A Talk with Ryan Thornburg
Ryan Thornburg is the managing editor of US News & World Report's website, but he has also worked as editor for Washingtonpost.com and CQ.com (Congressional Quarterly). He's also had a lot of experience blogging, even before the word blog was first used.Obviously, he had a lot of experience and a lot of good stories. He started off by talking with us about blogging in general. One thing that he hit upon that I had thought in the past, but that he really hit upon was the idea of a blog as a "trusted guide to the rest of the web."
He gave this interesting fact: polls show that Tom Brokaw is more trusted than NBC. People trust other people first and foremost, and that's where a lot of the appeal of blogging comes from. There is a human element that people can trust. There's a lot of Internet out there, and it's nearly impossible to sift through it all and find the good stuff, and Thornburg argues that that's where blogs have an essential role.
Later he talked more specifically about his work at the websites of major news sites. His experience with the Deepthroat story was particularly interesting.
"We got scooped," Thornburg said. "And it hurt. ... It felt like being naked on top of a trapeze."
The story was out there, and the Washington Post had nothing on it. Thornburg appeared genuinely sorry for Bob Woodward, however. Woodward obviously has a long history with the Deepthroat story, and he felt very strongly about personally telling the story at his own pace. The story was out and spreading like wildfire, and it was "out of his control" according to Thornburg.
Once the story started coming together and Thornburg had gotten some good video interviews for the website, there was still an embargo on the story until Woodward said it was ok.
Thornburg's memory of the day is a little shaky, he says, as everything went so fast. At the end of it, Thornburg said he felt like it was a good thing that Mark Felt admitted to being Deepthroat.
"A lot of us were living in the reflective glow of Woodward and Bernstein," he said. After that, journalists could move on in a way.
Thornburg talked about a lot of other things, especially his time at Washingtonpost.com during the breaking of the Monica Lewinsky. He remembers hearing about it from the Drudge Report. He said that he underestimated the growing role of the Internet in journalism at the time.
"The media cannot control a story anymore," he said. "The early days were just crazy."
He ended his talk on something I thought was really fascinating. I've noticed the Facebook Share feature on Facebook itself, and I promptly ignored it. However, I saw it a few days ago on The Onion. Apparently, US News And World Report's website has it as well.
Thornburg mentioned earlier that he and other major media outlets have noticed that personalization pages rarely get changed. Even if people use them daily, they generally don't change their personalization settings after the first time.
Well, Facebook goes in the opposite direction now. The website's entire existence revolves around people constantly using and adjusting their personalized settings. And now, with this Share feature, people can seek out the news items and other content that they find interesting and post it. It's new and fairly primitive, but I can certainly see a future where a person can use Facebook to subscribe to all sorts of news feeds and YouTube video categories and all sorts of stuff. Rather than having a hundred personalized pages with a hundred different media sites, a person can focus on their MySpace or Facebook personalized page and get everything from there.
I will try emailing Ryan Thornburg with this and report back with what he thinks.
posted by tromano @ 8:41 PM
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