The backstory to my Atlantic story

How this particular journalism sausage, with all its ethical and practical choices, was made.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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Children perform during the opening of an orphanage in Lviv, Ukraine. (Photo by Pavlo Palamarchuk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Every story is a series of choices.

Whether it is who we, as reporters, choose to interview, or how much space we give them in our story. How do we interpret their quotes for the reader? How do we convey context around the story we’re writing? How do we identify vulnerable sources in a way that protects them?

When an article I’d written about Ukrainian children being forcibly sent to Russia published in The Atlantic on Saturday, I was pleased with the depth of new information it offered. In journalism, you want to advance a story, not just write the same thing that’s already out there. But, in this case, putting together what I’d learned in my reporting was fraught: How could I advance the story without hampering or outing sources who are doing important work?

After obtaining the initial material that furthered the story of the children, I had to contend with a number of choices, including how to verify the information and how to protect my sources. Here’s some of my process for this article, from its conception to filing with my editor.

Initial tip

In this case, I was shown a story in a dissident Russian newspaper that drew attention to a public Russian adoption database, which was blending stolen Ukrainian children in with Russian ones. The database may have been public before that story, but it seemed very few outside Russia knew about it. The reason this revelation was so important is because not distinguishing the children by nationality is going to make their eventual recovery much, much harder than it already was going to be.

This was all fascinating, and heartbreaking, but I needed to confirm it. Simply repeating information — even from a reputable news outlet — is not how you do good journalism. Journalists get things wrong; you don’t want to perpetuate mistakes. The echo chamber in journalism is real.