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Damascus grad takes a job at The New York Times

Damascus Gazette

June 20, 2007

by Susan Singer-Bart | Staff Writer

With a smoothie in one hand and his laptop in the other, Brian Stelter prepared to sit down and talk about his post-graduation plans at the Music Café in Damascus last week.

But first, he had to call his editor to tell her about a correction that had to go on the TVNewser blog, his three-year-old online chronology of life in the world of television news, right away.

Stelter’s attention to detail and accuracy is one of the things that has made TVNewser required reading for television news professionals and junkies.

And it is one of the reasons The New York Times has hired Stelter, a recent graduate of Towson University, to write about the media for its Web site and newspaper.

‘‘Brian is a very talented reporter and has an impressive network of contacts in the media world,” wrote Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, in an e-mail. ‘‘He quickly became a must-read for network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists (and I count myself among them).”

His hiring is part of The Times’ effort to integrate its online and print editions, she wrote.

‘‘I’m a very young person going into a very corporate, traditional situation,” Stelter said.

He looks forward to the challenge.

The Times offer was the only newspaper offer Stelter considered. He had other offers of Internet work.

‘‘It felt good when I visited and looked around the newsroom a few weeks ago,” Stelter said.

The New York Times hires only a few reporters straight out of college each year and gives them extra support. Stelter will go into The Times’ three-year intermediate reporter program, where he will work closely with editors as he develops his craft.

‘‘Part of me thought I should stop writing about TV and do it,” Stelter said. ‘‘Things like the Paris Hilton coverage reinforce why I don’t want to do TV. ... I’m not convinced TV will be around in 20 years — I get all my news online — but the brand of paper will still exist, maybe not the paper.”

Leaving TVNewser was a difficult decision, Stelter said. He has been reluctant to trust his blog to anyone else, even continuing to run the blog himself earlier this year while an exchange student in China for three months.

‘‘I didn’t let people know I was in China,” he said. ‘‘I told my editor I had a backup writer, I didn’t. ... I would have been so worried about the blog if I had let someone else do it. That’s why it took me so long to decide to go to The Times.”

Stelter, 21, has been blogging since he was 9, even before the term blogging had been coined. While a student at Damascus High School, he helped design the Montgomery County Public Schools Web site as a summer job.

Stelter’s first blog was dedicated to Goosebumps books, then he grew up and focused on the Nintendo 64 game system.

‘‘I didn’t realize what I was doing back then,” Stelter said.

At some point Stelter realized he loved writing about the game more than he enjoyed playing it, and with that realization, he began pursuing his passion for information.

‘‘Even though what I was doing with Nintendo wasn’t journalism, it was journalistic,” he said.

By the same token, at the age of 10 Stelter thought he wanted to be Brian Williams of NBC News.

‘‘I watched him since his first newscast — July 15, 1996,” he said.

In time, he realized he could never be Brian Williams, but he could write about him.

Stelter started TVNewser four years ago as CableNewser. After a year, he decided limiting himself to reporting on cable news was too narrow a focus. Mediabistro.com bought his site three years ago and hired him as a salaried employee for the renamed site.

‘‘He just did a tremendous job,” said Laurel Touby, founder of Mediabistro.com. ‘‘He is obsessive about his work.”

She was crushed that he accepted The Times job without giving her a chance to make a counter offer.

‘‘Honestly, it sickens me to think that this kid who has figured it out is going over there,” she said.

Dedicated and intense are other words Touby used to describe Stelter.

Stelter had no trouble blogging, being editor of the Towson student newspaper and keeping up with his college classes and social life. He also worked a brief Gazette internship.

‘‘Once in a while I missed something to go to a party,” he said.

In 2004, he allowed a friend who did freelance reporting for The New York Times to reveal in that newspaper that he was a college student. That only solidified his relationship with the movers and shakers in TV news.

“When it first launched, we all speculated about which former TV news honcho was responsible for all the scoops on the site; little did we know he was a college freshman,“ Schiller wrote.

The Web site averages 50,000 hits a day, Stelter said.

‘‘No one reads it except the people who run networks,” Joe Scarborough said to his ‘‘Morning Joe” audience on MSNBC Monday morning after interviewing Stelter about his career and the latest television gossip.

They had discussed the rumor Stelter reported Sunday that Paula Zahn will be replaced by Campbell Brown on CNN.

Blogs provide the first draft of the next day’s newspaper stories, Stelter said.

‘‘Someone called me [on a] Sunday morning to tell me Bob Woodruff was injured in Iraq,” he said. ‘‘In the 15 minutes it took me to get online I had five messages.”

He spent that day constantly updating the blog as information came in.

People in the business call Stelter with tips or send him tips anonymously through the TVNewser Web site.

He was even introduced to his hero, Brian Williams, on a tour of NBC and has met with him several times.

‘‘I found out he reads it [TVNewser],” Stelter said. ‘‘In many ways he respected what I did.”

When he is writing, Stelter sometimes asks himself, ‘‘What would Brian Williams want to read.”

Some loyal readers have posted criticisms of his decision to join The Times, but Stelter feels confident the blogging world has grown enough that a good replacement will be found.

‘‘He turned it into a sexy brand that people want to work for it,” Touby said.

People with 30 years of experience in journalism have applied for the job, she said.

‘‘He’s got a big, wonderful career ahead of him,” Touby said. And if he is not happy at The New York Times, ‘‘I told him he is welcome back in three months.”