Keeping an Honest Document Index

A long inquiry accumulates documents faster than most reporters expect, and by week three it is common to lose track of where a particular figure came from. An index built from the first day, rather than reconstructed later, is the difference between a story you can defend line by line and one you can only vaguely stand behind.

What belongs in the index

Every document obtained — whether a planning notice, a monitoring report, a public comment record, or notes from an interview — earns an entry the day it arrives. The entry should record where the document came from, the date it was obtained, and a short note on what it establishes and what it doesn't. That last part matters: a document rarely proves everything a reporter hopes it will, and writing down its actual limits early prevents overreach later.

Interview notes deserve the same rigor as formal records. Note the date, the setting, whether the source spoke on the record, and any follow-up questions still outstanding. Treating a conversation as informally as a text message, and a gazetted notice as formally as a court filing, keeps the two from blurring together in memory weeks later.

Reviewing the index, not just building it

An index that's never revisited is just a filing cabinet. Reviewing it at each stage of the inquiry — checking for gaps, contradictions between sources, or documents that were requested but never received — is where the actual analytical work happens. It's also the point at which a reporter usually notices which official hasn't responded, or which claim still rests on a single source.

The index isn't paperwork around the story. For a sustained inquiry, it often is the story's skeleton.

By the time an inquiry reaches its final stage, the index should let a colleague — or an editor doing a fact check — trace every claim in the draft back to a specific, dated document. That traceability is what separates a well-supported piece from one that merely sounds well-supported.