Cyberjournalist Jonathan Dube interviews Len Apcar, the New York Times editor in chief, on Times on the Trail. Apcar doesn’t like to think of this new thingie as a blog; he prefers “news service.”
I did not want to jump on the bandwagon and race to the lowest common denominator. That?s not what I was about here. I really studied the blog space. I talked to a lot of bloggers. I went to a bloggers’ conference. And I came away from them and I said, there?s a concept here we could use, and we could turn this into what was jokingly refered to for months as an information delivery device. But this whole business of whether a blog should be edited I thought was a red herring. The whole question of whether a newspaper could blog I thought was a red herring. So my view was, if you want to call it a blog, you can call it a blog. I?m not calling it a blog because I don?t think it?s a blog. It?s an updated news service.
Apcar on The Trail inspiring knockoffs in other departments.
I?ll tell you Jonathan, to be quite candid about this, I?ve looked at this kind of page as a possible template for other areas of common interest. In other words, you could take this page and build a page for Opera buffs. You could do it for theater. You could do it for any number of special interests.
I wanted to learn how to do this first with political reporting. I thought it made a lot of sense. It played to The Times strengths. We have just scores, dozens, of reporters covering the campaigns. I was hoping we?d have a good lively debate, which we?ve got. So I want to learn by doing this first, with politics. And then from there I?ll step back and say, what do we think? what kind of tool is this? How do we learn from this?
So now the blogosphere has failed to put its man in the White House and the Times is officially saying: look, blogging the way you do it is not the way we will do it. I don’t see that as a failure, though. The Times’ campaign coverage looks suspiciously bloglike … the Times adapted the form to its own needs but the bloggers were here first and they deserve credit that goes with being a pioneer — which is so much nicer these days because we don’t have to build our houses out of grass and mud.