Beat reporting, public records and teamwork: The story behind Annenberg Media’s investigation into a professor’s death

Two USC journalists share their reporting experience.

By Cole Sullivan and Sam Bergum

Editor’s note: Annenberg Media recently published a months-long investigation into the circumstances leading up to the stabbing death of USC Professor Bosco Tjan in December 2016. Cole Sullivan and Sam Bergum have been covering the case since the night of the stabbing. Sam is the executive producer of Annenberg’s live nightly newscast, Annenberg TV News, where Cole is an on-air reporter. Their reporting uncovered possible warning signs — including a written “Tarasoff warning” sent by the killer’s doctor alerting Tjan and USC of a threat — prior to the stabbing. As part Annenberg Media’s participation in the Trusting News project, Cole and Sam recounted how this investigation started and what it took to report the story. They also shared tips and takeaways for aspiring journalists.

Cole Sullivan: It started with a whispered tip: “There was a Tarasoff warning in the case.” “A what?” “Look it up.”

I opened Safari on my phone and did a quick search before texting my colleague Sam Bergum, “Google Tarasoff warning.”

Sam Bergum: It only took one search to understand the gravity of the information. While Cole was on his way to the newsroom, I was reading through web articles on the nature of a Tarasoff warning — that a doctor heard a threat so severe they were duty-bound to break patient confidentiality to protect the threatened person. I texted Cole my reply: “Oh my god.”

CS: At some point in the conversation, I said, “It’s going to be hard, but we have to chase it.” I think we were both agreed that this news was a major development, and one that opened up many new questions about a case we thought was closed. We quickly looped in two faculty members who were invaluable throughout the process, Alan Mittelstaedt and Stacy Scholder. They served as our editors who guided us in the right direction and offered ideas on new avenues to pursue in our reporting.

SB: We agreed that our first step was to find the public case file and the transcript of the hearing where the judge found Brown not guilty by reason of insanity. I requested the transcript online and we went to the courthouse that week to request the case file in person.

CS: It was quite the adventure going through the bureaucratic process of requesting a case file, finding out someone else had it on a different floor, going to that floor, being told it wasn’t ready yet, coming back the following week, finding it missing, getting a call that it had been found, rushing back downtown to read it before the clerk’s office closed for Cesar Chavez Day, going through the folder page by page, requesting copies, paying for copies in a different line, and finally receiving the copies. We left the courthouse clutching half a dozen photocopied pages that would prove crucial to our investigation.

SB: The gold mine for us out of that trip was just two lines out of a hearing transcript. The transcript quoted the prosecutor referring to “terrorist threats” and a “terrorist soft letter” that was “sent to the victim.” We were confused at the word choice at first, but when we looked at it a second time, we realized “terrorist” and “terrorist soft” sounded awfully close to “Tarasoff” — a simple typo from the court reporter, with potentially significant implications.

We knew what the warning was, but we didn’t have its existence fully reportable quite yet, so we starting making a list of sources at USC who might have known about the warning at the time. Top on the list was USC’s Department of Public Safety — to that end, we set up an interview with DPS Deputy Chief David Carlisle to talk about campus security and mental health.

CS: I’ve interviewed Deputy Chief Carlisle many times before on other stories. For this meeting, he asked that one of his sergeants, Josh Voyda, join us. Voyda, it turned out, is the current DPS liaison to USC’s threat assessment team. Over the course of the interview, we were able to get both a broad strokes understanding of how DPS/USC deal with threats and mental health and also narrow our questions into the Brown case specifically.

SB: We didn’t do the interview on camera (against our instincts as TV journalists) because we thought they would be more likely to share information without a camera in their faces.

We left the DPS office in a state of shock — together, Carlisle and Voyda had confirmed on the record the existence of the Tarasoff warning, said that Professor Tjan and DPS had received it, and that at the time, they didn’t have a system in place to make sure Brown was okay to come back to USC after his voluntary leave of absence.

CS: At this point, we knew we had a story, and that it was one with significant implications. But we also faced the challenges of student reporting. After all, we did have classes to attend in the midst of all of this. The following week, I was scheduled to interview one of Professor Tjan’s colleagues and go back to the courthouse to follow up on a number of different leads. Sam was out of town for a job interview.

The interview with Tjan’s colleague, Professor Irving Biederman, went as expected; he shared memories of Professor Tjan that got at the heart of the story. One of the concerns I had about this complicated story was that we would lose the understanding of how tragic Tjan’s loss was. I wanted to make sure we were able to convey his importance to his friends, colleagues and the USC community.

The next day, at court, I spent a couple hours going through huge binders listing every search warrant returned in Los Angeles County from Dec. 1, 2016, to April 2017. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We only had the names of the LAPD detectives on the case and a rough idea of the date a warrant may have been returned. To my surprise, I found several relevant documents that added significant detail to our understanding of the night of the stabbing and the possible warning signs leading up to it.

SB: Because of my interview, I had to wait several hours to find out about Cole’s breakthrough. The second I arrived at the airport, I got a text from him saying, “Call me when you get to the airport.” I knew the lack of a “hello” or “how’d the interview go?” meant he had something important to share.

As soon as I was through security, I called Cole, who said he found the search warrants and had something big to tell me.

CS: I began reading the search warrants aloud to her while pacing around my apartment.

SB: I was sitting outside my gate, surrounded by my fellow passengers and trying to keep my reactions to myself. The warrants outlined dramatic details about the night of the crime and said the LAPD discovered a “long history of threats” Brown made against Professor Tjan, including details we were not previously aware of.

Cole said he had already told our advisor Alan, and said that Alan thought we should move up our deadline to the very next week. I didn’t sleep at all on the flight back to LA — I was too excited and nervous about the story.

CS: One of the reasons why Alan suggested moving up our deadline was because USC became aware of our reporting on the story. The school spokesperson had called Sam earlier that week and we were pretty sure they had a good idea of our reporting.

Over the the course of that weekend, we spent many, many hours writing and rewriting our web and broadcast stories. On Monday, we reached out to a few final sources — including the former DPS liaison to USC’s threat assessment team, who helped fill in some details about the university’s response to the Tarasoff warning. We then asked USC’s spokesperson some specific questions.

We already knew that USC had restructured and expanded its threat assessment team after Tjan’s death, and we wanted to talk to Patrick Prince, the man the university hired to run it. I set up a time to talk with him at 7 a.m. the following morning (Tuesday — one day before publication) and spent about 45 minutes in his office.

SB: We didn’t expect to get a lot of details from USC’s spokesperson, if we got a response at all. But, to our surprise, four minutes before we needed to hear back to include comment in the story, we received an email from the spokesperson with two carefully worded paragraphs.

Cole was in the middle of recording his voiceover for the video piece in our newsroom’s radio studio — I read him the statement aloud over the speaker from the other side of the glass.

CS: We then had to rewrite the web and broadcast pieces to incorporate the USC statement and the new information it provided. The statement provided some new details, but was very carefully worded and left some ambiguity — specifically whether USC continued new safety measures to protect Professor Tjan after Brown returned to campus. This ambiguity made incorporating the statement into our story more complicated.

Once we updated the story, we also needed to make sure that every word was right and that we told our audience how we knew what we knew. That meant another painstaking round of line-by-line, word-by-word fact-checking for both the five-page, four-and-a-half-minute broadcast piece and nine-page, 2,200-word web story.

SB: Our fact-checking process was elaborate and time-consuming. We laid out copies of all our interview transcripts, documents and notes on a table, and we each took one story to check. We went through each piece word-by-word, underlining every fact, attribution and meaningful line (basically every word). We verified every underlined word/sentence with its source in our packet of documents and noted how we knew it on our printout of the stories. It was a bit tedious, but it forced us to think through what we were communicating with every single word and to make sure every fact was clear and correct.

CS: Suffice to say, between fact-checking and editing our broadcast story from scratch, we didn’t get much sleep that night. I got 90 minutes before coming back to the Media Center Wednesday.

SB: I didn’t sleep at all — I was back in the Media Center less than three hours after we left, since I was executive producer for that night’s broadcast of Annenberg TV News. Fortunately, my trainee Chris Cheshire stepped up to the plate and took over the show, saving me a lot of stress as Cole and I fixed last-minute details. Our broadcast piece would be the entire first section of the show, an unusual choice for ATVN.

CS: Before we published our web story or went to air on our broadcast piece, we asked four faculty members to look over our work. Alan and Henry Fuhrmann went over the text story with a fine-toothed comb to make sure our reporting was sound and to fix any style issues. Stacy and Barbara Pierce went through our broadcast script to make sure we were articulating our reporting clearly, even in the more conversational tone of TV, and that the visuals on screen portrayed the information appropriately.

SB: We hit “publish” just before 1 p.m. Wednesday.

CS: Sam and I held hands as she pressed the publish button — that’s how nervous and proud we were of this story.

SB: After making sure the piece was shared on social media appropriately, our last task for that night was to make sure the broadcast segment aired. Cole was in the studio and I was in the control room, watching the package we had agonized over play on the studio monitors. As the story played, the studio was dead silent — the mood was unlike anything we had felt before at ATVN.

After the broadcast went to the first commercial break, I walked into the studio and gave Cole a hug. We were excited, relieved and so incredibly proud that we got the story.

The Challenges

This story was not an easy one to report. Both of us feel that we spent more time reporting this story than we have any other in our (admittedly short) journalism careers. Here are a few of the major challenges we grappled with along the way.

Sources

While we relied on court documents for some of our reporting, we had to get many of the details and confirmations on the record from human sources. It’s clear from the subject matter how difficult this story is — first emotionally, but also legally. Convincing people to speak on the record was not easy. We wanted to make sure that we were sensitive in our initial ask and in our interview questions. We focused on building relationships with sources that eventually resulted in more leads and elements. Thinking carefully about how to interact with sources in a way that wouldn’t upset or “burn” them was important to us: Some of the biggest breaks on the story happened because of sources we kept in friendly contact with.

We were always reminding ourselves that many of our sources were people who had gone through a terrible tragedy. We were both pleased when one of our sources said speaking with us was a cathartic experience for him. We wanted to get the story, but didn’t want to cause any unnecessary harm along the way.

Representation

As journalists, we’re always thinking a lot about the people who appear in our stories as sources — who they are, what their motivation is for talking to us and how they know what they know. But another important part of this assessment, especially for TV, is thinking about what kinds of people are being represented on screen.

We were both very aware and very frustrated that the only interviews you see on camera in our TV piece are with white men — including Cole as the reporter. While there’s nothing wrong with showing white men on camera, we were a bit disappointed (in ourselves and in the story) that the only sources you see don’t represent the diversity of the USC community or the diversity of all of the people involved in this broader story.

It’s important for us as makers of media to consider the subconscious messages we’re sending to our audience. Diverse representation is a part of being a responsible content creator, and we hope to do a better job of that in the future.

Multi-Platform Reporting

In the early days of our reporting, we tried not to let the platform for which we were packaging drive the reporting itself, and instead prioritize gathering facts (thus the decision to do many interviews off camera). But as we came closer to publication, we had to start thinking more practically about the ways our reporting could be presented on different platforms, in ways that were unique and appropriate.

Certainly, this piece was made to be a web story, and a long one at that. We conceived of our web piece as a kind of home base for our storytelling — it would be the most detailed account, largely because the platform of a website allows it. The video piece, our next priority, was more challenging, because we were so limited in interviews and compelling visuals. It took some creative writing and editing to keep the piece moving and make it understandable for the viewer.

After those two major elements were published, we had to start strategizing for an ever-growing list of platforms: radio, Alexa briefings, Snapchat, the email newsletter, WeChat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to name just a few.

Each platform creates unique challenges for packaging a piece like this one. How do you explain a complex story with complicated attribution and very particular wording with potential legal implications in 30 seconds on Snapchat, or in a 280-character tweet? We spent a long time (and we’re still working on it now) thinking about the best way to tell the story, or as much of the story as we can, on all these different platforms in unique and natural ways.

It’s an exciting test of our storytelling skills and an interesting culmination of the multi-platform training we’ve received at Annenberg Media.

The Takeaways

For future student journalists who might be working on similar stories, here is a list of some lessons we learned along the way.

• Shoot video when it happens, no matter what. No matter how late it is, no matter how little you want to, no matter how much trouble it will be. When a story breaks, make sure you get every piece of video/audio/information you can when it happens. You’re going to wish you had it later. We did.
• Save EVERYTHING. Names of people you tweeted at, names of people who commented on FB posts, screenshots of posts/emails, footage, backup footage, documents, random thoughts…document and save it all in more than one place. It’s easier to have it handy, rather than trying to remember when that one memo was sent and whose inbox it might be in.
• The value of beat reporting. Because you never know when a source might whisper something to you. This story happened because we had been following the Bosco Tjan case for more than a year — the proof can be found in the case file, in the form of the dozens of camera requests we filed to cover court hearings. Sticking to the stories that matter and paying attention can pay off in big ways.
• Public records are your friend. Sometimes it can be time-consuming to track them down, but search warrants and case files were invaluable in filling in details we didn’t know and giving us new leads to pursue. It’s worth a trip or two (or six) to the courthouse. You’ll be surprised at the gems you can dig up.
• Don’t stop asking questions. This piece took curiosity and determination. It would’ve been a lot easier to not pursue it and relax for our final months at USC. But we knew from the moment we got that tip that there was more to this story, and we had to figure out the whole picture. For us, that was the driving force behind our reporting. If you have a hunch about a story, or if you’re hearing something that doesn’t quite make sense, keep working until you get to the bottom of it.
• Challenges for student reporters. We both prioritized this story above pretty much all else — sleep, food, social interaction, etc. We skipped half a dozen classes each in the final weeks of our reporting. Assignments, job and apartment hunting were all put on hold. Because of how sensitive the story was, we didn’t tell anyone outside our faculty advisors what we were working on, leaving our friends in the dark about why we were spending night after night holed up in the newsroom. Most professional journalists don’t have to choose between turning in a paper on time or reporting. Despite those challenges, this was an invaluable learning experience for us, and a very special capstone to our four years at USC.
• Teamwork. Neither of us could have done this without the other. We can’t overstate how important it was for us to bounce ideas off each other, proofread important emails together and support one another as we slogged through long days of difficult reporting.
• Good editors make for a good story. We also could not have done this without the insight and support of our faculty editors. Their expert advice helped us find the story, their careful eyes helped us be clear and accurate and their creative minds helped us make the story sing. We’re very grateful for their help.

Photos courtesy of Alan Mittelstaedt.