Katie Couric | Deeply Personal Reporting in Haiti

We’re covering most of the Haiti events from Cultural Creatives HopeTracker posts on our new Daily News blog. This footage of Katie Couric working with a group of Belgian doctors in Haiti is so moving and thought-provoking, that we want to share it here.

Katie has also written a personal reflection on her three days in Haiti, posted on Huff Po. The evolution of an anchor speaking in an almost literary voice reflects new directions for big media. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Lou Dobbs (to a fault, in my opinion), and Christiane Amanpour (less so) employ this more personal approach in their reporting.

Generally, though, mainstream journalists are under strict rules not to cross the line, inserting poetry and personal style into reporting.

This old-school fault-line that reputed journalists could not cross — the facts and nothing but the facts, ma’am — approach is changing for good and perhaps not so. We must remember that journalism during the Vietnam War years did gradually take on a much more human voice.

Katie Couric writes: The Human Face of Haitian Tragedy

via Huffington Post

A few drops of water on acres and acres of parched land - that’s how I woke up thinking of the massive relief effort that’s been orchestrated to help the Haitian people.

I will never forget the three days I spent there following Tuesday’s earthquake.

“The horror, the horror,” as Kurtz said in “Heart of Darkness.” The despair, the desperation, the lack of dignity for the dead.

We drove through the back roads one night, house after house destroyed in a neighborhood that had so little to begin with.

A heavy set woman, maybe in her twenties, in black underwear lying face down, was covered with a light coating of ash - surrounded by a half dozen other dead bodies - one arm reaching upwards to the heavens because rigor mortis had set in.

Some bodies I saw on the sidewalk were smaller, covered with sheets. I imagined who they might be: a toddler who was playing inside a house, a school boy who was doing his homework.

Then there were the tent cities: families just sitting, waiting under sheets, under a flatbed truck, and in an abandoned school bus … keep reading at Huff Po

This video is also very moving:

Watch CBS News Videos Online