Investigative reporter James Neff to speak about opportunities for journalists in archives
Investigative reporter and author James Neff spent years re-investigating the Sam Sheppard murder case for his book, The Wrong Man, ultimately concluding that Sheppard did not kill his wife Marilyn in 1954. That reporting was rooted in historical archives.
Neff will give a talk in the Franklin Hall commons at 6 p.m. Thursday as part of the Media School Speaker Series. The talk, “Unleashing the Hidden Power of Archives,” is also the keynote speech for the Roy W. Howard Archive Symposium. It will focus on the value of archives and public records through the lens of some of Neff’s most significant journalistic work.
“I’m going to talk about the importance of archives to power journalism,” he said. “Whether it’s historical nonfiction narratives like my book on Robert F. Kennedy, Vendetta, to using government records to inform and give context and insight to breaking news events.”
Archival storytelling has played a key role in Neff’s works as an author, including in his books The Wrong Man and Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa, which chronicles the epic grudge match of the 50s/60s between Robert F. Kennedy and James Hoffa.
The implementation of archival materials into reporting and storytelling techniques is revolutionizing nonfiction storytelling, Neff said.
“More and more, archival materials are easily retrievable more quickly, and more thoroughly today than in decades past,” he explained. “It’s changing our ideas not just about how to write history, but about how to do investigative reporting as well.”
In fact, the Roy W. Howard Archive Symposium is celebrating the newly accessible Roy W. Howard Archive, a 14,000-piece collection The Media School recently digitized.
Neff’s talk will explore how archival materials can be used both in daily reporting and breaking news and in more elaborate narratives like some of his own work. They provide concrete proof of actions, he said, a means to hold public figures accountable, to fact-check and to evaluate rhetoric.
Archival materials played an especially significant role in Neff’s reportorial work for The Wrong Man, where among other sources he consulted the Library of Congress’ Roy Wilson Howard papers (a separate Howard collection from The Media School’s Roy W. Howard Archive).
“I found revelatory and important information from the Roy Howard papers about one of the key figures in the book, a fellow editor at the Cleveland Press whose misconduct is a part of the story,” Neff said.
He also used archives to locate police reports and grand jury transcripts from the case that had not been available previously.
Neff has worked at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Seattle Times, and has served as a board member and president of Investigative Reporters and Editors.
After joining the Seattle Times in 2001 as the investigations editor, Neff directed and edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning stories and five finalists.
He became a Pulitzer finalist himself in 2003 for the 18-part investigative reporting series, “The Terrorist Within,” for which Neff was lead writer. The story, which explores the roots of terror and the tribulations of combating it, follows an Algerian boy’s evolution into a terrorist.
In 2017, Neff served as chair juror in the selection of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
His talk, he hopes, will draw from his years of experience and distill it into an important lesson about archival storytelling.
For budding journalists especially, Neff said he hopes his talk can offer expertise, wisdom and insight to broaden their repertoire of reporting skills.
But most of all, he wants it to be entertaining.