Mark Whitaker is on a roll. His magazine, Newsweek, just won its second National Magazine Award for General Excellence in three years. The first, in 2002, was essentially for the magazine’s coverage of September 11 and its aftermath, and was probably the sweeter one, as it was a head-to-head victory over archrival Time. This year’s was for Newsweek‘s war reportage, and it was still more evidence that Whitaker made the right decision upon ascending to the editor’s chair in 1998 not to follow Walter Isaacson’s thinking at Time that the future of the newsweeklies lay in soft news. These days, it seems Newsweek is battling literally everyone for scoops in Iraq, whether it’s Seymour Hersh’s one-man gang at The New Yorker, the news networks (including Al-Jazeera), and even bloggers on the ground in Baghdad. Whitaker took some time out from his duties to discuss the end of the newsweeklies’ identity crisis, the leaks in the Bush Administration threatening to become a flood, and Newsweek‘s chances for more National Magazine Award success in 2005.

Birthdate: September 7, 1957
Hometown: Norton, Massachusetts
First section of Sunday Times: “In order: The news section, the business section, the Sunday Styles section, sports, and then I end with the Week in Review. And then I do the Sunday puzzle.”

Tell me about your ascent through Newsweek. You started there as an intern and never left—I thought no one spends their career with one publication anymore.
I’m of the generation where everyone was changing jobs. I thought I was strange because I wasn’t. I’ve stayed in one place because it was always interesting. On the other hand, I had no idea that things were going to turn out this way. I left grad school without completing my Ph.D. thesis to take a junior-level job. When I first arrived in New York in 1981, they didn’t even have an office for me. For six months, I had to sit at the desks of various vacationing secretaries. Then I was moved into a windowless office for a year. Believe me, I don’t think I was being groomed for anything besides writing sidebars and being the person who would stay and do the late shift on Saturday night, so the more experienced writers could have weekends to themselves.

Originally, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. They said, “Why don’t you come to New York for a year and meet some people, and then we’ll send you back out?” Of course, I never got back out. It was the Reagan era—either a Soviet leader was dying every week, or we were invading a country every week, so there was just a lot going on. Then our business editor quit. I asked [then-editor] Rick Smith if I could have the business job. He was nice enough to give it to me. He didn’t have to, because I didn’t have a business background, but he trusted my sense of what a Newsweek story should be. I did it for four years, and in a way it was like going back to school, because I was learning a lot about business. That was a great time to be editing business. We had the crash; we had the S&L crisis; it was the Milken era. Then, after the first Gulf War, there was this big changing of the guard. Maynard Parker was named editor, and he asked me to be one of his AMEs. When Maynard died of leukemia in 1998, I was his number two, so I just fell into the editor job.

Congratulations on your latest National Magazine Award. The way I understand it, the magazines up for General Excellence don’t really compete against each other, but against some platonic version of itself. Is Newsweek living up to its platonic ideal of itself right now? And isn’t it interesting that Newsweek—and the newsweeklies—have finally roused themselves during these troubled times?
Well, I like to think we do a good job at anytime. But clearly this has been a historic period ever since 9/11, and I think it allows us to really display our strengths. It’s at times like these that people look at these magazines, and that has coincided with our rethinking of what a newsmagazine should be, and committing to the idea that we had to not just summarize the news; even if you did it elegantly with nice pictures was not enough. You had to break news, you had to set agendas, you had to do original analysis, you had to do things that even well-informed readers getting their news from other sources would find fresh and valuable. I had taken my editorial staff on a retreat six months before September 11, and we had decided that was the direction we had wanted to go in.

So has the identity crisis the newsweeklies were having in the ’90s, a time of peace and prosperity, passed once and for all?
That’s always with us. People have been predicting the demise of the newsmagazine certainly as long as I’ve been doing this. And we’re still around. We’re still healthy. So I think it’s a very enduring format. I also think it’s no accident that it’s a widely copied format. The front page of The New York Times looks more like a news magazine today than it did 20 years ago. TV newsmagazines—Dateline and 60 Minutes and so forth—have done very well emulating the format. So all of that I take as a sign that it’s a very healthy concept. However, the more people emulate it, the more we have to push the envelope and keep trying new things, so we’re moving on and rethinking the form.

Walter Isaacson transformed Time during the ’90s into a magazine that was much softer than its predecessors, and he was hailed for turning it around. But he doesn’t have any General Excellence Ellies to show for it. Is hard news back? Is this what a mini-Renaissance for the genre looks like?
Absolutely. And I think, at the end of the day, that’s why people buy and subscribe to newsmagazines. I defend the mix—having a mix of hard and soft news is a good thing. I think occasionally doing a back-of-the-book soft feature on the cover is fine. But when people are deciding to resubscribe, they’re doing it on the basis of your news coverage.

The other things are great and add to their sense of value, but I think it’s the job that you do on the big events of the day that drives the subscriber circulation. And even on the newsstand, our biggest sellers historically have all been news stories. They are not celebrity stories; they are not soft stories; they are not even religion stories, which tend to sell well. But the biggest sellers have been in the period after the first couple of weeks after September 11, when we broke all records. So I think it’s a misconception that news doesn’t work for newsmagazines on the newsstand. It does but it has to be a very intense news climate when people are very hungry.

There’s definitely a hunger for news about Abu Ghraib, the general situation in Iraq, and what, if anything, the Bush Administration knows about both. Seymour Hersh is breaking stories singlehandedly, while Bob Woodward has disgruntled government sources eating out of his hand. Now even Colin Powell’s own handlers are shoving him away from TV camera. Is the wall of secrecy around the White House crumbling?
I think that it is folly for any administration to think that it can totally control information. It was interesting—watch the Rumsfeld hearings, and there were times that he seemed almost as upset that he couldn’t control information as he was about what had happened in the prison. But that’s the era we live in. Yes, a lot of the leaks and the cracks we’ve seen in the administration—which had been very good, and frustratingly so, about message discipline—are the result of deep divisions within this administration about how this war has been handled—now, particularly, that it’s become so messy. Divisions about the way intel was handled before the fact, about the lack of postwar planning, about issues of how and when we’re going to hand over power to the Iraqis. And, obviously, over the prison scandal now.

It’s partly the State Department versus the Defense Department, and it’s also the FBI versus the CIA. There’s a growing split in the conservative movement between neocons and more isolationist conservatives. And all of that gives people more incentive to leak and to talk, and that’s why we’re getting all of these stories. That being said, I think that you need really good reporters to get them. It’s not an accident that Sy Hersh and Mike Isikoff for us are getting these stories, because they are great reporters.

Who do you trust? Where do you look for reliable sources? Is there a inclination to distrust government sources—particularly high level ones—because of these competing agendas and previous misinformation?
I think you have to look everywhere. If Rumsfeld or Bush wants to give us an interview, then we’re happy to talk to them. But I think you also have to listen not only to the other critical sources in Washington, but to people on the ground. One of the things that has made me confident about our critical reporting before the war, during the war, and since the war has been the guidance I’ve been getting from our correspondents in Iraq. They said before the war, “Look, this postwar is going to be a mess. This is not going to be easy. This is a very divided country. All of these religious conflicts are going to come to the fore. Chalabi and the people we’re going to try to put into power are not respected,” and so forth.

Melinda Liu stayed in Baghdad during the whole war, and she was reporting from the first week on that we were not going to be greeted as liberators. Rod Nordland has been there for the better part of the last year and he is very gloomy about our prospects. It’s going to be very hard to have the positive outcome we were hoping for. So, I think when you’re hearing that from the field, it makes it a lot easier to stand behind and trust your critical reporting no matter what the administration is telling you. But that’s always been true. It was true in Vietnam. The press became more critical of the war in Vietnam before a lot of institutions, probably because they had reporters like David Halberstam and others who were saying “Look, this is not going to turn out well.”

But today you also have unabashedly partisan media, particularly in cable news, who insist the war is going well, if for no other reason than it helps ratings to do so.
There’s a real appetite for it. I don’t think the media is creating the divisions; I think the divisions are feeding the success of both TV shows and publications and a lot of books that are very partisan. There’s a real audience there, because that’s the way people feel. It’s sad. It’s sad for this country that people are so divided. Not that there aren’t real reasons for it, but we’re unfortunately getting closer to the point where one side just won’t listen to the other. Part of that came out during the Richard Clarke hearings before the 9/11 commission. The Bush administration was not paying attention to some of these warnings the Clinton administration left them about terrorism partly because they were coming form the Clinton administration, and they hated the Clintonites so much that they figured, “Whatever they tell us must be wrong.” Clark was a guy who worked for both administrations. He’s become quite anti-Bush now, because he thinks Bush screwed up the war on terror, but he was a career bureaucrat with a particular expertise, so there was no reason to think that he had any sort of agenda coming in. But they figured he worked for Clinton, so who needs to listen to him? I think that’s sad, and I fear that the anger is so deep that even if Bush is defeated and Kerry and the Democrats come to power their hatred and distrust of Bush will be so great that they will make the same mistakes.

What do you figure your chances are of repeating in 2005 for General Excellence?
Zero.

Zero?
No, I don’t know. We’ve been very fortunate, and I’m very proud of our two wins. I think it’s great for our staff, and they’ve worked hard for it. But I don’t think anybody here expects necessarily to become the Los Angeles Lakers or the Chicago Bulls of the National Magazine Awards.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer who has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

David Brooks has just about had it with the bobos. The New York Times op-ed columnist may have coined the nickname for so-called “bourgeois bohemians” in his 2000 bestseller, Bobos in Paradise, but his bobo critics haven’t been kind to its follow-up, this summer’s On Paradise Drive. Both books attempt to trace the sociological contours of upper-middle-class America, the first focusing on cheerful, middle-aged liberals in the Northeast, and the latter on cheerful middle-aged conservatives in the multiplying “exurbs” of the Southwest. While Bobos attracted great reviews, this time around Michael Kinsley delivered a 2,000-word smackdown of Paradise in The New York Times Book Review—Brooks’s own paper!—accusing him of the mortal sins of jokiness and generalizations. But Kinsley admitted the real reason liberals feel betrayed by Brooks in the first paragraph of his review: “Liberals suspect that a writer as amiable as Brooks must be a liberal at heart.” He’s not, as he proves twice a week on the Times op-ed page. This, Kinsley wrote, is his “prize for being the liberals’ favorite conservative.” If so, Brooks thinks they have a funny way of showing it.

Birthdate: August 11, 1961
Hometown: Born in Toronto, raised in New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: “I always told myself that if I ever gave up reading the sports page first, I’d have to retire.”

Tell me about your career—how does one end up on the op-ed page of The New York Times?
I worked as a columnist at my school paper, at the University of Chicago, and then I worked for a free Southside weekly in Chicago, which didn’t last long. Then I worked for the City News Bureau, which is the legendary police-reporting wire service owned by the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Then I went from covering rapes on the Southside to the National Review, and that’s sort of my most interesting story. When I was at Chicago writing a humor column, I wrote a parody of Bill Buckley’s life, and he said to an audience in Chicago, “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.” Three years later I’d gotten a little more conservative, so I called him and asked, “Is the offer still open?”

I went to work at the National Review for a year, and then I went to work at The Washington Times, where I did some work as a movie critic and editorial writer. During that time I started writing magazine pieces about the supply-side movement, and I was hired to be a book-review editor at The Wall Street Journal in 1985. So I worked there as a book-review editor, then editorial page correspondent in Europe for four years, then as op-ed editor. I’d done that for a year-and-a half when my friends, along with Rupert Murdoch, started a magazine: The Weekly Standard. And I thought it would be fun to hang around my friends. So I moved down to Washington to do that.

How did you develop the ideas of On Paradise Drive? I recognized many of them—”Patio Man,” “Red & Blue America,” “The Organization Kid,” etc.—from your recent magazine pieces. Did you start with a thesis and explore it in magazines, or did writing the stories lead you to your concept?
A little of both. While I was touring for the last book, I found millions of places where nobody ate organic vegetables. And at the same time there was all this growth out in the suburbs. So I thought, “Why don’t I write about these people, who are very much mainstream Americans?” Then 9/11 happened, which made American identity seem more important to me. And then it was sort of an evolution of my being curious about this while working at magazines, so it led to a bunch of magazine pieces. But it was also part of a general interest that I thought I would probably get a book out of it.

Are you worried about being a one-trick pony? There’s a groundswell of pop sociology books out right now, and you seem to be the leader of this cottage industry.
I think people like reading about themselves. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was a whole bunch of these books about popular sociology, and it just sort of died away after that, which I thought was weird. So I think we’re returning to a more normal state. As for me, I think I’ve probably run the string out on this kind of book. I think the Kinsley review showed that people are less inclined to want this kind of book from me. They see me as political, and they’re less willing to play along, especially if they don’t share my political views. I think the reality is I just can’t do this kind of book anymore.

What do you think of your “liberals’ favorite conservative” title? Did you make a deal with yourself to embrace that role when you took the Times job?
I’m a New Yorker, I’m Jewish, and my style of conservatism is sort of Teddy Roosevelt’s style, or Alexander Hamilton’s style, and that’s who I am. That sometimes puts me two-thirds of the way in the normal conservative camp and one-third of the way out, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m culturally liberals’ favorite conservative. I’m from the Northeast; I’m not a big-hair guy from Texas.

Do you think Bobos in particular cemented that stereotype? Because you seemed to be writing about liberals, or at least how liberals saw themselves?
I didn’t think of it at the time as being about liberals. They’ve turned more liberal because of Bush and the war. But I didn’t think of that as a political book. I don’t see On Paradise Drive as a political book—I don’t think the words “George Bush” or “Iraq” appear in it. It’s turned out in the reviews that the reviewers who have identified themselves as liberals have been much more negative about the books than about the people who have identified themselves as conservatives. It may just be a fact that in a polarized age you just can’t write nonpolitical books anymore if you have my job.

How does the media class fit into your scheme of things? It seems to me they’d be contemptuous of the people featured in On Paradise Drive—the super-prosperous neo-suburban families.
If there’s a generalization of the media class, it’s that it tends to be more urban than the rest of the country. I think that while the media’s done a much better job in the past four or five of covering religion, there’s still a ways to go. Pentecostalism is the most important social movement of the 20th century. There were zero Pentecostals in the world in 1900. Now there are 500 million. If you went to a newsroom and asked, “What’s a Pentecostal?” not many people would give you an intelligent answer. And one of the things I’ve tried to do in this book is try to understand why people move to these “exurbs.” They get castigated as these vacuous sprawl zones, and I think there’s an easy put-down of the people who live there—they’re supposedly shallow, materialistic, complacent. I think it’s a lot more complicated why people move out to places like that.

Can the media understand that? Do we need to embed top editors and producers in the heartland before we can fix this?
I’m for ideological and cultural diversity. I still think there’s not enough. If you walk through Conde Nast or walk through any large corporation, there aren’t enough Pentecostals, not enough conservatives. There’s just not much of a media landscape that looks like America. I’m not sure I’m the answer either, because I’m from New York.

When Philadelphia magazine sent a reporter to exurban Pennsylvania, where you had set a number of first-hand anecdotes about life in semi-rural, “red” America, the reporter discovered a list of small inaccuracies and overreaching generalizations. On the one hand, it was extremely petty. On the other, it raises questions about your methodology.
A couple of things. First, if you applied that sort of standard or investigation to any story, you couldn’t do anything except straight sociological treatises. You couldn’t do any humor, any sort of broad writing. In the Atlantic piece—my red/blue piece that he analyzed—90 percent was straight, and heavily fact-checked by the Atlantic, and most of his examples were drawn from this initial, broad riff I opened the piece with. And in some cases I thought he got things exactly wrong and he knew he got them wrong. I made a joke about there being more book stores in blue America than red America, and he says I got that wrong. But that’s just not true.

There were some things where my writing was overly careless. Out of all the facts in that piece, I’m not sure these were the damning ones that any fair-minded person would pull out to analyze that piece. I think he was being picky. But that’s the difference between being a Times columnist and not. When you get up to being a Times columnist—especially if you’re a conservative—there’s just going to be a greater tendency to want to pull you down. So that piece was not written out of any fair investigation of who I am, it was a piece to try to pull me down a peg. And there’s just going to be more of that. But that’s life. It comes with the territory.

What’s the reader response to these passages? Being a Midwest-bred, New York-dwelling liberal, all of your cracks about the heartland ring true to me. Do some people say, “That’s exactly right,” or “That’s not true at all?”
Most people seemed to say I get the feel of things right. Some people say I got it wrong. That sort of style is imprecise—you’re describing a mood or a zeitgeist of a place, and there’s inevitably a level of imprecision you can’t capture in sociological data. The reader has to be willing to play along and sort of laugh or not laugh, and say that’s right or that’s wrong. It’s written in a playful manner and has to be read in a playful manner. If someone’s coming to do a hit-job, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable for somebody who doesn’t want to play along, who wants to be hostile.

One of the things I’ve noticed with this book and my new status, is that it’s been positively reviewed by most people who were conservative or didn’t declare their political allegiance, and negatively reviewed by most people who’ve declared their liberalism. It could just be that we’re in a war, and Abu Ghraib and all that, and they don’t want to play along. They’re not in the mood to be amused by me. Look at my Amazon.com page, and there are two or three reviews that mention Ahmed Chalabi. I’ve never met Chalabi, I don’t think I’ve ever written about Chalabi. There are a bunch of people who attack me for supposedly being a part of the war cabal. Whatever I write, they’re just not in the mood to be amused by me, because they’re angry about this or that.

On the flip side, do conservatives see you as being part of the liberal media machinery? Do you get tarred from both sides?
I do, but not so much from conservatives. Those who know me know that I’m a sort of Teddy Roosevelt in any case, so they didn’t expect me to be Robert Novak. There is criticism from the right, but I happen to think—maybe I just feel it from where I’m sitting—that the rage is mostly from the left these days. The right is more or less in power, and therefore they’re less enraged at the world. And you sort of know the Bush Administration has screwed up a few things, so they’re not in the mood to be rageful. They’re in the mood to be self-lacerating. One of the things that’s been striking about this job is the number of people who call me in the middle of night and leave messages insulting me one way after another. There’s just a level of howling that goes on that I haven’t encountered before.

What are you writing about next? If you’re done with the bobos, what’s the next big thing?
I’m not writing a book these days. I’m just going to work on the column. In theory, I’d like to write another book, but I’ve obviously got to wait to see how Iraq winds up, how the election winds up, how the culture war winds up.

Do you want to do an even-bigger picture book then?
I haven’t really thought about it. I’d like to find a subject that really engages me. Thomas Friedman has done books on globalization, because he’s found a big subject that engages him. I don’t think I’d do it on foreign policy. Maybe I’ll find a domestic policy issue that really engages me. The problem is that for it to work, I’d want the book to sell, and at the moment, only the political sells. The only nonfiction books that sell—

—Are the pure vitriol adhering to party lines.
I’d rather shoot myself. I don’t want to write that kind of book, and maybe it’s just the wrong climate for the kind of book I want to write. In which case, I’ll just play with my kids.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer who has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily. You can buy On Paradise Drive at Amazon.com.

Bill Press knows why you don’t hear what you don’t want to hear. As the author of Spin This! and the former co-host of CNN’s The Spin Room, Press charted how glossings-over, obfuscations, and non-denial denials often become the first drafts of history. And unlike certain populist liberals who can mow down conservative opponents, provided they’re straw men, Press is used to climbing into the ring every day with conservative pit bull Pat Buchanan on Crossfire and later on MSNBC’s Buchanan and Press. So his credentials are in order for writing yet another George W. Bush attack book, the unambiguously titled Bush Must Go, which he conceived as one-stop shopping for arguments against re-electing the sitting president. Press took some time recently to talk to mediabistro.com about his book, red media vs. blue media, and why terrorists always seem to be on the prowl when Democrats are finally getting some good press.

Birthdate: April 8, 1940
Hometown: Delaware City, Delaware
First section of the Sunday Times: “Sunday Styles. I always read the wedding of the week first.”

So how did you get to where you are?
I never went to journalism school, and I never trained as a journalist. I was just very lucky to arrive where I am. I studied for the seminary for 10 years after high school, then left the seminary and went to California and got involved in politics. I ended up being Governor Jerry Brown’s policy director in Sacramento. At that point, I had sort of enough of politics and wanted to try my hand at media. This was 1980. With no TV, radio, or print experience, I applied for a position as a political commentator at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and I got the job. So I worked in Los Angeles for roughly 15 years, doing talk radio and television commentary on the evening news. Then in 1996, Michael Kinsley left Crossfire, and I auditioned for that position on the left at Crossfire, and got the job. I moved to Washington, and did Crossfire for six years. I was fired by Walter Isaacson and moved over to MSNBC, where Pat Buchanan and I did Buchanan and Press for a year and a half, and now Pat and I are political commentators.

You recently made a rather remarkable statement on CNN’s Reliable Sources while defending Michael Moore. You said “I’m here to defend the premise that the left can be as hard-hitting and sometimes as careless with the truth as the right.” A few questions come to mind: Is defeating Bush in November a higher goal than the truth? Is Moore allowed some leeway because he’s not a journalist per se? And what is the definition of a journalist these days?
The point I was making on Reliable Sources about the Michael Moore movie was that there is a huge double standard going on. There is a demand for absolute accuracy on the left, and no interest in accuracy on the right. I say that’s not fair. I don’t see anybody doing daily fact-checking. I never see Reliable Sources do a whole show to fact-check Rush Limbaugh, or fact-check Bill O’Reilly, or fact-check Sean Hannity. And they spew the same lies over and over and over again every day. I know because I’ve appeared on those shows. They’ve been doing it and getting away with it for years, and suddenly someone has come along on the left who is very effective, has a huge audience, and huge popularity—and it’s not just the right wing that is claiming Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t kosher because he exaggerates here and there, but even mainstream media is piling on.

So I say, where were they? Where’ve they been for the last 15 years? I think you have to distinguish that from people like myself, who are journalists who have to be very careful with the truth. Well, journalists are those who practice journalism as a profession. There are reporters whose job it is merely to report the news, pure and simple. But there are commentators like myself who are hired to give their opinion on one side or the other, and then there are people like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore, who are pure polemicists, and they’re not expected to deal in the whole truth. Everybody knows that’s who they are, and they can get away with a lot more than I could, or Bob Novak could, or Pat Buchanan could.

Why did you feel the need to write Bush Must Go when there are many Bush attack books out now? What was your initial aim, and who is the intended audience? It seems like you’re preaching to the choir, like all the other authors.
Well, as I like to say, my book is the latest but the best of the Bush-bashing books. My idea to write this actually came about at the beginning of December, when I was hearing from a lot of people on the left, “I hate Bush; I can’t stand the way he talks; I can’t stand the way he walks,” that sort of personal stuff. For me, politics is about policy, not personality. So I wanted to get beyond that almost infantile personal stuff and really lay out in one place as tight as I could from a policy point of view the reasons why I believe that George Bush has been a dangerous president and should not be re-elected. I went to the publishers and said I wanted to deliver a handbook for Campaign 2004 for Democrats and for uncommitted voters. I wanted to provide them with the arguments they need all in one place—a one-stop shop for why Bush must go.

Most people don’t have access to the resources that I have. They may have heard something about the economy, they may have heard something about the environment, they may have heard something about weapons of mass destruction. But I wanted to put it all in one place for easy access, for people who needed information that they could take to their co-workers, or their family members, or their friends, and say this is why it’s important to get rid of this guy. So it is a book meant for the choir. But it’s also a book meant for those people—and maybe there are only 10 percent of them in this country—who are still on the fence and want to know just the facts about what Bush has done and what he hasn’t done. I think that if people read the book they’ll come to the conclusion that he has proven he’s not up to the job. Or to put it more strongly, I think I prove that he’s taken this country in some pretty dangerous directions.

Well, what should be the role of journalists right now? Do you think places like Fox News have abdicated their responsibilities as journalists and are presidential boosters, as their critics claim? And, if so, how should liberal journalists respond?
I believe these times demand of journalists to do their jobs, and I do not think they are doing their jobs. I don’t expect any better of Fox News than a right-wing slant; that’s who they are, they’re proud of it, and everybody knows it. But I do expect The New York Times to do its job. I expect NBC, CBS, and ABC to do their jobs, and that means not just accepting whatever propaganda they get out of the White House—any White House, Democratic or Republican. They need to do their own due diligence and their own homework, to ascertain what the facts are and report the facts. They did not do that in the campaign of 2000, they’ve never done that with George W. Bush, and I think they have given a total across-the-board pass to George W. Bush and his administration. They simply reprint and repeat their lies without fact checking. They’re partly responsible for taking us to war in Iraq because they didn’t do their homework. In an election season or not, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, I don’t care—the media’s job is not to take sides. The media’s job is to report the news and not just to repeat what’s in a White House press release, or what the President says.

What do you think of efforts like Air America to build a separate-but-equal liberal media universe to oppose Fox News? The idea of Crossfire—that liberals and conservative can debate the issues of the day with civility and ideas—seems almost alien today.
I don’t buy the premise that Americans just want right-wing opinion on right-wing talk radio and television. I do believe that there is an audience and a hunger for voices on the left and voices in the middle. You can’t find that today on talk radio because frankly, most talk radio program directors are unwilling to put a liberal on the air. That has given birth to two efforts actually, and you mentioned one—Air America, with Al Franken, Janeane Garofolo, and company trying to create an entire liberal radio network. There’s also a second effort called Democracy Radio, which is attempting to find good, strong liberal voices and put them on existing radio as part of a mix.

I think both are healthy and both are needed, and it’s a tough go because it’s expensive, but I think both will succeed. But it could lead to a situation where people just turn to the radio station or TV network that feeds them the political point of view that they want to hear, and they’re never exposed to any other opinion. I fear that as well, and I hope that doesn’t happen. I think the best solution is, again, to have your mainstream media that do nothing but report the news, and then to have on the opinion side —whether it’s talk radio or talk TV—a good healthy mix of opinion. I think that’s how democracy is best served.

Obviously you don’t think it’s particularly served well right now.
No. I don’t believe the media are serving the public well today because I don’t think the media are doing their job of being fiercely objective, doing their homework, and laying the facts on the table and letting the chips fall where they may. Inevitably—and I know this from my own work—they’re going to be accused at one point of tilting to the left, at another point of tilting to the right, and that comes with the territory. They’ve got to just be strong and courageous and do their job and be willing to take the flak. It’s when they start trimming their sails, which they’re doing today, that they really abandon what their cause is, and that’s when they’re not serving journalism well. And I’m afraid that’s where we are today. I’ll give you one current example.

There’s Tom Ridge out there again with another terrorism warning. Based on what? Based on nothing? Based simply on the fact that for two days, John Kerry and John Edwards were on the front page of every major newspaper, looking a lot better than Republicans thought they ever would. So I’m convinced without even doing the homework that the right changed the subject. The last time there was a terror warning—you can track them—happened to be when Abu Ghraib was in the headlines. So Ridge says, “I’m going to make this announcement,” and the cable networks turn this whole operation over to him, with no critical commentary. OK, if they’re going to cover it, then they ought to have somebody from the other side, saying “Let’s look at this. What prompted this? And why is it that every time the Democrats seem to be making some good news, the administration tries to say ‘The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming!’?” I didn’t see anybody doing that. How many times did the administration pull that gag? It’s same old trick, and the cable networks fall for it. They’re not doing their job. So I’ve made my point.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. He previously covered media from Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

While most of the American sports media is resigned to tearing itself away from pennant races and football training camps this week to cover the soap opera beginning in Athens on Friday, Sports Illustrated‘s Olympics beat writer, Brian Cazeneuve, has been preparing for these Games nearly as long as some of the athletes have been in training. Cazeneuve, 38, has been in Athens for almost a week now, laying the groundwork for SI‘s wall-to-wall coverage of the Games online and in the magazine. He’s already picked every medal winner of every event, as he does for each Winter and Summer Games. (And SI football guru Dr. Z thought he had it rough, predicting the Super Bowl winner every year.) Before he left on his Greek odyssey, Cazeneuve spoke to mediabistro.com about the simple matter of covering the sprawling, won’t-be-ready-until-Thursday, 28th Olympiad.

Birthdate: December 13, 1965
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports

This isn’t just a job for you, is it? It seems like a very specific calling.
I attended the 1984 Summer Olympics as a spectator. And by the end of the Opening Ceremonies, I had resolved that this would be my career, because I was so moved by the energy of the whole thing. Young people from 200 countries were in one place, and there was such a positive vibe about the whole thing. I decided on that day that this was going to be my career. That was July 28, 1984. So I overloaded my college course load at Boston University so I could graduate in three years and be able to attend the Calgary Winter Games. When the time came, I contacted some people at Time and sent them some clips, and there was an editor there who was open to the idea of me contributing to their Olympic coverage. But he said that he was going away for vacation for a while and could I please get him some story ideas? So three weeks later, I gave him a packet of 150 ideas, which I don’t think he anticipated, so he said, “OK, you’re hired.”

For a year I worked with them on the Calgary and Seoul games in 1988, and then I freelanced in Europe for three or four months at a time, basically sending a master list of ideas and events to different papers and wires, and I was very lucky because the first event that I ended up covering was for The New York Times. It was a track meet in Switzerland, and they had not agreed to use me, but they said, well, let’s see what happens at the meet. That night there was a world record broken during the very first event, and I happened to be in the stands sitting next to the person whose world record was broken. And both the Mets and the Yankees were rained out that night—both in different cities—so it ended up being the lead story in Sports.

Three records were set during that summer, and I happened to hit all of them just by chance. So I did some work for the Times, which at the time they did not have a full-time sports person in Europe. I did some for The Washington Post, the AP, Reuters, and Time, and I think by the time I came back and added up my income and expenses over four-and-a-half months, I was $17 ahead, which was thrilling, because it meant that I hadn’t gone into great debt. I did that for a couple of summers and during the winters I covered the Knicks, Jets, and Rangers for the AP, and I also edited a hockey magazine. And I kept building up different freelance clients until SI called me in 1995. I’ve been working for them since 1995. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. And it’s great to be able to do it.

Where are you staying in Athens? I’ve been reading that a number of guests will be housed in cruise ships because they couldn’t even finish the hotels in time.
We are staying at a hotel in the tourist section up the city, and it’s funny because one of the wings of the hotel apparently wasn’t finished. I think some of us who were planning to stay there have been moved to another hotel, and I know that some people on our publishing side are staying on a cruise ship. Hopefully when we arrive they won’t ask us to take out a hammer and nails.

Are these Games the culmination of two years of work? Is this a personal crescendo for you, or just another—admittedly huge—story?
This isn’t really like anything else in the sense that sometimes you have an Olympic cycle in which you might write about a particular athlete or a particular story, and then the storyline changes immediately after the Games are over. I think the public’s appetite for Olympic sports is voracious for a couple of weeks, and then the people sort of disappear from public view. It’s great if you get a chance to follow these people year-round and get to learn their stories and tell their stories to people in advance of the Games.

What makes the Olympics different from baseball, football, and basketball is that, because you have so many different sports and so many different cultures, you don’t have to tell the same story twice. If you are interviewing baseball players all the time, for example, their interest in talking to you is going to be limited. They feel they’ve heard the questions before, so there’s very little you can do that is unique for them that will keep their interest and encourage them to give you a good story. I also think that because an Olympic athlete is not well-compensated for what he or she does, that they’re not very spoiled and they’re very grateful for the coverage they receive. And because there aren’t that many people after them in the noncompetitive months, if you get people during that time, you get an exclusivity and an access that allows you to tell a pretty compelling story that hasn’t been told yet. That’s what I enjoy about covering the Olympic beat year-round. I’ve covered every winter and summer games since 1988 in Calgary.

But is it like other sports reporting? So much of Olympic reporting is purely human-interest driven. You don’t read thrilling stories about an actual decathlon, or see fencing highlights on SportsCenter.
I think that people who dedicate their lives to something as noble as competing in the Olympics in fencing have interesting stories to tell. I don’t think it’s necessary to throw statistics at people the way you would throw batting averages at a baseball fan. These are, in many cases, people with Ivy League backgrounds putting their careers on hold to go after something that will not make them any money even if they win gold medals. It’s compelling. Why would people want to do that? What about the romance of it, the pursuit of it, makes people want to do this? I think that if you tell that story, it doesn’t matter if that athlete is a fencer or a judo player or a rower or a wrestler. You’re telling a story of a young person who is very dedicated to something and who has arrived at that point in their lives because they have a focus that not everybody has. What is it that compels somebody to do that? I think that’s different than somebody who swings the bat four times a game, and his numbers are .280, 20 homers, and 80 RBIs. Great, but what’s his story?

Much has been made about the threat of terrorism to these Games in particular, but people seem to forget that terrorism is always a threat—Munich in ’72, of course, but there was also the bomb in Atlanta in 1996. How does the threat in Athens stack up historically?
There were some pretty energetic student protests before the games in Seoul, where students were throwing rocks and firebombing a couple of stores. There was concern about the Basque separatist movement before the Barcelona Olympics, and there was concern even before 9/11 about a group in Athens called the November 17th Group. They are anti-American, anti-Western, and they have carried out a number of assassinations over the past year in Greece. The Games are certainly a tempting target for anyone who wants to make a statement. Because we are more aware now of how high the stakes are, people are more aware of Olympic security than they would have been in the past. I don’t think too much has been made of the story, because obviously if there is a major incident it will greatly affect, if not end, this year’s Games.

Once you arrive in Athens, how will you approach the Games? What are SI‘s reporting logistics like?
I believe we have 11 writers and as many photographers going, plus technical people and a couple of editors. We’re going to have a fair number of pages in our issues during the Games, which I’m certainly happy about, and we also have to write for our website, SI.com. What we’ll do is hit the ground and—especially for the website and for the first week—try to gather up snapshots of things that happen in Athens. I’ll go to the athletes’ village, I’ll probably try to spend some time with an athlete’s family, try to go to a training session, spend some time talking to the U.S. flag-bearer for the opening ceremonies, and try to give people a sense of what it’s like to be there, and what makes the Olympics a unique experience.

Once the Games start, we will have sports specialist writers ready. We will have one person dedicated to track and field, another to swimming, another to gymnastics, another to basketball, another to boxing. And we will cover some of the smaller sports on an as-needed basis. And other sports may evolve into stories as the Games progress. That’s part of the charm of the Olympics—you can be in one place and something magical happens in another place that you didn’t anticipate, and so you’re scrambling to find out what happened and trying to be there. It’s a lot different from covering a world championship, where everything is centrally located. That’s how we’ll go about it. We’ll have a plan and obviously we’ll have to freelance a little bit as the Games progress and the stories evolve.

What do you think about the perception of the most recent Games as a giant, made-for-TV spectacle? The Atlanta Games in particular were perceived as a prime-time soap opera.
Of all the games I’ve been to, I will say this: Atlanta was very poorly run. I think we do not appreciate in the United States how badly those Games were perceived in the rest of the world—as more of a carnival than an Olympic Games. Part of the problem is that we had a lot of local people running the Games as opposed to people who’d run them in the past, people who understand what the Olympics are about. It’s not a Super Bowl; it’s 28 Super Bowls. It’s the Super Bowl-World Series-NBA Finals-Stanley Cup. Put them all together, they still don’t equal an Olympic Games in terms of logistical preparation. You have people from all over the world, so many languages and so many cultures you have to account for and so on.

I think the Salt Lake Games, in 2002, were very well run, and did a lot toward improving people’s perceptions of the way Americans can run an Olympic Games. They were not too big, they were not too carnival-like, the focus was on the sports themselves, and not on the athletes, and also it was in a place where they had held a lot of Olympic events before.

In Atlanta, when they built the main stadium, for example, it was built for the Atlanta Braves baseball team. It just so happens that the Olympics were passing through. None of the facilities—even those that were built at the time of the Olympics—were built for Olympic sports.

I think, given the Greek ties to the history of the Games, that they’ll treat the games with great care. They’ll come off well because the people there care specifically about the Olympics as a movement, rather than just the 2004 Olympics as just an inconvenience in their city.

How can you possibly predict every medal winner of every event? How long does it take for you to do that, and what reporting do you draw upon?
Well, it’s a lot of phone calls. In many cases, I talk to people who are experts in a particular sport. Some are athletes, former athletes, and coaches, and I get their input and that’s critical. You pore over results, you talk to [Olympic] Federation people about the health of various athletes who you hear have been injured, and you’re constantly adjusting. And even when you adjust, things happen. Since we came out with that issue, one gold medallist is out with an injury, and another had a drug test that’s knocked him out. Another person with an injury that was supposed to be minor is now hobbled a little more than we thought. So those things happen. But you ask a lot of questions, you get a lot of input from people, you try to get more than one voice in a particular sport, and you keep very good files.

I can’t imagine. I thought Paul Zimmerman had it tough predicting the NFL every year.
Yeah, well, Dr. Z. is all over football. Let’s see him deal with fencing and sailing.

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

It’s been almost a year since Stefano Tonchi made the leap from the fashion creative director post at Esquire to the style editor post at The New York Times. In that year, his predecessor, Amy Spindler, tragically died of cancer, the man who hired him, Adam Moss, bolted for New York magazine, and Tonchi has still managed to consolidate the Sunday Times myriad fashion, design, and travel supplements into what will eventually become a monthly style bible by the name of T. Tonchi spoke to mediabistro.com last Friday from Venice, where the Times was hosting a party for T‘s first cover subject, Kate Winslet. He’ll be back in New York on Wednesday for the start of Fashion Week, at which he’s been a regular front-row presence since his days at Esquire, Self, and L’Uomo Vogue. But it’s his belief that these days, Fashion Week is about anything but the clothes.

Birthdate: October 10, 1959
Hometown: Florence, Italy
First section of the Sunday Times: The front page.

You’ve had an unusual career path for an editor at The New York Times. How did you come to be there?
I’ve been interested in magazines all my life. I started writing for a university newspaper, and I had a small magazine in my 20s in Florence. From there, I was hired as a reporter/journalist writing for Italian Vogue, and then from there, I became one of the fashion directors at L’Uomo Vogue. Then I moved to the States and became creative director for Self magazine, and from there became the creative director for J. Crew. When I moved to the States, I wanted to learn the business of “America”—the business of the mass market, the business of research. It was a very interesting experience at J. Crew and Self, because they are two of the most American institutions. And Esquire was another of those institutions, although Esquire is much more of an elite, and much more close to my heart. And I’ve come to a place now that has some of the elitism that I like. It’s an elitism of education, more than anything else. It’s an elitism of choice, not an elitism dictated by focus groups.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the birth of T was how you were able to quickly subsume four different magazines into one new one with its own style and visual identity—and one that stars a lineup of Times‘ heavy-hitters like Lynn Hirschberg, Suzy Menkes, Cathy Horyn, and Herbert Muschamp. Were you given a mandate to merge the magazines when you came in, or did it happen organically?
I was hired to look at the style pages of the magazine, and that’s what we started to do in the first month of my tenure. In the weekly magazine, we’re trying to renovate it to have more surprises, to have a variety of subjects—not only fashion stories and photography portfolios, but also to have someone like Herbert Muschamp talk about the new Prada collection and Miuccia Prada and contemporary art. We also recruited Amanda Hesser, and next week she will debut a completely new way of doing food for the magazine. So there is also a lot of things changing in The New York Times Magazine that incorporate style and fashion and food. That was actually the first part of my responsibilities.

Then I was asked to look at the supplements, the eight “Part Twos,” that come out every year—Fashions of the Times, two Men’s Fashions of the Times, two Style & Entertaining, and two Home Design. And talking to Adam [Moss] and then with [NYT Magazine editor] Gerry [Marzorati], I thought the reader didn’t understand the continuity between them, that we should create a stronger identity.

I think it’s a very important time in publishing for newspaper supplements all over the world. If you think about the supplements of the London Telegraph or Sunday Times or with the Financial Times—which has a new monthly supplement called “How To Spend It”—they’re all very successful, not to mention Germany and France, where they have created very, very powerful weekly style publications that are free with the newspaper. So, from this perspective, I thought: “Why not create something stronger that takes advantage of the authority of The New York Times?” The first step was creating a logo that was recognizable to the reader, so: T.

And then we created something those supplements never had—a front of the book. I think the front of the book is where you define the identity of a magazine. We created some departments that will be consistent through all the different publications. One will be fast news and short stories with attitude; one will be very product oriented; one will be words and opinion. We asked a number of journalists to be columnists in every issue—we created a column for Suzy Menkes, the style editor for the International Herald Tribune, which is also owned by The New York Times Co. Then we asked Tyler Brule to write a column named “Perfect Bound,” about the pursuit of perfection, and then we asked Lynn Hirschberg, who is writing about Hollywood and style. Lynn Hirschberg is another very strong presence in the magazine—she is an editor-at-large in the regular magazine, and we’re using her a lot in T, too.

Isn’t that what T is also about? Bringing together these talents under one roof? I noticed that in T, Suzy Menkes isn’t listed as an International Herald Tribune writer; she just happens to be in the Times stable and writing a column. Is knocking down departmental walls part of your job description, too?
Well, the idea was to create something more consistent to help the reader. We have these great editorial pages, and we can really deliver something more than just something that comes between advertising pages. This has a strong identity, which is what I really wanted.

T is a mirror of what has been happening in society at large. Ten years ago, or 60 years ago, when Fashions of the Times was created, fashion was very much a business, sure, but it was something very marginal in society. Today, designers are some of the most influential people we have to live with. They not only dictate what we wear, but they also influence the way we look at things—even geography. They have the power to make areas become expensive because of the presence of certain stores. Look at the changes in Soho, or in the Meatpacking District. And that’s just New York.

It was time to look at fashion as a strong component of contemporary culture. It really is a complex world—fashion designers are opening restaurants and hotels, and you have film directors designing collections while architects are getting into the business of retail (think of Rem Koolhaas and Prada). Fashions of the Times was just so much about the clothes. And the clothes are not even what the designers are there to sell—they’re much more into the idea of “lifestyle.”

Speaking of blurring job descriptions, how do you approach the position of style editor? While you’ve co-written several books, your reputation is that of a stylist. Do you approach the job as a creative director? Are you hands-on with the copy there?
I have an overview and a vision, which is what I think an editor should have—the way things should look and sound like. I assign, with the people I work with, all of the stories. Sure, I have fantastic people to work with because the Times has a fantastic stable of great writers and editors. If you look at even the short stories in the front of the book, you find opinions, and that is what I ask of them. We try to have humor, we try to put things in a larger perspective. My interests are very much in contemporary art and design, and those are forces we always have to keep in the picture.

Sure, I will never be known as a writer. That’s not what I am. I’m much more about defining and telling a story through images and through a structure—I think this is also what, more and more, the next generation is doing. People respond so much to images, and who said that you cannot tell interesting, meaningful stories through images?

Will you be able to be more experimental with T than most fashion and style magazines? Does the fact that you don’t have to worry about selling on the newsstand —that more than one million readers will see and read T regardless of who’s on the cover—liberate you as an editor?
It’s not so much about experimenting. This is the first issue we put out. We’re going to add new things. I want to create new features that can only be in T, and can only come from the Times. But at the same time, I want to be useful to the reader. The readership of The New York Times is probably the most educated and the one with the highest income, but it is not a specialized readership in terms of style.

I’m not here to compete or play the games of W or Visionaire or Vogue or that kind of magazine, because they speak to a specific woman, a woman who is more or less obsessed with clothes and shopping. I think our readers have a knowledge of fashion and they like fashion, but they are not the same readers. They buy the paper every day to find out what’s happening in the world, not only politically, but in film, in sports, in the arts, and in fashion. We are empowering fashion, recognizing that fashion is not a chronicle of one designer or the other selling or not selling anymore, but forces that are mingling and mixing with contemporary culture.

Does the supremacy of visuals explain why the Times—the “Gray Lady”—has invested so much time, money, and energy in a primarily visual magazine? And does this explain why Fashion Week has become the spectacle that it is now?
Well, think about New York Fashion Week—it’s owned by IMG, a giant communications firm. There you have the picture. We live in a society of total entertainment, I would say, and fashion is a big part of it, because there is a lot of money involved, and it is easy for fashion to talk louder than other disciplines. When you think about contemporary art or architecture, they are much more marginal somehow. But fashion makes them more accessible sometimes. Think again of Rem Koolhaas. Certain kinds of architecture and design can, through the eyes of fashion, become much more mainstream.

Fashion Week is very much about entertainment. What is happening—which on the one hand is sad, but it is a little difficult to stop—is that many shows have become more show business than the clothes business.

But won’t we eventually start to burn out? Don’t we ultimately just want something that’s wearable?
I think there is an interest in the younger generation to go back to the product. It also comes from the fact that the readership, the consumers, are much more aware about quality. There is an interest right now in going back to the boards and looking for new fabrics, new techniques, new ways of dressing. I think the younger generation is trying to go back to its roots. We went so far that so many designers now are doing everything else but fashion.

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

While Adam Moss starts “phase one” of his overhaul of New York magazine, his former deputy Gerry Marzorati keeps on keeping on over at The New York Times Magazine, which may just be the best newspaper supplement in the land. Marzorati has a lot to do with that, as he’s been ensconced there for a decade now; he just marked his one-year anniversary as editor. If that’s news to you, it’s because Marzorati has no need for buzz: One of the luxuries of being buried inside the Sunday Times is the freedom to chew slowly on things like the election or Iraq in every issue, without worrying about newsstand sales. Still, slow change is coming, especially with Moss gunning for the cultural big game—witness each magazine’s MoMA features just a week apart. Expect a long battle, as Marzorati has no intention of heading back into the wilderness outside the Times anytime soon.

Birthdate: February 8, 1953
Hometown: Patterson, New Jersey
First section of the Sunday Times: The Book Review

You’ve had the luxury of a long stint at one of the smartest magazines in America. Can you retrace your career path up until the point when you vanished into the wildlife refuge that is The New York Times Magazine?
My first publication I worked for was the SoHo News. I started as an editor there in 1977, and I worked there until it folded in 1982. I went to Harper’s magazine, and I stayed there for 10 years. I was at The New Yorker for a year, and now I’ve been here more than 10 years.

You’ve been busy helping style editor Stefano Tonchi whip up T from the Times Magazine‘s sporadic lifestyle supplements, but the magazine itself has barely changed in past year. The biggest change has been the revamped food section with Amanda Hesser. Why make your mark in that area first?
I became the editor of the magazine a little more than a year ago, and one of the first people I spoke with was Amanda. Having done a lot of great work at the paper, I think she was feeling a little restless and wanted to do something new. I’ve always been a big admirer of her writing and of her thinking about food. I think she is one of the people who really understands that food is a sort of new form of pop culture in America—at least for the kinds of people who read The New York Times. It’s got its trends and celebrities and gossip and a sort of intellectual aspect. She understands all of that and, you know, writes like a dream, so I said, “Well, maybe there’s something we can work out where you’d come over to the magazine.” And it took a bit of time, but that’s what happened. The writing in the food section, before she got here, I thought had always been terrific, but I didn’t think it was necessarily getting at this kind of newer, edgier food culture that we have now. This is what she came up with, this sort of smorgasbord of different kinds of writing about this new and exciting food culture.

What’s next after the new food section? What will be the hallmark of “Marzorati’s Magazine?”
There are things in the works that I’m really not ready to talk about yet. I wasn’t hired to remake the magazine; the magazine is a very, very successful component of the Sunday Times. I worked closely, as did a lot of other people, with Adam [Moss] over the last five, six, seven years, reconceiving the front of the book, and reinventing some of the typographical aspects of the magazine. So you’re not going to see a wholesale change, or a kind of relaunch. I mean, we are what we are. We are a magazine of ideas—the sort of literary journalism that responds to the news—and we follow our curiosities. We are a general-interest magazine. Perhaps since 9/11 a little newsier than we had been, but I think that can be said of most magazines. It’s a newsier moment. I’ve tried to give more space to photography in the well to let the stories breathe a little bit. These are smaller changes, but it is The New York Times Magazine and I wasn’t made the editor to change it.

What is the overarching mandate of newspaper magazines at this point? Besides the Times Magazine, there are a handful of other papers’ magazines with a fraction of the resources and influence, and there are the national inserts—Parade, USA Weekend, and the latest incarnation of Life—which are cash machines, but often not taken seriously. What’s your personal vision?
I think The New York Times Magazine is a unique product. There are other Sunday supplements, Sunday magazines, newspaper magazines, but I think from the perspective of our readers, who make it a first destination on Sundays, and our writers, who are top-flight national magazine writers, and the photographers we use, who are international photojournalists—we’re a national magazine that just has a different delivery system than the newsstand. And I’m happy with that.

I’ve worked in magazines, at Harper’s and The New Yorker, and I’m happy not to have to fight for position on the newsstand by wrangling one more tired celebrity for my cover. I’m happy to not have to deal with the kind of excruciatingly expensive mass-mailings you have to do to keep your subscriptions. And I look at it as a complete blessing to have The New York Times as my delivery system, and to be a component of the Sunday paper. It’s two million readers, double the weekly readership. People who go out get this Sunday Times, of which the magazine is a big draw, because they want it, not because their boss is picking up the tab. This is something that they want to get. I reach those readers on Sunday, which is still, in what might be seen as an increasingly secular culture—it’s Sunday, it’s still a time that people set aside for leisure and reflection. We are a national magazine that happens to be distributed in an unusual way. That’s how I edit it.

Considering that reach, and your resources, do you feel you have a responsibility to push the similar stories, and a similar sensibility, as a Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly, or any of the other smart, small-circulation magazines that go relatively unread? If T is going to pick up the slack on the lifestyle front, is the Magazine going to become still more serious?
Over the last few years, we have probably dealt with more hard news than we did in the ’90s because it’s felt like a more hard-news time. The issue we’re closing this week has a long piece on Darfur [Sudan] with a long photo essay from there, and then a long piece on the Bush White House. This is what readers in the news moment demand. It’s still the kind of long-form literary nonfiction that I’m interested in publishing. These pieces won’t read like something you’d find in The New Republic. But that’s where we’re going to go, that’s what we’re going to respond to. The magazine has a long tradition of doing international news. We’re going to continue to do that, we’re going to cover Washington, we’re going to cover culture.

One of the things I am interested in, and I suspect involve the subtle changes I am interested in, is celebrating culture. I’m not as interested in pointing out all that’s lousy about the popular culture. I think that’s become an easy thing to do, a kind of thing that seemed edgy 10 years ago, but now everybody is doing it. I want to publish pieces like the profile on Wong Kar-Wai because I think he is a remarkable artist. And we did a long cover story on Pedro Almadovar. That’s something I want to be able to do. I want to say, “These are the great ones.” I want to celebrate them, even though they may not command as great a place in the marketplace. I don’t think our readers necessarily worry about that. I think our readers want to be engaged with the great artists of their time, so you’re going to see more of that that you have in the past.

Do you feel you’re competing with Adam Moss? The throwaway critique of New York magazine at this point is that it looks more and more like The New York Times Magazine every week.
No. Adam is a friend and a great editor, and I learned a lot from him and I miss him. I think when we worked together we were in a great conversation about magazines. But the reality now is that half of the paper’s circulation is outside the New York metropolitan area. So a million of the people who get The New York Times Magazine every week aren’t in a place where they can even see New York magazine. I think what Adam’s done, it just looks great, it looks way livelier than it did seven or eight months ago, but I don’t think that week-in-and-week-out we’re on the same turf.

What’s the future direction of T, which you ultimately oversee. The Sophisticated Traveler will be folded into it, so it will become a full-fledged monthly.
That’s right, it’ll be like a monthly luxury style magazine. When Stefano was hired, my feeling at that time was that style is something that’s become a much bigger thing in our culture than women’s fashion or men’s fashion, and style now permeates all of our culture. You really have a democratization of style, and I felt that the very narrowly defined individual supplements weren’t capturing that. There was a way to create a magazine that would break down those kinds of boundaries a little bit and try to be more fun about style, and a little thinkier about style, and certainly more beautiful about it in terms of raising the level of the photography and making it a more sophisticated design. And I wanted us to stop thinking about them simply as an advertising base for women’s fashion or men’s fashion, and to start thinking, “Wait a minute. There’s two million readers who might really be interested in this magazine!” And ultimately, that’s what I have to sell. For lack of better words, they have this readership that is sophisticated, wealthy, and curious, and this is what I can offer advertisers, not simply a promise of a kind of narrow content.

Should The New York Times even be in the business of publishing a luxury magazine?
My feeling is that The New York Times should be interested in everything, absolutely everything. And that is a huge part of our culture, so why not? No one who picks it up at a newsstand or subscribes to it expects to march through it and read every single thing. Magazines can be pleasure. I’m somebody who believes strongly that, even when you’re dealing with the most serious topics, a magazine is a pleasure vehicle. It’s something to hold in your hand, it has a tactile feeling, it should have beautiful pictures and inviting typography and all these kinds of things, and pleasure should be part of that package that you get on Sunday. The New York Times should not be homework. The magazine is, you know, it’s something to get into a bubble bath with.

Would you ever want to leave the Times Magazine at this point? Would you ever want to have to worry about getting a celebrity on the cover again?
I don’t see myself leaving, not any time soon.

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

Emily Crawford would like you to know that she never went to art school, never wanted to be a designer, and that, truth be told, typography isn’t exactly her strength. Not that any of those things stopped her from ascending to the design director’s post at Travel + Leisure last year after Luke Hayman decamped to revamp the Adam Moss-ified New York magazine. Crawford, 35, received her design education in the Boston trenches of Fast Company’s art department during the magazine’s early days, when she, her boss and mentor Patrick Mitchell, and a handful of other staff scrambled to paint the excitement and idealism of the late ’90s boom even as issues kept swelling in size. After her trial by fire (and after she and her colleagues won a National Magazine Award), Crawford moved to New York, serving a stint at The New York Times Magazine before landing at Travel + Leisure, where the devotion to visuals and commitment to striking photography has played to her strengths as a designer.

Mediabistro: You’re only 35, you never had formal training, you haven’t been at the magazine for very long, and yet you’re already at the top of the masthead, and at the top of your profession. Why do designers have more mobility up the masthead than editors, and more latitude to jump from one magazine—or magazine genre? Do designers simply care less about politics than editors do?

Crawford: I think it’s ultimately more of a meritocracy. There seem to be more people who have become very successful as art directors or designers who don’t have formal training for it. If they happen to be talented and visually astute, it doesn’t matter if they went to law school.

If anything, having that diversity in their background is a bit of an asset. The higher up you get in a magazine as a designer, the more involved you really are in the creation of the editorial. You’re not just looking at making things pretty and solving visual problems—you’re contributing to the ideas behind the stories. The people who are most successful in the field are able to straddle those things. I’m kind of jealous of people who went to arts school and knew early on what they wanted to do, because I fantasized early on in my career about working on these utopian projects without limitations and really having fun. At the same time, I’ve heard that art school can actually be quite limiting because you don’t get as solid an education as you would at a liberal arts school.

It’s also weird because of the musical chairs aspect of it. I never really understood that before I moved to New York. The only real magazine I ever worked at was Fast Company, and I was there for six years. Maybe it was just the special circumstances of Fast Company—it was a start-up, well-timed, massively successful, and it was a good group of people. It was really fun to be part of a movement, and I didn’t get how a creative director would be at one magazine for a year and a half, and then suddenly everything would shift and everyone would jump to other places. Now I get that more because I think it’s very easy, actually, to fall into a visual rut. You can only bring so much to the subject matter in a magazine and you can only do so much with the editor you’re working with. There’s a shelf-life, or a half-life. It gets tired after a while, and simply by virtue of a new set of eyes looking at the content, a magazine can be pushed forward. So, that makes more sense to me now.

Mediabistro: Travel + Leisure has a strong visual identity—it hasn’t gone through a lot of redesigns. How much of a personal stamp have you put on it? How much more would you like to put on it? And how much longer is it until that look starts to go bad?

Crawford: Actually, Luke Hayman did a major redesign when he started. Pamela Berry was the creative director before him, and she did amazing things with the photography—she’s the one who really elevated T+L to the reputation of a this very sophisticated, almost fine art photography publication. You could tell that was her focus, and when he came in, his goal was to continue that, maybe update and modernize it and make it energetic, but also focus on all of the useful information contained in the magazine, the guidebook aspect. We just finished a tweak of the front of the book, but I’m basically sticking with the redesign that Luke did. At the same time, I do have a slightly different aesthetic, and I’m trying to bring us back to emphasizing the photography and just making it as beautiful as possible. I think it’s evolving. I don’t know whether I’d say that I’ve put my stamp on it.

Mediabistro: What about your personal shelf-life at the magazine? Are you mentally already en route somewhere? Or are you personally and intellectually engaged by the magazine’s contents?

Crawford: I feel very lucky because I’ve always loved travel as a subject, and I’m very drawn to photography in general and always loved looking at T+L when Pamela Barry was there. I feel pretty spoiled in being able to work in a place where every story is like opening a Christmas present when you open the photos. I find it really stimulating just to work with such good photographers and figuring out a way of really showcasing them. I’ve also only been in this position for six months or so, and I’m still learning and getting used to it. And now I have the ability to make changes and fully evaluate how we can keep making the magazine better and better. I think that right now, we’re beginning to build momentum on what we’re doing, we’ve put out some pretty strong issues, and we’re trying to set higher standards for ourselves

Mediabistro: What’s it like being a first-time design director? What went through your mind when you realized you were calling the shots from now on? And how did that affect your management style?

Crawford: Well, I’ve always been pretty bossy, so it hasn’t really changed much in terms of leadership except that people have to listen to me. (Laughs) Once you’re in the number-one position, it’s a major shift. You are much less hands-on in terms of the design. You’re working on the cover and maybe one or two features if you’re lucky. The rest is overseeing and directing everyone else and being in a lot of meetings, doing a lot of administrative and corporate stuff. Frankly, it’s draining. It’s a lot to juggle. I’m running around, troubleshooting and helping out the other designers and sitting in meetings pretty much all day, and it isn’t until 7:30 p.m. that I sit down and can actually focus on maybe designing something.

Mediabistro: You entered the field through an old-fashioned apprenticeship, coupled with working in a start-up. Looking back on that now, would you recommend that path to other young designers, or do you wish you’d had a more gradual acclimation process?

Crawford: Now, more than ever, I realize how lucky I was to have fallen in with Pat Mitchell and how much he did for me, taking on this kid who didn’t have much experience but was very eager. I think that was one of the best ways to learn the craft.

When you’re working at a magazine, there’s all these different elements at play. You have to really collaborate with the writer, and there’s the business side, and there are all these compromises you have to make. There are limitations and constraints you must work within, and you really are problem solving, while at the same time, you want to do the strongest work you can. You’re not going to learn that in school; you have to experience it in order to get the hang of it.

The corporate thing was really pretty strange at first. Fast Company was not run like a normal magazine, and we were in Boston, so we felt kind of very far away from the New York publishing world, and I still feel sometimes like I’m in the thick of it here and it is an adjustment.

Mediabistro: Speaking from the view of a bona fide outsider, what else doesn’t make sense about New York’s magazine world?

Crawford: Let me see. Well, one thing that I think editors at a lot of more traditional publications—and I’m not talking about T+L—is that a lot of editors don’t give the creative directors the space to do as good a job as they could. At Fast Company, the editors were smart enough to realize that Pat really understood what they were trying to do, and that he was the expert at the visual things, while they didn’t really know what they were doing on that front. So instead of trying to kind of control what he was doing they gave him space. We’ve had much more freedom than I’ve experienced at a magazine in New York. And as a result we were able to do much stronger work. I don’t know whether this is because there’s so much money involved. When you’re deciding on a cover, you’ve got a publisher and much more corporate involvement, as opposed to the art director and the editor deciding on what makes the strongest visual and editorial message.

Mediabistro: Do you think designers over-rely on a particular component of the typography + photography + illustration equation?

Crawford: The good ones don’t, and there are a lot of good ones out there. But it has to be a combination.

Mediabistro: Which do you feel most comfortable with?

Crawford: I think my typography is at the bottom. I feel very insecure about it. I think it’s something that you work your whole life at getting better at, and maybe I’d feel more comfortable if I’d gone to art school.

Mediabistro: How much of what you do is art vs. science then, and is that part of the art?

Crawford: Yes, without a doubt. It’s funny, I’d like to think I’m pretty good at conceptualizing visual treatments for stories. If there’s a tricky, more idea-driven piece, I enjoy the challenge of figuring out a way of illustrating that. At the same time, I love photography, which can be a lot more straightforward. I feel very lucky, because Fast Company was definitely more idea-driven stuff, and here at T+L the majority of it is just creating really beautiful, compelling layouts with these great photographs.

Mediabistro: Do you need to be personally interested in the subject matter of your magazine? Could you master every different magazine format—women’s service, celebrity weeklies, a laddie book—if you put your mind to it?

Crawford: For me, it’s really important, and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I have to have some sort of personal stake in the editorial content. I don’t think that I could, although there are a lot of magazines…

Mediabistro: Would you go back to a start-up at this point?

Crawford: That’s a really good question. Because when I started working at a start-up I didn’t have much to lose…

Mediabistro: And now you’re a known quantity. You’re a design director.

Crawford: Exactly. And I’d love to work at another start-up—I love the excitement, and the energy, and the kind of collaborative workplace that is part of a start-up, but it would have to be something that I was really, really, excited about to take that risk.

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a “Robert Newman Look.” Unlike other designers—or, to be more specific, unlike Roger Black—Newman hasn’t carried with him any stylistic flourishes or quirks (like Black’s love of serif fonts and Oxford rules) when he’s hop-scotched from magazine to magazine. Newman’s method is more along the lines of total immersion. Whether it was the elegant minimalism of Real Simple, the Rat Pack-throwback look of mid-’90s Details, or the just-the-facts spareness of his current gig at Fortune, Newman was determined to mind-meld with the editorial vision rather than subvert it with his personal tastes. It didn’t matter if that was the vision of Inside, Vibe, New York magazine, Entertainment Weekly, the Village Voice, and even the grunge heyday of Seattle’s alt-weekly The Rocket. So is it really his fault that all of the editors with whom he’s worked got fired?

Mediabistro: You’ve managed to studiously avoid developing a signature look over the course of your career, which may have something to do with all of the genres you’ve worked in—the men’s magazine, the hip-hop magazine, women’s service, business, the alt-weekly, etc. What was the mental process you underwent when you moved from Real Simple to Fortune? How do you sublimate your ego the way you seem to do?

Robert Newman: Each magazine is a challenge, and I don’t see them in terms of the style but in terms of their content. Having worked at Vibe and Details, Real Simple seems like a total left-field move, but for me it was the challenge of perfecting the information architecture. It was about mastering the presentation effect.

For a lot of art directors, their first and foremost job is to marshal and present information to the reader, and to take the editor’s vision and voice and create a visual presentation of that. When I look at it that way, it’s always a challenge. Can I do a women’s magazine? Yeah. Can I do a business magazine? Yeah. Can I do a hip magazine like Details? Yeah.

Rather than approaching each magazine with a particular style—although I think I have more of a style than you give me credit for—I try to get a sense of what the editors’ vision is and how they want to direct it. Then I often just tweak the style they have to make it more efficient and more effective.

That’s not always the case. At Details, we totally threw it out and started all over again. But at Fortune, and Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly, and the Voice, those were more the development of a look than a total overhaul of a look. They were starting with basic visual DNA which was essentially sound; I was giving it more of a voice and articulating it. It might be very quiet, like at Inside or Real Simple, or it might be really brash and hip, like at Details or the Voice, but they all have a visual presence. It’s really relentless when it works, when the look goes from the front to the back of a magazine, and on every page there is a heightened awareness of the importance of the visuals, the roles it’s supposed to play, how it’s supposed to advance the magazine.

You try, but the editors don’t always let you, or it doesn’t always work. But when you can pull that off, it’s great—the visuals aren’t just a complement, they’re actually adding content and value to what people are getting from the magazine.

Mediabistro: So, you see the job as primarily puzzle-solving or translation, then?

Newman: Yes, it’s puzzle solving. You have to really study the magazine, study the competition and the feel. When I went to Real Simple, I just absorbed all the women’s service magazines. I read them all, I studied them, it was like a puzzle: How could I get into this, something I didn’t know a lot about, and figure out a way to give it a true voice?

Mediabistro: And what lessons did you take away from them? Did you actively set out to re-engineer the look of women’s service?

Newman: I think a lot of visual art, both decoration and design, is seen as a way to decorate the content of the magazine. But at Real Simple, all of the design had value. Everything was so stripped down. What was so interesting at Real Simple was: how can you strip the design to its bare essentials and make every element so functional that every single thing had a reason for being on the page? There was absolutely no decoration of any kind, either visually or in terms of pictures or type or colors. If the picture was in there, it had to impart value and content that wasn’t imparted anywhere else. You didn’t just run a picture because you needed a picture on the page to decorate it.

Mediabistro: What you’re really doing is information architecture, then. But how did that work at Details, which was all flash and glitz when you were there?

Newman: What I try to do is find the essence of the magazine. At Real Simple it was information architecture and presentation. At Details it was style and attitude. The most important thing there, as far as I was concerned, was to be hip and cool. At Real Simple, the most important thing was information architecture and visual content.

Mediabistro: How do you arrive at an understanding of what that essence is? Do you conduct elaborate interviews with the editor and absorb what they’re saying? How do you immerse yourself beyond reading other magazines?

Newman: The first thing I would do is go back and really read the magazine and look at its past. When I went to Details, I read every single Details published back to the first issue, and it was the same with Entertainment Weekly and same with Vibe. I read, or at least look through, every issue, and usually I end up grilling people about what they’ve done in the past, how it went over, etc.

At Real Simple, at Time Inc. magazines, you have the benefit of all of these reader surveys. So part of what you’re doing is discerning who the readers are so you know exactly what stories work, what the readers want, and, of course, it’s very humbling.

Then usually what I try to do is come up with a visual idea, as I just said, for each magazine. We start with this germ of an idea. At Details, the idea initially was “Let’s make it feel like old Blue Note jazz record covers,” and that was the germ that expanded. At New York magazine, the idea was “Let’s strip it down and give it a very cool, arch-urban kind of feel.” We wanted to be the graphic-design equivalent of an Armani black suit, or a woman’s black cocktail dress. And at Entertainment Weekly the idea was, “Let’s make it the equivalent of entertainment graphics, like the 2-D version of TV, movies, and stuff.” The design was going to be entertaining in a flashy kind of way.

We come up with an idea, and it gets into the staff and everybody just takes it from there. A lot of it has to do with me finding people at the magazines and in the art department that I’m inspired by and compatible with. Most of the looks have developed through collaboration with them. You find somebody there who’s got some great ideas and you take it from there.

Mediabistro: What are you trying to do at Fortune? Now you’re at a magazine that’s almost entirely comprised of subscribers, so you have little or no pressure to sell on the newsstand. How are you serving the reader?

Newman: I think people really see the covers in two ways now. The newsstand is still important even if you don’t sell a lot of copies there. Most of the Time Inc. magazines, like EW or Time, don’t sell a lot on the newsstand except maybe their special issues. But they use the covers A) to build heat and buzz, and B) as a branding thing. You want a dynamic cover out there on the newsstand because it’s an ad for you.

But also I think of the coffee table as a newsstand. We are very concerned that the readers actually read the magazines, not just get them in the mail. I think a lot of magazines are satisfied with just getting into people’s houses, and all they want are those numbers so they can tell advertisers, “Yeah, we have a million readers.”

But at Real Simple or Fortune, it’s imperative that the readers actually read as many of the stories as possible. The cover has to work to get them to open up the magazine. And we actually have to deliver value to the readers in those stories because they pay a lot of money to subscribe.

I was just looking at the Fortune reader’s demographics, and the average subscriber pays $40 a year. They really want their money’s worth. I just renewed my subscription to Esquire, and it cost $8 a year. If you spend $40 and you don’t like the mag, we get these letters: “I didn’t get my money’s worth out of that issue!” At first I was appalled to read these, and then I realized that they are paying enough money to want some value. If you don’t get your money’s worth out of Esquire or GQ, you don’t care. It’s so cheap you won’t even stop renewing it. It’s ridiculous.

Mediabistro: Earlier in your career, at The Rocket in Seatlle, you were an editor. Why did you switch over to the art side of newspapers and magazines, and how much of your approach now stems from your experience as an editor? Should all designers, or at least creative and design directors, put in time as editors?

Newman: I’ve always thought that smart magazine people would figure out a system where designers could work as editors and editors could work as designers in some way. Having been an editor, I think the biggest thing is that it gives you a much better sense of the imperative of storytelling and the logical presentation of material, so that it all makes sense to the reader.

When I’ve worked on things, we never do things just because they’re cool. They always have to make sense. That is the first thing an editor asks when you present something. If I can’t answer that, they’ll say “Well you know, this is good, but it doesn’t relate to the story, or it doesn’t make sense.”

It’s also really good for art directors to be able to read and write, and to deconstruct stories to discover their essence. It certainly helps when you’re given manuscripts at an early stage.

Mediabistro: Do you actually have the luxury of having time to read them?

Newman: No. (Laughs.) I’ve had many careers in my past, and editing was one of them, and I was a designer before I was an editor. Art direction was more fun for me, and it was easier to move around more. I really like to move around, and I think most art directors would agree that it’s pretty easy. You’re like a hired gun in a lot of ways. It’s also a lot easier for an art director to move up to the top right away, as opposed to editors, I think. The guy who was my predecessor at Fortune was here for seven years before he became art director. That never would happen with an editor.

Mediabistro: Is that because people perceive editing as being harder? Or that it takes longer to master the voice and the tone of a publication?

Newman: It’s probably the same reason there are more women art directors than women editors—it was never considered the prime place to have a career. Why are there so many women photo editors and women art directors? Because they can get jobs there. Why are there so many more women art directors than women editors? Is it because women are more creative? No, it’s because they can get jobs. All the men want to be editors because that’s where they perceive the power to be. I think until recently, the position wasn’t seen as so powerful.

And it’s definitely easier to move around. I feel I could be a candidate for any art director job that opened up, whereas there are very few editors who could be considered candidates for any editorship. I mean, I can be the art director of Real Simple or Fortune, but neither the editor of Fortune nor Real Simple could be the editor of the other magazine, right?

Mediabistro: Why is that? Why are you not pigeonholed?

Newman: I think a lot of designers are; it’s actually a common complaint by art directors. I’ve done business magazines, but every time I apply for a women’s magazine job they say I don’t have the experience. To me it makes total sense. If you’ve done a business magazine, you can do a women’s magazine because they’re both about service and information architecture. But people don’t see it that way.

Editors don’t want to admit that it’s much easier to master the material than they let on. It’s not that hard. If you are an editor for Money magazine, you could go to Real Simple in a second as far as I’m concerned. And some have gone. But editors can’t believe that it can be that simple. All you have to do is study and read, and look at what the magazine does and pick up on it. It’s not that hard. Most art directors feel they can work in any medium as long as they’re interested in it. It’s the editors who try to say, “No, this is a great mystery, you can’t do this because you’re coming from a hip-hop magazine; how could you possibly do a women’s magazine?”

Mediabistro: So how did you end up at Fortune? Were you internally poached, or did you investigate moving over, since it’s one big, happy corporate family there.

Newman: Well, my editor at Real Simple was fired…. Actually, what happened was that the guys at Fortune were looking to make a change, and they called me to talk about it. It was sort of the same way Dick Cheney became vice president. They called me to get ideas, and after a while they said, “Why don’t you just do it?”

One thing I was thinking last night is that I’ve had a lot of editors fired. (Laughs).

Mediabistro: What did you do to them?

Newman: Check this out. When I was at New York, Kurt Andersen was fired. Then I went to Details, and Michael Caruso was fired. Then I went to Vibe and the editor, Danyel Smith—fortunately I got along really well with her successor. Then I went to Inside and… you know what happened there. Then I went to Real Simple and she was fired. (Laughs.) I told the editor of Fortune when I took this job, “No one has survived me yet!”

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.

Is there any publication—glossy, newsprint, or digital—that Roger Black hasn’t redesigned? While he built his well-deserved reputation on his early, iconic designs for Rolling Stone, New York magazine, Newsweek, and Esquire, Black is better known these days as a consummate re-designer, a blue-chip name you call when it’s time to send the message that a magazine is under new management. As the chairman of Danilo Black Inc., he’s overseen recent designs and redesigns for the likes of Budget Living, Popular Mechanics, American Media’s tabloids and Men’s Fitness, MIT Technology Review, and a slew of newspapers, including the new Spanish-language chain Rumbo. Black originally offered us 10 minutes of his time to recap, once again, his career and thoughts on design. He ended up giving us close to two hours.

Mediabistro: At this point in your career, you’re more of a troubleshooter—the expert called in to fix a design someone else has broken—than a designer who lives with a single, growing, organic publication. How do you approach that role? Do you go back to first principles? Do you walk into a magazine and strip off the design like a layer of paint? And how many magazines suffer from ill-conceived redesigns?

Roger Black: All of them. I think there are two things colliding here. One is the idea I call “design equity” in a magazine, and the other is that the publishers will run off the edge of the cliff, like in a cartoon, and realize that nothing is holding them up. I think it’s maybe best to try to preserve the design equity of certain magazines, and for others it’s really essential to strip away.

I don’t know if you read National Geographic these days, but the typography is good, the color is unbelievable, and the printing has improved a lot in the last 10 years. And it’s actually surprisingly different than the 1950s and 60s memory we have of National Geographic, and I think it was very important that they did that. They kept the basic feeling and they tried to bring it up to date and make it popular and fun. And I think they did it. I mean, I don’t read it either, but I’m very impressed by it.

We did a big redesign of Reader’s Digest in the ’90s, and I don’t think they went far enough. At least, they didn’t tap into people as young as I am—the Baby Boomer crowd. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to go that far. We consolidated some of the great designs from the ’50s and brought them back in, so that was kind of a restoration project, but I don’t think it got radical enough. The decline of the U.S. edition of Reader’s Digest was not arrested, and they stripped all that off and kind of went over it with a small hammer.

Mediabistro: Would a total redesign have stopped the fall? How often do you come up against management that refuses or lacks the will to carry out the ideas they hired you to provide because they don’t have a clue?

Black: They usually do have a clue. Quite a few of the clients I’ve worked with have a very good idea of what they should be doing, but they don’t know necessarily how to do it. And there’s a lot of other factors involved, including what the readers think, or what the other clients of the magazine think, the advertisers, etc.

My impression is that the implementation problem usually stems from the fact that the editors are distracted by daily life, or by the pounding of their publishers, or something else. There is never a time that a real redesign doesn’t depend on a real state of crisis—somebody’s chasing after the editor.

At Popular Mechanics, which we redesigned last year, the editor was actually right on the fulcrum of deciding whether he was going to retire or not. He was really quite a fine editor—great circulation, very loyal readers—but he was getting older. They weren’t going to shove him out the door, but I believe that the redesign was a catalyst for him deciding “You know, let somebody else do this.” He had done this stuff, he had a little bit of help, he didn’t need it anymore. He has a nice place in Tucson or somewhere that he went home to and that was that.

So there is always some volatility at the time of a redesign. They don’t call it a redesign because everything is going great.

Mediabistro: So how do you see your own role in that situation? Are you a doctor diagnosing the larger problems of a magazine, or a shrink?

Black: That’s a good analogy in the sense that you can’t pull up in the redesign truck and say, “Hey, you look terrible today; come in for a few minutes and I’ll fix you up.” People don’t go to the doctor unless they really need help. You can’t force a redesign on somebody. Every time that I’ve worked as a general consultant for a large group and they told me to do a redesign for a client, these usually didn’t do very much. It doesn’t do any good to do a redesign if you don’t really rethink the content and the direction. And sometimes people will think a redesign will help them when they really don’t change anything else.

There is a certain kind of magazine that really owes it to itself to have some kind of continuity, and people forget that. I have said this a hundred times, it’s not sinking in: The real owners of a magazine are its readers. If you are a subscriber to, say, Newsweek for 20 years, you really think of it as ‘my Newsweek’ and changes to the magazine are sometimes not very welcome. If only they would consult you—sometimes you’ve been there longer that any of the staff.

Newsweek is a good example. I did a redesign of Newsweek in 1985, and I did two or three others after that. In 1985, we tried to build on some core memory on what Newsweek should look like, which was a little rougher. I thought of it as a little tabloid, although I never said that to them. It should be more popular, more liberal, more fun, more unpredictable, you know… rougher. I think it came out very well, and, in any case, it coincided with the big shift between Newsweek and Time. So [then-editor] Maynard Parker had me redesign it again, in a serious way, and then he had problems with the art director, and I came back in and art directed the magazine as a consultant for a short time. When Maynard died, I didn’t really have the heart to work on it anymore, it was too upsetting. Then my successor changed it dramatically and threw out the typeface that I originally put in, even though it had been there for years.

It’s like when the Times of London threw out the typeface Times Roman. Now, maybe it was becoming generic—I mean, every printer in the world had their typeface on it—but, my God! It’s called Times Roman for a reason! Make it work for you!

They could have taken their design and kept that equity. They’ve changed it since then, too. Why didn’t they go back to Times Roman? It’s the same thing if you’re talking about American newspapers. The Boston Globe had a beautiful typeface called Madison that was originally their staple typeface, that [famed typographer] Matthew Carter had redrawn for them. Nobody else in the Unites States—or maybe in the world—used it. It was distinctive, very Boston for some reason, very apropos to the history of the Globe, to the whole thing. And then, for some reason, a new editor came in and cleared that out and put in Miller, which is a very fine typeface that Matthew Carter did, but sadly, it’s used by everyone in the world. It’s all over the place, particularly under the name Georgia. They took something out that was their own. I had the same problem with The New York Times throwing out Bookman and Trade Gothic.

Mediabistro: The metaphorical owners might be the readers, but the real owners seem to commission redesigns when they’ve lost touch with what the readers are thinking, and hope that a redesign will magically boost sales. I’m specifically thinking of David Pecker and American Media, which hired Danilo Black to remake Men’s Fitness, then decided to throw that design out and copy Men’s Health instead, because Men’s Health sells a half-million copies on the newsstand. How do you get it through the skull of a client that they’re blowing up a perfectly good design?

Black: The strategy we tried to put into place for covers was doing well on the stands, but they would override it every other issue, and those issues did badly, so they thought that the whole thing was doing badly, and it wasn’t. And it turns out that the hideous thing that they did, did well. (Laughs.) What the hell.

There is this general feeling that particularly the business folks have that there is some kind of magic formula that I might know, or that some other old-time art director might know, about how to do covers. I think they’re all looking at the wrong thing.

Bonnie Fuller gave a talk at the American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton last fall, which four years ago would have been kind of electrifying, because, whatever you want to say about Bonnie Fuller, she makes things look interesting. You feel vaguely guilty that you’re interested in them, but you’re still interested in them and you pick them up. And yet her influence is so pervasive and so codifiable that Us Weekly is continuing to channel her without her being there, and they’re doing better than Star, which I find comical. The momentum of what Bonnie did can beat her at her own game.

But the fact is, once everybody has the same celebrities, and they have those little circles, and there’s the same language, and little tips about certain things… It’s a great way to do a cover, but then you get into this problem that they all start to look like that. And then they don’t always deliver on these promises on the cover, and the opening begins to sag. If you go to the newsstand, it’s unbelievable. If you go the typical grocery store, at the check-out racks, they are all blowing out at you with bright colors and white T’s and suggestions that are pretty much the same from magazine to magazine.

Mediabistro: Considering each of those magazines are selling a million copies a week on those newsstand, is there a way to improve on them, or is commodification a fact their publishers can live with?

Black: We did a job for Redbook last year for quite a few months, so we could see if it was working. It did. I mean, it worked moderately. It’s like any kind of quality control problem—if you adjust every single knob in the machine and not just the one at the end, you’ll get better results. You need to make sure that every single step of the process is working. Have good headlines, have a great picture, have great printing, have good display, and then there’s the whole distribution side of it.

Guess what, however? If you don’t have a good magazine inside, it ultimately doesn’t sell. But if you have a good magazine going forward, and say that people really like Us Weekly, they’ll pick it up even if they don’t really care to hear more about the current divorce or whatever.

Mediabisto: That sounds less like design and more like quality assurance. Are you a designer or a business consultant? Are you being paid to create hits, or just keep things from getting worse?

Black: I’m sure the reason I was a successful art director as a staff guy was that I knew how to run budgets. And it was not so much that I kept within the budget, because they never really reward you for keeping within the budget. It was that I was able to get more money the next year, and build up the art department. It’s sort of a dynasty creation thing, where you are trying to get more staff, get more resources, get bigger budgets. And that’s a management thing and very few art directors pay enough attention to that stuff.

But there are no new magazines. There hasn’t been a big, blockbuster home run in years. When Rolling Stone came out in ’67, it had an enormous impact. Every college student editor in the country copied it. But the thing is, there may not be any really good ideas, and people are not taking risks, and the magazine business is not going the same direction as it used to—it’s not getting bigger and bigger.

Mediabistro: And if it’s a mature industry, it’s not one beginning a long period of decline, does that mean the best design minds in the world are heading elsewhere?

Black: When it comes to art students today, everybody is doing video games. They don’t want to do magazines. Although, I have two guys I’ve been working with lately who claim that they wanted to be magazine art directors ever since they were 12 or 16.

Mediabistro: I’m sure they got it from reading SPY.

Black: (Laughs) I’ll ask them, but I don’t think you’re totally right about maturity and decline. I think we’ve topped out with the big-time, general interest, mass-circulation magazine. But there are more titles, and the flip side of a world where it’s all just tweaking a knob is that anything goes.

In the ’70s and ’80s, there were these giant movements that swept through design. You had people like Neville Brody and David Carson, and the funny thing is that all their stuff still lives. Even my old designs from the ’70s—all that stuff still lives. There was a comedy troupe that brought out big posters at the bus stops in New York City that looked like Rolling Stone in the 70s. It even used the Rolling Stone typeface. Clearly, somebody knew that’s what they were copying. And it looked fine, it looked perfectly up-to-date.

Anything goes now, so there is no trend. The trend is: no trend. However, if you look at the video-on-demand side of media culture, what’s happening is that they’re vertical in a way that magazines built from other brands could be quite successful. And so people like Hearst are going to strain harder and harder to get million-circulation magazines. But they have to do it with Oprah. All the big wins over the last several years have been Oprah and Martha, where you can latch on to some giant celebrity thing. And you have to remember that Martha Stewart did a really beautiful job at putting out a magazine.

Mediabistro: But those aren’t original designs, either. They’re just an optimized, celebrified take on women’s service themes. Does it really pay to just keep recycling?

Black: Some of the best designers, people like [Pentagram partner] Paula Scher, are just recycling bigger ideas from a long time ago—like Russian Constructivism—so people don’t remember them, as opposed to last month’s Esquire.

I’ve never looked at my own work much after it was done, or looked at anybody else’s work. But when I got to The New York Times Magazine in 1982, they had a drawer full of other people’s layouts that they would build on top of. It was shocking. I saw a page that looked strangely like Rolling Stone, and it was an old Rolling Stone thing from like five years before that they had kept in this drawer and then hauled out so they didn’t have to rethink the layout.

Mediabisto: They were borrowing entire grid systems basically?

Black: Yeah, sampling.

Mediabistro: What are you working on now?

Black: Right now we’re doing Nintendo Power.

Mediabistro: Nintendo’s still printing that? I remember buying the first issue back in 1987.

Black: You outgrew them, but in fact, they have a wider audience now. Nintendo was always for kids, but now gamers keep playing games forever, and the new DS—the Nintendo portable—is selling incredibly well, and it isn’t all 12-year-olds buying them. What we’re trying to do is make the magazine more reflective of the readership, which is, you know, the usual job.

It’s fun; I’m not exactly the prototypical teenage gamer, but trying to figure it out and make something that works across this age span—the gamers in their late 20s and pre-adolescent kids. You can’t put big, babe-alicious, head-smashing stuff in there. You have to figure out something that doesn’t look either too juvenile or too grown up. It’s interesting.

Mediabistro: What else?

Black: There is something else I can’t talk about, an enormous project that I’m working on. I’m also doing a lot of newspaper work. I just did a Spanish-language daily that started in Texas and is going to be a national daily. It’s called Rumbo. It’s probably the best thing I’ve done lately. It’s one of those things that was just executed better.

And, hilariously I’m consulting for Quark, Inc.

Mediabistro: So you are a craftsman who blames his tools, or at least tries to improve them.

Black: I’ve been working with Adobe for many years, and I also worked with Quark in the ’80s. I did a hilarious demo of Quark—I think it was version 2.0—at the Aspen Design Conferences in 1988 or 1989, and saw Milton Glaser standing behind me, watching me trying to do a layout in Quark. Milton said, “But Roger, you don’t do this yourself, do you?”

Mediabistro: It never occurred to the old guard to use computer then, did it?

Black: I don’t think they ever did anything other than draw a little tiny picture and hand it to somebody. See, that’s the difference, that was our generation break—back then you had the big master sitting in the big room, drawing those sketches for other people.

Anyway, Quark—through a series of coincidences—invited me to see if I could find ways of opening up the dialogue between them and designers. Because there’s a new CEO there and there have been some big changes. And now they have competition.

Mediabistro: Adobe’s InDesign is beginning to eat their lunch.

Black: Well, it’s not eating their lunch, but it’s nibbling at them. The fact is, they’re really two different products, and I’m trying to engage both of them. I would love it if they would both do better. Competition is fantastic for us designers. Quark is very good for a template thing with style sheets, like a magazine. InDesign is better suited for a cover or poster—it’s a graphic program as opposed to a word program.

Mediabistro: Do you feel designers are still limited by their tools at this point, or has that bottleneck finally been removed?

Black: Personally, I feel more inhibited by the operating systems than I do the tools.

I think that Windows and the Macintosh have the ability to have object-based application development, so Adobe, for example, could re-use the same typographical code, the same pixel editors, etc., so that every time that you wanted to edit the picture, the tools would just devolve. You wouldn’t go into [Adobe] Photoshop, then into InDesign, then back again. The tool would be more object-oriented. You can sort of do it now in the Mac OS, but nobody has really developed it yet.

The most constraining thing is the software for optimizing output and figuring out how the color works together. Getting designs out the door is strangely underdeveloped.

I wrote a book in the early ’90s called Desktop Design Power that sold a lot of copies, and by some miracle, I said it was all about Quark, [Adobe] Illustrator and Photoshop.

Mediabistro: You can brag that you called that one correctly.

Black: At the time it seemed obvious. But in ’89, it wasn’t obvious at all. Nobody knew what was going to happen. The fact that it’s so stable and relatively predictable and calm is great, but I think we are long way away from the perfect set of tools.

The other thing is how to mix print with the internet, going back and forth between them. Right now the best thing we have is XML [the Extensible Markup Language], with which you can output content and bring it into another world. I’m very interested to see what comes up in this next era of internet stuff. I think it’s going to speed up in the next five years. The media world would experience a sort of Diaspora, and everything will be always-on.

By the time I’m going to be ready to retire, these titles will be things of the past and people will be putting together their own media. Sometimes they’ll just want to sit down and watch TV, or read a magazine, but there’s going to be a lot more out there.

Greg Lindsay, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily.