People, companies, and government agencies don’t always return your phone calls. To investigate secretive subjects, reporters can make creative use of documents that are out in the open. Lawsuits, Instagram posts, tax records, and disciplinary records—to name just a few publicly available sources of information—can reveal a lot about who’s in trouble and who’s making money off whom. With persistence and discernment, journalists can piece together all kinds of stories from the public...
