Coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and key Public Policy events. And every weekend booktv now for 15 years the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a Public Service by a local cable or satellite provider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow was on twitter. Booktv covers hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. Heres a look at some of the events will be attending this week. Look for these programs to air in the near future on the tv on cspan2. Catholic is on the author programs booktv will be covering this upcoming week. For more go to our website of tv. Org and visit upcoming programs. Youre watching booktv. Text is the Helen Bernstein book award for excellence in journalism. This twopart event begins with a Panel Discussion on longform journalism to this hourlong event was held at the New York Public Library in new york city. A good evening, everyone. We will not be poured on by the rain just yet. Anyway, im so pleased to welcome you here tonight at the New York Public Library. We have a Wonderful Group with us today for a focus on uncovering the truth uncovering the truth longform journalism in the age of twitter. A celebration of the 2014 finalist for the Helen Bernstein book award for excellence in journalism. Im particularly thrilled to see mrs. Bernstein here tonight. Thank you for joining us come with her daughter, kathy. [applause] their generosity has made this award possible. It was established in 1987 through a gift to the New York Public Library from the Bernstein Family in honor of helen and her lifelong love of journalism. Helen, we thank you. [applause] the award is given annually to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. And the five award journalists gather to tonight exemplify this. Their books were chosen by librarians from over 100 nominations. And the topics range from Hurricane Katrina to haiti and corporate pollution, to military strategy and returning soldiers struggling with ptsd. The library is so proud to be home to this award and have the opportunity to honor and support excellent journalism. Thank you to you. The digital age may change how we receive news, but the need for dedicated, passionate and strong reporters committed to deep investigative reporting remains a constant. The importance of uncovering the truth, or as some of my journalist friends say, witness the truth, to bring the public the news they need to be active members of an informed citizenry has not changed. It is perhaps or important today than ever to shine the spotlight on these efforts. Now its my pleasure to introduce a moderate for this evening, james hoge. [applause] for those of you who dont know james hoge, he is a senior advisor, editor of foreign affairs, very long list of accolades including being the washington correspondent, editor and publisher of the chicago sun times, publisher of the new york daily news. Hes been a fellow at harvard john f. Kennedy school of government, the freedom for media center at columbia university, he is a former chairman of the International Center for journalists and the former chairman of Human Rights Watch for 20102014. It is my extreme pleasure to invite him here tonight. Thank you. [applause] good evening. So happy to see you. I have been with the bernstein awards now for a number of years, and every year i am struck by the quality of the books that we are given, the seven of us, and its very hard to make a decision because the books are also good. Some of them are quite different from each other, but the level of quality is there. And i mentioned that because theres a lot of worry at least in the media world of whats going to happen now that newspapers are not what they once were, dont have the resources they once had, cannot afford to do some of the things they once did. Whats going to happen to longform journalism . Thats a fancy word, for investigative or explanatory or insightful journalism that has the space to really go into a substance come old time there was some depth. Its always been assumed, made we should assume so much but that is an Important Media for Democratic Society like ours, that you are not going to get some official sources, however wellmeaning they may be, or from public to chilis. You will not get the full advantage of whats going on in the world. You certainly wont get the rough edges. Lets just take one example right now that were having to deal with in this society. Soldiers are coming home from afghanistan and iraq. Many of them have to go to Veterans Hospitals because the wounds that they have gotten in those conflicts. And the disgrace of our Veterans Hospital is becoming public, would not have become public if not generate the interest and hope the remedies that are to come without a very vigorous press that has the ability to get to larger public. Now, the bernstein awards are, if i may say, a form of longform journalism. They do go as you were to turn us and get the journalists, the books that we select, all deal with the subject of some serious public consequence to this republic, to this society. Thats kind of the baseline. From there you can go in any direction. I think were very honored tonight to have a five finalists who will learn tomorrow which one is this years bernstein award winner, but all of them deserve it, believing. And this is the first year where we decided to have a session in advance of the awards ceremony tomorrow to let these authors who have put so much into their products and audiences which are interested, have a fuller discussion. We had a title tonight on longform journalism, we will honor that but when they go in some of the directions. I hope we can touch some that are of interest to you. So he was here . Dan fagin is associate professor of journalism and the director of science, health and of our mental reporting program at new york university. His book and was a finalist this year is toms river a story of science and salvation. It was recently awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize or general nonfiction. Before joining the nyu faculty in 2005, he left Environmental Writer for newsday. David finkel is an editor and writer for the Washington Post, for whom he has covered wars and kosovo, afghanistan and iraq. And many of the foreign subjects as well. Hes the author of the good soldiers, the critical the claimed account of you searched during the iraq war. It won the Helen Bernstein award in 2010. His latest book, thank you for your service, was named as a finalist for the 2013 National Book critics circle award. And he is a finalist here again for the bernstein award. Fred kaplan who is on his way, got some traffic delays this evening, but we expect him here shortly. Those of you most of us are new yorkers, you know what traffic delays only. Sometimes they are short, sometimes they are not. Weve got our fingers crossed. Fred is a columnist for slate, the author of two books and the four military reporter and Moscow Bureau chief for the boston globe. He was the lead member of the clubs team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on the nuclear arms race. His book, the insurgents, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the category of general nonfiction. He is this years edward r. Murrow press fellow at the council on foreign relations. Jonathan katz is a freelance journalist and a former correspondent and editor for the associated press. He was the only fulltime u. S. News correspondents living in haiti when 7. 0 earthquake struck. He won the 2010 my dell medal for courage in journalism, and his book on haitis ordeal entitled the big truck that went by bracelet one the 2013 overseas press club award. Im going to let him explain to you what that title means. Sheri fink is a correspondent at the New York Times. Or news reporting has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine award and the overseas press club Lowell Thomas award, among other journalistic prizes. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, she received her m. D. And a ph. D from stanford university. Her first book, war hospital am a true story of surgery and survival, is about medical professions, professionals, under siege during the genocide in bosniaherzegovina. So let us now proceed and if you all will join me up here, our finalists. [applause] sherry, you are over here. Jonathan, next. And that handsome guy at the end, thats fred kaplan. Okay. Longform journalism, which as i say has been very important part of what journalists like to think of as their contribution to a better society. There are a lot of people who say its much, much tougher today to get longform journalism done and then present it. First of all come is a very expensive form of journalism. I was at a newspaper the did a great deal of the. Some of it we will here tonight, some of these books, some of these projects take five, six years or longer. And somebodys got to pay the bills. But how you get the people once youve got a product. When newspapers, city newspapers and so on, its a vehicle. In fact i was on the Pulitzer Board for ten years and then on this board. And the number of books that qualified for a long form journalism about serious subjects which implied something about the educational system and also tells you that the books are not a last resort. It is the first resort. Because of what is happening, and part of this any thoughts, one at a time, so first of all you are doing whatever it is, but your sense of the scope is important now or something has taken its place. It is as important now and i think there was the misperception early on that would not read long on the west and that has been debunked and also we have seen the New York Times is a great example, the regionthe recent projects, an incredible platform the web can be for multimedia rich story telling and i was a little cynical about that having trained at different times in my career as a radio reporter separately, when you see some of these platforms and start ups coming up with cool wasted tell stories that almost seamlessly goal between different media, i am starting to be converted and sees that as a way of changing these important stories and there are ways long form journalism activates in a different way than your historic news stories so we are hungry for it as an audience. I dont see that going away but the big question is how it is funded and paid for and one of the things is as a society, as the Financial Model for journalism is going away, changing so dramatically, seeing journalism as a public good which the public may invest in maybe the way we go forward and we see foundations and other donors looking at journalism as something has the public good, something they need to promote and step in, so many journalism jobs have gone away. Funding problem is a real one and we can have that in a minute but i want to stick with what we have transferred from what we have today and on this point, a lot of Investigative Reporters, reporting one of the things that is an effect, what i call the amplification that you can get from other media picking it up and your own media source picking with a story. It is an example how important that can be that you press all over that story after you brought it up. In a way i think that is true. I definitely agree with the point you may generically which is a wonderful thing, that is an network in every sense in which you contribute to the network and drop the network and the initially those who came from newspapers, some of us sort of reacted suspiciously to the sharing aspect of the web. The idea of aggregation and polling content but eventually you come to realize that that is the power, where the impact comes from. Comes from people reacting to it and disseminating or commenting on it. Hy wouldnt want to overstate my impact because the events that i wrote about most of them occurred many years ago and i have been a thrills about people applying lessons to their own situations in the United States especially in places like china. To encapsulate what the book is about. The book is about abettor 140 characters. The book is about a town in new jersey that a town like any other town accepted experienced kind of a rapid industrialization, large Chemical Plant came to town, and unusual amount of disease appeared and the book is a mystery trying to sort of understand what really happened and why it happened. And really makes it clear how fascinating this process is, trying to figure out how to understand the relationship between pollution and cancer and other chronic diseases too. That is what i was shooting for with the book and i do think it is an example of what long form can do. Long form, the idea about writing short, riding along, is there a future for a long form . There will always be a future first of that is interesting. There are tweets that are much more boring than 150,000 words. There are a plenty of books, maybe mine too, much shorter than i wrote it so really it is just about doing good reporting and being interesting and one of the things we call learn from the new web, the new economy, market place, information on the web. Lots of different ways to see stories but the successful ones have one thing in common, they are interesting. I you finding that when you write for the web you really have to do it in a different way . I am the wrong person to ask about that because i am an academic. I teach, and when i write i do right sometimes maybe others would be better to comment on that but you do write differently, web. You want to take advantage of the schools in the activity and the sharing aspects of the web that go with the me and one thing you learned, the way not to raise on the web is to take what you wrote that is the wrong way. I tend to write with my phone. The advantage for me was first of all my hairline not withstanding, i am at least close to the generation that knows the digital names. I remember there not being an internet. My entire professional lifenot the form that it is currently and although you can say that every six months. The advantage i had in learning to think simultaneously i worked for news services. That is extremely, lets call it platform agnostic. You have no idea where it is going to appear, if it is in the newspaper or on a website or plastered on the side of a building, if somebody is going to rip and read it, you kind of have to learn to write in a way that is going to work in different formats. One thing that is absolutely true in terms of the difference between things you do online and things you can only do, you can work in on these, snowfall, the other day i read an amazing piece on reparations in the atlantic. One of the Amazing Things about that peace is in the middle, reading it on line, breaking off in the middle of a paragraph there would be a short 5 or 10 minute documentary about one of the characters, and those of the things that if we can figure out how to do them well there would be a terrific future for journalism in general, the only catch we keep talking about is paying for it. I didnt pay for that piece that i read about on line. Lets get to that. That is the core of the from. There are different ways beginning to develop, a big fat healthy newspaper with a bank accounts. Some of the centers we have talks about that. How much does that change the game, the broadcasting station, you get started, you go to a news center or Postal Center or american progress, get the wherewithal to go and do the job in the first place . I had a few experiences for that. This book started a project when i was a free lancer and the Kaiser Family foundation had a grant for writers working on Health Policy issues. I was hired by at new kind of model for Foundation Based journalism. Traditional news value, but some up in a different way. And a few other examples preceded it. So this was how does this in a newspaper or magazine . It was funded, had an initial foundation for 10 million a year for five years or Something Like that and slowly replaced by funding. We were just reporters but their output, they didnt have that platform of a widely read product, no one had heard of it and it was the republic, republican, who are you . That is good when you are an Investigative Reporter and want to lay low i guess. The way they did originally get their workout was in partnership with other media. This piece was published between the new York Magazine and after i went to do this book there were some opportunities, we received a fellowship for journalists writing books on policy issues from the new america foundation. These things were patched together. Six years from start to finish. My editor sources of funding. The experience with new ways of funding that he end up doing . No i want to peel back for a second to a previous point. It is a funding problem but to me theres another problem which is the experience of reading, when i am not writing books, and we have five books here tonight, and there is page after page of this and if you read these books they dont they kind of disappeared into the story being told. When im not writing books i am an editor at the Washington Post