Old-Fashioned Reporting Still Number One?

Anne Hull - image courtesy of asne.org

2008 Elijah Parish Lovely Award recipient Anne Hull, a Washington Post reporter honored for courageous journalism, delivered a convocation address at Colby College several weeks ago. In her address, Hull retells the story of her experiences documenting the Department of Labor’s guest-worker program and exposing maltreatment within the gates of Walter Reed. Her speech is powerful and her message certainly compelling, but there’s a small part of her argument with which I do not agree. Discussing the decline of truly intrepid exposé reporting, Hull belittles the rise of a “caffeinated society of bloggers…filing dispatches from a TMobile spot at Starbucks.” Citizen journalism may not necessarily take as much effort as what Hull calls “committed” and “invested” reporting, but Hull is greatly underestimating the kind of access that anonymous bloggers can get and generalizing all bloggers into one unaccomplished category. Perhaps it is that major stories can be broken more easily now and some feel that bloggers don’t have to pay their dues. Sensationalism of new media is also a threat (read about a student using Twitter to escape jail), and maybe we are better off with what Hull cringes to call “old-fashioned reporting.”