Investigative reporters Pat Stith and Joby Warrick with special projects editor Melanie Sill lead the effort. The paper's news research department headed by Teresa Leonard played a significant role.
Information is shared and ideas and leads spring from conversations and compared notes.
The series incorporated this philosophy of teamwork unline any story we'd worked on in the past. The story itself began as check of phone records of a state official who was suspected of accompanying major players in the hog industry on hunting trips, and evolved into an examination of the hog industry and how it operates in North Carolina. Here are some of the tools we used in gathering our 16-foot stack of documents on the hog industry. We acquired a database listing phone numbers made by state employees on their long-distance calling cards and the number of the phone from which the call was made. Records of the official in question were culled out and we began the task of identifying hundreds of numbers on dozens of pages of calls.