They debated just how to approach the story, and decided to lead on the EPA’s appalling testing record. Kissinger assumed lead writing position at the computer keyboard, while Spivak paced and Rust rolled back and forth on her chair as they hashed out a narrative together. “Meg would start writing something, and I’d say, no, that’s not quite right. And then I would say something out loud and she would write it down, and Cary might say, but that’s too strong, and then we would sort of retype it,” Rust says. “So it was really a product of the three of us just sitting there and thinking about every line that was put down. And then Meg would go home at night and try to smooth it out.”

Much of the discussion centered on whether the story they were telling was balanced. Occasionally during the hours-long sessions infused with coffee and chewing gum, Spivak would throw a dart at a picture of the entire Journal Sentinel watchdog team tacked to a board against the wall. It helped relieve stress, he says. According to Kissinger:

Cary [in particular] with his background in business reporting, was, I think, very concerned that we don’t oversell this and that the chemical industry has a voice in this story. [He was] throwing up stop signs to say, wait a minute, it’s not a slam-dunk case… Until it’s proved to be bad, this stuff is legitimately in the marketplace.

On September 18, the team sent their draft to Katches. They knew that the story had some weaknesses. “I was worried that it was a little egg-heady—I didn’t know if the average Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reader would find that [intellectual approach] sexy,” Kissinger concedes.  Overall though, the three journalists were excited by the two-pronged article—about endocrine disruptors and lax EPA testing—that they had produced. “We were proud of ourselves. We felt like we had a pretty compelling story about these dangers and the fact that the government hadn’t done anything,” Kissinger says. Adds Rust:

I thought it was a really great story. I mean, a lot of people had written about these chemicals, a lot of newspapers, a lot of magazines. This one though seemed to me the most comprehensive and thorough. It had all the history about what the government had been doing about it, all the history of how scientists have come to this.

But, as the team would soon find out, not everyone felt that “comprehensive” should be the only goal.