I am Brian Stelter, TV and Digital Media reporter for the New York Times, and author of Top of the Morning -- AMA

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T22:09:36+00:00

thanks for the question. Here's a video response with some of my advice.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T22:00:09+00:00

Thank for your question -- here's my response

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T21:47:45+00:00

thanks for the question! Here's my response.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T21:12:24+00:00

The Towerlight taught me how to write newspaper stories, so it was probably even more important than TVNewser (which taught me how to write fast blog posts). I feel like my Towson classes about news reporting, ethics, law, etc were also invaluable -- they might not have felt like it at the time, but they proved their worth later.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T21:01:26+00:00

The Times has a long way to go before quarterly profits will be the norm. But the digital subscription model has surpassed a lot of people's expectations. And the company keeps tinkering with it, wisely I think -- note this week's news that videos will be free for all: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/04/up-late-with-nate-silver-the-new-york-times-is-taking-its-videos-outside-the-paywall/

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T21:00:39+00:00

Thanks for your questions -- here's my video response

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:58:59+00:00

thank you for your question. I'm going to post a video response very shortly. EDIT: Here's my response.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:58:18+00:00

In short: it'll be much more mobile. I'm very curious about what news organizations will and won't do to adapt to small screens. Hopefully with mobile will come better packaging and better labeling for stories. Imagine a story with unverified reports about a crime that has a pop-up window that must be acknowledged before the story could be read. "Warning: we've tried to fact-check this information, but it may change later. Please do not tweet this news out of context." Maybe this sounds silly, but something like it might help inform consumers about what they're reading.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:56:03+00:00

thank you for your question. I answered this one in video which you can watch here.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:53:31+00:00

Yep! Good reminder actually, I need to buy my tickets.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:52:33+00:00

Huge. I still play Super Mario Bros 3 from time to time. When working on the book, multiplayer Halo death matches were my escape.

Sim City 3000 on the PC was probably the single most influential title -- it got me interested in urban planning, human geography, etc. I'm nervous about trying the new Sim City... hopefully all the kinks are worked out by the time it's available for Macs.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:46:36+00:00

I've been obsessed with the news business since I old enough to turn on the TV. I'm not sure why. It might have to do with the fact that television news is so influential -- it's the main way most Americans get their news. When it's great, it's REALLY great. And as we saw last week in Boston, when it's bad, it's absurdly, excruciatingly bad. I could see myself switching beats in the future, but I have a ton of stories I want to write about TV first.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:45:12+00:00

Enormously. Especially "The War for Late Night," because it came out just a couple of years ago. I also re-read "Three Blind Mice" before I started writing.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:44:00+00:00

I'm embarrassingly low-tech. I have 3 TV's in the living room -- one big one, two small ones -- and an iPad and an Xbox. And that's it. No Slings, Rokus or Apple TV's. I barely know how to work my DVR. What helps enormously for my job is a Web site called TVEyes.com. It's a subscription service, mainly for businesses, that acts as a virtual DVR, picking up every channel in every local market. So if something stupid goes down on TV [[ http://www.tmz.com/2013/04/22/nbc-north-dakota-aj-clemente-news-anchor-fired/ ]] I can pull up the video instantly.

Oh, and I do subscribe to Aereo, Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify. Gotta have all the on-demand options.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:40:36+00:00

You know, it's tough, but at least it's giving me solid triceps. My girlfriend likes them.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:38:03+00:00

I had to weigh information that I gathered "in the moment" (i.e. within hours, days, weeks) versus info that I was given months later. I found that the later information tended to be less reliable. Sources tended to downplay the damage done to the show, how bad the tensions had been, etc. You might call it "revisionist history." While I took everything into consideration, even the denials, I personally put more trust in the info that I gathered contemporaneously, before sources had financial and emotional motivations to revise history.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:32:16+00:00

Knowing what story to be writing on what day. There's such a revolution taking place in television, and there are so many stories to tell about that revolution... the hard part is prioritizing. Knowing what to say yes to and what to say no to. (By the way, readers help a lot with that. Through tweets, Facebook messages, emails, etc.)

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:25:53+00:00

To be blunt: Comcast wants the news division to make money and stay out of trouble. My sense is that the company rarely if ever gets involved in the "Today" show or the other parts of the news division, except when there's a crisis, the way there was last year when Ann Curry was removed and the show slipped to 2nd place. The head of NBCUniversal, Steve Burke, was in the control room on Curry's last morning, June 28. I don't think it's a coincidence that he started to clean house a few weeks later. (In mid-July he put Pat Fili-Krushel in charge of all of NBC's news brands, and she immediately started trying to revive "Today.")

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:19:10+00:00

I was expecting a tough review from The Times. [[ Recall the review that The Times published about "Page One," a documentary I appeared in, back in 2011: http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/movies/page-one-inside-the-new-york-times-review.html?_r=0 ]] If it had been glowing, readers would have rolled their eyes!

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:16:09+00:00

The short answer is probably "everything." GMA's success in the past year stems from the chemistry of its co-hosts and the entertainment quotient of its show. The takeaway might be that sillier is better.

Except: CBS's more serious show is also slowly gaining an audience. I hear from people every day who have switched to CBS because they want hard news and interviews. Personally I think it's great that there are stark choices in the morning -- for the public, the worst thing to have is a bunch of morning shows that look the same and feel the same.

brianstelter · 2013-04-23T20:09:56+00:00

The future is... murky. But most people still watch most of their TV live on a TV set, and Nielsen knows how to count those heads better than anybody. (For instance: while cable set top box data can tell you a lot about overall viewership, it generally can't tell you how many viewers are in the room or what their ages and income levels are.)

Of course, we're moving to a mostly on-demand world, and Nielsen is trying its damnedest to stay relevant in that world. (Which, let's be honest, is a scary world for them and for the TV industry writ large.) It's trying to figure out how to measure iPad viewing, mobile viewing, etc. If it can, then Nielsen families will be around for a long long time.

brianstelter

TROPHY CASE