Hey! I know this guy!
Less self-referentially (and my smile was not smug!), this struck me as a pretty sound explanation of the differences between print and journalism work:
Rubin, fifty, epitomizes the old-school print reporter who has found the leap to Web journalism intoxicating. A nineteen-year veteran of the Inquirer, he writes a very popular, link-rich, and witty blog called Blinq.com and also covers the business of entertainment for print and Web—everything from auto shows to sports and popular culture. Rubin's home page says, “It was a wise man who said news is a conversation. Let's talk.” He says Web journalism is “a shot of adrenaline. It makes me superproductive. The feedback is immediate. I know almost instantly what's working. It's like I'm back in my father's hardware store, deciding what to put in the front window to bring in customers.”
Writing for you guys is a very, very different experience than writing for op-ed pages or magazines. There, I craft a piece, bless it, pack it a rucksack, and send it into the world hoping for the best. Despite spending months on it, i may never hear anything on it ever again. Even if I do get feedback, it'll be literal feedback, rather than engagement. Here, however, I get comments in seconds, can revise based on new developments, can instantly springboard from a discussion into a new post. It's a very, very different experience, one that forces a lot more speed and regularity, but offers, in some ways, commensurately greater rewards. I also learn a lot more in the aftermath of a post than I do in the days following an article, so from a development perspective, that's a plus. On the other hand, articles, with their attendant time, research, and reporting, teach me quite a bit more as I'm working on them. So it's sort of a toss-up.
Lastly, I think media types spend too much time obsessing over the web's potential for interactivity and too little on its capacity for storage. The biggest difference between a blog and a magazine isn't the comments, it's the space. There's no zero sum competition for content. No health care post takes space that would otherwise focus on 2008, and so I need never pull back on either, or avoid wonkery because it will steal space from bigger draws. When Bob talks about the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, "[where] if you click on suburban Waukesha, for example, you’ll be directed to WaukeshaNow, with a cornucopia of community news and community voices— City Again At Top of Tax Rankings. Main St. Lanes to Close. Bus Fares Up. Art Project Delayed—plus lots of commentary, debate, and listings," what allows those options are the web's near unlimited space. The limit, here, is personnel. But so long as papers have money to pay staff, they can keep serving readers in ever more specific and useful ways.
Bob's whole article, by the way, is one of the most reflective and forward-thinking meditations I've read on the future of print. Well worth checking out.
