TV Barn
 For hardcore TV watchers, the Internet is essential. Channel surfers flock to discussion groups, trade spoilers, and recap to their hearts content. It's hard to remember when the Web wasn't around to trade theories on character motiviation, plot twists, or shocking cliffhangers.
However, there are a few folks who saw the communal nature of the web and how it intertwined with the tube long ago. Aaron Barnhart is one of those pioneers. He started up the Late Show News as a simple text e-mail newsletter back in 1994 and covered late night talk shows with aplomb and wit. He parlayed his hard work into a TV critic gig at the Kansas City Star and his essential TV Barn blog. The engaging Mr. Barnhart was kind enough to take the time to answer a few of our questions. Here are his thoughts on the Web, blogging, and, most importantly, television... Hey Aaron, when did you first get on the Internet? I had an unused Internet account from my graduate student days. Somebody told me you could read discussion groups and send email... to other people with email, which in 1990 wasn't many people I knew. But the Usenet groups were exciting and Usenet was the first place where I published my journalism. What was the Internet like back in the days when Usenet dominated? The makeup was a lot more scientific and college students, because they were the ones with Internet access. That said, things were as boisterous and chaotic as they are now—just nerdier. I remember what a big deal it was, for instance, when they split the Star Trek discussion groups up into a bunch of subgroups; oh man was there hell to pay. When did you first hook up with other Letterman fans? When did you publish your first Late Show News? The alt.fan.letterman newsgroup took off in the fall of 1993, when Dave's show on CBS launched and zoomed into first place in late night. Jay was being crushed. Dave was the king of New York, not just late night. We loved it. He could do no wrong. It was such vindication for fans who felt he'd been screwed out of the Tonight Show job by NBC. So we yammered online every night and morning after, dissecting the shows, the guests. We had tons of in-jokes, references to things we'd seen on the show, just like any small discussion group has. You don't see that anymore. Nowadays the shorthand people use online is snark. Carriers who are infected with snark just hop from one comment section to the next all over the Internet, spreading ignorant but oh-so-hip-sounding insults. Anyway, I took over the a.f.l. FAQ file in 1993, rewrote it about six times and thought, "This is fun, but it's getting old." I thought it would be interesting to do a newsletter that passed along all the news from late night for fans, not just Letterman—remember, the "Later" show was in flux, Conan O'Brien was working on 13-week renewals, Jay was desperate (and copying Dave's bits)—so I started Late Show News in February 1994 and it took off immediately. Do you still keep in touch with people you met in the LSN days? In fact, the first person to send me an attaboy about Late Show News was Sue Trowbridge, who continues to supply late-night lineups for my weekly newsletter and is a friend. Every now and then I will get an email from someone that begins, "Aaron, I've been reading you since the Late Show News days." It's a nice bond we have, remembering the Internet before it was like oxygen. Were you a sort of a proto-blogger? LSN was everything that a blog is now. It had point of view, it had immediacy, it was passing along stuff that you couldn't find in print... so yes. In fact, one of the more frustrating times for me was after I stopped the newsletter and began doing a website in 1999. There was no blogging software back then and people like me and Jim Romenesko were doing it by hand because all the web-page-creation software was useless for what we wanted to do, which was news. Do you consider yourself a trailblazer in that you were one of the first writers to jump from the web into the "mainstream media"? Well, of course today the web is the MSM, or at least the parts of it inhabited by people whose full-time job is to report and analyze the big stories of the day. In that sense I was bound for the MSM, I just didn't know it at the time. I certainly wasn't interested in a marketing job (I was flown out to New York by one network to interview for such a job). And the idea of supporting yourself on the Web in the mid-1990s wasn't even in the picture. Unless you worked for a nerd herd like CNet or Wired, you had to get paid by the MSM. However, within three weeks of starting Late Show News, I got a freelance assignment handed to me by the Village Voice, and I added the NY Observer and NY Times to my clips file within a year or so. Things moved fast—the Net was just a great place to audition, though I only saw that in hindsight. Where do you stand on the whole print vs blogs issue? Do you like having a newspaper gig? I love having a newspaper gig! I just can't imagine having one without having a presence on the Internet. I need those people out of market who communicate with me online—but I also need the heft of a major newspaper, and the wire service we feed, supporting me as well. TV Barn is also a great outlet for my journalism. It got me here to Kansas City, the best city in America to live in today. And the Star, well, if you could see our dead tree edition, your eyes would pop. It's a gorgeous paper, stuffed with a lot of great journalism from people who've been here forever. And we're the dominator online in our market too, so if anyone's going to monetize that, it's us. Blogs vs. print is not just tired, it's expired. My hat's off to anyone who intelligently digests the news of the day and makes it readable to other people. Try doing that every day for 10 years and answer all your email; not so easy. So whether that person chooses to live on the Web or considers herself a print journalist doesn't matter. It's a relatively small, self-selecting group who do the actual hard work of journalism today. Everyone else is the peanut gallery. It is tired. Why do you think blogs vs. print issue has such legs? Navel gazing on the part of reporters/bloggers? That's partly to blame, I'm sure—but I think there are deeper reasons. With bloggers, I think it's simple. They like to see themselves as part of something big, grand and revolutionary. Many, I think, genuinely believe they are transforming the media by challenging the mainstream media (MSM), although I'm not sure there is much hard proof of that. Beyond that, that anti-MSM stance is the fire that keeps their blogs going. It informs a lot of what they write. Many print journos, on the other hand, don't understand blogging and see bloggers as irritants, people who criticize their work but also wouldn't have material for their blogs if not for the MSM. Meanwhile, every newsroom in America now has top management beating the drum for their staff to "do blogs," even though it's clear that many journalists in print and TV haven't the foggiest idea how or why they should "do" one. (Witness the trail of busted blogs across news organizations.) I just spoke on blogs to a features editors' convention so I know that interest remains high. Editors are not dumb, they know their staff should be doing them, but that many don't want to and many staff blogs go untended. But journalists are torn on this. They know money is flowing out the door. They know a lot of it is going to online (though not necessarily enriching the people who criticize their work so passionately). They know they need to get with the program. But many aren't sure how to proceed, or if ultimately their expenditure of effort online will be worth the effort. Ironically, however, I think the reason print v. blogs stays alive is that there are websites like Romenesko's where journalists can chew it over, not just over the water cooler, but with thousands of equally disgruntled/perplexed/blogging colleagues around the world. Do you think editors will always have a role on the web? Do we need someone out there to point us in interesting directions and tell us what's interesting? Oh, totally. In fact, the more diverse, perplexing and variegated the web gets—we have not even begun to see video explode online, because search hasn't caught up with it yet—the more you need talented people analyzing it and boiling it down for others. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, believes that certain people in any social network actually perform this function. I think a lot of people would find TV critic a surprisingly demanding job. I know it is for me. The first couple of years were fun, but the rest has been knowledge (and hopefully some wisdom) gained through hard experience and just showing up every day to do your job. I'm writing you this at 5 a.m. my time. After I send it off, I'm going to write a blog post reporting why it seems likely the TV Critics Association, on whose board I serve, will probably have a January press tour, even if the big networks back out of it. Next, I will do two weekly radio shows in San Diego and Baltimore; in between those I will give a writers' strike update on the air with KNX, the all-news radio station in L.A. Then, before my third weekly radio appearance (KMOX in St. Louis with my friend Paul Harris), I'll try to finish a story on "Meet the Press" for the Sunday paper, featuring clips from an interview I did last week with Tim Russert (whose juiciest sound bite I put on my blog last week, generating a ton of traffic). This is what it's like to be a TV critic these days. It can be a real grind. But I also feel much more knowledgeable on this beat than I did when I started. I'm able to write many stories I couldn't write if I hadn't put in my time. And to get to your question, I think readers value that. Ever since the Late Show News days, readers have been telling me, "I don't watch much TV, but I read you." There's that sense of, "I watch it so you don't have to," that you're always going to have. I sift through an ever-increasing pile of shows and find the good stuff. I weigh in on stories of local and national interest to TV watchers. A number of readers have told me they set their DVRs based on what I write about—a pretty good sign that as technologies emerge that give viewers more choice, they will need help making good choices. And I'm happy to help. It is kind of funny, though, that someday, as newspapers follow their readers and advertisers onto the Web, I'm going to wind up where I started: writing exclusively online, with bits and pieces of my work showing up in the paper. What do you do when you're not in front of a computer or TV screen? I have a side business as a publisher. My wife is a historian and we decided to publish her first biography ourselves, because in addition to not buying into the blogs-versus-print myth, I think self-publishing is now an equal of regular publishing. Just like with blogs, there's a lot of subpar stuff out there because the bar is so low. But Diane's book was reviewed in four of the major trades, and we sold out our first printing. (QuindaroPress.com, he plugged.) I play Engels to her Marx, and it's very pleasant walking over that bridge to the 19th century. We drive the blue highways of Kansas quite often. The Flint Hills are a real perk of living here. I'm working on an oral history project for my old church back in Chicago. And I serve on the board of the Television Critics Association, which puts on the semi-annual TV critics' tour in LA (needless to say, I help maintain the group's website). What blogs do you read? I have a ticker on my website, and I try not only to have the breaking news from the TV world there, but interesting, oddball and must-read stories from off the beaten track. So I check about 100 feeds on my Bloglines roll. Of course, I read the trades and wires online, and Nikki Finke. Right now I'm reading WGA strike blogs. There's a new ratings blog called TVbythenumbers.com that's quite good. Mark Evanier's NewsFromMe.com is outstanding. BestWeekEver.tv is guilty fun. BoingBoing usually has news I can use. NBC's Brian Williams has a great blog and so too, for completely different reasons, does James Wolcott. I try to avoid the blogs that journalists are addicted to, like Drudge, Fark, and Romenesko (though Jim is a friend and I do read his other blogs). Your favorite critics? Michael Kinsley and Christopher Hitchens never fail to amaze me, whatever they write about. Tony Scott and Roger Ebert are the only two movie critics I'll ever need. From our beat, Tom Shales at his best is unstoppable. It's hard to find any one TV critic who covers the entire oceanfront, but between them Mo Ryan and Lisa de Moraes come pretty close. Favorite TV show these days? I've been rewatching past seasons of The Wire and I just continue to be in awe of that show. The pacing of episodes is superb; the pacing of the entire season even better. The way we know some characters better than our relatives. The social commentary embedded in scene after scene, in ways you simply assumed they couldn't do on television. I'm so looking forward to January. Worst TV show you've ever had to endure? Great thing about my job—you don't have to put up with crap for very long. However, after spending one season covering "American Idol" every single night it was on, I was about ready to put knitting needles through my skull. It's a good show, I guess, but enough already! What's the worst part about being a TV critic? No real complaints. I am frustrated, though, at how much reprinted PR there is out there on the Web and how tough it is to be heard with a strong, independent voice... which makes you wonder sometimes if you should be speaking with a strong, independent voice. Also, there are constantly stories I don't have time for and wish I did. Any future plans for your writing? Well, I plan on publishing some more books, but books on TV are either fandom or academic titles, and I'm not interested in writing any of those. I've written a couple magazine articles this year; that's been a nice change of pace. Thanks, Aaron! We'll always be tuned into the TV Barn.
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