Pulitzer winner Anne Hull urges students to pay attention, be curious
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anne Hull told students Wednesday afternoon about her vivid career, one that has taken her to inner cities, rural Christian towns, places demolished by hurricanes and hospitals where ignored veterans languished.
Her work often gives voice to the marginalized and, particularly with her Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the neglect of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, effects change in the communities she spotlights. Because of the Walter Reed story, the top three people in the Army lost their jobs, Hull said.
Hull is the latest in a series of top award-winning journalists to speak to professor of practice Tom French’s spring Behind the Prize class.
French was one of Hull’s earliest inspirations, she said. Then a St. Petersburg Times reporter, French was one of Hull’s mentors when she was a “copy kid” and handled calls at the city desk. She hadn’t thought of journalism as a career until she worked in the newsroom teeming with reporters.
“I thought it was an awesome job,” she said. “They were always going out, keeping the city honest.”
Hull attended college for only a year before dropping out, so she believed she didn’t have the right education for the job. But when the fashion desk needed a writer for a story, she jumped at the chance. Soon, she started writing a slew of small pieces for the fashion desk and pitching her own stories. One of her first features was about fashion in New York.
It wasn’t good, she said, but the editor worked on it with her and it was published.
“You have to have a little nerve,” she said. “You get started, and then you figure it out. You have to be in a world you respect and one that is full of people who are better than you.”
Be sure to channel your inner voice, she added.
“Don’t try to write like someone else,” she said. “It’ll just sound like a comb-over.”
Hull spent 15 years at the St. Pete newspaper, then moved to the The Washington Post. There, she was part of a team that included reporter Dana Priest and the late Michel du Cille, BA’85. Their work on conditions at Walter Reed won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting in 2008.
In addition the award, Hull was a Pulitzer finalist three times while at the St. Petersburg Times and three times while at The Washington Post.
Hull’s style is all about following and watching, hunting in person for the social context or tension. No need to be or act omniscient, she said. You just show up and be curious.
She said she likes to become invisible to her sources, though it isn’t always easy.
When covering a story about gay youth in Newark, New Jersey, she knew she stuck out as an older white woman. But because she made the effort to be there and get to know her sources, they began to brush it off when people would ask about her presence.
“Who’s that?” a girl would ask, and Hull’s source would reply, “Oh, that’s nobody. That’s Anne.”
That’s where you want to be, said Hull.
Taking notes about everything is key. Her reporting for the Walter Reed story largely began as eavesdropping and reaching out to people who expressed discontent. Subtlety was necessary. She hid her notes in Sudoku books at first, pretending to do puzzles so she could observe without disturbing anyone. This innovative spirit helped her find a direction for the story.
“Bureaucracy is a really boring topic,” she said. “You have to find the right people to bring that story to life.”
Intense note-taking also helps writers bring sensory detail into stories, a skill that was invaluable when reporting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Giving the reader a sense of being there is important, Hull said, and she wanted people to feel how awful it was in New Orleans at that moment. Paying attention to what you notice is crucial to truth-telling.
“There were all these rumors about armed gangs, and I wish I had the sense to say in my stories that wasn’t true,” she said. “There’s a lot of value in saying something that refutes the popular narrative if you can back it up. Trust yourself.”
Many of Hull’s skills came from learning on the job — sometimes the hard way. For one story, she learned never to take other people’s news as factual when she reported that Bruce Springsteen had made a surprise appearance at an event because of commotion on the radio. In actuality, Springsteen never came.
“I’m always afraid of getting it wrong or bad. That’s the terror, always,” she said. “You don’t ever escape that.”
But her career has taken her across the United States and won her nominations for multiple awards.
“I really never knew what I wanted to be in life. I loved what I did in the moment,” she said. “If I said ‘It will take me 20 years to do x,’ I would have said forget it. I don’t have the patience for that.”
But not having a plan worked out for her. Her job, she said, never feels like work for a moment.
“There’s no way to know what you will do 20 years from now,” she said. “I know it sounds Pollyanna-ish, but do something you like.”
She told the class that even now she is struggling with a story she was working on. The answers never come easy, she said, but that’s why the job is so interesting.
“Imagine if there were no reporters telling these stories,” she said. “It’d be Orwellian. Awful.”
Hull’s talk was yet another that was well-received in the class.
“I think this class overall is a really unique experience, having this kind of access,” said Amanda Marino, sophomore journalism student. “Anne is so different from anyone we’ve seen so far and different from anyone we’ll see in the future.”
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