Don’t just ask questions in your news interviews. Ask questions so fact-fueled that you’ll know when the answer is a lie. Don’t just sit back after your story is published – call the people in it and ask them to critique it for accuracy and fairness.

And don’t just seek the story’s other side – “master it.“

Those were among the lessons two-time Pulitzer Prize winner William K. Marimow, chalk in hand, taught Monday, Oct. 24, to some 40 undergraduates in two English department journalism classes at the University of Delaware.

Marimow, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a guest speaker in classes taught by adjunct journalism professor Dan Biddle, an Inquirer alum. Marimow previously has led news organizations such as National Public Radio and the Baltimore Sun.

Reaching back to his days as an Inquirer reporter, Marimow took his listeners on a step-by-step journey to confirm a telephone tip from a reader: A harrowing tale of police brutality, which had begun as a routine car stop one night in Philadelphia’s Society Hill section and ended with an innocent driver beaten so badly that neighbors heard him shouting, “Mom! Mom! Help me!”

Such highly detailed revelations were Marimow’s stock-in-trade: Both his Pulitzer Prizes were for stories that described patterns of misconduct by police.

Though a longtime city hall, labor and investigative reporter before he turned to editing, Marimow allowed as to how he once had been “totally, completely bamboozled” by a Philadelphia mayor’s seeming denial of having accepted free suits from a clothing workers’ union leader.

Further fact-gathering revealed that the denial was, in Marimow’s words, “a lie of a technical truth.”

One student asked what sort of journalism Marimow had found most rewarding in a career that dates back to the early 1970s.

Stories that made “a difference in people’s lives,” Marimow replied. “Especially the powerless.”