The best news reporting is surprising. It causes the reader to look at an event or person through a different spectrum or lens.

Take the famous neurologist-author Oliver Sacks, who finds stories when nature does the unexpected, goes off the beaten path and turns conventional wisdom inside out.

Writing four years ago in The New Yorker, Sacks in "To See and Not See" told of a patient in Oklahoma — given the alias Virgil — who had been virtually blind since birth with what was thought to be retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary condition that slowly eats away at the retinas. An ophthalmologist, however, doubted the official diagnosis and thought a simple procedure to extract the cataracts might lead to partial sight.

When the bandages were removed from Virgil's eyes, all he saw was a mass of confusion interrupted only by the surgeon's comment, "Well?"

What Virgil saw had no coherence. "His retina and optic nerve were active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them." writes Sacks. "He was, as the neurologists say, agnostic."

Seeing, as everyone learned in the case, is not that simple. "When we open our eyes each morning it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see," writes Sacks. "We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience categorization, memory and reconnection."

Virgil's story was miraculous, but it raised a host of unexpected questions. Is seeing enough? What about the role of experience and memory? Is it always better to see than not see? We no longer know for sure.

In using the article in undergraduate magazine classes, I was perplexed by student reactions. They found it boring, overly long, too technical and lacking in detail about the relationship between Virgil and his fiancee (who openly promoted the surgery).

They wanted a conventional ending — the battle to regain sight ends in triumph — and were not interested in the medical history of vision or the fact that the story ended with more questions than answers. In their desire for a "cleaner" version of the story, I suspect, these future journalists had already learned an important lesson for their own careers: surprise the reader — and future editors — but not that much.

At times, the news media seem to act more like the medical experts following the Virgil case than skeptical outsiders. In searching for easy truths, cheap grace, quick fixes, and miracle remedies, the news media think they are giving the public what it wants. But I think what the public really wants is what Virgil's medical team had hoped for — sight and coherence.

As the wire editor at The Omaha World-Herald in the mid-1970s, I selected national and international stories for Page One and the rest of the newspaper. As today, there was a constant flood of new scientific and medical discoveries. These new findings were often compelling and surprising — the classic definition of news — but these breakthroughs were often contradicted or even discredited in the following weeks.

These follow-up stories often received lesser "play," meaning they were buried in the inside page, so the original and often inaccurate images lingered. One image did stay with me: that of a cancer patient in a small Nebraska town whose hopes were raised, then dashed, by a series of new discoveries and later stories that debunked the "breakthroughs."

Though science reporting has become more sophisticated in recent years, some things have not changed.

Witness the recent case of Dolly, the cloned sheep. Four months after the initial breakthrough was reported in late February, The New York Times carried a solitary article inside its science section indicating that some scientists are skeptical about whether cloning actually took place.

Or take physician-assisted suicide. It was the rare newspaper that carried the issue beyond the normal advocates and opponents of assisted suicide. For instance, David McCurdy's story in this issue of the Bulletin (Pg. 12), raises the interesting and ignored question of the nurse's role in assisted death, yet very few articles have been written on the topic.

In addition, the larger question is not so much about the right to die but the quality of one's death. Most polls indicate that people facing death want choices, but of a different kind. They want to die with as little pain as possible, with loved ones and at home, whenever possible.

The story of a good death, however, is beginning to get covered. The Philadelphia Inquirer won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its series on death and dying. The Wichita Eagle is running a continuing series on what constitutes a good death.

This kind of journalism would appeal to James Carey, a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a thoughtful critic of the craft. The purpose of journalism, Carey believes, is the development and enhancement of a common life.

Before the Wichita newspaper engaged in an 18-month project to tap into the community's civic life, reporters expressed frustration that they kept covering the same people and institutions. As former editor Buzz Merritt said, real issues are not addressed at city hall or the courthouse, but in the "dark and trackless swamp of public life."

Civic journalism has its critics, but at its center is a concern for uncovering the layers of public life, "framing stories" differently, and writing harder-hitting articles — and still being first with the news. It's also about covering the ignored, forgotten and powerless.

There are many untold stories in healthcare that deal with people's real concerns: finding adequate and compassionate care for elderly poor who are dying, how assisted suicide would affect people with severe disabilities and limited resources, just to name two. There are hundreds more.

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," said Carey. "To make experience memorable so it won't be lost and forgotten is the task of journalism."