Interview with Michael Shear

The HPR sat down with Michael Shear, editor of the New York Times’ The Caucus Blog, to talk about political coverage and the media in the 2012 election and beyond.
Harvard Political Review: What was the biggest difference in the media’s role in 2012 compared to 2008?
Michael Shear: The speed with which we were all forced to try to quickly keep up with the pace of everybody else means that we’re less able to think about what it is we wrote before we write it. We’re less able to take a deep breath and add that extra paragraph of context we would have been able to write in 2008 or pause for one minute and say, ‘this isn’t exactly the story we need to write’. The time pressure is the biggest difference. Those pressures weren’t non-existent last time around, but it’s magnified one-hundred fold. And sometimes we lose stuff along the way because there’s a limit. Context is important. But that takes time. But I think it’s better for the public and our democracy would be better served by having more thoughtful long-form pieces. I’m not sure what all of this stuff gets us.
HPR: Can you compete with Politico and BuzzFeed for speed?
MS: Not really. Technically, I mean, do we have a system that could? In theory, if I’m typing directly into WordPress and somebody gave me the authorization to do it and I hit publish, it would be up instantly. But except in the most extreme instances I think we’re not set up as an institution to compete with BuzzFeed, which is really fast, or Politico, which is pretty fast. The one exception, I’m really proud of our live dashboard, originally designed for the Oscars, which we took for debate and election nights. That’s quick.
HPR: If you can’t compete for speed, do you want to be able to?
MS: It’s pretty engrained in journalistic culture to be first to something. So I think at some level we all want to be able to compete for speed if we can. But I think the BuzzFeeds and the Politicos have taught us that we have to let some stuff go. Even just in terms of people; I mean, they’ve got like a hundred people and I could count on one hand the number of people we’ve got counting the election.
So they’re going to get some stuff first. But the problem is that if you let too much stuff go, it becomes the seminal moment. I’m thinking of Sarah Palin and the clothes. I remember being initially so dismissive of that, and later I was just so pissed at myself because it was one of those things that people remembered.
HPR: Do you want to get to a place where you can get to compete on speed?
MS: Personally, I’m not so interested in being a journalist whose 100% goal is competing on speed. If I were, I could go to Politico or go to BuzzFeed. But I will say, the New York Times can’t poo poo all of that. It’s a spectrum. And for a long time the New York Times and other publications were sitting back, stroking their chins, saying ‘we’ll get to that story at some point.’ And you can’t do that anymore. You just can’t. That’s not how politics works anymore. So if you’re the New York Times, you’ve got to find that point somewhere in the middle.
HPR: Is the New York Times’ model sustainable?
MS: I don’t know. You look at what’s happening at the Washington Post, which has lost a lot of its ambition. It’s closed every single one of its national bureaus. Metro bureaus have all shrunken down. That’s just an economic reality that a paper that once was swimming in money has come to realize that.
So I don’t know if the model is sustainable. There’s not a lot of examples of newspapers that have been able to do all that stuff. Crossing our fingers, the Times approach with the paywall seems to be working. Which is a good thing. Because that’s where my salary comes from.
HPR: How similar will the Times look in twenty years?
MS: I don’t know that we’ll be printing a paper in twenty years. At some point, it won’t make sense to print a paper anymore.
I can imagine a kid twenty years from now saying, ‘wait, wait, they printed the words on paper and they drove them all over and some guy on a bike took a bunch of them and threw it on to your front stoop?’
Will it happen in twenty years or twenty five, I don’t know. And that’ll cut out a lot of costs. But we’ve got to make sure that by that time people are used to paying for the content in a way that’s sustainable.
HPR: How does that change an editor’s job? How do you still differentiate yourself from the Politicos?
MS: For so many years, success was defined by getting on the front page. That’s kind of an exaggeration, but ultimately the ethos was ‘you want to get a story on the front page.’ That culture still exists, but it’s being torn apart by the web.
Sometimes, I do a story for online, someone else writes it for print, gets put on the front page, but I still get way more readers.
HPR: So is that what success looks like in twenty years?
MS: I think so. Every different place is going to have a different model. In the context of big newspapers, my best guess is there will still be a hierarchy of stories. That’s kind of what editors do. What there won’t be is a physical print paper. The challenge will be, ‘how do you judge what’s really important?’