There you go again, Mindy, making a specious comparison. The equivalent of your question about thousands of columnists is akin to asking how many TV shows do you know out of the tens of thousands that have aired since TV was born in 1950.

What matters for young journalists is not how many writers they know, but that they have an understanding of their profession’s evolution — and, more practically, how its best practitioners plied their craft.

On Mark Hamilton’s blog, you make the weak and somewhat troubling point that you care less about whether students know Breslin’s name than that they know his story about JFK’s gravedigger. Do you really want your students to only know the story? Or do you want them to understand how Breslin got the story — i.e., what compelled him to track down the gravedigger, how he extracted details from Pollard, how he wove those details into such an evocative piece?

If you’re any kind of journalism teacher, then you want students to learn the story behind the story — at which point they’ll know more than just the story or Breslin’s name. They’ll have a better idea of what it takes to be a journalist. If you’re not attempting to teach your students at least that much, then it’s hard to figure what they’re gaining from your alleged expertise.

Mark