i said, "come on. give me the name." i asked what letter it started with. they tell me i was out of my mind. i told them to cut the alphabet in half. he said, "no." a began going everywhere i could and everybody and threw me out of their offices. . .

about three hours later he called me at home. he said i think i have something. i said, what's the name? there is a anymore hawesen. i said, really. and they said they have this contract and five years ago they were almost bankrupt. i said we should call this man. and he said the name. i said you should call and

let's ask him about this. and he turned out to be the guy. and his denials were really quite amazing. he even said that he had jewish family and that's why he would never do this to his own people. but in fact he had done this. so mice and michael broke this story and bill wrote a column, the headline of which did say sent the germans into orbit and created this sensation and it was ultimately all true. the headline was auschwitz in the sand. >> how did it feel when you got that word eimhausen? >> it was indescribeable moment. and the second was when we sat down and played poker with them and absolutely bluffed them into this whole thing and went to this meeting. my friend michael gordon covered arms control and two

guys actually knew this and we sat down and said this is steve my colleague, he covers the c.i.a. and i looked at these two guys and said, we have the story, we know all about it. it's emhausen. in fact, all we had was the name. they said did you get a briefing from the c.i.a. about this? i said, i don't discuss my sources. i said nobody said anything about diplomacy. at that point they began to lay out in enormous detail things we knew nothing about. that was the moment where i thought, oh, my, this is really something. >> it can also be terrifying. i think all you guys would agree with that, there's that moment right before it goes to print or right after you've

been on the air and, i hope this is right. even if you have the most golden of sources there is a moment when it's absolutely terrifying. >> that moment came because people visualize washington as a place where leaks are handed to you so finally we get the story nailed down. i have the story sitting in a print out and i went to see a senior adviser. i said, look, we have the story. is in anything you would like to add? he said we're taking hands-off on this thing. then the germans started off by denying it and the state department wouldn't say anything. and we said you know this is true. they said you made this mess, you can get out of it. and i thought to myself are we sure? is this right? >> the title of this conversation tonight is in the spirit of david hall by stam. and i would like you to talk.

start by you are the managing editor of an organization that was created in a sense of desperation for investigative reporting buse a coup couple in california were willing to endow for at least three years, now more i think, investigative reporting because the perception was that it was genuinely in jepdi. and when the existence of this was announced and the call went out for people who might be interested, paul, the top editor, the former editor of the "wall street journal," i remember i was talking to him about it here, he said it's very discouraging because we're getting overwhelmed with applications from very, very good journalists in places like the los angeles times and it

was disprirting because they were prepared to leave jobs like those at the los angeles times to come to what is still something that may or may not survive for very long, we just don't know, but was certainly not the platform that the los angeles times at least had been. my question is, you are the probably top model of nonprofit journalism right now. what do you see in terms of the likelihood of the surviveability of this kind of reporting that you've done, you've spent your life at? >> first, investigative reporters are optimists. you have to believe that if you keep banging at this lock box it will contain something. so i'm an optimist. i think in the long long run investigative reporting will flourish because i think ultimately what we're seeing in

the revolution in the media business is that original, unique content is what people want. so i think there ultimately will be a commercial argument for finding things out that nobody else knows. and i certainly hope that's the case. but i think you can make a real commercial argument for it. so i think in the long run when we get through this ugly transition there's great hope. the period we're in right now is a very ugly one. >> is your prospective sort of choice of who you have the ability to hire if you had the money to hire still as overwhelming as it was when it was previously announced? >> it's a little less than it was and it's interesting why. in many arenas, we've got so many resumes for 18 jobs. >> but these are real jobs. the thing that mattered, that made it so appealing is that these were jobs paying a living

wage that were going to create a news room and going to be in new york and something that was genuinely for real. it was not a hopeful startup, it was something that was really going to be well funded, at least as long as the fuppeders didn't get mad. >> so far so good. i will say the one arena where it's changed a little bit and it is interesting and it does reflect a business model issue. when we were competing with reuters and "wall street journal" and bloomberg, all of which in different ways are very well funded, we're always the low offer by a mile and we still manage to get some people in the financial world. but i would say financial journalism is a little healthier, but that's because they have a different thing where they're charging companies for information as well as producing journalism. >> you're from the world of the

traditional media, commercial media, a for profit media, a media that is in many ways endangered, abc as a network might not be, abc news, who knows. i mean, i don't know. i'm asking you. when you are talking now, the david represented a beginning of a generational change. he's talked about the great tradition that he was sort of part of. but i would say that he and his generation sort of established a tradition, one that was willing to take on government in a way that had not been generally true of the commercial mainstream media in the past. and we're members of that succeeding generation and the folks and others here tonight are people that represent another generation. what do you think abc news has to say to a generation that's coming on? if they're interested in

careers in investigative reporting, for instance? >> first, abc news has an investigative unit, and that's great. one of the things the networks realize is if you don't, you're really not a real news organization. that really defines you. it helps define a news organization that they'll put that kind of money into investigative units. one of the things about, you all know well about investigative reporting, sometimes it doesn't pan out and you may have invested a whole lot of money and time into something that didn't happen. there was no villain, there was no one doing anything wrong or at least that's what you found out. i think everybody in journalism today is worried because we're in this incredible transition. as far as the -- and i can't

tell you how many younger people come up and say i want to be a foreign correspondent just like you. >> please have them call. >> yes, i will. and i love that the appeal is still there. i love that someone can look at what doy or what charlie does and say in all his young fabulous staff who i've run into overseas all the time and they always ask the best questions, because they live there, is they really know what to ask. but i think, to me, the networks offer, in all the white noise and in all the journalism that's out there, i think it's more difficult for people to figure out where to turn. maybe it's my generation, but i think it's difficult to figure out what's important. i mean, even if you go to the "new york times" on the internet, we, if we have the

paper in front of us, and i'm doing that less and less quite frankly and reading it more on the internet. but in the old days that story on the right is the most important story that you should read. and when i told my children growing up that all they had to do was read the first paragraph of every story except one on the front page and they had to read the whole thing, i tried, but that story on the right was the story that was the most important. i look at the internet at night and one hour it's this, the next hour it's that, the next hour it's that. so i worry about that for a generation that doesn't quite know what's important, doesn't quite know what the vegetables are and that there's so many choices. trust me, i go on our website and i'm reading about lindsey lohan, too. and i don't want to say that people don't. there's so many stories to tell and some are earn tainment, some are -- entertainment.

some are political, some are -- you need all of them. we have 8 million viewers every night and that's a pretty astonishing number still. that may have decreased dramatically as others increase, but we still have 8 million viewers. and i think what we can offer and that the networks are kind of the last that despite where what everybody says is we're horrible, i think it's the most objective news you can get and you can tune in and watch world news and you get 22 minutes of the day's news, and there are very few places you can go in that economy of time to get day's news. and that is what i hope we stay with. i know sometimes all the networks think we have to do a different model but i think to me the most attractive thing about what we do is present what happened on a daily basis on those programs.

i mean, we're scoring all kinds of this, we have this very cool i pad globe and you can find stories and archived stories and that. and that's great. look at that. but boy, if i miss the evening news, and i look at all of them just spinning through them, i think you're really missing out on being a citizen and you're not informing yourself. and i really worry about that. i worry about that there's a generation that doesn't know what the important stuff is. and that you're losing a professional class that has invested their lives in figuring out what the important stuff is. and that's not meant to sound arrogant that i know this is what you should read, but dwow this for a living and we try to interest people in what is important. >> you represent another model still, which is a startup model but is a for-profit and is

focused on news. there are a lot of web startups but there are very few that are as ambitious or serious minded as global post. talk about what the convictions and the optimism was that expired -- inspired and what it is now. >> so, global post starts as this split screen here in boston. i have been working at the boston globe. i've come off 06 of ten years as a foreign correspondent. i feel like i've reached that moment where this work really matters and it's that moment at which the boston globe pulls the plug on its foreign operation and decides they're no longer going to have any international news. i'm feeling very sad about this

great institution that i love. i know the people who made those decisions are sad, too. but something is going to have to be born out of this. so i begin to do, what a lot of journalists think, starting a not for profit. i don't have that business skill and i'm thinking i would love to get $30 million. i know i could pull the team together. where can i get the money? i start with a not for profit model. i am doing this while my four sons are pounding above me on the floor boards in my little basement office and i'm thinking, i can't leave the boston globe unless i really have funding. and i learn it's really hard to build a not for profit. it's very difficult. at just about the moment i'm approaching despair, i come see you and others who i was putting together a, an advisory

board and several mentioned i might want to talk to someone else here, and that was phil who is the founder of new england cable news. and really had a business plan of how he felt he could do this. and it made a lot of sense to me and he shared it with me. and i think he saw in me someone who had the contacts and the networks to build that team. we shared an editorial vision of what we wanted it to be. we were right in synch and he wanted me to come in as a cofounder. he had lined up a lot of the investment and we were able to go forward and do this startup. that was in 2008. i left the boston globe in st. patrick's day and we launched in january of 2009. we launched with zero traffic. we're now getting past the big

mile stone of 1 million uniques per month, which is how you do the metric on the web. so that's 1 million people every month come to our site. and there's a great engaged audience that's there. we have now about 65 correspondents on contract in about 50 countries. we have about 100 correspondents in total writing for us all the time and they're a mix of young people getting their first shot. they're mid-career veterans who find themselves kind of crashed on the rocks of the collapse of establishment journalism and they are also wonderful veterans who have been around a long time like david greenway writes a column for us. david is going to afghanistan for us this month.

that's 50 years of experience in david, we have some with 20 years, we have some with two years. but we have this team that's a little bit like herding cats. they're all over the place. but i think what binds them together is a sense of that tradition that david talked about. he was part of something that i'm sad to say no longer exists and that is the idea that you can start at a small paper in the deep south covering an important story on a local level, and then you get to the tennesseen and then you get your shot at the big paper. that's what i did. i covered hudson county, jersey city, then i finally got to the new york daily news, then i got lucky to go to the boston globe. that journey of going from one pape tore the next is largely over for the younger -- for the

students here who really want to take on this career. it's going to be a different path for you. and what we're trying to do is say we want to be about the next generation of foreign correspondents. we want to start a new kind of model and say here's a shot to go off to a country where you know you have some facility for the language and you need to live there. it's an absolute prerequisite of ours that you live in the place about which you write. because that's the only way you can really get at those stories. so we're trying to create something new that can replicate the experience that david had which was to get that moment that every foreign correspondent is waiting for, which is that intersection when history as he put it cata puts you to a moment when journalism matters. and you don't know when that's going to happen but i think that's the thing that everyone is out there looking for. and the more people we have in

the world trying to do that, the more eye balls we have in the world, i think the better we are as a country. and we need to start to build these new models because we can't let the great traditions of journalism die. we've got to start thinking about rebuilding. >> i know you want to talk about a particular story that just appeared that will help people understand what global post does. can we put up the visual of this. explain what we're looking at here. >> this is the story that we did actually last summer. and what we've been trying to do is to think about how we can stay with a story but also create an environment of understanding that takes you in depth. so this is a history of the taliban. this reflects -- i started covering the taliban in 1996 because the then foreign editor of the boston globe sent me and said, there's this new movement, they're called the taliban, go check them out.

a fantastic photograph started covering it at the same time and we've known each other a long time. but there was one story that neither broke that was inside this series and that was by gene mckenzie who is our kabul correspondent. gene and i were having lunch in kabul, a big n.g.o. hangout. this kind of swartsdzy guy walks past, gives her a hug and says that guy has a contract where they pay the taliban protection money. so i drop my fork and say, excuse me? yeah. she says everyone knows that. and i said, jean, no, they don't. check, please. we literally started reporting the story. and jean began to dig in on this story and she didn't break it perfectly. this was not sort of a spotlight boston globe six month investigation. but she got the first story out

that said u. aid gives hundreds of millions of dollars a years. when it gets to the subcontractor level, that's where their afghan contractors and those subcontractors are absolutely paying off the taliban for protection. it's a protection racket with a straight 20% off the contract. we begin to do the math on that. we begin to see we're talking about potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. certainly scores of millions of dollars. and we begin to think this is just a huge story. now, we don't at global post have all the resources we need to get that story. partnering with or getting more funding is what we need to think about to really get those kinds of stories. but we know we have the people in place who can find them. what we did is we got it fart enough downfield that u. aid --

far enough down field so that this came out last week. they spent one year on an audit. they gave us, that wasn't a call in the middle of the night that said, hey, the report's out. and we're giving it to you first. and it basically confirmed our reporting that the taliban is taking a 20% cut off of afghan subcontractors in afghanistan. one contract was $5 million that the taliban took. >> so we're paying the people who -- >> our tax dollars going to the taliban. that story really resonated. it got us on a lot of attention. and i think at global post we're trying to find the way that we can do those kind of stories now. and that's really become our focus i'm trying to go in now. we have the daily running. we can keep that daily machine going with great coverage done by people who know it. can we take it deeper? can we do the kind of stuff

that david loved to do. >> he was a professional journalist and he made a living, modest one when he got out of college, a living wage at the "new york times," then he left the times and began writing books and he made the rest of his career effectively as a book writer. a journalist who wrote books, big books, long books, and very highly regarded bookeds. my point is this. you've talked about a new model. the appeal was it paid a living wage. you've lived a life based on being paid in a way that allowed you to be a professional journalist. there is a lot of thought now that professional journalism may genuinely be an endangered content. is it important? >> first, yes, it is important. absolutely it is important.

i think that one of the things that we have -- the initial rush when the internet began destroying the business model side is people said it ain't going to be so bad because we'll have crowd sourcing. the crowd will investigate things. if the crowd were that good at reporting, they'd already be reporters. the crowd sourcing thing has been a great disappointment. i do believe that the future will bring us more stability. i think we can't overstate how much of a transitional period this is. just a couple of very quick facts. the -- when i worked in oregon, we were a newspaper that before the internet was gaining 50% of our revenue, half of our dollars from classified advertising. our business model with you very simple. what can be a better kind of

model. if you don't reich that, you can just not sell your car. and we were the only game in town. the effect that craig's list had just cannot be underestimated. now, down the road, we all know this decision in the journalism business to give away our content for free. got to be the dumbest idea. but we did it, now we're going to have to nall back. we'll see over the next few years that people will begin charging small amounts of money. what i'm saying is that the business will ultimately emerge in a way that we don't yet know, it will stabilize, and there will be living wages paid to find information because people want it. i think they'll pay for it. >> what about the talented amateurs, the people who come, who graduate from harvard and have a passion? i mean, that seems to be refreshed again and again. is that going to be enough? is there a real need for people

who send a kid to college and pay a mortgage from the profession of journalism? >> first, i don't think the media has done a particularly good job of letting the american public know that what we do is important. i really don't. and i hope you're right about everything you just said. because i think we have sort of stood back and been stunned by all the changes. there are a lot of really smart people working on trying to keep up but in effect the public doesn't understand the importance of journalism in many ways. and i always say you'll miss us when we're gone. and i'll talk to the young reporters here, too. there is to me a new model of business, i don't know if you know nick. he's a young journalist who free lances for a living. he's fantastic. and i first met nick in

pakistan and he moved to pakistan with his wife and they lived there for two years until they got thrown out because he had written something in the "new york times" that they did not like or so their visa's were revoked. so nick and his wife have managed to get a house, pay a mortgage, and -- i think it's a harder model than perhaps what i went through and i don't think any of us got in it for the money, but that steady job one place all the time. i think -- >> working for the man. >> yeah. is absolutely wonderful model. he loves what he is doing. he writes for the new york time magazine all the time. if you're a talent and a great journalist, you're going to do ok. >> i think this matters a great deal because if, and i do recall. i had a very similar -- i was

thinking i had a very similar career to david. afse copy boy, yes, i was one of the last copy boys in america. i went at age 22 covering school busing as a person who had just recently gotten out of high school by any definition. and i didn't have kids or a family, no idea what it was like to be an adult in our society and i was sitting there trying to interpret busing in the south to an entire community of people. i was way over my head. nothing wrong with it. i think young people do a great job. i put many young people into places where they were way over their head. but if nipses are only people who don't have families in theirerly 20s and have no idea, i think newspapers will be poorer for it. i think that's great. i was one of those guys but i don't think it's enough. >> but i also think the young

nicks are going to grow into that model as well. >> if they leave and nobody comes back, we really have a problem. >> we're seeing a pretty interesting model develop. if you see a young talented person, i'll give you one example. nickive's a really talented photograph and she's really well educated and can write. she can't write right out of the box the way someone who has been doing it for ten years or so can write but she has a gift as a photograph. she goes to turkey for us and begins to unpack that place, has an affinity for it, understands, begins to do it. she slowly starts sending back these photo essays that tells us things about turkey that's interesting. she starts doing int views. she's now getting readily good.

we had to pay her in a way that probably wasn't that different than what david made at that first newspaper where he made probably nothing and taking a big shot and trying to make his name. living is in jerusalem, i never owned a car in my life until the globe leased one. it was a generous way of telling you go out and cover the world the way the boston globe used to be able to afford it. it was the luckiest thing, the greatest job you could ever have to be working for a big

great newspaper as a foreign correspondent. from my point of view. now it's hard. if you want to do this, it's difficult. you're going to have to be your own brand. you have to make good decisions. i would never let nicki go to afghanistan or iraq. there's no way she's ready for that. but she put herself in the region to understand it where she can operate safely, where she can learn. that's a great strategic direction in which she sent her career. and i think if we're going to get these startups like ours working, we're going to have to be attentive to the needs of those correspondents. and there's a sort of obligation we hold to really make these feel like they're part of something. and we're trying our best. >> we're going to open it up to your questions.

i hope you're going to join us. there are mikes here up top and over here. if you would, make sure that what you say is in the form of a question. and also, if you would identify yourself. >> my sname will. my wife is a student here. i'm a freelance journalist, kind of what charles is talking about. living in india and japan and found very few people willing to pay more than $5 for an article. but that's beside the point. my question is about the cover of afghanistan. and i'm going to ask martha because she is representing the networks. i worked for a couple weeks and wrote an article from there and for the last two years, when you watch nbc news or abc news, and your stuff is much better than some of your competitors, richard specifically is pretty

-- but it is just not representative of what afghanistan is. and all i see when i watch the news is i see either women getting victimized, which is true, or i see men that are taliban and have a gun and are going to abuse the women. there's never any reality of these afghan men that are just normal like us. >> so what's the question? . >> my question is, at what point does that get cut off? i don't think ire going to these countries that you're saying i'm just going to show the tale ban or women. so when does it get cut off, when does it get editted? who is responsible for that? and how do you get the message of the reality? >> one of the things that's a problem with afghanistan is the country is really suffering from war fatigue. and -- >> our country. >> our country is suffering from war fatigue.

and i think -- >> war fatigue. >> and true, nine years of war, they feel and probably we have covered these stories again and again and again. now, i'll be really specific about your question. i don't -- i think i'm in a unique position so it's harder for me to say. i'm pretty much in charning of what i put in -- charge of what i put on the air. that is not the only view of afghanistan nor should it ever be. we have people who are based in kabul who get out as much as they can to see other things in kabul. i mean, do i think everybody has a complete picture? i really don't. and it's tough getting on the air with these stories. it is. it's very, very tough. because throughout these years people say the networks only want to put on the blood and

gore of war. trust me, when afghanistan comes on, the tv goes off or changes channels. it's a very sad thing. and i don't think my bosses look at that and say we can't do afghanistan. but it is really challenging for us to try to go out there and tell stories that make people care about it. or show some normal life in afghanistan. now, i also have to say that we're not over there, and we got this so many times in iraq. why didn't you cover the good news? because, frankly, covering iraq there wasn't a whole lot of good news. shir, if you went to some areas it was peaceful but our troops weren't there. our troops are fighting. and that's the same in afghanistan. i try more and more analysis when i come back. i don't like it to be based on i saw this one horrible thing so the whole country is going to hell. i think you really have to talk to as many people as you can, you have to certainly talk

about people who are living normally. but right now we're in a stage there where you really have to -- it's very difficult to figure out what's going on there. it really is. >> i'm a freshman at the college. i want to ask about the difficulties of your job. you've all worked overseas. was there any point in your life when you were this close to saying i'm done, i've had enough of this, i need to move on? but somehow you didn't. can you share with us those very difficult moments? >> i'll start with one. i had only three happy years as a foreign correspondent. and i do remember a moment when i was covering the war in yugoslavia when i had gone to cover the birth of democracy and free market in poland aund

found myself crawling around in corn fields saying how did this happen. but i remember we had written about a particularly, discovered a particularly awful mass consider and there were bodies stacked in an old age home and older people had been killed and it was very bloody and upsetting and i called the desk and basically said you could have 14 inches inside and i remember just losing it and saying, what is it you want here? we've got 100,000 refugees. what is it going to take for you people to care about this? i thought this is crazy. and then i must say, i kind of stopped myself a few hours later and said, well, then i'm not doing my job. if they don't care, it's because i haven't made them care. and i took it back on myself. but there was certainly a moment, and the word was yugeo fatigue. it wasn't war foo tiege. i'm sure charlie's got a lot of

frustration. >> that's not the answers you were expecting. i bet you were thinking, i'm done with this sort of thing, it's too dangerous. but probably all of us are -- the frustration is just not ever getting what you want on the air or in -- you know. >> i think the thing about what you said is that i love the way you came back with you need to work harder. if there's anything that i take from david's history and the work he did is how hard he worked. you know, this is something that i think, i really worry about younger correspondents who don't have all these opportunities and they're so busy putting together that life i just described, running in all different directions to make it happen, that it's hard to really sit down and focus on that one big story like david had a chance to do in vietnam or like he did with the economy. think of the hard work that went into just trying to help

us all get our heads around this economy and the reckoning and where it's he hadding. and i think, i love, i like where he ended 77. that's really healthy. i had more frustrating moments where i didn't have such a healthy response. >> there's lots of -- there aren't as many fists put through walls. that shows the state of journalism. that's my definition of the state of journalism. >> the worst thing to do is to hang up on an editor. you know you're not going to get another connection. you're in the middle of afghanistan with a phone that's not working that well and you hang up. but i've had moments of really i think one thing that people don't understand is a lot of foreign correspondents have their families with them. when i lived in jerusalem with my family we had our kids and

the bus bombings were going off and you're suddenly very connectd to the izz really and palestinian people and what they're going through because you're part of that. and i think surreal experiences of living in jerusalem, going off into serious fighting in the west bank, seeing kids shot by israeli snipers, coming home, coursing past a bus bombing where izz realie civilians have been killed and you're coming home to meat loaf and your kids are running in the garden and you're part of it. for me a moment of despair was recognizing that three little boys and a bombing right near the kids' school and the hamas bombers -- excuse me. their brain in the school parking lot. and my wife and i looked 59 each other and said, we're out. that's it. we've got to go.

and it was august of 2001 and we moved to london and we arrived september 5, 2001. and i thought, i'm out of the middle east. and i thought -- >> and you were. >> i'm going to paris, i'm going to cover london. this is going to be amazing. september 11th happens. of course the whole world changes. and then you realize that all those things you covered now really come into sharp focus. you have a chance now to take all that work you've done and bring it to the field. and i love that quote. i've said it now three times so i won't say it again. but that despair can often lead to fate that brings you to the place that you really need to work hard. >> my name is i barack obama. i'm a freshman -- i bram. we my question is about safety. how important is the conversation of safety when you're going into the region

that you have a story you want to cover but you know it's unsafe. what sort of a balance do you try to find and how does that thinking process go along? >> i'll take that probably because i've been in the war zones probably most recently. i think you have to be -- i always tell people who have not done this before that don't be lulled into your own safety. have rules, set some lines that you won't cross. because when you get in there you start forgetting that because you're excited and something is happening and toupt go further and further. i don't tell my family what i do and i don't tell them half the stuff that i've done. and i share that a little i suppose with the u.s. military probably. i have some disadvantage. i remember one day we were rocketed and mortrd and the marines i was with said, i'm

not telling my wife about this. and i'm like, too bad, it's going to be on tv tonight. but i try to be careful and not be crazy. i had a colleague, bob wood rough who was horribly injured and thank goodness he is doing just great but it was an amazingly america luss recovery that bob went through and that was really hard. that was hard on me, that was hard on my kids. because they knew bob. they knew -- my son who is actually now a freshman in college, i remember then because he was quite a bit younger used to kid me that i've never been an anchor on tv. and peter jennings had died the year before and be then bob was anchor. and then in my child's mind he said to me that this, mom, i decided i don't want you to be aven anchor any more. and that's to my how many

iffers going to stay safe and that was his coping mechanism. so you do think of things like that when you're over there. on the other hand, i've done things i know i shouldn't have done. and i went into the swat valley in pakistan when the taliban were controlling huge areas of that. and as a woman i pretty much stood out like crazy. and no matter how many scarves you put on, you walk two feet and they know you're an american. but that was that moment when you thought, i need to do in. i need see this. and we did it very quickly, i got out and interviewed a couple people, and we drove 120 miles an hour out of there. in terms of body armor, i always wear body armor. peter jennings used to tease me that i look like a complete dork. i'm too bad, i'm wearing it

wherever i go. and i think you just have to have your own rules about what you'll do. in afghanistan now we have security. in fact, i will take some credit for that because a couple years ago we were staying at a hotel there and we started going back and forth to bag ram, which isn't the safest drive, just by ourselves. and we got stopped once by some police which was a little nerve racking and i remember calling our foreign editor saying we should not be traveling along these roads by ourselves. so through experience you try to get better at that. i don't think -- charlie, i love hearing him say this but he won't send people who have no war experience to war zones. after bob was hurt, i said to abc, don't -- and bob was experienced, but don't send people who have no experience.

and they were like anything could happen. but if you're a in a humvee, you'll know what questions to ask. if you're with people not doing the right thing, you'll know that. you just have to have experience. and you talk to people who have been there so you get better. >> this is the thing that keeps me up at night all the time, is that we're a small news organization with limited resources. we're very stealth. and the thing that is the balance there is we can never be so stealth that we put people at risk. so we have had to be really stringent about being sure that everyone who is in iraq and afghanistan is a serious veteran and we have to really cobble together coverage plans that we can afford by being creative, by being very precise, by being sure they check in with us, by making sure we know exactly where they

are and being extremely careful because as we build these new models for journalism, the one thing we can't forget is we have to protect the people in the field. if we're going to take on the challenge. >> hi. i'm a visiting international student. you talked about the feeling of having the piece of information that you just knew was going to be sensational and break the news. so i was curious, and i guess my question goes to all of you. if you ever wondered if you crossed the line or if you ever ended up not publishing an article because of moral or ethical reasons. >> that's a very good question but we have a lot of people who want to talk so i'm just going to ask one of you to radio spond to it. >> -- respond to it. >> if you're a good journalist, especially in the investigative realm, i think you have a

better answer. i'll just say yes. >> investigative reporting involves getting information that somebody does not want you to have. and the courage to know no matter how hard you worked it might not be there. >> there's sort of different kinds of answers. i've certainly not written stories that didn't pan out. and i have and i'm sure martha and charlie have as well from time to time had to withhold stories or details at the request of the american government. that does happen. but i would honestly say sometimes you just -- i really take a deep breath when i'm about to do something that's going to be hurtful to another person and say we have to do this. i've never felt that we had to hold a particular story. we do a story that's going to appear in friday. i could tell you but we'd have to shoot you all. but it's a story where a very

decent person in the story doesn't come off that well. but that's not imimportantly. it's news worthy. we have to do it. but sometimes stories don't pan out and you don't publish them. >> my name is blare from the ed school. and my question is for charles. you mentioned in your talk that nicki, you were sending her over to turkey to immerse herself in the culture and the history of the country in order to be a better foreign correspondent. my question is, in the future in a globalized digital news world, do you think the foreign correspondents will be from that country instead of sent there? >> that's a really good question. and we do have many who are from the country and who write for us as well. but one of the things we're trying to do is really write to an american audience. and therefore, if you're from that country and you've gone to college in the states or you've lived in the states for a long time, that's great. as long as you know that the

mba matters a lot more than cricket, as long as you understand if you're going to make a reference to the west bank, describe it as roughly the size of rhode island. i need those touch stones. we have such an uphill climb to get americans to care about the world. i've got to have writers who can do that. and i don't care where you're from as long as you can do that. but we do find that it's really good to have frish eyes -- fresh ice. that's the skill of being the story teller. people talk about crowd sourcing and about sort of citizen journalism and how we have to have everyone have equal say. since prehistoric times, someone had to be the guy who tells the story. there was one guy with a torch and went into the cave and said what's in there and told everyone. they didn't have everyone go

in. you know, i really believe that journalists have a craft for getting it right and telling the story in an interesting way. and that's what we're looking for. and yes it needs to be told in a way that an american audience can come at it. >> there's a great line about he was asked about what he thought about citizen journalists, ben bradley. >> the water gate. >> the executeive editor and he said what do you think and he said, what do you think about citizen surgeons? >> that said, one thing we're interested in and really pursuing is finding the top journalists in these countries. with whom we can partner. and then it becomes a learning experience. we're exploring it right now. >> in the real world i'm a bbc

correspondent. i'd be interested in your views, which is challenging the conventional wisdom where the benefit is historical hindsight. could you talk about the difficulties that is involved with that particularly when editors and audiences have a particularly fixed view about something? >> i think that's really good question. there was a period in the late 1908s when a colleague of mine and i were frustrated. we had gone out to do some story and we coot get them to pay any attention. and he said at the "new york times" never be behind but never be ahead. and there's this sense that you can circle too far ahead of a story and it becomes very, very frustrating and lonely. but i think that's where the great journalism is.

if you define yourself as challenging that conventional wisdom you're going to find great journalism. nobody has really changed anyone's mind by doing a slightly different version of the story everyone's already done. >> we're running out of time and i want to get to the two other questioners very quickly into the conversation. >> my name is paul, i'm not a harvard student but i am a news junky. question for martha, which is i find your story about cheney breath takingly cynical but not at all surprising. and my wonder is what do you think is the chemical reaction that produces that moment? why did it happen with you and not with one of your colleagues? is it the time of day? >> that's a really interesting question. you know what, i don't know. but i know he walked out of that room and his staff, i know, you could see his staff in the room just go, oh, no.

and then they'll talk about it. and i know a lot of them -- no one was mad at me, which was very interesting. no one was blaming me for that. it was, well, he was tired or he had a long day or maybe you misunderstood him. what he meant was. so what's your question. whatever. i'm just running it the way it was. i don't have to do anything. but there's certainly moments. i mean, i have never interviewed him before. i had covered, if it tells you something, i covered the white house two and a half years and never met him. so there was that. i think sometimes people go into interviews and they think this is going to be nothing, it's ten minutes, who cares. we have to be -- i think we are in omen during that interview. i don't know what he had been doing all day. but i felt like he had a lot of chances to -- a lot of moments

passed where he could have said let me explain further and he never did. >> i'm a graduate of the kennedy school many years ago and i would like to change the subject to something in journalism that i think has been an enormous failure which is the coverage of climate change. and i wanted to ask teevepb's question about that, which is what is it going to take for you to cover this? we've had a decade of rapidly warming environment and climate catastrophe. >> we've got your question. >> first of all, we do cover it. and i think it is being covered. i think should it be covered more? absolutely. but my personal view is that the sort of transitional period in the world of energy, that we're moving out of this carbon based into something else is the single most important stories of our times. i would challenge you back a little bit and say i think there's an awful lot of

coverage. i don't think people are ignoring it at all. we're certainly not. >> i am sor troy say that we're out of time. i appreciate, i'm sorry, sir, but we -- i hope that you have enjoyed this as much as i have. it's been a great opportunity to honor the tradition and the passion and the spirit of david . and thank you all very, very much. good luck. [applause] >> next, live, your calls and comments on "washington

journal." then on "newsmakers," an wagner. then chinese tv's year end review of 2010. >> c-span's original documentary on the supreme court has been updated. today you'll see the grand public places and those only available to the justices and their staff. and you'll hear about how the court works from all the current supreme court justices including the newest justice. also, learn about some of the court's recent developments. the supreme court, home to america's highest court airing for the first time in high definition today at 6:30 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> this morning, christian science monitor correspondent linda felledsman examines president obama's relationship with the liberal and progressive wings of his party. and then later retired