Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Q&A: RedEye's Curt Wagner

Curt Wagner, an editor at the RedEye and Show Patrol Blogger, experienced a big transition in his 20-year journalism career as it sculpted his way into the online world of journalism. After working various positions at the Chicago Tribune since 1993, Wagner branched out into the pop section of sibling paper RedEye and eventually endeavored into his own personal interest of television entertainment.  (Photograph Courtesy Chicago Tribune).

Q: How long has it been since you first entered the journalism field?

A: 1989.

Q: So it’s been a really long time, I mean that was back when you started off writing on typewriters and now with the technology changing, you own multiple Twitter accounts, you manage TV blog Show Patrol. How did you make this transition?

A: I mean that’s just where the business was going. It wasn’t until the last two years I think that I got really into the online thing once I started my TV blog and just this last year RedEye has really pushed the social media angle. But I mean newspapers are kind of going away so everybody’s turning to online now.

Q: Do you find it at all difficult at times to manage all of your social media Web sites?

A: Yea, I mean it would be easier because I’m doing this tool thing as the features editor and I have this TV blog and I’m writing stories for the paper, too, so you know, I have a lot of different things that I have to deal with, so it’s kind of hard. We try to post links on Facebook, Twitter, and on Digg. That’s just a whole other layer of going and posting all of the stuff everywhere, too, so that takes some time and sometimes I don’t get around to it.

Q: I wanted to talk to you about your TV blog that you’ve mentioned a few times, Show Patrol. How did this come about, how did it first start?

A: Well, I have an interest in TV and always have, so we were trying to figure out ways to get columnists in the paper and we had been using just wire stuff for TV stories and I was like well you know I should just start watching stuff and writing it and starting to do it and then when we started to put this in the paper then we thought let’s put it online and start a blog so we started doing some blogs.

Q: Is this something you developed yourself?

A: It pretty much was. I just decided to do it and then our web guy was like why don’t you write it as a blog and I said cool, I will! So that’s what we did. It was purely out of my own interest.

Q: I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I do have one last question for you. You made this transition into all of these social media Web sites and the online journalism field has seen a significant growth in the past years, would you suggest to current journalism students going into the field that being platform agnostic is a required ability to have?

A: I always think that you should know, even when we were doing newspapers, how to do everything. At that point, I thought you should be able to copy and edit, you should be able to write stories, you should be able edit stories, you should have all aspects, and be able to do everything. I think that’s useful.

They always used to say even for reporters, you should be able to report about different subjects. I think that’s true even in what you are capable of doing, like not just reporting, but in all of these different forms of media. I make video clips to go on my blog site and I know how to design pages for the newspaper and all of that kind of stuff.

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