Q+A with Jason DeRusha

At this point, every office is familiar with “Twitter Guy.” You know, the dude who looks weird when his grill isn’t reflecting the pale blue glow of his overheated 3G. Well, somehow, local news correspondent Jason DeRusha has built a bona fide career on being Twitter Guy. He has a blog on WCCO.com, and his nightly two-minute segment at ten o’clock, “Good Question,” actually takes this bottom-up, hive mind, social media stuff seriously.

In fact, DeRusha believes the main reason people like “Good Question” is because it’s an alternative to the traditional, authoritarian, know-it-all model of network news handed down by our forefathers (i.e., Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel). “TV news always starts with the answers,” DeRusha says. But Jason is the Twitter Guy, which means he starts with a question and tries to figure it out by asking all his friends. Look, I know some of you don’t really know what “twitter” is, and may think it sounds vaguely perverse, maybe even threatening to the general welfare. But trust me, here’s the thing with people who are really into social media: Like Jason, they’re usually nice.

They have to be, right? Basically, they’re trying to connect to people all the time. Bottom line, Jason DeRusha just wants to be liked—that’s why he asks people to send him good questions, and that’s why he returns seventy-five e-mails a day.

A thirty-four-year-old Maple Groveite with a wife and two kids, he grew up a good Catholic, the oldest of four, in another suburb, Des Plaines, Illinois. He was a baby-faced boy of eight when his dad bought him his first computer, a Texas Instruments 99-4A. “My neighbor across the street had a Commodore 64,” he remembers. “If I wanted to play Frogger, I had to go across the street to Irene Erickson’s house.”

Thank God the owner of that Commodore 64 was a girl.
Yes. All my friends were girls growing up. In my neighborhood, they were all girls, so they were all my friends. And sadly, this has been the paradigm for the rest of my life as a young man. I was a good friend.

Jeez. When did you lose your virginity?
I lost it to my wife.

What?!
Yeah. I know. How about that.

To your wife? How old were you?
I’m not sure. Twenty-one or twenty-two.

You were in college?
We were engaged. So I was out of college. I’m a year older than her.

Wow. I guess that overshare was kind of my fault. Uh, so is "Good Question" the most rewarding gig you’ve had in your career?
Yeah.

And you’ve been doing it for how long?
Since January 2008. Ben Tracy was doing it before me. When Ben started doing "Good Question", his goal was to get to the network, and he did it.

Do you have a goal?
What I want to do doesn’t exist on local TV right now.

What do you mean?
I haven’t totally figured out exactly what I want to do.

Is it on the penumbra of your consciousness?
I think about it a lot. To me, the biggest problem we have with television news is that we’re a linear broadcast. There’s a whole generation of people who use RSS feeds and blogs and Facebook. You build your own thing! On the local news, if you want to see my story at ten minutes after ten, you have to sit through ten minutes that you might not care about.

I haven’t watched local TV news since . . . maybe since Colleen Needles was in her prime?
You didn’t watch at all on the day the bridge collapsed? C’mon.

Nope. I followed it all online.
Wow.

I do read your blog, bro.
Well, we are of a generation that expects important news stories to come to us. That’s a problem when you do a nightly half-hour of two people sitting at a desk telling you what the news is. We are pretty good on TV at getting our viewers to go to the web—we’re not very good at getting people on the web to come to the TV. And I’m not clear on how to complete the loop. I’ve been experimenting with posting my good questions on my blog and inviting people to answer them, to share their thoughts and help me tell the story before it goes on TV. The old model is to put stuff up after it was on TV and get comments on it. But to me, that’s no good—I need people’s help before I do the story on the air.