Published: October 1, 2006

A Shore Thing

How a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter became a mentor-blogger.

In summer 2003, Will Richardson was vacationing with his family on Assateague Island in Maryland when his wife, Wendy, struck up a conversation with another beach-goer, Kathryn Higham. Richardson joined the discussion and discovered that her husband, Scott, was a journalist. The high school teacher told Kathryn that he was always on the lookout for mentors for his journalism students. So Kathryn led Richardson up the beach, to meet Scott, mentioning along the way that he’d won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting a year earlier.

“I almost stopped dead in...