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You know Madison, I have to say -- I was joking with some old friends of mine and I said my favorite years
in journalism happened at the Daily Cardinal when I was a student here at the University of Wisconsin.
It was one of those moments where you really kind of just have to embrace what journalism is all about.
There weren't a lot of rules.
You could've made the rules as you went along, but you learned how to do journalism and the day to day challenge
of putting out a newspaper every morning.
I look back on those days incredibly with a lot of nostalgia, with a lot of fondness,
and I think in a more serious fashion I kind of learned how to be a reporter in those days of the Daily Cardinal -
that sense of being critical, of being a little bit skeptical
of what you're hearing and never taking things at face value.
These are things that I think a lot of people don't learn.
The Cardinal made it possible for us to get that sense of things.
I almost look at that from a couple of perspectives and the first perspective was it rigorous.
It was a rigorous education.
You went into a class, you learned about things.
Not just the trade, not just the craft of what journalism's about, but the ethics behind it,
the philosophy behind it, the history of it.
It felt like I came out as a well-rounded journalist in a lot of respects.
The other great thing about Madison, though,
was how many opportunities there were for young journalists to actually write.
You had, of course, two student newspapers.
I had an internship at the weekly, I was able to do some freelancing
for the Milwaukee Journal back then before I joined the Sentinel.
When I came out of college I had a folder full of clippings
and then probably the culmination was all this is a professor helped me get a job at the Associated Press right
out of college, so in a lot of ways I think I owe everything at least in the early part of my career to the university.
I think it's two things.
One is language.
You know, when I first started as I went abroad as a foreign correspondent and was 25 years old,
and I had Arabic at the time, it was essential.
Well, I don't want to say it was essential.
It was important.
I think these days language is essential.
I think it's hard if you're thinking about being a foreign correspondent not to have that language is going
to be, is doing a real disservice to you.
I think the other thing that I find, I think, with younger journalists at least is there's such a focus
on being a journalist that maybe some of the younger journalists are losing perspective on the other things
that make great stories, and that's history.
That's, of course, language like I already mentioned, a sense of a place, of travel, of experience.
I think all these things when they're rounded together create better reportage, create a better story,
create better journalism, and I think some people have forsaken that for the ambition
of just becoming a journalist first and foremost.
You know I had this incredible weekend in March where - pardon me - in April where on a Friday night I heard
that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for a second time.
Six hours later my wife went into labor.
My editor at the time said I'm one of those few people
who can say the Pulitzer Prize was the second best news he got in the span of a couple days.
It was true.
My son was born on April 10th and the Pulitzer was announced officially on April twelfth.
You know, I think journalism is one of those things where there aren't a lot of rules, where we kind of have to -
there's an honor code in some ways - and I think this notion of ethics, this notion of creating some kind of, you know,
body of rules in which we can, you know, not regulate the profession, I don't want to say necessarily,
but at least provide some kind of institutional grounding for what we do as journalists is incredibly important.
I think just in my time as a journalist over the past 20 years I've seen the standards decline pretty markedly -
pretty remarkably, in fact, and I think especially when you look at foreign correspondents
where there have been stories that aren't grounded in reality.
Today more of that sense of academia and the professional side of journalism can intersect -
can work together to create something a little bit more ambitious.
I think it's becoming ever more important.
I tell you, I've always thought that one thing I'd like to do after or even while I'm working
as a professional journalist, is to teach and to work with students.
I think, you know, it's again, journalism is so much experience and to get to share those experiences,
to get to talk about those experiences, to try to see the next generation of journalists come
up - I think that's always a real pleasure.