Today's interviewee is Buzz Bissinger, a reporter best known for his book Friday Night Lights, which was of course adapted into last year's acclaimed movie. Prior to that, he won a Pulitzer prize for a six-part investigative series he co-wrote with two other reporters from The Philadelphia Inquirer about the city's court system.

Do you approach magazine reporting differently than newspaper reporting?
Yes. Whenever I approach a magazine story, the first thing I worry about is structure and narrative, finding a thread to take a story through seven or eight or ten thousand words. How the hell am I going to tell this thing, carry it through from beginning to end. Magazine pieces also allow a writer to have a much more open point of view, which i find liberating. In newspaper reporting, because of the very nature of newspapers and the way they are edited, so much has to be equivocated, so that stories sound like litte more than he said, she said. It's the whole objectivity thing, when of course there is no such real thing as objectivity anyway.

Do you have any advice for aspiring sports writers on how to make their subject come alive and be interesting even for those who might not be huge sports fans?
Trying to make the subject accessible merely beyond the sport itself is a way to do it. Getting into the lives of characters is another way to do it. But it's always not so easy: I have seen many many sports stories, either in magazines or books, that stretch like crazy to make larger themes when no larger theme exists. Friday Night Lights was about larger themes, legitimately I think, because high school football is at the nexus of small town life in America. It influences everything from race to education to gender identity to the very way a community thinks of itself. That's why those themes were in the book. My newest book, Three Nights in August, about the strategic and emotional complexity of baseball through the eyes of a legendary major league manager, did not lend itself to larger themes beyond the very exquisiteness of baseball itself, all the myriad layers. I don't respect books that grope for sociology and larger meaning when there is none: it's easy to pad a book with lots of junk in the name of being comprehensive. So going into Three Nights, I made a choice to just stick to baseball: if you don't have an interest in the game, you are not going to grativate towards the book. I know that and I accept that. But that doesn't mean I quit trying. The goal, as should be the goal in any piece of writing, is to take the reader into a world he doesn't know about, dig deep into the subculture of a place. I have tried to do that in Three Nights, take the reader deeper into the game than any writer has ever gone before. That means writing about the beautiful complexity of baseball strategy. I also try to leaven the book with ample personal material and studies in character.

Regarding your book A Prayer for the City, how does a reporter get good information from or about politicians, who might tend to be tight-lipped?
I was fortunate in that Ed Rendell, the protagonist of A Prayer, is the antithesis of tight-lipped. Before I decided to do the book I gained a promise of access from Rendell for his first four-year term that he made good on. And the very reason I chose him was because of his willingness to pretty much say whatever pops into his head. The other thing I tried to do in A Prayer, and my other two books for that matter, was to be circumspect and quiet. Reporters ask too many questions, often out of anxiety and ego. They get in the way, make nuisances of themselves. I was very much like that for the first five years of my career. Then I learned that the real job of a reporter is to listen, not show off how much he or she knows. So during the four years I was with Rendell, I asked him virtually nothing. And when I did, I picked the right place and the right time.

What has been your most difficult assignment and how did you solve the problems it presented?
My most difficult assignment was at the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was assigned to do an investigative series on the city's court system with no leads or deep throats or anything specific other than a sense among the paper's top editor, Gene Roberts, that the court system was thoroughly screwed-up and corrupt. I knew that I would have a friendly haven for possible leads in the city's district attorney's office, which hated the city's judges and was only too willing to help them get hanged. So that helped. But the series, which ultimately took two years and finally involved two other reporters, was just a constant piece of shoe leather--doing hundreds of interviews in the hopes of coming up with something real. Bit by bit leads did develop. But there were dozens of dead ends. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, but I would never do one like it again. Among other repercussions it destroyed my first marriage.

With the film version of Friday Night Lights, did you learn anything that would be helpful for writers whose work is being adapted to the screen? Patience? Speaking up with your opinion?
Patience and patience and patience. It took 14 years for the book to go from film to screen. After a decade I never thought it would happen, but miracles do occur, even in Hollywood. Speaking up with your opinion makes virtually no difference in Hollywood: they really don't care what the writer of the originating material thinks beyond some feigned attempt to listen. And writers whine too much about getting screwed by Hollywood. Nobody put a gun to my head to sell the rights for a nice pile of money: If i was so concerned about how the book would be adapted, then i should not have sold the rights. As it turned out, i thought the film was terrific, very faithful to the soul of the book. Basically i was lucky. I guess the best advice I can give comes from a line of dialogue in a wonderful movie called Croupier: "Hold on tightly, let go lightly." It applies to pretty much everything in life, although I rarely follow it...