Bill O’Reilly to President Obama: “Does it disturb you that so many people hate you?”

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly was relatively civil [by O’Reilly standards] to President Obama during his live 15-minute pre-game one-on-one. But O’Reilly can’t help himself — he was repetitively argumentative, stepping on the President’s responses in what was as much a debate as it was an interview.

Followup: Gersh an ‘Editor of the Year’—again

Actually, there’s more to it than that.

After we posted yesterday’s item on Gersh Kuntzman’s outstanding editorial leadership, Suburban Newspapers of America announced that is had chosen Kuntzman as “Editor of the Year—Daily, 3rd Place.”

This is especially notable since Gersh’s newspaper is a weekly — but it’s a weekly that operates as a daily by posting nearly all of its content online, on a daily basis, ahead of the print edition.

Kuntzman won SNA’s top “Editor of the Year, 1st Place” prize as a weekly editor in 2008. [He’s won lots of other awards as well — and he’s happy to tell you about them!]

Meanwhile, SNA chose one of Kuntzman’s reporters — Stephen Brown — as “Journalist of the Year—Weekly, 1st Place.”

Brown was an attentive student at the Graduate School of Journalism that Gersh operates at The Brooklyn Paper (referenced in yesterday’s post). Brown learned so well under Kuntzman that he was hired away by AOL Patch as the editor of one of its Brooklyn editions … where he will be competing with … Kuntzman.

This video features Brown with “Not Gersh Kuntzman” Vince DiMiceli. Gersh was on vacation when it was shot and Vince, who edits the affiliated Courier-Life newspapers, went whole hog filling in. (Vince is a standout in his own right — as newshound, editor, page designer, and news media internet pioneer.) The clip proudly references Gersh’s role in “training the journalists of the future.”

Congratulations!

Gersh Kuntzman and the future of journalism

Gersh Kuntzman, a standout community editor, was running with a Flip before Al Gore invented the internet (I exaggerate, but so does Gersh — usually to good effect). Any reporter who completes the Graduate School of Journalism that he runs at The Brooklyn Paper can swim with confidence in the uncharted waters of New Media.

Gersh knows that media in the future will not mirror media’s past, and that journalists must adapt or die.

He was my editor when I sold The Brooklyn Paper to a division of NewsCorp in 2009, and he’s continued under the new management to good effect.

Here’s a double scoop sampler, fresh this week, of video a la Gersh —

Want more? Here’s Gersh taking a dump for a story, covering snow on a budget; riding a new bike lane, and immodestly accepting the SNA’s Editor of the Year award (start video around 1:17).

Meanwhile, video is just one part of Gersh’s exposition. He’ll rarely pass up an opportunity to personalize a news story (for example, inserting caffeine suppositories; reporting each of the many times his bicycles were stolen, and covering the night he posed nude for an art class of hipsters).

• • •

Gersh would not suggest that he has all of the solutions to Old Media’s woes, and it’s not clear that his formula will pay off in the long run.

But the old prescriptions will no longer work: Readers won’t take the medicine old-line editors would like to continuing doling out, and staff-short newspapers will be unable to fill them in any event.

If newspapers are going to survive in print or online, they’ll need to adapt to the kind playful experimentation that Gersh can’t suppress.

UPDATE: Click to link to followup.

UPDATE: 2 stars leave Village Voice

UPDATE: NY Times, in Wednesday report on Village Voice changes, has VV editor Tony Ortega blaming the economy for the firing of Wayne Barrett:

“By now I think we expected the economy to be doing a little better. So I’m a little disappointed we haven’t grown. But we’re holding our own.”

• • •

From NY Times: Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, two muckraking fixtures of the New York City press corps, are leaving The Village Voice. Mr. Barrett was let go; Mr. Robbins quit in protest.

In his last VV column, posted today, Barrett says: “I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of the Voice. These will be my last. I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new. If I didn’t see that, others did.”

 

 

So, you want to be a journalist!

By Brooklyn Lee at xtranormal

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Video via Dana Rubinstein. Thanks, Dana.