>Uncovering Misery at Walter Reed (AJR)
(Via Romenesko)
Interesting interview with Dana Priest and Anne Hull about their work on The Other Walter Reed. Particularly:

Q: I’ve heard people in grocery stores and my local coffee shop talking about this story, which does not happen very often. Is this a reaffirmation of the power of newspaper journalism?
Hull: Well, you know, people are still reading newspapers and they’re still reading long stories in the newspaper and actually they’re still reading long stories on the Web, and that’s a good thing for people who care about telling stories … And hopefully this will be some kind of subtle message to other newsrooms that if you can spare the time and the resources to turn a reporter loose for a good bit of time, then something good might happen.

As I’ve sort of said before, I’m not so sure TOWR should be viewed as an affirmation of newspaper journalism, with all the public trust, higher calling ideology that implies. It’s just great journalism, period. The sooner newspaper people start disassociating the good work they do from the dead trees they’re so used to seeing it on, the better.

And Hull is right on that reporters should be turned loose, though in addition to freeing up their time, I’ll go ahead and suggest that we should be turned loose in other ways. Topically, for example. Trust smart people to manage their own time and priorities, and they’ll give you smart work like TOWR.

But I don’t exactly agree that it’s a matter of whether newsrooms “can spare the time and the resources to turn a reporter loose.” What, like we need to keep up this current pace of accounts of non-fatal house fires, non-productive government meetings and all the other non-interesting micro-news topics?

Which is not to say that stuff shouldn’t be available in our pages or on our servers. In fact, we need more of it. Except we don’t need to be the ones who do it. Let’s free ourselves up to do all the enterprising, investigative stuff we’re supposed to be so good at.