A few more details on Bob Woodward's visit to Lisle

“Nice job on the Woodward call-in,” I told staff writer Marco Santana, about his deadline story on Watergate legend Bob Woodward's appearance at Benedictine College in Lisle.

I liked it because Santana had to boil the highlights from a two-hour talk on a wide variety of topics into a coherent but detailed story with a deadline about an hour after Woodward's remarks ended. And even though Woodward's appearance was pegged on the release of his latest nonfiction novel, “Obama's Wars,” Santana went with a “lead” that focused on Woodward blaming the former Google chairman for the difficulties of the news industry.

Woodward, now assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, told an overflow crowd this week that he told former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that his tombstone will read, “I killed newspapers.”

But because one of my jobs here is to critique our reporters work, I also had a suggestion for Marco: Woodward's remark was intriguing, and the answer might be fairly implicit, but I did think a reader might want to know exactly what Woodward meant. So, I'd like to share it:

Essentially, Santana says, Woodward believes Google and other news aggregators have taken away the advertising money that fueled traditional news sources for decades. With newspapers and other information sources scaling back their workforces, the information-gathering, the digging for wrongdoing and being a watchdog has waned.

And, as Marco noted in his story, Woodward opined that it may take an “almost catastrophic decline in the business before people realize how important they remain.”

“There is something that is going to happen, that we are going to miss,” Woodward said. “We will miss some vital story and then people will say, ‘Where were you?' Then people with money will say, ‘Well, we will have to invest in information.'”

To many of us fossils in the news business, Bob Woodward is an icon — one of the reasons we got into the business. He and reporter Carl Bernstein got the ball rolling on the Watergate cover-up leading to the downfall of the Nixon presidency. Much of their early Watergate reporting for the Post was ignored by the rest of the mainstream media.

Another thing I liked about Santana's story was the fact that it left me wanting more. So, I'd like to share some other tidbits from Woodward's talk:

Ÿ Every morning, Woodward told the crowd of more than 400, he wakes up with two thoughts: 1) I'm getting old and I really have to go to the bathroom, quickly followed by: 2) What are people hiding? “Everyone hides, everyone conceals. You have to find a way to see it.”

Ÿ Journalism is a momentary entrance into people's lives when they are interesting. You get out when their lives cease to be interesting.

Ÿ Woodward watched Henry Kissinger fill out a form that would supposedly predict how long he would live. When he got his score, it said he should have been dead already. Kissinger changed some answers. This prompted the Woodwardism: “Don't let politicians or public figures ‘rescore' history.”

Ÿ Woodward said his Watergate reporting, instead of making governments feel they should be more transparent, made them think they should be more furtive a “let's make sure we don't secretly tape ourselves” mindset.

Ÿ The Internet has created a culture of impatience and speed. Woodward said he has the luxury of saying no if an editor asks him if a not-yet-complete story is ready to be posted online, but younger reporters do not have that luxury.

Ÿ The best time to interview people is at 8 p.m., in their homes. They've eaten dinner, they're not yet sleeping and it's the time their guard might be down.

All that, and the man is a native of Wheaton. Nice.

jdavis@dailyherald.com