Bob Woodward at the PG

Bob Woodward, the Washington Post investigative reporter and author who became famous for uncovering the Watergate scandal, visited the Post-Gazette for a lunchtime session today at the invitation of Executive Editor David M. Shribman.

It was part journalism tutorial, part pep rally for discouraged reporters and editors in the era of the incredibly shrinking newspaper.

Woodward didn't offer much in the way of practical suggestions to solve the industry's current crisis - maybe charge for content on the Web, perhaps reduce the size of papers - but clearly such advice wasn't his thing. He is all about the reporting, the accumulation of empirical facts. His faith in the survival of the industry is that readers still needed to be told good stories. His fear (mine too, as I said in my column last week) is that absent such reporting, secret government will flourish.

He started off his presentation playing the professor, asking his students - that would be us - what was the fundamental story that needed to be wriiten to explain the economy's collapse? (He said that most of the stories dealing with the collapse had not adequately explained it).

Someone suggested that a lack of regulation during the Bush years had allowed excesses to flourish. But he pointed out that started under Bill Clinton. Someone else observed that European financial institutions were well-regulated but that had not saved them from trouble. And so it went on.

For Woodward, the source of the recession can be traced back to the banks. His advice for reporters was this: Find a typical bank and chart its business before and after and you would have the key to what went wrong and a way to explain it to readers.

Woodward is smart and engaging and clearly very at ease with himself. You can understand how he got people to talk to him. He talked about knocking on the doors of generals unannounced in pursuit of his reporting for a book - a tactic which would intimidate most people, if only because it would seem counter-productive (apparently it wasn't).

Interestingly, for all the books he has done on George W. Bush, he is not in favor of a witch hunt to prosecute him now that he has left office. The difference between Watergate and the controversy over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, was that what went on during Watergate was clearly criminal. By contrast, the wars began with the support of Congress and the American people. I have long thought that myself.

Elsewhere on the Post-Gazette Web site, you can hear Woodward in his own words.

It was a nice way to spend lunch: Food for thought for everyone.