Today, Matt Apuzzo ’00 works as an investigative reporter at the Washington bureau of The Associated Press, but journalism was not Apuzzo’s intended career path. Planning to become a doctor, he graduated from the College with a degree in biology. “My career path was a bit of a 180-degree turn,” he said. “Not being very good at organic chemistry changed things, and by that point I was pretty much through the major. But I was working for the Morning Sentinel, and I was very active with [the Echo]. So life just took me in this direction.”

On Sunday, Oct. 19, Apuzzo revisited the Hill to discuss his work with students, before sitting down with the Echo’s Will Kalasky to answer a few questions about his career.

WK: For those who may not be familiar, could you give a concise description of what it is you do at the AP?

MA: I’m on a team that focuses on longer-term, more in-depth projects, typically, but not exclusively, related to national security and terrorism. Those are the major issues of this generation; it’s important, it’s fascinating and it’s hard. And in that regard, it’s like a puzzle….Trying to put it together is fun and challenging....My first boss out of college used to say, “If you can cover a fire, you can cover the UN.” And I would say the corollary to that is if you can cover a town hall, you can cover the White House. It’s all about being persistent. Don’t just take the first answer: be skeptical. A healthy level of skepticism is crucial, whether you’re covering a board of selectmen or you’re covering Congress. In the end, it’s all the same basic stuff. There’s no trick. Seriously. I see the reporters who I look up to, and I say, “Gee, they must be doing something different, because they’re so good and so talented.” But there’s no secret handshake. It’s just a lot of hard work and curiosity.

WK: What does your average week look like?

MA: The average week at my current job is very different from my previous jobs. Right now, I’m working on longer-term projects, so I know every week what I’m building toward, and what my colleagues and I are trying to piece together. You may feel like on Monday that the interview you had that you thought was going to be great turned out to be a bust, and you feel like everything is falling apart. And then Tuesday you come in, and your colleague had a great interview and maybe got a document that takes you in a different direction, and Wednesday you’re off and running. By Friday, you’re in the general direction you were going on Monday, but you’ve veered down a slightly different course. And that’s fun! It keeps you interested, and—at least for me—it makes me want to keep coming into work.

WK: A lot of what you cover is political in nature. What are your opinions on preserving impartiality? How do you prevent bias from skewing the facts, intentionally or otherwise?

MA: Everything in Washington is political, but I only very rarely get involved in pure political coverage. And I’m not a very political person. If it weren’t for this job, I probably wouldn’t pay attention to politics….That’s just not what interests me. If I have a political belief system, it’s that things aren’t always as they seem. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, people on either side are trying to spin you. My belief is that the facts are usually somewhere in between. One of the things the AP has done a really good job with is offering fair comment and representing both sides. It’s our job as journalists to identify what is true and what isn’t.

Journalism is not [stenography]—you don’t just go to a speech, write down what the guy says and report back. If there are things in there that aren’t true, we need to be willing to say that; it’s not taking an opinion. It’s funny….Whenever we point out that President Obama is wrong on the facts, we get all this cheering on the blogs.…“The AP is sticking it to Obama, good for them!” And anytime we take the exact same strategy to call out Speaker Boehner or Eric Cantor, those same bloggers are saying, “Oh, that liberal media….” And at the same time the Democrats are saying, “Oh, great, finally the AP is sticking it to Eric Cantor.”

If you just stick to the facts and don’t let that other stuff distract you, you have a much better shot at being impartial. But you can’t limit yourself to, “Oh, you say this, he says that, I wash my hands of the whole thing” either. There are facts in this world, and it’s our job to put what politicians say in context.

WK: Are there any trends in contemporary journalism that you oppose?

MA: I think the government’s insistence on anonymous sourcing for routine, often political stories undermines credibility both in [the] government and in the media. Frankly, it makes it harder to differentiate when anonymity is really important. You’re not going to get stories about national security or law enforcement on sensitive issues without anonymous sources. But at the White House, for instance, every administration insists on doing its political spinning as anonymous sources, and they use them as a way to get two stories off of one story: you get the story from anonymous sources on Tuesday, and then you get the real story from the President on Wednesday. So they get two bites of the apple—two positive stories in the paper. That’s bad for journalism and bad for government, and it seems to be on the rise, even during my short time in Washington.

I’m also disappointed when I see the government going after leaks and trying to force reporters to reveal their sources and threatening to put really good reporters in jail. I think the country requires a good, healthy, independent press, and when the government goes after reporters who are rightly reporting on the most important issues of the day, I think that has a chilling effect on good journalism. It’s upsetting whenever I see that happen, and, unfortunately, the Obama administration has been more aggressive than its predecessors. That’s troubling. The biggest issues of the last 10 years are about the balance between civil liberties and national security….All those stories, from waterboarding, secret prisons, wiretapping…they’ve all come from talented reporters willing to ask difficult questions and being able to promise anonymity to people who have a very real need for [it]. It’s just not good for the country when people on both sides of that equation have to worry about going to jail.

WK: In recent years, there has been much concern about the replacement of print media by web-based reporting. What have you observed with regards to that transition?

MA: Being at the AP, I see things differently than I did at newspapers. The AP has been in the 24-hour news cycle for a long, long time, so the idea of a story breaking at any given time of the day is not a new concept. But I think that newspapers that have been successful and have held on, and reporters that have developed a niche, a brand, have in many cases been those who created a product that arrives on your doorstep in the morning that is different than what you got all day long. Oftentimes, it’s because facts and newsbreaks come at the public 24 hours a day.…Everybody has a news ticker on their smartphone, [and] the news is on every television wherever you are, so you’re constantly getting messaged. Print reporters who can synthesize all that, cut through the noise and present the facts in context—one-stop shopping—can keep going and have a market, despite all the concerns about the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. It’s why people still buy The New Yorker; it comes out once a week, and its stories are really long. And that’s great, because it says there’s a market out there for in-depth, interesting coverage that you just can’t get in soundbites.

WK: What do you find most personally fulfilling about your job?

MA: It’s fun! It’s a hell of a job. You have a front row seat to history. You’re asking questions that—hopefully—matter to people, and you’re telling people things that they didn’t know yesterday. It’s personally rewarding when you feel like you’re telling somebody something that’s useful, important and meaningful to them. It’s not about outcomes for me. I don’t write things saying, “Oh, I’m gonna write this, and it’ll change the world”; journalists write things so that people know what’s going on and can make decisions for themselves about what they want their government to be. If a reporter reveals something that the government didn’t want them to reveal, the reporter shouldn’t be driven by a personal agenda. The agenda should simply be that people deserve to know. People deserve to know what’s going on in their government; the government doesn’t always want them to know. But the great thing about our democracy is that, given all the information, they’ll decide for themselves what they want.

WK: Seeing as you ended up taking a career path that didn’t align with your major, in what broader ways did your education at the College benefit you in the long term?

MA: Colby does a good job preparing people to be curious, to ask questions about the world we live in. That’s what’s required in journalism, but it’s also required in so many other jobs. I think it’s the foundation for a lot of what we do in life. Whether you’re developing computer software, building bridges or writing for a newspaper, the best people out there are the most curious among us. And I think Colby does a really good job stoking that curiosity.

WK: What is your advice for students at the College seeking a career in journalism?

MA: The most obvious advice is to write as much as you can, for whoever you can, even if you’re not getting paid. And read as much as you can. But the less obvious advice I’d give is to be curious. I think good journalism requires the ability to ask questions and get answers, and sometimes that means asking difficult questions that make you uncomfortable and make them uncomfortable. But that’s how good journalism is made. Be curious and be willing to ask difficult questions, and be willing to question conventional wisdom.