This is exactly right.

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You know, everyone who she'd ever insulted in her paper became a suspect.

That's a long list.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the co-hosts of podcast, Buried Bones on Exactly Right,

and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world.

On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way,

amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and

reported on notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad,

and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. When an outspoken journalist in

India was assassinated in September of 2017,

it shocked the world. The conspiracy that was uncovered by journalists and investigators was

disturbing. Author Ralo Romig tells me the story at the center of his book, I am on the hit list.

When you pitch this to New York Times Magazine,

what was your one paragraph pitch? I mean, how do you summarize the story of a female journalist,

who of course we've read about all over the world, female journalists being murdered,

and usually for political reasons? But how do you pitch this to the New York Times magazine where they say, oh, okay, our readers will read this story? Yeah. And, you know, it can be a little

tough to get people to read stories that happen outside of their own country, you know? It can be a little bit of a

tough sell. There's, you know, just a lot that needs to be explained. There's a lot you need to get caught up on. I had to

learn a lot about India, you know, when I started going there before I could even kind of begin to

...