NBC’s Tom Brokaw speaks with The Poynter Institute‘s Mallary Jean Tenore. Excerpts:
> Whether the networks should do more single-subject evening newscasts: “We nearly did that when we were ramping up to go to war. We said, ‘Tonight we’re going to take you through the critical decisions, what we know and what we don’t know.’ I think there could have been more one-subject broadcasts. And the value that the network news could have brought was, ‘We’re going to give you as much of this subject as we possibly can.'”
> If he’d like to join Facebook: “I have too many invasions of my privacy as it is. I’m thinking about just signing up so I can share things with my granddaughters a little more, but I worry I’ll read things on their Facebook that will unnerve me.”
> What he thinks of Twitter: “I don’t get Twitter. I know that it’s very popular and that it’s a quick way of getting a text blast out, so to speak, but an awful lot of it seems to be…just stuff that fills air.”
> His advice to today’s journalists. “Learn to write. Text messaging is not writing. Whether you’re writing for a newspaper, online, or on the air, get better at writing.”