How Reporting Creates Change: A Conversation with Pamela Colloff
July 23, 2026 at 03:30PM
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Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about how she developed as a reporter and writer, using these skills to uncover the failures of the American criminal justice system. Colloff and O’Meara talk about preparing for interviews, how thoughtful reportage can effect real change, and learning from the perspectives of incarcerated and exonerated people.
Colloff’s first book, Catch the Devil, a deep dive into serial con man Paul Skalnik, is now available.
This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.
Pamela: Every assignment, at the beginning? I’m sure this is the one that reveals I’m a failure, that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is the one that’s going to break me. There are different stages. There’s the elation after finding a great idea, and then despair because no one’s going to talk to you, and then elation when people talk to you. Then there’s despair because you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. It’s this endless roller coaster. It’s funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt.
I remember asking Gary Cartwright [Ed: Cartwright wrote for Texas Monthly from 1975–2010.] about this after a particularly tough close on a story. This was in the late ’90s, early ’00s, and I was really struggling because it felt like every story took so much out of me. It still feels that way, quite honestly. And I sought him out and said something like, “Gosh, this is so hard. Does it get easier?” And he just laughed and he said, “When it gets easier, it’s time to hang it up.” I think what he was saying is that when the work gets boring, when you feel like you really know what you’re doing, then maybe you should move on to something else. I loved that, and it also gave me an appreciation. I think about this a lot now; I feel so lucky at this point in my career to be doing work that is endlessly challenging, like every story is a new Rubik’s Cube to figure out.
Brendan: When it comes to writing, there’s something called the Skip Hollandsworth Method. What is that method, and do you still employ it?
Pamela: He read a draft of mine. I couldn’t tell you which story. His rewriting instruction was to take all the quotes out, and once I had taken the quotes out, to revise it. And once I had revised it, then decide which quotes to put back in. He said, “You’ve got to do a draft where the only voice that’s there is yours.” It was such good advice because in that particular story (and I think this happens in stories where I’m having more difficulty), I was leaning really hard on quotes. He was telling me to figure out what the story was saying. You have to tell the story, and then thoughtfully choose where you need someone else’s voice and judiciously put that back in. It might also have been referring to Skip’s theory of interviewing. My inclination is to over-research everything before I arrive at the interview, to show the person that I’m knowledgeable. I have to earn their respect. Skip would show up to an interview and say, “Wow, so what’s podcasting? How do you do it?” Just the most broad questions imaginable. He got great material just coming to people totally fresh. He’d done his homework, and if he needed to follow up with something specific, he could. But I think there’s something to that. I’m really working on coming in and trying to leave a lot of space for the person I’m interviewing instead of showing them how much work I’ve done.
Brendan: You need to get them talking and get into their headspace, and it helps to have that baseball card knowledge. But the whole idea is to get them talking.
Pamela: I will make my list of questions, which is usually absurdly detailed and many pages long, and I’ll spend a lot of time working on that. I put it away when I get to the interview. Of course the work that went into it is informing the conversation, but I just try to have a normal conversation for as long as I possibly can. And it’s not until we’re going to shift gears and I’m trying to remember the things I haven’t asked that I pull out my notes. I used to be embarrassed about looking at my notes. I don’t know why I used to be so self-conscious about that.
Brendan: I loved that you brought up Skip’s tip on removing the quotes, and then having the confidence with your authority over the material, and then cherry-picking the right ones. You need to take agency and shape the piece in your own voice.
Pamela: Before I have the confidence to write in the way that I want to write, where I really own the material, I have to spend so much time with people. At the outset, once I outline what it’s going to involve after they say yes to talking to me, I’ll say, “I’m going to be around a lot and you’re going to get sick of me at some point.” To be clear, it’s not always in person. I just finished a story where much was done by phone and Zoom and text, but I was in constant communication with my sources for about six weeks, throughout the day, every day, in various ways. For me it’s spending enough time with people that I feel like I have the right to describe what I’m describing in a story, and to tell their story in a somewhat omniscient way, that their voice comes in when they say something unique in the way that they phrased it, or makes you suck in your breath.
Brendan: There’s your book, and the long stories you’ve written. There are false starts, stories that don’t get off the ground. Coming up with ideas is paramount. Ideas are your currency. How do you generate the story ideas that you know that you’ll run with, be it for ProPublica, The New York Times, or even a book?
Pamela: When I started at Texas Monthly at 25, again having no idea what I was doing, we had a monthly staff meeting with everyone who worked at the magazine. Before the meeting, each writer had to submit five fully developed story ideas. Not just “Hey, it would be cool if we wrote about this.” You had made some calls, or had done some real research, and you had them fleshed out. It was coming up with five viable ideas, so you had to come up with 20 ideas to get down to five, and then you had to flesh them out, and you had to write them up, and they were put in a packet that was distributed to everyone. You would get called on. If the editor in chief liked an idea on your page, you would get called on to talk about it. To pull that off every month, you’re looking for story ideas every second of every day. There’s nothing that is not fodder. There is no conversation that is not something that might lead to a story idea. I felt like it made me. I was already a curious person, but it made me talk to anyone and everyone and ask them more about their lives. So that was really good training. And it’s an exercise, a muscle you build over time.
So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it.
Brendan: In your work for The New York Times, but also in Catch the Devil, there are men on death row, and they hear guards stomping and keys jingling, and they’re wondering if they’ll be taken to death watch. It’s chilling to hear that and you put us in their headspace. It’s incredibly moving and pulses with a kind of terror that you feel for them, no matter what they may have done.
Pamela: So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it. I always think about the perspective that I have as someone who spends a lot of time talking to people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, the things they long for, or the things that they savor when they have the chance to get them. I’m thinking in particular of one exoneree who I’ve spent a lot of time with. The way that they described just the most ordinary things. Anthony Graves had been on Texas’s death row and was freed. He talked about what it was like to go into a grocery store after you’ve been in solitary for years, and all the colors and textures and smells and the way light falls on different things. The way he talked about going to the grocery store was like how one of us might talk about going to see the greatest work of art we’ve ever seen. The way these men talk about the food they long for or putting their feet in the grass, things like that. I’m lucky to have that perspective.
Another thing is the potential for writing to change things. Some stories I’ve written made things happen in the world, and that is the greatest feeling there is. And then there are other stories that haven’t done that, but they have put a light on people who really needed that light on them. They’ve highlighted something important to make readers think more deeply, or maybe focused on people working in the trenches where no one’s paying attention, but what they’re doing is so important.
Listen to the full conversation below.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/07/23/creating-change-pamela-colloff/
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