The speaker for this morning’s Roger Summit Award Lecture was John Schwartz, a writer for the New York Times, who previously wrote for the Washington Post. He’s clearly no newcomer to online research, noting that AIIPers use Nexis and Factiva to prove we’re “smarter than the Googlers.” He even mentioned using the Well! “We’re all information professionals. We find things and tell people. I just have more clients than you do.”

Then he talked about interviewing Paul Saffo of The Institute for the Future and asking him what he did for a living. Saffo said they were in the same business. “You write something for a large audience and charge a little. I write something for a small audience and charge $100,000.” He then talked about using online resources to identify people to call and interview for a story. “The killer ap of the Internet is people,” he said. I really liked it when he discussed his use of the Washington Post library and how good the librarian/researchers there were. Always nice to know that the info pros are appreciated by the journalists.

He did have some comments on journalism and blogging, most of them fairly predictable. Blogging is democratizing journalism, for example. He had some wry observations as well, such as bloggers are learning about quality and judgment, while some in the mainstream media are forgetting. “Not long ago you had to be a professional journalist to create bloopers. Now anybody can embarrass themselves.”
Some days the blogs win (he cited Dan Rather); some days the mainstream media wins (he cited the Terry Schiavo letter written by the Republican). He then contrasted the immediacy of local bloggers reporting on the Southeast Asia tsunami with TV news. His belief is that we need both.

This led to observations on credibility. “There’s no free ride; you have to earn credibility.” Which is true both for the mainstream media and bloggers. “Everything we do at a newspaper has an impact on our credibility.”

At the end of his witty and informative talk, he came back to another time he interviewed Paul Saffo and asked the same question about what he does for a living. This time the answer was, “My job isn’t telling people what will happen; it’s helping them understand uncertainty.”

In the Q&A period, he had one more memorable quote, this time it’s his, not Saffo’s: “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”