R.B. Brenner, metropolitan editor of the Washington Post, is the recipient of the 2009 DeWitt Carter Reddick Award, recognizing outstanding people in the field of communication. It is one of the highest honors given by The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication.

What follows is the text of “Optimism About Journalism’s Future: A Revolutionary Act”— Brenner’s remarks presented April 5 at the College of Communication Honors Convocation.

Optimism About Journalism’s Future: A Revolutionary Act

Thank you Dean Hart and the College of Communication for this most unexpected and very meaningful honor.

When I read the dean’s letter informing me that I was the 2009 recipient of the Reddick Award, it was impossible not to linger on the paragraph that listed previous honorees: Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Bill Moyers, Helen Thomas, Ted Turner, to name a few. The list was a Who’s Who of Journalism Giants.

And of course we’re honoring the legacy of DeWitt Carter Reddick, a towering figure in journalism education. Dean Reddick was a pioneer among teachers of our craft. His labors and vision not only laid the groundwork for what the College of Communication is today but also inspired legions of future reporters and broadcasters.

So I immediately circled back to the top of Dean Hart’s letter, searching for the date and half-expecting it to read April 1st. You know, an elaborate April Fools’ joke perpetrated by those wily Texans on their gullible visitor from D.C.

Even now, I have trouble wrapping my head around my name being added to that august list. But it’s sure fun to try.

It reminds me of my first year at The Washington Post. One Sunday afternoon, I found myself working on a story with Bob Woodward as the supervising editor. Ever since Woodward teamed with Carl Bernstein to expose the crimes of Watergate, he has been the Buddha of reporters for my generation. On the outside, I tried my best to act professional in his presence. Face stoic, concentration locked on the job at hand. On the inside, I was jumping out of my skin. Because on the inside still lives a 16-year-old boy—the kid who fell head-over-heels in love with newspaper reporting in the late 1970s, inspired by Woodward and the romantic idea that one day I, too, could meet a source in a dark parking garage, open a reporter’s notebook and change the world.

Back to that Sunday afternoon. Woodward hovered at my desk. His lips were moving. All I could hear, though, was the teenager’s voice whispering from within: “I’m talking with Bob Woodward ... about a story ... for the front page ... of The Washington Post. Can it get any cooler?”

So while I definitely lack all of Mr. Cronkite’s gravitas—the indelible imprint he has left on history—and while I can only dream of being a fraction as funny or feisty or beloved as Ms Ivins was, it turns out a few things do bind me with them:

A passion for journalism.

A belief that if we do our jobs well, we might not change the world but we sure can make it a better, more just and decent place.

A love for the beauty of language and the power of a well-crafted sentence.

And an unshaken faith in that old journalists’ credo: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

This morning, I’d like to share a bit of that passion with you.

I'm an optimist by nature. Being an optimist about journalism’s future seems almost a revolutionary act these days. It’s easy to get a headache from the daily drumbeat of bad news about the economics of American newspapers. Bankruptcies. Layoffs. Buyouts. Foreign bureaus shuttered. State Capitol and Washington bureaus cut to the bone. Losing print readers to the Web in droves yet not making nearly enough money online to pay for good journalism, which takes resources.

Worse, the feeling that we’ve lost some of our mojo, our swagger.

Look at me—living proof. For the vast majority of my 25 years as a professional newspaper reporter and editor, I couldn’t wait to get to work early and stay late. On the best days, I was willing to do it for free. Even on the rough days, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

But in the past year or two, the stress level rose. It became less fun. The unthinkable even slipped into thoughts: What would life be like if I wasn’t a newspaperman forever?

Clearly, it became time to step away from the newsroom for a while, to gain perspective that comes with distance. That’s when Tracy Dahlby offered me the chance to spend a semester at The University of Texas at Austin as a visiting lecturer. I’m forever in debt to Professor Dahlby, the leader of your School of Journalism. He’s a principled, caring intellectual who is pushing the school’s boundaries in the pursuit of excellence. He refuses to settle for merely very good.

As you all know, UT and the larger Austin community are special, special places. The campus is filled with smart and creative people, brimming with ideas and purpose. Yet somehow it’s also relaxed. Folks are comfortable in their own skin. Every day here, I can feel my creative batteries recharging, my love for the art and craft of journalism regenerating.

The graduate students in my reporting and writing course this semester often thank me for the real-world lessons they’re learning. Truth is, they’ve taught me something far more valuable. They—and you—are journalism’s future. And when I look it in the eyes here, suddenly it becomes easier to be optimistic.

What advice can I give, then, to help you prepare for the future?

To those who do not intend to pursue a career inside a newsroom: Be assured that the skills you’ve acquired majoring in communication will serve you well in almost any profession—with the possible exception of math! (That is, if you’re anything like me, one of those mathematically challenged journalists.)

Even more important, the skills will serve you well in life.

In an age of frenetic chatter, what’s more valuable than the ability to express your thoughts clearly and succinctly, to prioritize the essential and suppress the trivial? You learn how to do that by studying journalism and other fields of communication.

In an age of naval gazing, what’s more rare than curiosity? The study of communication helps you gain the confidence to approach other people, to ask questions, to look and listen, to learn about viewpoints and cultures very different from your own.

In a “what about me?” culture, what’s more precious than empathy, understanding what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes, even if they’re an uncomfortable fit? The best journalists, even those with hard shells, exude empathy. You learn that by studying their work.

Finally, through your major, you learn that there are a couple of secrets to becoming an effective communicator:

First, read as much as possible: fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, poetry, song lyrics. Learn from the masters. Melville wrote a pretty fair three-word lead with “Call me Ishmael.” Capote’s opening to “In Cold Blood” is a model of establishing sense of place: “The Village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’” Consider John Lennon’s “Imagine there’s no heaven” or Bob Dylan’s “Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listen’”—now those are mind openers.

Second, become a relentless re-writer. Your first draft is just that, a first attempt. Go back in and scrub and polish and revise. Then work on it some more. One of the books my students are reading this semester, “Telling True Stories,” describes writing as “a craft for the thoughtful fanatic.”

In the few minutes remaining, let me address you brave and adventuresome souls who plan to become professional journalists.

I’ll begin by telling an old joke about musicians that applies just as well to newspaper guys like me: One cold winter day, the members of a band are on their way to play a concert when their bus breaks down. The musicians grab their instruments and start walking through the snow. Before long, they come across a cozy house. Inside, a family is sitting around the dinner table—eating good food, talking, laughing, clearly enjoying each other’s company. The band members are damp and shivering as they gaze at this idyllic Norman Rockwell scene. Finally, one of the musicians turns to another and asks: “How do people live like that?”

Let’s face it. Journalism is a calling that finds you more than the other way around. Why else would you choose a career known for long hours and relatively low pay? Because you can’t imagine doing anything else. You’ve caught the bug and realize there’s no cure.

Journalism opens doors you’d never dream possible. In just the past 14 months, I’ve had the chance to hang out with movie stars Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams as a consultant for the soon-to-be-released film “State of Play”; made my “acting” debut with a two-line cameo; and last but not least, shared in a Pulitzer Prize with a team of Washington Post colleagues.

Sure, the newspaper job market is tight now, as our sputtering business models get revamped or replaced. But the market was bad when I searched for a reporting job in 1983, fresh out of Oberlin College. I would have loved to start my career at The Washington Post; that was unrealistic. The next best thing was to find any good small paper that would hire me. I knocked on a lot of doors and hoped to land in a newsroom with strong and patient editors who could teach me the many things I didn’t know.

The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina took a chance on me. It proved to be a fine launching pad. I’ve wiped the exact figure from memory, but my starting salary was something like $27,000 a year. Often I worked 60 hours a week. Not because they required me to, but because the work was so interesting—and so much fun—I didn’t want to stop.

More than two decades later, I’d trade almost anything to recapture the adrenaline of that first year covering a beat. Picture a city guy from Philadelphia who was 22 but looked 16 and barely knew how to drive, careening down country roads, figuring out how to cover North Carolina tobacco farming counties. I thought I was a hot-stuff writer, but the paper’s editor, Joe Goodman, stopped me in my tracks with his order to be descriptive without using adjectives. His early lessons about the power of verbs and the use of “telling” details (not to be confused with just any detail) remain embedded in my brain.

That was a good decade before our world would begin to be rocked by the Internet and all that followed. Back then, Joe didn’t have to worry about training me to shoot video and record audio clips; or to blog and use Twitter; or to navigate Facebook as a reporting tool.

Your generation—and mine—needs to be more versatile and adaptable than ever, because the inventors of technology will keep finding new ways for people to get their news.

You need to hone the fundamentals of reporting and writing so that you can be fast and deep. Fast because the 24/7 news cycle isn’t hype anymore. Your readers expect to know what happened a minute or less after it happened. If you don’t give it to them, they’ll find it somewhere else. Deep because with so many news sources online, the basic facts of a story—Who, What, When, Where and Why—have become plentiful and perishable commodities. Your readers now demand original, enterprising and surprising journalism, the kind that opens eyes, provokes thought and, sometimes, touches nerves and hearts.

Your big challenge is to preserve our most treasured values—careful and accurate reporting, clear writing, intellectual honesty, transparency and fairness—while, at the same time, break free from some of the old conventions that have made us less relevant to younger generations.

Out of the shock and despair in newsrooms today will come bursts of entrepreneurial spirit. It will be exciting and dizzying and a lot of fun for those of you ready to strap in and take the ride.

Before you go hurtling into this future, let me leave you with one caution: “new” for the sake of new isn’t always better.

During our recent spring break, I packed a couple of books to read on vacation. One was a fading paperback, published in 1974, titled “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I’ll leave you by reading one passage from the book:

“‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?', a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.”

Thank you and congratulations to all of you being honored today.