David Pogue [7] had just hit the 1 million follower mark on Twitter the day he spoke with The NewsHouse for our video interview [8].
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 [9]'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, [10] 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 [11] 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."