Debra Kamen

I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times.

What I do is I look at the people running the real estate industry, who for so many years have been relatively invisible.

And the more that I look into it, the more that I find there are people in the real estate industry operating unethically.

And their unethical behavior affects every single American.

At The New York Times, we're always looking a little bit deeper to help readers better understand the world.

You can subscribe to The New York Times at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

I'm Debra Kamen.

I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times.

This one time, I was working on a particularly difficult investigation of the bad behavior in the real estate industry.

I was in a meeting with my editor, and she said, Debra, why is your face so white?

And I just told her the truth.

I said, you know, this story is really hard.

And she looked at me and said, that's what we do.

I think about that all the time.

At The New York Times, I have never encountered someone who said to me, that's too ambitious or that story is too hard.

It's the contrary.

I am told you need to dig deeper.

You need to keep going until we make sure we have every single fact, every single layer to tell the stories that would not be told because they are hard.

And that's what's special about The New York Times.

It allows our readers to understand not just what's happening, but why it's happening.