Earlier this week, GalleyCat mingled with news anchors and cable personalities in the posh Bookmarks Lounge during the launch party for CNBC reporter David Faber’s new book, “And Then the Roof Caved In: How Wall Street Greed and Stupidity Brought Capitalism to Its Knees.”
We caught up with Faber for an exclusive interview, finding out how he built a nonfiction book out of his long-form documentary piece–a powerful combination in this multimedia world. “When you do all that reporting for a documentary–the year we spent on the reporting–two hours wasn’t enough room to say everything we wanted to say,” he explained.
“There’s so much interest, source material, and reporting that I did for CNBC, so there was an opportunity to make a book out of it … if there’s a willingness for the reporter to go home at night and write, it will make a great companion to a documentary.”
GalleyCat also asked the CNBC reporter about the endless churn of the new media news cycle, a process that drives some writers to cut corners–as we saw yesterday when author Chris Anderson admitted to including unattributed Wikipedia passages in his new book. Faber had an old-school journalism response…
Faber replied: “I’ve been doing this for 22 years, and I started on a typewriter. I think I’m kind of an anachronism … There’s a need for instant information, and I try to provide that in my daily work.
“But there’s no substitute for making the phone calls, going out to dinner or having a drink with a source. That’s the kind of journalism I practice. I think there is a tremendous pressure to be fast. Better to not be first and be right, than to be first and wrong,” he concluded.