I describe myself as professionally nosy, which is mostly a joke… mostly.

I really do want to know. I want to know why someone made that decision, what happened before they got angry, what somebody meant when they said, “it’s a long story,” and what I might be missing when the answer seems a little too simple.

I think that eagerness to know more is what makes me good at reporting.

But the longer I do this job, the more I realize curiosity is about more than asking questions. Sometimes it means resisting the urge to decide what the answer is too soon.

People are rarely as simple as we want them to be.

Someone can be wrong about part of an issue and still be asking the right question. Someone can communicate poorly and still have something worth hearing. An official can genuinely believe a decision is good for the community and still deserve tough questions about how and why it was made.

Two things can be true. Usually, many more than two things are.

I see this especially in contentious conversations, where it is easy to dismiss the message because we don’t like the messenger. Someone is too angry, too political, too loud or wrong about one detail, and suddenly nothing they say has value.

People also carry whole lives into these conversations. Their reactions are shaped by what they have experienced before I get to meet them: promises kept or broken, institutions they trust or don’t, times they were heard and times they weren’t.

That doesn’t make every conclusion right. Facts still matter. Verification still matters. But understanding where someone is coming from doesn’t require me to agree with where they landed.

I try to bring that same curiosity into interviews. I want to be the kind of reporter people want to keep talking to, not because I’m trying to squeeze out one more quote, but because I genuinely care about what they have to say.

Some of my favorite moments happen after I think the question has already been answered and we keep talking. We might get a little off topic. We share some personal anecdotes. So often, that’s when I hear the nugget that changes how I understand everything else.

Curiosity doesn’t mean believing everything I hear. Sometimes the next question is, “How do you know that?” And that’s what attributions are for. Quoting isn’t endorsing or agreeing.

And sometimes my first instinct turns out to be right. I just want to get there because the reporting took me there, not because I wrote the ending in my head and spent the rest of my time looking for pieces that fit.

Eventually, every article needs a closer… I just don’t want to write it too soon.