---

name: reporting-plan
description: "Build a reporting plan that locks the claim, sequences sources, and stress-tests the narrative before you invest months chasing a story that doesn't hold."

/reporting-plan

Investigative journalism fails in two modes: reporters who chase shadows for six months and surface nothing publishable, and reporters who publish without enough confirmation and end up with corrections, retractions, and lawsuits. Both failure modes have the same root cause — the story wasn't stress-tested before the reporting started. A reporting plan forces you to state the claim precisely, decide what would prove or disprove it, map who you need and in what order, anticipate the subject's rebuttal, and know exactly when you have enough to publish. The plan doesn't constrain the story — it separates the investigations worth your time from the ones that feel important but collapse under scrutiny.

The Core Claim

• State the claim you're reporting as a single declarative sentence: "Company X misrepresented safety test results to federal regulators in 2021 and 2022."
• Not a question, not a theme — a claim. If you can't state it as a claim, you have a topic, not a story.
• What would prove this claim true? List the specific evidence: documents, records, first-hand accounts, expert confirmation of technical facts. Each item must be named specifically — "proof that the safety data was altered" is not specific. "The unaltered version of the safety report from the company's internal database, compared to the version submitted to the FDA" is.
• What would prove it false? Name the single piece of evidence that, if it exists, kills the story. If you can't name it, you're not actually testing the claim — you're building a case for a conclusion you've already reached.

Sources Ranked by Importance and Accessibility

• List every source who could move this story forward. For each: what do they know that you need, are they likely to talk (and why), and what would it take to reach them?
• Rank by importance × accessibility. Start with sources who are both important and accessible — they build the foundation and often provide leads to the harder sources.
• Identify the must-have source: the person without whom the story cannot be published. This is your reporting priority. Everything else serves getting to them.
• For sources who are unlikely to talk: what secondary evidence would substitute for their on-record account?

On-Record vs Background Strategy

• Which sources do you need on-record, and why? The standard is: the more central a claim is to the story, the higher the standard for attribution.
• Which sources can provide background that you then verify independently? Background sourcing is legitimate — but the claims it surfaces must be verified through other means before publication.
• What's your policy for documents? Leaked documents authenticate the claim if the provenance is clear and the document is unaltered. Name how you'll verify each document's authenticity.
• Note: if your entire story rests on a single anonymous source, you don't have a story yet — you have a lead. Say so.

The Rebuttal Anticipated from the Subject

• Write the three strongest things the subject of your investigation is likely to say in response when you contact them for comment.
• For each rebuttal: do you have evidence that directly addresses it, a credible third-party expert who can evaluate it, or an honest acknowledgment that the point has merit?
• The rebuttal section is where bad stories fall apart and strong stories prove themselves. If you can't answer the subject's likely best arguments, the story isn't ready.

Legal and Ethical Risks

• Defamation: is every factual claim in your story supported by evidence you can produce? For claims about private individuals, the bar is higher than for public figures.
• Source protection: have you told sources what their exposure is? Have you taken technical precautions for sensitive communications?
• Document provenance: are any of your documents potentially stolen, hacked, or obtained through methods that could expose you or your organization?
• Name each risk and the mitigation. "Get it reviewed by our legal team" is not a mitigation — it's a plan to identify risks after you're already committed.

The Publication Threshold

• State the specific evidence threshold at which you have enough to publish: "We can publish when we have two independent sources with first-hand knowledge of the falsification, plus at least one supporting document."
• Name the evidence you have now vs the evidence you still need. The gap is your remaining reporting work.
• If you reach the threshold but the story has changed direction — because the evidence points somewhere unexpected — say so explicitly. Good reporters follow evidence, not pre-filed stories.

Rules

1. The claim is a declarative sentence, not a question or a theme.
2. You must name what would disprove the claim before you start reporting.
3. Every central factual claim needs a source who can be identified and an evidence path that doesn't rely solely on them.
4. The rebuttal section is mandatory. If you haven't tested your story against the subject's best arguments, it isn't ready.
5. The publication threshold is set in advance, not decided after the pressure to publish arrives.
6. Legal and ethical risks are named with mitigations — not deferred until production.

The output is a working document your editor can approve before you commit significant resources — a plan that shows the claim is credible, the sourcing is achievable, and the story will hold under scrutiny.