Working for a newspaper starting to look a lot like blogging.

This was my first visit to Matt Waite’s blog, but if this post is any indication he is my kind of journalist and an exception to the rule. Waite is a staff writer for The St. Petersburg Times.

As he points out in his post he isn’t a web editor or an audio producer. Last month however he had an idea to compile and edit a slew of voicemails from St. Pete Times readers responding to a recent story about a local girl who was suffering from hiccups for the last three weeks. Over 300 people offered cures for the stricken girls hiccups.
He pitched the idea to the web editors but everyone else was too busy to do the work. Matt did it himself and got it up on the papers website. Matt’s instincts were right. It is great content. I also noticed a follow up to the story is still on the front page of the papers website.

Matt Waite may work for an old media newspaper but he has new media instincts.

Others blogging. Invisible Inkling asks:

What exactly, is your job description as a journalist anyway?

To inform? To tell a story? To entertain?

Matt gained another fan at Webomatica:

The content contained in a newspaper is totally interesting to me. It’s the dead tree media - the delivery mechanism - that I despise

and still another at Innovation in College Media.

Waite and Sholin are part of a new breed of journalists who are going to go far in this business because of their ability and willingness to adapt