There's a lot of foreshadowing in there if you know what comes. What I meant by the soft roundness of childhood is she's still a child, she's 12, right? But also I wanted to show the qualities in her that were turned against her by investigators. She was adventurous and she was pushing the envelope and she liked boys and nothing that was wrong. It was just who she was and that was made to look like incredibly, that she was the aggressor in this situation with a man in his 30s. Yeah. I know the C over many decades how investigators, how police, how families are treating victims of sexual abuse. And so I'm curious what you saw in your reporting. You talked about the polygraph test. It was so shocking. I mean, I am the age roughly of these women now who I'm writing about when they were teenage girls. I remember that time, I remember time when what you were mattered in rape cases and when rape shield laws were not in place and you could ask a woman about her sexual history. I remember all that, but it was still so shocking to sort of go back in time and just see how at least back then and I do think things have changed enormously. They're still deeply flawed. But the starting point was one of disbelief. It was, you know, you don't want to ruin this guy's life. I mean, on your word. So when I read about Karen and when she told me about being polygraphed, I was just so stunned. I mean, just the visual of a 12 year old girl, you know, all alone her parents weren't with her being polygraphed while this man in his 30s who's clearly lying about everything never has to go lie detector test was just amazing. And I make the point two things. This was common back then, which I did not know. It was common back then to have polygraphs given to women who brought stories of sexual assault forward. I was just stunned by that. But also just that there was so little care taken into why a 12 year old girl would come forward with a story like this that there was no, there's nothing like victim services or anyone to help her with so interesting and shocking. I think also I made the point in there that of course I should make sure say polygraphs are notoriously unreliable. So to me, what was interesting was in that time frame, people believed in them and the course of an investigation or whether or not you charged someone with the crime was often determined by the outcome of those tests. And so you're you're pulling these records over many decades as well. So you're putting you you put through all these public records requests just to get very specific like you're putting them in and then what is the wait time and you know do you need to just go make yourself busy with other things if and when these things come back through. And I worry that saying any of this will make Florida like want to change their roles. I'm not the first journalist to say this, but Florida has incredible sunshine laws that they are there have been efforts to curtail them in recent years. There's like an ode to them in my source notes, but Florida is incredibly transparent. Not in everything, but in things like police reports, court documents. I mean, I was able to get my hands on most everything I was able to find logs of where each person was housed in the Pinellas County jail during certain periods of time. Why would that be important? Well, if you are coming forward to detectives and saying that you overheard this person tell the story, you know, were you even like near that person? Gallnick was held in solitary confinement usually, so there were all sorts of different challenges to how he could have heard these stories. Salitary confinement is not the right term. He was held apart from general population. But basically I would put repeated, I mean, I can only imagine the public records, folks at the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department. I'm sure they're very sick of me, but I would put a record request through and you know, I'm talking days or weeks before things would come back and this was for records from the 80s. So, I mean, kudos to all of the public servants in Florida who make this happen. Conversely, I tried to get Salnick's FBI records because he does have them. That took years and years and years. Then I got almost nothing and what I got was basically redacted beyond, you know, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. So it is so interesting. And then there were other states where I was trying to uncover things about him. It was so hard, I remember. There was one parish in Louisiana. And I called the D.H.A.'s office to ask about, you know, who's your public records clerk? And the response was like, "What?" You know, like, you know, what you're talking about. And can you tell me a little bit about fact checking too? So that was, I fact checked the book myself with input from other readers. So there were people who were experts in certain parts of the story, who, you know, in addition to cross-referencing every single document, you know, I had other people read it. My greatest fear, you know, living in Texas and writing about Florida, is I'm going to say something horrible, like, Tampa's east of Orlando, or something that like, immediately makes someone lose trust in the book. So, you know, I come from a tradition first to Texas monthly, now at the New York Times magazine, where you have to annotate every sentence that you write. And I don't think readers know that, but you cannot get anything into print, literally without every sentence leading back to a document or a person or both. And so that's how I approached the book. And caught plenty of things big and small as always happens. And, you know, it's so overwhelming with a book, but you have to, because it's immortalized, you can't make that change later on the website. And I always think of something that my friend, Maurice Shema, who's at the Marshall Project talks about, we always talk about that like horrible feeling right before you publish, and he calls it the "Error Terrorist." And I love that term so much. And publishing a book is just like having the error terror for like years. You know, like, what Easter egg is in here that somebody is going to find? So anyway, I tried to make it as bullet proof as possible. I also sent what I call "No Surprises" letters to some of the key sources. This is something that I learned when I started at ProPublica. And I think that tradition originally came from folks there who had come from the Wall Street Journal. But essentially, that idea is, and we did this with the article too, that you write a letter to sources who are in the book, who have not spoken to you, or who you tell difficult truths about in the book. And so what that letter does is it lays out everything that's in the book. And that gives them time to respond, and then whatever responses they make are then incorporated into the book. To me, that's something that just helps ensure, you know, that you have crossed every T and dotted every I. Those letters can be tough to send, because you're putting it all out there, and you're not sugar-coating anything. I think that's the importance of those letters. You're being very frank and forth, right? When I was a baby reporter starting off, I would write all sorts of tough things in my stories. And, you know, they would be fact-checked, but I wouldn't maybe communicate with the people I had written the tough things about. And I would just sort of like wait for them to read the story and respond. And I would just like in this crouched position, like, "Oh God, when is it going to happen?" And I don't, now I do the opposite. It's like, let's just be frank. Tell me what I got wrong. Tell me if you think I was unfair. I'll do my best to balance the documents, the facts I have, and what you're telling me. Speaking truth to power and all that, of course, that's important. But you've got to get your facts right, right? And you can also, there's a world in which you write very tough things about people that they have done. And you also are communicating with them, and you're transparent with them. And I think I'm not saying that I always get that right, but I try really, really, really hard to get that right. I always try to think how would I like someone to approach me? And also, I mean, my God, the mistakes you can make when you are sure you have something right, and you haven't run it by the person who you're too scared to call. Mm-hmm. You mentioned the no surprises letter or something you started doing at ProPublica. And before that, you were at Texas Monthly. It's so much award-winning work there, and I'm curious how your approach has evolved from those early days at Texas Monthly to today. Well, it was the best place to ever learn how to do magazine journalism, and especially true crime or criminal justice reporting. I had Skip Hollinsworth and Gary Cartwright, the storytelling masters, who are sort of my elder statesman, Skip would hate me saying that, but it's true. Mimi Schwartz, who's just one of the most incredible magazine writers, I think of our time. Mike Hall, who tells these just beautiful, vivid, and raging stories about the criminal justice system, and so many other people. So I was with all these brilliant people, and somehow got hired there at 25, and was sure every day for the first couple of years that they were going to figure out, I had no idea what I was doing. I was going to be showing the door, and I just tried to soak up as much as I could. And I remember starting off, I mean, starting off writing crimes stories in the 90s, I'm not going to say that I'm proud of every single thing that I wrote. It was a really different sensibility with really different concerns, and definitely stories were told in a more a flashier way that was less concerned with victims and their families. So I think I, along with so many people from that time, learned the importance of reporting in a more thoughtful way. But I don't mean that I was doing anything terrible, but I just think the standard at the time wasn't necessarily that you spent a lot of time thinking about the victims' family in a story like this. And so I think that's made for me, and so many other people who sort of gone through that process. It's made us better writers. It's made our stories more nuanced and layered and interesting. And I learned a lot about that doing some oral histories that I did for Texas Monthly. Probably the one that's the best known was an oral history I did of the UT Tower shooting, which happened in 1966 here in Austin, Texas. And that story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the victims of the shooting, both people who were shot and people who witnessed that. And I think that the richness of that narrative was just a great lesson for me. How did you end up at Texas Monthly in the first place? You have very nicely asked me already if I have a strategy going into things, and I have no strategy. I ended up, so I grew up in New York City in Media Central, which would have been smart perhaps to have stayed there. And when I graduated from college, I really wanted to see the rest of the country and to travel. And so I spent about six months traveling around the US with a friend of mine, Margaret Brown, who's now this incredible documentary filmmaker. And we ended up falling in love with Austin, Texas. This was the era of slacker and all of that. And I'm a cliche, ended up falling for a musician and marrying him and staying here. I was going to stay here for a year. It's been 30-something years. Anyway, I set out knowing I wanted to do magazine journalism. I had interned. It's really sad that these places are gone now. I had interned at the Village Voice, and I had interned at Spin Magazine. And I had learned so much through those experiences. I ended up staying in Austin. And I had done these internships at Spin Magazine and the Village Voice. And I had learned so much there, and I had done an independent study when I was in college, where I wrote magazine stories, basically, for a class credit. And I knew that's what I wanted to do. And when I came here, I was sending them to an editor who just would not give me the time of day. And then he left the magazine, and I sent a query letter to Evan Smith, who was a junior editor at the magazine at the time. And he just immediately picked up the phone. I was like, "Who are you? Come right for me." And so I started freelancing for Evan. And incredibly, this is where I feel bad trying to give any advice to younger journalists. This world doesn't exist anymore. I had a staff writing job at Texas Monthly when I was 25. And that was my master's in my PhD. It was learning from everybody there and trying to figure out how to not get fired. I was a generalist for a long time. And that's actually something I loved. I miss that so much. about the magazine. So, you know, you'd be writing a death penalty story one day and then you're on the barbecue team a week later traveling across the state, writing about food and then going to Mexico for a travel piece and I loved and then there'd be a personal essay. I loved that churn of stories and I feel like they're fewer and fewer places like that now and everybody's a specialist. So I I miss that. I miss being a generalist. I revered Gary Cartwrights, Capone's Worth, Mike Hall, I just I wanted to be them as the best way I can say it and so I had that model I didn't include Mimi in that list because she wasn't doing as much criminal justice stuff. I would give my right arm to write like Mimi but I think there was both that admiration and Texas Monthly was sort of famous for its crime yarns many of them were yarns. They weren't investigative and at the same time it was the 90s the late 90s in Texas so this was the most intense period we have had in the modern history of the death penalty as far as the number of executions that were taking place here in Texas. It was just astronomical and I think 1999 was the year that the most executions ever took place in the US and that's because most of them were here so it was sort of inevitable to be writing about criminal justice. It was like in the air. It was part of living here and that just became my beat and I remember one of the first stories I wrote for the magazine was an innocent story. It was like just a small piece about a man in Houston who'd been wrongly convicted of rape but I had watched many years earlier when I was in high school. I'd watched the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line which is about a wrongful conviction of a man in Dallas in the 80s and I was just so spellbound by that film and by that story focused on a man named Randall Dale Adams who was wrongly sent to Texas death row and I ended up getting the interview him when I was at Texas Monthly but that just that idea that you could make an error or that colossal was endlessly fascinating to me and so I ended up writing quite a number of stories delving into that. And now today you work with both Pro Public and the New York Times magazines so what does it look like in terms of how you develop story ideas? So there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen luckily they're all very smart cooks but the job I have a really interesting job because I'm literally split between both news organizations and to me I've always interpreted that to mean that my mandate is that every story has to have both the hard-hitting investigative elements of a Pro Public History with the narrative power of a New York Times magazine story and that is really hard if like that's a total order. Pitching stories that check both of those boxes and haven't been done by the staffs of either of those news organizations and get my editors excited and don't duplicate something I've already done that is like the Rubik's Cube of my job but I love the challenge of it you know and I love teasing out all those things in the writing and the editing and I work with two genius editors I honestly would be so fortunate to work with one of them and I get to work with both of them but Tracy Weber at Pro Publica and Elena Silverman at the Times Magazine both legends and they are so smart and it's so funny when I was writing the book and I had this incredible direction from Hillary Redman I felt like the three of them were sort of like like I would write a sentence I could hear one of them be like that's not right like I know what the sensibility of each one of those women is and it really is just such a privilege to work with such brilliant people and then the book itself did you enjoy the experience? Are there what would you like to do more? That's a great question I mean I feel like I feel like I'm you know nine and a half months pregnant when you're asking me that I mean yes right like how can you only do this once and and learn all the the hard lessons of book writing and not do it again though I don't know how my husband would feel hearing me say that because it's hard it's really hard I think the challenges for me and it took a while to get them down were not just structure but pacing the pacing of the book is so different from an article and then the the story arcs like how do you keep a story arc sustained over 80 or 90 or 100,000 words how do you keep people immersed and engaged and it's so different than I thought it would be like I think the thing I was the most looking forward to with writing a book was like oh I'll get to go down all those rabbit holes that I never get to go down you know all those things that you have to cut from a magazine story and I ended up feeling like I actually had to be more disciplined with the book because the book is asking so much of readers and so I've got to keep them focused at all times so I had to be very disciplined but yeah I think I think I probably will try to do it again but it is an undertaking I do coming out of this I feel like I wish that writers had more support from one another well they do book projects we talked about how much the sort of media landscape has changed there's a different landscape and I'm curious what advice you have for emerging journalists on how they might go forward even if it's in a completely different world that we're in here and how to keep learning and challenging themselves it's such an important question so I think about what life was like pre pandemic when and I'm going way back but this was true even right before the pandemic you know I learned so much of what I knew sitting in this open office space where we all just have these little cubbies where we had to make our reporting phone calls and it was mortifying you know I remember making some early early calls this was when I started off a text monthly and there was a guy who sat opposite me and he would listen to me you know leave a message on someone's been you know answering machine asking them to call me back and I'd hang up and he'd be like yeah I don't think you're hearing back from them you know there was this constant like peanut gallery right of people chiming in or trying to trip you up and you know some of that was hard don't get me wrong but like conversely I got to hear all these other reporters calls and I would hear how they got people to talk to them and I would you know I wasn't on reporting trips with them but I was immersed in what they were doing every day and so I think now that we really don't have that and now that people are so much more separated to me the key is creating those communities and I'm I'm part of a big writers group here in Austin and I love this group so much because you have people who are in their late 20s up to people in their mid 80s you have fiction writers non-fiction writers you've got it all and I remember looking around the room and just thinking everyone in this room has struggled with this to some degree or another I'm not alone I have all these people I can go to to ask for advice or support or whatever I need and so I guess that's my advice it's like to create these communities and to seek out mentors I know that's like such a people hear that all the time but it is so true and ask a lot of questions how does great advice pay I'm congrats again on the book thank you again for being here thank you so much thank you so much I really really appreciate it thank you again to Pam and thanks to all of you for listening if you like what we're doing with Neiman storyboard leave us a written review and a rating in Apple podcasts or Spotify you can also share this podcast with a friend we'll see you soon