You know that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Richard Lewis is convinced he created the phrase X from hell? The joke of the bit is that of course Lewis didn’t invent the line—those things don’t really get invented, they just sort of turn up. Well, except in at least one case: Jon Hein is unquestionably the man who invented jump the shark, the term du jour for that specific moment when a television show—or anything, really—goes from good to bad. It’s when Cousin Oliver comes to join the Brady clan, when Pam Ewing wakes up and finds Bobby in the shower, when the Darrens switch. Over the last few years, Hein has turned a college joke into pop-culture phenomenon, and this week his Jump the Shark book comes out in paperback. Hein spoke to mediabistro.com yesterday about coining the term, and he went shark-hunting for us, looking at the upcoming television season, the Bush Administration, and the war in Iraq.

We all know by know what jumping the shark is, but I don’t know how you got started in the shark-watching business.
It goes back to my college days, in the mid-eighties, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A few of my buddies and I were watching TV one night and just started talking about the moment when we knew shows started to go bad. So we’d be like, “Love Boat—oh, when Vicki came on.” It was a really intelligent conversation. Happy Days came up, and my roommate for four years, Sean Connelly, this total ROTC, straight-arrow guy, thought about it and in all seriousness said, “When Fonzie jumped the shark.” And there was a pause in the room, because we all knew exactly what he was talking about—that episode where Fonzie, in his leather jacket, jumped over a shark on waterskis. And then we just proceeded to use the phrase to pinpoint any moment when anything started to go downhill. So it’d be like, “Did you see the game last night? They totally jumped the shark.” “See the girl he brought home? Oh, he jumped the shark.” So it was a college thing.

So how did it grow from that to this phenomenon? Did you even realize that the potential was there?
Absolutely not. I mean, fast-forward ten years. I have a computer training business, and I needed to learn HTML for my business. And I thought, why don’t I just make a site so I can learn the language? And “jump the shark” seemed like it would be a great experiment. So I called my old roommates, who were now all over the country, and I said, “Look, here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to put up about 150 to 200 shows. Just give me your two cents on them, and I’ll put up mine, and we’ll go from there.”

I did the project—I called it Jumptheshark.com—in December of 1997. And Christmas Day I posted the site. The sole purpose was to amuse my college roommates. That was it. And then a couple of months later, the L.A. Times wrote an article about South Park possibly jumping the shark. That’s when it kind of entered into the media’s awareness. And it built from there. People really got into it—it’s not what I have to say, but it’s what everybody has to say, and everyone has an opinion on this stuff—and the site just grew and grew and grew. And there was an op-ed in The New York Times about politicians jumping the shark. And I’ve been on the Howard Stern show a couple of times. It just bloomed and blossomed into what I have today.

It must be hugely gratifying to be the guy who created a genuine catchphrase. But to what extent has it also become a business? I mean, the book is going into paperback, so I’m sure the hardback was successful. Have there been other spinoffs?
I had this site, it kind of built up, and then I had a deal with Rolling Stone to do a Jump the Shark music site, which kind of brought it out of TV for the first time. Then when the Maureen Dowd op-ed hit, every book publisher in town started calling me, asking, “Where’s the book?” I was very fortunate that way; I wasn’t knocking on doors. I had a wonderful opportunity to do the hardcover, and every talent agent wanted to be with me, and the networks wanted to be with me, so it was definitely a wild ride.

What it’s evolved into is the hardcover that came out last September, the paperback that came out this week, and right now I’m negotiating a TV show. Last year we developed a game show for syndication, which just didn’t sell, so we reformatted it into a panel show, and right now I’m negotiating with one of the networks on doing a deal to make that happen. If that happens, that would be fantastic. I also did a 2004 calendar, a page-a-day kind of thing. I’m fascinated by where it’s gone, and now it’s reached the point where people say, “Oh, you created that website just to capitalize on that phrase.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no. I came up with the phrase. I’ve got the chicken and the egg.”

So let’s do some shark-hunting. The TV season’s about to start. What do you foresee as potentially jumping this year?
I think Joe Millionaire is definitely going to jump the shark, if it hasn’t already. CSI, one of my favorite shows on television, if they explore that Grissom-Sara romance, or the thing with him going deaf—there’s things in the air of getting more personal with the characters, which will absolutely make it jump the shark. Tuesday nights on NBC, that’s pretty much where shows go to die. Good Morning Miami, Frasier, which jumped the shark when Niles and Daphne got together, that whole line-up is absolute shark-bait. I think King of Queens is going to jump the shark this year, just because they moved it to Wednesday, to anchor their new Wednesday night. Smallville, with Clark hitting puberty—anytime anybody hits puberty, like Rudy Huxtable, that’s a moment when a show often jumps. I think The Practice already jumped the shark, but I’m dying to watch it this season.

Well, I mean, firing half the cast…
The cast thing, it’s just flailing. David E. Kelley, talk about somebody who jumped the shark. He’s got a new series on CBS, The Brotherhood of Poland, NH, which I know is going to be terrible. Look at his record lately—Girls Club—and he’s just Bochco’d. There’s a lot of stuff that I think is prime for—I think it’s going to be a busy season, let’s just put it that way.

Now, you say in the introduction to this book, that anything in pop culture can potentially jump the shark—music, sports, movies, politics. Has the Bush Administration jumped the shark?
I think it’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the Bush Administration jumped the shark. Could it have been not being able to find one weapon of mass destruction? Possibly. Could it be when—well the list is too long.

How about landing on the aircraft carrier?
Well, that was a classic. That whole scenario, and I don’t mean to make fun of it, but I can’t help it. It was so staged, so ridiculous. But I mean, the pretzel, Pretzelgate? Has everybody forgotten about that? Making up words? Politics is just so ripe.

Could the Iraq war have jumped the shark at some point? I mean, it was a big success in the beginning, and now everybody thinks it’s a disaster. Maybe the aircraft carrier’s the moment when the war jumped the shark.
You know, I think that’s a pretty good example of it. I’ll try this, and you can tell me if it works or not: When the statue toppled. Everyone knew it was done at that point. We were done in theory with what we were supposed to do. Has it been all downhill from there? You can have a show like M*A*S*H where Henry Blake dies, and Radar comes out and cries, it’s a wonderful television moment. But from that point on, that show was not as good as it once was. Maybe with the Iraqi war, it could have been something like that, where you had a highlight, or a good moment, but then from that point on, it kind of hasn’t been the same. I think, yeah, catching the sons was a pretty big deal, but other than that, it’s really been as we read everyday, a bombing here, a bombing there. What have we really done, and where are we going? Either that, or the aircraft carrier. I’m glad you reminded me of the aircraft carrier, because, oh, man, that was just so great.

What about, as a whole genre, network news, which has been constantly losing viewership for years now. Do you think that you can isolate a moment when the network evening news jumped the shark?
I think CNN is why network news jumped the shark, because you had another outlet for news. CNN, in turn, jumped the shark when Darth Vader reminded us over and over that, “This is CNN”—and of course the CNBCs and the MSNBCs and the Fox Newses cropped up. Also, I don’t think news is as personality-driven as it was 10 or 20 years ago. As strong as Brokaw and Jennings and Rather are, Cronkite was Cronkite. I don’t think that’s still there.

So maybe network news jumped the shark when Walter Cronkite retired?
Well, some people think that. Some people think it’s when someone asked Dan what the frequency was. But I think the cable, particularly CNN, was really the moment when network news jumped.

Now, the hardcover version of this book went bigger and looked at lots of different things jumping the shark. For the paperback it pulled back to your home territory of television. Could we make the argument that when the “Jump the Shark” brand tried to expand out across all things, that’s the moment when “Jump the Shark” jumped the shark?
I knew you were going to go there. The way we set up the paperback was, we wanted to do only TV for a couple of reasons: We wanted to hopefully set up a series, where if the TV edition does well, then I’ll do a music and sports, et cetera. And the feedback I got on the hardcover was, people really liked it, but a lot of the core people from the site wanted to see just TV. So hopefully this satisfies both of those audiences. “Jump the Shark” will jump the shark when you dig into your cereal box and the action figure comes out.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. You can buy the paperback of Jump the Shark at Amazon.com.

In 1935, Dr. George Gallup—previously an ad exec with Young & Rubicam in New York—founded the Gallup Organization, which would soon become the nation’s pre-eminent pollsters. Things started off well, in 1936, when Gallup correctly predicted FDR’s defeat of Kansas Gov. Alf Landon for the presidency, contrary to the then-leading polling group. From that start, Gallup expanded its polling—never on behalf of political parties or special interests—into all sorts of fields and all around the world. An internationally known name, Gallup had been pictured on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News by the time he died, in 1984.

James Clifton, the founder of a Nebraska research firm called SRI, took over the Gallup Organization in 1988, and since then the company’s business has grown rapidly. Indeed, when Gallup made The New York Times a few weeks ago, it was not for one of its polls but for news about the company itself: Rather than releasing its poll results through other media, as it has in the past, Gallup would become something of a publisher in its own right, developing new ways to get its data and analyses directly into interested consumers’ hands without being processed and reported by various middleman news organizations.

Clifton spoke mediabistro.com recently about this shift at Gallup, the company’s history, and why public-opinion polling is important in the first place.

Most of us think of the Gallup Organization as the people who do election polls. But apparently there’s a whole lot more to it than that. What’s the other stuff you do—which I understand is actually most of your business?
When Dr. Gallup was leading the company, politics was what governed democracy. He had tools and techniques to access public opinion and ways to hear the voice of the electorate that was reported leadership. Now, 70 years since he founded it, free enterprise is as or more important than politics in what rules the world. So we’ve just taken the tools that he invented and in addition to the electorate we’ve applied them to customers and then to employees. You know all of us are governed, lead, or managed by politicians or by CEOs or by our managers, so we’ve just added those two other electorates: customers and employees.

But Gallup holds this spot in the popular imagination as these mythical poll people. What you’re describing sounds on some level like it’s taking away from that mythology: You becomes just another consulting firm, maybe with a different technique.
It’s very, very different. Most management consulting firms, it’s just thinking outside the box. That’s what McKinsey and Bain do, they think outside the box, so they look at your organization and they say, you’ve got to quadruple, you have to acquire, and blah blah blah. We are still very data-based. So what we do is for, I don’t know, probably half the Fortune 100 companies, we go through, and just like Dr. Gallup did, we study the electorate, we study their customers, just thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And then we build a strategy based on the voice of that electorate, their customers. It’s very, very different.

The news now is that you’re pushing to become more of a media company than just a research company. Again, in the popular imagination, you kind of are this media company; you provide these studies for the news media. How is what you’re going to be doing different from what was being done before?
We used to just do our polls and then hand the data over to media and then they would report the polls. And the media do a terrible, terrible, terrible job with polls. Where there can be a very rich story, they just print one little headline, and so all the best work that a thousand Gallup people have done just gets totally missed. But now we’ve given up on that. Instead, we’re becoming our own source, with the polls and the analysis in one place. We’re a destination not just for journalists but for everybody—you might be a professor, you might be The New York Times, you might be the London Telegraph, you might just be someone who wants to learn more about one of our polls. And any of these people can go to our web solution—the Gallup Brain, it’s called—because they’re doing a paper or they’re a lobbyist or they’re a whatever, and all the work we’ve ever done is stuffed into this gigantic website, going back 50 years. If you wanted to see a 50-year trend on how blacks and whites are getting along, that’s all in that website. Whatever our next blockbuster is—the last really big blockbuster was we showed that after President Bush and Colin Powell said that our relationships are fine with the Muslim world, with a billion Muslims, we did a poll of 10,000 Arabs in nine countries, and we found that 20 to 40 percent of them think it’s a good idea to kill Americans—you’ll be able to get all the data and analysis there. We used to just hand that off, just be a source. Now real people can use it, and that’s been a huge breakthrough for us.

How did the Gallup Organization become so synonymous with polling?
I’ve looked into this, because I was really curious how Dr. Gallup in one lifetime became so famous—when I go to another country, it’s just embarrassing, when everybody knows Gallup and all that. What he did a long time ago was that he decided that he would never work for a special-interest group. And so he would never work for Republicans or Democrats, obviously, but also not for the NRA or even things like animal rights. So he never took a paycheck from a special-interest group. I saw a study recently where it said that red meat’s not as bad as you think and all of that, and it came out of Johns Hopkins. At the very end, the last sentence the research was funded by the National Cattlemen’s Association. That’s what we never do, and so I think we became synonymous, because not only were we honest but also because Dr. Gallup figured out a way to always have the face of independence. He would say, “Oh, we would never work for them, we would never work for them,” and that’s what we’ve always carried on. That’s why I think we became such a big name, we didn’t do it because any of the work that my leadership team has done, we inherited that from Dr. Gallup.

So do you think old George would have been pleased with this move?
I think he’d be real pleased. His said that if democracy is about the will of the people, somebody ought to go out and find out what that will is. He never said officials should necessarily vote the will, because the leaders have to vote their values and all that kind of thing. But he said that if leaders have polls—and they all do—he said that you’ve got question the integrity of democracy if people can’t have polls that are as competent as the polls the leaders have. Otherwise you have to ask yourself, what are they keeping secret? So why would we keep it a secret from the man on the street, what the rest of the country is thinking, so only the leaders would know? Dr. Gallup had a great mission and that was why he published polls, that’s why they wouldn’t work for a president like other would, because he wanted the polls for the man on the street. So now with the new application that we have, I think that he would love it, because now more than ever people can use the Gallup Poll.

And of course you’ll still be doing the presidential-election polling you’re so well known for?
More than ever. We do polls of Chinese, I just agreed about half an hour ago to do an in-depth poll of Russians, we’ve got upcoming work in Baghdad, and many Muslim polls. A lot of it is just technology— we’re bigger and have more resources than Dr. Gallup did. But we do far more polls of the six-billion world citizenship than we did before.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

Jim Kelly has one of the great jobs in American journalism—running Time magazine as the newsweekly’s managing editor—and he also had one of the toughest acts to follow. He eased into the editor’s chair at the start of 2001, replacing Walter Isaacson, the attention-grabbing managing editor credited with rejuvenating the newsmagazine genre for a soft-news era and keeping Time squarely in the middle of the publicity map, with such events as the magazine’s star-laden 75th-anniversary party, in 1998. For the last two years, as the country has moved in a more hard-news direction, Kelly has ably steered his large staff, producing a National Magazine Award-winning special issue just two days after the September 11 attacks and overseeing gripping coverage—with breathtaking photography—of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On a recent Tuesday—newsmag editors only have free time in the early part of the week—Kelly spoke to mediabistro.com about his career at Time, the magazine’s history, and the importance of the red border.

Birthdate: 1953
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: Front section

So you’ve got one of the great, important, Halberstamian Powers That Be jobs in American journalism. Was it always your dream to be the managing editor of Time?
I’ve certainly always wanted to work at Time, ever since I was in high school and I would read it during lunch break. I’d go up to the library and look at Time, and look at The New Yorker and New York magazine. Those are my three favorite magazines. In college I read it basically as an excuse not to do my schoolwork. I went to college at the time of Watergate, and that of course was a very hot news story. I think if there’s one cover story that made me really want to work at Time it was a cover story on John Le Carre. It was such a smart take on one of my favorite writers. I thought if it was the kind of place that you can cover politics as well as do cover stories on novelists, it was not a bad place to work.

So did you start at Time right out of school?
I worked briefly for Bill Bradley when thinking about running for the U.S. Senate, but that didn’t last very long—well, Bill lasted very long, but I didn’t last very long there. I started at Time 25 years ago.

I was a writer for eight years, and then I became the foreign editor for three years. I had a great run, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gulf War number one. Then I began top editing various sections and became deputy managing editor in 1996 and managing editor in 2001.

At a place like Time, such a well oiled machine, where the writers know exactly what they’re doing and senior editors keeping their sections running, how much of your day-to-day is actually editing and how much do just end up dealing with corporate stuff?
That’s a good question. In the early part of the week is when I try to do the meetings with the publishing side. If I have to meet an advertiser or make a brief speech at a lunch, I try to do it on Tuesday or Wednesday. There’s a reception tomorrow night at the Smithsonian for our White House photographer, Diana Walker, so I’ll go down to that. But Thursday and Friday are the days that I basically live here at the office. I close the door and read every story in the magazine before it appears, sometimes several times. I look at all the layouts, proof all the photo selections.

It’s kind of a two-and-a-half-day rolling close, where whenever people have a story that’s finished or a layout that’s final they come to my office and I look at it. I’m here Saturday until about 6 pm, pretty much for the end of the close.

Time has won several photo awards in the last year or so. Was it a conscious decision of yours to bump up the prominence of the photos in the magazine?
I think 9/11 was a turning point for us in terms of how we view photographs at Time. Our 9/11 issue was put together in 36 hours, and we decided we would lead the magazine with a dozen of pages of photographs and then do one story, just simply one story about that day.

What I wanted to create was a magazine that not only would read vividly two days after it came out, but would read vividly 10 or 20 years later, that this was what it felt to be alive that day. And that was told very well photographically. And then the war in Afghanistan proved to be—it’s a fairly colorful place to have a war, so many photographs came out of that. And then we decided, based on that, that we would handle the Iraq war as much photographically as possible. Then the photography that was presented to me exceeded, far exceeded, my high expectations. We have a terrific photo staff, so we just started leading the magazine every week with 20 to 24 pages of photographs, which was unusual. No one else was doing it.

You make it sound almost accidental, this decision to go with larger photo spreads—something driven only by the quality of the photos you had available. But it seems like maybe it’s also an answer to the whither-newsmags question, that the reason to read Time on top of the Times is because you can do this beautiful, lush photography.
I think you’re right. I think that photojournalism is one way that we distinguish ourselves. But, also, what we have found is that news is a newsmagazine’s best friend. The more the papers write about Iraq, the better it is for us because it helps sell the audience on the story. Iraq is big news; you have to pay attention to it. But it also allows us, since we only have to come out once a week, to really pick the places where we want to devote our resources. We don’t have to cover the breaking news they have today. You know, the president can give a speech on Monday and The New York Times has to cover it and put it on their front page Tuesday. We can mention it in whatever way we like because we’re coming out a week later. One of the advantages we have coming out once a week is that we only and mostly do just one story on Iraq, so we get really good, we hope, at picking a story that has real depth and that adds something, because we don’t have to cover the day to day stuff.

Given that news is a newsmagazine’s best friend, how do you make the decisions about when to go hard with the covers and when to go soft? In the last two weeks, for example, with “Mission Not Accomplished” and the Plame leak covers, you’ve gone much harder than Newsweek has.
You know, there are many fun parts of the job, and the most fun part is figuring out what the cover is every week. That decision is often made Friday night or Saturday, and by that time obviously the stories are in and you’re picking between two, sometimes, two completely different covers. Like any good news organization, we try to plan ahead and the cover story last week, the “Mission Not Accomplished” cover, was a result of two months of reporting in Iraq and a few weeks of reporting in Washington. It just seemed to be the right moment to run it. It could’ve conceivably run the week before. It could’ve conceivably run the week after. But we went with it the week we did because it was in the air.

Last week’s cover, with the Plame leak, we just thought it was a great juicy tale. But that issue of the magazine is interesting to look at it because you do have the Plame story as the cover story, but there are many other stories in the magazine that show the enterprise of the magazine and show the tricky thing I have to do, which is to show breadth and depth at the same time. If you look at the five-page story on how gays are treated in Wyoming five years after Matthew Shepard, the nine-page story on the energy scam, the four-page story on Chechnya, the four page report from Iraq, the four-page arts lead on the making of Clay Aiken, they all dive deep into those specific areas but they have very little in common. Frankly, to have an investigative piece on coal and a profile of Clay Aiken, there aren’t a lot of magazines that can afford that kind of diversity.

How does the sort of iconic tradition of Time magazine influence what you do, if at all?
I take the red border very seriously. But one of the great things about being editor of Time, it does allow you to be a generalist. It allows you to look out there and say, “This politician, this trend, this Hollywood movie, this society story; they all can be covered in Time.” On the other hand, any cover story that has the red border around it has got to be the best possible story you can write on that subject. I don’t get a lot of leeway—”Well, this story isn’t so hot, but what the heck let’s put it on the cover”—so the stories week after week have to be executed at a fairly high level no matter what the subject is. The red border, for me, is first of all a tremendous asset. Along with the National Geographic yellow border it’s one of the most recognizable magazine brands. But a story has got to be awfully good to deserve that red border.

Do you ever worry, though, about putting something like yoga on the cover and giving these trend stories the imprimatur of being on the cover of Time magazine?
I know what you’re saying, and, yes, it’s something to worry about. It’s something you have to be concerned about. I mean, the science of yoga actually turned out to be a very good story, very well executed by Richard Corliss. When we did our meditation cover a couple of months ago, done by Joel Stein, that also was a wonderfully written, tremendously researched story. It was not something written off the top of Joel’s head. Though obviously there’s a big difference between the science of meditation and the George Bush cover in July, they both are executed very well, great reporting and wonderful writing. And that’s how I have to fill the mission of the red border.

Has it been challenging to run the magazine through the company itself being such a big story for the last year or two?
I don’t think most readers associate Time magazine with AOL Time Warner or with AOL. Time has been around for 80 years. By the time the merger took place, it had its own very strong identity.

Internally has it been difficult to manage your staff, through the buyouts and the stock price collapse and so forth?
I think what has helped us is that we’ve been so aggressive about covering our own company and that has given us the credibility that you don’t always find in magazines that are owned by other companies. I think anyone running a magazine, anyone running a website, in the early part of the 21st century has a set of business challenges that they’ve got to meet and consume a chunk of their times. I’ve had more fun than I’ve had recently, and I’ve also had less fun, and we’ll get through it.

Yeah, you guys at least have the consolation that you’re pretty sure you’re going to hang around for a few more months.
That’s true. Oh, let’s say three months.

In fact, this is the 80th birthday year now. Any big birthday plans?
We’re still recovering from the 75th.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

Just shy of five years ago, Cynthia Cotts took over The Village Voice‘s media-criticism column, called “Press Clips.” It was only her second staff writing job, but she’s certainly held her own. Cotts’s column is different from most media writing: Heavily reported and often concerned with issues important to workaday journalists at New York’s papers and magazines, it’s less interested in the highflying issues—what Si’s up to, how Sumner and Mel are getting along—that so many media writers care about. Cotts covers the newsrooms of the city’s tabloids, and she homes in on media labor issues you’ll rarely find covered elsewhere—all of which seems about right from the Voice. She spoke to mediabistro.com about the traditions of her column and her paper, and about her alter ego, Tainty Scotch.

Birthdate: “I anticipated this one. I’m in my prime.”
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
First section of the Sunday Times: “It depends on what catches my fancy.”

The “Press Clips” column has a certain heritage—Alex Cockburn and Jim Ledbetter and so forth. How do you view the tradition, and how does it affect what you do?
When I started writing “Press Clips,” I got a very good piece of advice from an editor at the Voice. He said, “Don’t try to imitate any of your predecessors, be yourself, that’s the best thing you can do.” I took that to heart, and I think that served me well. Everyone brings something unique to writing “Press Clips.” Since the days of Alexander Cockburn, the Voice has changed, the political world has changed, the world of media reporting has changed, and so I would never put myself up in competition with Cockburn. I can’t be Cockburn; he is a unique legend. Jim Ledbetter had this kind of moral authority that he brought to the column. I’ve tried to make it my own.

If the goal is to be yourself, what’s your background? What did you do before you started the column?
I’ve had literally a checkered career. By that I mean I spent a lot of time working as a fact-checker at such places as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. This was my introduction to New York journalism, and it was really one of the best introductions anyone can have, because as a fact-checker at one of those magazines you get to work with some of the best writers in the country and get an insider’s view of both how they do their writing and their approach to journalism and storytelling.

So where did you move after your fact-checking days?
It was a long and circuitous route that brought me to “Press Clips.” Essentially I spent most of the early ’90s working as a freelance fact-checker and freelance writer, which is a period that taught me quite a bit and made me sensitive to the plight of freelancers in this economy. I wrote numerous articles about drug policy and criminal-justice issues. On the basis of those, I got a fellowship at Yale Law School called the Knight Fellowships in Law for Journalists, which consists of taking the classes the first year law students are taking. My next gig was staff reporter at the National Law Journal. This was my first job as a staff writer.

I spent one year roughly at the NLJ writing news stories. Jim Ledbetter left “Press Clips” to go work for The Industry Standard. I was fortunate enough that I had some good people backing me for this position, and Don Forst, the editor-in-chief, hired me. I think it was a bold move when he hired me and I’m totally grateful for it—it wasn’t immediately clear that I would be the right person to do this job. But the summer before I got hired, I had been writing short media pieces for “Media Circus,” which was then Salon‘s division of media coverage, and that had brought me to the attention of some people who were helping recruit potential successors to Ledbetter.

By the time you arrived at “Press Clips,” as you said before, the world of media reporting had changed a lot since Cockburn’s time, there’s so much of it now. How do you think your “Press Clips” fits in among Michael Wolff or Keith Kelly or Howie Kurtz or Matthew Rose?
When Don Forst hired me, he gave me some basic ground rules for what he was looking for. He wanted it to be a reported column, not an opinion column. He wanted stories with a New York angle. And he wanted me to break news. Those are all essential things to understanding how I’ve approached “Press Clips.” And I’m looking for news that haven’t been reported somewhere else. That becomes a pretty tall order when you’re competing with all the other media reporters working today.

My own personal formula for what I do with “Press Clips” generally is, my goal is to be both entertaining and a champion of truth and justice, and to try to prove that those two are not mutually exclusive. And I think that’s a real trick. It’s hard to be clever and earnest at the same time. It’s hard to have really serious political convictions or to root for the underdog and still appeal to readers who are weaned on a really heavy diet of ironic and sensational material. I try to find a way to take serious subjects and write them in a way that’s successful enough that people are going to have some sort of access to them. People are going to find some way to access them without feeling like, “Oh, I’m being lectured to,” or, “I’m reading another predictable Village Voice ideological rant.”

But, at the same time, you must recognize your audience. You’re going to write things that are more from a lefty perspective than if you were writing for, say, Forbes. I mean, the recent column about the National Writer’s Union—that’s something you’re not surprised to see in the Voice.
One of the great challenges of my job is to define and communicate with the audience. If you were to draw the diagram of the audience for my column, there are different overlapping groups. Some people are going to read it because it’s in the Village Voice, and they expect to get a certain political approach. Some people are going to read it because it’s providing some insider view in the media industry. Some people are going to read it because it’s hitting on a subject that is of extreme topical interest at the time. I’d like to think that some people read it—and some people told me they read it—because they’ve come to think that reading Cynthia Cotts is something worth doing. To me the question is more, who is your target audience? I don’t see myself writing to the fans of Alex Cockburn. I think my audience is the U.S. media industry, and, the subset of that, the New York media industry. I don’t have a mandate to have a sort of predictable Village Voice ideology.

Do you intentionally try not to do that?
It’s just not my mandate. To me, my mandate is to compete in the world of media reporters. Writing for The Village Voice, I’ve been given a tremendous amount of editorial freedom and very few sacred cows. I think that it’s very clear, to people who study this, that there are certain subjects that reporters for other publications will never touch. Say, some of the things I’ve written about Nikki Finke vs. the New York Post.

Right, Keith Kelly is not going to do that.
Not just Keith Kelly. It’s a peculiar story—most New York publications are very careful about what they’re going to write about the New York Post. The New York Post is a sacred cow for a lot of publications because of its unique power, extreme power. There are pieces that I’ve written about The New York Times that I think you’re just not going to find elsewhere. And sometimes it’s because they’re about, say, labor issues. I will take the point of view of the underdog. So if there’s a struggle between the rank and file and management, that’s something I’m interested in covering and I know that the Voice will support that. It’s also unique because this kind of story you’re going to be hard pressed to find covered by other media reporters until it becomes that sort of hurricane that was the Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg story.

How much leeway have you had to cover the antitrust stuff with Voice Media and New Times. Is that something that they’ve allowed you to be as free as you wanted to be to write about?
No one at the Voice tried to control what I wrote about it. Personally, my judgment was that when your company is the subject of a justice department investigation, it’s wise to withhold judgment.

What have been some of your favorite stories during the time that you’ve been doing the column?
I actually find, when I think back on my favorite columns, my favorite ones are pieces on matters of writing style and editorial style. Every Labor Day, for the past few years, I’ve written about comparing lede paragraphs in magazines that were on the newsstands at the time. Twice I’ve done pieces on words that are abused quite heavily at The New York Times—examples being the words bitter and ironic—that I’ve looked at over the course of a year. I do a Nexis search and reduce it to a handful of examples that reveal these are words that have come into vogue. And then really my favorite column of all time was the one that I did on the use of pseudonyms.

What prompted me to write it was that I had learned that Joel Stein, at Time magazine, was writing as “Calendar Boy” for Vanity Fair. It was just a silly piece of gossip, that Joel Stein was Calendar Boy. I started making some calls to people and asking them about other pseudonyms that either had been exposed or had not. I was trying to make it like a New York Times Arts & Ideas story, “what is the role of a pseudonym in journalism today?” I talked to some people who really got me going on the notion that pseudonyms had many positive uses in journalism.

What positive uses, other than covering your ass?
Some people turned me around. I started with this kind of typically prosecutorial, “This is a bad thing. Pseudonyms are always used to hide.” But then, for example, some sources pointed out that when you write under pseudonym, you are freed from your conventions or your routines of writing. You’re also freed from the consequences if you’re writing something negative about somebody. So, there’s a kind of freedom and playfulness that’s encouraged by the use of a pseudonym. And as one of my sources was telling me this, he said, “In fact, you should try it. You should try writing this column under the use of a pseudonym and see how it goes.” So, I decided that I was going to use a pseudonym and I came up with one, which was an anagram of my name.

I had learned that The New Yorker has the guy who answers letters to the editor, and his name is Owen Ketherry, which is an anagram of “The New Yorker.” So I came up with this anagram for my name, Tainty Scotch. And some people were fooled. I had two people; one inside the Voice and one at Vanity Fair, who asked me afterwards who wrote that column. So I was very pleased by that, and it kind of revolutionized my thinking about pseudonyms.

That’s funny.
I’m also proud of my accumulated contributions to reporting on The New York Times. I think I’ve done some pieces that were very difficult for me and for my sources to get out. A story that I wrote sometime in March, with the headline “Republic of Fear,” about Howell Raines’s management style, what it was doing to the Times. It really preceded and foreshadowed the events of last summer.

My biggest regret about having taking this job as a media critic is that I will probably never be allowed to write for the Times, and that would be a goal of mine. And this is just a funny thing. I get a lot of e-mail feedback from readers and one recently joked with me that the first time he will read my name in the Times will be when they print my obituary. It’s not a concept that I like to entertain but I thought that you might be amused by it.

Jesse Oxfeld is editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. Photo credit: Staci Schwartz/The Village Voice 2003.

There are many people who write about the press, but one name always towers over the rest. Howard Kurtz has been covering the media beat for The Washington Post since 1990, and he’s fashioned himself into sort of the platonic ideal of a media reporter. He works hard, he’s got great sources, and he regularly breaks news about the news biz. He’s so prolific he not only writes several times a week for the Post; he has also written four books, and he does a daily column and a weekly live chat on the paper’s website, a weekly show for CNN, and freelance magazine work for titles from the Columbia Journalism Review to Vanity Fair. Of course, all this work has its drawbacks: Kurtz is regularly taken to task for his apparent conflicts of interest, and—not insignificantly—the personal life can sometimes suffer. Yesterday morning, Kurtz took a break in the Post‘s busy newsroom to talk to mediabistro.com about his gig, his critics, and what happens when Rick Bragg is suspended while you’re off getting married.

Birthdate: August 1953
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Now lives: Chevy Chase, Maryland
Reads for work: “Got a couple of hours?” Blogs and newspaper sites early in the morning, the Post on paper over breakfast, and 8 or 9 additional papers in the morning at work.
Reads for fun: Recently: Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis, showing “some of the same political problems going on 240 years ago that we have today.” Currently: Foreign Affairs, by Alison Lurie, and Wall Street Meat, by Andy Kessler.
First section of the Sunday Post: A glance at the front page, then op-ed. “Although during the NBA playoffs I probably sneak a look at sports first.”

You’ve been doing the media beat for over a decade now. Tell me the path that led you to that job.
Well, in my time at the Post, I covered a whole variety of Washington beats: Urban Affairs, Justice Department, Capitol Hill, and then I was the paper’s New York bureau chief in the late eighties. When I was scheduled to come back to D.C., I didn’t want to cover another building, and, because New York is such a tabloid town, I found myself writing more about the press and its impact on things. So I was just sort of instinctively attracted to the idea of taking on the media beat and had no clue that it would turn into a big industry for me. Media coverage then was more of a backwater than it is today, when everybody with a modem is a media critic.

You talk about how now everybody with a modem is a media critic, how has the beat changed in the decade-plus that you’ve been doing it?
It’s changed to a remarkable degree, which is probably why I’m still fascinated with it. When I started covering the media, there was basically one cable news network, the internet was not really a factor, and talk radio had not yet become the major force it would become within a few years. So, in a nutshell, things have just speeded up to a remarkable degree, like the world is stuck on fast forward. Everything I do now, including my own online writing, moves at an incredibly faster pace than it did in what now seems like the leisurely world of 1990.

Also, I imagine, there’s much more competition on the beat.
Yes and no. On one hand, you have websites devoted to the media and you have a lot of magazine and online commentators dissecting the press, some of them with ideological axes to grind, all of which I think is terrific and healthy. But if you look at major newspapers, there really are only about a half-dozen fulltime media reporters even today. There are lots of TV columnists who write about dramas and sitcoms and occasionally news, but there aren’t that many who do what I do. I think there’s still a prejudice among editors that this is somehow navel-gazing and the average reader therefore isn’t interested, when nothing could be further from the truth. People are fascinated by how the media works, by understanding how mistakes are made, by just sort of shining a light on what journalists do for a living. And this is one of the reasons why I get so much reaction to what I do.

When we were setting this up last week, you emailed that you’re working 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. these days. Are you always so busy?
Well, the online column has kind of taken what was already a crazy schedule and made it insane. I don’t work those hours all the time, but because I have to get up early now and write for washingtonpost.com and then do my regular job during the day and also devote some hours to Reliable Sources [his CNN show], and I also do a weekly chat for washingtonpost.com, my schedule just has a way of spinning out of control. Often at 10 or 11 at night I’m looking online at the next day’s papers, for what might make good fodder for the online “Media Notes.” It’s a pretty demanding schedule, but I’m not complaining about it in the slightest. I like to work, I have a fast metabolism, and it keeps me interested in what I’m doing. It’s a fairly decent way to make a living.

Speaking of liking your work, Mickey Kaus had an aside a few weeks ago that you were reporting Raines stuff while allegedly on your honeymoon. True?
I plead guilty. As the person who broke the Jayson Blair story, I was very dedicated to following the saga to its conclusion. So I ended up having to file stories both on the weekend I got married and from London while my wife and I were on our honeymoon. She was incredibly understanding about all of this and kind of understands the special craziness that comes with being a journalist. But I’ve found myself having to reassure people that despite these extracurricular activities my marriage is still going strong after four weeks.

And mazel tov on that.
Thank you.

Does this happen often? Stories coming up when you’re on vacation and so forth? I’m getting the feeling it might.
There have been other vacations when I’ve had to deal with work. I was so determined not to work on the weekend I got married that I didn’t bring my laptop. Which turned out to be a small problem when Rick Bragg got suspended from the Times and also I got hold of the Jayson Blair book proposal. I ended up having to file one of those stories from an airplane at 30,000 feet, using the old-fashioned scribbling-on-a-pad approach [and then phoning the story in]. I learned how to do that back in the days when I worked for The Washington Star, which was an afternoon paper and where you often had to run to the phones and dictate a story on deadline. It’s still a skill that comes in handy.

Do you ever consider, between the Post and the online stuff and the books and the CNN gig, giving up something?
Well, I haven’t written a book in a couple of years, as part of my effort to have a more normal life. And, you know, some of these things come and go, but there’s a certain synergy, to use that dreaded word, in what I do. Writing an online column helps give me ideas for articles for the Post, chatting with readers also generates ideas. Look, there are times when I take weekends off and go to the movies and hang around the house and live a relatively normal life, but I’ve got a demanding schedule because the bottom line is I love what I do.

About the CNN show: That’s the big criticism of you, that you’re conflicted to be covering the press for the Post while also working for one of the biggest players in the field. Do you at least acknowledge that this is a valid concern?
It’s absolutely a fair question. It is also not exactly a secret that I am on television as well as writing for a newspaper. My view is that I’ve criticized CNN a lot over the years, and I’ve probably written more negative stories about The Washington Post than any reporter. So I like to think that I demonstrate that I am tough on my employers. Readers and viewers will have to make up their own minds about whether I’m pulling any punches. I am laying it out there, making full disclosure, and I’m very cognizant of the fact that I need to be tough on the Post and CNN when the occasion arises.

The other criticism is Eric Alterman’s charge that you’re almost a GOP partisan. Where do you think that comes from?
It comes from liberal ideologues who don’t understand or care for a fair and non-political approach to media criticism. I mean I have to laugh when people suggest I’m some sort of closet conservative, because I also get waves of emails accusing me of being a communist pinko working for Pravda on the Potomac. The truth is I make it my business not to lean either way. I’ve written some nice profiles of very conservative journalists, and I’ve written some nice profiles of very liberal journalists.

What do you think is the biggest media story today?
The sad and continuing breakdown of the public’s trust in the press, which in my view has been aggravated by a whole bunch of self-inflicted wounds. It’s not just the occasional scandals involving fabrication and plagiarism, it’s not just the perception and sometimes the reality of bias, it’s a sense on the part of the public that people in this business are arrogant and don’t play fair and live by a double standard in which they point fingers at everyone else and yet bristle when legitimate questions are raised about their behavior. The public’s view of the press has continued to decline during the time I’ve been at this job and that is the damaging reality that journalists face today.

Is there a way to undo that?
I don’t expect people to love us. Asking tough questions about politicians and businessmen, particularly in an era of war and terrorism, is not going to win you huge numbers of fans. I think we could repair some of the damage by being open to criticism, by not being so defensive, by doing a better job of explaining what we do and why we do it, and by quickly correcting mistakes in a prominent way when we make them.

About the recent Times scandals: Has this been one of the most exciting and interesting things you’ve covered? It seems to be so unprecedented in so many ways.
On one level it was simply a great detective story. I started this in late April, based on one Jayson Blair story that bore an uncanny resemblance to a piece in the San Antonio Express-News. From there I started calling people who had been quoted by Blair, who told me they had never spoken to the man. Even when it became clear that this guy was a serial fabricator, I had no idea that this would mushroom into the sort of mega-scandal that would ultimately bring down the two top editors of the paper. Contrary to what many people may think, I didn’t particularly enjoy the spectacle. I am friendly with a lot of people at the Times; I felt bad for what they were going through. I felt the institution had been sort of unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few people, and I think ultimately all of us in the news business are hurt when The New York Times gets a black eye.

Was it as unheard of as it seemed for Times people to be leaking and talking outside the family quite so freely as they were in that period?
I was stunned by the level of anger and resentment that had been built up toward Howell Raines and the degree to which some people at The New York Times felt compelled to make that public. I think that Raines, who had great strength as an editor and in some ways was unfairly tarnished by this, created a vacuum—along with Gerald Boyd—by retreating into a bunker and refusing to give interviews and not explaining what was going on at the paper or defending the integrity of all the other reporters. This helped spark the explosion that ultimately forced Raines and Boyd to leave. Had Raines had a different management style, there’s not a question in my mind he could have ridden out the scandal. But as one Times staffer sympathetic to Howell told me, in many ways he was his own worst enemy.

Who’s your guess for the next editor?
Since I often criticize people who engage in uninformed speculation, I’m going to take a pass at that one. This is a decision to be made by one man—Arthur Sulzberger Jr.—and while I can tell you what the latest buzz is, I don’t really know.

What’s the latest buzz, then?
Well, I’m going to leave it at that.

Jesse Oxfeld is editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

For more than three years, Jon Fine has covered the media business for Advertising Age, the 73-year-old ad-world weekly. During Fine’s tenure, Ad Age‘s web presence has grown, and his regular appearance on AdAge.com has brought his work to those of us outside the advertising business who might not have previously been exposed to it. Over the last week, in fact, he’s become perhaps the key correspondent at the enormous and somewhat ridiculous Rosie O’Donnell vs. Gruner + Jahr lawsuit, from which he’s filed regular online updates, slaking the thirst of those curious and amused mag-world folks who didn’t want to schlep down to Centre Street themselves. Fine spoke to mediabistro.com recently about the trial, his background, and whether or not the Manhattan media scene is problematically incestuous.

Birthdate: February 21, 1968
Hometown: Wichita Falls, Texas
First section of the Sunday Times: “The magazine, because it comes on Wednesday.”

You’ve been doing an awful lot of Rosie coverage recently—daily, breaking, almost wire-style dispatches. Are you personally very into it, or is it just that you’re the guy on this beat who’s got a daily web venue?
In this very circumscribed world, this is the biggest thing going on right now. And it’s an ongoing thing. I’ve been fortunately given the freedom to be there as long as it takes. By writing for the web, I have a little more leeway in terms of deadlines. Some of the newspaper reporters might have to rush back at 4 or whatever to file. I don’t. It’s sort of been a chance to represent, as it were, for Ad Age, because of the daily nature of it.

On a personal level, I’ve just gotten completely fascinated by this because everything up there has to do with the culture of magazines. There are huge personalities involved. It’s obviously a big conflict and a big roll of the dice for a new CEO, and I just find this completely fascinating. It’s the first trial I’ve really ever covered. And just the theater of it and this sort of ballet of it, I’ve just been completely sucked in.

Do you get to take advantage of your webbiness and do a sort of ’30s movie, running-out-to-the-phone-booths, filing-at-midday thing?
I did that when Cindy Spengler, who’s the chief marketing officer of Gruner + Jahr, broke down in tears on the stand after relating the whole Rosie-says-lying-gives-you-cancer thing. It had been out there, but it hadn’t necessarily been attached to Cindy’s name, I don’t think. And I was able to, during a break, get to one of the few places in the hallway where my cell phone works—I literally was kneeling by a window and just hashed out three quick paragraphs that we got up pretty much immediately.

I guess now that Inside.com doesn’t exist there’s really nobody left other than you who can do that in the middle of the day.
Well, Media Week can, and they have. And obviously there are other people who can, too. The daily newspapers are geared, and rightfully so, toward producing the daily newspaper. But if something really big happens, David Carr, for instance, will have something on NYTimes.com by the end of the day. I think some years ago, on this beat, if you were on a weekly it was easier to compete with the dailies. Right now, you have so much competition: the Times, the Post, the Daily News, Women’s Wear Daily, Media Week, Sridhar and the Observer, I must be forgetting five or six—places like you guys. If you go back, there is a time when the Post and the News had no media columnist. If you go back 10 or 15 years, it was just the Times and the Journal and maybe Ad Age and the trades, and the whole thing had a slower frequency.

But you weren’t doing this 10 or 15 years ago. You’ve been at Ad Age since 2000, and I know you had an unusual path to this…
I graduated college, and my orientation then was primarily musical. I was in a band, and we’d put out records. My main concern, my first year out of school, was playing rock shows in Europe, basically.

Then through a friend of a friend, I ended up hooking up with this magazine called News Inc., which doesn’t exist anymore. It was kind of a monthly competitor to Editor & Publisher. It had the great misfortune of launching into the teeth of the major media downturn in the early ’90s, which eventually forced it to be downsized to a newsletter. I came on as a fact checker for, like, one issue and then stuck around for a while. Fact checker became assistant editor became associate editor became editor of the newsletter, eventually, when it got busted down to that. I was doing that for three or four years.

From that, I went to The Village Voice to do sort of side projects; they thought they might do some custom-publishing kinds of ventures. Then I got a column at Newsday, which I did for about three years, called “Pushing 30.” They called me up and said, “We’re looking for a Generation-X columnist, and your name keeps coming up.” I said, “Well, I’m happy to continue the conversation as long as you never use that phrase with me again.”

Did that for a few years, went to Brill’s Content pre-launch, was there for six weeks and three days, if I recall correctly—Steve called me into his office and said, “This isn’t working,” and I said, “Yeah, you’re right.” Then I went to do freelance. The bread and better was kind of like three different pots—there was like a music pot, there was a sports pot, and there was a media pot, which was Ad Age, Columbia Journalism Review, and some other places.

The grind of waking up on the first of every month and realizing that you need to make X thousand dollars appear by the 30th in order to pay rent, that’s kind of wearying. And around the time I was kind of freaking out about this, an old friend of mine said, “You should just find a staff job, like, if the media-reporter job at Ad Age comes up, you should take it.’ And then three weeks later I was calling my predecessor to get someone’s phone number, and I said, “What’s up?” And she was like, “Well, I just got promoted. Do you want a job?” So there’s that, and there’s all this other extra-curricular crap, too, which is the music thing.

Who is the audience of Ad Age? Is it agency people? Buyers?
No, the majority is actually marketers. The circulation is like 60,000. God knows how many agency jobs have been lost, but the circ stays pretty steady. I mean, it’s people at the companies that advertise: carmakers, watchmakers, Proctor & Gamble, all down the line. The audience is actually very elite marketers and advertising people—and that, as we know, is 80 percent of the revenue that makes this business run.

Does that color what sort of thing you’re writing? Are you writing in the same vein as everyone else on the beat, or are you following specific stuff for your audience?
Everyone is chasing the same big stories. My audience’s media habits are very similar to those of everyone who’s obsessed with this stuff. It’s not like this is an entirely foreign world for them, even if they may be mercifully less obsessed with what happened at Michael’s than “Page Six.” They understand the underpinnings of the business probably better than the average reader of competitor X.

But some of the mid-level personnel tangos, and editor X‘s latest tantrum, I’m not going to really worry about that. Those are lovely little stories, but we’re concentrating more on the business side. On the other hand, whatever Bonnie Fuller does next is a huge business story, just because of what they’re trying to do at American Media, and her role in it, and just the way the whole Bonnie Fuller-David Pecker partnership can either (a) let this company remake itself or (b) crash and burn.

What do you think is the biggest media-world business story right now?
The way Time Inc. is launching Cottage Living is indicative of where the media world is right now. What they’re doing is they’re launching relatively modestly for them, about 500,000 circulation. It’s out of their Southern Progress division, which is based in Birmingham, which means (a) smaller staff for the kind of magazine it is and (b) cheaper. The reason why this is important is because the revenue and advertising metrics for the entire industry remain really lousy after three years. And the circulation situation remains really lousy. This dynamic hasn’t changed, and I’m not sure that all of the big companies have finished reacting to that dynamic.

Every time Cathie Black, the president of Hearst Magazines, is on the stage, she’ll point out, “You know, it’s really weird that in Europe and even in places in America outside of New York, they need half the people to put out a magazine as in New York, why is that?” Now, what does that mean for magazines? The whole model has to change, because of the overall economic and business environment, but it hasn’t changed yet. How that change manifests itself—it’ll likely be slowly and fitfully and extraordinarily painfully for the people involved—is a good story.

There are other things, on a more micro level, like what happens with David Pecker and Bonnie at American Media? How does the stewardship of Ann Moore at Time Inc. differ from Don Logan’s? What happens to Primedia? And the current hothouse flower for that one is, well, what happens to New York magazine? I don’t think anyone really admits it, but New York is still a magazine that everybody in this sphere reads, even if they sort of roll their eyes about it. And there’s an excellent chance that when this is done, it’s going to be a completely different thing. That’s pretty interesting.

So Gotham magazine has this spread on media reporters in the new issue, and you say in it that “the worst thing about your job” is “realizing the degree of incestuousness this world breeds.” This seems a good time to note that, first, you and I are friendly, and, second, and more important, you are and have been for a year or so dating my boss, Laurel Touby.
Guilty as charged.

You’re not exactly fighting hard against this incestuousness thing, are you?
You’re saying because I met somebody that I truly care about, who happens to work in the same business, I should just—

And who bases her business on meeting everyone else—
So you’re trying to get me to trash your boss and my girlfriend on a website that she owns? Is that what’s going on?

No. I’m just trying to get you to say, “Yeah, I guess that is pretty incestuous, isn’t it?” I guess I’m also trying to get you to admit that perhaps you’re a tad hypocritical in decrying the incestuousness.
I’ll give you two answers to that. No. 1, do I have friends who work at magazines? Do I have friends who are writers? Is my girlfriend running mediabistro.com? Yeah, absolutely. But this isn’t all that I do. And I—and I’m sure everybody else on the beat—have entire subsets of friends and interests that go way beyond this. I didn’t really read my Gotham comment as saying it’s a terrible thing, that it’s incestuous and I can’t wait to get out. I love it. I cannot tell you how much fun it is covering this as a reporter. I can’t think of a business beat or any beat that is more fun than this—regardless of the fact that you could argue that it’s the same 200 players kind of endlessly circling each other in this dance, and you can roll your eyes at that.

Despite all of the ridiculous meta moments that we all recognize and roll our eyes at, this is a blast.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

When I first knew Romesh Ratnesar, he was a few years ahead of me in college and one of the world-weary old-boy stars of The Stanford Daily. He continued to live up to that persona, nailing a job at The New Republic upon graduation and washing up at Time magazine a year or so later, in 1997. He’s been a rising star there ever since, the rare newsmag staffer equally adept at both reporting from the field and crafting complex stories back in New York from other reporters’s files. In fact, amid two years in the London bureau and brief reporting stints around the world, Ratnesar has also found time to write more than 20 cover stories for the magazine, on everything from the ascendance of Sen. Hillary Clinton to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the hunt for Osama. He’s now doing a second tour of duty in Iraq, rejoining Africa bureau chief Simon Robinson there after a six-week assignment in the spring. He spoke to mediabistro.com by satellite phone last week, about his job and life in Iraq and his future at Time.

Hometown: Rochester, New York
Birthdate: June 11, 1975

What sort of work do you get to do in Time‘s Baghdad bureau? Do you get to write your own pieces much, or are you mostly filing for other, larger stories to be written back in New York?
It’s a mix. I think the first time I was here I wrote four or five stories. I think Simon, who’s been here for a while, has written a number of stories. We do file as well; it all really depends on the week and how busy a news week it is. If it’s a heavy news week, invariably we will file to New York and the story will be written in New York late on Friday night. But for features we want to work on, we write ourselves.

What’s the day-to-day like? Is there a predictable routine, or is it just a responding-to-what-happens-next sort of thing?
Well, what we do is a little bit different from what wire reporters and newspaper reporters do. I mean, we don’t have to cover the daily events, which are myriad every day—there are at least 10 news events going on any given day all over the country. If there are major things happening, we’ll often go to the scene, but for the most part early in the week we try to figure out a few stories that we want to pursue and then we spend the week reporting those. There is no routine though. It’s an interesting and tough place to work, because you don’t know from day to day where you’ll be going and who will be available. You can’t reach most people by phone; you pretty much have to go their houses and hope they’ll talk to you. Every day is a fresh field.

When you do go out to do on-scene reporting, do you travel alone? Or do you have guards and interpreters and so forth?
Generally, if we’re going to meet an Iraqi, we’ll have a driver and a translator with us. If we’re going out with the Americans, we just take a driver—and, often, if we’re out on a patrol, you ride along with them. We certainly don’t travel with armed accompaniment, and I think that’s probably true of most print reporters. I think TV, because they carry a lot of equipment, they often have security with them.

Do you worry about your personal safety?
From time to time you kind of have to watch yourself, avoid certain kind of situations. If there’s a big attack of some kind and you get a little too close to the crowd, and they recognize you as a western reporter, you can find yourself in somewhat of an uncomfortable position. Any time you go out with American soldiers, especially on combat or patrol missions, there is a risk of coming under some fire. But I don’t think about it very much. I don’t know that most journalists think about it that much, and, if they do, then they won’t go out on those kinds of operations. I mean, there’s plenty of things to do here that don’t involve taking your life in your hands.

But just everyday things—I mean, have you stayed at all at the al-Rashid Hotel, which those rockets were fired at while Wolfowitz was there?
No. The al-Rashid is, or was, I think only populated by people of the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] and the military people. There were no journalists there. We stay in a residential house that we rented shortly after the war ended. Most of the big news organizations that I know of are renting their own houses or staying in very small hotels. There are a couple of big hotels that people stay in by necessity. But most news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, we all have our own homes, which is where we work, too.

That’s a very different world from living in Greenwich Village and working in Rockefeller Center, your life here in New York. Is that disorienting, or at least was it when you first got there, that dichotomy?
Yeah, in some ways. I like working in the field—I like working in New York, as well—but it’s a different kind of experience. It’s disorienting in the sense that it’s always disorienting to go to another country and have to get used to different language, different customs, different currency, just the basics of working in any foreign country. It takes a while. I mean, I found in coming back that it took me at least a couple of weeks to sort out how to make contact with people. The military and the CPA have their own set of rules and ways of dealing with the press. It can take a little bit of effort to sort out how that works. There are just a lot of layers of bureaucracy, you’d be surprised—which makes working here not so different than working in Washington.

What do you find to be the most interesting or significant things you’ve reported on from there?
I find any time we deal with people who are associated with the former regime, or whose sympathies were for the former regime, they’re interesting people to talk to because they’ve had their world potentially destroyed, their future is completely uncertain, and they’re suddenly in a country that is run by Americans and sort of overrun by Westerners. And I think the most interesting thing here is talking to Iraqis about how they make sense of what’s happened to them. It’s a pretty extraordinary thing to live under a regime for 35 years and then in a blink of an eye it’s gone. It’s a completely different world and reality for them. That, to me, is what makes working here pretty exciting and stimulating.

This isn’t your first interesting foreign reporting assignment. Where are some of the other places you’ve been, and how does this compare?
I’ve been in Israel and the occupied territories. I was in Saudi Arabia last year. I’ve been to the Gulf before, and in Asia. I worked in Europe for two years. I don’t think there’s anything quite like this. I imagine Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban was a pretty extraordinary story. Because of the presence of the U.S. military and the fact that you essentially have a government that the U.S. is running in the middle of the Arab world—22 million people—everyday it’s remarkable to take stock of that reality. I don’t think there’s anything quite like Iraq at this point. There’s probably not a story that has as many moving parts and as many stories to tell. I mean, there are just an endless number of stories that are worth pursuing, which we don’t have time to do and probably no one is doing. There are stories that haven’t been discovered here, and there will be for years. I read today that they’ve only dug up 40 mass graves and there’s something like an estimated 300 still out there. That’s hundreds of thousands of people still looking for dead relatives that they have no idea what happened to them. Every one of those people have a story. Most of those stories haven’t been told. I think this will be a great place for journalism for a long time.

How much longer are you going to be there?
I’m going to be here until early December. I’ll head back to New York after that, and hopefully will be back sometime next year.

One thing I find interesting is this sort dual newsmag life you have. On one hand you do the Nancy Gibbs thing, sitting comfortably on Sixth Avenue and spinning great cover stories out of lots of files and research and so forth. But then you also go off for periods and do the foreign-correspondent bit. Which side of that divide do you enjoy more?
Well, I don’t want to get myself in trouble. Both are very rewarding. I’m a big believer in the kinds of stories we do. I think we still are able to synthesize complicated news stories in a way that other publications just don’t. I really do enjoy being able to have that perch, but it’s something that I need to balance with experience and reporting in the field. They both inform each other. When I’m in New York I have the advantage of having access to reporting from all over the world. I’m in contact with correspondents, and I can pick their brains whenever I want. When I’m here I get to kind of make my own rules and make my own schedule and decide what I think is important and what I think the magazine should be doing, which is also gratifying. I’m lucky enough I have the opportunity to do both.

And when you look down the road, do you think you’ll be able to continue to do both or are you going to end up on one side or the other, as a New York writer or a foreign correspondent?
I think that at some point I’d like to spend some extended time in the field in a specific bureau that has a lot of appeal to me. Getting to know one story is always a good thing for journalists, especially journalists interested in foreign affairs. I suspect that even if I do that, at some point I’ll be back writing the kinds of stories I’ve been writing in New York. The nice thing about Time is that it offers all these things to people who work there. People do go off and become foreign correspondents and are never heard from again. They bounce around, travel the world, they live great lives. I don’t necessarily see myself doing that, but I’d like to spend some more time outside of the office before I hunker down.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. In the winter and spring of 1996, as the opinions editor of The Stanford Daily, he edited Romesh Ratnesar’s biweekly column, “Bread and Circus.”

Marion Ettlinger has been a photographer for three and a half decades, but she only discovered her specific calling 20 years ago. That’s when she started taking portraits of authors, and, since then, she’s become probably the nation’s leading author photographer. Whenever you buy a new book and find on its back flap a truly striking image of the author, a photo so gorgeous and detailed it seems almost painted, one that seems to capture the essence of this person who wrote the book you’re holding, that’s most likely an Ettlinger shot. “I think I can always recognize a Marion Ettlinger photograph, read its signature, even downsized to a little porthole window on the back of a paperback, which the author peers through and says, ‘Hi,'” writes the novelist Richard Ford in his foreword to Ettlinger’s new collection, Author Photo. It’s a sumptuous and fascinating collection, 173 pages of endlessly compelling images, photos of the wizened lions and the fledgling newcomers. Ettlinger spoke to mediabistro.com from her studio last week, explaining why she likes authors, who was her favorite to shoot, and why she decided to do this book.

So how did you become the author photographer?
I became an author photographer when in 1983 Esquire magazine, which was doing its 50th anniversary issue, commissioned me to photograph 50 writers. I had been a portraitist, and I had been photographing all sorts of very interesting people in all kinds of creative fields. Esquire had hired 50 writers to write about 50 Americans who made a difference, or something like that, and each of these writers had an essay in the issue. There was going to be an index of the writers in the front, with their bios, and they needed a photo to accompany each bio. They gave me the job, and it was really a crash course. I think I photographed 45 of the 50 writers. I was sent all over the country to do the shoots, and it was somewhere in this process, in this immersion in photographing writers, that I felt very strongly that they were my natural subjects.

So you’ve just been doing it since?
Yeah. I mean, I continue to shoot other people, as well, but I definitely had developed a keen interest in photographing more writers. So I just kind of leaned in that direction.

What is it about writers that drew you to them as a subject?
I guess it’s partly because they were being photographed not because of the way they looked or because of the way they moved; they were being photographed because of their inner life and their intellect, which are invisible to the eye. And here I was, dealing with the outside of them, and that juxtaposition of the inside and outside I felt was an interesting challenge, and I wanted to explore that. I also found that, in general, writers are a pretty intelligent group, and, as a result, they usually have a pretty good sense of humor.

So they’re just fun to spend time with.
I find them to be great fun. Of course there are exceptions, but to generalize I would say I enjoy them a lot. They’re stimulating people.

Do you typically read writers’ works before you photograph them?
Oh, yeah.

Do you find a correlation between what you think of their writing and what you think of them as people?
Sometimes you’re surprised. There are some writers whose work is quite humorous and then in person they’re sort of stern. And vice-versa: some people whose work is very serious and solemn end up being kind of raucous and bawdy.

Why this book now?
I’ve always wanted to do a book, and I didn’t think the time was right until now. Prior to this, I just didn’t feel like I had enough. And even when I had enough, I guess I didn’t think I had enough good ones. Then there was a certain moment when I thought, “I have enough good ones.”

So then this isn’t a you’ve-done-your-work-as-a-photographer-and-now-you’re-finished sort of collection?
Oh, no no no. In fact, one of the things that I thought would drive me crazy—I was thinking about the book, and I was thinking about that moment when the book shuts down and you can’t put anymore in, and I was thinking, “Well, let’s say I do a good photo after that.” I thought that would drive me crazy. But it has had the opposite effect because I have done some photos since that gate came down, and, as opposed to it being frustrating in any way, it just makes me feel like there’s life after the book. Which is a much healthier way to feel, I think.

What was your process in deciding what photos to include? Was it fun digging through your archives?
It was amazing, because I had never done it before. I had never counted up how many I’ve done, and so it was all kind of news to me. I found that I had photographed more than 600 writers, and, when I started eliminating, I was able to edit it down to about 350, at first. Eliminations were based on—it was easy because there were photos that I didn’t think were good, or good enough, or interesting enough, or something enough. But those 350 I felt very attached to, and I wanted them all to be in my book. But of course that would have been kind of a glut, so that’s where my editor came in and edited it down to the 236 that are in there, which is still plenty.

At that point how did you and your editor make that decision? Was it purely artistically, or was it a question of including certain writers?
The main thing at all times was visual. The book is visually driven, as opposed to fame-driven. One thing that was very important to me was that there be the famous writers sitting alongside the first-time novelists, or perhaps someone who had written something a long time ago but hadn’t come through with another book yet. I wanted it to be writers people wouldn’t particularly be familiar with mixed with the renowned, as well.

Any favorite subjects?
I’ve had many favorites, but I guess my all-time favorite is Raymond Carver.

Why?
It was a combination of things. First, I had been introduced to Carver’s work when a guy that I was mad about read aloud a story of his to me. The story was “Gazebo,” and this guy could really read. It was this heady way to experience a writer’s work, this guy reading this fantastic story to me. I’d never quite heard anything like it. So after that, I went out and I got all of Carver’s work that had been published to date, and I just drank it up. I loved it.

I don’t remember exactly what the time lapse was, but maybe a year or so later I got a call from the Sunday New York Times magazine to photograph him. So, first of all, I was beyond psyched about this, because of the way I’d come to his work. Then, meeting him, he was just so warm and mischievous and a really great guy. I told him the story of how I was introduced to his work, and he loved, loved, loved it.

I enjoyed working with him so much. As gentle a guy as he was, he knew he could look really menacing, so he was great to photograph in that way. I photographed him again at another time, and he was also extremely encouraging to me about my work.

Are there any images in this book that are particularly your favorites?
Oh, I love all my children equally.

Good answer. What do you think makes authors want to come back to you for their portraits?
Some don’t. Some do, and some don’t.

What’s your technique—and how is it similar to or different from that of other well-known portraitists?
Well, I can’t speak to what other portraitists do, because I’m kind of ignorant about what other people do. I kind of try to keep it that way. But what I do, I’m very, very low-tech. I don’t use any lights. I use natural, available light, daylight. I’m using the same camera that I started to use in 1968. I use black and white film. I do my own prints, and I don’t know what else to tell you about it.

Fair enough. I saw the jacket photo of you in the book, the author photo in Author Photo was shot by you. Did it cross your mind to have someone else do it?
No, never.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. Photographs of Marion Ettlinger, Gordon Parks, and Raymond Carver by Marion Ettlinger. Reprinted from Author Photo with the permission of Simon & Schuster. You can buy Author Photo at Amazon.com.

The funny thing is that Evan Smith had never set foot in the state before he came to work for Texas Monthly, the glossy chronicle of all things Texan. Somehow, though, the New York City-born and New York State-educated Smith managed to pull it off, and in 2000, eight years after arriving in Austin, he was made editor of the magazine. Texas Monthly has long been a regional magazine that commands national respect—New York is probably the closest equivalent, though right now Texas Monthly‘s fortunes are much more stable—as Smith has continued that tradition; earlier this year he accepted a General Excellence Award for the magazine at the National Magazine Awards. He spoke to mediabistro.com last week about his career, his magazine, and how to successfully balance the parochial and the national.

Birthdate: April 20, 1966
Hometown: Queens, New York
First section of Sunday Austin American-Statesman: “Insight, which is the opinion section. A close second is the real-estate section, because I’m a complete new-house junkie.”

Texas Monthly is such a unique publication; there’s no other state magazine with such a high national profile. What’s the history of the magazine? How did it become what it is?
The first thing you need to know is that in the early days of the magazine, there were really no rules. As you say, there’s nothing like it today, but there was really no precedent. The magazines it was compared to in the old days, like New York magazine, for instance, were obviously city-specific. This is a state. The philosophy behind the magazine that’s appropriate for this conversation is that Texas was considered more like a city with Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio as neighborhoods. The common interest, the connective tissue of Texan-ness was similar to what you would find in a big city like New York or Los Angeles.

Bill Broyles was the first editor, and his folks made it up as they went along. One thing they stumbled onto very quickly was the idea of doing long-form journalism in the tradition of the great American magazines; there was no experience that this magazine or a magazine like this one had had that told them not to do it. And that really got the magazine a place at the table early on. People read it; it was a place where great writers could go and do their best work. If you were a reader of magazines and you loved to sit down and spend a lot of time with a magazine, this was one that really gave you stuff to sink your teeth into. I don’t know if there was a deliberate attempt to replicate, say, what The New Yorker was doing, but I think that’s a good analogy. What The New Yorker had done all those years for New York and for the country by extension, Texas Monthly was doing for Texas.

Over the years, the amount of long-form journalism that we published ebbed and flowed according to the times. It was fashionable in the early ’90s, for instance, to move away from that and to move more toward shorter, funnier, quick-hit type journalism, the assumption being that people had less time and inclination to spend many, many hours with a magazine, given all the media competition out there. In the last couple of years, we’ve moved back to doing long-form journalism in a big way, and the numbers speak for themselves. Newsstand is up. Total readership is up. And the profile of the magazine is quite a bit higher than we had any reason to expect, and I think the reason is that people have appreciated our treating them with respect, treating their intelligence seriously.

How much of your readership is outside Texas?
I would guess around 5 percent of our readership is outside of Texas. The areas in which readership outside of Texas is the highest, best penetration, is two categories, one you’d expect and one you wouldn’t. The one you would expect is Texas exes, either people who lived in Texas for a long time and now live somewhere else, or graduates of UT or Texas A&M.

But the other thing is we have incredibly high penetration in Washington, D.C., Hollywood, and New York. It’s within the political community—and not just because of the Texan in the White House, though that helps. In Los Angeles, we are among the handful of magazines, we’re in the top three, I would say, that have had the best success having our stories bought by studios and made into films. And then we’re also read a lot in book publishing. I consider it to be flattering when books are done essentially as a result of our ideas being stolen. Some people get upset about that, I consider it to be flattering.

With this presence in some of the major media markets, how does that work in your editing? How do you balance the parochial versus the national in what you’re covering?
It’s like that old notion of all cats have four legs, but not all things with four legs are cats. All national is parochial, if we view it as such. If we write a story about Dan Bartlett, who is the White House communications director, or James Baker, or Tommy Lee Jones, we’re only doing those stories because of the extent to which they are Texas stories. Everything we do nationally has some parochial aspect to it, or we wouldn’t be doing it. Likewise, the parochial stuff we do, you’d like it to have some kind of national appeal, but I’m less concerned about that. If we do a story about the murder of some socialite in Dallas, hypothetically, it may not interest anybody outside of Texas, but presumably inside Texas, it’s going to totally interest them. It’s a balancing act, but it’s one we’ve pretty much figured out.

You’ve only been running the magazine for three years. What was it like to come in after such a legend as Greg Curtis?
It was obviously huge shoes to fill. He was really good about keeping me close by for the years that I was deputy editor, so that I got a real good sense of what it took to run the magazine and had also been involved enough at every level of the process to have thought about it long and hard. And to have had some ideas of my own, about what I would do if the day should come when I could take over the magazine. Anybody who becomes the editor of a magazine had better know what he wants to do. This is not a teaching hospital. And if you’re going to be the editor of a magazine, you’ve got to have a very clear sense, and it’s got to be one you’ve drawn up over some time, of things you want to accomplish.

So when I came in on day one, I had a pretty good sense of returning to long-form journalism, that was one thing. I wanted to go back to columns and columnists, to essentially take the dozen or so writers here who have subject expertise—Pat Sharpe on food, Jim Atkinson on health, Paul Burka on politics—and really brand them with that expertise. I knew that I wanted to continue, from a design standpoint, with the emphasis on great photography, great illustration as an additional editorial element. You need to have these kind of thoughts in your head when you take over, and, although you follow in the footsteps of someone like Greg Curtis, and it’s definitely daunting, it’s doable if you have confidence in what you want to do.

All told, you’ve been at the magazine for about a dozen years. What had you done before you came there?
Immediately before I came to Texas Monthly, I was at Self, the women’s magazine, where I’d been for nine months. Before that I had been on the startup team for Mediaweek, which was the Adweek spin-off, for a short period of time. Before that, I was at a magazine that died after a year called Business Month; I had been working at Whittle in Knoxville, Tennessee, after graduate school for a year and a half, and I was recruited to come up to New York and work on this business magazine before it started. I also did a brief stint at The New Republic as deputy editor during my time here. I went up there as deputy editor, didn’t find it to be a place I particularly wanted to be, came back here. It was like that season of Dallas when Victoria Principal woke up after a long dream and the whole preceding year hadn’t happened.

You were already at Texas Monthly, though not yet running it, when Emmis bought it, when it stopped being an independent publication. What was that change like?
Any time a magazine you work for is sold it’s a jolt to the system. But they’ve been incredibly understanding of our particular expertise in Texas. They’re up in Indiana, we’re down here, and they have not attempted, not once, in the time I have been at this magazine, before I was running it and since I have been running it, they have not once attempted to screw with anything editorially.

I have a lot of respect for that, because I know the temptation when you own something is to get right in there and mess with it, you think you know better than the people doing it. But they’ve been really hands-off. And I’d like to believe that the success of the magazine is a product of their willingness to let us run it ourselves. The business side is more affected by the new ownership than the editorial side, and a lot of stuff that’s happened on the business side has been really good. We’ve made more money in the last five years profit-wise, than we had for many, many years that preceded it.

Considering how successful you’ve been under Emmis’s ownership, both editorially and business-wise, it’s sort of a shame they’re apparently not bidding for New York.
New York magazine is a terrific brand. And it has the opportunity to be a terrific magazine. But it’s going to require a lot of money. Not just the money to buy the magazine, but the money to rehabilitate the guts of it, to rehab it. And then you’re going to need a huge marketing and promotions budget just to get the name out. That’s an extraordinarily crowded media landscape.

What rehabbing of the guts do you think is necessary?
I think it’s unfair for me to comment and pick specifically at things that are wrong there. Let me just say, I think that the New York magazine brand has extraordinary potential. And whoever gets it is going to have a real opportunity to make that into one of the great magazines again, as it has been previously. And as I’m sure it’ll be in the future.

The way the business is run these days, a lot of companies are reluctant to pour a whole lot of money into magazines, I’m not speaking specifically about one magazine, though obviously I am talking about New York in the abstract. Nobody wants to spend money, they want you to do everything, but do it cheaper, more for less. And I think a magazine like that requires an investment, on a year-in, year-out basis. And the product is going to reflect how much of an investment is made. And I feel for Caroline Miller, because I think that she has great instincts and good people, and if you’re not getting the kind of financial support from your company that a magazine like that requires, it’s going to be real hard to convert on that potential.

You did that Walter Cronkite interview in the last issue. What was it like to sit and have breakfast with him?
I’d never met him before. When he got to the hotel and I met him and we went and sat down, he seemed to me to be a little older and a little less together than it turned out he was; maybe he just needed to eat—as the breakfast went along he began to get a little pinker.

He had a lot of strong opinions about things. He was very interesting and sharp, funny. And he was totally unfazed by all these people coming up to pay their respects, and I think on the Jayson Blair thing especially—Jayson Blair’s publisher came up and asked if Jayson Blair could come over and pay his respects and of course I’m thinking, “Please say yes, please say yes.” Cronkite just smiled. When Jayson Blair came over he couldn’t have been nicer, but, at the same time, when Blair left, Cronkite was kind of busting on him. I think it shows that he’s still got it going on. Everybody I get to meet in connection with this job is a real treat, whether it’s Cronkite or somebody no one’s heard of. That was just another day at work.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

For more than a decade, Ken Auletta has been The New Yorker‘s media columnist, authoring both the magazine’s regular “Annals of Communications” column and a series of lengthy and insightful profiles of media-world players. His pre-Jayson Blair profile of Howell Raines brought to the fore the poisonous atmosphere at the paper under Raines’s editorship; his Harvey Weinstein profile elicited a dog-like snarl from Richard Gere at the Golden Globes, in the Miramax honcho’s defense. Earlier in his career, Auletta was a political reporter and columnist for the city’s tabloids; he started writing for The New Yorker in 1977 and moved to the media beat after publishing Three Blind Mice, a history and analysis of the three television networks that became a national bestseller. His most recent book, Backstory, is a collection of his New Yorker pieces, and he spoke to mb recently about the book, the columns, and the state of the media business.

Birthdate: April 23, 1942
Hometown: Coney Island, Brooklyn
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports

Your new book is called Backstory: Inside the Business of News. Why is it important to understand the business of news, and how is that business changing?
There are several themes in the book that relate to the business of news. One is that there’s a lot of chatter and talk about political biases seeping into press coverage. Fox News claims the liberal bias dominates, and liberals claim that Fox and Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal—that a conservative bias dominates. In fact, my argument is that the much more pervasive bias in the media today is an economic bias, which is a business bias—the corporatization of the media. These giant companies that increasingly own journalistic entities are concerned about keeping their profit margins and stock prices up. To do that, they feel they’ve got to get the circulation up, and the rates up, and that drives them to put pressure on these media to do more sensational news, more conflict news, more gotcha news and more infotainment news—O.J., Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen—and inevitably, that leads to the softening of the news. But it’s driven by economic forces.

That sounds similar to Eric Alterman’s argument in What Liberal Media?—that corporatism is what really biases news.
He’s a little more conspiratorial than I would be. A lot of this happened out of panic. It’s not that the editor of a newspaper, or the assignment editor at a TV station or a network, is sitting there and saying, “How can I please my ultimate boss?” Every day, they look at the ratings, or they look at the circulation, and they think, “What can we do to increase it?” And part of it is saving their own skin. They know that if numbers continue to decline, they’ll be out of a job, and so they worry about job security, they worry about catching a story—that they’ll be first with something, which is another motivation that should not be minimized.

Also, you’ve got this immense cultural clash taking place. The business culture of these giant companies basically says, “We need to inspire synergy within this company, we need to lower the borders between our divisions, we need to create teamwork, we need to make this a more community-oriented kind of place where people are thinking about not just news, but business.” But the news culture is a very different culture; it’s not a team culture, it’s an independent culture. It’s a culture that, when they hear the word synergy, they often think of shilling. “You want us to do Good Morning America from Disney World? That to you is synergy, but to us, that’s shilling.” “You want to lower the walls, and you think that’s great, but I don’t want the walls lowered between the business side and ad sales and news. I want to keep that wall up high, keep them the hell out of the newsroom.”

So what happens in the future with that clash? Is there any way the newsy side can win?
It can’t win. What the people on the news side have to do is figure out a language to communicate to their owners in a way that treats them as partners, because in fact they are partners. The news people only have one weapon in their gun; the only piece of ammunition they have is the brand. When business people talk about brands, they talk about brand extending. When a journalist talks about brand, it’s not brand, it’s about credibility. We have to figure out some way to say that if we do too much talk of synergy or what we think of as shilling, or if you want to lower the number of overseas bureaus, or you want to reduce our investigative reporting, what impact will all of that have on our credibility?

If it impacts our credibility, then you’ve killed the brand, which is something the business people understand and believe in. We have to figure out a language that says, “All right, if you want to get your profit margins up from 8 to 16 percent, if you don’t think 8 percent is enough—we do, but if you don’t think it’s enough—then understand that in order to do that, to double our profit margins, here’s the choices we have. You want to close the bureau in the state capital? Do you want to close two of the five overseas bureaus? Do you want to cut out all of your investigative reporting that wins the awards for this publication?” Somehow we’ve got to quantify for the business side what the consequences of their decisions are.

Are there any news organizations now that are doing that more successfully than others, speaking the right language to their corporate people?
It goes back to something that people at the Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have said for years: What you want is a good publisher. You want a publisher who understands the business you’re in, and basically says, “I want to make a profit, because if I don’t make a profit we’re not going to have a successful publication. But it’s more important for me not to cut the bureaus or to cut the investigative reporting, because in the long run, I know that’s what makes this publication what it is, and this media outlet what it is.”

Fine. So it’s great to work for an Arthur Sulzberger or a Don Graham, but how do you get all the other owners in the world to drink that Kool-Aid?
Somehow you want to try and create a dialogue that educates people who don’t come out of the world of journalism, who come out of the world of business. I remember when I was doing Three Blind Mice, Bob Wright said, “I want to bring in McKinsey and analyze how NBC News does its reporting.” And one of the things McKinsey came back with was a report that half of all the pieces that NBC News did never get on the air. Now that’s pretty goddamn wasteful. Even if you got it down to half of that, so that a quarter of them didn’t get on, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars in savings. Maybe that means, let’s get our assignment desk, instead of just assigning everything, is there some way we can improve the procedure so we can have better predictability of what might get on air? In journalism, you’ll never have total predictability, but that’s part of the education we have to provide these business people.

We have to tell them how inefficient journalism is—the planes, the schedules, you wait for trains to come, you wait for calls to be returned. And sometimes you can’t do a story in a day, sometimes it’ll take you three days. From a business person’s point of view, that seems pretty wasteful. But if you want to get the facts right, and you want to talk to the right people, maybe you need three days. That’s all part of the dialogue that often doesn’t take place.

You’d been a New York City politics reporter before you did Three Blind Mice. What moved you on this media beat in the first place?
My theory is that journalism is like a free airplane ticket. It can fly you to a different planet. And I have visited several planets before: I’d written about politics—city government and city politics and national politics—I’d written about business, I’d written about poverty. I had visited various planets. Then I said, “Well, I don’t know a lot about television, network television particularly, and it seems it’s changing before my eyes. I’d like to explore that.” I explored, basically, an industry going through profound changes because of the onslaught of cable and other competition, the way the Internet world that I write about now is challenging old established industries. That book came out, and Tina Brown contacted me and asked me whether I would consider writing the “Annals of Communications.” I first said no, because I was thinking of writing a biography, which I’d never done before, that might be an interesting new planet to go visit. Anyway, one thing led to another and I eventually agreed to do the column.

The interesting thing about being a journalist covering the journalism business is that you’re doing something where you’re both an observer and a participant. Particularly as you’ve become a media-world figure—and also when your wife, Amanda Urban, is one of the biggest literary agents—are you cognizant while you’re reporting things that you’re not just looking in on a world but rather looking at a world that you are a very much a part of?
I don’t think a lot about it, frankly. I don’t write about my wife, and I’m not going to write a profile of someone who’s one of her clients, for conflict reasons. And if I did, hopefully my editor would catch it and kick my ass. One of the things I don’t like about journalism today—and this is another theme of my book—is journalists thinking that they’re stars, that they are personages in their own right. When you appear regularly on television and give these lectures and are asked to express opinions, you lose the essential thing you need to be a good journalist, which is being a good listener. I mean, yes, you’ve got to be a reasonably clear writer and reasonably intelligent and reasonably careful and get your facts correct, but the first thing you’ve got to be is a good listener, to listen to what the other person is saying and actually hear them, and shut up so that you’re not talking all the time because otherwise they won’t talk. I’m a listener, and hopefully I retain some humility to listen. I don’t feel when I walk into a room that I am a personage; I have enough control of my ego that I don’t have to out what I think or fill the void. My job is to shut up and listen.

There’s a common descriptor of your work—it’s quoted in the press materials for the book—that you’re “the mogul Boswell.” That’s a compliment to you as a listener, I guess, that you give moguls their chances to be Johnsons. But it’s also used somewhat critically, that you’re too generous to the people you cover. Michael Wolff, in his book, called you a “mogul fanzine writer.” What do you think of that kind of criticism?
I think it confuses getting access with what you do with that access. There’s an assumption that if Rupert Murdoch is talking to you, or if John Malone is talking you, or if Michael Eisner, Howell Raines, or Harvey Weinstein is talking to you, that they just gave you that gift. Getting access is incredibly laborious. It takes months sometimes. And I think what happens is that people look at how unusual it is that these people are talking to someone and allowing them in their office, and they just assume that I’ve become their message board for the world. But I think if you read the pieces, they’re not that.

What I’m trying to do is to understand these people. If I do Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates or Howell Raines, my job is to get inside that person and understand what makes them tick. One of the reasons people will talk to reporters is if they honestly believe the reporter is trying to understand them—it’s not the only reason they’ll talk. They talk because they have vanity, they talk because they’re convinced they’ll blow it by you, they’ll talk because they’re worried that you’re talking to the enemy, they’ll talk because they think you have a prestigious publication they want to be in. People talk for lots of different reason. But one of the reasons they talk is if they feel you really do want to be a Boswell, you really do want to understand what makes them tick and what they do. If someone says “fanzine,” I just dismiss it; I don’t think it’s true.

Fair enough. So Wolff, of course, is the other guy who in his own way tries to understand what moguls are doing. In the last month or so, he very publicly tried to become a mogul himself. Any similar aspirations?
No. I love my independence. I’m not tied down to an office, I’m not responsible for a lot of other people, I’m not dealing with financial investors and six people, which would have been the case in the Michael Wolff situation, each of whom want to be at the head of the table. I was once a manager and an executive years ago, in another life. I had to read a budget and hire and fire people and all. But I like that feeling of independence I have now, and it’s something that I don’t want to lose.

Jesse Oxfeld is editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. Photo courtesy of The New Yorker. You can subscribe to The New Yorker here and buy Backstory at Amazon.com.