A Man Who Was Born to Spread the News

This was news: Little brother Tim had fallen into the toilet bowl.

After a few seconds, the toddler managed to pull himself out. He wasn’t injured, only embarrassed. And, just his luck, his older brother published a newspaper devoted to household events, particularly calamities like this.

Jim Romenesko, 10, played the story big on the front page. He distributed the newspaper (circulation: 1) among his family. His papers were popular; one issue was devoted to Lady the dog’s infamous biting of the mailman. In one heroic effort, Romenesko published despite having just lost a tooth. The dried bloodstain is still visible on that issue in a family scrapbook.

This was how Jim Romenesko started in the news business, in Walworth, Wis., collecting items of esoteric interest and hand-writing them onto scrap paper. He does something similar today, adjusted to--indeed, enabled by--the advent of online publishing. His Web site, Jim Romenesko’s Media News (https://www.medianews.org), has become a busy clearinghouse for another insular realm, media types. They look to Romenesko for news on their favorite topic: themselves.

Romenesko’s career evolution forms a one-man anthropological case study in technological change. He’s gone from pencils, glue bottles and X-Acto knives to the sleek easel of the Internet. And his life underscores one of the enduring miracles that it’s now possible--taken for granted, even--for people to build a global following without leaving their desks.

Romenesko wakes at 5 a.m. in his Evanston, Ill., apartment. He pours the first of his eight daily cups of coffee, toasts a Pop Tart, slips into a robe and moccasins, and walks 8 feet across his room and into cyberspace by way of his Macintosh G3 computer. He then begins a tour of some 200 Web sites, visiting a broad range of newspaper and magazine sites seeking newsy nuggets on his business, which he then “aggregates” into a dynamic library for media-news junkies. He also looks for bizarre stories for his Web site Obscure Store and Reading Room (https://www.obscurestore.com).

“I consider myself well-versed on the first two graphs in a lot of articles,” said Romenesko, 47, a former reporter for Milwaukee Magazine, the Milwaukee Journal and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I’m well-scanned, if not exactly well-read.”

Media News is unquestionably well-read. Along with the Obscure Store, the site attracts about 20,000 page visits daily. The site also includes a spirited letters forum--a kind of virtual reading room for an industry of big egos, fragile psyches and sharp elbows.

“I think [the site] has created more of a journalism community,” Los Angeles Times education reporter Jeff Gottlieb said in an e-mail. “Everyone I know in journalism peeks at it every day.”

Romenesko’s correspondents send a steady flurry of e-mail, more than 200 on a weekday, pointing him to stories. Some reporters write urging him to link to their stories on his site.

Romenesko scans the Web nonstop throughout the morning, cutting, pasting and linking good items. By 11 a.m., Romenesko has scanned some 55 “must-read newspapers.” Then he delves into “the next level” of newspapers (another 75), and “a third level” (75).

At 12:30, Romenesko takes a shower, then repairs to a nearby Peet’s coffee shop, where he luxuriates over print versions of newspapers--and where, in a 90-minute sitting, he typically will receive 25 e-mails on his Palm hand-held computer.

At Marquette University in Milwaukee, Romenesko interned at the Defense Research Institute, a news resource for defense lawyers. Romenesko browsed publications seeking stories relevant to defense lawyers, then typed up synopses on a green Royal typewriter. He also typed his first newspaper stories on his Royal, contributing freelance pieces to the Milwaukee Sentinel.

In 1977 he became a police reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, which had just installed video display terminals, a text-on-screen format soon to become a newspaper industry standard. At his next job, a features writer for Milwaukee Magazine, he typed on a boxy Digital Equipment computer, then upgraded to a Macintosh. In 1982 he began writing a column on the media, Press Room Confidential.

He simultaneously worked as a journalism professor, mostly at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, through which he got his first Internet account in 1990. The global network then was still largely the preserve of government and academic types, plus a scattering of early techie adopters like Romenesko, who remembered, “I had the distinct sense that something in the world was changing.”

He joined the online service Prodigy and became a voracious online browser of newspapers--a hobby that jibed neatly with his new job, in 1996, as Internet columnist and feature writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Romenesko taught himself hypertext markup language, the coding behind Web sites, by reading a “For Dummies” book. In January 1998, Romenesko started ObscureStore.com; to attract readers, he included a section on gossip about the media.

In May 1999, MediaGossip.com became its own entity, which Romenesko produced in his spare time. Last year, the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism school and research center, hired Romenesko to produce Media Gossip full time for its Web site. One provision was that Romenesko had to change the name of the site to Media News because Media Gossip was deemed offensive to the institute’s virtuous and sober mission.