Ever fondly wished to be a fly on the wall in the hallowed halls of the iconic New York Times newspaper? Or feverishly wondered if the media institution would soon be extinct, blogged and YouTubed out of existence by internet news? Find the answer to all these questions and more in our interview with Media Reporter Brian Stelter — one of Page One‘s central figures.
Christine Champ: First off, I have to ask … paper or digital?
Brian Stelter: Totally digital [laughs]! Actually you know here’s what I use paper for … I was in Starbucks just now since I figured I had to have one since I was in Seattle, and The Times was on the newsstand and I went over to pick it up to take a look at where my story was placed in the paper today. I still care about print for that reason: I still care about where they place my stories because it’s still a judgment by the editors about the importance of a subject. For better or worse placement in the print paper still matters a lot at The Times. Getting on the front page of the print edition still matters a lot. But as a reader I could care less, and as a reader I would prefer it online.
CC: So you’d be fine if print news went away?
BS: I wouldn’t subscribe to it in print. Although over the weekend with my new girlfriend I loved sprawlin’ the paper out on the kitchen table and diggin’ into it for a couple of hours—that was cool. I could get used to that. Maybe Sunday I’ll read it in print, but not the rest of the week. The Sunday paper is meant to be read in print, isn’t it? But no digital … if we were going to reinvent the news ecosystem from scratch today, we would not print anything on paper, except maybe glossy magazines. We would put it all online and on iPads.
CC: Do you think print will eventually disappear?
BS: I think print will keep being diminished … I can’t imagine it disappearing altogether. The Times DNA is just too much a part of me to imagine that. But I’d be lying to say it doesn’t come up in meetings (the question of whether we’re going to stop printing the paper). The publisher has always said there’s no plans, which is a way to hedge that answer. I’m sure there are no plans right now. Print is still so valuable. We make so much money off the print edition. But it would be great to wean people off of print and shift them over to the web–especially shift them over to tablets and mobile devices because I would think the margins would be a lot higher. All those poor trees and stuff being cut down …
CC: Yes the environment is a major reason to go digital, though I know a lot of people who resist because they love the smell and texture of paper.
BS: Maybe the iPad in the future will have a smell.
CC: A paper smell …
BS: A scratch-and-smell sticker. There must be some way to do it. I’m such a tablet advocate. I realize it will take many years to get tablets in everyone’s hands but some day that’s the way these papers should be read in my opinion. It’s the way I think my mom would love to read the paper. It creates less garbage at the end of the day, and lets you read only what you want to read. I’m pretty bullish in the long term about what tablets could do to not necessarily replace print, but to supplement it.
CC: Speaking of the web, at 18 what made you decide to create a site like tvnewser.com rather than just update your MySpace page like many other teens your age?
BS: The blog? I guess I started it because I was obsessed with television news. Probably part of me was thinking to myself: “this could be a job someday”. But most of me was thinking “I love television news and I don’t think it gets enough attention”. My real motivation was—this is true—The New York Times does not cover cable news enough. They’re obsessed with the broadcast networks. Back then it was Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather … they were obsessed with these nightly newscasts that fewer people were watching. They weren’t covering Fox News, CNN and MSNBC which more and more people were watching. So I thought my blog should be about that topic, cable news. It was a hobby–something fun to do in college. Pretty quickly it became pretty popular and less of a hobby and more of a job. It was the perfect college job—I got paid basically beer money to keep it going. And what I didn’t know at the time was it was a resume for The Times. It was a resume for companies to consider hiring me when I graduated. But it was out of curiosity about the media. I was a news junkie and a television junkie so it was a nice intersection of the two… If you ask my mom she’ll say I always wanted to get a job out of it but I genuinely don’t think I was. It would have been a weird way to get a job. Although now I tell students that’s what they should do. Figure out what you’re obsessed with, what you’re passionate about. I don’t understand sometimes how there’s 25 reporters out covering a political campaign. How do you stand out in that pack? I think it’s smarter to go find something you can stand out doing, especially if you’re young and trying to get a start. And for me that just happened to be TV news.
CC: Moving from your own blog to an institution like The Times, was there any downside or loss of freedom?
BS: There was a loss of freedom because I was suddenly being edited. Everything I write is edited and not only edited but everything I write is a result of a decision making process about whether we should even be covering it. So it’s not just editing it’s also the assigning process. But that loss of freedom didn’t hurt that much. They very much allowed me to roam freely. And they’ve continued to allow me to roam very freely and cover television as broadly as I want to, to the point where I went over to cover Aljazeera. They’ve been very open to my ideas so it hasn’t been as restrictive as I thought it would. I thought there’d be much more ageism. I thought I would get marginalized for being young and that didn’t happen at all which was surprising to me. It is a little weird to be swimming upstream to go from digital to print but there’s a nice balance. I like that I can start a story online … this morning we put up a story at 6 am, updated it, and it is in the paper tonight a little better, a little improved, because it was online all day… I like that we can marinate a story online—enhance it, improve it, and get feedback on it then it ends up on the paper. It’s a nice relationship between print and web.
CC: Coming from a web background and younger generation, what do you think of the Tribune Company owner Sam Zell’s sum up of what young audiences want from the news, as basically–puppies first … and then, maybe, Iraq—that was spotlighted in Page One.
BS: I don’t know what 20-something Sam Zell knows, but the 20-somethings I know sometimes want Iraq first. That doesn’t mean they don’t love puppies, but there’s a keen interest in the world that I find from people of all ages. We may have to do a better job of packaging it, and that might involve writing about puppies in Iraq once in a while. That reminds me of the dog on Navy Seal Team six–the dog that helped in the Bin Laden raid. We had a big story about that dog, that’s great. We also had a dozen other stories about all the elements of that … I think reaching younger people is a challenge generally. I think we’ve got some tools we could use to do it better–Facebook being a big one of them. But I rolled my eyes a bit when I heard that comment. Maybe the sentiment that we should put puppies on the front page so people would pick it up is what he was trying to say. I guess what’s legitimate in my mind is gosh it’s annoying for a journalist that people are willing to pay a dollar for a song, or four dollars for a coffee but not a dollar for a newspaper. I can sympathize with that frustration. News is not meant to be always enjoyed, it’s meant to be consumed I suppose. And we might be able to do a better job of making it more enjoyable. I don’t know. But the notion that people aren’t interested in the world rings false to me.
CC: Your comment about people’s willingness to pay for their news also brings to mind the web-prompted trend in recent years of major media outlet like The Wall Street Journal switching from paying experienced journalists to free bloggers. How do you think that changes the news?
BS: I definitely detect a downward pressure on salaries and compensation for writing across the board. I don’t think there’s any easy solution to that other than an unwillingness to write for free. Now of course I wrote for free for many months on my blog and then for only pennies, but I viewed it as a hobby not as work… I think maybe part of the solution, although not nearly all of it, is for there to be less commodity journalism and more original journalism. What I mean by that is the 25 people covering a campaign. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. To have 25 people chasing the same shiny object … if you have 25 people gathering the same quotes the organizations paying those people aren’t getting the most for their money necessarily. In a situation like that it’s a matter of spreading out resources more efficiently and effectively. In the same way that any capitalist society would, but more probably there are a lot of stories that need to be told. So hopefully there remain enough news organizations that have the budgets to send people out. I was in Joplin on Monday covering the tornado. I just happened to take a break from television for a day and did disaster reporting and I have to go buy new shoes today because my shoes are filthy and this sounds really silly, but someone’s going to have to bear that cost. We need literal shoes on the ground in disaster areas and at some point you’re going to have to buy new shoes. If we can have The Times and a half a dozen others that are in this business keep doing that I think we’re lucky… if we can keep that contingent of journalists out there I think we’re going to be better off. I love that the movie talks about the notion “consider the source”. Even I as a journalist haven’t done enough of that. Try to find the original source of information as opposed to rewrites. Find the boots on the ground not the people that are rewriting the stuff…That’s the message I take away from the film but I hope it seeps through for others as well.
CC: You need a source that you can trust especially with news traveling so fast, or you risk the new outlets manufacturing news, on purpose or not, as the documentary points out with NBC’s mistaken announcement of the end of the war in Iraq …
BS: Yeah you need those deliberative bodies to think through what you’re seeing and hearing. NBC news comes on and makes that announcement. A lot of people heard it and believed it and went about their day. The Times made a decision not to run that story because we did not feel it was news that merited space in the paper. If we didn’t have all those editors around, if it was just me, I would have splashed the story up on the web site … I was so glad there were those editors processing it, thinking it through, calling The Pentagon, calling Baghdad, making a decision even if it offended NBC. It’s great to have checks and balances on other news organizations. We talk a lot about journalists being checks and balances on the government,well, they can also be a checks and balances for other news organizations. And I think that’s what we were doing on that day.
And the other thing is the way we can all influence the news process the way we couldn’t before. We have these tools online to engage reporters and editors… It doesn’t mean we’re always going to change how we’re behaving or our minds, but I know my work improves all the time thanks to reader emails and tweets and Facebook comments. It’s not always obvious because a lot of it’s subtle … it’s nice there are ways for readers to get in the middle of the process and either push us to cover something we’re not covering, or push us to cover it a different way. It’s pretty powerful.
CC: Or leaking information ahead of the major media like WikiLeaks. What was your first reaction when Assange’s footage released?
BS: My first reaction was that we should all watch this video [laughs]. That we should all have to watch this video. Bill Keller’s comments about WikiLeaks struck a cord with me. Later in the year he what this materials about is knowing what your government is doing in your name. That really made sense to me… It was not easy for The Times to figure out how to treat that information. People will continue to debate how we did it, but it’s hard to argue the notion that more information is bad. If we can go back to that as our core tenet–that more information is good in the world–then it becomes a debate about how to handle it in the most responsible and safe way. That’s the debate we had at The Times. But I love that WikiLeaks is front and center in the movie. If I had to guess what was going to make the final cut it wouldn’t have been the Iraq war video, but in the context of the broiling debate over it last year it makes perfect sense.
CC: What do you think is the best thing that will come out of WikiLeaks for journalism or news?
BS: I hope that it has shown people that have access to private, important information that they have ways to share it with the public that are not just dropping it off on the front steps of The New York Times as Daniel Ellsberg says in the movie about the Pentagon Papers. The Journal has come up with a site to upload secret documents. I think Aljazeera has a clearing house for documents as well. The Times has talked about having a site like that. It makes a lot of sense that we would give people a way to leak information because after all that gets back to the checks and balances on the government. It doesn’t mean we’re going to publish everything or put people in danger. But it makes sense that people should know there’s an avenue or outlet for information they have that deserves a public hearing.
CC: What’s you take on how social media has been used both sides of political struggle, as it has recently in Egypt—protesters using Facebook to organize and the military using it to stop them?
BS: Right, we should harbor no illusions that for all the good of social media bad actors can use it just as effectively—if not more effectively. Look back at the internet being turned off at some points. The series of revolutions to me have been so eye opening because the people are using the same tools we have to organize and to communicate—and to broadcast. Especially broadcast being the pivotal word because when you see it, you have video of it it’s so much more powerful. To have YouTube loosen the restrictions on video has been really important, and you can’t really necessarily rely on the networks to show you what’s going on there. The most violent content in Syria last month the networks would never broadcast, but you have access to it on YouTube and websites, and you can aggregate it on sites like The New York Times site. I don’t know if there’s any historical parallel there but I’d like to think that conflicts would last a shorter period of time when we have more access to what’s actually happening in a conflict.
CC: After being in documentary, have you thought of making your own? Is there a big story or topic you’d like to investigate on film?
BS: That’s a great question … My editor … we’ve talked briefly about what we would do.
CC: Puppies in Iraq?
BS: Yeah. I’ll tell you what interests me right off the top of my head. I’m interested in how television as a medium sort of manipulates people and manipulates public opinion. It’s really hard to write stories about. It’s really hard to write 1000 word stories about. In fact, almost impossible so far for me. But I’m really interested in it as a subject, and I bet you could do it more effectively in a film than you could in a print story. Sometimes it’s about matching up topic and medium, right? Whether it is the Iraq war, or Libya or the political campaign in 08, the idea of television effecting our public opinion is really interesting to me. So I could imagine a film about that. That’d be pretty cool. But I hadn’t given that a thought before. It’s cool. It’s a good idea. I should think about that. And I’m also a mass transit geek so I’d love to spend time doing history of subways or something but that’s random.
CC: What’s next for you? Will you stay at The Times?
BS: When you’re at The Times four or five years there’s a whisper “what would you like to cover next”? Some people stay on the same beat 20 or 30 years but others move around at the paper. So I’m starting to think about what’s my next beat. What would I be doing if I wasn’t doing media … I’ve tried writing a couple of stories about politics and I haven’t found that other perfect beat yet… it makes for well rounded journalists. But now I need to think about what documentary I want to make …
