WSJ journalist John Carreyrou shares year-long Theranos investigation [video] | Hacker News Reader

WSJ journalist John Carreyrou shares year-long Theranos investigation [video]

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43 pointsbakztfuture11 comments

I really liked the point made about how Carreyrou being an NYC-based investigative journalist (with a focus on healthcare, not tech) who is largely disconnected from SV has enabled him to approach this story in a way that SV tech journalists would be afraid to, because it could jeopardize their careers.

Carreyrou was part of a WSJ/NYT team that received a Pulitzer last year[0] for a series of pieces on Medicare billing[1]. That's one of the reasons why I'm surprised some prominent Valley personalities didn't take his articles more seriously from the beginning[2,3] - he's not some two-bit tech blogger with an axe to grind. There's a world of difference between investigative journalists, like Carreyrou or Bob Woodward, and tech bloggers like Michael Arrington or Sarah Lacy.

0: http://www.poynter.org/2015/for-the-wall-street-journal-a-pu...

1: http://graphics.wsj.com/medicare-billing/

2: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/early-ther...

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzI763-NPug

> There's a world of difference between investigative journalists, like Carreyrou or Bob Woodward, and tech bloggers like Michael Arrington or Sarah Lacy.

Or, for that matter, Jason Calacanis. It was really uncomfortable watching parts of the video where Jason would go off on speculative tangents and John Carreyrou would have to bring things back to statements supported by facts.

Jason's a personality and pundit, that's sort of his job, much like objective and sourced facts is Carreyrou's job.

Bob Woodward is not an investigative journalist these days. He's long morphed into a vanilla establishment insider. Why would you bring him up, of all people?

>Why would you bring him up, of all people?

That's really rude. You know why he brought him up - he's one of the most famous investigative journalists. I'm sorry you're offended and that you don't consider his current work to be investigative enough.

I stand by my comment. I'm sorry if it sounds rude, but Woodward really is not an investigative journalist today and has not been for more than a decade (to be generous). It is an insult to the profession to put him in that category, and I'd argue that most investigative journalists today look at him as the person not to become. Hence my surprise. He could have named Bernstein, or Hersh, or a thousand others who did not become vanilla political insiders as soon as they could.

It's like saying "great kernel hackers like Bill Gates", when he has not written a line of code in 20 years. I would find that association really curious, wouldn't you?

But he really isn't. Woodward isn't remotely near the outsider status he had in the 1970s. Its hardly "rude" by any standard.

FWIW Carreyou and his WSJ colleagues were awarded the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting last year for a project on Medicare fraud:

http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7226

The work they published to win the award was great, but he'd been fighting that fight for many years...and his dogged pursuit led to the CMS agreeing to publish the reimubrsement data in full, for the first time ever:

https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...

If you're interested in what the data contains, it's only a couple of GB as a flat table, but contains Medicare reimbursements for every doctor, for every type of reimbursed procedure, which allows for a lot of interesting analysis about healthcare in general...I wrote up a walkthrough that explains how Carreyou arrived at his numbers for the lead story in the investigation: http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj-medi...

I've never met him or asked him how he did his work...but it underscores what a great thing he and the WSJ managed to accomplish: producing an important investigative story and pushing for the release of the data so that anyone else could reproduce it.

I thought this was a great conversation. There right about the strangest part of all of this is the CEO mixing it up on Twitter while the company is obviously suffering from some serious issues.

Any TL;DR?

It’s recap of all the news & revelations on Theranos till Walgreen’s shutting down its Theranos Wellness Center (i.e., till yesterday).

John Carreyrou just summarizes the events in chronological order through his answers to the interviewers questions.

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