Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

One of the current journalism memes is that there is a great divide between print reporters and old-time newspaper people and bloggers. Often the reporters are portrayed as crotchety old farts with no enthusiasm for the new media.

Don’t tell that to Andrew Malcolm. At age 64, Malcolm has years of experience as an international correspondent at The New York Times and a feature writer at The Los Angeles Times. He has also worked the “other side,” serving as Laura Bush’s press secretary for a time. Mark Glaser has an interview with Malcolm, who is now working at the LATimes to help anchor the paper’s political blog. He is eager to dispel a few notions about journalism and blogging.

Here’s the key sentence, at least for this sometime journalist: “To me … journalism was a place where people who wanted to learn the rest of their lives went to work,” he said. That’s the reason many of us get into journalism in the first place – to learn as much as you can about as many subjects as possible. And doing a weblog is just another extension of that.

Another newspaper political blogger, Ryan Beckwith, at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., says in an interview with Talk Politics that the divide between bloggers and reporters is already lessening. He is already seeing convergence. “Over time, I think papers will learn to be more immediate, more chatty and more transparent, while bloggers will learn to be more rigorously sourced, more fair and objective.”

And to those dire warnings of inevitable newspaper extinction? “Any student of biology can tell you that the dinosaurs didn’t disappear, they evolved. Their descendants are the birds we encounter every day. They are nimble, require fewer resources and can do things that dinosaurs only dreamed about. Oh, and there are millions of them.”

Speaking of political blogs, don’t forget that the Washington Post/Newsweek Campaign Tracker widget, powered by NewsGator, is available here for anyone with a Windows Mobile Phone.

Comments

[Cindy]

It's not only the writers and publishers who are evolving, it is the consumer who is changing as well. How much of the drive toward this chattier, more informal style you've referenced, which needs to incorporate rigorous standards, is borne out of the public's expectation that every single thing be catered exactly to their taste?

I think this is the end result of the trend seen in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Susan Friedmann's Riches in Niches -- the power of the niche is so strong, so customer defined and driven -- that every industry, including publishing and journalism, is forced to respond.

There may still very well be a place for traditional newspapers -- but they're going to morph into a specialty product, and lose that everyman feel they had a generation or two ago. The everyman is reading blogs -- and they're writing them.