Inside the Media Minds of Byron Tau: ProPublica

Christine Blake: Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. We are your co-hosts, Christine Blake

Madison Farabaugh: and Madison Fairbaugh. 

This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio here at W2 Communications, let's go Inside the Media Minds.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Inside the Media Minds. Madison and I are speaking with Byron Tau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and experienced investigative reporter, most recently for the D.C. Bureau of the Associated Press, and he's currently transitioning to a new role as a reporter at ProPublica. 

So it was really great to talk to him and hear more about how he approaches investigative journalism. It was really interesting to hear how long the process takes and how collaborative it can be amongst different reporters. Madison, what were, your, some of your takeaways?

Madison Farabaugh: Yeah, I really loved hearing Byron's perspective on how, you know, he and his team have used AI in the past, what that impact on the journalism industry is like in general. I thought he had some unique strategies for how he leverages it, so I think listeners will definitely enjoy hearing that. 

And then I also liked hearing his perspective on just different, different ways that an investigative reporter might reach out to a company or a person when they're trying to gather information, and what that typically looks like in terms of process.

Christine Blake: We also heard about his book and how that was a result of several investigative stories that he was working on as well. So we hope you all enjoy this episode with Byron. 

Hi there, Byron. Welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you on today.

Byron Tau: Thanks for having me.

Christine Blake: Yeah, absolutely. So Byron, right now we are thrilled to talk to you because you're kind of in between roles, leaving your position at the Associated Press and then moving into your new role as a reporter at ProPublica. So, we're excited to hear about that. But let's go ahead and start with an overview of your career journey. What got you interested in journalism, and where has that led you here today?

Byron Tau: Yeah, great questions. And yes, I am in the middle of a little bit of unemployment or an adult summer vacation, and start a new job soon. What led me to journalism? I think in some ways it's a lack of other alternatives. I know a lot of reporters like to joke about that, but I was always a strong writer. I was always interested in civics and history, particularly American history. And I think, like a lot of people who have that particular set of interests and skills when they're young, they gravitate towards Washington, D.C. or other big media markets like New York City, and end up as journalists. So that's kind of what happened to me. I got the bug writing for my college newspaper. 

After graduating, I moved to Washington, D.C. with not much of a plan, and this was 2008, so the job market was not particularly great. So I kind of bided my time. I waited tables at the Cheesecake Factory on Wisconsin Avenue. I started getting a journalism degree at night at Georgetown, and just kept kind of hunting for internships and other opportunities that would get me closer to journalism. And that's kind of how I got my start. Eventually, Ben Smith, who was then at POLITICO, hired me as his editorial assistant, and that kind of launched my career in journalism.

Christine Blake: Cool, that's excellent. I love that overview and how it all kind of folded out for you. We are Cheesecake Factory fans too.

Madison Farabaugh: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and so I know, as we mentioned, you're coming from the Associated Press, and we actually saw that your team there had won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance. So we would love to hear about what that reporting process was like and what made this story specifically astonishing to you all.

Byron Tau: Yeah, so I was part of a team at the AP that was looking at the U.S. role in spreading essentially surveillance technology around the world, and the story started a few years ago when my colleague Dick Kane and a freelancer named Yael Grauer got essentially a pile of documents about China's surveillance systems, and, and those documents, in a lot of ways, showed the role that U.S. tech companies had played, and that role was a far bigger one than had been previously understood. So, they embarked on a couple of years of reporting on that. I came into it rather late, but I, my part of it was to look at specifically how the Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. immigration agencies were doing, were using technology that you know sort of pioneered abroad as kind of tools of mass repression in many instances, and how those tools were being used in the United States, not you know always for exactly the same purpose, or and, and not always in in the ways that authoritarian governments are using them, but tools and techniques that were somewhat similar to what we saw abroad. 

And so, I and a colleague did a story on how the border patrol was monitoring the movement of millions of cars in inside the interior of the United States, and on finding ways to single out drivers whose behavior they found suspicious, so there was nothing kind of in, in someone's personal background, or there was no real reason to pull this person over, other than they exhibited a behavioral pattern that, to the government, was indicative of drug trafficking or human smuggling, and you know we found some some pretty eye opening examples of you know innocent people who were caught up in this kind of thing and did a story on it. 

So yeah, it was part of a package that the AP submitted to the Pulitzer board and that we were honored to win for. So really an incredible project that I, I played a small part in, but one that I, I think really showcases the AP's global reach and ambition, the ability to kind of tap reporters on multiple continents and do a patient, long-form, long-term investigation. I think that's sort of the strength of the organization, as well as to couple it with great video and photojournalism, and so yeah, it was one of the the best projects I've worked on, and, and it was both cheering to see that it, it won a prize, but more importantly that you know readers responded to it and policymakers in some instances reacted to it.

Christine Blake: That's fascinating. I'd love to dig into that a little bit more, specifically your take on investigative journalism. So, at the AP, obviously, you were an investigative journalist. So, what would you say, or how does that differ really from like everyday reporting?

Byron Tau: Yeah, I think in so, in some ways, all reporters are investigative reporters, but investigative journalism is a particular subset of it that, where you honestly have the luxury of time and resources to take big swings and to do big projects. You know, unfortunately, ours is mostly a negative business. We don't generally investigate. You know, all the, all the planes that land, we tend to investigate wrongdoing, and we tend to investigate where there's areas of you know where more accountability or more light or more transparency is necessary, and often in cases where big institutions, whether public or private, are falling down on the job in some way, and so you know it is, it's, it's, it's a unique sub-discipline of reporting because you know again I think most beat reporters they do get to write you know the basic breaking news stories sometimes when they're you know they're covering an institution there's, there's good news there's, there's opportunities to, to kind of highlight all different facets of that organization's work, and investigative reporters tend to, to be a little more on the negative side, but, but in the public interest, right? 

Like, there's generally some reason that we're doing an investigation, or at least looking into something, and it's usually because we either have been told or we hypothesize that there's there, there may be something that the public ought to know at the other end of that. So yeah, it is a unique and special kind of reporting. You know, unfortunately, it takes time and it takes resources. And in today's media environment, those things are rather scarce. You know, sometimes investigative projects can take years. 

Sometimes they can take weeks, but they're rarely quick. They're often difficult, and sometimes they are dry wells. Right. Sometimes you do investigate something, and you decide there is no story there. And you know, in the interests of fairness, you move on without writing something, but you've sunk a lot of resources into it. So, at the end of the day, for a lot of organizations, it's a luxury to have a team that's just doing that. And for a lot of us, it's a real honor to be part of that team because there's just so few of those slots in journalism.

Christine Blake: Yeah, and I'm curious too. What is the longest project you were a part of, like time-wise?

Byron Tau: Yeah, I mean, so you know, when I was at the Wall Street Journal, I did a lot of what are sometimes called rolling investigations. So that means that you're focusing on a topic or you're, you're tracing some storyline, but it's over the course of months or years. And so when I was there, I did a surveillance series that began in early 2020, and I kept reporting on that topic for, you know, almost four years, and that culminated in a book I wrote. And so often you can stick with a topic or a storyline for a long time and publish. Interim updates along the way, and, and that, you know, after the, at the end of it, you, you'll have a pretty good corpus of work. 

So I'd say that was probably the longest kind of storyline I worked on in terms of a single project or a single story. That, that border patrol and surveillance project, you know, I came into it, and my portion of it took about a year, but again, it had been in the works for several years before that, and you know, it involved reporters all over the world, from China to Nepal to Israel and the Palestinian territories to us in the United States traveling around the country, and so that was probably the biggest single story I was involved in.

Christine Blake: It must be so rewarding once that finishes and it actually publishes.

Byron Tau: It is, you know. It's also, there's also a lot of anxiety that, that goes into it because when you're publishing something big and high stakes and long, especially, you know, these stories tend to be long lengthwise. There's a lot to get, to get right, and there's a lot of details. And I remember, you know, just for my part of the border patrol story, we were fact-checking it in the like in the minutes that, that led up to publication. You know, I was I remember I was sitting in front of my fireplace with the fire going, and all night, I was just catching tiny little things. You know, I found a pretty major typo that would have required a correction had we let it go in, in an hour or two before. And I probably read it I don't know, maybe 50 times that day before it went out. And so, yes, like when you get a story like that out into the world, there is a tremendous amount of relief, but also the run up to it is very anxiety-producing. So it's, it's, it's very tiring. It's exhausting. You fall asleep. 

Ours published at midnight, in which you know, and then I had to just basically go to sleep, and the world wasn't probably going to see it really until the next morning. And so you know that wasn't an easy night of sleep either. So you know, sometimes, sometimes when you're publishing, the publication is just the beginning, and the reaction will start to roll in over time. And so you're, you're not out of the woods when you get the story out. But you know, eventually, yes, it is. It's very rewarding to get a project like that out. It's particularly gratifying when there's you know when there's a great public reaction to it, and you know there's the sense of relief when there's no corrections needed to it.

Madison Farabaugh: And just thinking about kind of these, these stories or projects that you'll be working on for a long time, I'm curious how you build relationships with those companies or individuals who your team might be investigating for one of these stories? You mentioned earlier how sometimes there is a negative connotation because you are looking for certain information. So, have you had any, you know, lessons learned from that experience?

Byron Tau: Yeah. So you know, there's probably three reasons why an investigative reporter might call someone who's in the PR industry. Two of them are good to neutral, and one of them is very bad. You know, first of all, we might be doing a story on your biggest competitor or your regulator, and want your perspective, you know, on very deep background about where they're screwing up or doing wrong things. One other reason is we might simply be doing something on the industry and be looking for kind of a neutral voice to explain the norms or the way something is supposed to work, to highlight, you know, the way something might be broken. And the final reason, and frankly the most common reason an investigative reporter might call a company or an organization, is that, that we are preparing a story on you, and we want your comment. And often those are the most fraught and difficult conversations to have. And so, generally in investigative reporting, when we are developing relationships with at least kind of what we reporters refer to as at least through the what we call the front door, so going, going through the normal channels and then explaining what we're doing and seeking interviews. 

You know, usually that's, that's for the first two purposes, right? Either that we're reporting on some part of your industry, but you're not the central focus of the story, or we're looking for a voice to explain kind of how things normally go, or how things ought to go. When we're doing kind of critical reporting, to be honest, we're looking for ways around you. We're looking for ways to talk to people that are not, that, that we're not going to have a mediated conversation with the PR person sitting there. And those kinds of reporting activities are generally, ee often get a lot of flack. We often get angry phone calls. But you know, the one thing that it's important to understand is we're doing it for a reason. And you know, any good investigative reporter, any good reporter worth their salt, ought to be giving you a very long lead time for what they find ought to very seriously take, you know, if you tell me something is wrong. I, I don't just say okay, I'll put I'll note that you say it's wrong. I'm going to go back to my sources. I'm going to go back to the documents. I'm going to make sure everything I say is, is buttoned up. And so, you know, just having kind of an understanding of that, especially when you're dealing with an investigative reporter, I think is, is really important for both sides. 

And recently, I was doing some reporting on an organization, and and the you know the, the PR person I could tell was not happy with what I was doing, and and probably had at some point been ordered by his superiors to call me and tell me to stop calling everyone that previously worked at this company, and you know, I think he had the understanding that he couldn't really do that, and that wouldn't be productive. But you know, I told him that I don't, I don't write, I don't. There's no surprises. I don't, I'm not going to call you and say my story's going up in an hour, and you have, you know, like there's gonna, you're gonna have weeks to respond. 

And I think we came to a good understanding. And frankly, the story never published because nothing we, we, you know, we couldn't substantiate it. And so you know, just having an understanding of that kind of process and being fairly straightforward with the people you're communicating with at companies, and assuring them that, at the end of the day, you are going to give them an awful lot of time that their perspective is going to be very high up in the story no matter what you find. That if you tell a reporter that something is wrong that they're going to take those concerns seriously that we may not ultimately agree on the angle or the thrust of the piece but having kind of an open line of communication and not hiding the ball, I think, is really the most important thing and the most important part in dealing with institutions.

Christine Blake: Yeah, makes sense and good to know. I'm curious too. What, tell us a little bit about your, your upcoming role as you start at ProPublica? What are you going to be interested in covering there? What is your role going to be there?

Byron Tau: Yeah, so I'm going to join a newly formed national security team at ProPublica. There's they're going to announce a spate of a couple of hires, and we're going to be digging into essentially you know national security agencies and and do journalism in the public interest, trying to understand how the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, and other national security entities are going about their mission, and trying to inform the public a little bit more about what goes on inside these relatively opaque and secretive institutions.

Madison Farabaugh: And as you head into this role, have there been any trends recently, whether it's been in national security or even surveillance or privacy, that have been very top of mind for you that you're kind of looking forward to exploring a bit more?

Byron Tau: Well, I think that you know I can't open up an article or a newspaper without seeing the words AI, without seeing the word AI somewhere. So I think, you know, like in many other industries, artificial intelligence is transforming the national security establishment. So that's, I think one big giant storyline, and that you know, we, our our country conceives of itself in a great power competition with rivals like China and Russia, and there is this tremendous desire to control the most advanced chips and the, the biggest compute. So that's going to be an ongoing national security story. I also think the amalgamation of data, both by government entities and by private sector entities, and the ways in which those, those entities share and obtain data is going to continue to be a big story, and you know beyond that, I think you know we're in a, we're in an era of relative geopolitical instability. There's a war in the Middle East. There's, there's tensions around the world over trade and migration, and so I think it's just going to continue to be a very interesting time for reporters, and there's a lot for us to report on in this space.

Christine Blake : Yeah, and a lot of reporters and writers that we've spoken to recently talk about how even the media landscape is changing as a result of AI. Have you noticed any changes from that perspective?

Byron Tau: Yeah, I mean, from my perspective as an investigative reporter, I consider AI to be a tremendous boon to a lot of my work. It's made doing research, especially research that involves some sort of data or coding, to be a lot easier and more accessible. So I'm, I'm not, despite me covering a lot of technical topics, I'm not a coder. I don't understand, you know, Python or R or any of these languages. But you can spin up AI tools and scrapers really, really fast to collect data. Now, of course, this is a double-edged sword because, you know, we insist on accuracy and process and so, so often you need to check that data and you need to manually go through lots of it, but just in terms of making a research process that at least will help generate leads, will help give you a start in, in doing investigative reporting. 

AI has really made that job a lot easier if you know how to use the tools responsibly, and you know using them responsibly is always very, very difficult. But there's all sorts of things that have made my life a lot easier, from being able to kind of collect large amounts of information from websites and sort it much quicker than I used to be able to do manually, to you know, automating certain very boring and repetitive tasks like checking websites for updates, or digging through the Wayback Machine, or doing some basic research on, on a topic that I'm unfamiliar with. I think AI can very much help. Again, it's very important to use it responsibly to understand its limits, I don't generally use it for writing because I, I think I'm a better writer than AI. Although it is very, very good at proofreading and fact-checking in some instances, or you know, and I found some processes like giving a draft story to AI and just asking it to ask me how I know every fact, right? That, that's not having the machine do your thinking for you. That's just going through an iterative process with the machine. 

So, I think I'm actually fairly excited about the possibilities in a lot of cases. Again, it's, it's a matter of how you use it and what kind of guardrails you put on it. And I, I would never say that I would never, we we, we, we journalists who are trying to use it responsibly do not just take AI output and put it in our stories. Everything's checked. Everything's vetted. Often, a data team of very sophisticated programmers and engineers who do know how to code will look over AI's code or they'll repeat something that AI did to make sure that it's, it's correct. So you know, I don't, I don't want anyone to, to get the impression that you know investigative reporters are just pulling, pulling things Claude tells us off, off the, off the screen and pasting it into her stories. That's, that's not how we're using it. But as a starting point, as a tool, as a beginning to do research, as a way to surface leads that will later be checked out with human sources or by, by other people, it's a really great tool, and, and I'm excited about a lot of the possibilities for journalism.

Christine Blake: Yeah, I, I totally agree with you, and I think I love what you said about iterating with it and asking it to fact-check you and like kind of get, get that response with it. I think that's a really smart way to use it.

Madison Farabaugh: Yeah, yeah. 

Byron Tau: I think there are tons of uses out there like that that, that aren't kind of turning your thinking over to the machine, but are doing something in concert with it that, that help, that use it to help look for blind spots and errors and areas that you might your human squishy gray matter brain might have overlooked, but that a computer that's a little bit more exacting and and doesn't get tired can really help surface. So yeah, I think there's tons of different use cases like that.

Madison Farabaugh: And speaking of kind of those blank spaces or areas where you know research or more reporting could kind of fill the gaps. There, have you noticed any technology, security, or even surveillance trends that perhaps the media hasn't been covering as much that you think deserves more attention?

Byron Tau: That's a good question. I think in general, like very technical topics, like you know, what government agencies have access to which datasets is stuff that the, the public doesn't always pay attention to, but are quite important. You know, I think, you know, a lot of the the geopolitical battles over access to like rare earth minerals and, and advanced computer chips are going to end up shaping a lot of the, the rest of the 21st century and that's , that's stuff that's paid attention to in kind of a a very specific niche but isn't always breaking through to the ordinary person. I mean that's, I guess what comes to mind immediately, but you know there's there's all sorts of things out there worth investigating, and you know I think sometimes, especially in an era where attention is so fragmented and where it's, it's so hard to to maintain public attention on any given topic for any length of time, like some of the, the big longer-term trends in tech and national security are kind of going under the radar, even as they get covered. 

I mean, I don't think they're like a tremendous part of our, our public conversation. I think that's true of a lot of different areas, including you know energy and transportation and technology as well. So you know, often they're, there's kind of two parallel conversations. There's the conversation among industry insiders and policy journalists and the Hill, and then there's the broader conversation that the public's having and the stuff they're paying attention to. And they're not always the same. And I think the role of journalists is to kind of often, to highlight undercovered things to serve an educational function, to shine a light on things that are a little bit boring and a little bit dry or a little bit esoteric, but are going to have these big consequences. And so that's what I've tried to do in my career, and I'm going to keep doing it no matter where I work in journalism.

Madison Farabaugh: I think that's where the human perspective is so, so valuable. You can only have AI do so much research, but then, as you mentioned, perhaps some of those stories that might not initially have as much human interest, that's where the investigations or just all of that background research to get the actual experience that people are having with whatever topic it is. I think that's something that AI can't, can't yet replace. So I think that's where roles like yours are super important.

Christine Blake: Yeah, Byron, we have a couple listener questions before we wrap up with you. But you mentioned your book earlier. We'd love to hear more about that, Means of Control. What inspired you to write this book? Do you have any other books in the works?

Byron Tau: Yeah. So I mean, that book came out of a series of stories I did for the Wall Street Journal, you know, at the kind of two years into this project, which was essentially about how governments buy up lots of data on the population and are using it for law enforcement or national security most of the time without any sort of a warrant or some sort of oversight or court process, and how that kind of thing was, you know, kind of upending our traditional understanding of limited government and civil liberties. And so, kind of two years into writing these stories for the journal, you know, it just occurred to me that I had a lot of colorful details and characters and people in my notebook that never kind of shined through a daily newspaper story, and so, you know, I thought I had a lot more to say on it. 

So I, you know, I went looking for a book agent and ultimately put together a book proposal and pulled it together, and you know, took a couple months off my job at The Journal to write it. I lived in the woods of upstate New York, and, and just basically got up every morning, brewed my coffee, ate my breakfast, worked on it for you know six or seven hours. I would often, you know, go for an afternoon walk or a hike in the Adirondacks, and then come back and cook dinner and work on it some more. And so I did that for months, and at the end of it, I had a book, and yeah, it came out in February of 2024. Still available anywhere books are sold, and yeah, as you said, it's called Means of Control.

Christine Blake: Yeah, I love that.

Madison Farabaugh: That's every writer's dream, I'm pretty sure, unless you don't like the outdoors that much. But to me, that sounds wonderful. It

Byron Tau: It was. It was really. It was really wonderful. It was. It was lucky. I, you know, kind of. I didn't have any real family responsibilities or, you know, other, other reporters and writers who, who try to do things like that often run into the reality of their small children or their families. But at the time, I was. I was, I was just, I was running solo, and it was a great experience.

Christine Blake: Yeah, sounds like it. 

Madison Farabaugh: That's awesome. Thank you for sharing. I think our last listener question for today is: What are you looking forward to most as you head into this next chapter of your career?

Byron Tau: Yeah, well, I mean, I think what's exciting about working for ProPublica is that they really do give you the time and the space to go deep on things, and often are looking for kind of human stories, or you know, to go beyond just the fact that something is happening, and to look for the harm and to find a character or a person to illustrate it. 

And at the end of the day, there are just very few outlets that have the time and the inclination and the resources to do journalism like that, and so that's what I'm the most excited about. But it's in many ways a continuation of work I've done at other great media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, and I'm very excited to start.

Christine Blake: Yeah, well, we are excited to continue following your journey as well. So, thank you very much for your time today, coming on the podcast. We learned a lot and really enjoyed speaking with you.

Byron Tau: Thanks so much for having me.

Christine Blake: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Inside the Media Minds 

To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please visit us at W2Comm.com.

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