When reached by phone for this interview, Lisa Belkin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the paper’s former Life’s Work columnist, provided the perfect lede: “Can I call you back in a minute? I’m trying to get my son’s AP scores sent to college.” Soon after, Belkin — who recently started penning the Times‘ Motherlode blog and will moderate mediabistro.com’s Women’s Magazine Dinner on November 12 — called back (after successfully submitting her son’s scores) and provided her insights on joining the parenting beat, journalism in the new media world, and finding the elusive work/life balance.

Name: Lisa Belkin
Position: Motherlode blog writer, New York Times Magazine contributing writer, host of “Life’s Work with Lisa Belkin” on Sirius XM Radio
Resume: Started at the Times as a clerk, answering phones in the Washington bureau, then worked her way around the Times ever since then, writing books along the way. Wrote the Life’s Work column about the intersection of life and work for the past nine years. Article that got the most attention: The Opt-Out Revolution, about high-powered, highly-paid women who leave the workforce.
Birthday: April 10
Hometown: Westchester, NY
Education: Princeton University
Marital status: Married to Bruce Gelb
First section of Sunday Times: “Magazine, except I almost always read it before Sunday, online.”
Favorite television show: Lost
Last book read: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Guilty pleasure: Mallomars

You’re a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and recently started penning NYTimes.com’s Motherlode blog. Talk a little bit about what each of these jobs entail. How do you structure your days and weeks?
[Structure] would be a good thing to have, wouldn’t it? I don’t know that I have as much of it as I should. The blog is a daily exercise in terms of what is out there and being talked about in the parenting circles. There’s always a magazine piece in the background. Depending on whether I’m reporting or writing, that’s another part of the day. There’s periodically a column that we are just starting [in the NYT Magazine] so I don’t even know how that’s going to work, but it will be blog ideas that become longer and larger, and rise to the level of a column. Every day is different, and structure really is one of the things I’m working at right now.

How do you decide what goes on the blog and what becomes a column? Do you write a blog post and then if the response from the readers is strong, it turns into a column?
It’s the other way around. There are some things that are longer and a little bit more than a daily blog post and those tend to become columns, either a Life’s Work column for the Styles section or a front-of-book column for the magazine.

How does the blog work? Do you have editors who you work with to figure out topics?
Yes, there are two people who I work with daily. Megan Liberman is the content editor, so I’ll bounce ideas off of her. We’ll decide what has legs on any given day. Then I write and send it to her. She looks it over and sends it to Jeff Delviscio, who is the tech person. This is all brand new to me. There is an immediacy to it that is exhilarating and terrifying. I can write something at 8 a.m. and it can be up by 8:30 a.m. if things go well. It’s lightning speed. And then there’s feedback, which isn’t brand new, but it’s constant. So I’m learning.

How does that immediacy of the feedback alter how you’re writing?
That’s a good question. I’ve been [writing the blog] for exactly three weeks, so I don’t know the answer to a lot of the questions yet. But there is a subtle difference between what will get people reading and what will get people talking. I can’t quite articulate the difference, but I’m beginning to know it when I see it. A blog is more about what will get people talking and print is more what will get them reading.

It’s fascinating what types of columns get the most comments.

Right, but it’s not only about comments because I don’t think comments are a complete reflection of who’s reading. The things that are most commented on are not necessarily the things that are most trafficked, but the comments are fun. The comments are something that we never used to have. You used to write and then wonder. I would be really happy when I would see someone on the treadmill or the subway reading something I’d written because that would mean they actually did.

Now, they tell me they did. I put it out there and a few minutes later, they write back. The comments are the point in a way, because the comments are the conversation. It’s not just what you write. It’s also what they then add to it that makes a blog richer, I think, than just sending it out there.

I find there’s something about having commenters that makes me take one more look at what I’m writing and think, “Is this actually what I want to say?” because I know if I get something wrong, I’m going to hear about it immediately.
Yes, if it’s not exactly what you want to say, you will know. You will hear about it in five minutes. The beauty is though you can say, “Oh yes, you’re right,” and you can add or write back. It’s truly interactive. When I first started hearing [the word interactive] a decade or so ago, I didn’t really get it, but [writing on the Web is] completely interactive.

How did you end up on the parenting and work/family beat?
It evolved. The Life people came to me. I got a call one day, and interestingly it happened to be a particularly bad, disorganized, frantic day, and they called and said, “We want to do a column about life and work, and we’d like you to write it.” So for nine years, I did. You can’t write about life/work issues without having an eye on parenting. Not everyone who struggles for life/work balance is a parent, but parents have particular struggles.

The panelists at the Women’s Magazine Dinner consists of women who’ve taken their careers online. How has the Internet changed the opportunities for journalists, and specifically female journalists?
The buzzword for the decade I’ve been covering life and work has been “flexibility.” If you can work on your time in your space then you have more control over both your life and your work. Women in particular are looking for this because they are the ones who — at least up until now — feel the most pressure. For them, it’s been a game changer. It means that you are more likely to be able to fit the puzzle pieces in to form a whole that works for you if you are able to take the work piece of it in a tablet-sized box with you wherever you go. That’s how I do it. I got myself a wireless card, and I can work absolutely anywhere. It was almost true before the wireless card. It is now absolutely true with the wireless card, except maybe on an airplane.

If you’re a writer and you have this thing you can take anywhere and write anywhere, suddenly all sorts of possibilities are open that weren’t open when you needed to sit at a desk and talk face to face with an editor. It means this profession is entirely mobile, and for women who are looking for mobility and flexibility, it’s changed everything.

Are there specific aspects of Web sites aimed at women or parents that you think work well?
I’m drawn to two kinds of Web sites when I’m looking for fodder. One is really good news people who have a hand in what’s new out there: new studies, new conversations, new trends. The other [kind] are really talented essayists, people who have a lot to say about something that’s universal, but phrase it particularly well. The thing about parenting is that so many people are doing it — it’s a universal experience — and what I find powerful is when somebody manages to capture that in a way that hasn’t been captured before.

Where are you finding those people? Is it more on the sites of mainstream publications or on personal blogs?
Both. I actually spend a lot of time on blogs that maybe nobody else has heard of. There are women out there exploring their lives, often anonymously, which is one of the fascinating parts of this. It allows moms who have something to say — they are mostly moms, although there’s a growing daddy lit, if you will, that is much more recent — [to say it]. Women who were going through this life-altering experience of parenting were doing it in this relatively isolated way and some of the most interesting blogs are their stories without their names, so they can be completely honest. There are a lot of pseudonyms out there.

When you find one of these writers, what do you do? Does it spawn ideas? Do you contact the blogger?
I haven’t done anything. What I hope to do is reach out to a lot of these women and bring them onto my blog and make it more of a community there. Again, I’ve been at this for three weeks, so that’s one of the things I haven’t quite gotten to do yet.

What skills does a journalist need now to succeed? You have an XM show. Do writers need to know about satellite radio? What about Podcasting? Video shooting/editing? Blogging?
I’m surprised about how much of my journalistic life is spent talking. It started out completely writing. I’m stunned that probably the most important training I got early, early on was my speech and debate class in high school. I talk all the time now. The speeches, the radio show, so much of it is verbal. Writing is still the core. It’s still the root of it, but it’s so much more about the oral part than I ever would have expected a few years ago. I have actually contacted my high school speech and debate coach to thank her.

What was her response?
She was very pleased. Then she saw me a few weeks later on the Today show, and she sent me an email telling me I was talking too fast.

I would imagine that being the parenting columnist has a certain time limit, both in terms of available material and your interest in continuing to write the column. I know you just started the blog three weeks ago, but any idea what’s next?
I have no idea how long it’s going to last. I have a feeling I will know when it’s time to leave. My first question when they asked me to do this was, “Aren’t my kids too old?” which is sort of a way of saying, “Aren’t I too old?” The answer was, anyone we pick is going to be at some point on the parenting spectrum, so in a way it makes more sense to have someone who’s been through more of it because you have more touchstones. You have more experience under you’re belt. I’m finding that even though that was my concern that’s actually right.

First of all, there are many fewer people out there blogging who have teens than those who have young children. It’s unusual. And secondly, I guess I’ve actually accumulated some wisdom along the way. I do have the perspective of “This too shall pass,” which you don’t have as much, or I certainly didn’t, when you were smack in the middle of it. I’m grateful for that perspective now, and I wish I hadn’t made some things as huge as I did along the way. I hope to pass that on, but I’m also grateful for it journalistically because I’m not drowning in the middle of many of the things I’m writing about. I do understand that the good things end and the bad things end, and you appreciate the good things and you get through the hard ones. I don’t know where end will be.

What’s the key to the work/life balance?

If you find out let me know and I’ll write it, okay? I have not figured it out. I thought the column was going to be about answers. That’s what I wrote about in my last column: There never were any answers. There were a lot of interesting questions, and there was great conversation, but if you figure out the answer, let me know.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2003, Steve Proctor traveled across the country, moving from his position at The Baltimore Sun to take a deputy managing editor spot at the San Francisco Chronicle under managing editor Robert J. Rosenthal (another East Coast transplant). In the years since, he’s seen Rosenthal’s departure and significant cuts in the newsroom while the remaining staff has increasingly focused on transitioning to Web, a job Proctor has helped oversee. It’s a difficult time for newspapers nationwide, and the Hearst-owned Chronicle is no exception, but the deputy believes the paper has cut costs while continuing to produce great journalism. (The BALCO steroid investigation springs to mind.) During an August visit to San Francisco for the Magazine Publishers of America conference, we took some time to talk with Proctor about changes at the Chronicle, how the Web influences the print product, and how the obsession San Franciscans have with “extremely tall buildings” has changed the paper.

Name: Steve Proctor
Position: Deputy managing editor for news, San Francisco Chronicle
Resume: United Press International, reporter (1979-80); The Baltimore Sun, reporter and various editing positions leading to deputy managing editor for sports and features (1980-2003); the San Francisco Chronicle (2003-present)
Birthday: June 25, 1957
Hometown: Riverdale, Maryland
Education: BA in journalism/history from American University in Washington, D.C. (1979), and John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University (1998-99)
Marital status: Married, two children
First section of the Sunday Times: A-section
Favorite TV show: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food
Network
Guilty pleasure: “Golf Channel, as I am addicted to the Scottish torture.”
Last book read: Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American
Revolution, by Gerald M. Carbone

You oversee the Metro, National, Foreign, Business, and Sports sections. What are your daily tasks?
Typically I’ll get into the newspaper sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 in the morning, and I’ll spend the first hour and a half touching base with my key editors — the editor of metro, national, foreign, business, and sports — and lining up what we’re doing in response to anything that’s breaking that day. Obviously we have enterprise stories that we’ve been working on for a period of time that are always in progress, and we will talk about those at times, but primarily we focus on what’s happening that day and how we want to deal with it. We have a meeting at 10:30 every morning with the editors of the various sections of the paper and the editor-in-chief, Ward Bushee. We will spend a little bit of that time talking about what is really hot on the Web site right now — like every newspaper in America we’re a Web-first operation, so part of my morning discussion will be when we can get these things up on the Web.

Hot in terms of what people are looking at?
What people are reading. So, that guides my choices somewhat in the paper. Sometimes you’ll see a story that maybe wasn’t on your radar screen just getting massive traffic on the Web, and you realize there’s a huge amount of interest in this story, and then you take a second look at it because of that. We reflect a little bit on what was in today’s paper, things we might have done differently, things we loved. And then we just go around the table and talk about what stories people are offering for A1 pretty much exclusively. There’ll often be a very lively discussion about how to cover certain stories, and we’ll get great ideas sometimes from editors who are not in the business department about how to cover the unfolding business story or whatever.
That [meeting] usually goes from about 10:30 to 11:00. Between 11:00 and 2:00 or so I have a chance to kind of catch up on other things, like enterprise stories that are in the works. I’ll start working on Sunday packages. Any kind of corporate things I have to do, like evaluations, I try to squeeze them in between 11:00 and 2:00.

At 3:00 we look at all the photographs we’ve taken for that day, graphics we’ve developed and so forth, and then sort of semi-pick out the design for the next day’s front page. From there on, I’ll continue doing advance work or reading the day’s stories as they’re coming in and helping to shape them with editors who are developing them. I usually stay here till 6:30 or 7:00 at night, later if necessary. On the night of a [presidential] debate, when the debate ends I’ll spend another half an hour talking to the people about how we want to frame the stories and then let them carry it forward.

You’ve been at the paper since 2003. How has it changed?

When I came here in 2003, in addition to the editor-in-chief, there was a managing editor and a deputy editor, and there were a lot more people in upper management. As we’ve downsized, they’ve really flattened out the management structure, so there’s an editor and three deputy managing editors, [of] which I’m one. That had meant a great deal more responsibility for me in terms of the managing of the newsroom day to day, and dealing with A1 on any given day, which I’ve enjoyed. It’s given me more freedom to operate in the newsroom in the way that I think is best, so that’s been good.

There’s been an increasing emphasis all through the years — and it was really something that started before I came here in 2003 — on integrating the Web and newsroom operations. Like in a lot of papers, our Web operation grew up somewhat separately from the newsroom operation, and that creates barriers that make it difficult to excel in the way you need to both on the Web and in print. We’ve been going through the process of trying to integrate those systems much more so than we have in the past. We started the continuous news desk, for instance, that keeps constant breaking news updates on the day. We’ve expanded the number of blogs, photo galleries, videos, all the sorts of things that attract more readers to the Web, and have taken over responsibility for updating a lot of the sub-navigation pages on the Web [although] not the homepage itself. I developed a desk — in coordination with other people here — that constantly updates the Bay Area news page, the national news page, so that if a reader is coming back throughout the day they’re finding a new look and different stories. And a day like today with the stock market crashing, for instance, we need to have that business page updated every six, seven, eight minutes, because people will keep coming back.

Who’s doing that? Is there a separate Web staff?
The Web staff manages the homepage itself, because there’s a sense — and I think wisely — that the sensibility of the newsroom editor and the sensibility of a Web reader are different things. But they don’t have a large enough editorial staff to really keep all their pages updated in a certain way. So some of our more minor pages — like the environment one — will be updated automatically. They’ll just scrape whatever we have in the editorial system and update it.
On the active pages — like local news, national, foreign — what I essentially do is take the wire editing desk and make that a combined wire editing/page updating desk, because the nature of wire editing is such that you don’t have reporters that you’re dealing with. You’re just looking at wires and copying and merging things together. Every hour we try to take 10 minutes to update pages, so that on a minimum they’re updated hourly — more if news is breaking. It gives me resources to keep those sub-navigated pages fresh. One of our goals is to get people beyond the homepage and get them to spend more time within the Web site itself. And that’s a way of getting that accomplished.

You mentioned that the Web traffic sometimes influences content in the print publication. How so?
It’s more a case of play for the story. Most of the stories that are driving traffic on the Web we’re already writing at one dimension, in one way or another. I’ll give you an example: every single time we’ve posted a story on the Internet about an extremely tall building in San Francisco, thousands of comments come on the story right away and the Web traffic goes crazy. I knew that there was a passionate interest in tall buildings in San Francisco, but I had no idea the depth of it until we enabled comments on our stories. And so as a consequence of that I’ve tended to give every story about another tall building issue front page display, whereas I might have kept some of those in the local section in the past. And I mean I shouldn’t say anything is all the time, but I’m much more inclined to put a story about a tall building on A1, because I know from seeing how the debate becomes so passionate on the comments area how strongly people are interested in those stories.

One of the big advantages of newspaper Web sites is that you can very accurately track what people are reading in a way that you never could before.
That is an enormous help as an editor, because you have your own instinct about what’s good, but you can never know what everybody thinks, and this really gives you an opportunity to know — in a very specific sort of way, in real time — what people think about the unfolding news of the day, what’s really attracting them. And you have to be a little bit cautious about it on one level in the sense of certain kinds of things that you might not put a lot of attention on in the newspaper are real huge Web traffic drawers. What I would call cheap crime tends to be huge Web traffic drawers. I still don’t play a lot of cheap crime on A1 in the Chronicle.

Before you came out to the West Coast you were out on the East Coast at The Sun — so was former managing editor Robert J. Rosenthal. Is there any difference between East Coast and West Coast papers?
When I first came out here I was just surprised. I don’t think I’ve been at a meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area, either at the Chronicle or anywhere else, that actually started on time. And I think of that as kind of a cultural indicator of a more laid-back approach. People on the East Coast are just a little bit more intense — and in some ways that’s good in the newspaper, because people can be more driven. But I haven’t really noticed anything substantive in terms of the coverage itself. One of the first things I realized when I got here was what a terrific staff we had. I think in some cases in the past maybe they didn’t feel the leadership was what they wanted, and my sense from them has been that they just want a more clear, focused idea of what it is that we want to accomplish as a paper, and as we zeroed in on that, the work has been terrific from them. So I’m really happy and proud about all of that.

You get to work this morning and the stock market’s already down 550 points. How does the time change affect things?
Even still the world is mostly run from the East Coast. So if you’re covering the presidential debate, most of the presidential debates will be conducted someplace on East Coast time. That gives you more time to deal with the debate and offer an analytical take on it. Wall Street closes out here at around 1:00 or so, so you have much more time to reflect, contact people about where they think the story’s going and so forth and so on. We’ll often know before our final deadline what the Asian markets have done because of the time difference, and we’ll be able to include in a story about Wall Street how the Asian markets reacted this morning to the news. There are a number of advantages to being out here from a time perspective. And in every way, covering sporting events, covering the World Series or whatever, we’ll have a lot more time to write the story after the game ends than someone else will most of the time. It’s a big advantage from the standpoint of deadlines.

How does that work on the Web? Did you have someone here this morning at 5:00 in the morning when the markets opened in New York?
Yes, I have the Web staff working pretty much from 7:00 a.m. till about 11:00 p.m. I could have someone here at 5:00 obviously and there would be news to put up there, but you don’t have a lot of people looking at the Web then, so you have to just sort of make some value judgments. Our main traffic will be sometime between 8:00 and 10:00, sometime between noon and 2:00 and right around 3:00. There are three spikes a day, so we’re conscious of making sure that we have fresh things for those spikes — by 8:00 a.m. if you’ve signed onto the Chronicle you would have a complete update of what’s going on in the markets and so forth and so on, particularly on a day like today.

Are you happy with where the Chronicle is and where it’s going right now in terms of coverage?
In terms of the news coverage I’m very happy. I think we’re putting out a very strong paper every day. I think our paper — if you compared it to regional papers of our size — would really stand out in that class for the type of journalism that it produces consistently day in and day out, and especially for the high spikes. I think some of the work we’ve done in the past four or five years, the BALCO steroid investigation being one of them, and a number of other narrative stories that have gotten some recognition. We did win a Pulitzer Prize for photography for a pretty powerful narrative story about an Iraqi boy who was blown up there and flown back here to Oakland to be cared for and pieced back together. A number of our stories have gotten a lot of national recognition, but I think our paper day to day is a very, very solid paper, and I’m very happy with the work that we’re doing.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

When Sewell Chan came to The New York Times from The Washington Post in 2004, he immediately made an impression on the Gray Lady’s famed Metro reporting staff with his prodigious work rate and nearly daily bylines. It didn’t take long for the New York media world to notice the efforts of the Harvard graduate, as well. In a 2006 New York Observer story, Gabriel Sherman wrote, “At a paper populated by reporters with sharp elbows and brazen ambition, Mr. Chan’s singular, nearly inhuman work ethic stands out.” Three years later, he’s the bureau chief of the Times‘ local news blog, City Room, one of the paper’s most-trafficked portals. With his blog nearing its two-year anniversary, Chan spoke with mediabistro.com on the 14th floor of the NYT‘s headquarters about working with the boss’ son (Times scion Arthur Gregg Sulzberger), his paper’s efforts on the Web, and why Times reporters go on “autopilot” when news breaks.

Name: Sewell Chan
Position: Metropolitan reporter; City Room bureau chief
Resume: The Washington Post, reporter (2000-2004, intern in 1997 and 1999); The Wall Street Journal (intern in 1996); the Philadelphia Inquirer (intern in 1995)
Hometown: New York, N.Y.
Education: Harvard University, B.A. in Social Studies, 1998; Oxford University, MPhil in Politics, 2000
Marital status: “Single (Is this really relevant?)”
First section of the Sunday paper: “Hard to answer. I alternate among Week in Review, the Magazine, and the Book Review.”
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Dim sum
Last book read: Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad

In general, high blog traffic is often event-based. Heath Ledger’s death was huge traffic-driver for City Room, and also the Obama election comes to mind. Do you have any thoughts about that?
It gets to a bigger question of what is a blog. The whole blogger versus journalist debate that might have existed around 2004 is dead. Over. Stale. Uninteresting. I couldn’t care less — it’s a meaningless debate to have. What’s more interesting to me is what a blog means now. There’s the traditional, which is one voice of one person, like Firedoglake or Andrew Sullivan, that’s coming from a single point of view. Then there’s the very, very popular group blog model, the Huff Post model, that I think in some ways is one of the most successful, because it’s got a bunch of people with something that ties them in common. You know where the whole site is coming from, but you definitely get a multiplicity of voices.

The blog that I work on is called a blog, but it’s not what most people would think of when they use the word “blog.” For one thing, it’s group-written, but it’s not group-written with people who share any predilection or point of view. What they share is that they cover metropolitan news for The New York Times. They definitely bring their individual perspectives or interests to the table. David Dunlap, for example, writes about architecture and public space and photography and the quirky changes in the streetscape of New York City. Jenny Lee will often write about food and cultural trends. She has an eye for the wacky and weird, and definitely a lot of strong interest in ethnicity and immigration. Corey Kilgannon, who is one of our most amazing roving bloggers/multimedia journalists, wanders around with a camera and a video recorder and shoots video and does audio and takes photos, and he’s mostly trolling around boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn looking for these outsize or hidden personalities who are wonderful New York stories. They are bloggers in a sense, but they’re also just doing what traditional great journalists have always done — but with their own strengths.

The days with Heath Ledger or the plane crashing into the Hudson or the crane collapse, those are the rare days. Those are days when we can be positioned very, very prominently on the homepage because the news is major — major subway shutdowns, odd weather, major news, including political news. But that’s less than a third of our days. Most of our days, we keep up traffic by supplying a steady stream of varied features. And that’s the key to keeping the blog alive: You can’t just rely only on the breaking news. You have to also have blog posts that are going to engage people in discussion and get people talking and chatting, and I think that’s what we spend a lot of our time focused on.

I’m not saying the breaking news is easy, but we kind of run on autopilot when news breaks. This is a pretty well-honed organization. All our instincts kick in. We’ve dealt with 9/11 — there’s not much that can faze us. I’m not saying reporting on a plane taking off from LaGuardia and dropping engine parts over Queens and then making an emergency landing in JFK is child’s play, but it’s pretty clear how to do it.

Well, you have a model for that.
There’s a model for that; it’s easy to do. City Room was a new model in a sense, because we were never doing it this quickly. When the steam pipe exploded near Grand Central, our first blog post initially was, “There’s been an explosion near Grand Central. We don’t know what it was. Stay tuned.” We would never have done that even two or three years ago. We would have waited probably half an hour to an hour until there was some sense of what happened. It’s not that way now, and the blog really gets readers more involved. We had readers immediately writing in from the scene, and the eyewitness points of view; amazing photos from this reader who loves The New York Times and was shooting photos from the Empire State Building. It’s just a much quicker report, and that higher metabolism has been new when it comes to breaking news.

You made your name as a metro reporter. How do you feel about it not existing as a standalone section anymore?
I don’t feel particularly strongly about it; I wasn’t thrilled, and I think most of my colleagues weren’t thrilled either, but the space allotted to metropolitan news has essentially stayed the same. We get too hung up on the print edition and how it’s sort of organized. It’s important still. The printed product is beautiful, and I think it’s here to last. It’s an important part of my day. But there are very valuable arguments to be made that actually having a lot of serious metropolitan news in the A section, which is the place people turn to for serious news outside of the business section, makes sense in a lot of ways.

I think the main area where I was most unhappy is that it imposed some restrictions in terms of displaying photographs and having it look visually and graphically as nice as it did before. But, you know, it’s a hard time right now.

The New York Times recently launched The Local, four citizen journalism sites. Do you have any involvement with that?
I helped consult with them, and I know and work with and have worked with Tina Kelley and Andy Newman, the reporters, as well as Mary Anne Giordano, who’s the editor overseeing The Local. I think it’s a really exciting new venture. It is very different from what City Room has been about and what it can accomplish.

City Room launched in June 2007, and we didn’t really know how granular we could get. We got on a lot of community board mailing lists and a lot of business improvement district email lists, and obviously every local politician knows how to find us, and they do. But it’s not meant to be a blog that covers every planning dispute, liquor license renewal application, zoning permit questions — the really nitty-gritty, like what’s happening to my local subway station. That’s beyond our capacity, but also beyond the focus. It goes back to the famous question, how do you cover a city of 8.2 million people? On one level, it’s impossible. What our blog does is try to pick out some of the most salient or interesting issues of the moment. That means by definition that we’re going to leave a lot of things uncovered.

I think The Local is a wonderful complement to that. The question that everyone has quite frankly is how much we can scale that. Does every neighborhood need a version of The Local? I think we picked a few initial communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey to work with that are interesting just to see it as a model for what might come.

Any early feedback on how it’s working?
It’s been received really positively by neighborhood residents, and it definitely involves so-called citizen journalism a lot more than anything we’ve done. City Room wasn’t a revolutionary concept. The challenge wasn’t conceiving of it. It wasn’t some brilliant idea necessarily. To the extent we’ve succeeded, it’s been by just making it a high-quality product. I think The Local will do that. The question is how big it can get, or what the demand for it will be and how many neighborhoods it should expand to.

What’s it like working with the boss’s kid?
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger joined the Times staff as a reporter, and he’s been working continuous news. He’s already been working with metro, and he’ll continue to work with metro. He has been absolutely impressive, gracious, smart as a whip, hardworking, full of energy, full of ideas, and has a great sense of language. His writing sparkles, and he’s a charm and a pleasure to work with.

Obviously money is one of the biggest issues facing newspapers today. How does that affect your day-to-day job?
The answer you probably expect me to give is, well, we’re completely insulated and that’s a good thing — and that is the answer. I’ve never been asked, and would never expect to be asked, to cover something because it would be either especially popular with readers or, God forbid, advertisers. It would never come up.

Look, do we know that if we write a post about dog owners in Chelsea versus poverty in the Bronx that one topic might get more readers than the other? Sure. That never factors in. Again, it’s always about a mix of stories, and we try to mix the morally significant with the somewhat frivolous but enjoyable, because that’s what people want to read on a blog. They want a steady news diet, a varied news diet.

That said, I think the Times has gotten a little bit more bold about asking journalists, especially the younger journalists, in this building about their ideas for making money — not in any way that would interfere with our editorial mission, but just sensing how we feel about things, all the ideas that have been discussed, from micropayments and voluntary contributions from readers to so-called crowd sourcing and more reliance on citizen journalists.

I’ve definitely been part of meetings where myself and other younger journalists here have been solicited for ideas. And that’s been a really, really good thing and hasn’t been in any way to the detriment of what we actually do editorially.

Have you noticed any tightening of the purse strings at the Times?
No, the main thing I’ve noticed is that we have been using freelance journalists a little bit less. And we’ve had a general hiring freeze. There’s been very little movement on the staff. The first two or three years I was here, it felt like a new reporter was hired at least every few months, if not more frequent[ly]. And now it’s been quite a while since we’ve had anyone brought in from the outside. So it’s like there’s internal movement within the paper, but very, very little hiring from outside right now.

You’re on Twitter [@sewell_chan]. How do you use it?
Twitter is a major sort of point of weakness for me. I don’t think I’ve nearly begun using it frankly well enough, and I think I do understand it. In some ways, I was an early adopter in that it was in May of 2007 when I set up my account, not too long after the South by Southwest event at which it became big among tech people. But then for awhile I didn’t Twitter at all, and I’ve really failed so far to exploit it for its potential. And I’m trying — I want to use it more.

I’ve had to think about it a lot, to be honest. This is almost a little bit of a confessional, but I think it has a different purpose for me than a Facebook status update would. I’ve made a conscious decision that I’m going to use my Facebook status updates more for personal things that would be of interest to my friends who know me and my tastes, and to really limit Twitter to my public role and my public face as a New York Times journalist. I do think there’s a lot of potential of getting tips from readers, but also sharing with them and helping to pull back the curtain a little bit. City Room in general helps to pull back the curtain on the news, because you often see an early version of what runs in the print edition the next day. You get news very quickly. We’ve been much more open about our uncertainty if we don’t know something on a breaking news story. But I think Twitter allows you to pull back the curtain even more and perhaps discuss — to an extent that doesn’t tip off your competitors — what you’re working on. Or to have some musing about things that you’ve seen in the city that you’re interested in writing about, or to pose questions to readers about what they’d like to see more of. And in a way, that’s much more dynamic than what you can get through the comments section or emails from readers, which are valuable means of feedback, but not nearly as direct as Twitter.

Where do you see City Room in two years?

Well, I think it’s got off to a great start. We’re going to celebrate our two-year mark in just a few months, and I’d like to see it grow a little bit. I think there’s still some capacity for more posts. We feel we have a natural limit of around 18 to 20 a day. There are some blogs like Gothamist that do more — and I love and respect Gothamist — but I think that their model’s a little bit different from ours. A lot of their posts are shorter and simply link out. Our limit of 16 to 18 to 20 posts a day feels about right given that we just don’t blog all day and night, which I think also makes sense. I mean, we could blog all day and night, but there are really meaningful questions about whether that’s wise.

And where are you in two years? Are you happy if you’re still the bureau chief of City Room in two years?
It’s a fabulous job. I think I’d be happy to do it as long as they want me to. There are definitely a lot of other things I’d be excited about doing here, as well, so I guess time will tell.

Any specifics?

Just time will tell.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

Jesse Pearson, editor-in-chief of Vice since 2003, works in a room barely big enough to be called a closet. His “office,” located in a space that used to house KCDC Skateshop, is part of Vice‘s auxiliary location (next door to its original, still-functioning work area). The company’s growth necessitated the move. Pearson’s cramped surroundings, however, suit him fine. They are packed with back issues still wrapped in cellophane, an overflowing bookcase, and the editor’s desk; plenty of room to work or a sit for an interview, even if he can’t extend his arms in both directions without hitting a wall.

Name: Jesse Pearson
Position: “Editor-in-chief, Vice magazine. I’m also a producer for Vice‘s Internet TV network, VBS.tv.”
Resume: “I was an editor at Index magazine for a couple of years, then I was a freelancer, then I started editing Vice in October of 2003.
Birthdate: “July 10, 1975. Same birthday as Jessica Simpson and Proust.”
Hometown: “Levittown, Pa. and Medford, N.J. Two sides of the Philly suburbs.”
Education: “I graduated from Hampshire College, but since they don’t have tests or majors or grades, I’m not sure if my diploma is real.”
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “Book reviews. But I read less and less of the Times every Sunday. Their magazine, especially, is like the punch line in an unfunny joke about baby boomers.”
Favorite TV show: “It’s a tie between The Wire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Guilty pleasure: Wawa hoagies.
Last book read: “I just finished Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard in preparation for an interview with him. He was amazing. He’s 83, and he smokes Virginia Slims.”

You’re the editor of the magazine, but what else are you involved with inside the company?
VBS is the online television network that we do, and I manage a few shows on there. I do a show, Shot by Kern. He’s this great photographer of just pretty girls naked, basically.

That’s a tough job.
Yeah, real hard. We became friends through him shooting for the magazine, and then I had this idea for a show — where I would go on his shoots and interview him about the girl and interview the girl about him. It’s kind of cheesecake on one level, but we get into some weird psychological stuff, like what their parents think of them being naked for a camera.

I do a show called Soft Focus, which is interviews with musicians. There’s a guy who was in a band that was an influence on me when I younger called The Nation of Ulysses. The guy is named Ian Svenonius, and he was always this really great writer. All their album liner notes would be like fake manifestos. They were kind of a fake political organization; it was all about terrorism and destroying America. I thought he’d be a good writer; I approached him a long time ago to work for another magazine that I edited before Vice and he did, and we became friends through that. He’s kind of a rock historian, so we got to interview all these musicians. That’s been really fun because we’ve gone to England and all over the country, and we’ve done all these people who are just heroes to us.

The only other publishing experience you had was at Index. How did you learn the job here?
Trial by fire, basically. Index didn’t really — I didn’t work very hard there; I just did a lot of drugs basically. But they were great people there so I learned a lot, especially from the founding editor of Index, who is an art historian and critic named Bob Nickas. He was kind of a mentor to me as a writer. And also through Index, I met people who became coworkers here or freelancers for this magazine.

There was a staff in place when I came in as editor, so I got shown sort of the general flow of information. But we’re a little more loose with how we do things, as you can probably tell from the magazine — if you look at earlier days, especially.

Do you think you’re figuring it out?
I don’t think that there is anything to figure out. You know what I mean? We’re really open to having the magazine be radically different every month, so we do the heavily-themed issues that have nothing to do with the issue that came before them, or we’ll do a themeless issue that’s just a total hodgepodge of crazy stuff that doesn’t seem to make sense together when you think about it, but does when you read it, to me at least. It’s just kind of what’s interesting to us that month.

Do you think that the Vice model where your staff is multitalented — can edit, can write, can produce for VBS — is the new model for magazines?
I don’t know if it’s the new model, I just know that it works for us. The staff of the magazine here in New York is me and five other people, basically. We have all the international editions — each of which has an editor who kind of functions as a bureau chief — but we are their editors, as well.

The mastheads of some other publications are just bloated with people: There’s an editor, a subeditor, editor of accessories, editor of whatever. I think that not only is that why we’ve seen so many people getting fired from their jobs, but it’s also why those magazines are kind of boring to read. They’re just so dispersed through so many different people and chiefs and voices and everything.

Have you seen a downturn with the economy?
I think we’re doing pretty well. We do better than a lot of other magazines because we’re free and because we discourage subscribers. As far as I understand in the rest of the magazine industry, a lot of money is lost on newsstands because copies that don’t sell just get pulped. It seems kind of ridiculous to me to be on a newsstand. You don’t need to be on a newsstand. That sounds kind of ignorant, but we don’t want to be on a newsstand, and we don’t need to.

You find your audience and you know where they go, and then you put [the magazine] there. The problem we have is of course people take like 30 issues at a time and then sell them on eBay and stuff like that.

Is that…
Frustrating.

How’s the general shift away from magazine advertising affecting you?
I figured we would kind of run parallel to this stuff, and we are so far. I think it’s probably because there are so many editions all over the world. We’re able to go for international advertisers, people who are in all of these different countries. When we were a much smaller magazine, we’d have a lot of record label ads in the back, for example. Indie record labels. Unfortunately, a lot of them are going out of business, so those ads aren’t there anymore. Larger companies wouldn’t prioritize a magazine like Vice if it was just an American or a Canadian magazine, but because we’re all over the place, it’s kind of our trump card. We’re doing more pages than ever, actually. I’m doing the photo issue, which is an annual thing that comes out in July, and I think it’s going [to be] the fattest issue we’ve ever done. We’re actually getting bigger, which I guess bums a lot of people out.

Do you get that blowback a lot?
Yeah. Not personally, because I don’t tend to go to the places where the people who would hate us would be, you know? But if there’s ever something about us on the Internet, there’s bound to be a lot of hatred and a lot of throwing around of words like “hipster” and “Williamsburg.”

Why is there that negative reaction? Is it from people who maybe picked up Vice 10 years ago and have seen how it’s changed, or is it people just randomly piling on the bandwagon?
There’s a small contingent of people who remember how the magazine used to be. For me, the magazine wasn’t bad before, either, but it was just pretty different at certain points in its life. There was a point where we were a little more provocative in maybe more of a direct way — and more of a way that might have been easily categorized as offensive or not politically correct or something like that. I think a lot of people saw it back then because it was in the press a couple times with some kind of slamming articles for certain things. New York Times did a really nasty article. Maybe people got an idea of what it was then and kind of never saw it again? The optimist in me says that a lot of the critics just don’t know that the magazine is different now.

But then we also get the blowback where people… It’s like, you can’t f*cking please anybody because people either say that it used to be totally offensive bullshit, cocaine, trucker hat, hipster crap or that they see it now and they say that it’s a sellout of bullshit, trucker hat, cocaine, Williamsburg hipster crap. It’s difficult to know what they’re basing their judgments on exactly.

You’re doing a lot more investigative journalism where you follow stories all over the world. That’s great, but how do you keep costs down?

The bureaus really are where the keeping costs down comes into it. The bureaus are really important. We’re almost anywhere but the Middle East right now, so if there’s an interesting story somewhere — in Europe, in Asia, even Russia now — we’ve got a bureau not that far away. Somebody can get on a train; you know what I mean? Also, it’s pretty easy to call somebody up. Skype is free. It’s just, get on the phone, or contact the Berlin bureau if you have one. We’re lucky that way.

I was reading an interview where the reporter asked you about the “male” voice of Vice and you took offense to that, saying you didn’t know why everyone thought it was a male-dominated voice. But then [co-founder] Shane Smith tells The New York Times that 65 percent of your readers are male. How do you explain that?
It’s hard for me to know. I don’t tailor the writing in Vice to a specific gender or even a specific age. And certainly not a specific class background. These are big questions. These are things that keep me up at night.

All I can really speak about it what our intentions are when we start. In some way, the audience is out of our control, I think. The staff is very diverse, which surprises a lot of people. There’s gay, straight, male, female, black, white, all these different countries, and I think what I told [the interviewer] was that we want to sound like educated valley girls. And that still appeals to me, kind of. But I guess maybe we sound like educated valley girls who are now in college instead of in high school.

So is Vice growing up?
No, no.

Then are you getting more sophisticated in your editorial direction as you get older?
We don’t sit down and do editorial plans where it’s like, “In the next six months, we’re going to grow up, and in the next year we’re going to grow up even more.” The magazine is always a reflection of what the people who make it are into. I guess if you want to call it growing up, maybe I’ve grown up and the people who work with me have grown up a little bit over the last few years. We’re definitely less interested in what the best band this month is now than we were five or six years ago. We’re more interested in things that are kind of — there’s this really gross marketing phrase that I’ve heard a lot — evergreen.

Do you think that’s partially a product of the Internet? You can do the band of the minute on your Web site, but the band of the month doesn’t work in a magazine form.
Yeah. The best thing about the Internet as it relates to what we’re discussing now is that some readers still want the band of the moment and that’s cool, and a lot of advertisers want us to do something about the band of the moment and that’s understandable. It’s not cool, but it’s understandable. Since we have the Web site, that’s where we can do it. But it wasn’t really a reaction. It wasn’t like, “Well the Internet is going to scoop us on this band somehow.” It wasn’t like we can’t cover a band that we like because Pitchfork is going to have something about them tomorrow. I don’t think that we’ve ever really been reactive in that way.

It seems as though the editorial side and the advertising side have always been closer than at other publications, or at least more transparently linked.
I’m happy with the level of freedom that I have editorially. There are a couple of things that [those on the advertising side] like to discuss with me if I’m going to try to put them in an issue. A dick, for example, or pubes. But generally it’s a very open and good communication. I can’t think of too many times when I’ve been asked not to do something because it might scare an advertiser, and that feels really good.

We’ve always been very transparent about the fact that the advertising pays for this magazine. How the f*ck do people think it comes out? We need them, and there’s no reason to hide that. Sometimes an advertiser wants to get more involved by maybe doing an advertorial. I’m not really crazy about advertorials in the magazine itself, although never say never. We’ve done it once or twice before, and if the right idea came along I’d happily do it again, but we do do some fun branded content-type stuff. We’ll do these little mini-guides. We do guides to certain cities. We’ll do the guide to New York, guide to LA, guide to Montreal.

There was some video game that came out a couple years ago that was basically just a war game, and [Electronic Arts] asked us to pitch them some kind of a big idea for a sort of ‘zine to go along with it. We did a ‘zine about the apocalypse, and all kinds of different ways to think about that topic. It was basically an issue of the magazine, and it was great. Not a lot of people saw it because it was a smaller run — it was just this little book that came with subscriber copies of the magazine — but we basically took EA’s money, and we made a magazine using their money. It was great. I got a trip to Nevada, and I got to go to a handgun survivalist training camp for like four days. That was never in Vice, it was only in this thing.

Do you have any involvement with Virtue?
It’s a marketing company; it’s a sister company to the magazine. They do a lot of really interesting campaigns, but I focus on my content.

In two years, where do you see Vice? Is there still a print issue?
I’d like to think that there will always be. I love print. That’s why I wanted to do magazines in the first place, because it’s a great object, a magazine. Editorially, where’s Vice? I don’t know. It kind of goes along with what I’ve already said a couple times, which is that there’s really not a plan, there’s not a formula. Sometimes I don’t know what’s going to be in an issue until a week until the issue goes to press. It’s very stressful for my staff, but it’s kind of the best way for us to do the magazine. It makes it what it is.

I’d like to have more international editions in two years, although I don’t know where they would be. We have 21 now in 25 countries, and I think we might have gone to every country that’s legal to make a magazine like Vice in already. I’d like the magazine to be a lot more global in every issue. I’m interested in working with guest editors, so I think we’re going to try and bring that in, getting somebody that we really admire and just basically doing an issue with them. And VBS should be basically a huge monster by then, too. It’s doing really well.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

It’s been a hectic summer for Joe Posnanski. Luckily, Sports Illustrated‘s newest senior writer enjoys the work. A lot. In addition to his day job at SI, there’s his other day job as a columnist for the Kansas City Star where he was named the best sports columnist in America by the Associated Press Sports Editors. (In August, Time Inc.’s sports magazine, where he had been a contributor for a year, hired him full-time, but he continues to write for the Star.) And then there’s his well-loved blog, featuring everything from card tricks to 10,000-word explanations of baseball minutiae. Posnanski also started the Future of Newspapers, where he and an assortment of guest columnists attempt to solve the problems of the ailing newspaper industry. And finally, don’t forget about his books. His latest, The Machine, debuted in mid-September at No. 17 on the NYT bestsellers list and has the writer on the other side of the interview circuit. “It’s not my favorite part,” he says. Interviews, after all, get in the way of writing.

Name: Joe Posnanski
Position: Senior writer, Sports Illustrated
Resume: Columnist at Kansas City Star, Cincinnati Post and The Augusta Chronicle. Started at The Charlotte Observer. Is the author of two books, The Soul of Baseball and The Machine.
Birthdate: January 8, 1967
Hometown: Cleveland. To Charlotte. To Augusta. To Cincinnati. To Kansas City.
Education: Studied accounting and then, after realizing there was math involved, moved on to English at what was then called the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Now, just Charlotte.
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday New York Times: “Book Review. Then Magazine. Then ‘Week in Review.’ Then Sports. Love the Sunday Times.”
Favorite TV show: The Office
Last book read: Hell by Robert Olen Butler
Guilty pleasure: “Checking Amazon numbers. It’s unhealthy.”

You’ve been at Sports Illustrated full-time for a couple of weeks. How’s it going?

It’s going great. It’s so weird because obviously I was working at Sports Illustrated before, and I was working at the Kansas City Star before, and basically on September 1st, it all just swapped places. I’m still working at Sports Illustrated and I’m still working at the Kansas City Star, only [the] roles [are] reversed and I’m doing more for one than the other. I don’t really know exactly how my life has changed, other than I get to call myself a senior writer at Sports Illustrated now. But it’s definitely been very cool, and I love the people there at Sports Illustrated.

So basically, the SI business card goes in the front?
Yeah, that’s what seems to be the difference. And, you know, I’m waiting for those; they keep saying they’re going to send me Sports Illustrated business cards. I guess until I get one of those, I’m not entirely sure that I work there. [Laughs]

You’re doing radio interviews and a lot of different press for [your new book,] The Machine. Is that difficult to balance it all?
It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, no doubt about it, but it all came together at once, you know? The book came out a week and a half after I started at Sports Illustrated, so they knew that was coming and we all tried to make a pact to make my life as easy as possible. I’ve written quite a bit for Sports Illustrated [since I started full-time], but I would imagine that once I get through this promotional period, I’ll be writing more.

Is there any plan about how much you’re going to be writing, and whether it’s going to be for the magazine or the Web?
We’re all waiting for the job to kind of evolve. I definitely am very involved in the Web and very involved with the magazine. Trying to figure out scheduling and how all that’s going to work is something we’re still in the process of doing, but it looks like I’m going to be doing quite a bit of column writing for the magazine’s front-of-book Scorecard section. I’m still going to be writing a lot for the Web site, whether it’s something they pick up from my blog or something I do specifically for them. We’ve already planned several fairly big pieces for the magazine. It’s definitely going to be across the board — which is exactly what I want. What makes Sports Illustrated so great to me is that there are so many different outlets, so many different formats for me to write for them.

You mention there are a lot of spaces to write, but unlike ESPN, there’s no TV outlet or radio outlet. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to stay a writer and not expand, like, say, a Rick Reilly has?
I never felt I was any good at any format other than writing. I always felt very uncomfortable on radio, very uncomfortable on television. For the kind of work that I do — the kind of writing I try to do — I think it best fits either online or in print. It just seems like there’s more of an opportunity for me to really sit down and think through my thoughts and try to color some shades of gray. Radio and television are wonderful outlets for people who have talent for that, but I tend to ramble on and tend to need to have my thoughts crystallized in order to make much sense.

I had a radio show very, very briefly when I first started in Kansas City at the paper. We did a show for about six weeks at the most. I really, really didn’t like it. I wasn’t digging ditches; it wasn’t that hard to do, but I never felt like I was coming across very well. What really bothered me is I thought it really was affecting the way I wrote. When I’m writing, I tend to try to have a very clear mind, you know? I don’t like a lot of voices running around in my head. When you do talk radio, at least for me, I was hearing a lot of different callers and voices. It really made it more difficult for me to write. For me, it always was better to stay in the writing, to stay in something that maybe I have some talent for, and try to avoid everything else.

Are the interviews getting tedious? Or is it different when you’re promoting your own work?
Well, it’s not my favorite part by any means — and I don’t think it’s anybody’s — but in this case, the book is something that I love. When you write something, you want as many people as possible to read it. You hope it’ll be a lot of fun for a lot of people, so you do these [interviews]. It’s not like doing a show in any way for me. It’s me talking about this book. Sure, there’s a lot of tediousness to it, but for the most part — and I think this is a little bit different for this book than it was for my first book — people seem pretty engaged on the subject. The people that I’m talking to, they pick something out from this book, whether it’s “Are the ’75 Reds team the best team ever?” — and usually they don’t think so and they want to argue for another team — or they want to talk about Pete Rose or they want to talk about Joe Morgan. It really seems like it’s engaged people, so it’s actually fun.

It’s funny; I love talking, I just don’t like doing talk radio. It seems for whatever reason they’re two different things for me. I do love having conversations with people, and like I said, people have been very engaged on this book, so that’s been a whole lot of fun. But yeah, when you do 14, 15 radio interviews in a row, you do get a little tired of your own voice.

Have you been surprised by the positive response to the book?

Yeah, I’ve been stunned honestly by the response. I think a lot of that is due to the excerpt that ran in Sports Illustrated. That just was a whole new market for me. It’s been great; it’s been tremendous.

I did a lot of press for my first book, but it was different. That book was very, very personal for me. I wrote about Buck O’Neil, and Buck had died just a few months before the book came out, so it was just a difficult time in some ways. I’d always expected when I wrote the book that Buck would be a part of the promotion. It would bring him to a new level, and of course it didn’t happen that way.

Switching topics a bit, talk about the Future of Newspapers blog.
I love newspapers, and even as I’ve gone on to work at Sports Illustrated, I still write for the Star because of the great people there and because I would like to be part of the fight. I don’t like when people get all pompous about journalism and when they start talking about how without [newspapers] there’s no democracy or anything like that. That sort of thing really bugs me. But, that said, I think newspapers have been such a part of communities for so long, and I don’t really see anything else that can do that or is willing to do that. I was hoping that we could create a conversation of what the newspaper can look like in the future.

‘Newspaper’ as a word could very well become as outdated as ‘album’ is when we talk about music. It doesn’t have to be paper to be a newspaper in my mind. When I think of newspaper, I think of something that gives you local news, local sports, the weather, all of these things that matter to us in our daily lives. It’s something that can give it to you in a one-stop shopping sort of way. I believe that people want that. I don’t think that the demand for that has gone down at all. I know that newspaper people in general like to beat themselves up about not keeping up with the times, and there’s no doubt some of that is true, but the big problem has been on the advertising side and on the circulation side of newspapers. The technology has changed, and because of that, the business model of newspapers is broken.

Just from the sports perspective, people in Kansas City don’t want to read any less about the Kansas City Royals, the Kansas City Chiefs, their local high schools, and Kansas-Missouri or Kansas State. They want to read more. They want more now than ever before. The demand is so high, why can’t we make this work? I think that we can, and I think we will. It’s just going to take a few breakthroughs in technology to figure out how to do it.

I grew up around Boston, so it was exciting when ESPN launched ESPN Boston. It’s a great hub where I can go for news and columns about Boston sports. Do you think it’s possible for a national media organization to successfully replicate what local papers do?
Sure. There’s a demand, so whoever is going to figure out how to make it work as a business model is the one that’s going to be successful. The issue that I have with ESPN is not that they can’t do it. I think ESPN Boston could very well become the go-to site. ESPN has smart people working there, they really understand sports, they’re very smart, and all that.

But the problem with any big entity doing it is they’re going to come in and they’re going to do what makes money, and that’s the goal. Newspapers have been that way, as well. If you’re going to do ESPN Boston, there’s a lot of money to be made in covering the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Bruins, and the Celtics. That’s going to be important, and maybe you’re going to throw a little Boston College in there, some Boston University or something, but you’re not going to go to the high schools.

The thing that newspapers to me were always able to do is — because they were undoubtedly making so much money — they were also able to do all kinds of things for the greater good of the community. It was part of the package, you know? People went into the business in order to tell stories and cover the news. There probably wasn’t ever a whole lot of money to be made in writing about school board meetings or that sort of thing, but newspapers covered it because it was part of this greater mission. I don’t want to pick on ESPN because I think they’re great, but I don’t know if ESPN’s mission would be, “Hey, our job is to cover Boston and give you every single thing you want about Boston, even stuff that you might not think you want.” Or will they be driven by what I think too much of us are driven now by, which is just ratings? Will they only give you the big stories and the things that are going to get big hits? Then we lose some of this other stuff.

You said something interesting about how newspapers gave people something that they might not know they wanted. I agree, and I wonder if the general public is going to realize they want this type of reporting before it disappears.
I think people will realize. I just finished this book about the ’75 Reds. I went back and there were four newspapers covering that team, and great, great writers covering that team. I was loaded down with different voices and different thoughts about that great team, and insider information that you would just never get today. As much as media has mushroomed over the last 34 years, no team, including the Yankees, is getting the kind of coverage today that the Cincinnati Reds got in 1975. The reason is because I think we’re all pushing for the hits. There are more [Chad] Ochocinco and Terrell Owens stories than ever before, and if somebody goes back in 50 years, they’re going to know everything they need to know about those big stories, but some of the little things — some of the lesser known players, some of the lesser known sports — are just really getting hammered because when you cut, that’s where you cut.

I do think that we’ll be missing something. And I don’t know the answer to it either. I think the answer is to make enough money that you can cover those things, but I’m not sure that we’re going to get back to that.

How do you manage it all? Until very recently you were writing the book, you had the two blogs, you had Sports Illustrated, and the Star and Twitter. Are you just constantly writing?
It’s not like I’m locked to my computer 24 hours, but I think a lot about stuff as things come up. The other day, during the semifinal of the U.S. Open, I saw [Roger] Federer hit that shot between his legs. I wasn’t scheduled to write. It was a day off. I was with my family, and we were watching that. We went out to dinner. I put the girls to bed, and I really wanted to write that story. For whatever reason — and I think it’s the same thing that’s been driving me forever — I sat down and wrote a 2,000-word thing about Roger Federer hitting a shot through his legs.

On some level, it’s not like you’re writing 15,000 words a week for Sports Illustrated. I’m sure you could do that, but at some point it might get tedious. You’re doing a lot of different types of writing.

Absolutely. The blog has been a very interesting thing for me because I started it with no expectations, no thoughts of what it could be, and no real sense that I was going to do it for very long. I just thought, “Ah, I probably ought to start a blog.” I was trying to sell the Buck O’Neil book at the time, and I thought, “Well, this is a good way to get it going.” I started really liking it. There was plenty going on in my life, but I found that this writing for me was really relaxing, and it was something I enjoyed. There was no pressure; there was no tension. I didn’t care if anybody read it. I wasn’t getting paid for it; I didn’t want to get paid for it. It was just something to do, I guess in the same way that somebody else might like to play golf or something. For me, it was just like a couple of hours a day, or an hour a day or a half an hour a day where I would just write whatever the heck happened to be on my mind.

In the grand scheme of things, it all seems to kind of fit together. People who are sick of reading me probably go, “This guy wrote another 2,000 words?” but for me, it’s not the same at all. The blog work that I do is really just stuff that I just love writing. The newspaper work I love in a very different way, and the magazine stuff I love in a very different way.

So we’re not going to see you out on the golf course any time soon?
I don’t golf. It’s funny, because I don’t have hobbies. I spend time with my family, but that’s about it. I always want to start playing tennis again, I just never really do. The last time I played golf, I played Augusta National. I always tell people that I’ll play again when I find a better course. Maybe if I can get on Pebble Beach, that’ll be the next time I’ll play.

If you’re going to go out you might as well go out at the top I guess, right?

Exactly. Maybe St. Andrews.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

Larry Burstein, the publisher of New York Media, is a vital part of the team that’s made New York‘s Internet counterpart, NYMag.com, one of the earliest success stories for magazine brands transitioning online. By selling the site’s Ellie-winning content, he and his team have created a moneymaking venture currently employing 40 staffers. Below, he talks about why selling print and the Web is really the same thing, the difference between a Web presence and a Web business, and the Lohan pics.

So what do you do on a daily basis for the Web site and the magazine?
The thing I’d like to start with is that we do it for both. We’re selling the brand. We changed the name of the company to New York Media. When we were moving downtown, we were outfitting our reception area, we had this big giant New York logo with a tiny URL underneath and it suddenly didn’t feel right considering how robust the Web site is, and how terrific it is, and how quickly it’s growing and what an important part of our business it is. At the time that we moved down here we renamed the company New York Media because not only did we have the magazine, we had the Web site, we had our first book published, we did our first issue of Look. It was a different kind of company. We sell the brand.

How much of your time is spent with advertisers for the Web vs. advertisers for print? Or does it all mix into one category?
People are responding to the brand. We talk to them about how much exposure they want on the Web site and how much exposure they want in the magazine, and we don’t really lead with one or the other. Everybody on staff is equipped to sell both. We have digital specialists within our group who can help some of the print-centric sellers, but everybody we add to the team now needs to be equipped to sell digital and print at the same time.

I had a call a few weeks ago where I thought this particular brand would be more suited to the Web than the magazine, and I began the call talking about the Web. I pointed out specific things like Video Look Book and some of the other fashion things that we were doing, and this advertiser said I was the first publisher to ask for an appointment and lead with the Web. Then we followed up with the magazine. We’ll probably get business from both.

One of the things that is interesting to me is watching magazines adapt to the digital age. So many of them are talking about having a Web presence and I think that what we have here is a Web business. There’s a big difference.

Can you talk about that difference? What makes New York different?
I think what makes New York different is the fact that New York is this incredibly great combination of feature journalism and searchable data. You can read about Elliot Spitzer and you can also find an Italian restaurant below Canal St. Those two things coming together make it a very viable Web site, along with the fact that the topic it covers is New York, so there’s something new to talk about every single day.

What are some of the specific challenges of selling the Web site vs. selling the print magazine?
The real challenge is how the market is adapting. In some ways, New York is almost ahead of the market and there are people out there who are completely equipped to buy the Web and there are people out there who are still lagging. And then there are people who ask for integrated packages but then aren’t necessarily prepared to execute them. The actual, technical selling of the Web is pretty standard. It’s how much inventory do you have and how can you sell it. The real challenge is finding the advertisers who are ready to move, who understand the value of this medium. It’s the first time in my career that I’ve been selling a medium that’s immediately accountable for its performance.

I was at an ad panel about digital media a month ago and the panelists were discussing how it’s hard to spend a lot of money online because the campaigns are all bespoke. Do you see that at New York?
We have some advertisers who are incredibly sophisticated at this and they can tell you how much business is bouncing back to their site when people will click on their ad and then not take action but take action weeks later. I guess the answer is that most of the advertisers on our site are very sophisticated when it comes to accountability and have specific metrics by which they measure our performance, and the site works.

When advertisers come to you, do you say, “How are you going to be tracking this?” Or is that totally on their end?
We ask them because sometimes that will impact what we put in the RPF relative to what their goals are, whether we think a run-of-site plan will work for them or whether we think they should concentrate on a specific panel.

It’s not a great time for magazines. Ad pages are down, yet you had a 4 percent increase last year. A lot of your advertisers are skewed towards the luxury side of the spectrum. A lot of the magazines being launched now are luxury publications. Do you think New York‘s position in the luxury niche has helped with the ad pages?
There are two reasons that the ad pages are strong. One is the ability to attract luxury advertisers. Luxury goods have to do well in New York. Most of their business is done in New York. If there business is going to succeed, it’s going to succeed here, so it’s important to cover this market. That means fashion, liquor, travel, cars, jewelry and accessories, and right now, real estate. That’s a big part of our success.

The other part of our success is the diversity of the ad base. Most magazines have an endemic ad base. A travel magazine depends on travel advertising and then non-endemic business to round it out. The same with a fashion magazine. Fashion advertisers are the endemic advertisers. A magazine like New York has a diverse ad base. We carry all those luxury goods advertisers, but we also carry a lot of movie, theater, cultural, restaurant, local retail. There’s a big local component to what we do. It’s that mix that makes the magazine exciting.

This goes back to your original question of why the Web site works. It’s the diversity of the advertising and the diversity of the content of the magazine.

A lot of publications are struggling to make the transition online. Yet here, you have a staff of 40 working online. What comes first, the advertising or the content online? Should a magazine like Esquire for example pump money into the Web by hiring a staff of editors and then hope the advertising follows?
I think you have to think of what do the people who are engaged with this brand want to see online and then figure out how to build the traffic. Once the traffic comes, you begin to get the advertising.

So how do you do that?
I don’t think there’s one broad stroke. I think the success of New York‘s Web site has been many small decisions that have added up to a successful enterprise. Not only is every bit of content in the magazine up online, so is a lot of original content that we felt would advance the brand and we felt needed to live on a daily basis. You have the three blogs — Grub Street, Vulture, and The Cut — and the Daily Intelligencer.

I also think that, I don’t know whether I read this or made it up, that the Web is our friend. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. I think a lot of magazines are in a position where they look at the Web, and they don’t know what to do with this new medium that’s coming along. Here, it was very easy to see how the Web was going to be a key part of our business and ultimately help the New York brand grow.

When did you start realizing that?
I think about five years ago. The company has been owned by Bruce Wasserstein for about five years, and I think at that moment we realized that a investment in the Web site was going to pay off.

You mentioned Look earlier. You just launched the Events division. Are there other initiatives coming up?

We have some. We’re not ready to talk about them yet, but the big initiative now is the 40th anniversary. There will be three issues leading up to it and then there will be a big 40th anniversary issue coming up in the fall.

Any interview wouldn’t be complete without asking about the Lohan pictures. When you do something like that, you had to anticipate it would be a big traffic boost. On the ad side, do you do anything to prepare for that?
There’s a very important separation between church and state here, so I knew about those pictures maybe two or three days before they were going to go up. We knew that there would be advertisers who would like to be included, and we knew there were advertisers who we knew would not like to be included. We were able to maximize the opportunity.

The real opportunity for that event was to get people from those pictures to other parts of our Web site.

And did that happen?
Yeah, it did. It totally worked.

Three tips for succeeding online
1. It’s all about the brand
Because people are “responding to the brand,” Burstein says he has an easer time selling both print and digital advertising.
2. Diversity
Burstein cites New York’s broad range of advertisers for helping stave off the advertising recession.
3. Advertising dollars follow content
“I think you have to think of what do the people who are engaged with this brand want to see online and then figure out how to build the traffic,” Burstein says. “Once the traffic comes, you begin to get the advertising.”

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor and co-editor of FishbowlNY.

Brandon Badger has books on the brain. As manager of the ambitious and controversial Google Books project, the Stanford graduate and speaker at mediabistro.com’s upcoming eBook Summit, is coordinating the effort to scan the world’s literature and make it available online. Over an outdoor lunch at Google’s Mountain View campus, Badger spoke with mediabistro.com about the hidden difficulties of the project, the possibility of a Google e-Reader, and whether we’ll ever see Harry Potter on Google Books.

Name: Brandon Badger
Position: Product manager, Google Books
Resume: Dropped out of Stanford to start a tennis e-commerce store. Returned to school, graduated and started working as a software engineer at Semantic. Moved to Google and worked on Google Maps before transferring to the Google Books project.
Birthdate: August 16, 1977
Education: “I went to Stanford. I did a B.A. in economics and an M.A. in computer science, class of 2003.”
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday New York Times: Sports
Favorite TV show: “Probably Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Guilty pleasure: “Tennis, I play a lot of tennis still.”
Last book read: Freakonomics

Google Books is a huge project. Have there been any challenges that you didn’t foresee?
What makes the Google Books project difficult is the scale. It’s very easy to scan a single book that’s maybe a certain type, a certain size, it’s a paperback or a hardcover, and it might be easy to transcribe that. But it’s very hard to do that for all the world’s books, for tens of millions of books. And so there are a number of engineering challenges that the team here has accomplished, starting with the original scan stations that were built, working processes to get clean photographs of the book pages, and then there’s a lot of computational work to take those images and process them so you get a clean, flat image that looks good on your computer screen. Then from there, it’s not enough just to have the images of the book pages. We really want to be able to extract out a digital representation of the book, so like an HTML version or a plain text version. That’s really important for a lot of the mobile devices that you see now, where you have a much smaller screen and you want to be able to re-flow the text on the screen. Extracting the text is a difficult challenge to do in an automated fashion.

There’s also a lot of difficult process issues that need to be worked out. It’s a big undertaking to go and partner with these large organizations, like you’ve got to meet with the libraries. There’s a lot of working with book publishers and explaining how our program can help them market their books to users and how our tools can help them make their books more discoverable. With any individual challenge, [it] is easy to fix on a small level, but it’s very hard to fix its scale so that, with an automated process, you can do it for tens of millions of books.

What’s your role as product manager in the whole thing?
That’s a good question. Google is very loosely structured; there’s not a whole lot of top-down management. As a product manager, your role is to inspire the team, to really define what the product goals are, work closely with the tech lead and the engineers on the project management itself — so breaking down the project into manageable chunks and then following through on the schedule to make sure we’re meeting our goals. You’re the outward face for the product as well, so there’s a lot of interacting with partners. We have publishing partners, but also library partners, device makers and reading application partners. And then also interfacing with the various other entities within Google to make sure that our products work well together. So working with the search team so that Google Books is able to blend well into the Google search results product.

So what does a typical week look like?
Usually about half my day is in meetings either with external partners or with our engineers. As far as the schedule itself, it’s very flexible here at Google, so you might have engineers coming in later in the morning but then staying later. It’s basically whatever works best for your family and your life situation. In general though, people work pretty hard just because they’re passionate about what they do. I’ll typically put in a normal day at work, go home, hang out with the family, play some tennis or some golf, but oftentimes checking email at night — also because it’s a global company we have remote teams, so I’ll be interacting with a team that might be in Taiwan or another team in Zurich. It’s sort of a 24-hour schedule in that sense where you’re getting email requests and questions all throughout the day.

You mentioned earlier about meeting with the book publishers. Obviously there’s this lawsuit that was just settled. How closely are you following that?
Yes, I follow it closely. I definitely do a lot of Twitter searches for Google Books or Google Books settlement. The settlement is a complicated issue, and in my role on the books Web site in the front end, really I’m just focused on building the best user experience I can with the set of data that I have. So we have a lot of books that are in the public domain, a lot of books that are in our partner program where these are in copyright books where the publisher allows us to give 20 percent preview as a way of giving exposure to their books. My attitude is that if and when the settlement comes through, that will just provide me with a wider set of data to further improve the product. Basically, it fills in that gap between the older public domain books and the newer books that are in print.

Are you working at all on the e-bookstore?
I am. We have announced that we’ll be selling digital books. The name for that is Google Editions of digital books. We hope to build a system and we feel like users want a system where you can buy the book and you’re buying basically the rights to view that book. Then you can have lots of different devices that are compatible and can view that book. So the idea is that if you’re on the train and you have your Android phone or your iPhone, you can be reading there; we’re keeping track of what page you’re on. And then maybe when you get home, you have a dedicated e-reader device that’s compatible with this system, and then you can continue right where you left off. We feel like this provides a lot of value to users and also provides a lot of value to book publishers in that it’s another avenue for them to sell their digital books. We’re also partnering with book retailers, so stores that traditionally have sold print books — we want to work with them and help them also sell a digital offering that we can run on our servers and support them in selling books.

One of the obvious kinds of outflows from that would be an e-book reader. Would Google ever consider getting into hardware?
Our feeling is that we’re better off focusing on digitizing books, as many as we can, and on offering the software and the platform that powers this e-books solution where users can purchase their e-books anywhere and read their e-books anywhere. When you start storing your books on the cloud, it’s not acceptable for the service [to be] down, [and] you can’t access your book: You’re right at the end of the book and you’re about to find out whether Voldemort dies at the end of Harry Potter and it’s like ‘404 Error,’ you can’t find your book. So I think Google plays an important role in supporting the infrastructure that can make this possible.

I don’t think it would make sense for Google to build a dedicated reading device in that I don’t think we know exactly what the future holds for which types of reading platforms users will want the most. We don’t necessarily want to pick one device and bank on that. Nor do we want users to be locked into one device, as well. For example, the Kindle is a great device, but as you spend more and more money buying Kindle books, if some other company comes out with a really sexy e-reader, you can’t really go buy and upgrade to that because you can’t move your books with you from your Kindle to that next generation device. With every book that you buy, you’re sort of locking yourself further and further in with Amazon. So I feel like we can play an important role in keeping the books marketplace open. I think it’s in everyone’s interest if there’s an eco-system where you can buy a book but you can transport that book with you so that when the next great device that we’ve never even thought of comes out, you can buy that device and sync down your books and read on that new device.

And Google takes a small percentage every time?
And we take a small percentage every time, yes.

So are we ever going to be able to find out if Voldemort dies on Google Books?
That’s a good question. We’re definitely working with book publishers. We have millions of public domain books but we certainly don’t want to be in the market position of all the old books. We also are working with our publishing partners so that when we start to sell digital books, we want to have all the latest and greatest books that you can buy from any publisher.

Last question: Where are you in three years?
Honestly I see myself still working on Google Books. I think this is going to be an exciting couple of years in the book space. As I mentioned, there’s sort of a convergence of devices and content and interest from users that I think it’s exciting that we’ll have basically more reading which I think is good for society. I have a 5-year-old son who’s in kindergarten and learning to read, I think it would be great if there were digital devices he could learn to read on, you could have text to speech, help him learn to read. You also think about all the children in the world who don’t have access to books. With digital books, the barriers are much lower for cost and transport, so it’s exciting to me to think that a kid in some rural village, assuming they have Internet access which is becoming more common, can basically have access to all the great literary works that Harvard library has or a large bookstore in the United States would have. In that sense, I’m really excited to be working on Google Books.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.

Bill Wilson is a music guy. His corner office on the fourth floor of 770 Broadway in Manhattan is filled with gold and platinum records given to him by artists like Sarah McLachlan and Notorious B.I.G., whose careers he nurtured while at Arista Records and then its parent company, BMG Entertainment. Since jumping to AOL — first as head of the music channel and now president of AOL Media — he’s taken the skills he developed creating pop stars and applied them to building brands on the Internet. MediaGlow, the editorial arm of AOL that includes sites such as Engadget, Fanhouse, and Asylum, currently gets 75 million unique visitors a month in the United States and growing. Wilson says the group will continue to add talent, despite recent layoffs as AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner. That’s music to the executive’s ears.

Name: Bill Wilson
Position: President of AOL Media
Resume: Joined AOL in 2001 as vice president of marketing, programming and promotion for AOL Music; promoted to general manager of AOL Music and vice president of programming for AOL Entertainment, then to executive vice president of programming at AOL before entering his current role. Previously senior vice president for worldwide marketing at BMG after working his way up through Arista Records as a product manager, where he helped launch the careers of artists including Sarah McLachlan, Notorious B.I.G., and Kenny G.
Birthdate: May 27, 1968
Hometown: Tenafly, N.J.
Education: B.A. in business management and B.S. in economics from SUNY Stony Brook; M.B.A. from Rutgers University
Marital status: Married to Nicole with two children, Isabella and Aidan
First section of the Sunday New York Times: “[I] start online, then print sections of ‘Arts & Leisure,’ ‘Style,’ ‘Business,’ [and] ‘Sports.'”
Last book read: Seize the Time, Here Comes Everybody, Power of Intention, The Effective Executive
Favorite TV show: Friday Night Lights
Guilty pleasure: Green Vibrance [a ‘superfood’ supplement]
Twitter handle: @Bill_Wilson_AOL

MediaGlow is a relatively new division of AOL. How has it been going so far?
Our whole goal with MediaGlow is to write about topics that people are passionate about or have great interest in. We bring in staff and freelancers who are the most experienced, who love the topics they’re writing about, and want to connect with the community around that. So, everything we’re doing is building out communities of like-minded individuals. We’re really excited. We have 75, 80 sites now, but we continue to look at opportunities to reach more and more people around more and more topics.

When you think back to when AOL went free in 2006, there were a lot of strategic discussions. We saw consumer behavior really starting to shift, where instead of coming through a few sites and main portals — AOL being one of them — we saw consumers going to many more Web sites with specific areas of interest. Search was a big part of that, the beginning of social media was a big part of that, but it was, I’d call it the infancy, and we in essence made a bet that that was going to continue. It’s paid off for us: At this point, we’re over 75 million people domestically that we reach, according to comScore, and over 275 million globally, so it’s exciting.

There’s a lot of editorial talent out there seeking jobs. It’s almost a perfect time for hiring.
Quite honestly, we’ve been very opportunistic, because we already had the strategy. The economy obviously took a downturn last fall, and we started to see the fallouts of either cutbacks or full categories becoming less and less covered. [But] people still obviously have a desire for the content. So we’ve seen two benefits: one, consumers looking for places to fill those needs that they no longer have, but, two, a significant influx of talent — you know, A+ names, A+ credentials. And what’s interesting [is] it’s been a domino effect. In January, we hired three or four world-class writers in the sports arena: Jay Mariotti, Greg Couch, Lisa Olson. And then all of the sudden the calls started coming to us, where their friends heard about their experience, the fact that they had a platform to connect directly to consumers, and that was a snowball. We’ve hired over 150 journalists through the year, just this year, and so we continue to see that accelerating. And our freelancers have gone from 500 at the beginning of the year to 3,500, so expect that to continue, as well.

You’ve been relatively subtle about the AOL branding. Why?
AOL has a very strong brand presence, but it also, particularly when we started this strategy, had a very definitive meaning, and people remembered it as how they connected to the Internet. When we looked at particular passion points, be it around music or politics, people would gravitate to brands that they were unfamiliar with over the AOL brand, because AOL already had a connotation to them in certain areas. So we do use the AOL brand in, say health, television, or music, where it’s something that they’re familiar with and they’ve used before. But when we’re creating these very niche topic brands, there’s a connection to AOL, but AOL is not the leading brand. And that’s a core part of the strategy. As Tim [Armstrong, AOL CEO] has mentioned, it’s almost like a Disney approach, where you’ve got Miramax, you’ve got Touchstone, you’ve got ESPN Sports, you’ve got ABC Sports. It’s a very similar model in that regard.

I think part of that AOL connotation is the old, stodgy kind of Web 1.0 one. Whether or not that’s true, is avoiding that perception also part of the strategy?
No, I think quite honestly we believe we can overcome that, and I think it’s a very exciting time now, because as we spin out, it actually gives us a chance to redefine what AOL means for consumers. So I think all this content will do more to reinforce that message over time now that we’ve got this constellation and stable of premium brands, that there is a connection back to AOL that’s more direct to the consumers. That doesn’t mean we’ll go back and change the branding, but let people know that when you go from Engadget to FanHouse to Asylum and down the line, it’s coming from the same publisher.

You started in music, and then you came over to AOL and headed the AOL Music division. How does that lead to being in charge of all the editorial content?
I worked at Arista Records with everybody from Sarah McLachlan to Biggie Smalls to Santana, and then I went up to the parent company and did all worldwide marketing, which included traditional marketing, but also digital marketing and nontraditional. I came to AOL because AOL was a great place in terms of when they did something it had an immediate impact with consumers, but they didn’t always know what they had done. We’d call up and say, “Hey, you just ran this promotion with Sarah McLachlan and we’re getting a ton of sales or we’re seeing activity,” and they would actually not even know they did it. I said if I could become part of that and actually start to drive a process around the things that are working, because they’re clearly affecting the consumer, there’s a lot of upside.

I think that the parallel from the music world to this world is we’re building brands. Instead of building Sarah McLachlan, Biggie Smalls, Carlos Santana, you’re building Internet brands. That’s what AOL Music was when we started, that is what Engadget is, that is what Politics Daily and FanHouse are. At the end of the day it goes back to in essence what I’ve always wanted to do, which is connect with consumers around things they’re passionate about.

How much time do you spend surfing Engadget or hanging around Asylum?
I spend quite a bit of time [on AOL’s sites]. How I start my day actually is reading all the consumer email. We get literally over a thousand pieces of email a day directly from consumers, and that comes in through each Web site. I’m able to look at each Web site, what consumers are telling us they like, what they don’t like, and what they want. I see what our competitive set is doing with that content, and then I go to our site and say how are we delivering and setting trends, versus also reacting to trends. The strategy quite honestly is — we’re always evaluating it, but it’s been pretty set for a while, and we’re just figuring out how to scale and grow, but that’s the bulk of my time actually.

Tim Armstrong has been here since May. How has he’s changed the corporate culture?
It’s been pretty remarkable. I’ve been here over eight years, and what Tim has done is he’s brought a very transparent management style. He communicates to the employees regularly, directly, which is not what we’ve always done. That’s probably the most important thing to employees, bar none. From a management standpoint, I think his biggest change has been [to] think big and take risks, so don’t try to incrementalize our way to success. Take a step back and think bigger: How are we going to win big? Play big and win big, versus looking to do what you’re doing a little bit better. It’s been a great learning experience.

What are some of the things AOL isn’t doing well?
I think over time we have let business considerations sometimes get in the way of consumer experiences. Tim has made a real grounding point of we’ve got to continually put the consumer first, second, third and fourth, and let’s not worry about the monetization — because as the company has had challenging times over the last few years there’s been a heavy emphasis on the monetization side. Tim is actually pulling down a lot of advertisements, on some highly visible areas, as well as low, to improve the consumer experience. Those are some of the things that I think over the time period, based on different times in the company, have not always been at the forefront.

One of the things I focus on most is really giving people that sense of empowerment, and giving them the boundaries in terms of, ‘Make sure we’re in the strategic guidelines,’ and if you want to go outside those, let’s have a conversation, but if you’re in these, go at it and let’s move quickly and learn from the consumer. We also at times have probably spent too much time in what I’d call in the lab, creating something and then fine-tuning it. What we do now is we create it, and as opposed to fine-tuning [something] for another two months, we put it out, hear directly from consumers what they like and don’t like, and make them part of the process. That’s a dramatic change too from, say, two years ago.

AOL’s had a lot of turnover at the top. You’re still here obviously, to your credit. Have the comings and goings of the executives been difficult?
I’ve been really fortunate, because if you look at the time that I’ve been here, which has been a lengthy time, particularly in the Internet world, we’ve always focused on [the] building of consumer value propositions, and as part of that, we’ve built a world-class media organization. Even though there’s changes at the top, it’s not like any of those particular changes, [of] which there [have] been maybe five since I’ve been here, have actually changed what we’ve done. There have been questions, like, ‘Should we be doing this?’ One big debate was, ‘Could AOL be relevant to an open Web audience?’ Our core audience was probably 25-plus, so the first thing we actually did was, to prove we can do this, let’s do 18- to 24-year-old men. We actually did that first [with Asylum] and had great success, and then kicked it from there. Although there’s been change at the top, there’s always been the ability to do what we believed was right for the consumers, so that’s been the constant.

Eighteen months from now, what’s the plan?
Eighteen months from now, I’d say a few things. One, continually growing our audience and connecting with consumers — and that connection with consumers is something that our shareholders value and our partners value from an advertising standpoint. We have Web sites covering many more topics with experts, and our full-time base has grown, our freelance has exponentially grown, and our audience has grown. And what is AOL, you know, from a question that you asked earlier, is probably less often asked, because it’s more prevalent and understood that we are building a content empire and connecting with consumers as a result of that. Eighteen months is a good time frame for that.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.

When Jim Bankoff took the reins as CEO of SB Nation in 2008, the company was essentially a network of fan blogs. A little more than four years later, the former AOL executive has dramatically expanded the offerings of what is now known as Vox Media, recruiting the Engadget crew to launch The Verge and debuting Polygon, a site dedicated to video games, as well. [Disclosure: I have written features for both SB Nation and The Verge.]

All three sites feature excellent writing, big, bold design and custom ad units and are becoming the success stories of what Bankoff calls the third phase of digital media, a time when quality meets scale. “It’s the hybrid of a few things,” he explained. “It’s acknowledging that you can use data and smart technology platforms to your benefit, but you use them to help unlock and unleash creativity, not to supplant it.”

Name: Jim Bankoff
Position: CEO, Vox Media
Resume: Joined AOL while still in business school and later rose to executive vice president of programming and products, helping to launch Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music, Engadget and others. Won an Emmy in 2006 for his role as an executive producer for the Live 8 concerts, the first such award given to a webcast. Served as a senior advisor to Providence Equity Partners and joined Vox Media as CEO in 2008.
Birthdate: December 23
Hometown: Upper Saddle River, NJ and New York, NY
Education: University of Pennsylvania Wharton MBA, BA in international studies from Emory University
Marital status: Married
Media idol: Former Time Warner CEO Steve Ross
Favorite TV shows: The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show
Guilty pleasure: Trolling Boston sports fans
Last book read: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Twitter handle: @bankoff

What do you do at Vox on a daily basis? Is your time split between the three sites, or do you focus more on long-term strategy and bigger picture issues?
I can remember four years ago when I first got started here. I would review every single pixel. I would go on every single sales call. I would clean up the conference rooms if there was garbage lying around or writing on the white boards. I guess I still do that. [Laughs] But we’ve grown to over 200 full-time employees and a bunch of contributors. My role is less about doing everything and more about empowering and enabling everyone else to do their jobs well. Specifically what that means is making sure they have the resources, the processes, the strategy, and the culture to be successful. I work with our partners and our investors, but in particular I work with our employees to make sure that they can create the best products for our audience and our advertisers.

You started at AOL and stayed with the company for a decade in a number of different roles. What did you learn from seeing so many parts of a company like that, and how have those positions informed your work at Vox?
I think about that a lot. AOL was a roller coaster ride. I was lucky and privileged to be a part of it, both the ups and the downs. I was only at one company, but it was one company that evolved and changed so much. You had the start-up phase, the managed growth phase, the crisis phase and the pivot phase, which was when I came into being an executive. We were trying to transform the company from an ISP company to a media company. I never worked on the ISP side, only on the media side. It really forced me to think creatively about how to be entrepreneurial in a bigger environment. It was a test, and it’s one that AOL and Yahoo! are still grappling with. The experience set me up for running this company.

For a brief period a few years ago, all the “financially successful” editorial companies were publishing quick hit, low-quality content. (Demand Media, Bleacher Report jump to mind). We seem to have swung back in the other direction with at least a nominal focus on quality, but quality takes time and money. How do you solve the quality/quantity/cost equation?
We believe that digital media is entering its third phase, what I call quality of scale. That’s where we are playing. It’s the hybrid of a few things. It’s acknowledging that you can use data and smart technology platforms to your benefit, but you use them to help unlock and unleash creativity, not to supplant it. We have developed our own proprietary platform called Chorus, and it enables us to empower our writers and our videographers to produce really good stuff, but to do it in a far more efficient way and to distribute that stuff using all manners of digital syndication, whether its search, syndication or partner sites. In a world where social is particularly important, substance does well. Substance is viral. I think it’s even more important to have quality in this era of Web media than it has ever been. The fusion of platform technology plus talent is what the next wave is all about, and that’s where Vox Media is positioned.

Brands matter. One of the things that has been lost in the digital media space is the concept of high-quality branded media. Who is going to be the successor to Conde Nast or Viacom? We are all about brands and creating quality media brands. The results are that we have the best demographics for young males across sports, tech and gaming. We’re No. 1 in terms of income, education, purchasing power and all the stuff advertisers want to see. When you invest in high-quality brands, it pays off with high-quality audiences and, ultimately, high-quality advertising rates. I think that’s part of the third phase.

SB Nation started a longform section last year, and The Verge and Polygon do amazing longform work, too. Longform is great for word of mouth and the editorial reputation of a site, but has it started to pay off in a financial sense?
Looking at longform in a vacuum as a standalone is the wrong thing to do. I would imagine that if you had a media brand that is solely focused on publishing 5,000-word stories with beautiful proprietary photographs and highly-produced videos, it would be a tough thing to make that economically sustainable. Longform is a mix of creating a brand and building an audience. We intentionally don’t look at it on a standalone economic basis. We want to be a large and profitable company. We want to grow our margin. We have serious investors and we run a serious business, but we believe the key to growing those margins is making sure that we have quality, engaging products. We can allocate investment across a variety of different endeavors, whether it’s longform, shortform or video. It’s the mix that consumers appreciate.

You’ve started experimenting with custom, full-screen ad units. How has that gone?
It’s gone extremely well. From our advertising product side, our ambition is to reinvent digital brand advertising on the Web. Part of it is related to the quality of the content. If you’re a brand advertiser and you’re trying to create a positive image, you can’t be in a sub-standard environment. You can’t be in an environment that isn’t consistent with the image you are trying to create for yourself. A big part of it is adjacency and being in front of the right audience, but another big part of that is having big, beautiful, high-performing ads. The ads we’ve rolled out have performed well, because they work for the audience and they work for the advertiser. They are big, bold, beautiful, and you can’t help but notice and engage with them. But at the same time, you aren’t frustrated and angry at the advertiser. You’re excited about the advertisement in the same way you would be about a television ad or a magazine ad.

But do you think advertising in general can work on the Web? I feel like we’ve all gotten so good at tuning it out.
Absolutely. Unequivocally yes. It can work. It should work. And I think that advertisers have gotten a raw deal up until now. We, as publishers, have taken the path of least resistance. We have let other people define our products for us. We haven’t been creative about advertising. Publishers would design a beautiful website, and then after the fact try to figure out where the rectangle was going to go. That’s just not a way to be successful. It’s not good for your consumers, your advertisers or your business model.

Having held several high-level positions in your career, what would you say is the best way someone can become president or CEO of a company?
All you have to do is start something up and call yourself CEO. That’s the easiest way. [Laughs] The truth is that the best way is to be really into what you are doing and really care. That’s not something you can fake, nor is it something you want to fake. You have to have a genuine, passionate interest in your work and what your company is doing if you want to have any hope of running it and running it successfully. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have made it to the top without that, but my advice is find what you are passionate about and do that, because that’s going to increase your chances of getting to the top if that’s what you want.

Noah Davis is a writer living in Brooklyn.

After eight years at Entertainment Weekly, where he “had gotten to do almost everything,” Jay Woodruff jumped at the chance when Kent Brownridge asked him to head Maxim.com. (After all, as the former EW.com managing editor says, one can only “feign interest in American Idol for so long.”) “Dr. Evil” left for OK! almost as soon as Woodruff arrived, but the editor continues to work with Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky building the site’s content. (He also oversees Blender.com and StuffMagazine.com.) In October, Woodruff spoke with mediabistro.com about redesigning Maxim.com, filtering the news of the day through the Maxim voice, and why he doesn’t have to worry about monetization.

Name: Jay Woodruff
Position: Editor-in-chief, Maxim Digital, Alpha Media Group
Resume: “After graduating from the second best college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I took a job selling college textbooks for Prentice Hall where I spent less time selling college textbooks and more time writing stories and freelance articles. Before they could figure this out and fire me, I applied to the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I spent the next two years playing softball and trying to convince the cute girl on the first floor of my apartment building to go out with me. I left Iowa with an MFA, a couple of softball trophies, and a fiancée. (Married 20 years. Extravagant gifts welcome.) I spent the next four years as a research and teaching fellow at Harvard for Dr. Robert Coles and writing short stories that were published mainly in quarterlies that no longer exist. When Dr. Coles and Alex Harris decided to start a magazine, they hired me to help, and the result was DoubleTake. DoubleTake led to Esquire, Esquire to Entertainment Weekly. EW EIC Rick Tetzeli offered me the chance to move over to EW.com, which led eventually to my current job as EIC of Maxim Digital. Here’s hoping this Internet thing will be really big.”
Birth date: “October 31, 1902.”
Hometown: Webster Groves, Missouri
First section of the Sunday Times: Real Estate
Favorite TV show: Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, UFC, college football. Sopranos, Band of Brothers, and BBC’s The Office on DVD.
Last book read: “Our Story Begins, by Tobias Wolff, my favorite short story writer; just started The Snowball, Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett. I’ve decided I might like to become a billionaire and hope that this book offers some helpful tips.”
Guilty pleasure: Anything with sugar in it.

You’ve been at Maxim.com about four months now. How’s it going? Is it different than you expected?
No, you know, it’s great. I’m very happy to be here. I had been at Entertainment Weekly for eight years, so I was ready for a change. I loved Entertainment Weekly, had a great experience there, but that’s a long time, you know? I was looking forward to being at a smaller organization, because I think we have the potential to be a little bit more nimble. And also my tastes are very eclectic when it comes to entertainment, and I’m not an entertainment omnivore, so I can only feign interest in American Idol for so long. Now I no longer have to pretend I’m interested at all.

I’m sure you’ve heard the golden age of the lad magazine is over. Maxim has tried to move away from that title, but where in the current marketplace does Maxim, and Maxim.com, fit?
I think that the labels that you apply to different magazines may come in and out of fashion. But I think it’s still basically the same competitive set. I mean, there are some titles that have disappeared, but we’re competing with GQ, Esquire, Details, ESPN, and the other titles that are demanding the attention of readers in our demo, 18 to 34. And the same sort of thing online, where almost every month there’s a new site that’s emerging and data that is going to be trying to draw attention from that same demographic. We compete with AskMen, with Heavy, with Break, and with some of the gaming sites.

The golden age of the lad magazine may be over, but there’s still a lot of guys, and they’re still looking for stuff to do, and they’re still interested in looking at attractive women, and they’re still interested in laughing. So we’re still trying to feed that beast.

Where are you getting content for the site? A lot of the magazine’s online, but in addition to stuff that’s in the magazine, how big is the editorial staff on the dot-com side?
Well, the dot-com staff is right now about a dozen people. It has fluctuated between 12 and 18, but I think the natural level for us is 12 to 15 people, so we get most of our content from them. They’re not all editors and writers. We have a designer and we have photo editors and we have two video editors. We also use some freelancers. We don’t have a huge freelance budget, and I try to reserve as much of that as possible for freelance editors when we get into crunch periods where we really have to produce a lot of content. One of the things that Jim Kaminsky and I are working on together is trying to integrate more seamlessly with the magazine, so that we’re getting more contributions from Maxim‘s editors.

One thing that works online is to bulk up a feature that’s in the magazine with Web-only content. Is that something you’re trying to do as well?
Yeah, the era of just simply repurposing magazine content online is long past. You bore your users online, and you wind up undermining the premium value of the print entity of the brand too if you do that too much.

We can run video, so when we have a cover shoot or a photo shoot and we usually have exclusive behind-the-scenes video of the shoot. We can run that. And we can also do offshoots. The next issue’s going to have a feature on Oliver Stone. So we can do a slideshow or an article online that places W. within the context of other political movies, you know, stuff like that. Sidebar stuff works really well for us online.

That said, one of the advantages of being affiliated with a print entity is that the top magazines are produced by some of the best content creators in the world, and some of our most successful pieces are not just simply repurposed, but sort of reinvented, repackaged to work really effectively online. For example, we can turn a feature into a gallery or a slideshow, or just take it in a different direction. As we move along, our site is becoming more interactive and we’re going to have a different set of tools where we can do more with games and just play with the content in new ways.

Kent Brownridge is gone now, but can you talk a little bit about what his role was when he was here, and sort of how things have changed now that Steve [Duggan] and Glenn [Rosenbloom] are on top?
Well, Kent hired me. So, I’m always going to be grateful to him for that. We only overlapped for a couple of months. And I think he was the point person leading the charge in trying to help the magazine and the Web site become more fully integrated and leverage one another more effectively. And Glenn and Stephen are doing exactly [that] — they have the exact same goal now. I’m just reporting to a different general.

Any truth to the Dr. Evil name?
(Laughs) Not in my experience. No.

Can you just talk a little bit about the timing of you leaving EW.com? Cyndi Stivers took over as ME of EW.com soon before you left.
Yeah, I had gotten a call from Maxim, and I think I had had one, maybe two conversations with the headhunter, Karen Danziger, and then with Kent. At that point I’d been at EW for almost eight years. I had been doing the Web site for two and a half, and I was feeling a little burned out on entertainment and just wanted a change. When Karen called me I thought, sure, I’ll talk — you know, it never hurts to talk to people when you get those kinds of calls.

Rick Tetzeli had come to me several months before and asked me whether at some point I would be willing to come back to the magazine. My response was, ‘I would definitely consider coming back to the magazine, but I don’t want to do it right now because there’s just too much unfinished business and there’s a lot of stuff that I really want to see through.’ And he agreed. So when he came to me and said he wanted me to come back and wanted Cyndi to come over — first of all, I thought she was a great hire, and she and I didn’t overlap much. I didn’t work with her too much, but I really liked her and was very impressed by her. But at that point I still wasn’t ready to come back to print.

Any reason why? Is it print specifically, or EW specifically?

Well, I had gotten to do almost everything at EW. I started out as a section editor in the back of the book, the movie review section, and then was promoted to AME, and oversaw the redesign of the front of the book. Then I managed the mix and the features well and I did bonus features, and then oversaw all the movie coverage. So I’d done front of the book, I’d done back of the book, I’d done features well, and I wasn’t too excited about going back to doing a job I’d already done, you know?

So it was specifically not wanting to go back to do work that felt familiar to me, but also I love online. It’s a new medium, it’s changing constantly. The medium itself is changing, and the tools that we have to play with are changing. The business is also rapidly evolving. It’s exciting. It’s never boring. Sometimes it’s frustrating. It’s often exhausting. It’s occasionally terrifying, but it’s never boring.

One of the things you did at EW.com was redesign the site, and that was a huge success. How does that inform your experience coming over to Maxim.com? Is there a redesign in the future?
I’ve tried to make a few simple tweaks. And we’re actually going to be unveiling some slightly more ambitious redesigns in the next week or two, redesigning the homepage, redesigning our key landing pages. Redesigns are very complicated and challenging. An editor can redesign an entire magazine six times in the amount of time it takes someone online to do a really good, holistic wholesale redesign of the site, because every change you make has architectural implications for the rest of the site.

The last five percent of a redesign always seems to take just a shockingly long time.
Yeah, so you have to be very, very conscious of your available resources, the additional demands you’re placing on those resources while you’re doing the redesign, because you have to continue to operate the site effectively while you’re doing the redesign. It can hurt you to be a little bit impetuous redesigning a Web site.

I think one of the smartest things Rick Tetzeli did at EW was introduce “The Must List.” The first iteration of that that was published had no photos. The next week it looked completely different, had photos and looked pretty much exactly the way it looked for the next number of years, until they recently redesigned it again. It’s hard to move that quickly online, and mistakes have different kinds of repercussions. So you have to be a little bit more thoughtful and careful, and therefore it takes a little bit longer, and that can be kind of frustrating for someone who has been in the print medium too.

Kent Brownridge mentioned that there were five million unique visitors across Maxim.com, Blender.com and StuffMagazine.com when you came over. Has traffic been increasing?
Yeah, traffic is picking up a little bit. If you’re looking at the three combined we’re between five and six million a month, and probably between 50 and 60 million page views a month on average. But, you know, my strategy is pretty simple, so simple that it may sound really stupid, but it worked at EW.com and I’m trying to apply it here, and that is simply to produce more content that is spot on for your demo and that is engaging, and make sure that you’re working with designs that allow you to really showcase that and leverage that most effectively. And, you know, the more content you produce, the more opportunities you’re going to have to strike syndication deals, partnership opportunities. There’s no silver bullet.

Right.
At least I don’t know of one. It’s sort of a combination of more really good content, updating the sites frequently so that people have a reason to come back repeatedly, content that’s going to appeal to partners so that you’re creating some partnerships and a lot of cross-linking, making sure you’re being smart about SEOs so that your stuff is popping in search. I mean it’s kind of basic.

You make it sound simple. So where does the money come from?
Again, I think the economics of this medium are evolving pretty rapidly. And, you know, I think some people have a tendency to view the Web as this sort of magical, perpetual motion efficiency machine. There’s no paper, there’s no postage, so, it’s, “God, it’s basically free.” Well, actually there are servers and there’s a tech platform that has to be maintained, and there are actually people like me that have to create the content. So fortunately my job is mainly to try to create good content, and worry a little bit less about how that’s going to be monetized. But, there’s a correlation between content and traffic, and there’s a correlation between traffic and how you get monetized. So there are sites out there that offer reach and there are sites out there that offer something else. And that’s where I think sites like ours that feature an established, meaningful brand have some advantage. Presumably, hopefully advertisers will continue to want to be part of the Maxim environment, the Maxim experience, the Maxim party. And my job is to try to make sure that we’re creating the most engaging environment so that people here who are much smarter than I will ever be about money can figure out how they monetize some of it.

Twelve months down the road where do you want to see the site?
Twelve months down the road I want the site to be much cleaner visually and to be offering between 20 and 30 items a day that allow us to refract whatever’s going on in the world through the Maxim lens. I want us to be offering news for guys, you know? There’s a lot going on in the world today. There’s always a lot going on in the world, and we ought to be able to refract that.

I spend a lot of time thinking about The Daily Show, and what Jon Stewart did with that show when he showed up. I mean the show was always good. But he took it to a whole different level through humor. You know, he’s provocative, he’s smart. I want Maxim.com to be a really funny, smart destination for men that’s also incredibly sexy. And I want us to be displaying our content on an absolutely state of the art platform, so we can leverage more than just pictures and text, but also the video more effectively, interactive games, everything. I want us to be able to fully exploit the medium that we’re operating on.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York.