Step Away from the Blog and Get Out of Your Pajamas

Brian Williams of NBC News wants you to get out of your bathrobe, stop wasting your times reading blogs, and…turn on the television. Williams addressed the NYU School of Journalism. Here are some excerpts.

“You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe,” said Williams. “All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years.”

Modems are so 20th century, Brian.

Williams added that “On the Internet, no one knows if you’ve been to Ramadi or you’ve just been to Brooklyn and have an opinion about Ramadi.”

“If we’re all watching cats flushing toilets, what aren’t we reading? What great writer are we missing? What great story are we ignoring? This is societal, it’s cultural, I can’t change it. … Like everybody else, I can burn an hour on YouTube or Perez Hilton without breaking a sweat. And what have I just not paid attention to that 10 years ago I would’ve just consumed?”

OK. Big stories like the one leading the NBC Nightly News website right now. “This version of Harry Potter is Making a Difference. Featured from Friday night’s broadcast: NBC’s Lee Cowan reports on a unique publishing house working overtime to be sure its readers, get their version Harry Potter on time. It’s an effort that’s Making a Difference.” Video for “Can Musharraf survive trouble in Pakistan?” is underneath.

And I’m up for checking out Vinny’s blog. Couldn’t he be the great writer that we’d have missed in prior decades?