Los Angeles Times White House Correspondent
"It's a very different kind of journalism than what I've done before," said the Los Angeles Times' Jim Gerstenzang, who at his editors' urging recently began to focus almost exclusively on his newspaper's latest online invention, a blog called Countdown To Crawford. Like many news blogs, it offers bite-sized appetizers of information. And some posts are supposed to be more Cheez Whiz than escargot.
Gerstenzang, who has spent 38 years in news and works for a paper that has a new owner and lots of financial uncertainty, was eager to learn new tricks, along with colleague Johanna Neuman, in trying to build an audience for one-stop shopping about the final months of the Bush administration. "I'm not convinced that this is the right way to go, but it's the way it's going," Gerstenzang said of the blog trend.
Gerstenzang said writing for the blog can be conversational and idiosyncratic, and it prompts feedback from readers that can be eye-opening or too raw and rude to publish. But he worries about online readers who skip print entirely in favor of the mini-marshmallows of news and commentary found on blog sites. "It's a little frightening," he said. "This is how they're getting their information? I know how much more information that I'd put into the newspaper."
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