Investigative journalism differs from news reporting because it looks beyond the incident. It also focuses on causes, consequences, and, if possible, solutions. It does not cover a single event, but a series of events. It tells a story. A story as Aristotle intended it.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a bright student of Plato who became the most influential philosopher in Western history. He tried to discover logic or structure in everything around him. In his Poetics, he examined the tragedies (plays) of his time. (In addition to tragedies, comedies were also performed in antiquity, but Aristotle’s notes on comedy have been lost. This is not a great loss for us, since journalistic stories resemble tragedies more: a tragedy is a story about an influential person who performs a decisive action.)
Aristotle first pointed to the importance of chronology in a story. A story, he said, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. By this he meant that a story should concern the past, the present, and the future. For, he argued, audiences (readers) understand current events better when they also learn about their origins and their future consequences.
If you created an imaginary timeline at the start of your investigation, you can now bring it out again. Your timeline contains all the building blocks you need for a good story — according to Aristotle.
For most investigative stories — think of exposés, reconstructions (of one-off events), process stories (events that repeat, such as the production and installation of toxic plastic water pipes), stories about failed policies, and crime stories — you can do very well with a chronological structure, a timeline. But every now and then you will encounter a subject that does not easily or comfortably fit into a chronological frame. If you feel that a timeline offers no relief, try a “spatial” structure instead.
A story with a spatial structure literally takes readers from one location to another. At each location, a different aspect (feature or example) of the problem is addressed. The coherence between events is now determined not by time (cause and effect) but by a theme. That is why this is sometimes called a “thematic structure.”
Consider this example from students at a university where we taught. They wanted to show that the buildings in which they had their classes were unhealthy and unsafe. Their first hypothesis, “Management endangers students’ health,” prompted our question: how? The students provided a whole series of examples, from windows that no longer open and blocked exits to loose carpeting and mold on the walls. They then chose to describe the problem by highlighting its various aspects one by one. Each deficiency in the buildings became a little story in itself, with its own history, perpetrator, and victims. In their story they metaphorically “traveled” across their campus.
The cherry on top of the spatial structure is when you also introduce a new protagonist (“perpetrator”) to readers at each new location. A splendid example is NRC’s 2017 story “Het mestcomplot” (“The Manure Conspiracy”), which won several prizes. It puts one leading actor (fraudster) after another in the spotlight. By the end of the “journey,” the reader has met all the small fraudulent steps that together form one gigantic fraud.
Both structures — chronological and spatial — are classic. They can both be traced back to Homer (800–ca. 750 BCE). Two major poems are attributed to Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first is a chronological account of the last days of the Trojan War and follows the Greek hero Achilles closely. The second is an account of a journey: the Odyssey follows Odysseus, another Greek hero, as he sails back across the Mediterranean to his home on Ithaca after the aforementioned war, being tested along the way by gods and monsters. Odysseus’s adventures are held together not by time but by a theme, in this case loyalty. The order in which he experiences them is of secondary importance.
You are more likely to encounter the spatial structure in investigative features than in exposés or reconstructions. And more in film and video than in print. The master of the genre is Michael Moore. Most of his films have a spatial structure. He takes the viewer on an adventure. Visual media are more likely to opt for a spatial montage because it is easier to depict space (locations) than time.
If you choose a spatial structure for your story, you can no longer really speak of a “timeline.” “Storyline” or “scenario” are better terms. What you call it is not important; what matters is that at the start of your investigation you make a list of the key events in your story — events that you know or suspect have taken place. They form a coat rack on which you can later hang your research findings.
In fact, what investigative journalists do resembles persuasion more than storytelling. We do not just write a story, we write an argument. We do not see it merely as our task to press readers’ noses to the facts, as news reporters do; we also give the facts weight. We offer not only information but also a judgment.
That facts do not speak for themselves was already known to the ancient Greeks. In antiquity too there were false prophets, snake-oil sellers, and populists who were believed by some citizens but distrusted by others. There were skeptics who asked how the orator reached a conclusion, which interest was being defended, and whether the orator believed their own story. They wanted not only wisdom but also sincerity and passion from the speaker. They wanted to be persuaded. Mere facts were rarely enough.
Here Aristotle appears once more. He left us not only chronology but also rhetoric: the art of persuasion. To win over your audience, Aristotle argued, you need to pay attention not only to the facts but also to the structure and presentation of your argument.
It is interesting to see the backdrop against which rhetoric came into fashion: at the same time as the emergence of democracy. After the people of Athens expelled the tyrant Hippias in 510 BCE, the next leader, Cleisthenes, overhauled the system of government. He introduced equal rights for all male citizens (women did not count yet) and instituted a democracy. That drew a firm line through cronyism, bribery, and violence as means to get your way; from then on, if you wanted something done, you had to persuade others with words.
If you wanted to work on your presentation in those days, you could turn to Sophists: itinerant teachers who, among other things, taught rhetoric. The philosopher Plato (ca. 427–347 BCE) did not think much of these “dealers in false knowledge” and “athletes in a sport of words,” as he called them. He suspected the Sophists of being more interested in winning arguments than in seeking truth. Plato’s younger student Aristotle was more interested in the new fashion. Certainly, he said, there is a risk that fine words and emotional arguments cast a fog around the truth (does this sound familiar?), but if applied purely, rhetoric can also be an instrument for discovering truth. Aristotle was the first to develop a theory of rhetoric.
We also find roots of narrative journalism in the same Greek antiquity, think of Homer. But back then stories belonged in poems and amphitheaters. In places where it really mattered — the popular assembly (Ekklesia) and the courts — stories were not told: people orated, argued, reasoned, and made cases. The Greek word for “orator” is “rhetor” — hence: “rhetoric.”