This is a raw transcript of a live chat put on by the Reynolds Center. More info here.

Kelly Carr: We’re ready to get started. Thanks again to Diana for joining us! Feel free to submit your questions at any time.

Diana B. Henriques: Hello Robin and All! Sorry it took me a minute to get rolling here. Let’s go.

Comment From John
When you interviewed Bernie Madoff, why didn’t you ask him to substantiate his assertions that some banks were complicit with him by asking him to point to specific evidence for which the Trustee could look?

Diana B. Henriques: I did ask him why he believed the banks were “complicit.” From my first visit with him in August 2010 (at which he raised no such allegation, BTW!) I knew that he had very limited access to records and lawsuits – indeed, to the Internet generally. So no sense asking for what I knew he didn’t have.

Comment From John
Your book includes many references to Bernie Madoff’s calendar. From where did you obtain it?

Diana B. Henriques: From a lot of hard digging and some helpful confidential sources.

Kelly Carr: When did you make the decision to turn your beat reporting on Madoff into a book project? Had you been keeping side notes/details during your reporting with an idea that the story might become a book someday?

Diana B. Henriques: There was immediate interest in my doing a Madoff book, according to my literary agent, but I had zero interest in doing a “quickie” book — and thought publishers would have zero interest in anything else. But when my agent (with NYT permission) circulated an abbreviated book proposal in early 2009 that included an 18-month delivery period, Times Books was interested. The contract was signed about April 2009.

Comment From L. B.
How long did it take to write your book?

Diana B. Henriques: In terms of months, days, hours?

Comment From L. B.
All three?

Diana B. Henriques: The cute answer is, it took 42 years of journalism training! But actually, I worked early mornings, weekends, vacations and holidays from April 2009 until April 2010, when I took a 6-month book leave. Returned to work October 2010, and went back to the morning/weekend/every other spare moment mode until we finally closed things up in late February. Yes…I’m tired!

Comment From Andi Esposito
Did you take time off to write the book? Or fit it within your NYT reporting commitments? What advice do you have for reporters writing about subjects or events that clearly have book in their DNA but for the reporter, taking time off would be out of the question?

Diana B. Henriques: My first three books were done without taking time off from the NYT, so it can certainly be done. Here’s what I did – I got up extra early each weekday and set aside several hours to work on the book — planning interviews, planning research, actually working on outlines and chapter drafts. Weekends were big, because that’s when I tried to tee up the following week’s morning chores. I kept a list of book chores with me at all times, and carried all the relevant documents with me on a flash drive so I could noodle through them when time permitted. There’s no way to sugar-coat this: You gotta love the topic so much that it feels like it’s worth the sacrifice of a lot of your “spare” life for a significant period of time — I think 18 months is about the minimum for this kind of day-job/ writing job approach.

Comment From Brad
Did you pitch the book to your publisher or did they pitch it to you?

Diana B. Henriques: My agent (first step: get a good one!) pitched it based on a slender proposal — but in all fairness, I was all over the paper that most of these publishers were reading every day, which helped.

Comment From John
Your hard work is evident in your book. But with respect to evidence of the banks’ complicity, I would have thought that he would have knowledge about computer systems, correspondence, peculiar financial relationships and the like. Such detail would have helped the Trustee fill in the gaps.

Diana B. Henriques: Actually, the trustee has far more information about Madoff’s paperwork than Madoff did — and the trustee’s legal team had spent 16 hours interviewing Madoff directly a few weeks before I showed up at Butner. So Irving Picard wasn’t relying on me to be the conduit for any helpful information Madoff might have on this topic.

Comment From L. B.
It seem like you have done extensive research. How did you go about doing the research required?

Diana B. Henriques: The first thing I did when I signed on to do this book was recruit a top-flight researcher — my lead researcher, Barbara Oliver, was retired from the NYT’s reesearch desk and had worked on two of my prior books. She dug up old lawsuits, old SEC files, things that had to be retrieved from the NYSE library — all those wonderful old dusty manila folders of yore. I also hired a young NYU graduate student who helped Barbara on some of those chores but who also helped me interview the dozens and dozens of Madoff victims I had located around the country. It was a team effort!

Comment From John
Weren’t the BLMIS documents–including Mr. Madoff’s calendar–under the custody of the FBI and the Trustee? How does a reporter go about cultivating such “confidential” sources?

Diana B. Henriques: Copies of many of the materials I relied on were in the hands of the FBI, yes. And the trustee has about 11 million pages of old Madoff office paperwork, some of which surfaced as exhibits to his many lawsuits. Will get right back to the “how do you build confidential sources?’ query in a sec — it’s a broader issue.

Comment From Linda Austin
If I have a story off my beat that I think would make a great book, what would you suggest I do to test that theory?

Diana B. Henriques: Okay – first you figure out who might have a vested interest, a good personal motive, for talking with you. And you approach them, making it clear that you already know a good bit about the topic. Trust is built slowly — it took me more than a year to get two particular confidential sources to talk to me, and a final important source didn’t open up until more than 18 months after my first request. So don’t give up and don’t get mad.

Diana B. Henriques: Getting back to Linda Austin’s query – didn’t mean to leapfrog past you, Linda! I suggest you do the “dinner party test” with any book idea. See if you can reduce it to a tantalizing item you can toss out during the second glass of red wine at a dinner party. Do people’s eyes light up? Do they start bouncing the idea among themselves? Or does someone quickly say something like, “How ’bout those Mets?” Pretty good litmus test, as a first pass!

Comment From Brad
Okay. Any advice on step one — get a good agent?

Diana B. Henriques: Sure – go to the book store and look at the acknowledgments in books that are like the one that you want to write. Any self-respecting author will thank his/her agent, and you’re off and running! You can also ask published colleagues, of course.

Comment From RobinJP
Hi, Diana, Thanks for doing this… Did you have any concerns about scooping yourself .. or having to hold on to juicy news and keep it for the book? How did that work with your editors?

Diana B. Henriques: It’s always a concern, but the problem generally solved itself because so many people I interviewed insisted that the only terms on which they would agree to talk was if the interviewer were embargoed for use in the book — they wanted to be sure their information would be presented in context, etc. The only breach in that arrangement was when Madoff himself broke our embargo agreement (after all, it’s a two-way street) by reaching out on his own to a New York magazine reporter. When I learned about that during my second prison interview, I immediately told him the embargo agreement was null and void and I planned to publish the interview in the following day’s paper. Made for a very exciting day…

Comment From Kat Aaron
Following up on the question about sources, can you talk more broadly about how you have cultivated sources (not just confidential ones) over your years on this beat?

Diana B. Henriques: I made a lot of calls to a lot of lawyers — seriously, on stories like this the litigators on all sides are among the first people we should call. I followed the court documents carefully, looking for minor lawsuits filed outside of NYC and followed up with those plaintiffs. I tracked down expert witnesses. The key to cultivating sources is to stay in touch – or, as Woody Allen said, “showing up.” We get busy, we get distracted, we let a month or two slip by without calling a source — and we lose ground. Conversely, we stay in touch frequently, even if briefly, and the relationship grows stronger.

Comment From Linda Austin
The writing in the book is very compelling. Are there lessons there that translate to writing for the daily newspaper?

Diana B. Henriques: Thank you, Linda! I had a wonderful time exercising my “writing muscles” on this book. Focus on scenes – how things looked, sounded, smelled, what people wore, ate, drank. I was able to actually visit the old Madoff offices, follow in his footsteps through the FBI arrest process, walk from his apartment building to his office, etc. Collecting those details can add so much color and life to a story. I encourage you all to track down books about screenwriting – “The Writer’s Journey” is an excellent one – and take those lessons to heart. You should look at your writing critically and make sure there are some details about sight, sound, touch, taste, etc. to give your readers the sense of actually being “inside” the story with you.

Comment From L. B.
How much did you depend on the information that Madoff gave you in your interviews? Did he lie to you?

Diana B. Henriques: Just an addenda to Linda’s question – think of your story in terms of archetypal stories – myths, bedtime stories from childhood, old proverbial sayings, looking for ones that fit. That will give you a clue to the inner power of the story itself. Is this a Cinderella story? A “pride goeth before the fall” story? A “Cain betrays Abel” story? Look for those timeless analogies!

Diana B. Henriques: Yes, of course, Madoff lied to me. Frustrating as it was to have waited almost 18 months to interview him, it actually was a boon to me because I had already done an enormous amount of research, assuming I would be writing the book without him. So I was able to test how plausible, how credible, various of his statements were. I depended on Madoff’s information only where I could verify it elsewhere – and where I couldn’t, I let the reader know that.

Comment From John
This is fascinating and very helpful, particularly your specific comments regarding your current book. When you wrote about your developing confidential sources “first you figure out who might have a vested interest, a good personal motive, for talking with you,” what type of personal interests did they have? How did you respond?

Diana B. Henriques: What I meant by that, John, was that you try to find common ground with a potential source. For example, I wanted the public to understand how varied Madoff’s victims were — not just wealthy movie stars, folks! So one approach to a reluctant potential source was to suggest that he/she might have a stake in that same issue – in the public seeing Madoff victims more accurately. That’s just one example – it varies by source, of course.

Comment From Jon
Great info, Diana. This is a journalistic ethics question. How did you integrate “off the record” comments into the book? Did you use them, just not source them? What advice do you have on this topic. Thanks.

Diana B. Henriques: Not sure what you mean by how I integrated them. As in all journalistic research, background interviews educate the reporter. Using that education in framing the story, pursuing new angles of research, finding new sources is always and ever an appropriate use of such information. Dealing with book sourcing is not a lot different – except that I was dealing with a lot more people who had never dealt with the press before and I was therefore extra careful to lay out the ground rules and get agreement on them.

Comment From L. B.
What is it about writing, either books or newspaper articles, that thrills you the most? And what do you dislike the most?

Diana B. Henriques: I guess I’m not the only one who hates writing but loves having written, eh? I get a thrill out of synthesis – simplifying something so that it flows smoothly and floats lightly into the reader’s mind but still carries the same freight. Now THAT is a thrill!
Dislike most? That darned, $%^@#$$ blank screen…just sitting there, staring at me….

Comment From Linda Austin
You collected reams of information for the book. Any tips on keeping that wealth of data organized?

Diana B. Henriques: I actually think I did a better job this time than on my three prior books, thanks to the digital age. I organized documents, news clips, interview notes, etc. into “subject” folders on a 16-gig flash drive (and, yes, backed it up regularly on two computers and another flash drive…not that I’m obsessive or anything!) It was so easy to save duplicates of something to several appropriate files. With my researchers’ help, I also constructed a gigantic master chronology for the book, with “sub-chronologies” for topics like the emergence of feeder funds, the evolution of the SEC, Madoff’s family life, etc. That chronologies also lived on the flash drives and were enormously helpful for keeping me grounded in the story.

Comment From John
Another ethics question: as a reporter develops trust with a source, does the reporter do so by indicating that the source or her organization will be presented in a favorable way or her organization’s blemishes will not be highlighted? Are the ethics different in your role as a reporter vs your role as book author?

Diana B. Henriques: Good heavens! No, the ethics are not any different for a reporter vs an author. And the only bargain I’ve ever made with anyone to get them to talk with me is that I will do everything humanly possible to be fair and to be accurate. I don’t know about you, but I work in a professional fishbowl. Pulling a stunt like “talk to me and I’ll go easy on you” would be in the media gossip columns in a nanosecond…

Comment From RobinJP
Diana, can you talk about emotional attachment to this story and the people involved? I’m sure it was hard to hear stories from all sides of this fraud.

Diana B. Henriques: It sometime felt like grief counseling, more than interviewing – especially in the early days. People were so devastated, so angry. I just did a lot of listening. But I set out to listen from all sides of the table. It was hard – people were constantly pressing me to somehow endorse the “rightness” of their point of view, to side with them somehow in the difficult legal disputes that emerged. Even now, in questions on my book tour, people will start out “Do you think it’s fair that…?” Now and as a reporter, I tried to stick with the notion that I didn’t have an opinion about what was fair or unfair – only about what was interesting and important and what was dull and trivial.

Kelly Carr: We’re almost out of time. Special thanks to Diana for spending the last hour with all of us. Diana, any closing thoughts? Any advice for local reporters looking to track fraud in their coverage areas?

Diana B. Henriques: Thanks, Kelly, for hosting. Tracking fraud so often means looking for things that just don’t fit, things that don’t add up. That means getting out of the office now and then to look for those things — and talking to people who do the same thing. The good news is that local beat reporters are far more likely to see such anomalies than others will. Happy hunting!

Kelly Carr: Thanks Diana! And thanks to everyone for joining us. You can find an archive of this chat on businessjournalism.org.

Comment From Robin Phillps
Thanks again to everyone who stopped by. If you have any ideas for future chats, send me a note.. Robin.Phillips@businessjournalism.org

Comment From John
Thank you for this wonderful event.

Comment From Linda Austin
Thanks so much, Diana. As always, you provide such useful advice. Please join us again for a live chat on May 23 with the authors of the new book, “Chasing Aphrodite.” They were Los Angeles Times reporters who turned a scandal at the Getty Museum into a book.