EDWARD LEIDA has been responsible for the look and feel of Fairchild Publications’ portfolio of glossies and trade publications for more than decade. As the company’s group design director, Leida has set the tone and templates for the company’s flagships, Women’s Wear Daily and W, the current reincarnation of Details, and an endless stream of marketing material, prototypes, and top secret projects like Cookie, an upscale parenting magazine currently in the works. It wasn’t Leida’s idea to have Bruce Weber and other brand-name fashion designers shoot elephants wearing Chanel for W—that was his collaborator, Fairchild’s creative director, Dennis Freedman. And it wasn’t Leida who collected back-to-back National Magazine Awards for the design of Details—that would be the magazine’s design director, Rockwell Harwood. But Leida is the one who meshes Freedman’s envelope-pushing visual ideas with W‘s typography, and he’s also the one who laid the groundwork for Detail‘s pair of Ellies. He’s the invisible man of magazine design, even though he’s one of its best practitioners.

Mediabistro: What’s on your desk right this second?

Edward Leida: Something close and dear to me. I’m doing sort of a soft redesign of W. There was no mandate or request for it from [Fairchild chairman] Patrick [McCarthy] or anyone else. It was something I sort of initiated myself. It wasn’t a selfish thing—the magazine just sort of looked like it needed a boost or a little bit of a freshening. So I commissioned a new slab serif font to replace ours. I saw so much of it being used by the half-dozen magazines knocking us off, that I thought it was time to have something that was a little more personal for ourselves. It’s sort of a preemptive thing. I’m not one to wait around for someone to say “God this looks tired” or maybe sales start lagging or whatever it is that often contributes to the mandate to change the magazine. The alterations sort of happen while I’m working on the [feature] well with Dennis [Freedman] simultaneously. Whatever downtime there is I use to reshape it…so in between I’m fitting it in with a little work at home.

Mediabistro: How does your relationship with Dennis work, exactly? The two of you have an unusually close relationship as far as design directors and creative directors go. And how do the two of you work with Patrick McCarthy?

Edward Leida: Patrick knows that our decision-making has never been flippant or selfish in any way. I think we are strategic-thinking people, Dennis and myself, and we are of two minds: business and creativity. We lean towards the creative side, but we genuinely believe that creativity is an integral part of a successful business—especially in our industry.

Dennis and I have worked together for 20 years. For any work relationship, first you must establish a mutual respect. You build on that foundation. Dennis is brilliant in choosing talent to photograph for W. And he recognizes what I am able to do with those images. Together we share in the experience. There are edits that Dennis does that I am ecstatic about, and some I am not crazy about. I voice my opinions and he voices his about design. We spend a lot of time together laying out stories and bouncing ideas off each other, so it’s a very open exchange. We sit down with [photographer] Mario Sorrenti and edit a story with him—it’s not like he just sends a messenger to drop it off. He literally sits here and we work on it. It’s very organic and very much about mutual respect. It really is sort of this “garage” mentality. The business side really is secondary, but the images we want to run that allow us to be “artistic” is built into the DNA of the magazine. So when you establish that, it just feeds on itself, and it’s easy.

Mediabistro: When you’re that personally involved with a magazine, how do you avoid stepping on the toes of the magazine’s design staff? And how do you propagate your ideas across Fairchild’s magazines while taking your designers’ thoughts and ideas into consideration at the same time?

Edward Leida: They are aware of anything I’m involved with that is going to affect them. We work in an open environment, and all of the pages I’m working on are being printed out in our own art department, so they see them. I debrief them, basically, and tell them ‘I think it’s time to make some changes and I want you to meet the typographers.’ I just show them pages and text and galleys.

So they are involved, but they are also busy putting the book out. But a lot of the design decisions are really made by me. I generate them on my own, and I really believe often they need to come from one mind. I also play devil’s advocate where I’ll show people things and I have them look and I’ll ask them what they think. So there’s an open exchange that way, but the initial process is just maintaining focus and cohesiveness in a singular experience and mindset. The way I have to do that, given the nature of the way we work here and it being so noisy, is to just strap on my headphones and sort of tune out.

Mediabistro: How do you juggle all of the projects that comes your way? Besides W, you’re working on internal projects, marketing materials, prototypes, etc. What have you done for Cookie, just to choose one. Did you take the lead in deciding what a luxury parenting magazine should look like?

Edward Leida: Well, I was involved in developing some marketing materials for Cookie. In that case—and this stems from the general philosophy of this company—we don’t want it to look or feel like any of the other parenting magazines. Fairchild has always been seen as doing something clearly different in its approach, with an underpinning of quality—a little less commercial. Not that we aren’t commercial, but we don’t try and take every product and wrap it in the consumer clichés that everyone is used to. The Fairchild philosophy has been to create “really good stuff” and make it appeal to a very select audience—which I think is the same thing that was done at Vitals.

It makes me think of when James Truman wanted to start his art magazine. He wanted to start it outside of the Condé Nast offices, and I think he wanted to do that because it creates this “garage” mentality where it isn’t all about the sales, the marketing, and all the infrastructure behind it to promote it and blow it out. It’s really about getting down to what you want to say, and making it the best thing it can possibly be. And if you love it, and it’s a magazine you can genuinely love, then the success will come. That’s where great things happen. Patrick is a great editor and allows that to happen, but he’s not crazy and isn’t going to shoot himself in the foot.

Mediabistro: Where do you start when approaching a new project? I know you’re a type guy—I’ve seen you identify fonts at a single glance.

Edward Leida: I am a type guy. I’m not a type geek. Typically, what I begin with is text. I’m not even sure right away what I am going to use, but I always just plunk down a galley of text. I have a blank page and I just put a column of text down it. I was having a conversation with a friend, trying to explain what type was, and I asked, ‘Do you know DeKooning, the painter? He always had this blank canvas and he would draw one line. After that, the rest would come.’ It’s sort of the same with me. I take a piece of body copy, and I put it on a blank piece of paper, and I look at it. I don’t really know what the process is, but it evolves into something.

I tend to be one that questions most of the things I do, and rethink them maybe too much. But I keep doing a series of experiments. You’ll find around my desk reams and reams of printouts of sometimes just body copy, or body copy with a headline, and that’s how I do it.

Mediabistro: What can you possibly see in a single block of text?

Edward Leida: I’m looking to get excited. This sounds clichéd, but I’m always looking for some weird contrast—when all the elements merge and the lights come on. There will be something about the text and the headline that immediately creates this little flicker or weird contrast where I say “Oh, that’s the way to go.” I may find that it’s the wrong direction, but I’ll start by pursuing that.

Mediabistro: Because Fairchild magazines aren’t generally expected to sell a lot of copies on the newsstand, you have the luxury of concentrating on typography and a sort of quiet elegance. Could you do a celebrity weekly if you had to? Where would you start? Or do you think that formula—neon fonts and ugly paparazzi photographs—is going to burn itself out?

Edward Leida: I think a lot of that approach comes from the need to be the loudest screaming magazine vehicle out there, and everybody is competing to be it. Who initially started this—and which art director said, “Let’s use day-glo green here because it will scream like hell”—I don’t know. But I’m saddened by the fact that it happened. It’s a blessing and a curse. The very freedom that allowed it to emerge was new and great, but it screwed things up for the rest of us. It’s just one of many things that is on the cliché list of what a consumer magazine is supposed to be. You’re supposed to have raunchy cover lines, day-glo colors, and everything is sans serif, and on and on. It’s this weird language that I’m completely familiar with, and it wouldn’t take a whole lot for me to know how to execute it. If we were going to do it, I think I’d find some subversive way of using it and still make it elegant.

Mediabistro: So where are you looking for inspiration at this point? Are there any magazines out there which genuinely excite you these days?

Edward Leida: I am such a classicist and traditionalist, but I’ve been having this struggle recently since I am also a modernist. Sometimes I feel like I’m being split in two. Honestly, I haven’t been looking at a lot of magazines. I’ve gone to the newsstand, and nothing is really turning me on. Either you have a whole barrage of vehicles trying to be modern, which I call the “flatliner” magazine, in which everything is sans serif and nothing makes your heart race. You’re in sort of a mild coma, and that’s “cool.” The other is sort of the traditional and classic look. And then you have some of the hipster magazines with a convergence of the two. They are using traditional fonts—and I don’t know if this is by default because they aren’t commissioning their own font—but I respect the art directors that are using them. But overall I can’t say that there is any one magazine that is doing anything for me.

I’ve become interested in homogenization. It’s interesting how globalization is creating homogenization and how it’s affecting design. I was recently at an architecture symposium at the architect’s league. People were talking about globalization. I found myself sketching a globe. The way I visualize homogenization is by picturing anything from the radius corners on an iPod to the Frank Gehry [Guggenheim Bilbao] Museum to the way serif typefaces have become a little bulkier and a little less super thick or thin. The same thing is happening in architecture and industrial design. The edges have been ground down—they’ve literally become rounded. That is something that interests me a lot more, rather than literally looking at magazines.

Mediabistro: So what are you on the lookout for when scouting for new talent? Someone who thinks in terms of sharp edges, I would imagine.

Edward Leida: They are of two schools. They might be staunch type freaks I can immediately recognize. And at the other extreme is the younger and more naïve recent graduate who, yes, is a possible future type geek.

But I’m very attracted to someone who has some fine art tendencies. Someone who draws and is maybe a little messy. Someone who is clearly a little different than I am when it comes to designs, but who is more like I was when I was in school—interested in both the fine arts and the graphic arts. They may not have tremendous typographic skills, but something interesting is going on with their drawing skills. I call those types of people “dangerous,” because when they finally master the typographic skills and are able to merge them with a fine art talent, they will be very dangerous. They can reach into their bag of tricks and pull something out that maybe I couldn’t.

Mediabistro: And then the pupil becomes the master? What’s the skillset and career path that’s led you to what is quite possible the most powerful job in magazine design?

Edward Leida: I originally studied industrial design. I took one semester of that, saw guys running around with calculators and slide rules attached to their hips, and I was out of there in a heartbeat. I graduated and I starting doing work for a small boutique-ish ad agency, but I was always interested in architecture and I always wanted to work for this design firm in Manhattan called Whitehouse & Katz. I got that job and got involved in some very interested corporate identity work.

Then, in 1985 this job at Fairchild came up. W was a newspaper at the time and they were looking to redesign it. My experience in really focusing on type prompted the design director to try to hire me. He moved quickly, but I put it off initially. I was scared of going into the magazine business since I knew nothing about it. I came from a design office that was pristine with immaculate cubicles. Then I went to Fairchild—where they still had rotary phones and it was an open environment with people yelling across the room to each other.

I don’t think there is a distinct “Eddie Leida look” today. I really try to do what suits the editor, and what suits the magazine best. And I owe that to my education at Whitehouse & Katz. It was developing corporate identities that led me to create specialized identities for each magazine.

I think people take themselves much too seriously in a lot of these businesses and I don’t. I really believe in craft and I am really focused when I am here. But we do laugh and we do have fun.

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

WHEN TINY, UNHERALDED CITY magazine won the National Magazine Award for photography last spring—upsetting Vogue and Martha Stewart Living in the process—the universal reaction by guests at the awards luncheon was: “Who?” The answer to that question, as far as CITY‘s consistently excellent visuals are concerned, is Fabrice Frere, CITY‘s creative director and chief operating officer. [Full disclosure: I am a past and future CITY contributor.] Frere, a veteran of Art Cooper’s GQ, traded in the streams of Condé Nast cash at his disposal a few years ago for the freedom found at the top of CITY‘s masthead. Since then, he’s outsourced his art director (even while CITY was nominated for a NMA in design), embraced digital photography, and succeeded in doing more than his rivals with a fraction of the budget.

Mediabistro: Where do you start when you’re a magazine as small as CITY competing in categories like fashion, travel, and lifestyle against well-endowed competitors like Condé Nast and Hearst?

Fabrice Frere: I grew very frustrated when I was at GQ with Art Cooper because it was very formulaic. Not that CITY doesn’t have a formula—we have a grid, we have layouts that prescribe to that grid—but what’s different is that we are reinventing the photography and the visuals. Our commentary is more visual than written, and we achieve that by giving photographers freedom. We’ve become a little bit of their playground.

Photographers have two lives. They’re doing either advertising or catalogues and are usually micromanaged by just about everybody in their field: “Just put the girl here, make sure she is smiling, make her look happy.” Those are the kinds of comments that plague photographers. And then, when they get to shoot for magazines, sometimes the bigger ones completely overrule any creative agenda they may have.

I think the pool of magazines that will let you do a kooky idea—but where you can still get respect and not look like a fool—is very small. There are plenty of very independent magazines, sure, that will let you do whatever, but you may not want to associate yourself with them. The key to luring photographers is finding that balance between being respected and still letting them pull off something great.

The best comment I ever received about CITY came from John Varvatos. He was looking at an issue, and he said, “It seems like people are having fun making this magazine.”

Mediabistro: But what are the mechanics of recruiting the talent you need to implement your vision? W is very similar to CITY in the sense of giving its photographers ultimate freedom while commanding incredible respect. And it has the money to command the A-listers. Are you continually looking for new talent because you’re priced out of even semi-established names?

Frere: We have photographers who are completely established and who finally came around and said, “The paper’s good, the publication is doing much better; you know, I’d love to be a part of this and get the exposure.” But I also harvest the new talent coming up, and usually, that’s where we find some of the best ideas for the magazine—their fresh, forward thinking. For every 10 books you see, you might actually see one that catches your eye and has a new point of view, a new way of treating fashion. I think those are the moments we live here for.

We don’t do celebrities, thank God. That’s when you really do need budgets. I remember being at GQ when Art Cooper—I was sitting across from him at his desk—was on the phone with Sharon Stone. Sharon Stone wanted to be featured in GQ, but she wanted to be shot with zebras. It was kind of hard to get zebras to New York, and she wanted to be shot in a zebra suit, sort of cuddling or holding two zebras next to her. And Art Cooper’s response was: “It’s not gonna happen.” He photoshopped them in later. And that’s what you get with celebrities. You’ve got to fly them first class, you have to have the champagne waiting at the photo shoot. It just becomes a very expensive thing, so we’ve stayed away from that.

Mediabistro: CITY‘s reputation is based almost entirely on its visuals. Can visuals alone carry a magazine for the long term, or will the words eventually have to keep up? Are you trying to achieve a balance, or did you have to pick your battles and choose to win photography while surrendering a bit when it came to stories?

Frere: I think we’ve gone astray, and I’ll tell you why. Bob Cato, who I think of as a private tutor, was a consultant for Condé Nast while I was there, and he very clearly expressed to me that, in a magazine, the art is there to support the written word. And I think we’ve completely violated that rule and that with the visuals supporting the magazine, the words almost seem incidental sometimes. Obviously, we’re working hard now to balance that out. Last year, we won 19 photography awards. I think it was nine from the [Society of Publication Designers] and nine from the AIGA awards. So last year was good.

Mediabistro: And you still see the magazine as broken and needing to be fixed?

Frere: In a way, totally. And I think some of the changes we’ve made recently with the editorial staff are going to reflect that. But I’ve never heard anyone open a magazine and say, “Oh, this story reads really well.” The first thing they’ll say is, “This is ugly,” or “This is beautiful.” And it’s usually the case with our magazine that people open it and say, “This is nice to look at,” or “It’s easy to navigate.” And then we’ll suck that someone in.

Mediabistro: How does your relationship with your art director, Adriana Jacoud work? She isn’t in the office and she’s not an employee, either. Is she responsible for CITY‘s look and feel?

Frere: No, originally it was Mariana Ochs, who was actually a girlfriend of mine. When I left Condé Nast and met up with [editorial director] John [McDonald], the publication had just been launched. I think three issues were on the way, and they didn’t look like anything really. There was no reason to the layouts or to the photography.

Mariana and I sat down and basically designed the template and the identity of the magazine. The mission at the time was: If you found a page from the magazine lying astray under a car or something and picked it up, you would know where it came from.

We did a first issue and then tweaked the design—things like scale, size, perfecting the fonts, limiting the fonts, applying rules, style sheets, and all that stuff. That took about three or four months, and we’ve building on that ever since.

Adriana came later. She used to work with Mariana in New York, and when Mariana moved back to Brazil, she came on board and we picked it up from there. Then she moved to Pennsylvania. She’s more of a graphic designer than an art director, actually. To me, an art director would go to photo shoots or conceptualize things with an editor and bring the visuals to the story. Adriana basically logs into our server once everything’s been shot, the copy is together and everything has been put on a mock layout. She picks it up from the server, and we have a few conversations about what the piece is, what it should reflect, and where it belongs in the magazine. And from there she spends about a day or two in the layout.

Mediabistro: What are the trade-offs of that arrangement? It strikes me as pretty unusual that a magazine with the visual reputation of CITY would have an art director with such a weak presence.

Frere: It’s unusual because there’s sometimes a disconnect between what you might be thinking graphically or typographically. That’s easy to fix with a quick instant message session or phone call. What’s also nice is that she has a fresh eye on it after we’ve been staring at it a little too long. It works well. It’s certainly much easier for me financially.

Mediabistro: If you can do this with a fraction of what the major glossies spend, why are they spending so much in the first place? Is it just because Condé Nast’s magazines can’t or won’t rein in their overhead costs?

Frere: We had a little saying that we printed up, something to the tune of: “For love or for money, there’s no in-between.” I still let it be known that we have small means, that we are not ashamed of it, and it’s OK.

I saw ghastly amounts of money being spent at magazines. For something like a front-of-the-book one-pager, which was going to get one small, quarter-page picture, I’ve seen them shoot on location, booking a van for the models and catering. I mean, that’s something you can shoot with your digital camera today.

I don’t know if they realize that. I think they play the entire game. And when I say “the game,” it’s everything. It’s having 30 people on a set, when you really don’t need 30 people. I’ve seen cover shoots at Condé Nast that cost $60,000-$70,000. Why? With that many people on the set, your subject is now frozen, shy, and confused about whose direction to follow. And there are people there who are basically just chatting on their cell phones. I just don’t know why it has to be such a big production.

Mediabistro: So what are the shortcuts you’ve discovering for slashing those costs? Besides shooting digitally, how many processes have you managed to streamline?

Frere: A lot. Our first big cut—and most magazines have done this by now—was going direct to plate. We’ve skipped the whole match print process, which was really expensive. When we did it, we immediately saved $80,000 a year. This is how I could afford a photo editor.

More recently, I think a lot of publications and catalogs have started to use digital photography, but for a long time, they weren’t sure, and didn’t really believe in the technology being ready yet. I can tell you that we have become beta testers of just about everything under the sun. I think the turnaround time for digital is amazing, and I’ve done shoots where you really can’t tell the difference.

Mediabistro: What do you use? Are there any best practices yet?

Frere: Most of the photographers actually shoot medium format, and they’ll put a digital back on the camera, connected to a fancy Powerbook with a very large hard drive. And they’ll snap 300 photos in a day. But since you know what you’re getting, it allows you to save time in the studio.

Mediabistro: Every shot is effectively a Polaroid?

Frere: Every shot is the Polaroid, every single shot. And you know when you have “the shot,” whereas you might think you have the shot with a Polaroid, but then you switch to your film, and whatever you have on film you won’t know about until the next day at best.

So, shooting digital saves you time. I think the quality is there now, and it’s only getting better now, day by day. I’ve heard rumors of cameras being developed that are actually 35-millimeter but capture so much information from that little frame that medium-size cameras might be obsolete, and you’ll be able to do it with these smaller ones. I’ve shot things with my 5-megapixel consumer camera that have appeared in the magazine, and you really wouldn’t know what I used.

We find photographers who completely embrace the technology, because our embrace makes it more attractive for them to shoot. They’re not looking at $3,000-$4,000 in personal expenses for film, film processing, making prints, and all that business. When they’re done, they’re just like, “Here’s the disk.” And they’re just paying the cost of the media. We can edit those photos that night and pretty much put them in the layout the next day. If you can do that, why wouldn’t you?

Mediabistro: Well, what happens to the magazine industry in the long run when every photo editor in the business realizes they can?

Frere: It’s changing already. Look at the number of photo labs that have closed down in the last three or four years. They used to be everywhere, and now they’re either closing down or adapting by offering digital services. How is it going to affect the rest of the industry? Just as everyone is becoming a musician, writing and remixing songs of their own, I think everyone is becoming a photographer. It used to take someone a lifetime to become an established photographer, through a lot of trial and error and whatnot.

Today, I know a photographer who decided he was going to become a photographer three years ago, and now he’s getting write-ups everywhere and shooting celebrities. That’s all because of digital. Otherwise, you drop a lot of money the old-fashioned way, on one shoot, and never recover it.

Mediabistro: Speaking of dropping money, how did CITY manage to win the National Magazine Award for photography last year? Because of the way the awards are judged, you didn’t compete with Vogue or Martha Stewart, but with a sort of platonic ideal of your own magazine. But how, with the budgets Vogue has at its disposal, does it not achieve its platonic ideal every year?

Frere: Vogue—American Vogue—is not that engaging. Even as far as the fashion goes, there’s so much more room to play with, and they’re not doing it. I used to think that in the old days at GQ, where we would just say “Oh, let’s get two models, put them around the pool, and it will be fun,” and that’s it. I think the idea is what matters most. Before you even take the shot, you have to have a very solid idea, and I think that’s where the money goes wasted. It’s the idea that if you throw enough money at it, it will be great. I

I’ve seen it in catalog shoots as well. I had to do one shot where I had to rent a kitten at $750 for two hours. This was a shoot with money. The kitten made more than I do in a week!

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

When Bruce Wasserstein, New York magazine’s owner and deep-pocketed patron, managed to lure editor Adam Moss away from his refuge at The New York Times a little more than a year ago, the hire set a thousand resumés in motion. Not since the flush, Internet bubble-era clubhouses like Inside.com did a media entity have the buzz, the real deal talent at the top, and the ability to keep writing checks needed to stockpile talent the way Moss has done. While his editorial hires have attracted the bulk of people’s attention, his key hires on the design sign were inspired. Luke Hayman, once hailed in the design press as “the best magazine art director you’ve never heard of,” left the top job at Travel + Leisure to come aboard. Jody Quon, who had worked with Moss at The New York Times Magazine, signed up as his photography director. And Chris Dixon, who also worked for the Times Magazine but is better known for his inspired work at Adbusters, was hired as Hayman’s art director. The three spoke with mb’s Greg Lindsay about the details of New York’s throwback redesign.

Mediabistro: Let’s start with the stories of how you joined Adam Moss’ pirate ship. Did he woo you? Were your portfolios left in FedEx dropoff boxes the day he was hired? How did this team come together and then set out on the redesign?

Luke Hayman (design director): I think I’ll speak for all of us in that we are Adam’s team. Jody, of course, came from the Times Magazine, and it’s my guess that Adam probably had her in mind right from Day One. Then he had to search for a design director. And Chris and I knew each other already—I desperately tried to hire Chris a few years ago and he wisely resisted. But he came over here. So that was the chronology.

Mediabistro: What made you want to leave Travel + Leisure, Luke? You were the only one of the three of you who hadn’t worked with Adam before.

Hayman: I had an amazing gig at Travel + Leisure, and I had no intention of leaving. But when I heard about this, [it] was a very unique situation, and I had this great fear that I would never get this opportunity again—where a magazine with incredible potential was bought by someone for the right reasons, who had enough money to do something great with it, and who hired whom I consider to be the best editor in town. All of those parts, coming together at the same time… I just thought they would never be offered to me. I had never had this opportunity, and so I hunted it down. It took about six weeks from the first email to the OK.

Mediabistro: I imagine a redesign was already in the cards when the three of you arrived. Where did you start from conceptually considering the magazine’s incredible design history, and were you exceedingly cautious because of that history?

Hayman: From the beginning, Adam said part of the brief was to do a bit of a restoration job. So, we are going back to the time of one of the golden eras, which informs some of the typography and the tone. He described to me how his parents had subscribed to the magazine when he was growing up on Long Island, and how he just had a thrill—and how other people said they had a thrill—when they learned of the magazine, and grew up with this magazine, and waited for every issue and discovered amazing writing, and just how the feel of the city that was conveyed through this magazine.

Mediabistro: How does the photography play into that, and how do the three of you work together? From what I understand, Adam is very big on process, and there lots of meetings and lots and lots of discussions over there. How do you the three of you plan each week together, and plan for future issues?

Jody Quon (photography director): The photography begins well in advance. Essentially, the photo department—as well as Luke’s team—are very much in touch with the editors to try to figure out the stories that have been assigned. Then, what ends up happening is that the photo team immediately gets in touch with the writers to figure out—based on what they think they’re going to be writing—what’s the best way to tell the story, yet be true to what the eventual storyline is supposed to say. As soon as we know what an initial lineup is going to be over the next week, two weeks, three weeks, or three months ahead, then that’s when we begin to start thinking about what the visual length of that story would be. We feel very blessed because Adam is an editor who embraces photography, and when a great picture comes walking through the door, he immediately recognizes it. He has extraordinary taste, and he gives the photo and design departments many, many liberties, allowing us to make our own assessment as to what is the most original and interesting way to tell the story visually. For him, the visual language is so, so, so paramount that it’s really such a blessing—certainly for a photo editor—to have the editor on our team in that respect.

Mediabistro: The most surprising thing about the new New York magazine, I would hazard, is the number of entry points into the magazine, and the incredibly amped-up back of the book—the “Strategist” and “The Culture Pages” in particular. None of you really had a service magazine background, so when confronted with the task of taking an already service-heavy magazine to the next level, how did you approach it?

Hayman: Well, Travel + Leisure is actually pretty service-heavy, when you get into it. You see the world with the photography, but in the front and back there is a lot of hard work that goes into the service, and that was my real background there.

But the redesign happened with a lot of prototyping with Adam. Adam had a lot of very strong ideas. He told me what no editor has ever told me; he said, “Make the type smaller, we have to fit more on here.” He and many other editors had so many great ideas we wanted to try that we just had to fit as much in as possible. From my point of view, there wasn’t any great, big idea that we had. The design just evolved, and we played around with many things. The redesign was long and torturous, but also a lot of fun and satisfying in the end.

We are still playing with a lot of it. We had a discussion this morning about several of the pages that I’m a little bit unhappy with, and we are going to try some more things. It just sort of grows.

Mediabistro: Where did you actually find the time to work on the redesign, considering the small staff and the relentless weekly pace? How much time do you spend on long-term planning versus putting out fires? And where are you finding the time for tweaks?

Hayman: I spent quite a lot of time on the redesign, and then Chris stepped in. And for a long time, he was doing the bulk of each issue in terms of the [feature] well and the culture section. We hired two full-time freelancers to help with the redesign, and they stayed for a while to implement the sections.

It was very intense. It was like having two jobs at once. Because you would just get your head into thinking about a feature and the redesign, and then you would get caught in a meeting—”What do you want on the cover?”—and suddenly you have to think about something completely different. So, it was a real shock for me, but Jody has been on a weekly pace for eleven years or something like that, and she put together an amazing team.

Quon: You know, the more you are asked to do, the more you accomplish. The busier you are, the more productive you are. And I think, as much as it can be difficult at times, we are even happier that way.

As far as the redesign goes, most of it is in place, I would say, and there is always going to be tweaking here and there, but that’s the wonderful thing about Adam: there is no ceiling for what the perfect product should be. Everybody should be so blessed to have an editor who has that level of expectation for his staff.

Back to the original question: Luke has more of a background in service than certainly I did. I had virtually no background in that, but New York is very much about service, so a lot of that stuff was already here. And for us, our job was to figure out how to repackage it and edit it down.

Mediabistro: The city magazine format has been updated and optimized, but hasn’t really changed much since Clay Felker invented it at New York decades ago. How far back into the archives did you go, and are there any other magazines you looked at that had a fresh take on how city magazines should be done?

Hayman: We literally did go through the archives and pulled out and Xeroxed the Intelligencer pages and got a feel of what they were like in the 70s and 80s. Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard started it all. It was very smart and had humor, and the issue of illustration was very innovative. And then the Bob Newman/Kurt Andersen version had just such a strength to it—Robert Best just did amazing things with type on a weekly basis before he had a computer. It just blows your mind when you see the amount of work he did.

Mediabistro: The redesign has such a retro feel to it, which is surprising in the sense that neither you nor Chris really have retro bent in any of your previous work.

Hayman: Aesthetically, this magazine was a complete change for myself, and I think for Chris, too, in terms of typography. I think both of us had a background in a much more modernist sort of design. Travel + Leisure had a very spare look in terms of the display text. My background has always been in modernism.

And then one of the first things Adam talked about when I met him was the restoration of New York, and his fondness for its legacy. I was taken aback right from the start, because I sort of had an aversion to classical typefaces, and there was so much of that in New York—which was influenced and then dominated by Roger Black and Rolling Stone—and it just sort of went against my nature.

But we all sort of got our heads around it, and organically and by chance, the sort of graphic languages we had started playing with right from the beginning was this sort of bookish, classical typography that Chris has really spent a lot of time honing. That’s partly because of the typeface that was here, which we kept, this gorgeous font named “Miller” which comes in lots of weights and has a very elegant italic and small caps, and just lends itself to very elegant, classical, bookishness.

And we started developing a style of charts and graphs that were a little bit ornate, an aesthetic we thought set a tone without going too far and being too sarcastic. It just had that sort of light touch and intelligence. We didn’t want to go anywhere down the path of a lot of the magazine design going on under the Brit influence—the Maxim look, the sort of packing everything onto a page. Though we wanted to have the content there, we didn’t want to have everything screaming at you. And Adam was very much an advocate for elegance.

In the instance of “The Strategist” opener, we tried many, many versions of that. We had started with something a lot bolder and he said, “Try that in italic,” and we ended up with a very elegant, skinny italic font which is just very, very pretty… and not something I would have come up with in the past.

Mediabistro: How unusual is your relationship with Adam? Just based on this conversation, he sounds like the most involved, visually astute editor any of you have ever worked with.

Chris Dixon (art director): I’ll just say one thing regarding editors, because I’ve worked with Kalle Lasn at Adbusters, who is very, very hands-on and has a film background, so he was always thinking visually and that was a good collaboration. Then I spent a short period of time at The New York Times Magazine when Adam was there, three or four years ago, just as a designer. He was very involved and knew a lot more about typography than many of the designers around. So you had to be on guard all the time, because he would come up to you with questions…

He is very attuned to design, and can go back and forth in a conversation about the editorial direction of the article, then quickly move to a discussion of photography, and then move on to how the typography is working for the story as well. He sees them all as one unit.

Mediabistro: How does that affect your freedom as designers? Do you ever feel like you’re being micromanaged? And is the vision of the magazine entirely Adam’s, or are you really collaborating with him?

Hayman: I just do what I’m told. (laughs) I’m really good on the Mac; that’s why he hired me.

Dixon: No, I think you bring a lot to a story or an issue, and then it’s just about a good collaboration. I’ll work with Luke on the design of a few stories, and then we’ll do a presentation with Jody and Adam, just to get everyone’s head together, and push everything another ten percent better, or tweak it a bit. It’s really more of a fine-tuning, but a lot of the discussion will drive the direction for the benefit of everyone involved.

Hayman: One unique thing I’ve found—which was a little intimidating, actually, when I first got here—is that Adam almost demands, or expects, or invites us to the editorial ideas meetings, and we are there not just to listen. We get our turn around the table to present ideas, and they often ask for visual one, or photo-based ones. We are in all the core meetings, so I do get the feeling that we are at the executive level . That sounds obnoxious, but I’ve been at some places where the editors are the big brains, and then they come out and disperse it to the junior editors and the designer—and then sometimes the photo department below the designer, even. But here, Jody’s team and our team are really in at the beginning, and we are given a lot of information. Often, Adam won’t start a meeting until he can have us in the room. That’s why I think the New York Times Magazine has won every award in the book. Because the design and photography teams are allowed and encouraged, you reach—he pushes you all the time to reach—and try to do something special.

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

When the Design Spotlight series was being conceived in January, Esquire design director John Korpics’ name was at the top of our wish list. He was the winner of last year’s National Magazine Award for Design, his second, and he had done for the visuals what editor David Granger had done for the magazine as a whole—raise a steadily sinking ship. In the process, he easily topped earlier redesigns by peripatetic legends Roger Black and Robert Priest. But he had been there for more than five years. How was he going to keep pushing himself? What obstacles were left to overcome? Two days after composing that list, the news broke that he was jumping to InStyle to replace the departed Rip Georges. [His successor at Esquire was announced Tuesday: David Curcurito, who will arrive from American Express Custom Publishing Solutions.] Mediabistro caught up with Korpics after two weeks on the job to reflect on his time at Esquire and to explain what’s wrong with InStyle.

Mediabistro: How did this happen? Did Time Inc.’s headhunters call you, or had you begun to burn out and decided to bail out instead?

John Korpics: It happened very quickly. I’d always liked InStyle, my wife gets InStyle… It’s an open, airy, kind of a good-looking, breezy magazine. And honestly, I’d always seen it as an opportunity. It’s a good magazine that I thought could maybe be taken to another level, and when it came up, I knew they weren’t going to call me. So, I called them up and said, “I know I’m not the kind of guy you would think of calling for this job, but I’d be interested in talking to you about it.”

I talked to Charla [Lawhon], the [managing] editor, and we hit it off. I didn’t talk to Rip [Georges], but I know him. It all sort of happened around the holidays—we talked on the phone a little bit, I told her what I thought I could do with it, and I told her what I thought I might need and we had a lunch or two. And that was pretty much it.

Mediabistro: Consider how informal the hiring process was, what have the first 10 days on the job been like? Is there any way to hit the ground running with a magazine of this size, or do you have to stand back for a while?

Korpics: My approach any time I come into a new magazine is to just learn how it works. And so basically—and I’m still doing this—I just watch. I say “Do it the way you normally would do it, and I’ll watch you” for a few weeks or a month, and then I’ll slowly see places where I think I can improve it. I think we’re going to look at rejiggering it slightly, maybe play with some of the fonts and things like that, so I’ve got that going on in the background, but that’s maybe not slated to go in for a long time.

It’s amazing because it’s a really big magazine. There are 110 editorial people here, and they have the production down to a science. I’m on the sidelines with my mouth wide open every day, going “My god, I can’t believe you guys are working this far in advance!” Slowly but surely I’ll stick my nose in and say “Hey, have you ever thought about doing the headline this way, instead of that way?” I think I designed my first little feature the other day. So in a way, I’m coming in as an entry-level designer, learning how the process works.

Mediabistro: Flashing back to Esquire for a minute, how did you get worn down at that job? Was there a moment when you realized you just couldn’t keep doing it anymore?

Korpics: It’s not that I couldn’t do it anymore. I could have continued to do it. It’s just that I was excited about the opportunity of doing something else. Designers are all different. There are some designers who can work at the same magazine and stay fresh and stay good for 10, 15, 20 years. I don’t think I’m wired that way; it’s hard for me to do that. That’s not to say I’m going to up and leave here in four or five years. I hope to be able to stay here for a while. But you do reach a point sometimes—or at least I do—where it’s hard to find inspiration, especially since magazines are cyclical. They tend to repeat themselves every year if you’re a monthly, and when I was at Entertainment Weekly, we used to do movie previews every season. By the time I’d been there for four years, I’d done sixteen movie previews, and you just stop. You run out of ways to do them. “I don’t know! I mean I’ve done 16! I can’t think of another way to do one!” And at that point, it starts to look attractive to you to maybe go over to, say, Esquire and do “Women We Love” for a change.

As designers we’re really conduits. We have to process the editorial information and interpret it visually, and once you’ve done that for the same information for four or five years, it gets to be hard to be reinterpret it. You wind up running into problems where you’re basically trying to do it differently just for the sake of doing it differently, but it’s not necessarily better, so…

Mediabistro: Well, with Esquire in particular, there’s a history. Henry Wolfe just died, and much was made of his contributions to the look of the magazine, and then there’s George Lois and the legendary ’60s covers, then Black and Priest, and so on. How did you deal with the weight of that legacy?

Korpics: I never thought about it.

Mediabistro: Really?!

Korpics: No, honestly! I think that was because Granger’s direction was to respect the old Esquire, but the new Esquire had nothing to do with the old Esquire, and I think that was a smart decision on his part, editorially. I had to take my cue from him.

You know, A lot of people would say nobody’s ever done magazine covers as well as George Lois has, and nobody ever will.

Mediabistro: And they didn’t sell.

Korpics: Right. And even if they did sell, the whole process was different and the time was different. Who are our Muhammed Alis and our Marilyn Monroes and our Richard Nixons these days? I just don’t know if America is as naïve about those personalities and is as infatuated with them as they may have once been.

The reason some of those celebrities were able to have the mystique that would make such fascinating covers is because it was the ’60s. You had Martin Luther King, and you had JFK, and you had all these amazing people at a really turbulent time in our history. Lois was allowed to create these fantastic covers that were statements, as opposed to “Pick celebrity X and try and sell your magazine that month.”

The approach was to try and pick the most interesting person in the media that month and do an interesting cover on it. It’s possible you could get close to some of those covers, but you’re right—they probably wouldn’t sell. They didn’t sell when he did them.

There were times, I guess, when I sat there and said, “Is it possible to even do a magazine like this anymore, much less an Esquire?” I don’t think I could have done Esquire like that, but would it even be possible to do any magazine like that? I’m not sure that you could, because we’re so celebrity-inundated these days that celebrities just aren’t that special anymore. I mean, they’re special in some sense. They have their niche in society and in the media, but in those days they were almost like gods. They don’t hold that place anymore.

Mediabistro: What power did you actually have over the covers when you were at Esquire? Considering the newsstand sales Maxim, Stuff and FHM were all racking up while you were there, did you ever feel heat from anyone about why Esquire was unable to do the same?

Korpics: The covers were very loosely done. I mean that in the sense that I think David [Granger] struggled to commit a lot of time as to who we should put on the cover, and I think that a lot of times, when it came down to who we finally agreed on, it was difficult to get that person, and we had to go to a backup person. But I think he preferred working that way, and actually, I don’t mind working that way. It makes it kind of fun and loose, but you do tend to struggle a little bit. You wind up putting maybe three or four covers out there that you never really wanted to, or you regret it when you see them.

I was very involved in the cover process. Four or five us would sit around and throw out names, and then we would talk about why they would be good, why they wouldn’t be good, how we would shoot them and how we wouldn’t shoot them. One of the big reasons I was brought in was because I had newsstand experience at EW, and I think that they needed to bring Esquire a little more back into the mainstream. And so I did a lot of stuff to the covers where we wound up running second covers and these banners, and things like that, and we boosted the newsstand sales from when I first got there, and then I guess last year they were flat.

I didn’t personally get a lot of heat from that. I think, ultimately, the decisions of who we put on the cover and how we presented the cover were David’s, but I definitely felt a certain amount of responsibility for it because I was trying to sell the magazine as much as anybody. That’s part of my job.

Mediabistro: Well, what’s your job going to be InStyle? Do you need to start tweaking the look to signal that it’s under new management?

Korpics: No, certainly not as a vanity thing or anything.

Mediabistro: Do you ever feel that urge?

Korpics: No, I think that what I can bring to InStyle is… it needs to be reorganized. I think it’s a confusing magazine right now.

Mediabistro: Confusing? I wouldn’t have thought of information architecture as being InStyle’s problem.

Korpics: (Laughs) What would you have thought of as its problem?

Mediabistro: I don’t know. I’m not exactly in the target demo.

Korpics: I think it could stand a big change in that arena. Ultimately, it’s a populist fashion and celebrity magazine. I think they need to do certain things to trade on what they have. They have access to celebrities whom a lot of the other magazines don’t have. I think we need to show that more in the magazine.

Then there’s the whole service side. I think they’ve been attacked on all fronts by magazines like Lucky and Vitals that have really jumped on this service thing. I think they need to come back to their roots to do that a little more clearly and straightforwardly.

Ultimately, I’m just trying to make it what I think it is—almost like a magazine that was thought of as a business first when it was invented 10 years ago. It kind of exploded in the first two or three years, then got huge and unwieldy. I think it could stand some organizational changes to make it a little easier to navigate, and there’s a lot of things about it that… it’s hard to explain. I’m not sure how much I should say. But if it’s a magazine about celebrity style and elegance, then it should feel that way. You should get that sense when you’re going through it. You should feel stylish and elegant and glamorous in certain parts, but if it’s also about products, beauty and things like that, then that needs to be clearly shown and presented in a way that’s easily accessible to the readers, so the readers get a little bit of both worlds.

Mediabistro: It’s interesting that you mention elegance, because I always think of InStyle as populist—it’s the progenitor of both the rise of the celebrity weeklies and of the shopping books.

Korpics: It is.

Mediabistro: Neither of those genres are especially glamorous or exclusive.

Korpics: But InStyle has an elegance that it never lost. Just look at its typography. The text styling is 10 [point type] on 16 [point leading] or something like that, and where most magazines will try and jam as much as they can onto a page, InStyle has always taken the approach of making it as clear and clean and as breezy and open as they can. And that, in and of itself, I think, feels a little more elegant and a little more stylish.

Because when I look at a lot of these… I mean, you’re right—the celebrity weeklies came around after InStyle, but they’ve definitely taken that supermarket tabloid approach. They’re much closer to The National Enquirer than they are to InStyle, although InStyle told them it could be done.

Now that magazines have gone much more toward The National Enquirer model, I think that the one thing that InStyle really has that a lot of these other magazines don’t is the access to celebrity and this sort of elegant approach to the way they do things. And maybe I see it differently from the way everyone else sees it, but I really do believe that it still has a lot of elegance and style and sort of grace to its pages. I think that’s part of the magazine that I want to keep and to maybe improve on.

Mediabistro: You’re the only person in this series to have won (or at least won recently) the National Magazine Award for Design. What has that done to validate your status amongst your peers and your standing among editors?

Korpics: I think that it’s weird for designers, because we get the token Design award. There are 16 or 20 editorial awards, and then they give one for photography and one for design. And it’s strange. (Laughs) It’s like, “Okay, I won the National Magazine Award, does that mean my magazine is better than everybody else’s?” No, I don’t think so. It just means that it was good enough to make it into the final judging, and then I guess those people liked it. To pick one magazine over all the others seems sort of ridiculous, but that’s the American way. Everyone likes to win an award. But the next day, you’re still trying to coax your editors to pull some words out of the story so you can put some pictures in them. That doesn’t change. They don’t look at you any differently after you’ve won. I won it once before too.

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

So far, the designers and creative directors featured in the “Design Spotlight” series have either looked back on a long and fruitful career, looked down from the pinnacle of their most recent triumph, or reflected on their complicated relationship with their work to date. Valerie Thai, on the other hand, is 25 years old. She is the associate art director of the Vancouver, Canada-based Adbusters, the almost legendary anti-advertising, anti-consumer culture magazine. Adbusters is one of very relatively few high-profile, glossy publications willing and able to use images and design as statement unto itself, rather than as a means for prettying up the text of a story. But sooner or later, Thai—who also went to school in Vancouver, at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design—will face the question every young designers poses to him-or-herself: do I stay here, stay true to my art and ideals; or do I move to New York, take the money and run?

Mediabistro: You’re art directing one of the last magazines left that really believes it can change the world, and that design can change the world. I think a lot of designers (not just magazine ones) think that’s beside the point. Do you share that belief with the magazine? Are you a politically conscious person? Or are you just there to do the layouts?

Valerie Thai: I was still in design school when they relaunched the First Things First manifesto. That was in 1999, and that was relaunched in conjunction with [design critic] Rick Poyner. The original one was from the 60s, and then [Poyner] re-edited and rewrote it to be a little more current, calling designers to actually question their role in society, the social responsibilities of being a designer, and questioning the values and ethics of the field—especially in connection with advertising. It sparked a huge discussion in the design community, both positive and negative reactions. So, I became quite interested in that still being in school, and the current art director of Adbusters at that time did a talk at Emily Carr.

Mediabistro: Was that Chris Dixon?

Thai: Yeah, that was Chris Dixon, actually. I didn’t take his class because it was in a different year, but he taught there for a while. At the school, Adbusters is quite well known, so that’s sort of how I became introduced to it. I found out about it there first, rather than being an activist first.

Mediabistro: Well, what was your personal reaction to First Things First? Did it awaken you to Adbusters‘ message? The manifesto pretty much condemns advertising on its own: “Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.”

Thai: It did, yeah. Being a student, especially, it was super exciting and it obviously delved into a lot of issues that are important and relevant. It introduced the dialogue and opened up my eyes.

Mediabistro: Well, how long have you been at Adbusters already, and how long have you been art director?

Thai: Well, I’ve art-directed two issues, and actually, different people have been art-directing various issues. So, I’m usually the active associate art director. Kalle [Lasn, Adbusters’ voluble editor-in-chief] actually art-directed quite a few issues as well. I’ve been working here for about two-and-a-half years now.

Mediabistro: How much of your decision to join Adbusters and stay there had to do with the magazine and its politics, and how much had to do with the fact that it was local? Why not pull up stakes after graduation and head to New York or points beyond?

Thai: It was definitely about the magazine. It becomes a dilemma when you’re a student. You’re faced with: “OK, I could either work for a huge advertising company that would probably pay twice, three times as much,” but then a lot of times you have to question yourself: “Well, do I believe in what I’m doing? Am I comfortable working and making and designing products that I don’t really stand by?” Adbusters talks about a lot of issues I do believe in. It’s an ethical issue up to each and every designer—you can either go one way or another.

Mediabistro: How different would you feel at a traditional magazine? The absence of advertisers must lead to a strange feeling of freedom: You don’t depend on them, so you have no one to offend.

Thai: I think we have way more freedom. More traditional magazine do have lots of ads in them, and they do affect, many times, the editorial content. There are certain things you can’t say in certain magazines because it’ll upset your funding, essentially the advertisers. And here, since we have no advertising, it opens the door visually and editorially.

Mediabistro: Opens the door to do what, exactly? One of the things I like about Adbusters is that it’s out-and-out propaganda. And since Chris Dixon’s time there, you’ve help ratchet up the shock value.

Thai: Well, since Chris Dixon’s era, it’s sort of evolved into more theme-based issues. Each issue deals with a theme that carries throughout, whereas before it was more divided up into how a traditional magazine would be. As for the propaganda issue you brought up: it is. We are promoting issues and trying to evoke emotion and get people’s attention. It’s either excitement or a call for activism. I mean, that’s our stand.

Mediabistro: What fields did your design school classmates enter, and do you look down on the ones who sold out and went into advertising?

Thai: If some of them decide to go into advertising, it’s fine as long as they’re aware of what they’re doing, because there are a lot design students who are just happy to take whatever job comes their way. “Oh cool, I’m designing, you know, this thing for Coca-Cola!” or whatever. But I think it’s important for young designers to be responsible and know the background of who they’re working for and not just become mindless workers just following orders. Understand what you’re redesigning and the ramifications of it—is this product harmful to society? A lot of students don’t really even think about that. They just think “OK, well… my role as a designer is just that, to redesign stuff.” But in actuality, you play a small role in this bigger picture, so you do have control and influence. I mean, there is a social responsibility that you have to take into consideration.

Mediabistro: How do you go about assembling each issue? Because there appears to be a ton of donated art, or appropriated art, and straightforwadly illustrated stories sit in the well next to giant, photocollage essays. Who’s setting the agenda for each issue and where do you come in?

Thai: There’s not really a set structure for how we approach things. (Laughs) I mean, we’re quite a small office. People are surprised at how big our art department is—it’s not very big at all. Maybe four people actually produce the magazine in-house. But usually the editor, Kalle Lasn, sets the theme as well as most of the structure of the magazine with the creative/art director [Michael Simons]. Then my role is to meet with them and just try to solve the visual aspects of how it could work all together. Because there are theme-based issues now, it’s more important for us to create a flow from beginning to end.

Mediabistro: How does that communication work in the context of a magazine like this? Does Kalle ask you things like “You know what? I really need you to shock the hell out of the reader with this story. Can we find an image for that?” How do you approach telling stories like this? Because they’re so alien compared to other magazines.

Thai: (Laughs) Yeah, it’s really hard for me to explain the process because it changes all the time. Some issues will have a few really long feature stories where it will be quite… I shouldn’t say “easy,” but finding imagery to go with them is a little easier than, say, trying to convey more abstract feelings or concepts.

But yeah, I, and the creative director and the rest of the art department are constantly in contact with local artists, as well as galleries, just trying to find new artists that we can feature who fit into the themes for upcoming issues. I know different magazines work different ways, but it’s not set up like a traditional magazine where once the structure’s done, it’s just handed off to a production department. We are also the production department as well as the conceptualizers. It’s like seeing it and taking it through from beginning to end.

Mediabistro: Are you working at all on Adbusters’ other initiatives, like the Blackspot Sneaker, or the “Antipreneur” initatives or the television commercials? Do you have the latitude and the time to dive into the ancillary projects?

Thai: Yeah, it’s a pretty exciting time right now, because there’s talk of launching all these different factions of “Antipreneur.” I guess it’s hard to say where it’ll all go, because while it has been planned, it feels like we did just dive into it. But it’s an interesting experiment, especially with the shoe—reclaiming it and producing our own, versus just, you know, sitting on the sidelines and slamming Nike without any action at all. It’ll be interesting to see in the long run. I mean, it’s only been marketed for the past couple months, so it’s kind of early to tell, but it seems to be doing well.

Mediabistro: And what comes next after that? I’ve already seen prototypes of a second sneaker, and is there anything else coming down the pipeline?

Thai: Yeah, there’s talk of a “culture shop” where locally-produced food and Fair Trade coffee would be served, as well as an area where people in the community could come together and discuss activist ideas. That’ll be coming up in the next issue. There will be a little booklet that’ll say more about that. And then there’s Version 2.0 of the shoe as well.

Mediabistro: You’re the youngest designer to be featured in this series by almost a decade. Who are your design heroes and who are you inspired by? What does it feel like to be a young designer working today, as opposed to a decade ago (or two decades ago?)

Thai: Obviously, it’s really exciting. I had the fortune of being here when Jonathan Barnbrook (www.barnbrook.net) art-directed an issue [#37, the “Design Anarchy” issue]. For me, that was really exciting to meet a designer who actually does a lot of activism in his work, and speaks about the First Things First manifesto first-hand. Being able to see how he worked was really inspiring. Other artists in school who were influential were… I guess ones like [Stefan] Sagmeister (www.sagmeister.com). It’s kind of funny because a lot of these designers do a lot of advertising, and at the same time, a lot of their work isn’t.

Mediabistro: Do you think you’ll move onto a more normal magazine or other design work after this, or are you part of a movement now? And are you going to stay part of that movement, or opt out at some point?

Thai: For now it’s exciting to be part of the movement. I can’t… I don’t really know where I’ll be five years from now. It’s a really hard thing to say. At this point, I don’t have any interest in working in advertising, obviously, but I can’t really say for sure if 10 years down the road, I would turn to a traditional magazine, or maybe I won’t even be in design. I actually started in fine arts and then did design after, so it’s really difficult for me to predict where I’ll be. I think most people would say that.

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

Cathie Black is referred to, un-ironically, as “the First Lady of American
Magazines,” a title that not only describes her power within the industry, but
also her shattering of its glass ceiling. It’s largely due to Black that Hearst
has been the steadiest of America’s great magazine companies, conserving its
strength and growing slowly, steadily, while others chased grand expansion plans
and digital dreams.

But now, Black has decided that the time is right for Hearst to join the Web
2.0 wave in earnest, beginning with a generation of magazine sites rolling out
over the next few months. mediabistro.com recently interviewed Black about her
company’s plans, the shape of the industry, and the endgame for the magazine
business, which she dutifully presented in nearly 25 words or less: “There will
continue to be stars made and opportunities presented — I don’t know if there
are going to be fortunes made — I think we are going to be around as we know it
as long as we all are comfortable constantly with reassessing, with taking risks
and not being afraid of change, of just getting unstuck. But I think,
personally, that most people have gotten over that.”

Name: Cathleen P. (“Cathie”) Black
Position: President,
Hearst Magazines
Publication: 19 consumer magazines in the U.S.,
nearly 200 worldwide, including such brands as Cosmopolitan, Good
Housekeeping, Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, and
Seventeen
Education: Trinity College (She also holds eight
other honorary degrees)
Hometown: Chicago
First job: Ad
sales at Holiday magazine
Last 3 jobs: President, then
publisher of USA Today; executive vice president/marketing of Gannett;
resident and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.
Birthdate:
4/26/44
Marital status: Married
What’s your
favorite TV show: Grey’s Anatomy
Last book
read: Two books in progress — Bad Blood by
Linda Fairstein, and I’m about to start Why Some Ideas Succeed and Others
Die by Chris and Dan Heath, that Kate White, editor-in-chief of
Cosmo, highly recommended. And there is always a cookbook by the side of
the bed for browsing.
Most interesting media story right now: Frankly,
it changes every day, sometimes every hour. But right now, Viacom asking YouTube
to remove 100,000 clips from its site and the Cartoon Network guerrilla
marketing stunt mistaken for a bomb threat are the two most interesting stories.
[Ed: Answer was sent Feb. 5]
Guilty pleasure: Massage
First
section you read in your Sunday paper: Page One and then Real Estate! (I
just bought a house.)

It’s my understanding that Hearst is about to begin re-launching each of
its magazine sites over the next few months, beginning with Esquire.com. I’m curious as to
what the readers should expect of these sites now that Hearst is finally heading
back onto the Web in a big way.
First of all, the sites are going to
look different from each other. The primary phrase we have at the front of our
brain, hopefully every single day, is “the user experience.” Our editors have
moved from thinking that a magazine’s Web site was just the magazine on the Web,
to really thinking that the magazine is a brand on the Web. We know for sure
that it has to be, and is, a different medium. In other words, we want to keep
that user going forward so they are finding the experience on our Web site
interesting, interactive, entertaining, fun, you name it.

Each one of them has been carefully thought out. [Esquire editor]
David Granger and I just had lunch today, and he was talking about Eric
[Gillin], his Web site editor, who he thinks is fantastic and who has a million
ideas and kind of, sort of scoped it out in his own mind. The teen sites have
been a petri dish for us. We’ve had a very goodWeb site for CosmoGIRL!,
and a younger staff is creating that, so we’ve used that as something to look at
to try to figure out what elements of that make sense for some of our other
sites. Everyone is just hot to trot. I mean all the editors here and the Web
editors want their site to be the best, and they wanted it up yesterday.

Unlike Time Inc. or Condé Nast, Hearst has been happy to farm out its Web
operations at times to Women.com and to iVillage. But now you’ve recentralized again with Hearst
Digital and the editors’ newfound zealotry for the Web. How and why did Hearst
get its Internet religion, lose it, and then get it back again?
Well I
don’t think Hearst ever lost religion, but the Web has changed so dramatically.
Early on, there was Home Arts, which merged with Women.com. So right from the
beginning, we were working through partners. I don’t know if that was such a bad
thing because, let’s face it, there weren’t that many users back then, and
certainly there were no ad dollars. In any event, Women.com handled our sites,
so we kind of talked the talk, but we were not creating them. It was the same
thing with iVillage. Yes, there was a Web editor for each magazine here, but the
real ownership was at iVillage. I mean that figuratively and literally. And we
all felt very strongly that for us to really be a part of a very
transformational moment in our media world, we had to be the patrons of our own
sites. So there’s great excitement here that this is the right moment. Our sites
are magazine brands; we don’t want them disconnected from the brands here.


What’s Hearst’s philosophy online in terms of revenue and growth? Ann
Moore is making headlines, seemingly every week over at Time Inc., as she seeks
to dump every spare penny into the magazine sites. She’s convinced that online
is where all of Time Inc.’s future growth lies.
The day that the digital
revenue for Cosmo will come close to profit that Cosmo makes for
this company will be a beautiful thing. Cosmo is a huge
profit-maker and a huge revenue-generator, so it would surprise me if at
any time in the next couple of years we would see anything approaching it. Maybe
it’s 10 percent of our ad revenue that comes into the company today, but the
idea of it becoming 50 percent or even higher of the revenue from our magazine
division is just improbable to imagine. I could be wrong, but I don’t see the
migration of many of our magazines to a digital-only platform.

That said, do we need a new way to measure the vitality of magazines? Is
it worth it to still track advertising pages sold? And is it worth a permanent 5
percent decline in ad pages in exchange for what amounts to a 10 percent gain
from digital revenue? Are we talking about the wrong things when we talk about
the health of the business as a whole?
No, I don’t think we are talking
about the wrong thing, but what I do believe that we have to look at digital
efforts as its own business, because it’s expensive. What I don’t want is to
encourage advertiser A or advertiser B to say ‘Well, I spent a $100 with you
last year. In 2007, I’m going to spend $90 at that magazine and $10 online.’ And
I don’t want them saying ‘you should feel good about that’ because I want them
to spend $110. It shouldn’t be an either-or.

In your remarks at a recent Magazine Publishers of America breakfast, you
touched upon the increasing difficulty of launches. Other publishers have
experienced this too, with Time Inc., Hachette, etc. all closing magazines to
refocus on core properties like People, Sports Illustrated, and
Elle. Even Meredith is pouring the majority of its efforts into
franchising brands like Better Homes & Garden in new media, rather
than inventing new brands. Given those developments as a backdrop, how do you
see the Hearst portfolio evolving? Is it inevitable that the largest publishers
will only have a handful of their most successful brands pumping at their
hearts?
It’s a simple answer to say you have to do some of all of it.
We’re all looking for the next big idea for what could be a really important
magazine. Oprah has been an extraordinary successful magazine. And there
are new magazines started in the last decade: Real Simple, and now
[Everyday With} Rachael Ray seems to have gotten a lot of traction on the
newsstand. But it’s a much more difficult environment.

You know, years ago here at Hearst, we launched Country Living, which
has been a great moneymaker for more than 20 years now. We put one magazine on
the stands with no ad staff and it sold very well, which told us that this
reader really had a connection to the magazine. In today’s world, pick any
number you want; I have no idea what Condé Nast will have spent — both for
almost the last two years and into the next two years — on Portfolio.
They’ve announced it’s a $100 million investment. We’re just not going to
do that. It may not be a hockey stick [Black is referring to the shape of
financial projections on a graph], but at some point, after your big early
investment period of two or three years, what’s it really looking like there? Is
it going to get the ad traction? Maybe it will, I’m not really positive.

But you know, we’re a different company, everybody’s a different company. We
measure our metrics very carefully. We review our new products constantly, and
ask ‘is it going to hit break-even?’ But not only is it going to break even,
what is it going to do in the 24 months after that? It is going to really make
sense for us to put in the time, the effort, the creativity, the financial
investment, etc.? It would be great to be able to launch something for $10
million, but when you’re in New York and the ad community demands a big hoopla
over the launch of a magazine, it adds overhead that’s just unbelievable and
hard to live up to.

What happens to staffing levels and employees as the industry contracts
and cut costs to maintain its overall health? You’re on record as being a fan of
the British magazine method, with its smaller, more nimble staffs, and Hearst’s
magazine have quietly reduced headcount on your watch. What does the staff of
the future look like at Hearst, and will employees have the same opportunities
to advance upward?
That’s a very good question. I remember when Felix
Dennis spoke at the MPA Conference six years ago, and he knew that when he came
to the United States to launch Maxim, he would have a 25 pecent larger
staff than he did in the U.K. just because that’s how New York is. And that’s
the sort of thing we wrestle with all the time.

For example, Quick and Simple is, at this point, sold by the Good
Housekeeping sales staff. There’s a lot of synergies between the two, so the
former’s advertising staff is — honestly! — one person and an assistant. But
they have the resources of Good Housekeeping, which has a lot of feet on
the street, if you will. America has not come around to the way most advertising
is sold in the rest of the world, which is much more on a group concept. You
might have a publishing director — there’s no publisher — and the next title
is probably “advertising director,” and they might sell two magazines or it
might be a group.

We were charting workflow not long ago — I like the operations side of the
business — and if you look at the U.K., an editor might touch a piece of copy
once or twice because it’s a small staff. It’s that they don’t have the time,
not because they don’t have the interest. They don’t have the time. It
moves through the system very quickly. If you chart most magazines in the United
States, including our own, you’ll see that people are touching, and retouching,
and editing, and re-editing something six or seven times. If you want to figure
out why that happens, look at the UK. I would suggest that they have very few
middle managers. It’s probably 15 people or 18 people or even seven people, so
they multitask. They don’t work all night long. Honestly, they aren’t in the
production departments at eight or nine at night.

How is the new Hearst Tower helping with recruiting? It’s been suggested
that the new building and new cafeteria has gone a long way in addressing
Hearst’s corporate inferiority complex vis-á-vis Condé Nast.
The power
of an environment to change people’s thinking,, and their attitude and their
sense of everything is unbelievable. Our retention rates have already gone up…
it’s only a few percentage points, so it’s not going to make or break it one way
or the other but — quite honestly — if I were 25 and if I were interviewing at
this company or a similar company, and saw that we have a fitness center and saw
this incredible café, and all the open work environment that creates
communication and camaraderie and all the rest of it, I’d think it’s a slam
dunk.

Well, assuming you were 25 again, and were starting your career over
again, where would you start? Seeing that you began your career at Ms.,
and seeing that Ms. doesn’t really exist anymore, I was picturing you
starting out at some sort of blog network aimed at young women…
I have
always loved the print business. I’m as excited about the digital world as
anybody else, but I love the feeling of being around creative people, of looking
at beautiful things, of reading a great story, so I’d probably come to magazines
again.

You broke gender barriers during your upward ascent, including becoming
the first female publisher of a weekly magazine at New York. How has the
magazine landscape changed since then in terms of opportunities for women? From
my generation’s view, publishing would seem to be dominated by women, or at
least editorial is.
It’s a very welcoming environment, and if you want
to look at an industry and ask ‘Where have women succeeded? Where are they
sitting in the larger offices? Where do they have the titles?’ I think you would
say, for whatever reason, ‘Gee, this seems to be a place that I can excel.’
Women tend to get stuck in the staffing positions, not the line-operating
positions, and they haven’t been trapped in those in publishing.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.

Rafat Ali is the founder, publisher, and editor of ContentNext, the parent company of his first and most widely known blog, PaidContent.org. Only 31 years old, Ali started PaidContent in 2002, after reporting stints at Inside.com and Jason Calacanis’ Venture Reporter. Long before the phrase “blogging for dollars” entered the Web’s lexicon, Ali was the sole proprietor of the newsblog of record for media executives desperately trying to crack the code of making content pay online. Since then, he’s added editors (including former Inside colleague Staci Kramer), investors (including Alan Patricof), new sites (MocoNews.net) and even veteran management (new COO Jordan Posell). I remember Ali when we were both cub reporters sitting back-to-back in the cubicle farm of Brill’s Content in its final days, after Brill had bought Inside and everyone was scrambling for the exits. Ali was an afterthought then; today he’s arguably its most successful alumnus not named Andersen or Hirschorn. “Last year was a very eventful one; it was when we really became a company. To call us one before then was really a stretch,” he says.

Name: Rafat Ali
Position: Editor & Publisher, PaidContent.org
Company: ContentNext Media
Education: Master in Journalism, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2000; B.Tech in Computer Engineering, Aligarh, India, 1996
Hometown: London, England; Presently settled in: Santa Monica, CA
First job: A PR executive in India… glorified press release distributor
Last three jobs: Intern, Inside.com and then Reporter, Inside.com; Managing Editor, Silicon Alley Reporter; and now this
Birthdate: April 26, 1975
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show: Friday Night Lights
Last book read: The Gang That Couldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten
Most interesting media story right now: The attempts by big media companies to develop a YouTube rival. More the mentality behind it than the story itself.
Guilty pleasure: Carpenters

Not many journalists ever make the leap from reporter or editor to CEO or senior manager. Did your training as a journalist adequately prepare you for that? And if not, what would you liked to have known before diving in head first?
I wish I had understood the financial aspects. If you want to run a company one day, and you’re a journalist and you don’t know stuff like “former earnings versus this versus that,” then you’re making a huge mistake, not just as a journalist, but as an entrepreneur as well. If you don’t, no one else will sort it out for you.

That set us back considerably [at ContentNext] because we couldn’t get our act together organizationally. Part of that was my fault because I didn’t know how to get health insurance — I didn’t know how to do the operational day-to-day stuff. That’s what I would tell someone getting into this game. Even with Om [Malik, a former Business 2.0 editor-turned blogger], I told him, “Make sure you get a financial person, even if you have to pay for him through the nose.” Make sure all the business stuff is in order because that will save you so much heartbreak and worry. That was what I had no clue about when I started in 2002. These days, bloggers start with the idea of being a business, but I started [my blog] just to raise my own profile.

Obviously you’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur…
No, I did not. In 2000 and 2001, I came out of school, and like everybody, I wanted to be a magazine feature writer. But the world doesn’t work that way.

You come to realize that being a magazine feature writer, like writing for The New Yorker or Esquire, just doesn’t happen. When you go to a journalism school, they don’t try to teach you that you will, but that’s the image you get: feature writing is glamorous. That’s what I had in mind. I never thought I would go out and break news. I never thought of myself as a reporter. But it turned out that way.

At Inside.com, I was a feature writer because I wasn’t doing daily stuff, I was writing one or two stories a week. Mine were trend pieces. But when I went to Silicon Alley Reporter, Jason [Calacanis] had that same question: “Do you have the chops to do reporting?” I said “Well, I haven’t really done much, but I can try.” I asked him to give me two months to prove myself, and after that, he could fire me. I emailed him that much and he said, “When can you join?” That’s where I learned reporting — or not learned, but where I was just thrown into it. We had a daily newsletter, and it had to have X many stories. I was given stories where I had half an hour to figure out the background and then start calling sources.

One of the things I tell people is that at Inside.com, how I learned to report was actually from watching you [Lindsay] and David Carr conduct interviews on the phone. In school, they never teach you how to do phone interviews — they never teach you about interviews in the first place. One of the things I learned from David Carr — I overheard him because he was generally loud, especially at the old Inside.com building where I sat across from him — was how to ask the hard questions.

And what did you possibly learn from listening to me?
You were always the guy they gave a story to when they couldn’t figure out anything else to do, and then you would call 50 people. I learned to call as many people as you can and that somebody will get back to you; somebody will tell you the story. People ask, “How do you get a story?” I say that there are as many sources within the company as there are employees in the company. Somebody will talk. I’ll email everybody, I’ll call everybody I have to, and somebody will talk. That’s what I learned at Inside as a general principle: Do whatever it takes to get the story. That’s what they don’t teach you at school.

As one of the first blogger-entrepreneurs, you’re also the closest to the end game at this point. What’s your exit strategy? And what will be the likely fates of your contemporaries?
We don’t have an exit strategy. I’ll tell you that right up front. If two years down the line someone says, “We want to buy your company,” we’ll be in a position to have that discussion. Our company should be in good enough shape that we’re ready to flip the switch if we need to.

I know this sounds vague, but even before Alan [Patricof] invested, we went through a round of talks with various media companies. Three or four companies you can probably think of wanted to buy us, and we had first-round talks with each of them. I realized that we were nowhere even close to being in a shape to sell the company. I decided we’re not going to sell the company; we’re going to make an investment: Let’s build the company into a real one. That was when I realized that we needed to build enough systems organization. I might sound like a guy on Dilbert, but the fact of the matter is that the business fundamentals are now in place. It’s difficult to scale beyond a certain point.

That’s a thing I worry about — we have built the company with me, Staci [Kramer] and two other people. How do we scale it? That’s another strategic thing we think about a lot. We have a CFO now, whose job is to ensure that everything is GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Principles] compliant. We’re very close to being GAAP compliant, which is a huge deal to us. All that stuff we have to worry about.

But back to your question about the endgame. I’ve been at this for five years. I have a wife now. I’ve been with her for two years, I haven’t really spent any time with her, and I want to. When someone comes along with the right amount, we’ll look at all the options. It’s an honest answer. I guess there’s no science to it: If somebody makes an offer that makes sense, I’ll definitely look at it.

Do you think what you are doing now is fundamentally any different than classic newsletter publishing or trade publishing?
Not really… Well, yes, in the sense that the economics have gotten much leaner. And yes, because you can come to market much faster, you can run on a leaner budget, and you can break stories as they happen because of the tools. But, at the end of the day, it’s all about sales. You have an audience; so how do you sell that audience to an advertiser?

For us, because of the industry we are in, because we have so many endemic advertisers in the space, the sale space has been shortened by a huge factor. And this is the trade media mentality — because of the endemic advertisers we have in the field, our sales factors are short, compared to a big general news site, which is focused on everything, and then they have to go to the agencies, and the agencies have a yearly budget. We don’t work by those budgets. We work with “I’m gonna email a CEO at some company and ask ‘Do you want to advertise?’ and they say ‘Yes.'” Then, a week later, they start advertising.

The next step is to go to the bigger companies, who go through a buying agency. We’ve started working with them — we now have three ad sales people. They’ve begun making the rounds of the agencies, speaking to clients, taking them out to dinner, all that stuff. If it were me, I would have said “Screw all that,” but you have to do it. It’s how a media company has been run for ages and ages. At the end of the day, it’s about ad sales.

One again, what will be the fates of your contemporaries? Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and he’s long gone. Denton continues to hold out, and remains enigmatic about his ultimate plans. John Battelle has gained some traction with Federated Media, but once the blogs in his network reach a certain size, they hire their own sales staffs and leave.
All these sites, these small blogs that are influential in a certain area or community, will never be on the radar of the media planning agencies because the latter don’t have the bandwidth to go that small and to look for the gems in a specific industries. John Battelle and his company, that’s their role, to be the broker for medium-to-large-ish sites. He’ll tell you that his aim was never represent the biggest of big sites because they can survive on their own, they can hire other people. His aim is to really represent the middle part. To that extent, I think he’s been successful over the last six to eight months or a year. It’s still too early to tell if he’ll be successful in the long run. He takes a huge chunk of money — 40 percent, which is ridiculous — but generally, I think he’s doing okay.

If the big media companies come and subsume us… I don’t know, that’s what happens with everything. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. Look at YouTube. Look at MySpace. I’m not sure if any of those two sites have lost anything yet. It’s too early to tell with YouTube, but has MySpace gone completely uncool because News Corp. bought it? I’m not sure that has happened. If it’s lost cool, it’s not because News Corp. bought it — it’s become too big and too mainstream to remain cool.

If big media comes in, will a lot of the stuff lose its indie cachet? If they do, then I’m sure new ones will be started. That’s the thing about this: It’s so easy to start something, that even if the bigger ones get bought by bigger media companies, there will always be enough people to start new ones.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview contains excerpts, and has been edited for clarity.]

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

Betting on the globalization of the advertising business is how Scott Goodson built his career. He didn’t set out to start another conglomerate or sprawling one-stop-shop with offices in third-tier cities, but rather the opposite. Back in 1999, after nearly a decade co-owning an agency in Sweden and working for JWT in his native Canada, he moved back to Europe to open StrawberryFrog, a boutique unencumbered by bureaucracy and eager to serve clients regardless of their geography. A few years later, Goodson packed a backpack and landed in New York to open a second office from scratch. His splinter group would go on to land clients as diverse as Asics, MTV, Heineken, and Sam’s Club, and also lead the onslaught of accented boutiques like Mother and Taxi. He sees the agency of the future as an ultra-lean team solely concerned with generating the best ideas for clients; the actual execution will be outsourced.

A little more than a decade ago, you were still in Sweden, where you were the co-owner of your own agency by the time you were 25. How did a Canadian born in Montreal end up in Sweden, not to mention end up in advertising in the first place?

I grew up in a family that was working in the business, and I started working in advertising for my dad’s publishing and printing company. After graduation, I wanted to find a way to work that was unconventional. And I met my Swedish wife, who lived with me in Canada for a while, but then we ended up in Stockholm. We moved there for what was supposed to be a year, but it ended up being 10 years. You get caught up in a life decision that you have nothing to do with, and it changes your life forever. The decision to move to Stockholm was one of those decisions that many of my friends and parents said, “What are you crazy?” but I went there just as Sweden was going through a media renaissance.

Sweden had been a country in which advertising was basically prohibited. There was no television advertising, no radio, and there was basically print and outdoor. So I learned a very different way of thinking abut strategy, because the Swedes were very strategic, and very logical in the use of imagery, particularly in using still imagery to tell the whole brand idea in one photograph. That was very much a Swedish art form.

Then, all the laws were repealed and there was just this explosion of creativity. There was no history of how advertising was suppose to be done, unlike in North America, where you have clients that have 60 years of how their advertising is supposed to be done. So we had clients whose idea of a TV spot was a Fellini movie. It was really easy to create good advertising, and also innovative marketing, because so many of the clients were in IT, like cell phone makers. They obviously wanted to break boundaries, change behaviors, and find new ways of connecting customers. There was a global market opening up for Swedish multinationals.

I did that for 10 years, and I learned a few things. First of all, a very small, very focused, and very talented group of people could guide and guard a global brand. You don’t have to be huge corporation.

Canadian journalists have attributed at least some of your success to your upbringing in Montreal. As a Canadian, they argued, you were raised to see the broader world and not just in terms of your native country, as Americans are prone to do. Were you unafraid to live and work abroad because of that, and did that lead you to start StrawberryFrog in Amsterdam?

I have no idea. There’s a certain amount of fearlessness you are raised with when your father owns a company. You have to stay focused on your goals, and sustainability is the key issue for an independent organization. I’ve never really been panic-stricken by running companies with a lot of employees and clients. The Swedish example was great because it proved you could do international global brand work for major corporations on international basis with clients that were not prepared to ram advertising down people’s throats, but needed an approach that would bring people together and inspire them to work together based on universal insight.

And, there are a lot of Americans in Amsterdam and a lot of Americans in Sweden. It’s becoming increasingly popular amongst young people to live in a world without borders. I do think that growing up in a social democratic country like Canada, you tend to compare yourself to other people, because you always want to feel that you’re growing up in a society that is better than other nations. You have a natural openness and curiosity about what happens outside of your own country. A lot of my friends went to work in New York or Toronto after school, and it just felt natural to go a totally different way. I think to some extent that’s why we’ve managed, through the company, to establish ourselves. I think that you need to be a little bit on the outside lane to see opportunities and possibilities to network with people that are just a little bit off-center, because otherwise you just trample the same beaten path that everyone else does.

You founded StrawberryFrog in 1999 near the peak of the Internet bubble and on the cusp of the Euro integration. What was it like to start a pan-European and would-be-global agency at that moment in time?

We were the only agency that set itself up, from the beginning, to be a global ad agency. There were no Dutch people in the Amsterdam office. After two years we had 325 nationalities in Amsterdam and clients all around the world. So I don’t think there was ever an agency that could be a brand that worked across all borders. Back in those days, most national agencies believed their ideas would go to the border, and you would never consider going for a French account or — God forbid! — a European account. That was just never done because that’s how Europeans thought of the market. If you were French you worked with French companies; if you were German, you worked with German clients. We were the first agency to say that’s all poppycock, and the first of its kind to be a non-nationally based agency.

While we chose Amsterdam for a number of reasons, it wasn’t because of the fact we were Dutch. It was the center of Europe, it was because Weiden & Kennedy had an office there and we could easily attract talent if we wanted to bring people into the agency and, from a cost perspective, it was much cheaper than London, Paris, or Berlin.

How has the advertising business changed since StrawberryFrog launched? A number of firms, like Mother, reached many of the same conclusions you did and have had similar success. And if you were able to serve clients globally from Amsterdam, why open a New York office?

We started out to be about “total engagement.” What we meant by that was we’d find an idea that was on the rise in culture and then we would take that idea and create a connection between the brand and that idea in such a way that we would create communities and build, basically, a popular grassroots movement. After five or six years, we did several campaigns that became quite well-known not only in Europe but also internationally. We won the 42-country Mitsubishi Motors account after starting the agency with the Smart Car, which was created by Swatch and DaimlerChrysler. Our relationship with Daimler evolved to the point where we were asked to pitch the Mitsubishi Motors European account. We won that, and it was an example of how sophisticated StrawberryFrog could be for what was probably one of the most demanding kinds of clients, which was not only a car account but also a retail car account with multiple markets and multiple languages.

At that point, we started to meet clients in the United States who were taking an interest in what StrawberryFrog was doing in Europe. After many discussions, people would fly in from the United States to talk about campaigns, and we would do work for people in the United States, but out of Amsterdam. After a while, I thought it was time to try something totally new, so I left the Amsterdam office and moved to New York with a backpack and the same idea. We won our first piece of business from Pfizer, whom we worked with for two years, and from there we started to win accounts. We’ll be three years old in February.

In March, you delivered a keynote address at the Global Future Marketing Summit in which you basically called for an end to the agency model as we know it. In the future, there would be boutique ideas shops earning big money for supplying ideas to the clients, while everyone else would essentially work for Kinko’s. Is that where the industry is headed over the next decade?

I think there are a couple of things. First of all, the advertising industry is not unique to business today. Every business is going through a revolution. I think the advertising industry does a better job hiding the fact that it’s going through a revolution, but the reality is there’s a massive shift right now. I think the bigger organizations won’t disappear, but they are going to have competition in areas that they never thought of in the past. The thought I had, back then when I wrote that essay, was the idea that a company stating today that is the FedEx of execution — when it absolutely, positively, has to be done overnight — is not a crazy thought. Clients could buy the best ideas and have companies that simply, and purely, are in the business of execution. I think that day is coming quickly. Pure ideas are where the industry is going to have to go. If the execution side of the business is a commodity and people are being squeezed for money, the only way that value can be created in this business and attract the type of quality thinkers that it needs is to come up with great ideas.

Small organizations like StrawberryFrog are trying to find ways of generating income in that respect. No one has really solved that yet, but I think clients are starting to look and be open-minded to trying new things. I think that the reality of business is that if someone is doing something successful, everyone stops and says, “Wow, if they can do that we can do that too.” Everyone starts to run a bit faster, people are inspired, and there are new brands and small companies that join the race and ideas get better and clients have more choices and there are more alternatives. In that respect, I think it’s better all-around for the industry, because you have more competition that’s not just relying on the established institutions that have been around forever.

Lessons From Scott Goodson’s Ad Career Arc

Like any good ad man, Goodson’s advice is pared down to the bare essentials: “Have fun; keep a sharp sense of humor; (for the most part) we’re not saving lives here, and never buy your own hype.” But there are a few additional lessons to be learned from his experiences as an entrepreneur abroad, including:
1) Don’t just talk about globalization; embrace it.
The opening of new markets overseas is creating opportunities for creative individuals of every stripe that never existed before. The pivotal moment of Goodson’s career may have been being in Sweden at just the right moment, while StrawberryFrog was founded on the idea that a tiny agency could, in fact, go anywhere it needed to for clients.
2) Follow the talent.

Goodson chose Amsterdam as the base for StrawberryFrog because it was already a magnet for European creative talent (poaching from rival agency Weiden & Kennedy was apparently part of the game plan). Set up your own tent in one of these camps — there’s a world out there beyond New York.
3) Find an organizational structural and management style that suits your temperament and stay put within it.

Between leaving Sweden and launching StrawberryFrog, Goodson spent two years as creative director of J. Walter Thompson in Canada. That unhappy experience helped shape his ideas of how his next agency would essentially be the opposite.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.

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

Luke Hayman was once dubbed the “best designer you haven’t heard of,” by a magazine covering the design trade, bestowing upon him a dubious honor along the lines of “best athlete to never win a championship.” Ten years ago, Hayman was the design director of I.D., a prestigious-but-tiny title known to few outside the design industry. He didn’t help his visibility by jumping to Brill’s Content and Media Central — a grab bag of meta-media trade titles that Hayman invested with more visual acuity than they probably deserved. He escaped to become creative director of Travel + Leisure, and finally shed his dubious distinction once and for all when New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss tapped him to refresh and reinvent the magazine with the help of a dream team of editors. The same magazine that once considered him a secret later offhandedly described as one of the two most influential magazine designers working today (the other being living-legend Fred Woodward at GQ). But Hayman topped himself when he joined the bluest-of-blue chip design firms, Pentagram, as partner a year ago and was immediately set to work retooling Time. We spoke to Hayman about his transformaton from magazine design’s most obscure superstar to saving a print icon at the precise moment the magazine seems doomed.

What were you doing 10 years ago this month, and where did you see yourself in terms of your career arc?

I was probably just getting to I.D. for the second time. I had been there once before as an associate art director for two years. There were two reasons I went back. One, I was having a child, and so I needed more income, but more importantly, it really was the chance to be the ultimate decision-maker, and to see if I could do it.

But before long, you had jumped from running a magazine to becoming a sort of consultant for Ogilvy, and then you jumped back into the industry to Brill’s, and would leave magazines again for Pentagram. Why do you seem to alternate between working for magazines and trying to escape them?

When I talk to students I make a silly joke: “I’ve spent my whole career trying to get out of magazines, and I just keep getting sucked back in.” I came to New York for a couple of reasons, and one was wanting to work on corporate identities, which I never done on a serious scale. My fantasy was designing an airline — I wanted to see my logo on an airplane tail, which is a common fantasy for a graphic designer just out of college. So I came here and freelanced for one of the bigger branding agencies for nine months, and it’s very frustrating for someone used to churning out stuff every few weeks to spend months and months covering a wall with logos. Then the senior people would narrow it down to five, and you’d refine them, present them to the client, and they’d choose one and you’d go on from there. And this would take a year!

But the trouble with magazines from a designer’s point of view is that while I love the first year — because you’re really figuring it out — and the second year is kind of good because you’ve figured it out and can do it to the best of your ability, by the time you get to the third year it’s really starting to get repetitive. There are some art directors I’ve seen who have been at the same magazine for 12 years, and I can see it keep getting better and better and better, but in small increments. I get much more satisfaction out of the big before-and-after, to have this sort of “Look how crappy it looked before, and look how brilliant it looks now!” That is so much more fun for my ADD personality.

So you returned to corporate branding at Ogilvy, where you were asked to redesign Brill’s Content. What made you want to leave the agency and join Brill’s full-time?

The job to redesign came up, and I was the only person there with magazine experience. So I did it and I was successful, and Brill is a very smart guy. He wanted continued creative direction for the magazine and he also wanted creative direction for Contentville, his e-commerce venture, and he also wanted creative direction for Media Central, his deal with Primedia to take over all their media-related titles and conferences.

You brought a level of sophistication to those trade titles — such as Folio and Cableworld — that is so rare. Why do most trade magazines look so terrible when there is so much talent working for them?

Good design doesn’t cost much money. It just needs someone in charge who understands what good design is, and very often the people who are in charge don’t care, or aren’t aware, or are not educated enough to see that. If you look carefully, you can find some trade magazines that are as beautiful as any consumer title, and it’s because they have someone who cares and is allowed to do that.

That sounds like someone describing Adam Moss. How did you land your job at New York? I’m sure everyone in town was messengering him their portfolios the moment he was on the job.

He’d heard of me. He apparently asked around, “Who should I meet?” But he hadn’t called me and I was thinking, “I’ve heard of this guy Adam Moss, and everyone says he’s the man — this is probably my only legitimate chance to meet him.” I’m not someone with the balls to call up an editor and say, “Hey, let’s have lunch.” I would never do that. But, I can call him up and say, “Hey I heard you are looking for an art director or design director. I’d like to put my name forward.” So I thought I could meet this guy, and while I sincerely thought I wouldn’t get the job, I wanted to meet him so he knew who I was next time. I called a mutual friend, an editor I’d worked with, and asked, “Would you mind suggesting my name?” and he said, “Of course,” and so he sent an email to Adam and Adam sent an email right back saying, “He’s already on the list.”

What did you learn from working with Moss? You pretty much had a dream situation in the form of a strong editor, a great team, and an owner with bottomless pockets.

Adam is very knowledgeable about design. He also had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do, conceptually, and I think he may have had a clear idea of how he wanted it to look. The best magazines are the ones where there is one person at the top who has a very clear idea of what they want (and who makes an awful lot of sense) that I can tap into and riff off.

At that point, did you feel you had already reached the top of your field?

This is going to sound obnoxious, but it really doesn’t get better than that. But when the call came to do Time, I was thinking, “Wait a minute this is the whole damn country. It’s not just New York and little bit of L.A. and a little bit of the smart people around the country. You’re talking about 4 million people here.” So that satisfied my massive ego in another way, but with that came another set of problems.

How long had you been talking with Pentagram, and how does one start talking to Pentagram in the first place?

Joining Pentagram is a lengthy process. I’m in touch with a guy in London who has been talking to them for 11 years. For me, it was more like a year. You have to fly to each office and meet everyone, and have dinner with them. They’ve seen the work, they like the work, and they want to see how you present yourself, the work, and your philosophy, and basically see if they like having dinner with you.

It sounds like you were joining a secret society.

[Laughs] It really does, especially with the name ‘Pentagram.’ It’s the Wicca Society.

How did you simultaneously land the Pentagram job and the Time job; was your hiring contingent on it?

The final vote for my acceptance at Pentagram was due at a meeting in November [2006], but at the end of September, [Pentagram partner] Paula Scher got the call from Time. They were having a bake-off — they called four different groups, and you had a month to come up with a prototype for what you thought Time should evolve to become. Paula said, “Confidentially, we are talking to Luke Hayman; we think he is very likely to be join us, and I will do this project if I can do it with Luke.” They said yes, so while I was at New York putting out a weekly magazine, worked weekends and between the hours of 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. with Paula and one of her senior designers to put together the prototype. They liked ours a lot, and I was asked to join Pentagram. The very next day, I moved into an office at Time.

Now that you’ve reached what is arguably the pinnacle of your profession, is there any advice you would have given yourself 10 years ago to speed up the process or correct any mistakes?

I feel really really lucky. I don’t think I made a false move, although a lot of people think I did by going to Brill’s. I saw a big role there doing a lot of design, and I did so much work there that I was really proud of, actually, although I never show it. Having said that, I’ve shown it twice in the last month, and it has gotten me jobs. Consumer Reports asked me to submit a proposal [for a redesign], which I did, and I spent a lot of time on it because I really thought it’d be a great job for me and my team. They called me back and said, “We love your proposal and love your work, but we don’t think you are for us.” And I thought, “What? You won’t even meet me?” I started talking to Kim Kleman, the editor, and she said, “I really do love your work, but I think you are too cool for us.” She had a really great analogy: “We think that New York is like a cool cousin, who will talk to you, but is only talking to you because you’re hanging around. We want Consumer Reports to be your older brother, who knows you, cares about you, and is a really, really smart guy who you know does his research before he buys a TV.” I said, “I can do that too. I can show you other work.” We tend to show our more flashy stuff, our award-winning stuff. So she said, “All right, prove me wrong.” We met, and we had the best meeting for an hour and a half, and I showed her all the stuff I had done for Steve [Brill]. She loved it. It just goes to show you.

Five Pieces of Advice From Luke Hayman…

…but first, a piece of advice from someone else. “A mentor of mine,” Hayman says, “had three golden rules of editorial design: 1) Read the copy; 2) Read the copy; 3) Read the copy.” Hayman’s own advice is:
1) Find a mentor.
Find someone good and then all of your work will be good. I have taken drops in salary more than once to work for great people.
2) Look beyond magazine design.
And look back as far as you can — it has all been done before.
3) In my book, you get extra points for originality.
It’s not that difficult to copy Fred Woodward/John Korpics/Robert Priest. And yes, they do notice.
4) Work harder than everyone else.
This should be self-explanatory.
5) Put yourself in the position of the editor, publisher and reader.
Play well with all of them.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.

Matt Bai enjoys an unusual distinction among The New York Times‘ political reporters. Perhaps alone among those on the campaign trail, he has the luxury of spending months on his next story, as his typical dispatches run north of 5,000 words. He covers national politics for The New York Times Magazine, not the paper, which affords him the precious time to see the shape of the campaign as it unfolds, rather than rush to an incorrect judgment (as his colleagues ultimately did on Primary Day in New Hampshire).

Bai is following the Democratic primaries this year with particular interest after having written The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, an inside account of the struggles within the Democrats to choose direction for the party. Since December, he has also been writing a blog on the Times‘ Web site, “The Primary Argument.” As you’d expect from someone used to filing every month or two, he’s still struggling to adapt. The first words out of his mouth during our interview (on the day of the Iowa caucuses) was, “Blogging is killing me…”

Name: Matt Bai
Position: political writer
Resume: Reporter, the Boston Globe (1995-96); national correspondent, Newsweek (1997-2002); contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine (2002-present); author, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (2007)
Birthday: September 9, 1968
Hometown: Trumbull, CT
Education: BA, Tufts (1990); MA, Columbia Journalism (1994)
Marital status: married, one child (and one on the way)
First section of Sunday Times: the crossword puzzle
Favorite TV Show: The Wire or 30 Rock
Last book you read: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Guilty pleasure: watching Yankee games in the afternoon when I should be working

As someone used to working in (very) long form, how are you adapting to the pace and rhythm of blogging?

I really approach it like an interactive column, which is the part I really love because I hear a lot from readers every day. But any columnist would probably tell you that’s not a sustainable pace [laughs].

As a magazine we can’t keep up with the events of the caucuses and primaries, so this is really a way to be relevant and hopefully interesting during a period when our lead-time doesn’t allow us to do much else. An 8,000-word piece is an amalgamation of months of questions and observations; all I’m really doing here is putting those observations together and addressing them piecemeal. The hardest thing for me to get used to is being wrong. A few times I reached back into my mind for a historical geographic or fact, and my mind has betrayed me. Someone wrote on the blog saying, “Hey Matt, don’t worry about it, this is what blogging is, and we don’t care if you forgot where the Missouri River is.” But it keeps me up at night. I’m just not built that way.

So who’s idea was it to start one, then? If it wasn’t your idea, who strong-armed you into doing it?

It was [NYTM editor] Gerry Marzorati, and saying he twisted my arm wouldn’t be accurate. I just trust Gerry a lot, and when he has an idea it’s always worth trying. People have come to me over the past few years, with at least two or three serious offers to blog, for pay, and I have always said no with strikingly little regret. But when Gerry came to me it was different. I just trust his judgment so much, and it was only a six- or eight-week trial run, so there was no reason not to.

What’s your working relationship like with the paper’s political reporters? Is the primary season an all-hands-on-deck situation?

We are totally separate. I have very little interaction with paper; I maybe go into the office twice a year to see folks. I work from home, and when I go to New York, I go directly to the magazine floor. But I think the emergence of the Web has helped a lot culturally because all of the departments of The New York Times are really working more cooperatively now. My existence is really quite separate, and can be really quite confusing because there are a lot of people at the paper I don’t know, and editors I don’t know. And there are times when people will expect me to represent The New York Times or have some influence, and they’ll mention to me an editor or reporter they’ve had some interaction with, and I don’t even know who they are talking about because my relationship with them is so tangential. It does get awkward at times, but in general, particularly in the last few years, the paper has been very supportive. Chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney and I get along great, and the people in the Washington bureau have been very helpful.

In The Argument, you approach sites like Daily Kos as the heirs of think tanks or the ideological standard-bearers of the Democratic party rather than journalists. I always considered them to be closer to highly (and openly) biased journalists, writing for a niche audience.

Everybody has a different take on this, and my own is that there isn’t much of an intersection between journalism and blogging, and therefore not much of a competitive problem. I see what they’re doing more as community building than informing; they’re pretty separate. What we at The New York Times call a blog is very different than what Daily Kos calls a blog. There’s always this discussion among journalists and bloggers about whether bloggers are journalists and whether journalists are dinosaurs. I’ve never found that to be a very enlightening discussion, because my experience tells me that those two things are very different. I get frustrated with journalists who completely dismiss bloggers as a bunch of know-nothing amateurs when they are doing something quite extraordinary in American politics, and some of them are frighteningly smart people. And I get equally frustrated with bloggers who think that they are doing what journalists do, when in fact, what they are doing bears no resemblance to the actual gathering and analyzing of information. I think that the roles are pretty separate and can coexist quite nicely.

[A short time later:] That’s probably too broad of a generalization. I don’t like it when [bloggers] make that kind of generalization about us. There are some blogs, like Talking Points Memo, that are gathering information, and certainly analyzing it well. All I really meant to say was that the vast majority of blogs are engaged in community building and debating within community rather than the actual gathering of information.

In your book The Argument, you assert that the Democratic Party is still searching for its soul, essentially. Have you seen any signs thus far in this campaign that they’ve found it, or are at least on the path to finding it?

I think they’re evolving, but there isn’t going to be a magic answer overnight. I wrote a post about the argument between the top-tier Democrats coming out of Iowa, which is actually quite substantive and important. It’s about: “What does leadership look like in this era after Bush?” There are real distinctions between the top three candidates about how you achieve change. There isn’t much discussion about what kind of change the country needs beyond the same things that Democrats have been talking about for a long time, some of which are more relevant to the moment than others.

I think these things evolve slowly. I think it’s a lot to ask for people to have the answers to really profound change, and I think it’s a lot to ask for leaders to come up with those answers on their own. It’s the job of a leader to tell difficult truths, which they haven’t really done, and I think it’s the job of movements and people to demand better answers, and I’m not sure they’ve done that, either.

In your essay about Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes, you wrote, “Like a lot of young journalism school graduates then and now, I had come to see political journalism as a lesser form of the craft, populated mostly by the effete and the unindustrious, while the real reporters were out there braving crack corners and foreign wars.” I was under the assumption that the campaign trail was the glamour beat, and was the only story that mattered to newspaper reporters in presidential election years. What made you become a political reporter?

I sort of grew up thinking that too, but by the time I got to graduate school, it was no longer true. I think especially in the era of cable TV and punditry, a lot of people think of it as a lesser form of the craft. I was very much influenced by Richard Ben Cramer’s book, and I was interested in reading Joe Klein, back when he was at New York magazine and then at Newsweek, and reading Hunter Thompson‘s work and other great book writers, but there was no one thing for me.

I think my way of taking on political journalism has been more influenced by novelists than political journalists. I grew up just outside Bridgeport, Connecticut, and spent most of my life in the Northeast, and I am very much shaped by the decline of the industrial economy and what that means for American cities and that disconnect of the newer, more affluent parts of America and the parts they’ve left behind. The people who told that story, and told it best, are not political writers. They are people like Richard Russo and Philip Roth, with American Pastoral. I think they understood that moment of profound anxiety and change better than political writers did. Most of the themes of my work are more informed by that, than by the tropes of political journalism.

Especially since the dominant meta-narrative of ambitious political reportage has focused on the “process” and the inherent artificiality of the campaigns.

I’ve always been interested in telling stories about people. I love politics as a game and as a craft, and I find it fascinating. If politics was a pursuit of winning elections, and the end in and of itself was just about who was victorious on Election Day, I wouldn’t have much interest in covering politics. I do think that a lot of my colleagues do find that to be the most interesting part. I think for a lot of political reporters of my generation, the game is the story. It’s not entirely our fault. Politics has become much more about the game than the actual business of governing, and that’s happened for a lot of reasons that don’t have to do with the media. It has to do with economic and social reasons, and the intractable problems of this country that are hard to solve. I don’t judge anyone who feels that way. I have some tremendously talented colleagues that have mastered the art of polling and documenting what is happening in each congressional district, and I think that’s a really cool skill. But for me personally, politics is about something much larger. It’s very much connected to the governing and the vision of where you want to take the country. My own hell would be to write about the elections, and never about the results.

In the same essay, you also mourn the fact that no one has been able to advance the campaign narrative since Cramer, who covered the 1988 election. Why are there so few great campaign narratives since then?

Politics changes as a result of being written about. I think Ben Cramer’s book changed campaigns in some way, and it also just reflected a time when campaigns were really changing, so I think that was a book you could only write once. I tried to write a political book that was very different than what had come before, because it was a narrative, and it wasn’t about candidates or campaigns. It was about people you’ve never heard of, or knew of only vaguely, but who were quite influential in changing the Democratic Party.

I think in anything you do, you have to always be thinking about how it will change the genre in some way, because I don’t want to do what has been done. None of us can totally avoid it, but I’m always trying to think of different ways to do things. We are here to engage readers. If I’m not engaging readers who might not normally read about politics, than I’m not doing something that I find satisfying. I never write for insiders — I always write for people who are casual followers of politics. I think in the magazine, we’ve been successful in doing a kind of hybrid story that’s part-narrative and part-essay, and often part-profile too. So I was certainly trying to write a book that was different than the ones I had read. Frankly, I don’t feel like reading the vast majority of political books that are being written right now, and if I don’t feel like reading them, then no ordinary voter will feel like reading them.

Your career path is a somewhat conventional one — newspaper reporter, newsweekly reporter, and now long-form reporter — but that path is less likely for a young reporter with each passing day. If you were starting over again right now, would you still pursue the same path, or would you become a political blogger? And did journalism school really help?

I get asked this question all the time in one form or another, because I meet a lot of students and I meet a lot of aspiring journalists. And I think it’s really, really important for us to help people who want to see it as a legitimate career option — so they don’t go to law school or graduate school or, god forbid, become a consultant somewhere — because it’s very hard. I think this is something we really fail at in the business and something that I’m not really in a position to change because I’m not an editor, but I wish we had a systematic re-examination of this, because we make it very, very hard for people to break in to the industry.

It’s not just the economic conditions. I mean, yes, it is economically difficult to hire a lot of people, I understand that, but we also have this bias against people that don’t have experience. And we shut out people at a very young age where, if your didn’t write for your high school paper, therefore you didn’t write for your college paper, therefore you don’t have any clips, therefore you couldn’t get an internship at a small daily paper… well, you know you are done! Go ahead and do something else with your life, because it’s too late! That’s a terrible system! We need smart, good people, and we need people who, if they decide at 25 that they’d rather be journalists than keep doing what they’re doing, have a way to get into this business. Not even journalism school guarantees that, so why should they pay the money or take the risk?

That’s a big problem. I don’t know what I would do now. I didn’t know what to do then. I kind of bounced around, from speech writing and to graduate school, and I never knew quite where I belonged. [Today,] I would certainly be looking at Web sites. I think if I could still write for the Boston Globe, I’d probably do that again — that was a great career break. But if I were casting around, looking for a job as I was when I was younger, I would have certainly been looking at Web sites because I think that’s where the growth is and I think that’s where people are doing some of the most interesting work, and playing more with the genre than other people are.

What worries me about it at the end of the day is, even for a political reporter, the most valuable kind of experience is the actual street reporting. There’s not a day that goes by that my experience covering murders and fires doesn’t translate to this job. So I fear that we’ve increasingly become people whose primary experience is in glibness and opinion and analysis, and who haven’t actually seen how communities function and how families are affected by policy and actually learn to gather original information and challenge their own preconceptions. The thing about covering news for some tiny, daily paper somewhere, is that it humbles you very quickly. Anybody who covers daily news may think they know what happened in a story, but it often turns out they were wrong. You think you know who committed the murder, but it turns out it wasn’t the spouse; it was some other guy. There’s a humility that comes with that experience, and I find that lacking in people who started their careers in Web sites or journals.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.