Buzz Bissinger on the state of journalism
What journalist Buzz Bissinger said during a recent visit to the Nieman Foundation:
* On Ed Rendell backing out of the Philly newspapers deal: “I think he realized that this was just going to be a can of worms that he did not want to get involved in. Every day, someone would be saying the coverage had been be slanted one way or the other by Rendell’s influence.”
Buzz Bissinger
* “What was great about journalism when I entered it — it was literally, really, right after Watergate, it was 1976 — papers were hot. Papers were making money. But beyond that, they all wanted investigative reporting. They all wanted long-form reporting.”
* “When I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I wrote 35,000-word stories. You know, seven full pages in the paper.”
* “One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant — as it goes up the food chain, one editor after another, after another, after another, and what happens is it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie.
* “I write for Vanity Fair which doesn’t have nearly the buzz that it once had. You almost never hear anything about it anymore.”
* Buzz Bissinger says newspaper editors are too cautious (Nieman Journalism Lab)
