Our guest this week is Ryan Tate, a reporter for Gawker Media, a listener to this podcast who has been following Dave Winer’s Scripting News since 1997.
Some of the items we discussed:
Why Nick Denton doesn’t care about your resume or where you went to college. (He looks you up on the web.) Ryan began as a commenter at Gawker sites, though he also had a career as a “print” journalist.
Why Gawker sites don’t practice “access journalism” in the same way that more traditional news organizations do.
The Apple iPhone anttenagate story and the role of readers in bringing it to light.
Ryan’s coverage of Facebook’s privacy changes, which began with this post.
The Angelgate story and the acquisition of Techcrunch by Aol.
The founding insight of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media: that journalists are a lot more interesting to listen to in a bar than they are to read in print. Eliminating that gap is his editorial approach.
The creation of a new editorial culture at Aol (amid a hiring spree) and at Yahoo– without what Ryan called “the old media baggage.”
The shift of economics correspondent Peter Goodman from the New York Times to the Huffington Post. “With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on,” Goodman said. “This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.” While he said he was happy at the Times, he found he was engaged in “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”
The Facebook Movie and what was and wasn’t captured there. (Dave’s review and Lawrence Lessig’s.) We agreed that the film will be good for Zuckerberg.
Dave went to a hackathon this week, but he has some doubts about them.
Oh, and Ryan Tate is writing a book on skunkworks and why they work.
Rebooting The News 
You guys can’t seriously be lapping up Peter Goodman’s hogwash. Wanting to go from the NYT to HuffPo to be free to act more like Fox News people only from the left perspective does not make that the future of news.
I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that your whole “View from nowhere” antipathy is just a lust for more blind, vitriolic partisanship in the press.
*Groan.* Dave may have his own nominations, but yours gets my vote for the most moronic comment we have yet received. “Blind, vitriolic partisanship in the press” doesn’t describe anything I have advocated or said or praised or stood up for. And you can’t demonstrate that Goodman wants to be Fox-from-the-left just by stating such.
I’m the “moronic” one, yet you go right ahead and default to flaming as soon as anyone is critical of your ideas.
No. Not “anyone who is critical of my ideas.” You, Tom. You and your moronic culture war claptrap. Peter Goodman leaves the Huffington Post for the New York Times, and so it must be because he wants to act out his inner Fox News, but for the left. He didn’t say that. He said he wanted to be able to tell the truth without laundering his views through “experts” and he wanted to be free to focus on solutions and, yes, to be a columnist. It was you who imported automatic assumptions about ideology into it and projected them on to Goodman and to me. So not anyone. Not everyone. You. Read it again:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/howard-kurtz/2010/09/huffington_snags_ny_times_star.html
Show me the Fox News for the left part.
What I’m saying is that your notion of reporting with “a perspective” seems to just point to peopleadopting partisan stances – which in my mind transcends journalism and goes to punditry at best and propaganda at worst. What is the purpose of jourbnalism if not disinterested truth-seeking?