Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Given that Monty Cook of The Baltimore Sun is a news editor who believes in the value of Twitter and other social media, it seemed appropriate to tweet his talk yesterday at the Johns Hopkins University. Tweets were not live, but assembled afterwards from notes.
@montycook, BaltSun editor, spoke and took Qs yesterday at JHU. Is he among most clueful editors working today? Excerpts follow. #mcook
“We have to stop being a newspaper company. Right now. We are a digital media company.”
The days of 6-part series may be numbered. Rethink how to present enterprise report’g. “Watergate was beat reporting, not a series.”
Twitter leads to offline connections, sources, sounding boards: “I can’t think of a better way for a reporter to do their job”
@gussent @saraneufeld @midnightsunblog & Eliz Large (http://is.gd/sUZf) are “prototypical reporters of the future” says their editor
“Reporters must be professional, passionate (not biased) and completely connected to the community they serve.” Dispassionate = over.
“There are a lot of important blogs out there.” Like earlier days of partisan newspapers. Linking, aggregation are important tools.
Trib bankruptcy was a good thing for BaltSun. Freedom from crushing debt, for now.
(Disclosure: I worked at The Sun until last summer. Monty and I were on the same team that launched the b paper and web site.)
