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We’re living in a very confusing information ecosystem right now, where it can be hard to figure out what’s really going on, what sources to trust, and what hidden motivations are compelling people to say what they say. I notice this especially on TikTok and Instagram, where everyone projects the confidence of an expert, no matter their qualifications. And yet, most of us, letting our feeds numbingly wash over us in our beds at night, end up taking most of what they say at face value. This, we probably know, is not good — for us or for any concept of the truth. But what’s the alternative?

Last week, we talked about where good ideas come from. This week, we’re focusing on the reporting process with features writer Lila Shapiro and staff writer James D. Walsh, who are behind some of our most eye-popping, harrowing investigations of the last few years. Lila published a deep account of the sexual-abuse allegations against fantasy author Neil Gaiman, but she’s also covered controversies in the book world, a state legislative battle over trans rights, and the fall of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. James co-authored two now-canonical investigations, “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence” and “Everyone Knew About the A-Team,” and has written about Walgreens shoplifting rings, Adderall shortages, and a murder-for-hire plot. He's also uncovered a web of corruption in an upstate New York town and the woman who ended up exposing it. 

Our conversation touched on both the brass tacks of reporting — we all get to learn together how to file a FOIL request and not to trust what you read in a court filing — but also how they check their own blindspots, ask probing questions, and get to the truth of something (or as close as anyone ever can). Good lessons for all of us, even if we’re just trying to get to the bottom of our own life’s little mysteries.  —Genevieve Smith, executive editor, New York Magazine

Genevieve: Lila, you just had a blockbuster story publish on Neil Gaiman. Maybe we can start by talking a bit about how that story came to be.

Lila: So in July, 2025, this podcast came out, which contained accusations about Neil Gaiman, a fantasy writer, who, as it happens, was one of my favorite writers in high school. So I've followed his career for a really long time. I listened to the podcast the day after it came out, and I immediately felt that there was more to the story than they had even gotten. His public reputation for so many decades had been not just as a progressive icon who, among other things, served as a global Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations in support of refugee children, but also really as an outspoken feminist, who would post often in support of Me Too and believing women and all of this stuff. There was such a jarring and substantial difference between the story that he told about himself to the public and what these accusations seem to be telling about him. And that apparent discrepancy had not yet been accounted for. The podcast wasn't set up to be a serious investigative outlet, and they sort of sped through stuff that didn't really make a lot of sense, and Scarlet — one of their main subjects, who became the main subject of my piece — didn't make a lot of sense as a person. They didn't tell her backstory. She just seemed very confused and confusing. And so a lot of people walked away thinking this is a really murky, complicated situation. 

Genevieve: So you had this hunch that there was still a lot we didn’t understand, and we at the magazine went ahead and assigned the story off that hunch. What did you do next?

Lila: I have reported in the publishing world quite a bit. So I have really good sourcing there.  So I called a couple of sources who knew him to get the word out that I was working on the story. They started connecting me with people right away, and I pretty quickly came across maybe a dozen people who had disturbing stories about him. Just weird, bad stuff.  “Nothing so terrible has ever happened to me, but this and that from rumors I've heard …”  

The other thing I did when I was reporting Gaiman, while I was doing organic reach through contact to contact, I was also putting together a spreadsheet of names that I pulled by going systematically through his work and looking at who he’s thanking in the acknowledgements of his first five books, who are all the people who worked on them. Because he's such a prolific blogger on the minutiae of his day-to-day life, who he hangs out with and where he goes, I was also reading through his blogs and coming up with more names, and then people I spoke to would add more names, and I was just reaching out to every single person who worked with him over time. The list grew over six months to about 300 names. A lot of people didn't respond, but I did totally randomly find other women who’d had upsetting sexual encounters with him. There was a fan convention that I had heard something really bad happened at, and I reached out to every woman he blogged about that weekend that he says he came into contact with, and one of them got back to me and was like, how did you know what happened?

Genevieve: And the truth is it wasn’t intuition. It was because you contacted 300 people. James, you've also done some massive digging operations. Your story with Bridget Read on the Alexander brothers, for instance — two hot shot real-estate brokers and their brother, all accused of many counts of sexual assault.

James: You could just make a list of high-school, college, and real-estate contacts and just start going down all of them. With both that story and the investigation into Larry Ray, it almost felt like, everybody knows why you're calling. 

Genevieve: They've been waiting for the phone call.

James: I think it's almost harder to report the smaller blast-radius stories.

Genevieve: When there are only three people who know what happened and if they don't talk to you then you got nothing.

James: Also starting off, I often rely on court documents, and there's only so much in those court documents and police records. It's just such a jumping-off point, but the first thing I do is file a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request, because it always takes so long. You don't really get a lot of information out of those police records, but you get phone numbers and people's names, and that has time and time and again proved essential.

Genevieve: Can you tell us how to FOIL?  Because this is something that I think everybody should know how to do.

James: I think the first rule of FOIL-ing is getting past the idea that there is a way to FOIL, right? It's literally just like Googling “form FOIL,” filling it in, and seeing what comes back. My favorite thing in the world to do is FOIL-ing addresses because then it's not so narrow. You could FOIL somebody's name, but if you FOIL an address, you can get everything that's happened in this house or at this business. Doing that to police departments has really been great. A cop told me to do that once and it was so helpful.

The first time I did it was this death-at-sea story I did a long time ago. The tricky part was that I was looking for information going back to when the person I was writing about was underage. So I couldn't just FOIL his name because the police department wouldn't have been able to release the documents. So I FOIL’d the home address and they just had to redact his name and then I got back everything that actually happened in the house, and so now I always say I want police reports connected to this address, all calls made to this address, any 911 calls made to this address. Sometimes you get 30 or 40 pages of calls and it's like — jackpot.

Genevieve: Do you have any tricks for getting people to talk?

Lila: I do think it's such a personal thing. I'm curious to hear what you do, James. Sometimes my husband will be like, "My God, you're so intimate with these people,” because my approach is sort of to convey that if we just ran into each other at a bar or whatever, you would want to tell me this. I want to listen, you want to share, let's just do it. I'm here for whatever it is that you want to say, and I'm not going to judge you. I think a lot of people really are desperate to talk about the stuff in their life to someone who's nonjudgmental and interested.

Genevieve: James, what’s your approach?

James: I just try to put my best foot forward and be ready for people to hang up on me, which happens every other day. The best feeling in the world is knowing some element of this person's story, getting them to talk, and then they tell you something new. I don't understand gambling. It does not do anything for me, but I imagine that's what it feels like — the dopamine. The number of times people have said “I am your Deep Throat” — and half the time, they don’t really have the story they think they have, but the other half of the time they have something really good to tell.

Genevieve: Is there a particular story you can think of where a source really came through?

James: The Alexander brothers story, it was somebody from Kent Security, the family's company, and he told me a story about a potential payoff of a victim at a Denny's in Miami when the brothers were in high school, and suddenly we understood the connection between the family and these assaults and how they were protected even in high school when everybody knew what they were doing, as we say in the headline.

Genevieve: In working with reporters for a long time now, I have noticed a common error is being so eager to show in your interview how smart you are and how much you've prepared that then when you go back and look at the transcript, it's just you talking and you’ve completely failed to get them to tell their story. 

James: My dad worked at ESPN for years and he introduced me to this guy John Sawatsky, who is like an interview guru. It can be sort of corny, but I took a class with him, and he had these rules, and one of them was just basically not showing how much you know in an interview. Ask these open-ended questions, keep it short and lean, and don’t lead people to the answers. No saying, “Aren't you feeling this way?”

Lila: I think 90 percent of the time I would agree with letting them unfold the story in their own way. I give minimal prompting beyond, "Tell me what happened and what next or what were you thinking then?" But then I do find that especially with subjects I'm spending a lot of time interviewing, some of the most crucial things I've got come from me sort of bringing to them my own theory of what’s going on and seeing how they respond. With Joss Whedon, we'd been talking a lot about his father, who was a TV writer. His father was very masculine. We’d been having this conversation about his father for days and about the Hollywood culture he was steeped in, and I kept trying to get him to talk about the affairs on Buffy and he kept saying, “I'm never going to talk about that.” I was finally like, “I can really imagine growing up in the home that you grew up in and entering Hollywood at the time you entered it, that it might have been not just okay for a director to sleep with his actresses, but almost like there was something wrong with you if you didn’t.” And he was like, "That's right. I felt if I didn't do it, I would always regret it." I don’t think he would have ever said that if I hadn’t shown him that I sort of understood who he was.

Genevieve: It reminds me of what a therapist might do. You are saying back to him in your own words what you're hearing him say. And that makes them feel seen, which encourages him to reveal more.

Lila: Yes. 100 percent. 

Genevieve: I'm curious about your relationship to certainty, because oftentimes you're finding out information or hearing a story and it's really believable, and then you hear something else that contradicts it and it's also really believable, and then you hear something else. I'm wondering how you gut check or how you correct for your own blindspots and overconfidence.

Lila: In the Neil Gaiman reporting, I encountered a lot of people around him who were very skeptical of the accusations and just told me straight out they knew it wasn't true. And I'd ask them, “How do you know that?” And it would literally just be like, “Because I asked him and that's what he said.” Compare that to some of the women who kept contemporaneous diaries that are dated and they wrote them the night the thing happened in great detail, and in some cases I actually did have access to psychiatric evaluations that showed trauma and depression, but not signs of delusion. Add to that, that many of these women, who didn’t know each other, had had similar experiences, which meant the behavior they were describing was part of a pattern. I am always trying to evaluate each thing that I’m being told and asking myself, Why is this person saying this? What would it mean if this were true or not true? 

James: I'm very thankful for my time as a fact-checker. I can’t help questioning every single angle of everything. It's like what I was talking about earlier with court documents being only a good starting place, because even court documents have mistakes and lawyers certainly have their own narratives. So if we were all to just sit and write stories based on those court documents, it'd be a disaster. That Justin Baldoni story in the Times really illustrates the way a story can look manipulated and a popular narrative can take hold and we find out later that maybe an anecdote isn’t true, or the framing is unfair.

Genevieve: I remember this dynamic playing out when you worked on the Larry Ray story. Ray had extracted what turned out to be false confessions from some of the students under his influence, but of course you didn’t know that at the beginning. And you had a real challenge of figuring out which stories to believe.

James: Yeah, it took me a really long time to get past the poisoning thing. I don't know if you remember, there was this whole theme of poisoning in the Larry Ray story, and it really took me a long time to finally feel comfortable being like, "Okay, there never was poisoning." I think right up until the deadline, we were calling people to make sure that there was no poisoning. 

Genevieve: Do you remember what convinced you in the end? 

James: One of Larry's tactics central to his coercive control of these students was convincing them that they had wronged him. And there was a wide spectrum of what he accused them of. It was a gradient that went from dinging one of his pots or pans to trying to poison him. And the poisoning accusation is what was all over the internet, in large part because it was on this website that Larry created that contained a supposed confession from one of the students: “I had poisoned Larry Ray and his family in order to sabotage him.” When Ezra Marcus, my co-author on the story, first learned about Larry, it was after he had heard from classmates at Sarah Lawrence that there were some instances of people getting sick around that time. So that was just something that was always floating around, and even when I met Larry in person, the first thing he did in the lobby of our office building was open his mouth to show me the damage the poison had done to his teeth, and I don't have the ability to assess that, of course. We called so many people to get some record of the poisoning and I asked him over and over and over again to supply some kind of proof of poisoning, some kind of medical records that substantiated it, and we never got anything. Even then, I don't think we ever actually explicitly say he was not poisoned in the story, but we leave it to the reader to figure it out.

Genevieve: Are there some of these reporting skills that we can all be using to evaluate information a bit better, particularly, maybe online information?

Lila: I think it's good to have a rigorous perspective on trying to understand and evaluate the news you're coming across, and by that I mean looking at multiple sources when possible, also evaluating the quality of the source, meaning is it a paper of record? Is this a publication that has fact-checkers on staff?

Genevieve: Right. Think who's doing the talking and what do they have to gain? What is their angle on it? Who is paying them? What’s their motivation?

James: I also think that it's just good to remember that you can find out so much more by closing the computer and showing up. Even take court documents, so many people stop at searching the state website for documents, but that’s only part of a comprehensive search. There’s a lot of stuff —

Genevieve: Where you have to go and you have to talk to the clerk, who's going to go down into some subbasement and get you the file. Yes.

James: I also still love a doorknock. It still makes me so nervous. I think part of why I like it is because I hate it so much. 

Lila: Yes, if something's going on at your kid's school, for instance, there’s a lot of value in not just giving in to the rumor mill, but figuring out, who are all the different people on the board here? Can I go to a board meeting and actually hear the words coming out of their mouth? It's hard to evaluate things just based on what you see on the internet. There's so much more opportunity to get a sense of someone if you are speaking with them on the phone or talking to them in person. 

Genevieve: Is there a moment from your own reporting where something happened when you went in person that you could have never gotten without physically being there? 

James: Certainly times when I thought there was no way somebody was going to talk to me. Back again to that death-at-sea story, there was somebody who knew his family and his house happened to be on the way to somewhere I was going. So I stopped and we sat on his porch and talked for three hours, and this is a guy who's not on the internet. I had an address and didn't know anything else about him. Another time, when I was reporting on these drugstore-robbery rings, I showed up at the pawn shop that the ringleader owned; he was a fence, buying and reselling all the stolen goods. I thought going in, There’s no way this guy is actually going to be there, and then I showed up, and one, I saw what a crazy back-alley sort of pawn shop it was, and two, his father was there, and his father just talked to me forever and actually really helped me understand the pawn-shop owner. He also basically admitted to me that he believed his son was guilty. When the dad's saying that about the son, it's insightful.

Genevieve: Another thing I’ve noticed is a good reporter seems to have an insatiable curiosity. My job as an editor is often to ask a lot of questions of the draft, and a great reporter will often say, “Oh, I have that in my notes, I just had too much information to try to get in the story.” Whereas a not-so-good reporter will not have thought to ask the question. Is that curiosity something you have had to cultivate? Is there something that drives you to keep asking questions?

James: I can say personally I only feel comfortable writing when I feel like I know so much more than what I'm going to be writing. Part of that involves getting through the awkwardness of asking. I'm not as outgoing as a lot of my fellow reporters, and so it's something that I have to really work at, but you just have to break through the uncomfortable silences. I've been good at forgiving myself for really dumb questions. Not like the dumb questions that are helpful and lead to insight, but dumb questions where I'm going to throw this out there so that I can think of the question I should be asking and really just extend this conversation. And the more I extend this conversation, the better. With this story I did on a huge corruption scandal in upstate New York, eventually a lawyer for the subject was like, "We need to end this conversation now" because it was just going on and on and on. 

Lila: Yeah, I feel like often I will just go on and on and on and on and on. I mean, I often think, How is it over? It's because my editor, Gazelle Emami, tells me, “You must stop reporting.” There's not another thing in me that’s compelling me to wrap this up. I was reporting up until the story shipped. There wasn't an end.

Genevieve: And what do you think is compelling you to want to get to the bottom of this so badly? 

Lila: I mean, I think for me personally, it comes from a very personal place. As a child, I always had a feeling that there was stuff going on that wasn't being said out loud that was confusing and strange that I had a desire to understand. I remember I'd be home alone as an 11-year-old and just going through all the drawers, trying to figure out, what is going on here? Who are these people? What secrets are they keeping? I'm interested in the truth, and if anyone wants to tell me the truth, I want to hear it. 

We’ll see you next week for part three: Getting Personal. Here’s your syllabus:

Suggested Reading:
➽ "The Lure of Divorce," by Emily Gould
➽ "Adorable Little Detonators," by Allison P. Davis
➽"What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained," by Mary H.K. Choi 

Extra Credit:
➽ "Tinder Hearted," by Allison P. Davis
➽ "How Much My Novel Cost Me," by Emily Gould
➽ "The Divorce Tapes," by Beth Raymer

If you'd like to revisit previous editions, you can do so below:
• Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

And please send us any questions, comments, or feedback at newyorknightschool@nymag.com.