A reporter is curious about how Trump the presidential candidate compares to Trump the private billionaire when it comes to charity. By systematically double-checking Trump's claims, he found an even better story.

How do we turn a narrow topic on a local story into a year-long project? Take that narrow topic on a state-by-state tour and compare how laws and data and history and stories differ in 50 comparable ways. This page is a set of real-world examples of how to find focus in a larger issue, and make a big project by looking at the U.S. state-by-state picture.

Not all of the news and journalism made it to the web. Lexis-Nexis Academic gives us access to well-organized, news archives.

Read an investigative story, then document all of its sources with a spreadsheet. You should get an idea of how many people and organizations were contacted, as well as the document trail that was followed.

For an investigative story that you've read, use LexisNexis to do 5 queries, to find 5 more stories of at least 500+ words, from 5 different years and publications that have insights/context not found in the investigative story you read.