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Stelter combines old and new media at Times

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 9:32 - by Patrick Thornton

Brian Stelter has been blogging and pushing the new media envelope much longer than he has been working at a mainstream publication, but now be combines new media with old to cover his beat.

Before coming to The New York Times, Stelter founded and ran the popular and influential TV news blog TV Newser. Now that he works for one of the most storied news organizations in the world, Stelter finds himself managing a beat offline and online.

At the center of his beat is TV Decoder, a blog about what’s on TV, who is watching what’s on TV and why it matters. But Stelter finds himself spending more than half of his time working for print. How does he balance the two and how do they work together?

“When I was first starting, it was a challenge to figure out what is a blog post versus what is a print story,” he said.

He said his blog is a way to pitch stories for the paper, and to report out stories for the paper. He can write a short post for his blog and gauge the reaction. He can also spend days, weeks or even months reporting little tidbits before he puts it all together into a large story for print.

“It’s frequently an archive for when I’m writing a story for the paper, so I can go back and use some of the thoughts I had three months ago for a story,” he said about his blog.

Stelter has never known a non-wired world of journalism. He can’t imagine not be able to use tools like his blog, Twitter or other social networks to help get instant feedback from readers. He really values the connectedness and feedback he gets from being wired.

“I think the big and most general advantage is it kind of makes it easier to share stories, ideas, links and to be able to ask for advice, contacts and sources,” he said about being a wired journalists. “When I go on Twitter and post about what I’m writing about, I’m opening myself up to opinions, more points of view and more sources. That’s almost always a benefit.”

Part of being connected goes beyond getting feedback from users. People like to help and contribute. Stelter said it makes people feel more connected to him as a person, because he is no longer just a byline in a paper, but a real person that they can interact with.

People can interact with Stelter in a myriad of ways. They can post comments on his blog, and he responds to some of those comments, or they can talk to him on Twitter or be his friend on Facebook. Stelter doesn’t use social networking at the core of his beat like many beat bloggers do, but rather he uses social networking to allow him to be more connected to his beat.

He hasn’t found Facebook to be that helpful of a resource, but he does use it as a directory for contacts. Many of his sources, PR contacts and others are on Facebook. Facebook does give his readers and easy way to contact him, but he hasn’t found any meaningful public discourse through Facebook.

“It just seems to me that Facebook isn’t the place that conversations are happening,” he said. “I would think the conversations are happening on the blog itself in the comments section. I use the comments section sometimes as an incubator for stories.”

He has used Twitter mostly as a venue to get instant feedback from users. During the open ceremony of the Olympics he used search.twitter.com to see what people were saying about NBC by just typing in “NBC.” He found a lot of people were upset with NBC for delaying the open ceremony 12 hours.

He wrote a blog post about the situation, it was linked from the homepage and the post started to get hundreds of comments. The comments on his blog and on Twitter convinced his editors that this needed to be a print story. Stelter was able to find great synergy between his social networking presence on Twitter and his blog and with print on this story.

“It wound up on the front page of the Times the next day,” he said. “A few years ago that simply wouldn’t have been possible. I don’t think it would have been possible to measure the reaction.”