Top coal reporter reflects on his career

The Rural Blog often shares Ken Ward Jr.'s coverage of the coal industry and the environment in Appalachia, both from his stories and his blog, Coal Tattoo, because if anyone knows the industry, it's Ward, who has extensively covered it for over 20 years. But we aren't the only outlet taking notice of The Charleston Gazette's veteran coal reporter; his work has been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS and NPR, and he has received several journalism awards. In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review's Brent Cunningham for the magazine's 50th anniversary issue, Ward reflects on his career, which Cunningham says reflects late Gazette publisher Ned Chilton III's credo: "The hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage."

Ward told Cunningham, "I think that most journalists, certainly in America today, are dishonest with the public by telling them that they’re objective. I used to go give talks at some of the trade groups in West Virginia, and I’d use this Hunter S. Thompson quote—that objective journalism is a pompous contradiction in terms—and people would always say, 'A-ha! That proves it! Ken Ward’s biased, we knew it all along.' And then I would say, 'Well, let’s talk about my biases.' And I would say things like, 'You know, I think everybody should be able to earn a living so they can take care of their families. I think everybody should have clean water to drink. I think everybody should have clean air to breathe. I think every kid deserves to have a chance at a good education. I think that everybody ought to share in the wealth of our nation.' Nobody ever really wanted to disagree with any of that. But they didn’t really like how it manifested itself in stories."

(Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog, agrees that journalists shouldn't claim objectivity, except as a method to get to the best version of the truth they can deliver. "Objectivity is an unachievable ideal, as a goal," Cross says, "but an essential method for journalists. And Ken Ward is objective in his methods.")

Here are other highlights from the interview:

"Part of the reason I wanted to do Coal Tattoo was that I saw the growth of pseudo-journalism about these issues, about mountaintop removal, climate change, the coal industry. I saw this pseudo-journalism taking over the public discourse. If real journalism is to survive, I think we have to engage with that stuff to a certain extent ... the same kinds of tools and skills that real journalists have to sort out what’s true and what’s not true, and who’s doing what to whom and who’s winning and who’s losing public policy debates - we need to deploy those things for products other than seventeen-part series that win the Pulitzer Prize. I keep trying to get our newsroom to stop calling blog posts 'posts,' because I think it makes them these kind of lesser forms of journalism. And they ought not be."

"I think that maybe we need to focus a little bit less on storytelling, a little bit less on finding Joe Smith who lives near a Marcellus Shale gas well, and his story about what it was like having that big industrial complex move in next door to him, and do more of giving him information he needs to understand why that happened to him and what he could do as a citizen of this republic to change or resist the situation. I try to do stories that don’t necessarily tell about somebody who’s going through a difficult time, but that tell people who have gone through a difficult time why the hell it happened to them, and how their government let it happen, what powerful institution did it to them, and what can be done about it."

"West Virginia’s my home. I’ve never lived anyplace else. It is impossibly rich with things for a reporter to cover. Right now I’m focusing on coal. I’ve written about a lot of other things, and I have a huge list of things I still want to write about. And I can’t think of many places that are in need of good journalism more than West Virginia is, or what higher calling journalists have than to try to write stories that make their home a better place."