2005 Buchheit Family Lecture
Hoagland advises journalists to stay curious, keep learning

By Carrie Goodin

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Hoagland, gives two simple words of advice to future journalists: “Stay curious.” Hoagland, a USC journalism graduate, tells a success story that ranks with the best of Carolina alumni.

Hoagland demonstrates what is at the core of good journalism--the idea that journalists have the ability and the responsibility to make a difference. Hoagland began to understand the press' influence in the community when he worked at the Rock Hill Evening Herald during the civil rights era. He said the newspaper took a lead role in trying to convince local citizens that change in race relations was both necessary and positive.

“I learned a lot about what a newspaper can do in the community,” Hoagland said.

He also learned about the risks involved as Rock Hill citizens reacted to the newspaper's activism. Someone even burned a cross on the lawn of one of the newspaper's editors.

“What was important to me as a young student was to see the firm way in which the newspaper supported what it thought was right for the community to change and basically stick to its guns over a very moral, very important issue. ”

Hoagland spoke Wednesday, Oct. 5, at this year's Buchheit Family Lecture of the USC School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He discussed his experiences as a journalist starting out as a jack-of-all-trades at the Rock Hill Evening Herald (now the Rock Hill Herald). Hoagland is now associate editor, senior foreign correspondent and syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.

Hoagland said he was able to climb this occupational success ladder quickly because of skills acquired at USC and at newspapers across South Carolina. The Rock Hill native also worked at The State and The Columbia Record, where he was sports editor.

Hoagland left South Carolina in hopes of working for the New York Times’ international edition in Paris. Though only 24 at the time, he was hired on the spot. “And because I was young they could pay me a lot less,” Hoagland added. In 1966 Hoagland joined The Washington Post as a metropolitan reporter and became foreign editor in 1979.

Though journalism has changed over the years, Hoagland still sees such optimism among younger practitioners. He told an audience of several hundred people who attended the Buchheit lecture that what struck him as he visited the USC campus was that, “the heart of idealism in journalism still beats.”

Since his days in South Carolina, Hoagland has written about a cross section of significant world events. He’s covered and analyzed the Tienanmen Square protests, the South African revolution, the Persian Gulf War, and the war on terrorism.

Hoagland said that when interviewing world leaders, it is important to remember who you are, where you are and what you’re there for.

“You have to be prepared, you have to be persistent and you have, to some extent, to be prickly,” he said.

One of Hoagland’s biggest challenges, he said, is not being intimidated by the aura in the Oval Office when speaking with the President of the United States. “It’s hard to get the kind of distance you can get with the Soviet leader or French leader,” he said.

On the other hand, with leaders like Saddam Hussein, Hoagland said a journalist has to remember not to get overly emotional or to lose his or her temper.

“Saddam tried to convince me that what I’d seen his army doing in Kurdistan in 1975 didn’t happen, didn’t exist,” Hoagland said. “I’d been there.”

Journalism's future role -- especially print journalism -- increasingly will be to provide context for the factual news story, Hoagland said, noting that readers have never been more informed yet more confused than they are now.

Like their readers, he said, journalists are always learning. “Being a journalist is an opportunity to continue your education and that’s its blessing,” Hoagland said.

Carrie Goodin is a senior print journalism major who hopes to travel the world writing for The Boston Globe.

October 7, 2005