The Making of Lost Empire

The goal was to go through these documents, do some key interviews, and then write a series of stories on the history of Reynolds Tobacco. Ideally, everything would be back to normal by Christmas 1998.

Here we are, almost 18 months from when we began with the first of what will be more than two months of daily stories on R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

What happened?

The simple answer is: Good stories, like 500-pound gorillas, go where they will. The reporters realized pretty quickly that it would take more time to tell this epic story in the way it demanded to be told.

As with most good stories, this one is about people. It is about those who inhabited the inner sanctum, who wrote the reports, who made the decisions that made RJR what it was and what it became. The reporting covered almost 50 years of RJR history -- a time of hope and optimism that faded as the medical case against smoking closed, ushering in tougher times for RJR here and abroad.

The reporters on Lost Empire were Frank Tursi, the newspaper's projects and science reporter; Steve McQuilkin, a business reporter who covered tobacco; and Susan E. White, a metro reporter who covers county government. The project editor was Ken Otterbourg, the Journal's metro editor.

Since May 1998, the reporters worked out of an office in the newspaper's basement. This project was as much a task of managing information as a reporting and writing job. A new computer system was installed in the basement to allow the tobacco team to handle the more than 700 computer files of information compiled for this series.

The reporters interviewed more than 100 people in a dozen states and the District of Columbia and transcribed more than 165 hours of interviews.

There is no shortage of documents about the tobacco industry. Many once-secret documents have been made public through court cases. Other industry documents used, including a wide-ranging report by RJR's outside attorneys in 1985, are still the subject of litigation and have never been written about.