Why this tech journalist is joining a newspaper

Owen Thomas, the new business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, writes on Medium about why he’s going to work for a newspaper after two decades with tech publications.

Thomas writes, “It was my skills at Unix shell scripting and HTML that mattered back then, not my wordsmithing. But I fell into journalism with jobs at Wired, the Red Herring, and Time Inc. (Along the way, the Chronicle covered me and mywebsite Ditherati a handful of times.) I’ve worked online, in print, and on TV, and I’ve come to realize that a good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

“I don’t see print as a burden. It’s something unique that the Chronicle brings against a mass of undifferentiated websites. The daily ritual of publishing brings discipline and focus — like the cron jobs I used to schedule when I was webmaster, to make sure new stories went up on time. And the Sunday edition, in particular, can be a showcase for what’s fashionably called longform journalism. Fast Company editor Bob Safian once told me he thinks of the print edition of his magazine as a powerful ‘marketing event’ for the publication’s journalism. I think that’s the right way to think about a newspaper’s print edition, too—a daily reminder of a newsroom’s commitment to cover the city.

“The Chronicle, particularly under Cooper’s leadership, is a prime testbed for new ideas about running newsrooms and delivering the news. ‘A newspaper is a conversation,’ Robert Thomson once wrote. For some readers, the familiar package of printed sections is the best way to have that conversation. For others, the open Web might be where they want to learn what’s new in the world. And for a new set of readers, it might be on social networks or — a particular area of interest for me — through messaging apps. Look for us to experiment with all of those.”

Read more here.