Maria Carrillo, managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot, told graduating seniors Saturday, December 8 that journalism is more important now than ever. "Today, everyone has loads of information at their fingertips. On the Web, you can find hundreds of references to almost any subject, from bulimia to beer pong. Problem is that so much of it isn’t true. Or it’s misleading or confusing or spun."Carrillo said that the most Americans get their news from media companies and that the public seeks credible information. "That’s why I can’t imagine journalists being replaced by blogs or Google or MySpace or You Tube or Wikipedia," Carrillo said at ceremonies for the School of Mass Communications.
The 1985 graduate of the school quoted Bill Keller, the editor of The New York Times, who said recently that "the civic labor performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens...It cannot be replaced by a search engine. It cannot be supplanted by shouting heads or satirical television shows."
“The truth is,” Keller said, “people crave more than raw information. What they crave, and need, is independent judgment, someone they can trust to vouch for the information, dig behind it, and make sense of it. The more discerning readers want depth, they want skepticism, they want context, they want the material laid out in a way that honors their intelligence, they might even welcome a little wit and grace and style.”
Carrillo discussed some of the Pilot's coverage that has had impact, including a series on suicide showing that far more people die of suicide than homicide. "We told the stories of surviving family members what what a toll those deaths took. We pointed out that most of those who contemplate suicide wouldn't go through with it if they gave themselves one more day. We touched a nerve."
The Pilot also ran stories about a local development company that fraudulently obtained loans to buy properties in low-income neighborhoods, for substantial profit. Those stories resulted in an FBI investigation.Carrillo told students, "As you look to the future, I’d encourage you to remember the past. This is a great democracy and part of the ideal is that there will always be people like you and me who seek to keep everyone else in line." The Pilot is Virginia's largest circulation daily newspaper.
Carrillo, who joined The Pilot in 1998, is former deputy managing editor for enterprise and led the newspaper's narrative team. Three serial narratives that she edited for the paper have been expanded and published as books. She and the staff gained recognition as a Pulitzer finalist in 2007 for explanatory reporting. Carrillo has been a Pulitzer juror, and a speaker at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference at Harvard. She is a former reporter and editor for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.
Read Carrillo's entire speech now.
