Jim Romeneskos Impact On Journalism

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Even without such scholarship, we know that the internet chews up content faster than print or broadcasting, and more impersonally. The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace, and the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker too has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press. Given my age, I tend to regard Romenesko’s legitimation of gossip as unfortunate and his devotion to the tradition of fairness as noble. There’s a word for these kinds of distinctions between the tawdry state of today’s journalism and the golden age of immutable values: quaint.

In little more than a century, journalism has been conducted under a variety of short-lived labels. Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism. To some of us, the New Journalism looked like a destination, but that was before the passage through gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.

The fogies are in an uproar about the internet’s glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in ­Romenesko’s old bathrobes. Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe, one of the more original thinkers at a legacy newspaper, counsels us to ignore the “journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation.” We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be before ­Romenesko’s great leap, which she defines as “the whole notion of the viral broadcast of often unverified information.” According to Rowe, the instant peer review that Romenesko has instituted by nationalizing newspaper shoptalk has two sides: “At its worst, it stifles creativity, makes executives risk-averse, and wastes valuable time and energy,” Rowe said in an email exchange in which we shared memories about the day we met Romenesko. “Advantages: It’s fast, it’s free, it’s efficient, and sometimes it’s even correct.”

I would simply add that you should read Romenesko while you can. He won’t be around forever, but his contribution will last. I’m not talking about his wholesaling of newsroom gossip; I’m talking about his trailblazing business model, succeeding where the websites of major newspapers have pretty much failed. That is, he’s proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable. Both the Huffington Post and the investors behind Tina Brown’s proposed aggregation site are also betting on that.

Because ­Romenesko is an online pioneer with old-fashioned newspaper values, he chose to do it in a nonprofit environment, but money can be made with his formula. That’s why Poynter has steadily boosted his pay and why Roy Peter Clark and others at the institute are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of him to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website. Poynter comforts itself with the thought that Romenesko didn’t found MediaGossip back in the dawn of the digital era with the idea of becoming rich. But like the rest of us, he might not mind wealth if it plopped into his lap. He wisely declined a 2002 job offer from Steven Brill, founder of the now defunct Brill’s Content. With the velocity of creative destruction in the information industry ever increasing, though, I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.

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