ROSE: As you try to make sure you handle all that and you can never be prepared for it. Are there rules about what you shoot and don’t shoot. Have you turned to your camera man and said, ‘turn your camera off’?
WILLIAMS: Yes. I still call it ‘the dinner hour,’ Charlie. I grew up in a kind of classic Henry Luce American two-bedroom ranch with an add-on bedroom and a one-car garage and we subscribed to Time, Life and Look, and so that formed my sensibility as a cold-war kid in America. We called it, ‘the dinner hour,’ and we couldn’t eat until Cronkite said, ‘that’s the way it is.’ And I remember propriety and the Vietnam war and pictures that would make my mother shudder. And why would I shoot video tape that be so revolting as to get in the way of the larger story that we’re trying to tell. We have YouTube for that, you know. This great new frontier where you can look at a tape of cat juggling or you can see what are basically kind of mini snuff films. The depth of human depravity. It’s all on the unregulated wild west universe.
ROSE: But people have to go there to get it.
WILLIAMS: Yes.
ROSE: Not just turning on their television.
WILLIAMS: We have a certain responsibility. We have an an audience of kind of rock-ribbed Americans who for a lot of them, this is the traditional broadcasting. I have a bound with them. I have a compact. And they expect a certain standard.
And Williams says he blogs on his Blackberry from the field:
ROSE: With all the new architecture, it changes what you do in what way other than helping you reach a larger audience and having you say, ‘if you’d like to see my interview with the president, here it is on NBC.com’
WILLIAMS: Absolutely. That’s right. I was covering this last war in Isreal. I remember this like it was yesterday. Below me in the valley the place where Jesus met St. Peter as he was tending his net. In my hand is my Blackberry. I was curious as to how the Yankees did the night before back home, how A-Rod and Jeter were doing on their race to become MVPs …
ROSE: Jeter was doing fine and A-Rod was having some problems.
WILLIAMS: That’s exactly the story I found, Charlie. And I just finished an essay for the Web that I was hitting send on that I had written with both thumbs on this little keyboard. That’s how the architecture has changed my work, but also you referenced this – more content. We no longer just have to slice off the part of the interview with the president that deals with the Fed. That now finds an airing and I can direct viewers interested in the Fed to the Web site.
I don’t think Williams is a very good blogger (though, at least, he apparently writes his own stuff), but I do like the image of him in the Holy Land with his mobile device beaming his own thoughts to his web site.
The full show is available on Google Video.
[dels]brian williams, nbc nightly news, television, news, journalism, blogging[/dels]