Photo by Julie of i live here:SF
“It has a lot of energy,” said CBS5′s Brittney Gilbert of the TV station’s newsroom as we sat down to lunch at Sai’s Vietnamese Restaurant, just down the street from the office. She added, “but it’s also really loud in there.”
Brittney’s one of those lucky few bloggers on the inside who gets to work in the thick of the hustle and bustle of news-gathering. Though she’s pajama-blogged from home with her own personal just-for-fun writing, her work with CBS is all pro.
Getting Access
I think most bloggers would be willing to sacrifice a little peace and quiet for the access granted by working in a major newsroom. Any online writer who’s ever gotten a brush-off from a publicist or government official can appreciate the doors that open when you say the magic words “mass market.”
“CBS’s name helps get access,” she said, mentioning a recent story her station recently did about Foursquare (in which reporter Mike Sugerman uses the word “cyberspace”). The story features appearances by Gavin Newsom, a social media expert with funny glasses and various local merchants — what blogger would have time or access to cram all those things into a five-minute post?
But is it News?
Of course, that access can breed complacency. If the Sugermonster really wanted to DO SOME NEWS, he could have mentioned Please Rob Me, a site that I personally feel is kind of dumb but has at least gotten people talking about the dark underbelly of location-based checkins.
Not to mention — Foursquare? Really? That’s news? I mean okay, sure, lots of people don’t know about it and would be interested, so I guess that’s the definition of what “news” is. But when the thesis of your piece is “here is something that exists,” well, heck, why not just ask your 15-year-old cousin what’s popular with the kids these days?
Aaaaaaanyway. Back to Brittney, whose news-gathering chops led me to compare her to Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.” (Which she confessed to never having seen! Put it on your instant queue RIGHT THIS SECOND.)
The fun of being in a TV newsroom, she explained, is seeing the sprint of breaking news. It’s a different atmosphere than what you’d find in print: “You’re not going to have breaking news at a paper, unless it’s on the web,” she said. And even then you might not!
Money Talks
I also asked her what she thought of Spot.us and NewsTilt, two new sites for journalists who are looking to ply their writing. On Spot.us, you pitch the story and then write it once donors provide funding; on NewsTilt, you get paid (if you’re lucky) after the story is written. Though she hasn’t used either, Brittney favored NewsTilt’s model, pointing out that with Spot.us, a wealthy donor could fund the stories that match their ideology.
“Whoever has the most money gets the stories they want,” she said of the system. “Powerful interests can manipulate news. … NewsTilt seems more merit-based.”
But money manipulating news isn’t anything new — just look at how many stories about cars are served up by news outlets funded primarily by automotive companies.
Keeping advertising and editorial in separate rooms is battle that’s been fought for decades — and it’s just the sort of fight that veterans know more about than the up-and-comers, which is why it’s a mistake to dismiss legacy journalists simply because they’re not on Twitter.
Smack dab in the middle of good-old-fashioned pavement-pounding and police scanners and choppers, applying lessons shared by news-veterans to the shiny new landscape of today — It’s exactly where any journalist would want to be. “I love it here,” Brittney said.
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I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 