Innovation in College Media

John W. Allman, a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, is an alumnus of Emory & Henry. This past weekend, he spoke at a Mass Communications Weekend banquet. His remarks are a great reminder of why journalism remains important, and I asked if I could share them with our audience.

Allman has twice been nominated for Pulitzers, and does investigative work for the Tribune. You can read some of his stories via this Google Search (the Tampa paper's site search function is iffy, to put it nicely).

Read his remarks below the fold.

Thank you, Dr. Keller, for inviting me back after so many years to a place that I love dearly. Fortunately for me, there’s been enough turnover up on the hill that they don’t know me like they did back in 1992 or else I might not have been allowed back on campus - but more on that in a minute.

It’s an honor and a privilege to be here tonight to speak to you about journalism and about what being a journalist in the 21st century is like. I hope to enlighten you. But I’m sure I will scare you as well.

But that’s ok too.

The truth is that each of you has the ability to help set the course of
mass media in this new century.

We stand at a crossroads of change.

A change in how the news is reported – The traditional nightly newscast and morning newspaper are no longer the first choice of viewers and readers. The Internet has opened the door to 24-hour nonstop coverage. More people read news websites than buy newspapers. Many prefer to catch a ticker tape scroll of headlines instead of sitting through an entire newscast. And bloggers now compete with legitimate media outlets, reporting from their couch about events they never witnessed, gathering facts from sources that often cannot be confirmed.

And a fundamental change in what constitutes news itself.

Celebrity gossip is rampant and out of control. Pertinent stories are losing priority to live courtroom feeds about paternity tests for Anna Nicole Smith’s baby or Britney Spears latest shaved-head rehab woes.

Too much of what is considered news today is simply hyperbole. Opinionists – not journalists – now dictate the discourse of our nation, drowning out sound reason and irrefutable fact by sheer force of volume. We are seeing more and more national news being generated, not reported, by people like Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck, pundits who have become emboldened to the point [that] they can get away with disaparaging presidential hopefuls by using hate-filled slurs or racist musings in an attempt to challenge a candidate’s credibility.

Meanwhile, relevant questions about timely topics such as the justification for going to war in Iraq are dismissed or, worse, branded as un-patriotic. Investigative exposes about secret wiretappings are likened to treason. And inquiries into the recent firing of a handful of U.S. Attorneys is condemned as partisan politics.

Mass media is not the profession today that it was fourteen years ago when I graduated. It is a harsh landscape of bottom lines and budgets, of Nielsen ratings and rack sales. More and more newsroom jobs are not being filled in the name of belt-tightening, which means more and more important stories are being left untold.

Imagine if Ben Bradlee had been faced with paring down The Washington Post’s newsroom. What if he had decided that he didn’t need two young reporters assigned to a complicated government story that no one initially understood.

Worse, imagine if a focus group had conducted a reader survey and determined that Watergate was too difficult for suburban soccer moms to comprehend.

What if, because of fear of exposure from multiple local and national news outlets, Deep Throat had never surfaced? Or if Mark Felt had gone public only to have his story refuted and his reputation impugned by Bill O’Reilly for daring to cast doubt on the president of the United States?

Would Nixon still have been held accountable? Or would public opinion have been so tainted that no one cared, allowing criminal activities to go unpunished and leaving the trust of a nation in disrepair.

Scary, scary stuff – but yet similar things are happening right now.

We live in a world where people are being conditioned not to question authority. We are being shown that to speak out is to invite personal attack. Do you think Joe Wilson ever in a million years expected his criticism of the current administration to compel someone to reveal his wife’s identity, jeopardizing her safety and ruining her career?

That should never happen – and we, as journalists, should always make sure that when it does, someone is held accountable. It doesn’t just mean at the highest offices of power. We have a responsibility to shine a light at any and all positions of authority, especially when problems are alleged.

For the past eight months, I was assigned to cover a complicated story about a state transportation agency whose executive administration, paid lobbyists and appointed board appeared to have violated state law, misspent millions in toll road dollars and operated with no oversight.

Myself and a colleague spent months pouring over public documents, reading phone records, billing invoices, meeting minutes and more. Our work prompted two state investigations and and a federal probe by the FBI. The agency’s board chairman stepped down. Its lobbyist was fired. Nearly every facet of the agency’s operation is currently under review because of more than 40 stories that we wrote starting in August.

But nothing could prepare us for what we discovered about the executive director: For years, he had owned and operated a pornographic production company in California.

The company specialized in videos and photographs of barely-legal boys reportedly being filmed hours after their 18th birthdays. And even more – the company had failed per a federal statute to maintain records at a public location, available for random inspection, that showed the legal age of each person engaging in hardcore sexual activity.

The executive quit within an hour of our story being published and fled the city. My newspaper put me on a plane to San Diego to investigate the fake address listed in federal filings as its record-keeping headquarters.

Some people complained. They said it didn’t matter, that this wasn’t news. They called me homophobic and questioned my motive for aggressively pursuing the story.

Was it news? Yes. Absolutely. Was it still difficult to write? Yes.

Why? Because we wield amazing power and we must be cognizant of that at all times. We can tip the balance of public opinion with just a paragraph. And with that power comes a responsibility that sometimes even the best journalist can forget.

In 1997, I was asked to help out with an investigative project about a long-running religious revival in Pensacola, Florida, that appeared to be a sham. The men in charge of the revival – a minister, an evangelist and a theologian – were making millions off the scores of people from around the world who flocked daily to this tiny church to see for themselves the presence of God.

I spent almost two years investigating that revival. I traveled across the country, following these men as they took to the road, holding extravagant celebrations where they sold thousands of copies of their autobiographies, lecture DVDs and more.

I read their stories. I visited their hometowns. I interviewed every person quoted in their books that I could find. Many of the stories were, in fact, lies. Specific facts could not be substantiated. Specific events described in great detail had never even occurred.

I became a hated man. One of the evangelists stood on stage one night in front of nearly 3,000 fervent followers and called me out by name as the anti-christ. He said that God did not condone murder, but God would reward anyone faithful enough to strike down a demon in disguise.

Other newspapers lauded the church. Primetime news magazines praised its ability to convert so many people to Christ. Some took shots at my reporting, questioning why a small north Florida newspaper had it out to ruin such a wonderful religious event.

I knew in my heart I was right, that these men were not acting in the name of the Lord. But that didn’t stop me from questioning myself on an almost daily basis. What if I was wrong?

It wasn’t until near the end of the second year of writing about the revival that I felt vindicated. The church had started selling a new line of DVDs that spoke about the power to raise the dead. They used examples that could not be verified. They quoted a missionary in Mexico who said he had this power, but he could not be found.

One person did believe them, however. A devoutly religious father in northeast Florida whose baby girl died of complications just six weeks after being born. He took her body from the local morgue, packed her tiny frame in a cooler and drove nine hours across the state to the steps of the church where he asked them to pray for his baby to raise her from the dead. The evangelists spent several hours praying over the cooler, unsure what else to do. Finally, they sent the man away, told him he was to blame, that his faith was weak.

I heard this from a church worker who had read all my stories and had begun to doubt what he was seeing. He gave me nothing but the age of the baby girl. I scoured obituaries from every paper in Florida - thousands of death notices - until I found her. And then I made that nine-hour drive, I ended up on that father’s front steps and then I went back to those church leaders and asked them how they could justify what they had done.

I told his story, and it remains one of the best I’ve ever written.

I worry that too few journalists are willing to take such steps today, to spend the time needed for research, to battle discouragement when leads run dry and to finally get to ask these tough questions – of themselves and of the people they are writing about. I worry that too few can handle the criticism. That they fear making a mistake. Or that they doubt, as an individual, that they can make a difference.

I’m here to tell you that this is not the case. We need young voices now more than ever. We need new blood, new writers and reporters who are fearless and want to make a change. We need journalists who can uphold the example set by Edward R. Murrow, Molly Ivins, Daniel Pearl, Hunter S. Thompson – journalists who didn’t care what people said about them, who refused to accept ‘no comment,’ who would not allow those in
authority to skirt accountability.

You can make a difference. And I hope that you will. And when, not if, when you encounter self-doubt, that nagging fear of whether one good reporter can overcome all the craziness that passes today for news, please don’t quit.

I joked earlier about being allowed back on campus. And I’d like to leave you with this one last story. It’s about dealing with the hurdles you will encounter. And I learned these lessons before my career even began, I learned them right here.

My freshman year I wrote a story in the Whitetopper that quoted an athletic coach saying terrible things about members of his team. I quoted the coach verbatim. First, he threatened to sue me for libel. Then he stripped me of a scholarship.

My sophomore year I wrote about a young gay student on campus who felt he was being discriminated against. When I interviewed this student, others overheard our conversation. They formed a small mob and stood outside a study carrel in the library, waiting for us to leave. I included that incident verbatim in my story. I quoted their threats and described each one of them in detail. For weeks, I walked around
worried, expecting retaliation at every turn.

My senior year, I wrote a series of columns highly critical of the college administration. The student body was abuzz. I got a phone call from my faculty advisor. He said he had just left a meeting where it was decided if I wrote one more column, I would be kicked out of school. My words were hitting too close to home, he said.

Three pretty significant events in four short years that helped define the reporter I would become.

Three things you can expect to have happen to you at least once, if not more, during your own career. Some sources won’t just threaten to sue you, they will take legal action. Others may attack you personally. Some may even threaten you physically with harm. Officials will try to block your questions, refusing access to records that you are allowed by law to see. They may talk to your boss to dissuade further coverage.

I could have not written those stories. I could have chosen not to quote a coach, whom I happened to like, saying things I knew he would regret. But that was what he said, on the record, in an interview, and I had a responsibility to let people know.

I could have not described that handful of students making hateful threats, but I chose to expose prejudice instead of shield it, because maybe in doing so change might occur.

I could have stuck with columns about student life and not criticized college officials whom I felt were in the wrong.

I could have quit journalism, and I did consider it, but I am so thankful that I did not. And I pray none of you will either, especially when the going gets tough.

Being a journalist today isn’t an easy job, but we need young fearless voices now more than ever because the fight to report the truth is far from done.