[ Posted Tuesday, October 22, 2002 ]

So What Do You Do, Jonathan Mandell?
The people in your media neighborhood.

BY CAROLINE CALLAHAN | Mandell is the editor-in-chief of Gotham Gazette, a website devoted to comprehensive coverage of New York City policy and politics. Last week, the Gazette garnered a 2002 Online Journalism Award for its special section on the World Trade Center recovery effort. "Rebuilding NYC."

First job in journalism: Fact and Fancy — my yearbook at IS 70, which has since closed down. The first published sentence I ever wrote was in Fact and Fancy: "From Jericho to the newest chartered city, urban residents have given their views of what the dream city should be." I think I was 12 years old when I wrote that. If I remember correctly, it took me many days. It's interesting that I'm still writing about the same subject.

First paid job in journalism: I had a lot of internships and temporary jobs. In college, in the summers and part-time during the school year, I wrote for the local newspaper, The New Haven Register. Then after college I had an internship at The Boston Globe. I worked in a lot of different departments — in the Living section, interviewing people like Gilda Radner, and doing theater and movie reviews. I also wrote editorials. I even spent time as something of a police reporter on the "lobster shift," which is what they call it when you work midnight to morning. I think they call it the lobster shift because you come to a slow boil. Actually, that's when lobster fishermen work. It was really a great education.

Hometown: Where I live now, in Greenwich Village. I moved around a lot right after college — seventeen times in the first two years after school — but I ended up where I started. You can see I am a man of habit.

Where he gets his gossip: I turn over in bed and go to sleep because I shouldn't be looking for gossip.

Biggest journalistic pet peeve: Reporters with a self-righteous attitude and self-aggrandizing tone.

A brief history of Jonathan Mandell: After my internship at The Boston Globe, I had jobs in places I normally would not have even flown over, such as the Owensboro, Kentucky, Messenger-Inquirer — after which I swore I would never again work for a newspaper with two names. I worked there for five months. I don't remember the exact order of my jobs, anymore, but I also worked at The Washington Post, and I had an internship with the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. I wrote an article about that miserable experience for The Boston Globe Magazine, and Jack Anderson wrote a letter to the editor saying that of the 200 interns he'd had over the years, I was one of the very rare ones who had been completely incompetent. I was sort of incompetent after the fact, though, because he didn't like what I had written, that I had made fun of him.

All this is ancient history. After two years of all this traveling around for my career, I decided I was sick of it and wanted to get back home, to New York. I eventually became a staff writer at the Daily News Sunday Magazine, which no longer exists, and then at New York Newsday, which shut down and became just Newsday. So I have written for the publications that we link to on Gotham Gazette. At this point, actually, I think I have written at least one story for every publication that has "New York" in the title. I can't think of a "New York" publication that I haven't written for, except The New Yorker. I even wrote an article for them, about taking Allen Ginsberg to see Rent, but they didn't run it, so I guess that doesn't count.

Most memorable mentor: I have had many; I've been very lucky that way. The first to come to mind is Jessica Mitford, who was called the "Queen of the Muckrakers" by Time magazine. When she was my teacher, I was so inspired, I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be a member of the British aristocracy (she was the daughter of a British Lord who joined the Communist Party, and then left it because it had become too boring), but I settled for being a journalist. She wrote The American Way of Death, an investigation of the funeral industry, and many years later wrote The American Way of Birth, an expose of hospitals. In between, she investigated the prison system in a book called Kind and Usual Punishment, and wrote many other exposes. There is a great book she wrote, unfortunately out of print, that collects some of her best articles, which is called Poison Penmanship. She taught me that you can write about a very important subject with irreverence and humor — in fact, sometimes a grave subject demands a humorous tone.

The other mentor who most changed my life for the better — and also ruined it in a way — was John Hersey, who is best known as the author of "Hiroshima," and who also taught me at Yale. The way he ruined it is that I was so profoundly affected by his lesson that journalism can be art that for years I thought that everything I wrote should rise to the level of literature. That's not always possible, or even desirable. Didn't Reagan say about his movie career "they didn't want it done well; they wanted it done Tuesday"? That can be true with a lot of what you do in journalism, too.

How he landed at the Gotham Gazette: I guess I just keep on failing upwards.

Tips on pitching editors: When Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, came to speak at the class I used to teach at the Columbia Journalism School, he told my students that when he reads a pitch letter, he is as much looking for the sensibility of the writer as he is assessing the subject of the story the writer is pitching. That seems right. Writing a pitch is offering a sample not just of your writing, but also of yourself. I'm very much in favor of a formal pitch, where the first paragraph is very similar to the lead that you would write in the finished article, the middle includes a couple of paragraphs that offers something close to a blueprint of the article, you then write what your qualifications are for writing the article, and then the last paragraph should be like the "kicker," the final paragraph of your finished piece.

Best books on New York City: On Gotham Gazette, we have a section called "NYC Books" that includes a list of what some expert New Yorkers (like historians and librarians and even the head of the Department of Sanitation's recycling program) think are the best books about New York City. Most agree that the two best are Robert Caro's The Power Broker and then, at the opposite extreme in terms of length, Here is New York by E.B. White. In terms of a reference work, The Encyclopedia of the City New York, edited by Kenneth Jackson, is very useful.

His favorite aspect of writing: Finishing it! Actually, it depends on my mood and the story. Sometimes it's just fiddling with the sentences, but sometimes it's fun to talk to people. Cynthia Ozick once said that she loves literature because it gives her a chance to meet people she would never meet in real life. I feel that way about journalism — and the people I'm meeting aren't imaginary.

Most interesting time in New York's political history: I'd say that one of the things that makes New York so endlessly fascinating is that there isn't one particular time. The last couple of years have been an interesting time. If I had to pick one time in history, it would probably be near the turn of century, just before 1898, when the consolidation of the five boroughs took place, and New York became the City of Greater New York. It must have been an incredible effort to get the boroughs all together. A century later, we are still not quite one city. Now, when you write to someone in Brooklyn, the address is "Brooklyn, New York," because Brooklyn was a separate city. But when you write to someone in Queens, the address is "Astoria, New York," or "Flushing, New York," or "Long Island City, New York," because Queens was a county with more than 40 incorporated towns and villages. And people who live even just one subway stop away from Manhattan still say, "I'm going into the city," as if things were the way they were more than a century ago, when New York City really was only Manhattan.

Why Gotham Gazette has had such success: Has it? Your lips to our board of directors' ears! To the extent that we have been successful, it is probably because nobody else offers one-stop shopping for the civic-minded New Yorker. We are the best place to learn about all the issues facing New York and New Yorkers, and to find the agencies, institutions, specific public officials and activist groups that are addressing those issues. It's also important to us to write "policy stories" as if they're celebrity profiles, by which I don't mean fawning or breathless, but easy to read, and sometimes even fun.

How he procrastinates: For a long time I felt guilty about procrastinating, until I took one of those one-day courses, which was entitled "Creative Procrastination," and I realized that that was what I had been doing. For example, when faced with a massive new project, I often have avoided starting by reading something (a novel, a play) that I could argue to myself was somehow connected to the subject, even if nobody else could see the connection. Now I realize that was a way of starting. Then of course, other times I just watch The Simpsons.

His favorite fact-finding resource: We have a section on Gotham Gazette called NYC Research Desk, which has a link to Google, Refdesk, and a dictionary; a list of "homework helpers" (though we don't call them that) available by telephone, email, and the Web; as well as a guide to 18 of the best brick-and-mortar reference libraries in all five boroughs of New York. All in all, Gotham Gazette itself is a pretty useful place for a site with the same name as the newspaper that Batman reads.

He literally owes his life to journalism: I'm a third-generation New York journalist. Before my mother became a professional journalist, she worked on the Brooklyn College newspaper with a classmate named Arline, who also became a professional journalist. Arline introduced her brother to my mother; they married, and eventually had me. So if it weren't for journalism, my mother and my aunt Arline might never have met, my mother wouldn't have met my father, and I would never have been born.

So What Do You Do? appears on Tuesdays.