Last year, I led a team of ProPublica journalists as they exposed the deaths of five women who couldn’t get lifesaving care under state abortion bans.

The findings of their series, Life of the Mother, were inescapable amid a presidential election and as voters contemplated state ballot initiatives to expand abortion access; they rippled through court hearings, nationwide protests and proposed legislation, and in at least one state, prompted reforms that now have the momentum to become law. (The series recently won The Batten Medal from the 2025 Poynter Journalism Prizes.)

Alexandra Zayas speaks at a recent ProPublica investigative editor training. She teaches Poynter’s Will Work for Impact course. (Hatnim Lee/ProPublica)

While impact of that magnitude is rare — the kind a journalist might see once in her career, if she’s lucky — the reporting strategies that led to it are tried and true. 

They shouldn’t be a secret; the world needs far more journalists doing accountability work. Starting May 8, I’ll demystify the investigative reporting process in a five-week, online group seminar called Will Work for Impact; slots remain open, and a second session is offered in October. 

Here are some things I’ve seen reporters do in almost every successful investigation.

Look for the harm

Nothing reveals the cracks within a system like studying the preventable harm they cause. Many investigations start this way, with a reporter stumbling upon an incident they come to learn is the tip of the iceberg. ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana set herself up for that a-ha moment by anticipating the harm that would come from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. 

As doctors warned that women would die, Surana sourced up with front-line providers and medical experts on maternal mortality review committees; she also familiarized herself with public death data in states that passed bans. It was in one Georgia trove, in 2023, that she first spotted the name Amber Thurman. The record noted questionable causes of death — “sepsis” and “retained products of conception” — and mentioned an at-home abortion. Surana’s further reporting revealed that Thurman, suffering from sepsis, waited 20 hours for doctors to clear her uterus of infected fetal tissue. They discussed, but delayed, a procedure restricted under the state’s ban.

Get the records

There’s a difference between knowing how important records are and actually getting them. Any number of obstacles stand in the way: Some aren’t publicly available. Others are illegally withheld, or painstaking to gather, or weirdly formatted, or so obscure, reporters don’t know they exist.

Senior editor Ziva Branstetter led a ProPublica effort to request death records from over a dozen states, going county by county in Texas. When a private contractor there said it didn’t have to comply with public records law, reporter Cassandra Jaramillo successfully argued it did because it accepted more than $1 million in county funding. The reporters found three more women in these Texas troves.

Getting hospital records was key to understanding what happened to them, but those were only available to the families of the deceased. When one man feared the repercussions of requesting them from the hospital where his wife died, reporter Lizzie Presser discovered a workaround: Medical examiners had access to these files, too. When officials pushed back that they didn’t have to provide the hospital records used to conduct the autopsy, Jaramillo presented the husband’s signed release form indicating the records should be made available.

Persist on people

Nothing powers investigative reporting like human sources. They point you to the right documents and help you understand them, serve as critical gut checks for your findings and build scenes for your stories. Those hardest to get are often the most valuable, requiring reporters endure amid efforts that sometimes feel like longshots. 

It took many visits, phone calls and letters for Thurman’s family to decide to speak with Surana. After nearly a year of silence, they reached out to her while she was out on maternity leave. So Surana boarded a flight to Atlanta, newborn and husband in tow. Once there, they still weren’t sure they wanted to talk to a reporter.

“When ProPublica came to my home, I pushed them away. ‘No. No. No.’ But Kavitha — she was persistent,” Shanette Williams later told Oprah. “She said it was something that you needed to know; ‘you have to hear me: Women around the world, people around the world, need to know that this was preventable.’” 

I’ll share more about these and other practices that journalists can use to do meaningful investigative work as part of the Will Work for Impact course. Please join us.