Bob Woodward, speaking on Tuesday March 15 at Poynter Institute, approached the topics of good journalism and the present digital media world.

From his words, good, old journalism skills still seem to remain the basis in the Internet journalism age.
The Web gives the feeling that information is completely available and can be spread all over, but in the digital age, prepared and accuracy-focused reporters are needed to provide the high quality, probing journalism the world requires. Technology in and of itself is nothing without good journalists seeking out truth and looking for the hidden information that always exists.

"Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn't have a Facebook account. He wouldn't have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk. And the information was not on the Internet. You talk to college students and they say, 'Instead of two years before Nixon resigned it would have happened in a week.' And I say, why? And they say, 'Because, people would have gone to the Internet and found it.' But I say, 'It wasn't there. Even if there was an Internet, the information would not be available,'" Woodward said.

Gaining access to the good sources and being able to get the best from them by building a trusting relationship still requires the same journalistic competence as ever. "You get the truth at night, the lies during the day. You gather pieces of data and try to get the whole story, and then once you have information, the power is in the information," he said. Having the good sources is not enough; reporters need to verify what's off the record and to always go deeper, trying finding out more about what we don't know.

Moreover, political bias has to be avoided. Woodward has seen true beliefs from the left, the right, and the center, and declared, "sometimes true belief gets in the way of facts." He added that if he were teaching a class in journalism, he would teach empiricism.

However, empiricism can't go without professionalism. When talking about the O'Keefe's "entrapment journalism," he said it wasn't the highest form of journalism not only because there exists a legal basis against it, but also because of the moral basis that reporters want to represent who they are and get their news cleanly.

As example, he reported, "In the Watergate investigation, Carl Bernstein and I went to talk to grand jurors. We had legal advice saying we could do it. It was very risky. It's something I'm not sure I'd do all the time, but when you're convinced the system of justice has collapsed, I think you have to be very aggressive. But we didn't say we were from the U.S. attorney's office. We identified ourselves as Washington Post reporters -- and we got nothing from the grand jurors."

On the subject of Wikileaks, he said, "I think some of that information is important, but it's oversold. It's not a deep revelation about high-level decision making, but it's got some good stuff in it. ... To The New York Times' credit, I think they persuaded WikiLeaks to not just dump everything out but to vet it and see if it was going to do damage, get people killed."

Source and image source: Poynter