| Tomorrow’s Web: A Q&A with washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady ’89 Jim Brady got in on the ground floor of online news. Shortly after washingtonpost.com’s launch, he coordinated the site’s coverage of the Clinton impeachment as an assistant managing editor. From there, he moved to AOL, where he rose to the position of vice president of production and operations, overseeing the online service’s coverage of the 2000 presidential election and September 11. In 2004 he returned to washingtonpost.com as executive editor. Having earned his bachelor’s degree in print journalism from AU in 1989, Brady maintains a close relationship with the School of Communication as a guest speaker and a mentor to students navigating their own futures in “tomorrow’s news.” Q:
What’s the biggest change you see in online news in the next five years? A: I think that in the next five years you’re going to see that the Post isn’t just a newspaper site anymore, and CNN isn’t just a television network site anymore, and NPR isn’t just a radio network site . . . The first 10 years of television were people doing radio in front of a camera, and we’re . . . in that stage right now where we still tend to reflect our parents on the Web. Over time, I think that connection [between Web sites and their media parents] is going to break down. We’re going to do things with video, for instance, that the newspaper could never dream of. At the same time, CNN could go out and hire five great columnists to write for CNN.com . . . So you’ll see sites that haven’t been natural competitors up until now become competitors. Q:
What’s that new cross-media competition likely to mean for the quality of online news? A: In the news business you’re going to rise to the top because you’re supplying quality journalism on a day-to-day basis. When you’re fighting with that many more people to win that title, the hope would be that the overall level of journalism would rise. Q: What does this future mean for the journalists themselves? A: I think reporters will have to change in the coming years . . . Right now we give video cameras to a lot of the foreign correspondents, and we encourage them, when they’re reporting stories, to shoot some video. And I think that’s a big shift for people in print, to lug a camera around and figure out when to use it . . . The Web allows a story to be told any way you want. We have so many more weapons at our disposal to tell a story now . . . and I think that’s where journalism is going, that you’re no longer limited to a certain medium to tell a story.” |
