Think back over these chapters. A striped tent, a podium, a row of folding chairs, reporters checking their light — and then a crowd nobody put on the guest list: middle-schoolers, their parents, a soccer team carrying hand-lettered signs. Gold paint flakes off the shovels as the officials pose above a square of roped-off dirt. A boy stands up and says there are birds living under this lot, then holds out a camera that proves almost nothing. And the ground answers: a head, a kite string, a bucket, a company man with a shovel lifted over a child. Two friends step into that gap, hands find other hands, and the circle holds while the cameras keep running.

A reporter who hears a striking claim does not simply print it. The first job is sourcing: finding out who says the thing, how that person could know it, and what interest they might have in being believed. A careful journalist then tries to corroborate the claim, which means looking for a second, independent source that confirms the same fact. Two people repeating a rumor they both picked up at the same meeting are not independent. Confirmation counts only when it arrives from somewhere the first source could not have supplied.

Documents are the strongest kind of confirmation, because they were created before the argument began. In the United States, public-records laws let any citizen ask a government office for files it keeps: permits, inspection reports, budgets, and letters. Such a request needs no stated reason, no lawyer, and no press badge, and the office must answer within a set number of days. Reporters file these requests constantly, since a signed permit outlasts any spokesperson's memory. When the paperwork and the press release disagree, the confident denial may prove to be a bluff — certainty with nothing behind it — and the disagreement itself becomes the story.

Sometimes the most telling document is the one that is absent. If a file an agency is required to keep cannot be produced, that gap alone is inconclusive: it might reflect careless filing or deliberate concealment, and a reporter must weigh both possibilities before printing either. Careful attribution keeps that difference visible: readers should always be able to tell whether a sentence rests on a record, an interview, or a writer's guess. A quotation proves only that somebody said something. A paper trail shows what was actually filed, approved, and signed.

No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.