I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima cover to cover tonight. It perfectly exemplifies what good journalism should be: a total immersion in the subject, full of detail, and presenting facts as necessary ingrediants of the main story, not sprinkled on top as a forced seasoning like so many writers mistakingly do. This century needs this kind of writing just as much as the previous one did; but Hersey wrote about Hiroshima by going to Hiroshima, not by reading about it on Wikipedia. Without the funds to travel, to spend weeks or months absorbed in a single topic, rather than quickly churning out story after story in an increasingly hopeless attempt to raise advertising revenue, journalists will adjust to these ever-lower standards, and quality will be the first victim. And maybe the next time a bomb is dropped, the world may twitter about it, but will anyone actually take the time to examine just how and why it happened?

I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima cover to cover tonight. It perfectly exemplifies what good journalism should be: a total immersion in the subject, full of detail, and presenting facts as necessary ingrediants of the main story, not sprinkled on top as a forced seasoning like so many writers mistakingly do.

This century needs this kind of writing just as much as the previous one did; but Hersey wrote about Hiroshima by going to Hiroshima, not by reading about it on Wikipedia. Without the funds to travel, to spend weeks or months absorbed in a single topic, rather than quickly churning out story after story in an increasingly hopeless attempt to raise advertising revenue, journalists will adjust to these ever-lower standards, and quality will be the first victim.

And maybe the next time a bomb is dropped, the world may twitter about it, but will anyone actually take the time to examine just how and why it happened?