Jim Romeneskos Impact On Journalism

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That’s the big picture for journalism and Romenesko. They are both being done in by large impersonal forces like the commoditization of news, accelerated obsolescence, mutating news values, and what happens when newspapers try to wring 21st-century profits from the 18th-century technique of transporting, by cart and hand, individualized packages of words on paper. So there was something vaguely Conradian about the video image of Romenesko’s apartment and his soft pleasant features, and his obviously sincere devotion to words on paper that came through my laptop’s tiny speaker. It’s not that either of us was mumbling about “the horror, the horror.” But we are both survivors of the print era destined to be bucked off the same bronco of change. Some of us and our papers are already history. I’m not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence as the most famous trade name in media blogging.

Right now, though, life is good. Romenesko is Poynter’s highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year. The advent of WiFi has freed him from his one-bedroom apartment in Evanston, Illinois. By 6 a.m, he’s dressed and off to the Starbucks across the street, drinking coffee and multitasking on his MacBook Air. He also runs Starbucks Gossip, an independent blog about the company, a job that “pays for my coffee and maybe a sandwich.” Then he moves to other WiFi-enabled spots, notably the Unicorn, a café crowded with “old fogies like me reading newspapers” and Northwestern University students munching sandwiches and staring at their computer screens. “I like to think they don’t see me as a dinosaur site,” Romenesko says when I suggest that he, like print newspapers, has an aging readership, and the kids are probably not on his blog. Indeed, there are signs that younger journalists are looking elsewhere for trade news that is intentionally satirical and loaded with political spin and contempt for the bosses.

One site of choice these days is Gawker, which promises “media gossip and pop culture round the clock.” Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko’s and has paid backhanded tributes to “mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one).” Gawker has also needled the pioneer of its craft about his Starbucks gig, and its readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. “I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me,” says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper. “I think Romenesko is what Gawker would look like if it had morals. It’s basically a newspaper on newspapers and provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry—an invaluable tool for that master’s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper.”

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