Alleen Brown’s 2024 Eco-Roundup included a kind review of Desk Set Research. As you see below, we worked together on the research and factchecking team at The Intercept and she is a good friend.
“I do not call what I do ‘searching,’ I call it ‘finding.’”
Legendary news researcher Margot Williams just launched a newsletter, Desk Set Research, that you must follow if you are a journalist, documentarian, or researcher of any kind. Margot and I were on The Intercept’s research team together, back when I was a fact-checker, and she taught me much of what I know about investigative reporting. She’s been doing this work for more than 40 years and has provided training sessions to hundreds of journalists. In her first posts, she’s already provided loads of tips and links for finding people, digging up info on corporations, and using publicly available databases. In coming days, she promises to share the tools she used to complete her latest data project, which analyzes court records to challenge the idea that federal judges have been hard on January 6 defendants.
Desk Set Research is named after a 1957 Katherine Hepburn movie about “the computerization of a television network’s research department.” Margot makes it clear that she’s writing this in a moment where, as she puts it, “’computerization’ in the guise of Artificial Intelligence is seen as a threat to our profession, and targets us for layoffs.” In fact, me and Margot’s research department at The Intercept was the first target of several rounds of layoffs that eventually led to me leaving. Margot seeks to start a conversation about the value of newsroom researchers, in an era of shrinking newsrooms.