WATERVILLE -- Anne Hull, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who helped uncover neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last year, on Sunday described her passion for telling the stories of the poor, the marginalized and the powerless.

Hull is visiting the Colby College campus to receive the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award in recognition of her work, which has laid bare to the public the struggles of immigrants, wounded soldiers and young gay people in the United States.

She joined a wide-ranging panel discussion on journalism titled "Giving Voice to the Voiceless" that also included former Chicago Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Editor David Shribman, Bangladesh journalist and human-rights activist Afsan Chowdhury, and Naomi Schalit, editorial-page editor of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel.

"I never write about people in positions of power," Hull said in response to a question about how writing about her subjects is different from writing about public officials. "I'm always dealing with unsophisticated people."

Hull worked with fellow reporter Dana Priest on the Walter Reed articles. Their revelations of the shoddy treatment of war-wounded veterans shocked the public and spurred reform and action at the highest levels of government. Sadly, panelists said, shrinking news budgets are making such valuable enterprise reporting more difficult even in large newsrooms and nearly impossible in small ones.

"One of the casualties in the smaller newsrooms is covering poor people in this country," Hull said. "And our coverage of class has dropped off the radar."

Schalit, who wrote about hunger in Maine in a series of editorials that has won several national awards, said doing her project with such a small editorial staff would have been difficult or impossible without much support from the papers' editor and publisher.

One man suggested to panelists that online readers do not enjoy long-form journalism as much as those who read in print, and asked how this would affect print news publications.

Shribman said long-form enterprise journalism is too important to eliminate.

"English students don't like to read 'Paradise Lost,'" Shribman responded. "The public doesn't like to read a lot of stuff, and sometimes, an editor has to be an editor."

In Bangladesh, where Internet access is limited and journalists face frequent persecution, reporters' concerns are much different, Chowdhury said.

"Hunger, poverty and violence is something that we constantly reported," he said. "In Bangladesh, I have sat mostly in protest meetings. Not in meetings celebrating journalists."

The panel discussion "Giving Voice to the Voiceless" was put on by The Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, which connects teaching and research with contemporary political, economic and social issues. The Lovejoy Award, named for a journalist from Albion who was killed by a mob for his anti-slavery editorials, honors journalists for courageous reporting.

Joel Elliott -- 861-9252

jelliott@centralmaine.com