OLD Media Moves

CNBC's Faber on long-form reporting, why he likes his job

June 25, 2009

Jason Boog of GalleyCat caught up with CNBC‘s David Faber at an event for his new book and asked him about his documentary pieces on the network.

Boog writes, “‘There’s so much interest, source material, and reporting that I did for CNBC, so there was an opportunity to make a book out of it … if there’s a willingness for the reporter to go home at night and write, it will make a great companion to a documentary.’

“GalleyCat also asked the CNBC reporter about the endless churn of the new media news cycle, a process that drives some writers to cut corners — as we saw yesterday when author Chris Anderson admitted to including unattributed Wikipedia passages in his new book. Faber had an old-school journalism response…

“Faber replied: ‘I’ve been doing this for 22 years, and I started on a typewriter. I think I’m kind of an anachronism … There’s a need for instant information, and I try to provide that in my daily work.

“‘But there’s no substitute for making the phone calls, going out to dinner or having a drink with a source. That’s the kind of journalism I practice. I think there is a tremendous pressure to be fast. Better to not be first and be right, than to be first and wrong,’ he concluded.”

Read more here.

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