Reviving Journalism

June 4, 2010

Sheri Fink didn’t even think about going into journalism, back when she was growing up in the Detroit suburbs in the 1980s. Her father had been a reporter before law school.

“He told me it wasn’t a very stable or well-paying profession,” she told me during a recent interview.

So she got a doctorate in neuroscience and an MD…and then, this year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Her dad, attorney Hershel Fink, gave his daughter that advice before the present newspaper meltdown. Today’s world is one where journalism as a profession seems to be in free fall.

Newspapers and broadcast news bureaus are closing. Salaries are dropping. ASNE, the American Society of News Editors, says that more than 13,000 newspaper jobs have disappeared since 2007.

That wasn’t supposed to be something Sheri Fink needed to worry about. A brilliant student, she went to the University of Michigan, then Stanford for her graduate degrees…

After which she decided to become a reporter instead.

Not a glamorous TV journalist, either — a reporter for a nonprofit website, ProPublica, which aims to produce “non-profit journalism in the public interest.”

This year, she made history by winning the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for “Deadly Choices at Memorial,” an article on a hospital cut off from civilization by Hurricane Katrina, a place which descended swiftly into a nightmare world without electricity or running water, where sleep-deprived doctors apparently euthanized patients.

The article was published simultaneously on ProPublica and The New York Times Sunday Magazine on August 27, 2009.

“Deadly Choices” is a model of what journalism ought to be. The Pulitzer citation noted that she’d spent months on the story, and had interviewed more than 140 people—most of them multiple times.

The writing is “dramatic yet understated,” an astonishing tour de force of thousands of words which, despite its length, is hard to put down, and raises many questions about medicine and society.

The Pulitzer board added that, “Remarkable in these days when so many hide behind the shield of anonymity, every source was quoted by name.”

Yet the one name the author doesn’t trumpet is her own. Sheri Fink hasn’t been using her award to market herself, though she is happy to talk about her work. Personally she is tiny — barely five feet tall, and may weigh less than a hundred pounds.

She looks younger than her age — 41 — and though warm and pleasant, is plainly driven by what used to be called a social conscience.

“While I was still working on my PhD I founded a nonprofit group, Students Against Genocide,” she said. “Gradually, I realized that journalism, rather than medicine, was really what I want to do and where I thought I could have the greatest impact.”

So after a crash course in reporting, she began writing, initially as a freelancer. She was drawn to war zones and chaos, and, thanks to a fellowship, was able to spend nearly a year studying wartime medical conditions at a hospital in Bosnia.

That experience produced an award-winning book: War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, published in 2003, a harrowing tale of overcrowding, Balkan politics, and doctors operating without anesthesia on patients they’ve crossed minefields to save.

She’s reported from every continent except Antarctica since.

Fink doesn’t try to be both doctor and reporter at the same time, she told me; she functions only as a journalist, except when she goes as a doctor on voluntary humanitarian missions.

Incidentally, it is unlikely her dad regrets her career choice. In a sense, they are now shared Pulitzer winners; as the main media attorney for the Detroit Free Press, Hershel Fink was heavily involved in that paper’s investigation of now-jailed Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, for which it won a Pulitzer the year before.

“I occasionally have to remind him that the reporters were involved, too,” she teased.

Maybe, just maybe, journalism isn’t really dead.

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Update: Last week I wrote about the efforts of State Sen. Bruce Patterson (R-Canton) to create a state regulatory agency for reporters. I thought it wasn’t a very good idea, and said so.

After my column appeared, he called me — but not to complain. “I have to commend you,” he said. “You seem to be the only guy who actually read the damn bill! This thing has gone global. It’s on Fox News. But everyone else says I want to license reporters.

“I don’t. My idea was to have it be a strictly voluntary registry. How can you write about a bill without having read it?”

Ironically, that was exactly why he was trying to create a voluntary designation of “registered reporter.” He thought it would be useful to designate who was a competent professional, in a world where anybody can present themselves as a “journalist.”

Trouble was, he wants to create a state board to do that.

Nobody disputes that some so-called reporting makes us cringe. But even if it weren’t for the fact that most journalists think government has no business regulating media, it’s hard to imagine state government being able to do even a competent job.

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.