I think the era of access journalism as we've known it is over.
The lazy blogosphere has given up on journalism and now trolls Twitter for their on-the-record in-depth articles.
All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.
Five years ago, I wasn't getting questions [about blogs and the internet] from the TV/radio critic of the New York Times.
Today's reporter is forced to become an educator more concerned with explaining the news than with being first on the scene.
Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.
The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.
My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.
In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.
Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.
There will be this mix of people like me who write for major national newspapers and amateur critics, practitioner critics, whose primary way of distributing what they talk about is through blogs and on the web. The line between professional and amateur criticism will become increasingly blurred. The problem here is that if you want to do this for a living, you have to be able to earn a living doing it.
The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.
