Q&A: ProPublica’s Max Blau on bridging investigation and narrative, live at University of Georgia

The SLR Podcast hit the road (somewhat virtually) for the first time this summer. SLR co-founder Jacob Feldman spoke to ProPublica’s Max Blau at the University of Georgia in partnership with the school’s MFA program in narrative nonfiction, of which Max is an alumni. 

Jacob talked to Max about his 2024 ProPublica piece “I Don’t Want to Die”: Needing Mental Health Care, He Got Trapped in His Insurer’s Ghost Network, which combines hard-nose investigative journalism with cinematic narrative writing, an effort that made Max a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. Max discussed the writing process, the creativity required when trying to acquire documents, as well as his personal connection to the story. He also answered the students’ insightful questions. 

The following highlights, taken from that conversation, have been edited for brevity and clarity. 

The full version of this podcast episode is out now! You can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jacob Feldman: Do you feel like shoe-leather, record-digging, source-finding, investigative reporting, and the more artistic form of narrative storytelling are two different skills? Or in what ways do you find that they intertwine?

In some ways they’re separate. I think in some ways they’re very similar. In this story with Ravi [Coutinho, the subject of the 2024 piece], to tell the story as a narrative required a set of investigative reporting skills that were similar in nature, but getting the records for the calls at the top of the story, that took a lot of time and a bit of luck. To reconstruct Ravi’s time in a story like that, you need to be creative, think how you’re going to get the records, what questions you’re trying to answer, and then actually get the data or the documents themselves.

Can you walk us through how you found the story?

In late 2023, my editor told me that for the upcoming year, ProPublica was going to be putting together a small team of reporters to investigate mental health care in America, which is a massive topic and mental health and addiction have been topics that I’ve cared about deeply. I’ve written about them during my career, and thought I could bring value and new insight to the kind of work that ProPublica is doing and not just because of my past work. One of the reasons I care about those topics is because of the way it’s impacted my parents and my family; it has a deep personal connection to me and it is among the reasons why I’m a journalist in the first place. In January of 2024, I was chosen for this project, and our editors took it from “Yes, we’re going to cover all of mental health” to actually “We want to focus on mental health and insurance.” I never covered insurance before, aside from Medicaid as a program, but not about payment denials or things of that nature. I did a lot of research. I was consuming everything, from 60 Minutes segments on mental health and insurance to trade publications to see what are some of the new things we could say about the ways in which insurance companies are using their practices as a business to stop people from getting the care that they think they should get. 

I had a call with an attorney named D. Brian Hufford. When you are looking for lawyers in this space, he’s one of the first people you run into. At the end of a conversation, he mentioned that there’s one person that he thought we should chat with, and that person was a woman named Barbara Webber who ended up being Ravi’s mom.

The thing that stuck with me is the way you are able to include Ravi’s voice, personality, sense of character, without obviously getting the chance to speak with him. One section jumped out to me: 

He wanted to save his business, which sold dream vacations to golfers eager to play the world’s legendary courses. He wanted to fall in love again, even have a kid. He couldn’t do that when he was drinking a fifth of a gallon of liquor — the equivalent of nearly 17 shots — on any given day.

You have a lot of details about his life that could be told in a straight news format, but instead you’ve turned it into a character-driven story. What was that process like for you? And is that something you’ve had experience with? 

Over 10 years ago, I published a story about a songwriter named Jason Molina who struggled with addiction and then ultimately died. And that story was built on interviews he had done over time, but then all his different bandmates, people that knew him in different eras, and then records as well. With this one, there were fewer people that knew Ravi. I believe that in writing narrative stories, proximity is power: the closer you can get to someone, the better and more visceral or real it’s going to be. This could not have happened without Barbara’s help, understanding of what we were trying to do together in writing the story, but she was someone who gave me his and her phone logs. So I had the day-to-day number of calls each were making and the time of how long they spent on the call, which was just like digits. So then I had to go and look up every single person Ravi was calling over a six-month period to see if this was an Ambetter person or if it was a friend. Was he calling CVS? I spent a lot of time reconstructing his phone blog based on the phone numbers. 

You have mentioned that there is a personal component to mental health. Are you comfortable speaking more about that and how that played into your coverage here? 

Yeah, I grew up in a family that has struggled with alcohol addiction and some drug addiction. For most of my life, my mom and I didn’t chat or didn’t have a relationship. She was sober from 18 to her mid 30s, and when I was 6, she relapsed and struggled with mental health and addiction issues, illnesses, and ultimately lost custody of me. In this program, one of the things that’s part of my body of work, but has not been published, is a piece about how addiction can pull us apart and then bring us back together. And so the story kind of looks at that experience, and someday I will hopefully publish that. I’ve had that experience, but it’s also my aunts and uncles. I’ve lost a cousin to an opioid overdose. I think a lot of why I became a health care reporter in the first place has to do with not having an education about the science or the risks that came with addiction. My dad explained it to me as a coin toss and it was as simple as that. Over time, through work, I started to dig into the science of addiction, the systems that shape barriers to care, and in some ways, the Ravi story is a continuation of that work.

Compiled by Étienne Lajoie. Photos by Sarah Freeman.