Leading up to the May 1 2007 National Magazine Awards, mediabistro.com is publishing a special package of our popular interview series, “So What Do You Do?,” with daily interviews of selected nominees, ranging from well-known to obscure. Today, we chat with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, which has been nominated for General Excellence three years running.

See our other interviews with Ellie 2007 nominees:
Joyce Rutter Kaye, Editor, Print; David Granger, Editor, Esquire?; Jay Stowe, Editor, Cincinnati; Ted Genoways, Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review; Mark Strauss, Editor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Name: Moisés Naím
Position: Editor-in-chief, Foreign Policy
Last three jobs: Senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Executive director, World Bank; Minister of industry and trade, Venezuela
Birth date: July 5, 1952
Hometown: Caracas, Venezuela
Education: Ph.D., MIT
Marital status: Married, with three children
First section of the Sunday Times: Week in Review
Favorite television show: Entourage
Guilty pleasure: Entourage
Last book read: Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
2007 Nominations: Two (General Excellence and Essay)

Do you think Americans are focusing more on foreign policy because of factors such as the Iraq war, globalization, and global warming? How has this affected the magazine?
It is unquestionable that Americans are more focused on foreign policy since 9/11, though I think we all wish that the increased interest would have been the result of more positive news. FP’s motto is “What happens here matters there — and vice versa.” And the 9/11 attacks and everything else that has happened since has clearly shown the importance of understanding how our world is now connected in the most improbable and surprising ways. Showing those connections and explaining their consequences is an important part of what we try to offer our readers.

Which media outlets are Foreign Policy‘s direct competitors?
We see ourselves as filling a very distinct niche between Foreign Affairs and The Economist.

When did you know you wanted to be editor of Foreign Policy? How did you get the job?
I wanted to be an editor since I ran my high school newspaper. When the opportunity to become the editor of Foreign Policy became available, it was very alluring.

Morton Abramowitz, then-president of our publisher, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, appointed a search committee to conduct a wide-ranging search for the magazine’s next editor. Like everyone else, I submitted my application and a memo outlining my plans for the future of the magazine. I knew that it was a competitive process, so I tried to keep my hopes in check. To my surprise, I made the shortlist and, after innumerable interviews, was selected and given the opportunity to implement my vision on how to turn the magazine around. That was 10 years ago and I am still on it. It is the best job I have ever had.

What do you think of your Ellies chances? Were you surprised by the nomination?
We won the General Excellence Award in 2003 in a lower-circulation category and have been nominated for the past three years — which, in itself, is a big honor. But, you never take such an honor for granted. Nothing beats being recognized by the toughest audience out there — your peers. I think our chances are as good as anyone’s, but each of the nominees is such a good magazine that I have no idea of who the winner will be.

Take us through a typical day in the life of Foreign Policy’s editor. (be specific if you can — “Wake up @ 8:30, watch the Today show, etc….)
It depends if I am on the road, which I often am, or in Washington, where FP is based. When I am not traveling, I usually wake up very early and do my writing and reading until late morning. I then go to the office and often stay until 8 or 9pm.

How do you feel about the state of the industry?
Everyone knows that the industry is in a state of profound turmoil driven by rapid changes in technology and consumer behavior. Yet, I am sincerely optimistic about the future of the industry. Yes, it will be drastic and painful, and the industry may look very different in the not-too-distant future. But, I have no doubt that the massive amount of information we now constantly receive only heightens a very basic human need for reliable guides that help make sense of the information avalanche. Editors, publications, sites, and other vehicles that are trusted by readers will always succeed. Having a well-known, trusted brand will be even more valuable than in the past.

What’s the biggest challenge of your job as an editor?
Anticipating what the world will be talking about. But, that’s only the first part. Then, I have to ask myself: How are others in the media going to be talking about that, and how can we add value to that conversation and offer readers a perspective they can’t find anywhere else? Then be thankful that you have a talented and dedicated staff to make it happen.

A lot of magazines are currently trying to figure out the Web. Is this a problem for you? What are you doing to compete online?
Actually, the Web is a big reason for my optimism about the industry. In our case, being a bimonthly, we saw a real need to stay engaged with our readers in between issues of the magazine. So, we made a conscientious decision a few years back to expand our Web-exclusive content in order to make ForeignPolicy.com both an extension of the print edition and a destination in its own right. The result has been that we have seen our Web traffic nearly double in just the past few years. And this past year, we have introduced our blog, Passport, which features insights and analysis by our editors throughout the day.

What’s the next step for Foreign Policy?
I am looking forward to FP’s continued expansion on the Web and overseas, particularly through our foreign editions and our fast-growing syndication business. We are pleased by the appetite for our content shown by other publications abroad and by the success of our editions in other languages. FP is currently published in 12 editions in nine different languages, and we plan to add at least two more non-English editions this year. As with everyone else in the business, the Web has opened infinite opportunities for us, and we are continuously finding ways to grow on the Web and to monetize that growth.

What will you be wearing to the Ellies?
Well, we’re based in Washington — the land of politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and policy wonks — and we have a well-deserved reputation for being fashion-challenged. But I’ll try my best. Then again, I guess it is hard to mess up black-tie.

[Noah Davis is assistant editor at mediabistro.com. He can be reached at noah AT mediabistro DOT com.]

Leading up to the May 1 2007 National Magazine Awards, mediabistro.com is publishing a special package of our popular interview series, “So What Do You Do?,” with daily interviews of selected nominees, ranging from well-known to obscure. Today we chat with Jay Stowe, editor of Cincinnati.

See our other interviews with Ellie 2007 nominees:
Joyce Rutter Kaye, Editor, Print; David Granger, Editor, Esquire?; Moisés Naím, Editor, Foreign Policy; Ted Genoways, Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review; Mark Strauss, Editor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Name: Jay Stowe
Position: Editor, Cincinnati
Last three jobs: Features, then executive editor at Outside, senior editor at The New York Observer, associate editor at Spin
Birthday: August 9, 1967
Hometown: Cincinnati
Education: B.A. in history from the University of Virginia
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “It toggles between the front page and the Styles section. If I look at the front page and go ‘uh, not immediately,’ I’ll go to the Styles section.”
Favorite television show: “I tend toward comedy, so Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Larry Sanders Show.”
Guilty pleasure: “Wow, I’ll have to get back to you on that one. My wife and I just had a baby, so whatever guilty pleasures I might have once had have been completely erased from my brain.” [The next day, Stowe emails “vinyl records.”]
Last book you read: Dog of the South by Charles Portis
Last song you put on your iPod: “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse
2007 Nominations: One (Profile Writing)

Has Cincinnati ever been nominated for an Ellie?
Yeah, it got nominated in 2001 — well, technically in 2002, but for an issue in 2001, before I got to the magazine — there had been some riots that took place in April of 2001 in Cincinnati. There was a single-topic issue in the August issue, which was pretty much as soon as they could get it in, because we are always operating two or three months in advance. They did a special issue on growing up young, black, and male in Cincinnati, and that got nominated in the single-topic issue category.

Were you surprised by the nomination [for Kathy Y. Wilson’s piece “Is Bill Cunningham a Great American?”] this year?
Oh, totally. Not because I don’t think it’s a great story — I do — but the judges are so fickle at these things that you never know what’s going to pop up. To be honest, I think city and regional magazines have a tougher time breaking through into the higher echelon of nominees than the national publications do.

The story is up against some pretty heady competition [National Geographic, The New Yorker, New York, and Vanity Fair]. What do you think of your chances, or are you just happy to be there?
I’m just happy to be there. We’re just stoked. We can’t believe that we got the nomination, and we’re just delighted. Frankly, I really don’t feel any competitiveness at all with The New Yorker, National Geographic, New York or Vanity Fair. It’s just incredible to be in their company. Whoever wins, wins. That’s already been decided, and I have no idea who [it will be].

Who does Cincinnati compete with?
We don’t have a direct magazine competitor in our market. There are a bunch of smaller and different, weirder little offshoot things, but they aren’t built like a city magazine. Our biggest competition is the Enquirer, which is the major daily here and there’s a weekly alternative paper called CityBeat that is pretty good — but, it’s a different audience pretty much, as most alternative audiences are. We don’t really have a direct [competitor], but we have other ones we kind of compete with.

How did you get to be the editor of Cincinnati? Did you want to move back to your hometown?
That was part of it. I’d been at Outside, which is located in Santa Fe, for five years at that point — it will be three years in June that I’ve been here. I had a great experience at Outside and really liked everybody I worked with and loved the magazine, but I was a little frustrated with my job at that point, feeling like I’d done what I’d come there to do, and I was on repeat mode. I wanted to do something different.

A friend of mine had gone to Texas Monthly, which is owned by the same company [Emmis Communications] as Cincinnati. I didn’t know that at the time, but I inquired about it, and the balls just started rolling from there. I ended up talking to the editorial director at Emmis, and she said “Well, the person who’s the editor at Cincinnati let me know that she’s gonna be leaving sometime in the next X number of months. There’s no set time, but let’s keep talking.” That’s basically what happened, and the previous editor here announced she was leaving, and everything happened really fast because they wanted to make a decision as quickly as they could.

To be honest, when I made the decision, I wasn’t sure I made the right one. We loved living in Santa Fe, and I loved working at Outside, but I was a little frustrated. It was kind of like “Should I do this? Should I not?” It was a lot of upheaval in our lives, but it’s turned out all for the best. It’s been a good thing.

What’s a typical day like for you?
Usually between 6:30 and 7am , my nine-month old daughter starts crying, and I go in and change her, and that’s how the day begins. Walk the dog, all that stuff. I get to work between 9:30 and 10:00. I probably should be getting to work earlier than that — sometimes I don’t even hit that — but that’s because I’m here usually ’til 8.

It seems like every day is a little different. There’s always some meeting — it seems like meeting are unavoidable. They drive me nuts, but they have to happen or, I don’t know, the wheels of the office will come off. It’s a lot of putting out little fires constantly, all day. My door’s always open, and I don’t have an assistant, so it’s like people are constantly walking in and asking me questions about something, or needing my advice for something, or whatever. In the midst of all that, I’m supposed to be editing stuff because I read everything that goes in the magazine and I edit a lot of it — not all of it, it’s a small staff here, like nine people — but we’re all doing at least three things. I feel like I’m doing a million, but I know I’m not alone. I’ve met enough editors at national publications who feel the exact same way. So, I’m editing stories, I’m trying to map out future issues, to come up with lineups and good story ideas. I’m sitting with my editors and thinking about how we can improve upon from what we did last month, all the time.

Then, at about 7:30pm I give up at my desk, and I just kind of expire and fall beneath it and wake up the next morning.

And then you get up and do it all over again?
Yeah, it’s like Groundhog Day.

What do you feel about the state of the industry? Do you feel sheltered from it because you are out in Cincinnati and away from the spotlight in New York?
I wouldn’t say sheltered. The interesting thing that I heard recently was that city and regional magazines actually had quite a good year compared to national magazines. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why that is. I guess the conventional wisdom would be if national publications are having a tough year, then everybody is having a tough time. But, that was not the case.

What that means though? I don’t know. I’d be talking out of my ass if I started to talk to you about what I think economic trends are and how they affect the magazine industry. But, there’s a war on for one thing, and the war is sucking a lot of money out of the American economy. The housing industry — finally the bubble burst and that, without a doubt, is going to have some effect on other sectors of the American economy. And last, but certainly not least, there is the Internet, which is definitely pulling dollars away at an ever-increasing rate from print journalism, whether it’s magazines or newspapers.

The thing is, these are all major concerns — no one is sticking their head in the sand about them — but I don’t think that this is the death knell for magazines nor for newspapers. Now, having said that, there’s a lot of work the print world has to do to shore itself up if it wants to — not remain in existence, but remain as a viable option for people, for readers out there. I think that can be done. I think that there’s enough people and enough brains out there that the magazine companies are going to figure out how to make those ends work. I think there’s a way to make money off of the ‘Net and still make money off of print.

Along those same lines, how important is the Web for Cincinnati? Do you have an in-depth Web site?
We don’t. It’s important, and we are finally, because of funds — we aren’t a big magazine at all, and staying afloat was the major important thing we had to do — but we had a good year last year, so this year, we are able to put a little more brainpower and a little money toward revamping the Web site. We have a Web site, it does exist, but it’s not something that anyone’s been able to fix. If you went to it right now, you’d find a whole lot of promotional stuff and marketing stuff, but very little editorial stuff on there. All I can say about that is, I was hired to run a print magazine, and to try to conceive of and run a Web site is a whole other level of a job which I’m going to be forced to have something to do with. I’m happy to be able to do that, but at the same time, it’s hard to put out a magazine also. But, we’re trying to figure out how to do that, and we finally have a plan in place to put more editorial stuff, more bells and whistles.

It’s kind of weird. I saw this presentation a few months ago [at the Emmis corporate managers’ meeting] by this guy, Rob Curly. I don’t know what his exact title is [vice president of product development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive], but he works for the Washington Post Company and he’s kind of the media guru or whatever the hell they want to call him. He’d only been there a short time, so he hadn’t done much at the Post, but the places he has worked were at the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas and Naples Daily News in Florida. Those were the places where he had all the examples of what he had done, to essentially create the Web sites the papers have now. That was really cool to see, because he had done a ton of stuff that was above and beyond what the paper was actually giving people.

I don’t, frankly, pay enough attention to the Web. I’m Mr. Analog. I don’t have a typewriter on my desk — I do have a computer — but I don’t spend a lot of time cruising around on the Web, so I haven’t spent enough time looking at other people’s Web sites. But, when I saw what this guy had done at these newspapers, I thought “Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me with what magazines should doing, and they’re not.” I’m sure there are magazine Web sites out there that are doing the same type of thing with providing all this extra features and extra stuff that’s not even in the magazine. It’s like a whole other magazine, but it’s got the same name on it. That’s where I feel like print publications need to be headed if they are going to make money off the Web and, therefore, survive. People don’t just want to read exactly what you printed again on the screen. They may want to get it in an archive, so you may want to provide that for them, but you need to have other stuff for them there.

A site that I look at at least once a day is The New York Times Web site, and I think they do a great job with that because they’ve slowly — well, actually pretty quickly — figured out that it’s not just reprinting the paper, it’s actually adding video and commentary and other stuff, and actually doing some Web-only features that I think are really cool.

I don’t really know enough about it to really comment, except to say that [the Internet] is the future, and anybody in print who doesn’t think that the Web is the future is going to go belly-up at some point.

What are you going to be wearing to the Ellies?
[Laughs] Clothes. Well, it’s supposed to be black-tie, so I guess I’m wearing a tux.

[Noah Davis is assistant editor at mediabistro.com. He can be reached at noah AT mediabistro DOT com.]

Paul Hoffman might not be “the smartest man in the world” (although Chicago‘s editors, who handed him that moniker, would beg to differ), but he’s certainly among the more accomplished journalists working today. Author of 11 books — most recently, King’s Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game — Hoffman won the first National Magazine Award presented for feature writing in 1987, was editor-in-chief of Discover at the tender age of 30, and served as president of Encyclopedia Britannica. He’s consulted* for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Engineering, and written for publications ranging from The New Yorker and The New York Times to Atlantic Monthly and Wired. His first biography, The Man Who Only Loved Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth, was an international bestseller and is published in 16 languages. He’s been a color commentator on ESPN, performed paper-folding tricks on Letterman, and discussed the future of technology on Oprah.

King’s Gambit, Hoffman’s new book, takes the reader from Washington Square Park in the 60s to Tripoli in the post-9/11 world, where “information officers” constantly harassed the author as he observed the Chess World Championships. It’s his most personal book to date, and Hoffman says writing it helped him through a rough period of his life. The work fuses memoir with chess history, an example of Hoffman’s unique ability to make even the driest subjects riveting. He examines the psyches of top players past and present, noting their propensity for madness (Bobby Fischer, anyone?), contrasting this with his own childhood obsession for the game he abandoned for 20 years because it drove him to tears.

Hoffman* stopped by mediabistro.com during a break in promoting King’s Gambit and working on his next project. Among other things, we asked him to spill the secret to his success (he didn’t), if he’s ever been more scared than he was in Tripoli (he hasn’t), and whether he really is the world’s smartest man (he would neither confirm nor deny).

Name: Paul Hoffman
Resumé: President of Encyclopedia Britannica, president and editor-in-chief of Discover, publisher of Disney magazines
Birthday: March 30, 1956
Position: “I write one book after the next and I do a lot of consulting, magazine redesign, and brainstorm consulting for Internet companies and ad agencies.
Education: B.A. from Harvard in history and science
Hometown: Woodstock, NY
First job: Senior editor of Scientific American
Marital status: Divorced; son, Alex
Favorite TV show: Sopranos. “I’m sad that it’s done. Jon Stewart would be my favorite that’s on TV right now.
Last book I read: Consider the Lobster

King’s Gambit is a combination of memoir and history lesson. How did that format come about?

It certainly is the most personal book that I’ve done. I haven’t been in any of my other books. I tend to write about madness, genius, and obsession, and the intersection of all three. I pick subjects or subcultures and go pretty deep into them. I wrote a book about a mathematician [The Man Who Only Loved Numbers] and went deeply into math. Of course, I’m trying to appeal to an audience that’s not just mathematicians, otherwise I would sell a few hundred copies. I think chess is a world — whether you play it or not — that is inherently fascinating. It seems like this game of wooden puppets, yet it brings out incredible emotions in the people that play it. It brings out all sorts of issues. It’s very hard to run away from the fact that if you lose, it’s because of something you did. You can’t blame a bad draw of cards or a bad bounce of the ball. Even if your opponent made the most brilliant move in the last century, something you could have done earlier would have stopped him from making it.

I was struck too by the two Americans that have reached the status of being the top players in the world — Paul Morphy, back in the mid-19th century, and Bobby Fischer — both were pretty nutty and paranoid. There’s a connection between madness and chess. It doesn’t mean you’re mad to take it up, but it’s striking to me how much madness there is at the top. It may have to deal with the fact that it’s a solipsistic activity. You have to spend hours studying games and preparing for games, and you’re by yourself essentially. I don’t know if there’s any more madness in chess than there is in concert pianists, but there’s a lot and I was struck by it.

There are a few reasons why I’m in the book. One is that chess means a lot to me. I was very serious about it as a kid, but it drove me crazy. I was dreaming about it constantly. I was too hard on myself when I lost. Too much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in how I did and I stopped playing. But I’ve always admired it. I think there’s this incredible beauty to the game. It combines an artform — the combination of pieces is incredible when you do something that’s beautifully unique and foresighted — but at the same time, it’s a really aggressive sport.

One of the reasons why I took up chess as a kid is that I saw it as this black and white world; everything was confined to the board. I had a pretty chaotic family life. My father was this difficult character and he taught me chess, but I always was fascinated by people that played it a lot. It was only more recently as an adult that I went back into it to try to understand whether professional players got the same kind of obsession and how could they handle the emotional highs and low. You’re playing a tournament game for four or five hours and you’re nursing a winning position for two hours, but you make a mistake and your opponent bounces back. It’s hard to deal with that. If you start obsessing about what you could have done during the game, you’re not going to have the concentration to continue.

King’s Gambit reminded me a lot of Word Play. Were you familiar with the book before sitting down to write?

Yeah, absolutely. The difference is that in my case, I’m not a journalist who decided to take up chess to see how I would do. It’s a game I was taught when I was five and it’s been a big part of my life. I grew up in Greenwich Village with this bohemian dad who took me all the time to the chess tables in Washington Square Park. People played chess all night and it was fairly safe. A lot of the cops liked chess and they sat there on horseback watching you play. Sometimes they even suggested moves.

There’s a huge amount of chess history in the book. How much research did you have to do?

There’s a fair amount of research. What distinguishes my writing is that I spend an incredible amount of time with the people I write about. It’s not just sitting down for a Q&A or catching up with them a few times. I really want to know what they are about and that only comes through great familiarity and spending enough time with them that I see stuff happen that’s emblematic of what they are like as people. Also, the more time you spend with people — particularly in chess where top players are always posturing — the more willing they are to open up and talk about the agony of defeat. It involved research in that I spent a lot of time with a small set of people and followed them around the world to the different places where they played.

Chess isn’t the most exciting sport. What did your agent and publishing house say when you told them you wanted to write a book about chess?

They were totally behind it. The same thing could have been said when I did The Man Who Only Loved Numbers. Math’s not the most exciting subject — there are a ton of people who were turned off by it in the first grade — but that was a bestseller, particularly in England. There, it sat in the No. 2 spot for a long time. I got a kick out of that because it was during the one-year anniversary Princess Di’s death, and the No. 1 book was a biography of her and the No. 3 book was a biography of her, and here’s a book about a mathematician. What I was able to do was to bring out this person’s really incredible history and how he fought against all sorts of personal crises in order to be as good as he was, and to be able to bring out what professional mathematicians see in math, which is this terribly beautiful world that you and I might not see.

I think people want to know about subcultures, if you have a compelling storyline. That’s the most important thing: You need to tell a story like a piece of fiction. It needs an arc. In the math case, it was this guy who’s two sisters died the day he was born and his mother kept him inside for 10 years. He didn’t have any contact with other kids because she was afraid he was going to catch a fatal childhood contagion and die. So this kid was terribly sheltered. Many people in this situation would have ended up in a mental institution or worse, but this guy channeled this into mathematics.

King’s Gambit is seen through my take. I’m not a professional player at all, but the game meant a lot to me [in my childhood]. It was this sanctuary to escape from a lot of crap that was going on. I idolized the players that played it at the top. It was interesting because as I got further into [the research] I found that they were some of the most deceptive personalities that I’ve ever met. You think, “How can there be deception in chess?” but there is in terms of cheating and posturing at the board. You’re not allowed to do anything to purposely disturb your opponent, but what about coughing at the board? What if you have a cold? That’s not against the rules to have a cold. It’s against the rules to purposely cough, but there are all these that people do [bend the rules].

[My agent and publisher] was very receptive to the idea because this type of book is what I do. I write about subcultures. I try to do it with an engaging story. Obviously, I depend on good reviews for people to say, “Here’s a book on a topic you might not know you’re interested in, but you’ve got to read it.” Luckily, the last two books I did got good reviews. But you never know. This one could wither on the vine or it could catch the Zeitgeist, you never know.

When you went to Tripoli, you were questioned repeatedly by information officers. In the book, you make it sound pretty terrifying. Is that the most scared you’ve been pursuing a story?

Yeah. Now we have diplomatic relations with Libya, but when I went there in 2004, we did not. The United States Chess Federation recommended that U.S. players not go, but I was determined to watch a world championship and go with somebody. Actually, [the country’s officials] were very receptive. I couldn’t get a visa in the U.S. I had to fly from Canada, and stuff like that but at the very last moment, they became less receptive because the Bush administration got mad at [Muammar] Khadafi and threatened to roll back this movement towards normalizing relations. The whole time I was harassed and taken into custody and I didn’t know what was going to happen. It makes a good story now that I’m back, but it wasn’t so much fun at the time.

Do you think that the skills you developed on the chessboard as a child translated into being a good writer?

It’s helped me to focus. Writing takes focus and chess takes focus. The wonderful thing about chess is that you can start playing when you’re three, four, and five. I taught chess at a private school in Woodstock to kids ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade. It doesn’t matter what level you are at; you’ll see yourself getting better from week to week. It’s really great, especially for kids with learning disabilities because the disabilities don’t seem to translate into affecting chess progression. So it definitely helped me. It gave me some confidence. It taught me to plan ahead. It taught me life stuff, like how not to be a sore loser and how not to gloat when you’re winning. When I work with young kids, the emotional aspects are a lot of what we work on so the kid doesn’t get devastated when he loses or get too cocky when he wins.

You’ve held a number of different positions in your career: ASME-winning feature writer, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, and editor-in-chief of Discover. What’s the most difficult job you’ve had?

Britannica was difficult because it was a company that was so entrenched in its ways. My other jobs have been start-ups. Even though I ran Discover for 10 years and it had been started long before I was there by Time, when I took over it had no staff and I hired the entire staff. I’m much more used to start-ups than running huge companies, so [Britannica] was much more difficult for me.

What’s your favorite story you’ve written?

Two stories. “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” was written in The Atlantic. It won the first ASME feature award. It’s my favorite because it certainly helped me the most. It’s why I can write books fulltime and do consulting gigs that come my way that are exciting. Also, a story I did more recently for Smithsonian, which is part of King’s Gambit, was the profile of a woman named Jennifer Shahade. She’s the strongest American-born female chess player ever, and chess is an all-male world, so I was very fascinated by what a woman was like who was able to penetrate championship chess to the highest levels.

How do you find these stories? What’s your secret?

As I said, the most important thing to me is that there’s a great story, so I can use the story to tell people something they need to know or were scared of. That’s why I wrote about math. I actually like math a lot, but I know some of my close friends don’t. I wanted to write a book that got across the beauty of math, but I needed to do it through the eyes of somebody who had an incredible life story because everyone can relate to another person’s story. That’s what I’m always looking for.

I did this book about early flight [On The Wings Of Madness] because there was a very colorful character, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and his life story was interesting and tragic. I could use that to hang a lot of science and engineering about early flight.

Also, people suggest things. My closest friend suggested that story about flight. He was down in Brazil and said, “Hey, there’s this amazing guy, Alberto Santos-Dumont. Americans don’t know anything about him. You should come down and check him out.” So that’s how that book came about.

So you get a phone call and someone says, “You should go to Brazil” and you just jet off?

[Laughs] Yeah, a fair amount. It also helps that I edited Discover for 10 years, so I have a lot of contact with writers and scientists. They are always saying, “You’ve got to meet this great dude.” A lot of times, those are the seeds to a book or the subject of an article.

If you could play one person in chess, who would it be?

I think Paul Morphy, the champion from the 19th century. I’ve played Gary Kasparov, the greatest player ever. It was a sad experience for me. One couldn’t expect to do great against him. But Paul Morphy… actually, Bobby Fischer would be interesting. Not now because he’s so out there and his political views are so offensive I wouldn’t want to play him now, but Paul Morphy, this 19th-century player, would be great.

You just finished the book. Plans for the future?

I’m exploring a couple ideas for books. I’m going to write a mystery at some point. I’m working on turning my last book [Wings Of Madness] into a movie right now. There’s some interest in that. It’s not like anyone’s making it, but suddenly there’s interest in it. And mainly promoting [King’s Gambit]. That’s what I’m focusing on in the next two weeks.

Are you going on a tour?

A lot of the press I’m doing here out of New York. NPR shows and stuff like that.

Final question: Chicago called you “the smartest man in the world” once. Is that still true?

[Laughs] I’ll let you judge.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s assistant editor. He can be reached at noah AT mediabistro DOT com.

When mediabistro.com decided to present “Golden Boa” awards to 10 media movers and shakers, Brooklyn-based artists Jude Tallichet was a natural choice to create the plaques. For the past 20-plus years, she’s worked in mediums ranging from bronze sculpture to light installations, and exhibited at galleries across the country. We spoke with her about the state of art today, her journey from Kentucky to the outer boroughs, and the difficulties of creating art from Jell-o.

How did the idea for the golden boas come about?
This was [mediabistro.com founder] Laurel [Touby]’s idea. She wanted to develop an award for people who have done outstanding things in media.

You’ve worked with all types of different mediums. What’s your favorite?
Sound.

Least favorite?
Jell-o.

You were born in Kentucky, educated in Montana, and now live in Brooklyn. What is it about New York that draws artists to the city?
I think all artists have to contend with New York at some point in their career. It is one of the major international art world cities, made up of artists, galleries, critics, and art press, as well as major museums and collections.

How has the Internet changed how artists become recognized?

Of course, the Internet has changed the way artists can communicate. Many artist use the Internet as a means of distribution outside of the traditional art market. This can be as simple as the distribution of text and image, or as complicated as a Web site such as “Fine Art Adoption Network,” where artists give away their work to someone who wants to have it, based on their reason for wanting the artwork. Maybe some object-making artists have been discovered on the Internet, but probably it was a first step. Although there are some artists who make work only for the Internet as a conceptual project, it seems to me that the traditional channels for visual artist recognition are still in place: the prestigious MFA programs, the galleries, the network of other artists, etc. I think more art writers have been discovered on the Internet: there are some great art blogs.

How has the internet helped or hurt your career?
It helps in that it is much easier to organize a show with curators.

What would you tell up-and-coming artists hoping to break into the mainstream?
Have a lot of studio visits. Invite as many people as you can to see your work. Put up a great Web site.

A number of your solo exhibitions have been at the Sara Meltzer gallery. How did that relationship get started?
One of Sara’s assistants saw my work in a show at P.S.1. and convinced her to do a studio visit.

Why has it continued?
We work well together, it’s a partnership.

Do you ever wish there was mediabistro.com equivalent in the art world?
Art openings are the closest thing to a mediabistro.com event.

Do you see any similarities between the life of an artist and the life of a freelance writer?
They are both really difficult professions.

You’ve known Laurel for a long time. What’s your favorite memory of her?
The time she was at my studio and we were trying to make a prototype award. She was gluing feathers onto a piece of wood and it wasn’t easy. Feathers were everywhere.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. He can be reached at Noah AT mediabistro DOT com.

To celebrate mediabistro.com’s 10th anniversary, we spoke with our Golden Boa honorees about their achievements in media. Check back throughout the week for Hey How’d You Do That features showcasing these media pros.

Since taking over as editor-in-chief of New York in March 2004, Adam Moss has transformed the magazine from a struggling book into a vibrant, Ellie-dominating franchise with a robust Web site. The former New York Times editor spoke with us about the difficulties of putting out a weekly magazine, the frantic scramble when “stories fall apart,” and how he chooses each issue’s content.

What are your top criteria for the ideas that may become features in New
York? What do you ask yourself/tell your editors to evaluate about
every topic, before you/they assign a story on it?

There are dozens of questions we ask ourselves, consciously and
unconsciously, but the top ones are probably: Is it interesting? Will it
be interesting to anyone but us? Will it still be interesting by the
time we can publish it? And then, of course, does it belong in New York
magazine — or is this really a story for American Ammo?

The August 20, 2007 issue
included a feature about New Yorkers living longer than people
elsewhere in the country, one about adoption, and another about a Long Beach
surfer. How did each of these make it into that specific issue? What was
your thinking in terms of how they complemented one another editorially,
and which segments of New York‘s readership they would appeal to?

You give us more credit for thinking these things through than we
deserve. In this issue in particular, I’m afraid to say that we pretty
much ran what we had, though we ended up very happy with each story.

Clive Thompson’s story was prompted by an intriguing study about the
life expectancy of New Yorkers; we wanted Clive to investigate its truth
and argue with it. The adoption story, which was about blended families
and was written by Emily Nussbaum, who happens to be Clive’s wife, was a
reaction to the public circus around blended families created by
celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie; we were interested in
reporting on what happens to the family dynamics of non-celebrities who
adopt kids from other cultures. As for the surfer, he just seemed like a
gnarly subject, though I’m not actually sure what gnarly means.

We rarely make a mix based on demographic considerations. We just try to
publish a well-rounded picture of New York that all segments of our
readership will appreciate.

Walk us through the planning process for an individual issue of New
York: If there’s no specific peg (i.e. Fashion Week, Fall Preview), how
do you choose which features that will appear in that issue? What
meetings/conversations occur between you and your staff, and when
(relative to issue date) do they occur?

These kinds of conversations are going on all the time. Things are
ginned up at the last minute when news breaks, but writers also work for
months on stories — sometimes two or three at a time. There is a formal
process in place, involving a schedule of meetings that’s too boring to
go into, but we violate it as much as we stick to it.

What’s a recent example of a change to an issue’s story lineup extremely
close to deadline? When did that occur (date and time), and what spurred
the sudden change?

It happened [in the October 8, 2007] issue, actually: We’d been working on a piece about
Daniel Libeskind for a while, but we hadn’t yet slotted it in to run.
When the news came last week that Libeskind had been chosen to design
what could end up the largest residential building in New York, we put
it into the issue we were just starting to close. Then last Friday, we
changed the cover story closing this week because an extremely
interesting book became available, and we were lucky enough to get a
piece of it. More often, though, changes to a lineup are defensive.
Stories fall apart and we’re left frantically looking for decent stories
to publish.

With a feature that isn’t pegged to a specific event, do you have a
specific run date in mind at the time you assign it, or do you aim to
have multiple ‘evergreen’ features in the works so that you can slot
them into non-time-specific issues when there are slots needing to be
filled?

Both. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time we met a target
date.

Three tips for finding the correct editorial mix
1) Don’t get hung up on doing what’s “right” for
the magazine.
“If a story excites
you, you should probably find a way to publish it,” Moss says.
2) Be wary of listening to advice from the likes of people like Moss who have been doing this for a long time.
“If you’re an editor as long as I’ve been an
editor,” says Moss, “you get too used to saying no because you’ve been hardened by the experience of too many small disasters.”
3) Sometimes inexperience helps.
“The best ideas come from
people who don’t know what hasn’t worked before,” Moss explains.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. He can be reached at Noah AT mediabistro DOT com.

To celebrate mediabistro.com’s 10th anniversary, we spoke with our Golden Boa honorees about their achievements in media. Check back throughout the week for Hey How’d You Do That features showcasing these media pros.

As president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide for the last decade, Jane Friedman has led the company to immense international success. Through innovative leadership decisions, she directed the launch of growth programs and decided to leap into the digital realm by creating a global digital warehouse. She was recognized as Publishers Weekly Person of the Year in 2006, and they described her as “a visionary pragmatist equally adept at building profits and relationships.” She was also selected as one of The Wall Street Journal‘s 50 Women to Watch, was chosen as one of Fast Company‘s Fast 50; and was one of New York‘s Influentials. President and group publisher Michael Morrison recently told Publisher’s Weekly that, “She’s part Hilary Clinton, part Mother Teresa, and part Mae West. Who could ask for more?”

Before joining HarperCollins, she worked as executive vice president of Random House, Inc., executive vice president of the Knopf Publishing Group, publisher of Vintage Books, and founder and president of Random House Audio Publishing. We spoke with her about her job move (she calls it “fate”), the Internet’s influence on the publishing world, and which books she’s cozied up to lately.

You had risen to a significant position at Random House before moving to Harper Collins in 1997. What were some of the most important factors that motivated you to take the new position?

It’s an interesting story because I can’t really enumerate the factors. What happened was that I had spent — this is going to sound really rude to your audience — just under 30 years at Random House basically running the Knopf Publishing Group, and I was the founder and president of Random House audio publishing and the executive vice president of Random House Inc. I had a multi-pronged position at Random House and I was very, very happy. My children were just about grown at that point — I have four sons — and I was celebrating how happy I was on Labor Day in 1997 with my partner. The next thing that happened was I came to work after Labor Day and I got a call from a friend of mine, who is a recruiter, and who knows that I hadn’t gone on a job interview since 1972. Literally. But I was intrigued. It was HarperCollins, a company that I had known of and about because the old Harper & Row had a fantastic literary backlist and so did Knopf. So I was always very aware of what HarperCollins had published, and I was also aware of the fact that HarperCollins had seemed to have gone off-track. There was a temporary CEO who had done what she had to do, but had made headlines for doing some Draconian things like canceling 100 contracts, etc. But as we watched from across town, we knew that she was doing the right thing to try to get HarperCollins back on track.

I was intrigued — rather than turned off — by the fact that HarperCollins had gone so not the way I thought it should. I was intrigued by the potential opportunities that a situation like that presented. I flew out and had a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Peter Chernin, never thinking I was going to take that job. I was very happy where I was. But the more I spoke with them, the more intrigued I became and the more I realized that this was a chance to run a potentially a global publishing company that I would be fully in charge of. After a month of consideration, I said sure. I decided to take the job.

Ironically, six months later, Random House was sold to Bertelmann, and who knows what would have happened to me. So if you believe in fate, if you believe in a little birdie watching out over me, something told me at that point to take that job.

And 10 years later, are you happy you took it?

I’m so happy. It’s 10 years in November. I’ve assembled a fantastic team of people — some of whom were here before me, many of whom I’ve brought in. We have fun; we have profitability, and we are looking toward the digital future with a great deal of energy and verve, and it’s a fantastic job.

What was the impetus behind publishing+? What early challenges did it face, and how do you feel that it has succeeded?

It has succeeded very, very well. What we learned in publishing+ really has become ingrained in the fabric of the DNA of our company now. Publishing+ was an idea that I had that started out with, “What are we going to do if we don’t want to keep chasing the big, bestselling authors? They cost too much money; they don’t often deliver the right kind of return. So what can we do internally to bolster our assets?” We looked at the company and really dissected what those assets were and what we could build from what we had.

It was a fabulous exercise. It started out with 20 executives from around the globe. It was totally global. We went to a retreat and then we came back and made teams. It was very intense for about 100 days. In that intense 100 days, the people that we selected to go on the teams — the best and the brightest — were really having two jobs. They were doing their day jobs and then they were working on one of four buckets. The four buckets were a branding bucket, using HarperPerennial, our trade paperback line, as the focus; another one was Collins, actually separating Collins out from Harper as a reference line that could be quite global and wasn’t really being global; something called Publishing Services that was exploring alternative ways of publishing books a la working with other institutions and organizations, and the first thing we did was we produced a book for Saks Fifth Avenue called Cashmere If You Can. It was a book about a goat and it fit into their cashmere promotion at Saks, and it went on to sell quite a few thousand copies and started us on the road to then doing the Rockettes and many other projects. The fourth bucket was a d-to-c bucket, a direct-to-consumer bucket. All four of the buckets are actively part of our company now, but d-to-c has taken on enormous proportions.

So, has it worked? Yes. Did everything turn out perfectly? No. We recognized, for example, that some of our colleague’s global publishing was indeed not global and we had to re-evaluate that sort of publishing. But for the most part, I would say 85 percent positive, and very energizing. Now we have bookseller+, we have library+, we have backlist+, the idea being that you think outside the book and try to figure out new ways to promote.

You’ve seen HarperCollins through the real rise of the Internet. How much has the internet changed the book publishing landscape over the last decade?

The Internet is such a big arena. The first thing is that we certainly have used the Internet for marketing; the Internet is a marketer’s dream and we take marketing very seriously here. We are able to reach an audience that would take weeks — if not months — to reach all the people who liked mushrooms. Now you can press a button and find all the mushroom societies. That’s the Internet in its simplest form.

Another part of the Internet was the development of the online distribution networks. You’ve got Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Internet bookstores, etc. and of course those sales have increased dramatically and we are using that online channel of distribution in many different marketing ways, including the ability to browse inside our books through all these channels of distribution. That has not all gone live yet, but — I have to backtrack a little bit and say that HarperCollins is leading the way in the digital world. We have spent millions of dollars to build a digital warehouse where we will have all of our frontlists from around the world and most of our backlists. We are looking to do 20,000 titles, all in digitized form, all that can be browsed, can be sent out as e-books, can be used for downloadable audio, can be used in any which way that they will present themselves in the near future. As you know, everyday another digital form is presenting itself.

We are also using the net to do some consumer-generated copy. We’ve done a teen book and a romance book with a company called FanLib — that’s fan fiction. We were the first ones to do that and to really see the value of consumer copy. We also are owned by the same company that owns MySpace, so we are very active in the MySpace community. It just goes on and on and on.

I would always talk about three things that changed the face of publishing. The first one was the superstore, which made the breadth of books available to the reading public. The next thing was Oprah Winfrey, whose impact on the book business is immeasurable because she gave people permission to read, and then the third thing, of course, is the Internet. We do believe that when all is said and done, all of the things we are doing on the Internet will help us reach a much broader audience and sell many more books.

What do you see as the future of book publishing? Will the book publishing industry be able to flourish on its own, or is its future inextricably linked to embracing synergistic relationships with other media and businesses such as speaker bureaus?

A book and author are the main assets of a publishing company. If we are going to remain a publishing company, which we are, we must value those assets. We can look at the author, and we can look at the book and the content and we can look at how many different ways we can use the content. I think that’s what’s changing in the publishing world today: there’s the book, there’s the audio book, there’s the e-book, there’s the snippet, there’s the this, there’s the that. We don’t even know what there is yet. So we have to figure out how we can maximize every way to market the content and the author.

At HarperCollins, we started our own speakers bureau because we think it’s important to keep the author in the limelight around the time of publication and also between publication. So that’s certainly synergistic, but it’s also is profitable because it makes some money for the author and it makes some money for the publisher. We just announced today that we have formed a partnership with an independent movie producer who is going to be looking through our backlist and frontlists for properties to develop as films. Now films are being made by lots of different companies, including all of our Fox companies, but this is another way to actually value the author and the book and the content directly through the publisher.

I think that in book publishing we need reviews, we need interviews, we need buzz, and the buzz now is what we create through all these other new means of technology.

What was the last book you read just for fun?

[Laughs] For fun… There’s a book that I’m absolutely passionate about called The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Pilgram at Tinker Creek many years ago, and I think it is absolutely the best book about love that lasts and changes over a 40 or 50 year period. I think it’s a brilliant book and it was fun to read.

What was the last non-HarperCollins book you read?

I just read Susanna Moore’s book called The Big Girls, which is a fantastic book published by Knopf.

Four tips for bringing publishing into the 21st century
1) Think outside the book.
The Internet has transformed the publishing world by introducing new marketing and distribution methods. “I think that in book publishing we need reviews, we need interviews, we need buzz, and the buzz now is what we create through all these other means of technology,” Friedman says, “You can think outside the book and try to figure out new ways to promote.”

2) Use what you’ve got.
Friedman’s innovations grew from this basic rule. She asked herself, “What are we going to do if we don’t want to keep chasing the big bestselling authors…what can we do internally to bolster our assets?” Her answer: “We looked at the company and really dissected what those assets were and what we could build from what we had.”

3) Be prepared for bumps in the road.
Things don’t necessarily always go as planned. When launching publishing+, Friedman realized, “some of our colleague’s global publishing was indeed not global and we had to re-evaluate that sort of publishing.” Roll with the punches.

4) Remember the basics.
Don’t get carried away with the marketing and distribution aspects. “A book and author are the main assets of a publishing company,” Friedman says, “If we are going to remain a publishing company, which we are, we must value those assets.”

Ron Hogan is mediabistro.com’s GalleyCat blogger. Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor.

Photo of Jane Friedman courtesy of Gideon Lewin.

If Paul Cloutier’s to be believed, the demise of print magazines is vastly overblown. The CEO of San Francisco’s 8020 Publishing launched two print magazines, JPG and Everywhere, using user-generated content submitted to Web sites and then voted upon by the online community at large. Both publications feature stunning photography and thick glossy paper stock, referencing the golden age of magazines. JPG‘s about to be profitable, while Everywhere‘s debut issue recently hit stands. We caught up with Cloutier via email to ask him about his vision for the printed page.

You started JPG and Everywhere by publishing a print magazine using content submitted by users of the magazine’s respective Web sites. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of the idea and then the implementation of it.

The basic idea was that we wanted to bring the passion and vitality we were seeing online back to magazines. More and more people were getting information online, but while most people just assumed that meant print was dying, we felt that just meant print needed to evolve. Our first magazine was JPG, a photography magazine where anyone could upload their photos to our Web site. Anyone could then vote on what they thought should be in the issue and then we made the printed magazine out of the best of what the community liked. Making a magazine like this meant that we could produce something that was far more in touch with what our readers were interested in, as they helped make it.

Were you ever worried there wouldn’t be enough content to produce a magazine? Is this still a fear?

Not really. We saw communities like Flickr, and were overwhelmed by how many great photos there were out there, and how many new blogs start up every day. In fact, our fear is the opposite, there is always way way too much great stuff submitted. Every time we get down to closing an issue, there are hundreds of great photos that don’t make the cut, and our challenge is finding ways to recognize all of the great work that doesn’t make it into the magazine. Recently we have started doing Issue Outtakes in PDF that represent what the issue would be like if we had no limitation on printed pages.

One of the primary ways content gets chosen to run in JPG and Everywhere is by user votes. Do you think having the level of community involvement has helped sell the print magazine? If so, how?

Everyone who participates on the Web site, whether by submitting a photo or a story, voting for something or even by viewing a photo, has played an active part in helping to make the magazine. We feel like it is this engagement with the magazine that makes us so unique from a growth and circulation standpoint. Everyone involved has a vested interest in the magazine. Certainly the engagement has a viral effect as well, as people tend to want to tell everyone about their photos in the issue and on the site.

The current trend for Web sites of print magazines is to run original content that doesn’t appear in the mag’s print pages. You’ve gone in the opposite direction — creating a print magazine around user-generated content submitted to the Web site. Do you see print magazines following suit, either by having user-generated content on their Web sites or in their print pages?

I think that any magazine can benefit from the expertise of its readers. Which is not to say that all magazines need to be completely Community Created, but that the opportunity is to find ways to break down some of the walls between editors and readers.

As more and more people move online, I think we are seeing the beginning of a huge audience that is unwilling to passively consume their media. They want to participate whether by tailoring it to their interests, sharing their opinion, or simply feeling they are a part of something.

I think many magazines will look at this and see cheap content, but the reality is that the cost structure is only a small part of the story, as we do pay all of our contributors. Ultimately the real benefit to a magazine is the authenticity, the more engaged audience, and the passion that this approach can bring.

JPG and Everywhere both rely heavily on photography, which is generally thought to work better in print than on the Web. Do you see newly launched print magazine increasingly focused on this area?

We feel like print does photography really well, but more importantly we believe our magazines should be about inspiration, and photography is a great way to draw people in. Online communities have become particularly good at creating high quality images, and we focus on the things that the community can create well. However, passionate communities of people are also really good at short-form written work like reviews, comments, and blog-post-like overviews, which we also make good use of.

Anyone can download a PDF of JPG for free. It’s worked out (subscriptions jumped 10 percent soon after), but when you originally thought of the idea, were you worried it would hurt subscriptions? What’s the advantage of allowing people to download the magazine for free? Did you ever consider charging for the PDF version?

No, and really for two reasons. One is that the community helped make the magazine, and they deserve to see where their contributions have gone. It serves as a sort of preview of what the issue looks like, which often times inspires people to subscribe. As well, it gives people an idea of the kind of contributions we are looking for.

Secondly, we are confident that print exists for a reason and we design the magazines to take advantage of what print does well. If we can’t compete with a PDF then we have bigger problems to worry about.

JPG‘s about to be profitable for the first time. What’s been the key to this?

Organic growth. One of the most expensive parts of making a magazine is circulation development, which often involves the waste of unnecessary copies to newsstand, or direct marketing to an indifferent audience. For us we start with the Web site and the interest of the community and the circulation grows out from there. Because of this we have been able to eschew most of the normal bureaucracy of publishing a magazine and can produce a magazine that has a circulation that only counts real people that have a passionate interest in the topic of the magazine.

What tips do you have for launching a print magazine in the digital age?
1) A good magazine is a community.
At their hearts, all magazines are basically artifacts of the interests of their readers. Good magazines embrace this and recognize that those readers aren’t just silent, passive consumers of content.
2) Don’t forget that there is an Internet.
Most magazines were launched before the Web existed and most that have launched since then still tend to act like it doesn’t exist. Look at what your people are doing online before you launch a print magazine. What parts of their behavior and interest are being under-served by the Web? Is there something that print could do better? Good print magazines are going to be hybrids that let the Web do what it is good at and let print do what it is good at rather than treating them like competitors. Start the process asking how the Web can make your magazine better.
3) Beware of “The Right Way to Do Things.”
Magazines have been made the same basic way for a long time, and many of the problems that they are currently faced with are caused by resisting change, and not recognizing that parts of the model are broken. If your only reason for doing something is because that is the way things are done, then you should consider if things have changed since that rule was made. Some of the smartest people in publishing right now are people who have come from outside of the publishing world.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. You can reach him at NOAH at MEDIABISTRO dot COM.

[This interview has been edited for clarity and content.]

In his new book, Taking On The Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, longtime investigative journalist Steve Weinberg profiles Tarbell, one of the OGs of the genre, and examines her famous takedown of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The University of Missouri J-school professor, who writes for Columbia Journalism Review and is the author of eight books, says he’s been “typecast as an investigative journalist for almost [his] entire career.” We caught up with him to talk about how the Internet’s changed the investigative journalism world, the best and the brightest of today’s reporters, and who’s going to pull a Tarbell on Microsoft, Starbucks and the rest of America’s giant corporations.

How did the idea for the book come about?
I’ve been typecast as an investigative journalist almost my entire career, even when I was in journalism school. As a result of that, my path has led to running this group called “Investigative Reporters and Editors.” It has about 5,000 members and it’s all over the world. It’s physically based at the University of Missouri [where Weinberg works as a professor].

Because of that job I was helping investigative journalists every day and I was a spokesperson for investigative journalism, and I started thinking more about the craft. I finally got around to reading Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company, which had come out in 1904 and which I’d heard about in my American history courses but I had never bothered to read. It had been long out of print, in the days when being out of print actually meant out of print.

I read it, all 800 pages and I thought, “Wow, this is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I’ve ever read.” It was 100 years old at the time I read it, but it could have been written yesterday about Microsoft or McDonalds or Starbucks. It was about a dominant corporation taking over the world, and she also brought down John. D. Rockefeller. I just felt like I needed to know more about the person who did this, so I proposed a biography about her.

How do you keep the subject fresh?
Part of it was looking into her techniques and getting into what she did in terms of investigative reporting. But also, her life, in a way, is outdated, but it’s also fresh for the contemporary reader because she was, obviously, a she, and struggled against huge odds to get anywhere other than being a stay-at-home mom, which she definitely knew she didn’t want to do, or a schoolteacher. Those were pretty much the options. She managed to go to college and get a degree, which wasn’t unheard of, but she was the first woman to graduate from Alleghany College. Through a series of unplanned events, she broke into journalism in a serious way. Up until her, there wasn’t a woman who was taken seriously as a journalist.

Most important of all, I would say, is coming up against a gigantic, dominant institution run by someone who is every bit as powerful as Bill Gates and a hell of a lot more colorful. I felt like it had a lot of resonance for today.

Where’s the next Ida Tarbell going to come from?
There are a lot of them now. You hear a lot about the death or illness of investigative reporting, and of course, at some newspapers and at some magazines and some broadcast stations and some Web sites, that’s true, it’s sicker than it use to be. But I would say in general, investigative reporting is extremely healthy at this country and in other countries, and a lot of the people doing the great work are female. It’s not so much being a pioneer anymore.

I don’t think the key issue is where is the next one going to come from. I think the bigger issue is, how many journalists are going to do a great job explaining the big institutions that are dominant in our time. There are a few journalists who do that on a regular basis but not a lot. The investigative reporting — I’m generalizing of course — tends to ignore the corporate sector and look more at government.

There’s Jim Steele and Don Barlett, who now write for Vanity Fair but really made their name at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Diana Henriques at The New York Times is mighty good at corporate gigantism and its behavior. There are a few others, but I don’t think anyone has done Microsoft or Starbucks or McDonalds or you can fill in the blank as well as Tarbell did standard oil, although there were some pretty good books on Microsoft in the past few years.

What are your thoughts on ProPublica?
I don’t know a lot — obviously, I know what you’re talking about and I’m certainly aware of [Paul] Steiger from The Wall Street Journal — but there’s already a model for ProPublica out there and that’s called the Center for Public Integrity. I’ve actually done a couple of big investigations for them.

The Center for Public Integrity, which was started by a guy name Charles Lewis who had been a producer at 60 Minutes. Lewis put together a great team of editors and writers and database people and got corporate money — foundation money, like ProPublica — and started doing these amazingly broad and deep investigations of power. Also, when CNN started getting serious, Ted Turner put together a giant investigative team of 40 people back in the late 80s.

So in a way, ProPublica is not that revolutionary. I’m excited for it and I hope it’s as good as CNN was for a while and the Center for Public Integrity still is.

Do you think that’s a good model going forward where investigative journalists aren’t tied to a specific publication but rather to an organization that gets its funding from other sources?
I think it’s an important part of the mix. These groups have shown that different models can work and I hope ProPublica is the same way.

You’ve been an investigative reporter for more than three decades. How has the Internet changed the discipline?
It’s certainly made certain parts of investigative reporting quicker. I love to be able to go online, even at my fairly middling level of knowledge, and dig out stuff, sometimes in a minute, more often in an hour that I might never have found before. A few years ago, one of the big environmental magazine called OnEarth, asked me to do an in-depth story about John D. Graham, a guy real high up in the Bush White House who was completely gutting environmentalism.

This was an assignment so I didn’t know that much about Graham. One of the first things I did was look at different Web sites at Harvard [where Graham went] and some of the organizations that he belonged to. One of the things I learned was that at Wake Forest, when he was still an undergrad, he got into debating in a big way and won all these awards.

This turned out to be real key to the story in several ways. First of all, it provided some of the narrative thread of the story because his debating background came all through the rest of his career. It also helped open the door because he was naturally suspicious that this lifetime investigative reporter writing for an environmental magazine would do a fair job. He really stonewalled me for a while. Then, in one of my approaches to him, I mentioned that I had been doing some background on his debating life and found on the Wake Forest Web site that he had met his wife on the debating team. That seemed to work wonders with him. He was impressed that I even cared who he was married to and all of a sudden he was somewhat cooperative. I eventually got the face-to-face interview in the old executive office building.

Even more revolutionary is this small corner of investigative reporting they now call computer-assisted reporting, where you can take gigantic government databases and turn them into understandable information. That’s what’s really amazing. I’ve seen some of that from the beginning and I’ve seen how that’s changed investigative journalism. The possibilities are almost endless now.

You mean because of the opportunities for number crunching?
The number crunching but what that number crunching reveals, the patterns that it shows you about the distribution of affordable housing or the number of sex discrimination cases across the country or whatever so you can start your reporting with an incredible knowledge base. You can look for patterns that the data suggests. It would have taken you years before that just to get to that stage.

What’s your hope for the book?
I guess I hope for what every author hopes for, short of best-sellerdom: that it gets read by people who care about any number of matters in this society, about corporate gigantism, about journalism and its role, about gender equality and feminism.

It’s also a damn good story. I give my editors at Norton a lot of credit. I proposed this as a cradle to grave biography of Ida Tarbell. Obviously, I knew John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil would play a big role, but only after I wrote the book and [my editor] started looking at it, did he say, “This is fine. We could publish this, but what about making Rockefeller more of an equal character. What about making it a narrative about the collision course.” So I did.

Three tips for becoming an investigative reporter
1. Relentless curiosity: “You need to be one of those people who’s always asking, why and how and how come,” Weinberg says.
2. Systematic thinking: “Your training needs to include not only the basics of reporting, but you need to learn to think through your material,” Weinberg says. “Always build a chronology of the person or thing you are investigating.”
3. Continuing your education: Keep up with the latest developments in technology that can help make your job easier.

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

In late November, Rolling Stone published an exhaustively detailed, 15,000-word treatise titled “How America Lost the War on Drugs,” detailing the government’s $500 billion failure. Jack Shafer wrote that he wanted to “force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read” the piece penned by RS National Affairs writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells. We spoke with Wallace-Wells about the genesis of the article, writing and reporting the feature, and the positive response it’s garnered.

How did you land this assignment? Did you pitch it to your editors at Rolling Stone or did they come to you?
Rolling Stone‘s editors came to me. I was told it was an idea that resonated with Jann [Wenner]. Obviously the drug wars are something that been have a topic of particular interest to Rolling Stone for many years but that had fallen out of urgency and current issues. I think they wanted a piece that would be comprehensive about what happened in drug policy since the crack epidemic. What exactly has been going on? We have this feeling that the drug war has acquired its own inertia and we have massive programs that are ongoing to try to combat coca growing and coca delivery in Colombia. There are programs in South East Asia. There are federal programs to assist police. We’re still putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail. But the feeling within the magazine was that we weren’t really sure what we were getting for all that input. The assignment as it was given to me was to figure out a way of synthesizing and structuring all that we were getting. And that’s more or less what I tried to do.

Was the original article intended to be this long and ambitious?
I’m not really sure. It was left open. The initial idea was to go out and see where it took me. There was the sense that I would be spending a number of months on it and that it would be a serious undertaking. It ended up taking me about three and a half months to report.

How did you manage to structure the story to keep readers interested?

There were two challenges at the outset. With a piece like this that covers action that’s taken place in so many different venues, it’s hard to write an honest accounting of it. You have to account for the dynamics of street gang competition in San Francisco and the political tension that was felt around law and order by the Clinton administration. You need to keep a sense of narrative propulsion going throughout. How do you get people from 1992 to 1996 and have them give a shit about what’s going on?

The other challenge was intimacy. In a piece that’s functionally an assessment of policy, how do you get some feeling of familiarity with characters and a sense of what this world feels like? How do you keep them familiar and credible?

Around the time I was beginning this in May or June, I was reading some histories by Taylor Branch of the Civil Rights movement, which are phenomenal, but also grapple with this narrative problem. The Civil Rights movement is something that feels incomplete unless you are grappling with it at a number of different levels, both geographically and structurally. The way he solved that was to tolerate an episodic character. You were telling a history, not making an argument. You would do an episode in this place and an episode in that place, and permit the through line to be chronology. That solved both of the problems that I was trying to grapple with because if you’re telling a history rather than writing an expository, there’s a very natural propulsion to it. The propulsion is, “What happened next?” Because we were able to jump in and out of these worlds, I was able, within the confines of these scene-conscious episodes, to do at least a little bit to develop characters and understand the feeling that came through for people who were involved at all different levels in the fight.

That was the first big decision we had to make, and that was the reason we ended up doing it the way we did. It was a structure that would permit the depth that we thought we needed for this kind of story and also the kind of intimacy that without it a magazine article would flounder.

It sounds like it was a pretty collaborative process. Were you working with your editors pretty closely throughout the whole thing?
Yeah, my editor and I would go back and forth with some frequency. I definitely wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Another instruction they gave me at the beginning that was enormously helpful was they wanted to make sure it was credible, that it relied not on advocates who had a leftist point of view, but was very reported and bureaucratic and insider-y — which sounds a little bit demeaning — but which would comprehend the War on Drugs as people were actually fighting it. That direction was critical because it gave the piece credibility.

One of the things that has been heartening is to hear people who were former D.A.s and policymakers say, “That’s how I remember it.” That’s what we were striving for, not to condemn the War on Drugs or detail a kind of argument.

How many people did you speak with? Did you speak with them once or do multiple interviews?
It was both. My guess is about 75 or 100 people. There were a few who were really critical sources, many of whom appear in the story frequently, who I went back to again and again. John Carnevale [the budget director of the drug control office] had a terrific aggregate view of what was happening, both in the macropolicy world and in the policy world. So did Carol Bergman, who was the legislator for a few drug czars. Many of the people I just spoke to once. I don’t know how many people we quote in the story. 35? 30? Maybe not that many. We were going back and forth a couple of times with most of the people I ended up quoting.

The thing that jumped out reporting this was it’s like the old men who sit around at the V.A. telling stories about the one battle they were sort of near in World War II. For the people who’ve gone through this, who’ve been D.A.s and police officers, this is something they care enormously about and they want to tell you their war stories. Many people have asked me since this came out whether there was a reluctance to talk to me and Rolling Stone. I tell them, “No, it was really the opposite.” People who have spent their lives trying to figure out how best to fight the drug war were extremely eager to tell their stories and show their perspective. As you talk to these people, very quickly the war stories begin to come out. For the most part, it wasn’t a pulling teeth or contentious set of interviews. It was a very pleasant and interesting narrative process. People are very constructed in their heads of these stories as stories because they told them to their friends and their grandkids. It was ripe for picking.

How’d you go about finding your sources?
The first thing I did was compile a timeline of significant characters and events in Washington legislatively. As you go about tracking down the staffers who were involved in those efforts, they give you more names of people they worked with: D.A. agents, social service providers in California. The decision of what policy choices [the government made] at certain times responding to what phenomena was out there not only gave the story a structure but also gave me a reporting framework because it gave me a basic line to spool out from. I was basically filling out this single narrative. I got some people through the DEA. I got some people, specifically care providers, by looking up interesting local stories, seeing who was quoted, and tracking them down. I got a bunch of people through looking up the research and seeing who the academics were who were doing interesting things in the world. The biggest thing was just talking to people who were dealing with this stuff legislatively and figuring what inputs they had and working backwards from there. The amazing thing about beginning as a political reporter — which is what I began as — is that so much moves through Washington and if you have a basic handle on how Washington operates, it can give you a way to write all kinds of great things like this.

How many pages of notes and hours of tape did you have and how did you group it all together when you sat down to write? Did you use an outline?
I don’t know how many pages of notes. When I was like a third of the way through the reporting, I started to notice things that people kept talking about as a critical moment, such as the conversations within the Clinton administration over whether to commit to Plan Colombia, which was a huge, several billion dollar program that’s now lasted seven years. This was regarded by everybody as a catalytic moment in the spooling out of the drug war from one century to another. Everybody talked about the conversations between Jim Burke, who’s the head of the Partnership for a Drug Free America, and Barry McCaffrey, who was Clinton’s second drug czar, in which Burke convinced McCaffrey to commit to this focus on youth prevention.

As I was going through the reporting, I sat down and said, “What are the 15 episodes that link up all the raw material that I’m getting.” Then I went back to my editor and he said, “That one sounds sensible, that one sounds terrible.” Once I had that, I could basically concentrate my reporting more, not to exclusively focus on those specific things, but to understand how each of these moments fit into the narrative. The weird and exciting thing about the story was the way in which it linked up activity at all different levels and all different places.

When did you start writing? Did you do all the reporting first and then begin writing?
I basically did all of [the reporting first]. I finished the draft in August and we didn’t do much with it for a month or so. Then there was some editing in October and we edited it on and off in November, but there wasn’t a huge time crunch. The assignment I had was write it when I was done [reporting], which was a nice luxury. I was going at a pace of about 1,000 words a day, which for me is a considerable clip, but with a 15,000-word piece, that’s still a considerable amount of time. It took me the better part of a working month — from the middle of July to the middle of August — to write.

And when did you start the reporting?
May.

Do you think the article successful? What do you think of the final product?
Yeah, I think it was really good. I think the reaction has been terrific. It’s a complicated thing and part of the struggle with the topic is that what is most critical to understand is masked. Right now, if we are thinking about meth amphetamine policy, we want to know where the raw chemicals come from, how they are transported into the U.S., and whether we are doing the right thing to combat them, but because there’s this fog of illegality, you never know exactly how that’s working. You have to rely on some triangulation of law enforcement people who are trying to fight it and policy people who are trying to figure out how it works and registered parties and cobble it together. I don’t pretend that throughout the tale it’s absolutely right. There are places where it falls far short of achieving truth, but I think it’s a pretty solid account of how the policy evolved and it’s an honest attempt to wrestle with how the traffic has evolved. There are certainly things that I know I could do better. I feel like there are some characters that we could have developed a little further, who were more compelling than we made them in the draft. There were things like that.

One of the things that has been nice is watching how people have responded. They responded to all different parts of it. I’ll see an article [discussing my article] that focuses on the overall structure of policy, then I’ll get interviewed by a radio station about the meth epidemic, and then I’ll see a blog post that is detailing the innovative new ideas about policing and how drug crime works. A nice thing about this piece is that its been large enough to contain a lot of different ideas about how the world of drug traffic and drug consumption work. It’s always a little bit hard to access your own work but this is one of the few pieces that I haven’t been completely embarrassed to read.

What’s up next for you?
I’m doing two pieces. One for Rolling Stone, which is an attempt to detail the political closet, focusing on the ways in which gay politicians are being closeted and how that closet is being broken or has been broken in the last couple of years. It’s been a nice mix of being political significant because of how the country’s politics have evolved, but also being a documentary of a microculture, which is where I think journalism can do it better than other fields.

The second, for another magazine, is a piece about the culture of Republican operatives, but it’s through a discussion of the efforts of the National Republican Campaign Committee, which is the institutional arm of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. It focuses on how they come up with sufficiently compelling candidates to take back the House and the Senate, and in what ways and how have the politics of the country shifted since 2004.

Tips on writing a long article
1. Be conscious of why a reader would read it
“A 15,000-word piece takes 50 minutes to read. It’s an enormous commitment, so at every point you have to be conscious of what is going to get the reader from word 5,100 to word 5,300. The best you can do is try to ensure you’re investing the piece with enough of the natural drama that the real world has, so the reader will continue reading after 1993 when you’ve had your nut graf,” Wallace-Wells says.
2. Be really into the subject
“I just started writing really long pieces a couple of years ago and there’s a natural impulse to game out what’s compelling to an editor and try to get into the magazine by guessing their interests. But if I hadn’t enjoyed paging through old Nexis clips of old crack epidemic stories, I would have been bored out of my skull.”
3. Listen
“I came into this story with the idea that drug policy had been badly botched and that bottom-line impression hasn’t changed, but the reasons for it have changed enormously,” says Wallace-Wells. “I’m much more sympathetic to drug warriors, the law and order perspective, and the difficulty of doing something about a very real problem than I had been at the outset. That sensibility helped make the story more credible.”

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. You can reach him at NOAH at MEDIABISTRO dot COM.

When BusinessWeek decided to freshen up its look, the magazine’s editors decided to go in an unusual direction. Instead of hiring a traditional design firm, they recruited Modernista!, a Boston-based advertising agency that had previously worked on the redesign on IN magazine. A team from the company worked in concert with BW‘s editorial staff, including editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and art director Andrew Horton, to remake the book for the Internet age. Bruce Crocker, design director at the firm, discussed the process his team went through, the end result, and the difficult task of “brand soul searching.”

Modernista is known primarily as an advertising agency. How did you end up working on the BusinessWeek redesign?

Modernista was approached by BusinessWeek for the magazine redesign as a result of the relationship we had developed with them during our design work on IN magazine, a quarterly supplement that focuses on business innovation which we helped name. We were awarded that project because of the depth of Modernista’s design and strategic capabilities. While Modernista may be known primarily as an advertising agency, we have always had a comprehensive design component in our work. In fact, our creative teams are built with triads of writers, art directors, and designers who work very closely with our strategic planners.

Who was on the redesign team from both Modernista! and BusinessWeek? How closely did the two groups work together? What was the process?

For the BusinessWeek redesign, the core design team at Modernista consisted of executive creative director, Gary Koepke; myself as design director; senior designer, Katie Andresen, who incidentally did much of the heavy lifting; and designer, Michael Seitz. Additionally, head of planning, Gareth Kay and account director, Kirsten Hano rounded out the team. On the BusinessWeek side, editor-in-chief, Steven Adler, and the magazine’s art director, Andrew Horton, were our contacts and collaborators.

Regarding the process, we approached the assignment the same proprietary way we approach all work at Modernista, which generally consists of brand soul searching, numerous research and audit exercises, strategic definition and positioning, and extensive creative/design explorations and testing. The working relationship between Modernista and BusinessWeek was relatively transparent. The fact that we were in Boston and BusinessWeek was in New York needed to be marginalized by regular on-site, face-to-face meetings at both locations. We were very sensitive to the distance factor and may have even over-compensated by having so many meetings. However, in practice, this approach not only became the best way to keep our communications tight, but also helped us stay on top of the rigorous schedule the assignment demanded. We also did a lot of electronic file sharing.

What were the challenges of redesigning a magazine to function in the digital world? How did you overcome them? What advice would you offer to others hoping to overhaul other magazines?

The balance and dynamics between print and digital are constantly shifting and being debated. We needed to keep our eye on a few key factors. Specifically, we needed to thoroughly understand how the magazine’s readers interact and absorb information through different media. Although this was a print assignment, it was critical that the reader experience be considered in conjunction with its digital counterpart. Simply put, print and digital are interrelated but engaged differently, so in a way, we needed to have a vision and strategy for both. The diverse resources that fall under the single Modernista roof gave us the ability to think three-dimensionally about the problem and ultimately provide a strategy that was logical and actionable.

The redesign includes a section that summarizes related articles from other publications. In the age of Internet aggregators such as Drudge and Google News, do you think more publications will follow this trend in their print editions? What other magazines or magazine genres lend themselves to this sort of cross-pollination?

Editorial aggregation is nothing new. In fact, in the early nineties, Modernista founder Gary Koepke, along with editor Michael Schultze, created a Dunn and Bradstreet print publication called World Tour in which all of its content was second source. It will be interesting to see how different media types will converge and how this type of information will be restructured and tailored to each particular reader experience. This is partly what we faced during the BusinessWeek redesign. In terms of specific genres of aggregated content that lend themselves to cross-pollination, for me it’s completely open-ended.

What’s your ultimate dream for the new BusinessWeek?
BusinessWeek has a very large and loyal subscription base, so part of our redesign objective was to create a publication that was even more relevant and useful as a tool to that base. Strengthening reader loyalty and increasing subscriptions is something that was very important. Another one of our key objectives was to provide a design that would help secure additional revenue from advertisers. If ad revenues increase over time, we’ll know that we’ve provided good value. But that’s not enough. The content flow, which we were a part of mapping out, needs to stand the test of time, as does the overall look and feel of what we’ve created. Additionally, we’d like to see other BusinessWeek products and services benefit from our contributions. If over the next six months to a year things are still intact, still relevant, and still functioning smoothly, we’ll feel good.

What’s next for you? Are you doing any more magazine redesigns in the future?

Modernista is constantly engaged in pursuing a number of diverse opportunities in areas that go beyond what is typically framed within an advertising agency. The recent U2 video that Gary Koepke directed is a great example how our curiosity has been realized. That’s exciting for us. So it could be just about anything that asks for a new point of view.

Four tips for successfully redesigning a magazine
1) Do your research.
Modernista and BusinessWeek spent “Many months asking several thousands of people, readers and nonreaders questions about what they want and expect” from the magazine, Crocker says.
2) Set goals.
“Strengthening reader loyalty and increasing subscriptions is something very important,” Crocker says and the redesign focused on helping achieve these goals.
3) Don’t be afraid to aggregate content from other sources.
“BusinessWeek shares ideas that they have found insightful even if they weren’t invented within the publication,” says Crocker.
4) Shake up the norm.
New sections will include The Business Week, News, In Depth, What’s Next, Personal Business, and Opinion. Columnists and a weekly feature will reside in a new back-of-book section.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. He can be reached at Noah AT mediabistro DOT com.