Investigative Journalism Today: New Mexico’s Scott Armstrong

“Rather than going for the stories that are most easily obtained, which are also often the ones people want to leak, you ask yourself what is going to be permanent.”

Scott Armstrong has a career in journalism that spans more than 40 years. Much of his career has surrounded achieving public access to secret government information. As a reporter at The Washington Post, Mr. Armstrong found himself on the Senate’s Watergate Committee. In 1985, he founded the National Security Archive as a database for government information gathered through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Nowadays, Armstrong follows local news through Searchlight New Mexico, an independent, non-profit news organization dedicated to investigative and data-driven journalism. On June 15th, he spoke with Merion West to discuss the difference between national and local reporting, current government relationships with journalists, and the state of investigative journalism.

At the beginning of your career, you reported for The Washington Post, a national publication, and now you follow local news through Searchlight New Mexico. What is the difference in your experience between local and national investigative reporting?

On a local basis, you are not faced with the same issues of secrecy, particularly national security material. What you’re looking for are things affecting the largest segment of your population. There are parallels, but you have to get an investigative reporting frame of mind. What are the empirical questions that are not otherwise being addressed by the daily press—or anomalies and mysteries that you need an answer for? It’s the same process, but you’re doing it on a much more finite level.