How do these stories fit into the offerings of the daily newspaper? What do the investigations add to the daily coverage?

MURPHY: Sometimes the daily stories are the things that help generate the lead that you want to figure out, and the investigative target. Sometimes they are totally unrelated. Reporters have tips; we have a tip line where we get ideas from. Reporters also have their beats from previous lives.

CORBETT: I’ll amplify that by saying investigations should be short term, midterm and long term. Not everything should be an 18-month project. And investigative reporters here write daily stories. A lot depends on what the opportunities are, and what they can bring to it.

MURPHY: Just in the past year, the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the head of the E.P.A. is another example where you had cross-departmental roles — where Washington was involved in that; the Climate desk; the regulatory team I was running. And they were all doing different pieces of it. In the end, they played a major role in Scott Pruitt stepping down, in part because of the multipronged revelations. It was the daily heat of the newspaper as an institution peppering his transgressions.

CORBETT: I think as a newspaper the investigative people are jumping in more on stories that are breaking, and trying to advance stories, as opposed to working in this very solo way on a project that they are pursuing independently. We are still doing plenty of those, but I think we really are trying also to have more quick-twitch muscles.

What can investigative reporters bring to a project? What skills and tools do they have that they can jump in and add?

CORBETT: Most of them are really good at documents: what to pursue, how to interpret them and how to build a case through them. Some people are extraordinarily good at being extraordinarily tenacious. Many reporters are capable of doing that, but we hope that those on our investigative team are particularly skilled at that.