The Pogue interview

David Pogue had just hit the 1 million follower mark on Twitter the day he spoke with The NewsHouse for our video interview.

Though later on Sept. 20, Pogue jokingly tweeted that his followers were a combination of spam, auto-follow and users who had left the site, during his interview it was clear why so many people look to him for tech advice.  Barely 5 minutes had passed before he began talking about gadgets.  All it took was one quick glance at A.J. Chavar's Nikon D90 to set him off on an anecdote about having lunch with Nikon representatives and seeing a DSLR shoot video for the first time.

The greatest difficulty in interviewing Pogue was simply scaling back my own questions.  After the interview had ended, A.J. and I both joked with Pogue that he had drawn the two "super-geeks" for the assignment. If Pogue had seen the unasked questions in my notebook, he would have known this as a fact.  Prof. Glass didn't exercise control over my choice of questions, but he did remind me to consider my audience -- perhaps afraid I would begin a geek-off that would only interest a small percentage of The NewsHouse audience.

Still though, I did sneak in a few selfish questions. A week earlier Google and Apple had begun their Google Voice row, and I asked Pogue if he thought the app store would be forced to become more open.  He quickly said he didn't think Apple would change their practices.  And his simple reason: Steve Jobs is a stubborn guy.

As we spoke about his book and the rise of internet crowdsourcing, we also got on the topic of the future of journalism (surprise, surprise, journalism students interviewing a journalist inside a journalism school), and Pogue offered his insights:

"I think I'm lucky that I can both have the job as the New York Times tech guy and exploit the wisdom of the masses," Pogue said. "Maybe the guy with the job part is going away. Maybe there won't be a New York Times. Maybe the New York Times will evolve into a news-gathering organization ... nobody knows where it's going. 

 "I'm frightened for the potential loss of true reporting. ... But I don't think the answer is: Don't let the public participate."