From his editorial discretion to his chiseled abs, David Zinczenko embodies Rodale’s brand of healthy living magazines. In 2000, at the tender age of 30, he took over as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health, and has since added editorial director of Best Life and Women’s Health to his job description. Ad Week‘s Editor of the Year in 2008 was the architect behind last year’s “Magabrand” theme of the MPA conference, which he chaired. Through frequent appearances on The Today Show, a line of best selling books, and two popular blogs, he’s living proof of the potential success of Magabrands, as all three magazines he oversees bucked the trend and posted positive circulation gains in the first six months of 2008. mediabistro.com caught up with Zinczenko fresh off his recent trip to Beijing for the Olympics to discuss the publication of his new book, Eat This Not That! For Kids!, his brand’s 1.5 billion media impressions a year, and whether fit is still the new rich.

Name: David Zinczenko
Position: Editor-in-chief, Men’s Health; editorial director of Women’s Health and Best Life
Education: Moravian College
Hometown: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Resume: Was previously editorial director, Men’s Health International. Started as assistant editor of Men’s Journal at the 1991 launch.
Birthdate: December 13, 1969
Marital status: Single
Favorite TV show: The Colbert Report. “Stephen Colbert openly fakes it, unlike so many who covertly fake it.”
Last book read: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
First section of the Sunday Times: “I love the Week in Review, but not only because of the editorial content. It’s fun to look at the jobs pages and contemplate other professions. Some of that ad copy is rather enticing.”
Guilty pleasure: “I like to eat well even if it’s the mac and cheese with truffles at the Waverly Inn. One of the reasons I care a lot about nutrition and exercise is because I have to eat and exercise in really smart ways to offset all of the cravings.”

Eat This Not That! For Kids!, teaches children to eat healthily. It’s a bit of a stretch from the Abs Diet books you started your book writing career with. Why the change of pace?
Eat This, Not That For Kids! is the follow-up to Eat This, Not That!, and I’m someone who dealt with weight issues growing up in small town Pennsylvania and made bad choices in regards to food. Nutrition and exercise is really important to me and especially with all this talk of nutrition and childhood obesity. It just felt like the marketers were constantly bombarding us with messages about really unhealthy food. We’re spending half of our food dollars eating out, and this was an opportunity to get the information back in the hands of children so they could make smart choices wherever they are eating.

Do writing books and editing a magazine such as Men’s Health complement each other?

Oh totally. This job, and particularly this time in publishing, makes you pretty format agnostic. You have to learn how to edit a magazine, how to write a book, how to pitch the Today show, how to blog. Not only is it very complementary, [it’s] helpful to what I do with the magazine.

You were named editorial director of Women’s Health earlier this year, in addition to your duties as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health and editorial director of Best Life. How do you juggle all three magazines?

I’m not one of those jugglers who tries to throw a chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a live chicken, but it’s more like juggling gold nuggets. They are heavy but uniform size and incredibly valuable to the readers and the company. The magazines all share the same mission: to serve the physical and emotional lives of the readers. In fact, the three magazines are hugely complementary because they are taking on the subject of mental, physical, and emotional health. What we learn about men in relationships will also be good for women in relationships if the advice is any good at all. Ditto the nutrition and exercise info. It just needs to be interpreted for different audiences that have different needs and different ways of taking in information. The appeal of healthy, vigorous living is universal across the titles, so we’re applying what we know to solve universal wants and needs. Furthermore, each magazine has really smart editors who listen closely to the readers and understand what they are looking for, so it’s a collaboration, and I’m just lucky to be a part of it.

How does your role as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health differ from your role as editorial director of Women’s Health? What are you doing for Men’s that you don’t do for Women’s and vice versa?

Right now, I’m almost in my ninth year of editing Men’s Health, and I’m very involved in the day to day of the magazine. The same is true right now with Women’s Health because it’s the early stages. But as an editorial director, what often happens is you can be a little bit more involved in the strategic things and not fly as close to the earth.

Best Life tends to be more strategic, long-term oversight and planning. Again, Women’s Health is a little more of everything right now as I get my feet wet and get to know the magazine and all its various channels — from online to international additions to books to DVDs to what will surely be Women’s Health‘s own spinoffs.

I would imagine there are no “normal” weeks in your life, but what percentage of the time would you say you spend on each magazine?

It’s pretty evenly split right now on Men’s Health and Women’s Health. Best Life is less time. I’m usually in pretty early, at 7 or 7:30 [a.m.], and through to 7 [p.m.] with usually a dinner or something after.

You just returned from China. What were you doing over there?

Because of Men’s Health and Women’s Health I was at the Opening Ceremony in the presence of the healthiest people to have ever walked the planet. How could it not be exciting? As for the ceremony itself, I think it’s a powerful demonstration of what a massive population with a central government can accomplish, but I still prefer the individualistic accomplishments that you see on the sports fields, the volleyball courts, and the running tracks. Still, the Opening Ceremony was a highlight for me. I was handling a few segments for the Today show, mostly gear and technology things looking at Olympic innovations.

Because of all your media outreach, you’re one of the most visible editor-in-chiefs. When media industry people think of Men’s Health, they inevitably think of you. In the short term, that’s good for both you and the magazine, but at some point, isn’t having you tied so closely to the face of the brand a bad thing? What happens when you leave?

[Laughs] This is a very strong company and these are very strong brands with very capable editors and writers. I think they’ll be fine. It’s not Dave Zinczenko’s Living. It’s Men’s Health. It’s Women’s Health. It’s Best Life. It’s a very commercially minded crew that knows how to do incredible sophisticated lifestyle magazines.

Is there ever any conversation that “maybe we shouldn’t send Dave on the Today Show. Maybe we should send someone else?” Is there ever any push to get other editors in the spotlight?

Well, there are. [Senior editor] Matt Bean, [Deputy editor] Matt Marion, and [editor] Peter Moore do dozens and dozens of radio interviews a week, and they are on Good Morning America, the Today show, and Fox News all the time. For Men’s Health, there are over a billion and a half media impressions a year, and while I’m certainly a chunk of that, there are probably six to 10 editors on the Men’s Health side who are representing in the media.

Men’s Health Living is publishing its second issue in December. Are there any plans to increase the frequency?

Not at this time. I look at the future of that magazine like any homeowner does his home. An upgrade here, an upgrade there — maybe we can convert those assets to pay for a move into a whole new neighborhood. I think guys are into their homes just like they are into their health, it’s just that they are not currently being served as guys by any of the existing magazines out there. I think the magazine industry abhors a vacuum, and we aim to fill this one. Right now though, it’s just a very complementary newsstand special to the main book, but we’re all very happy with the kind of success it’s been having.

This has been written about before, but [it has] an over 50 percent sell-through with 400,000 copies out there and a $5 price point. That’s really cool and it certainly indicates the kind of need there is for this information. A lot of guys turn to Ikea catalogs when they look for new information and we aim to change that — but after this next issue coming out in December, we’re not making any promises.

The great thing about it is the brilliant service that drives Men’s Health, Best Life, and Women’s Health can drive Men’s Health Living too because it’s all about living your life to the fullest. There are very specific ways that you can set about doing that. That’s where the special will excel. No, the housing downturn doesn’t worry me particularly because a shelter book is all about maximizing what you have and Men’s Health Living helps guys to [do] that.

The other reason I think [Men’s Health Living] is resonating is that your home is the eye of your life’s hurricane. It’s where your emotional, financial, physical health and your relationships come together. It makes sense that once you’ve read Men’s Health and learned how to improve your body and mind, you want to then turn to a magazine that will help you to put that ethos on display. It’s the same way a lot of fashion companies have gone into the home. Ralph has suits, and he has sheets. Porsche has cars, and they have knives. Other designers have home collections now.

One of the big selling points of Men’s Health Living from the industry perspective was that the first issue made a profit. How much of the success of a spin-off is determined by the bottom line vs. its ability to extend the brand?

I think paying attention the bottom line is so important, especially now, because there are constantly new forces and changing whims in the media world, particularly the publishing world. But for us, when we think about these moves, we are incredibly strategic about it, specifically, “How it will end up serving the brand?” Exactly how complementary is it? How is it going to extend the lifestyle messaging of the brand? Who it’s going to be competing against? We look at all of these things, and we also say if we want to get into the space, should we first come in with a book or a newsstand special or an online venture? We’re always thinking about these things at Rodale and at Men’s Health.

It’s an interesting, some might say bad, time to get into a shelter publication. Just yesterday, Home folded and Blueprint and House and Garden have closed recently. What makes Men’s Health Living different? Is it that you feel it has a unique space in the marketplace?

Yeah, we’ve rather modestly put on the spine of the magazines, “The world’s first home magazine for men.” Certainly, there’s nothing like this, and our internal research showed that this was something the guys wanted. They weren’t getting this information anywhere else, which is why some of them were turning to Ikea catalogs, and they would trust us to give them the information because of the authority that we have in all of these areas of their lives that matter. That’s all we needed to share and think that we needed to go into something like this. Look at the positive circulation numbers, not just for Men’s Health Living, but for Men’s Health, which is up three percent in the first half, with a price increase. With the January issue of Men’s Health, we took the price from $4.50 to $4.99, so you’re increasing the price 10 percent and your first half newsstand is still growing. We’re seeing that growth at Best Life, which was over 20 percent, and on Women’s Health.

When the economic going gets tough, what do you do? You set aggressive priorities for what’s really important in your life and you reduce the rest as needed. I’ve always felt that for the people we really care about, health, fitness, and good living will be the last things to get cut from the budget and it makes sense. What’s more important long term then your health and happiness? That’s the business we’re in and from the looks of the magazine industry right now, it’s a good choice. I’ve always felt that for all the options that people have for entertainment, magazines that offer solid, useful, and life-alerting advice service that are exhaustively researched and well-written are the ones that will thrive.

In February 2006, you told FishbowlNY your five year plan was: “Continued international growth to the tune of five new editions per year, turning Best Life into a category killer, and I want to someday sell 800,000 copies at newsstand — we just broke the 735,000 mark with our January issue.” Halfway through the five year period, are you succeeding? Would you change these goals?
They are going great. We’re the largest men’s magazine brand in the world, Men’s Health, with over 40 international additions, so we’re on pace to launch the four to five magazines a year.

I think [turning Best Life into a category killer] is absolutely happening. With the circulation at 500,000 with our premium prices — that’s also a $5 price point at the newsstand — and all the growth led by Michael Wolfe and his team, who have done a fantastic job bringing in advertisers like Louis Vuitton and others. It has high subscription prices, high renewal rates, and is a magazine that fills a hole in the market you could have driven a truck through. If you look at some of the traditional men’s magazines, it’s as though you don’t have kids, you don’t have a career, you don’t care about your health or your marriage. Here was Steve Perrine, the editor-in-chief, coming in and showing that this was a magazine that could fill a real need. So I think we’re well on our way there.

I’m going to have to call our senior VP, Rich Alleger, and ask him [about the circulation]. Jan/Feb was our biggest seller ever and I think it was somewhere between 780,000 and 805,000, but I’m not sure it hit 800,000.

Well you have two more years to get there so if you’re that close now, we’ll give it to you. Men’s Health is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. How?

We’re not big believers in self-indulgent anniversary celebrations because this isn’t about how important we are as a magazine, but rather we’ve always placed our readers first. What do they need and what are they trying to do with their next 20 years? We’ll play it low-key and add an extra dollop of cool service as a little fist bump, if you will, to the readers on the way to their next 20 years. No big plans as of yet. We don’t need a flashing billboard on the newsstand to advertise how cool we are. In fact, if we start to think we’re cool that’s when we’re in trouble. We’re not ahead of you. Our motto is we’re right here with you, and we totally understand.

I think Esquire‘s trying to monopolize that flashing sign anyway for their 75th anniversary issue.

[Laughs] You said it, not me.

If you’re not working at Men’s Health for the 25th anniversary, any thoughts on where you’ll be?

You know, I don’t know. This is what really gets me jazzed, Noah. Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Best Life are successful as magazines, but they are also each primed to make a splash in books. If you look at the success of The Abs Diet and Eat This Not That! and the tremendous anticipation over our first Best Life book, The Defining Moment: A Guide to Achieving Maximum Success, that Steve is going to write, you can see how the magazines translate into longer form, smartly conceived products: online, online video, TV, wireless content, and any other medium that’s embedded in the next decade. What’s great about what’s happening here is that it’s intensely personal and relevant, which I love. It’s adaptable to intensely personal delivery systems. That’s what a magazine is. So is a newsletter. So is a diet plan. And so is an exercise program delivered directly to your Blackberry. I think we’re woven into millions of people’s lives and that takes a lot of thread. It’s the whole Magabrand concept, which is just a conference name, coming to fruition. The medium isn’t the message any longer. The message is what matters. How we deliver it can totally change depending on the readers’ needs.

So you think there’s room at Rodale for you to continue moving up and creating a niche?

Yes, because Rodale has gotten incredibly smart about how to launch brands, starting from anywhere. When you have a magazine platform and you have a books platform and you have an online platform and you have an international platform and then you have a database of 24 million names and on and on and on, you can grow personally and professionally and create great things forever.

Okay, last question. Is fit still the new rich?

[Laughs]. I think I’m gonna leave that one buried.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

Gary Smith is a rare sports writer who’s transcended the label and become something much greater. In 2003, Slate’s Ben Yagoda called him “the best magazine writer in America,” praise Jon Friedman echoed earlier this year. For the past 25 years, his 8,000-word articles have graced the pages of Sports Illustrated, earning Smith countless honors, most notably four National Magazine Awards.

Those four stories, plus 16 others, appear in his newest book, Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories. It’s a compilation of the writer’s best work — chosen by the author himself — that showcases the intensely human tales Smith details. He describes his writing method as getting “swallowed inside one person‘s life,” and after speaking with him, one understands how he does this so effectively time and time again. Even when he’s the subject of a phone interview, Smith conveys an easy manner and a genuine interest in the details of the world around him. mediabistro.com spoke with the writer on the eve of Going Deep‘s publication about his storytelling process, his relationship with Rick Reilly, and whether he’d ever want to be on TV.

Name: Gary Smith
Position: Senior writer, Sports Illustrated
Education: B.A., English, La Salle
Hometown: Lewes, Delaware
Resume: Worked for the Wilmington News-Journal (4 years), Philadelphia Daily News (7 years), New York Daily News (6 months), Inside Sports (3 years) and Sports Illustrated (25 years).
Birthdate: October 27, 1953
Marital Status: Married, three children.
Favorite TV show: “I don’t watch TV, except for sports.”
Last book read: On Deep History and the Brain
First section of the Sunday Times: Front news section is first, usually followed by The Week in Review.

You write about four stories a year for Sports Illustrated. Tell me about the process. Are you writing more than one at once?
Every once in a while, they overlap, but pretty much it’s one at a time because they are wall-to-wall, full-court, you’re-in-up-to-your-ears kind of thing. It’s much better if you can be swallowed inside one person’s life instead of two or three.

You must feel pretty lucky to have that luxury. You’re one of the few people who has that type of contract.

I spend about two and a half months on each story, so it ends up being a full year’s work. I came in on that basis with SI and I’ve kept it that way. I wanted to feel like I really got to know the subjects. To do the kind of writing that I like to do, I feel like really understanding the character and being immersed in them is what it takes, so I’ve been very fortunate that Sports Illustrated has given me that time and space to really delve in that way.

Do you have an editor you always work with or do you have a different one for each story?
Usually, my front line editor is a guy named [senior editor] Chris Hunt and SI always has a backup editor, someone else who edits as well. That’s recently been a guy named Mike Bevins, but most of my years it was Rob Fleder. He was my secondary editor. Chris Hunt has been the first editor on all my stories for a long, long time, and I’ve been very fortunate to have that kind of relationship.

Where do the story ideas come from? Does Chris bring them to you, do you go to him, or is it a little of both?
The stories can come from any direction. I’d say it’s about 50-50, where half of them are mine and half are theirs. I can veto their idea, they can veto my idea, but as soon as we have one that’s mutually agreeable, it’s a go.

The story ideas can come from anybody at SI. There are researchers and fact-checkers who sometimes come up with good ideas, as well as the editors themselves. I’m wide open to any direction. Sometimes I’ll read a sentence or two in a newspaper that suggests to me there might be a lot more there to the story. It can unfold in many different ways.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a story where I spent four days up in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. Until this past week, they had the best record in baseball. And I’m also working on a story about a NASCAR driver who’s also a Hollywood stuntman.

When are those going to be coming out?
I think the third or fourth week for the bleachers story [It will be in SI‘s September 22 issue] and I’m guessing, but I really don’t know, sometime in October for the stuntman/NASCAR one.

One of your recent pieces was the obituary for NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw. His death was rather sudden and the story was only a couple pages long, much shorter than your usual work. Was your writing the obit pre-planned or did the editors come to you and ask you to write it after he passed away?
They came to me because I’d done a long story about Gene about nine months ago [it came out in January, 2008]. Naturally, when he died, the editors turned to me and asked me to do it because I’d had a lot of background and a lot of contact with people who were close to him.

You have a book, Going Deep , coming out on September 16. What was the genesis for the book?
It was a lot of mutual conversations. I’d been talking to Rob Fleder, who recently left Sports Illustrated, over the past year or so, but we’d had the idea going back three years. We all got together and Terry McDonell, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated now, really got behind it and made it happen now.

How much work is putting a book like this together? All the articles are already written, but what do you have to do to get them ready for inclusion?
I went back and edited them all. It takes a lot more time then you would think on first glance — it took a lot more time then I thought it was going to take. Figuring out which stories you want to put in there, how to pace them or how to order them, and then editing them all. To me, they’re always a work in progress in a way. Every time I look at a story again, I see things I want to do a little bit differently. It’s a decent amount of work, but mostly worthwhile.

Did you have final say on all the stories that went in?
Yeah, pretty much, they did give me final say. If [SI deputy managing editor] David Bauer, who was the editor on this book because Rob was leaving, felt really strongly one way or the other, he’d urge me or make a recommendation, but in the end, he would leave it up to me.

In the acknowledgements of the book, you write: “in an industry in which the long narrative is gasping.” In 10 years, do you think there will still be a place for the type of contract that you have and the type of writing you do?
I hope so. God, the way the industry is changing, I couldn’t tell you with total confidence, but I really hope so. The response you get from people on these types of stories seems to justify their existence. They just seem to hit people in a different way and in a different place that the quicker, little blurb-ier stories don’t seem to be able to. Everything has its place, and that type of journalism has its audience and significance in a different way, but [these stories hit] more human aspects and get into who they really are. I hope to heck it’s still there, but God only knows.

Are there any younger sports writers who you’re really excited about seeing where they go?
Scott Price at Sports Illustrated is younger than me and does a great job with it. He has a lot of talent. There’s a guy at the St. Petersburg Times and I’ve been reading some of his stuff — Tom Lake. He seems to have a lot of potential to me. Jeff MacGregor is another fine long-form writer. Those are a few names [of sports writers] that pop into my head that have more than enough talent to write 8,000 words.

[Former SI and current ESPN writer] Rick Reilly wrote the introduction for Going Deep. What’s your relationship with him like?
We’re friendly. There are some years where we’ll see each other a couple times a year, and some years we might not see each other at all. Whenever we seem to intersect, we really have a lot of fun together. Great guy. A lot of life and a lot of laughs.

Has that relationship changed at all since he went to ESPN?
No. That’s secondary. It was a big change for SI that he’s not with us, but that doesn’t affect how I feel about Rick.

It seems like one of the things that drew him to ESPN was the opportunity to go into television work. Do you have any desire to do that?
No, I am really not pulled to TV. That’s one aspect of media that really [doesn’t interest me]. I’ve gone on and done things before, but it’s not a driving urge or a need to be on TV.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

After trying the life of a Wall Street peon immediately after college, David Willey left the financial world and ran to the publishing one. A decade and a half later, he finds himself at the helm of Rodale’s Runner’s World, a position he’s held since 2003 when he jumped from Men’s Journal. During his tenure at the top of the masthead, Willey — who’s based in the company’s Emmaus, Pennsylvania offices — has overseen a redesign, helped ad pages increase despite the struggles of the industry, and been installed as editorial director of Running Times.

Willey is also the president of American Society of Magazine Editors, where he’s helping bring the organization into the Internet age. He played a key role in introducing panels about sustainability to the upcoming American Magazine Conference in San Francisco, and is relishing the opportunity to bring the next generation of editors into the ASME fold. In town for the board meeting, Willey took time to speak with mediabistro.com in Rodale’s New York offices about the upcoming conference, allure of working in Pennsylvania, and updates to the magazine’s Web site that will be like a “performance-enhancing drug” for page views.

Name: David Willey
Position: Editor-in-chief of Runner’s World and editorial director of Running Times
Resume: “After grad school, I spent a year struggling as a freelancer in New York, followed by a year on staff at a trade mag publisher, then (finally, mercifully) was hired at Men’s Journal, where I stayed for eight and a half years, starting as an assistant editor and moving up to executive editor. I started as EIC of Runner’s World in 2003. For the record: No, the editor of Runner’s World need not be some kind of near-Olympic-caliber runner. I’ve done four marathons and am still chasing the Holy Grail of a Boston qualifier with the normal mix of dread and hopefulness.”
Birthday: October 17, 1967
Hometown: Grand Rapids, Michigan
Education: BA Williams College, MSJ Medill School of Journalism
Marital status: Married, with two kids and a third on the way
First section of the Sunday Times: “Also for the record — that still means the actual ink-on-your-fingers newspaper to me — the Sunday morning ritual just isn’t the same on a laptop. First section? Depends. I scan the front page and if there’s something I want to read right away, I’ll follow the jump. If not, I go to the Sports section and, in Groundhog Day-like fashion, wish the “newspaper of record” had more actual news and results from the day before — which my middling, downsized local paper has no problem getting into the morning edition. (Okay, then I boot up the laptop.) I save the [NYT] magazine for later, when there aren’t kids and a dog clamoring for breakfast and I can actually, you know, read it.”
Favorite television shows: “Are all on DVD. West Wing, Sports Night (I’m an Aaron Sorkin junkie), The Wire, Arrested Development. But I will watch 30 Rock, Entourage, Mad Men and any broadcast of the Boston Red Sox.”
Guilty pleasure: Pinot noir, “Oberon ale, chocolate milkshakes, the corned-beef reuben kit from Zingerman’s Deli (although I don’t feel the least bit guilty about any of them — one of the virtues of being a runner).”
Last book read: “I’m a promiscuous reader, keeping several books going at one time and picking them up as my mood dictates. Nonfiction: The Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, because clearly we need to make some changes. Fiction: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — which I started before Oprah blessed it, I swear.”

Obviously it’s not the greatest time in the magazine industry, yet a lot of the Rodale publications are sort of bucking the trend — Men’s Health is doing well. Women’s Health is also staying strong. How’s Runner’s World doing?
Runner’s World is also doing really well. We’re continuing to grow. Our newsstand, like Men’s Health and Women’s Health, is up this year over last year for the fifth year in a row. Total readership is growing. Our online traffic is like a hockey stick. Coming off of the Olympics, we just had our best traffic month ever. We had 20 million page views.

The magazine is still really thriving. We’ve got an incredibly passionate readership, and I think running is one of those things in tough economic times — it doesn’t necessarily get cut from people’s lives. In fact, it may be the opposite. People are so passionate about it and it’s a part of their lives, and it helps them sort of stay in control. It helps them feel healthy, it empowers them — all those things that when life gets hard and economic times get hard, those things become even more important. So, I think what you mentioned taking hold at Rodale is happening at Runner’s World also.

The editor of Runner’s World has traditionally been based in Rodale’s offices in Pennsylvania, not New York. Talk a little bit about how that changes your job.
It’s a great question and it’s really interesting. I lived in New York for 13, years and I worked in magazines. I worked at Men’s Journal for eight and a half years. That’s where I was before I took this job at Rodale. After living out in Pennsylvania for five and a half years now, part of me still feels like [New York] is home, and I’m here a fair amount. Whenever I come back, I still feel very energized and comfortable. But there’s a lot to be said for having sort of a dual existence and being out [in Pennsylvania]. Some of it’s the obvious things that you would expect. The pace isn’t quite as insane. New York is a very work-centric place anyway, and it’s a little bit harder to have a balanced life. And I say this all speaking totally from experience. I’m married. We have two little kids with a third on the way now, and we have a dog.

I’m one of those New Yorkers who never thought I would last more than a year. It was kind of like, “okay, one more year.” And then I paused and realized I’d been here for 10 years and I loved the place. But I’ve always been very outdoors-oriented and active and athletic. Even when I lived in the city, I couldn’t live any farther than five blocks from Central Park because I was in the park literally almost every day. It was like my lifeline. I would go downtown for other reasons, but I had to live uptown. For all of those reasons, being out of the city is great, on a personal level.

There are also some magazine reasons why it’s great to be out there. We really are able to totally focus on the magazine. We do 12 issues a year with a pretty small staff, and we have a really small online staff of seven people. We really are able to focus on what we are doing while also kind of living the life. Basically, everyone who works on Runner’s World, the Web site or the magazine, is a runner. It’s part of our lives. We’re in the same building as Bicycling, so there are lunchtime rides going out every day. It’s like the Rodale lifestyle, which has kind of become, in the past several years, a little bit trendy. It even extends into organics, the balanced life thing. Rodale has been doing this for decades. It’s real out there. It’s not a marketing line or a pitch. It really is the way we live our lives out there, and I think there are some real advantages to that work-wise. It helps us really be in tune with the running community, the readers and the users of our Web site. We totally relate to them and interact with them all the time out there. We run with them. People are energized in a way that I think is different. I don’t think there’s any place on earth that’s more energized than New York City, but I think it’s a different kind of focus and energy there [in Pennsylvania] that comes with just being able to focus on what we’re doing. Some of the noise gets filtered out. You come into a New York high-rise, especially in the media industry, and there is lots of noise. There’s lots of other stuff going on and lots of it is important, but you can get distracted and knocked off track sometimes. There’s a lot less of that out there.

Have you ever been close to hiring someone only to have him or her say, “I really can’t live out in Pennsylvania?”
Yeah.

Is that a problem or do you think it’s more of people saying, “I need to check out Pennsylvania before applying for the job?” Is it a self-selecting population?
It’s a challenge when you’re recruiting people. When I took this job, it was with the mandate to grow the magazine, redesign the magazine, and that included bringing in some new talent. Editors, designers, writers, everything — and I recruited a lot of people from New York City. A lot of those hires are still there and they’re totally key people, but there have been some people who came from New York and realized that they didn’t like living out there or there were other things that just weren’t right for them.

You use the word self-selecting, and I think that’s definitely part of it. People like Tish Hamilton and Kory Kennedy, our current art director, came from the city. Robert Festino was the art director who did our very first redesign and he came from Entertainment Weekly. Those people tend to be older, they tend to be married. They tend to maybe even have kids. So, they’re at a point where I was when I took this job which was: been in the city, worked really hard in magazines and loved magazines, still care really deeply about doing great work but maybe was thinking a little about where else can I do this? If you have that mindset, it’s pretty logical to think about Rodale, and typically it’s not the single 25-year-olds who end up picking up stakes and moving out to Pennsylvania. Honestly, I can’t say if I were single and 25 that I would want to pick up stakes and go out there myself. It’s a challenge — I think it needs a little bit more time and effort on the recruiting end, but when it works, it works for the long haul.

Rodale bought Running Times in 2007 and you’re the editorial director of the publication. It seems to me that it’s more for the hardcore runner. Can you talk about the differences between your job with RT and Runner’s World and how the editorial focus of each magazine differs?
As Runner’s World redesigned in 2004 and really broadened, there was really big-time growth there. We brought in lots of new subscribers and newsstand started going through the roof, and that really kind of captured the growth that was happening in running overall. In particular, lots of young women are coming into the sport. We think of them as the post-Title IX generation.

When Runner’s World redesigned, it really did broaden it, welcoming all kinds of runners, not just the 10-time marathoners and people who are running 100 miles a week. The success that Runner’s World had, at that point, made life kind of difficult for Running Times. And you’re exactly right, Running Times is and was founded to focus on the more dedicated and the more hardcore runner. As Runner’s World grew and continued to succeed, that made life harder for Running Times. Running Times, out of necessity, started to broaden a little bit, too, because they saw the same growth patterns that were happening in the sport that we saw. Running Times got away a little bit from that niche, you know — the front of the pack as opposed from the front all the way to the back. There are lots of people who just assumed that we were going to buy [Running Times] and shut it down. It really is the only competition that’s running-specific that there is, and it’s one-sixth of our size. We never intended to shut it down; in fact what we thought was sort of the secret sauce of it was that we were the only buyer that really could let Running Times really go back to being Running Times because we’re Runner’s World. We’re already talking to all runners so we could empower Running Times to go back to its focus and talk to just the really dedicated people. That was the idea and it made sense editorially for Rodale to serve the whole running community; it made sense from an advertising standpoint; it just made sense all around.

I am the editorial director, but I don’t edit the magazine. Jonathan Beverly is the editor-in-chief of Running Times, and he edits the magazine. He and I talk all the time, but I don’t approve headlines or line-ups. I don’t line edit. There are things that I do for Runner’s World but not for Running Times. There’s a really small and hardcore group of editors and runners who do that, and that’s really working, too…

You ran the Chicago Marathon in 2007. It seems to me that a growing trend is for editors to embody their magazines in a way they didn’t 10 or 15 years ago. Would you agree?
I do. The obvious and easy answer to that is to start talking about the brand, which is fine. It’s a very real phenomenon, obviously, and I think it’s important. To be honest, I try not to use that word “brand” too much because I think it sometimes can be taken the wrong way and we run the risk of commoditizing what we do a little bit, if we just boil everything down to the brand.

I think what we still do as editors and writers and designers and photographers is be creative. It’s the things that we make and it’s that great alchemy of a great story well-told with an amazing layout and incredible photography. That to me is the magic to what we do, and that is kind of what is referred to as the brand now. It gets extended across all of the different platforms, and I’m not demeaning that at all. I still [think] that the magic is what creative people do and then the business ability to make that sustainable. Being a face of your magazine or your brand is also a huge part of what the industry is about now. I do think it’s important especially for brands like Runner’s World, where the real power is in the community. And I just don’t mean community in the online sense like “we have a chat board so we’re into community,” I’m talking like there is a real community of runners around this country and it’s deep, and it runs the gamut from this skinny 75-year-old who runs 20 marathons a year to the Sarah Palin soccer mom. Every town, every city, every state in this country has its own running community in it and it’s very, very real. I think it’s important for those people to feel like the magazine that they get every month and feel so strongly about, is not only for them but is by them, in a way. It’s by people who are runners like they are and it doesn’t get into politics, gender or race. It’s about being a part of the running community and understanding that psychology. I do make a real effort — it’s not just me, other editors as well — to run races around the country. I ran Chicago last year in that brutally hot marathon. I also ran the Austin Marathon in February. There’s a half-marathon out in Allentown that we run every year. A bunch of us are going to Philly to run the half-marathon in a couple of weeks.

The big events like New York, Boston and Chicago, those three big marathons, we have a pretty big presence at. It’s pretty cool, I have to say, meeting readers, because they’re so excited to meet the editor of Runner’s World. It’s not just because half of them can’t be put on the cover or have stories to pitch — well, there’s that too — they’re just excited to meet you because you’re the person who makes this magazine that they care about so much. I think it’s important especially for special interest [running] magazines when that is sort of the engine of everything. The more you can be in the mix with your readers and users, the better it is.

You talk a lot about the community of runners and it seems, in a lot of ways, it’s something that transfers really well to the Web. But I know there are a lot of runner’s discussion broads and groups online that might not need RunnersWorld.com to connect. Have you had trouble bringing runners to your site?
No, we haven’t. We’re, at this very moment, expanding the community aspects of our site in a really big way. The forum-ites have been there all along. They formed in and of themselves when the Web site was launched. Our Web site has been around for seven or eight years, and there are thousands of people who are on our boards talking about anything and everything. They’ve always been there and in a lot of ways, that’s one of the biggest assets of our site.

We just formed a partnership with a community vendor where we’re really going to extend that out. Everything on the site will eventually become part of the community. It’s things like being able to comment and share every single story, every bit of content on the Web site. It will also, we think, turn Runner’s World into sort of a social networking site. It will be sort of a Facebook-ish destination but really focused just on runners. What’s happening is sites like that are getting sliced more and more thinly , and it’s a great opportunity for brands like Runner’s World to make our own Web sites the place where that stuff happens. The users very soon not only will be able to go on and chat about stuff, but they’ll have personal profiles. They’ll be able to put out race photos from their most recent race and video, and Google map links to their local training runs. They’ll be able to find each other in local areas: You can just throw together, “Hey, I’m training for the Philly half-marathon. Is there anybody else who lives in Allentown who wants to do long runs on Sunday?” These people are going to be able to find each other immediately, and I think that’s going to be like a real performance-enhancing drug for our Web site and our page views.

I guess the billion-dollar question is, how do you make any money off that? Ads are a part of it but they’re not growing as fast as everyone needs them to grow. My thought with a place like Runner’s World is you make it easy for a user to buy a shoe that you guys recommend. At the end of a review where you’re saying, “Here’s this great shoe, our editors love it, we think you’ll like it too,” you add a click here link that takes you to New Balance or Asics or something like that. Is that a viable option? Do you think that blurs the editorial line too much?

Yes and yes. We do that now. We’ve got a shoe finder where all the shoes that we review in the magazine — we do four big shoe reviews a year, and we have set up our own shoe lab — is on the Web site: you can search by type of shoe, brand name, however you want. We have an arrangement with a company that’s called RunTex, which is a retailer in Austin, Texas, where there’s a button that says “Buy now” and you can click and go buy it. It does get a little tricky because we review shoes in the magazine, and we have absolute separation between you know, edit and advertising. Shoe companies are our biggest advertising category in the magazine. A shoemaker is our biggest single advertiser, that’s Nike, no big surprise. So we just have to make sure we’re very, very careful about that. We have a disclaimer on our Web site that sort of lays that out. None of this is a violation of ASME guidelines.

I’d hope you would know…
[Laughs] I thought about it very carefully, trust me. We have a disclaimer that tells people: Here’s the deal. We review shoes; we’ve got this arrangement as a convenience for you. No shoes that we recommend are given any kind of preferential treatment on the retail side. And we take a small percentage of the sale. Now that gets to the other part: The real answer to your question is, you just can’t make that much money at that. We act as the reviewer and the facilitator — even if we have a link and a “Buy now” button — you’re still not going to make enough money on that sale to have that be a big business.

Let’s talk about the American Magazine Conference in San Francisco. What’s your involvement with it? Are you all developing the panels or have you championed any of them yourself, specifically?
As the president of the ASME board, I’m more involved than I would have been otherwise, even as an ASME board member. So I’ve been aware of all the panel ideas and how they’re coming together, and I’ve had input on the editorial portion. I feel pretty strongly that the industry needs to get our heads around sustainability. There are pretty compelling issues to figure out with paper, distribution, recycling.

I don’t think magazines are dying, I really don’t. I know some magazines are closing and I think that’s part of the evolution of the media industry, but I really don’t think that there’s a better medium for bringing together that alchemy that I mentioned before. Great writing, great photography, great layout, you can hold it in your hand; it’s portable, it’s relatively cheap. It’s kind of the killer app. That said, there are some challenges that have to do with sustainability and paper, in particular. The MPA already has been working on things like that, but if there was an issue that I really sort of spoke up about, to really have some editorial breakout sessions about, that was it.

I feel like every week, there’s some slight tectonic shift that has taken place. You pick up the paper or go online on a Monday morning, and you read about some buyout or another magazine that’s closed or some other evolution. It’s all just happening so fast, and it’s changed the very job of being an editor. Editors everywhere, whether they’re editors of two million circulation, very high-profile magazines or maybe small city magazines, are kind of all grappling with some of the same challenges. I think and hope that a lot of that stuff will get talked about and at least kicked off at AMC and then followed up on with ASME — ASME really needs to grow with the magazine world.

We administer the ASME guidelines in print and online and that’s very important. But there are a lot of other things that ASME does and can [do], and I think the average ASME member probably just focuses on those two things: the awards and the guidelines, and violations. Both of those are more important than they’ve ever been, but there’s all this other stuff we need to do and be useful to all editors through all stages of their career. We just launched about a month ago, [a group] which is for assistant- and associate-level editors, and there are 65 or 70 members who have already signed up for that. [We] really need to get into the confluence of digital and print; how that impacts the awards, how it impacts editors’ daily lives. I think magazine editors are also a community. There are things that lots of us are doing with our magazines and our Web sites to serve our readers, and we just need to come together as ASME and think about that in the same way, and make sure that we’re serving the membership the way that each of us go back to our offices and serve our readers.

Are you talking about that in ASME board meetings? I picture all you guys sitting around in this dark room like the fall of Rome, but there’s a lot of smart people on that board, so I’m sure that this discussion is happening.
We talk about that all the time. The board meetings are full of very smart, successful, opinionated people, which means that there’s lots of great ideas flying around in debate. We do need to at almost every meeting talk about the guidelines, talk about the awards. We have been having sort of these larger philosophical issues, partly because we’re all thinking about it at our desks anyway. What does it mean to be a magazine editor today? So, what’s ASME’s role now, today? How much should we embrace digital versus print? You’re going to notice some changes in the way ASME looks and works and feels and serves its membership pretty soon.

On a more personal level, any idea where you’ll be in five years? Still want to be at Runner’s World?
I’ve never, ever been good at answering that question, honestly. This is where you say, “I love my job, this is the best job that I can imagine.” And I really do love my job. Rodale is a great place to work; it’s very entrepreneurial. My job has changed more times than I can count in the five and a half years that I’ve had it. When I took my job, the job was: make the magazine. Which, not too long ago was all of our jobs. And then, the editors here were given control over the Web sites, so now we’re overseeing the Web site. Very quickly when you start at Rodale, you understand the importance of international, so there’s that connection. We have — is it 10 or 11 international editions now? [Editor’s note: 12]. Rodale is very, very smart about its place in the media industry with — and Dave Zinczenko talked about it in your interview — all the different platforms. It really does mean that as editor-in-chief on these titles, you have all this opportunity to get involved in these things. You have a mandate to get involved in some of these things, but you can sort of pick and choose, from time to time, what you really want to focus on.

I have no idea what I’m going to be doing. I sure want to stay in media somehow. I still love magazines. I got into this because I was a magazine junkie 15 years ago. My first job out of college was on Wall Street. I was among the worst Wall Street hires ever made. It was only when I sort of stopped working — wasn’t crunching numbers and was doing research and presentations and doing writing, research — where it was the only time that I ever felt like I was sort of shining in that job. So I walked away from the Wall Street thing and went back to grad school in journalism. It’s the journalism, the writing, the storytelling, the magazine-making that I’m most passionate about. So whatever I do, I want to stay as close to that as I possibly can. There are a million different kinds of editors these days. You can shoot off into other mediums, television, and that’s all cool, and I’ve done that too. So that’s a very long way of saying I have no idea. If you’re an editor-in-chief right now in this moment, and you think you have a clear idea of what your next job is — what’s that old saying? If you want to amuse the gods, make plans. I think that’s kind of like the moment that we’re in magazines right now. Even if I did envision some kind of next job, a month from now it’s probably going to change anyway.

All right, last question. You got a lot of oohs and ahhs from the female section at ASME last year. Who’s better looking, you or Dave?
[Laughs] I can put you in touch with my wife and my two kids, but I think you know what my answer is.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

Christopher Keyes began his magazine career as an intern at Outside and rose through the ranks to associate editor. After leaving the magazine in 2002, first for Skiing and then for Texas Monthly, where he was eventually editorial director, Keyes returned to the Santa Fe-based independent publication as its editor in 2006. (“I had to leave for long enough for people to forget I was an intern,” he jokes.) In the past, the magazine he helms has helped launch careers of writers including Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, and Keyes relishes the opportunity to continue producing quality long-form journalism. In addition to giving us the grand tour, captured on video, of Outside’s office in August, Keyes spoke with mediabistro.com about his magazine’s rich literary tradition, building a brand, and the advantages of working in an office where his staff hits the slopes before work.

Name: Chris Keyes
Position: Editor, Outside
Resume: Started as an intern at Outside. Rose to associate editor before leaving for Skiing. Joined Texas Monthly as its articles editor before being promoted to editorial director. Returned to Outside in 2006.
Birthday: March 13, 1974
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Education: BA, environmental science and policy, from Duke University
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: Week in Review: “I go straight to Frank Rich.”
Favorite television show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Bill Simmons’ The Sports Guy podcasts: “Zero nutritional value, but highly addictive.”
Last book read: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Tell me a little bit about how you see Outside — where it is now and where it’s going.
We just had our 30th anniversary last year, so we’re 31 years in, and we did a redesign last year. As part of the redesign, I really looked back at this mission statement that we’ve had and it was great to see that we’re doing exactly what we set out to do 30 years ago: inspire people to live an active lifestyle. That’s the thread that you’ll see throughout our pages. In terms of that mission, nothing’s really changed, but if you look at the magazine, it’s changed quite a bit. At the core of it is still this dedication to long-form literary journalism that holds the magazine together. It’s why people love the magazine. That’s surrounded by lots of service which lends itself to inspiring that active lifestyle.

Outside has always had an impressive focus on the long-form literary journalism: Jon Krakauer started here, Sebastian Junger started here. As magazines get smaller and articles get shorter, is there always going to be room in Outside for those 3,000-, 5,000-word stories?
Definitely. And if that part of it goes away, in my mind, Outside goes away. It’s still part of our uniqueness in the marketplace. If people are going to read long-form literary journals, they want to read it in a magazine right now. So we’re just completely committed to keeping that and trying, actually, as hard as we can to find that in the next generation of voices. It’s a different business model now. I think if you were here in the 1990s there were a lot of contract writers; now it’s almost exclusively freelance. It’s harder to find guys that we can really brand as Outside writers, but one of the things we’ve done is make a smaller pool of writers that we’re drawing from and keeping them very busy. They might be appearing in other magazines, but hopefully we’re keeping them so busy that they’re going to be here exclusively.

Are there any of those writers that you’re really excited about?
Yeah, there’s a few. There’s Eric Hansen, who writes our “Out of Bounds” column. He’s kind of continuing in the Tim Cahill and Randy Wayne White heritage of misadventure as opposed to just adventure. Nick Heil, who’s a former senior editor here, just came out with a book on Everest, and he’s written some great stories for us. He also writes our “Lab Rat” column. And another guy, Kevin Fedarko, who we just sent to Pakistan with Greg Mortenson, the guy who wrote Three Cups of Tea, sets up the schools there. He’s written some incredible stories for us. We’ve got some young voices that we’re really excited about.

Magazine circulation is down across the whole industry for the past six months. How’s Outside doing and what are you doing to kind of stem that circulation decline?
[Outside is doing] well, surprisingly. When you look at the industry as a whole we’re doing really well. I think newsstand is up between four and five percent for this year. Our circulation is up about four percent, or I think about 695,000 rate base, and that’s higher than it’s ever been. We feel pretty good about where we are right now, but obviously it’s really challenging out there.

We never got sucked into the public place distribution game and the agent-selling game. We certainly have it like all magazines did, but when ABC really cracked down on [junk circulation], all of ours has really been strong. So we didn’t have a lot of junk circulation, and I think that’s helped us hold strong in this year. We’ve also really focused on our covers. Four percent isn’t like a dramatic increase. but when you look at where the industry is as a whole, we don’t have as many bombs as we used to. So it’s good to have some consistency there — not to say that they all fly off the newsstand.

Outside sort of exists in a weird space. It’s out in Santa Fe, it’s an independent magazine. Do you think that helps you avoid some of the pitfalls that other magazines are going through?
Yeah, I do. There are certainly disadvantages to being out here, because people do almost forget that we’re out here, but first and foremost, the great thing about being in Santa Fe is here we are, this magazine whose mission is, like I said, inspiring the active lifestyle. Everybody in this office is living that lifestyle, so it’s a real authentic publication in that sense. If you come here in the winter, we’re meeting in the parking lot at 6:30 in the morning going out skiing a couple runs and then coming into work. You can’t do that in New York, and I think that comes through in our pages because we really know what we’re writing about and talking about. It does give us a unique perspective to be out here.

It’s hard to find talent because you can’t go across the street like you can in New York, but the people who do come out here really want to work for Outside and know that it’s a commitment. They have to love Santa Fe. So we get people who aren’t just looking for that next step necessarily in the magazine, but want to really spend some time here. I think that gives us an advantage because we have a real consistency of voice, of institutional memory of where the magazine’s been and where it’s going.

How does that work for you? Are you constantly going to New York for various things? Do you spend most of your time in Santa Fe?
I spend most of my time in Santa Fe. We have an editor, Mike Roberts, who first started in San Francisco in our line division and came out here when we brought our line to Santa Fe. He became an editor on the magazine, and then we moved him out to New York City. He’s on Good Morning America and Bill O’Reilly — he’s kind of the face of the magazine in New York. But I do travel probably two or three times a year to New York and then go out to L.A. a few times.

And what’s [Outside owner] Larry Burke’s involvement with the magazine?
Well, the good thing is he’s had the same idea for the magazine for 30 years. He’s not involved in a day-to-day level, at least editorially, but he is in a business sense. But I know exactly what he wants the magazine to be. About once a month in our production cycle, I will show him the issue. We’ll kind of quickly go through — sometimes I’ll make a change that he wants and sometimes we’ll disagree and it won’t be changed, but for the most part we see eye-to-eye and it’s a pretty good working relationship.

With the addition of Outside‘s Go, you seem to be building a brand. Are there any discussions of selling the titles?
People ask about Larry’s involvement in the magazine and I always say, if he’s really involved that’s a good sign. I tell my staff that because I think that he is so passionate about this brand that I can’t see him doing anything else, and so I don’t think he’s ready to let go of it yet. But he also sees it as something that he wants to grow. Magazines aren’t necessarily growing right now, but you add another title, which I think will help make us more robust.

Our online division is doing really well, like all magazines are starting to grow their own divisions pretty successfully. We’ve got our first TV production coming out on the travel channel in November, which we’re excited about; [we’re] looking to develop a lot more television programming. So we see a lot of ways where this brand can go. And it’s fun to work at Outside because unlike a lot of the bigger magazines, because we’re independent, you can’t just come here and be an editor. You have to be a multimedia editor; you have to wear a lot of different hats. You have to know a little bit about marketing, you have to know a little bit about TV, because you never know what you’re going to be called to participate in. We can’t just hire a TV division. You are the TV division if that’s what wants to happen.

Can you talk about that TV program?

We did a package of stories two times, two years in a row called “Unsolved Mysteries,” which was just exploring mysterious things that had happened in the wild. The pilot is actually hosted by a former intern here who wrote the package, Tim Sohn; he and a producer flew to New Guinea to investigate the disappearance in 1961 of Michael Rockefeller — the son of Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York — [who] disappeared swimming from his boat, which capsized at the island. One of the first things Tim had to do was try to recreate the swim, which involved swimming across shark-infested water, so it was pretty hilarious. He says that the scariest thing for him was getting in front of a camera for the first time.

Not the sharks?
Not the sharks.

What are you guys doing online?
Well, we have a partnership that’s gone back to 2001, when we partnered with Away.com. They’re two distinctive sites: they share some travel content but we have an online editor here. Most of our producers, and hardware and everything is in D.C. at Away.com. But we have total control of the editorial vision of the site. We don’t have, as I discussed, the luxury of just pouring a ton of money into our site, so fortunately all these other magazines are. We see this trickle-down technology, see what’s working, and pick and choose where our strengths are. We know that almost three-quarters of our traffic is coming for gear coverage. So we’ve really ramped up our coverage there. We have videos of all the gear that we’re reviewing in both our magazine and our buyer’s guide. We launched these first ones which were hilariously poor production value, and it was the most popular thing immediately that we’d done on our site. So we’ve started producing those almost once a week. And really, I think we went from about 10,000 views when we had very little video content to almost 200,000 a month, in just six months. There’s a lot more in the pipeline video-wise. We started with a really big umbrella blog, which didn’t have a focus. Now we’ve got a separate gear blog, which is generating its own traffic really well.

We’re looking at what we’re good at. We know we can’t do everything online right now, but I think we have a unique opportunity because Outside, rather than being so general interest, does have a focus. We’re going to be able to build a community a lot better than some magazines that do really cover the entire gamut of men’s interests.

It seems to me that you have a lot of different niches that you can sort of build out.
Yeah, the fitness side, and we have the travel side, and we have these little components that I think we can grow individually that are some of this bigger whole. But again, not so broad that we’re doing the best bars, drinks, and food and all of this stuff. That’s all sometimes tied into the magazine, but not where we’re going to pour [all] our energy online.

Photography is a huge part of Outside. How has digital imagery changed the game? Do you worry about fake photography or doctored photography?
We worry a lot about it. In fact, it’s interesting you brought it up. We just had an “Exposure” shot that we ran — it was a sailing shot in San Francisco Bay. We asked the photographer, “Did you do any doctoring?” ‘No.’ Asked him again: ‘No.’ [We] printed the image, [and] got several hardcore sailing fans who looked at the image and saw that something wasn’t right about it. We went back and discovered that it was doctored. That really concerns us from a digital standpoint because it was more than just highlighting a portion of the photograph, it was doctoring reality. We really changed our standards there, especially with that front “Exposure” section, which is supposed to represent a real, beautiful reality-based photograph in the front of the magazine. It does concern us and we’ve started to really look at our policies there to ensure that there is no doctoring. And the question is trying to define where that line is. Even Ansel Adams was doctoring his photographs. That’s a part of our conversations now.

Where is that line?
I don’t know. Where we came down to, at least with the “Exposure” section is if it changes the reality of the photograph — if it creates a reality that isn’t possible, that’s not okay. But if it’s changing the quality of the sunlight, that may be all right. It’s really a case-by-case basis.

Five years down the road, where do you see Outside?
I see Outside still being a print publication. Larry and I joke that if tomorrow morning we could switch our entire subscription base to Zinio or some other digital platform, we would do it in a second obviously — from an environmental standpoint, from a cost standpoint. But I don’t see it going away. We’ve always been dedicated to this long-form journalism, to rich, beautiful photography; really still the only place that those two things thrive are in a magazine format. So I see that as being still here five years from now. I have to imagine there will be some shakeout among the magazines that are in this space or sharing some of this space, but I think because Outside has been here for 30 years and defined this space, we will be the one that really sticks around. That said, I see a huge upside for our Web site and our audience growing there. Some readers are going to want to get the Outside content that we create in the magazine, and a lot more are going to want to get it online.

Noah Davis is a New York-based freelance writer and co-editor of FishbowlNY.com, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you see City Room in two years?

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

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

Any specifics?

Just time will tell.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that…
Frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So is Vice growing up?
No, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Davis is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly. Maybe St. Andrews.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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