Seymour Hersh on blogs and journalism

In a recent interview with the Jewish Journal — which I found via Martin Stabe, who wrote about it for the Press Gazette after finding out about it from Mark Hamilton, who got it from the Canadian Journalism Project, who originally got it from Romenesko — Seymour Hersh talks about online journalism. He says:

“There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular.

And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. …We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it.

I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”

An interesting viewpoint from one of the deans of investigative journalism in America. He adds that:

“I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ’93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about.

Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded.”

The full interview is here.

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