Old School Reporting On Flint Water

When you work in media, you often end up at dinner tables talking with friends who want to know about the backstory on things making news. Their busy lives lead them to only hearing snippets of news during their days, and they end up with questions.

That's why, on The Richard Piet Show, we try to take a few minutes and talk with local and other newsmakers - to try and get you some explanation and understanding about the things that fly by you in little informational bits and pieces when you have time during the day to hear them.

We in media, though, have fostered that with what some call our "drive-by" media culture. Give you the basics in quick bites because your attention is likely going to be diverted to your phone, that person interrupting you at work, your kids, your spouse, whatever. So, media, much of the time, has gotten away from in-depth reporting - and we just give you a little at a time.

That's not the way it used to be. Back in the day, we took time to be enterprising reporters - to dig into stories and uncover what's going on. These days, big media companies are cutting back on staff to do such things. Who loses? You do.

But Michigan Radio's Lindsey Smith and her colleagues did it the old school way. Dating back to the very beginning of rumblings in Flint about tainted water, they began digging. Unlike many of the rest of us, they followed the story development by development. Lindsey and the news professionals with whom she works were suddenly getting attention from national media, because they were trying to understand it, too. To say nothing of the rest of us.

Click this link and listen to Lindsey's report on the Flint water issue, and hear some of the best reporting on the human side as well as the details of what has become a huge public health issue. Then, if in-depth reporting matters to you, tell the management of your favorite media.

This week we spoke with Lindsey about her reporting. Click the link below to hear what she had to say about it and about the water issue in Flint. She also talks about, as the mother of a young child, how it affected her personally.

Hear The Richard Piet Show weekday mornings from 5:30-9 on WBCK.