Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2001, Steve Lopez had been a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 12 years, been a writer at large for Time, Inc. and the author of three novels. It was in Los Angeles that Lopez met Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man playing a violin with two strings. Lopez learned that Ayers had been a music prodigy and a student at Juilliard before succumbing to mental illness. Lopez’s columns about Ayers and their friendship captured the attention of the city in a way few newspaper stories do. Last year saw the release of The Soloist, Lopez’s book-length account of their friendship, which was named Philadelphia’s “One Book One City” title this year, and April 24 marks the release of the Paramount and Dreamworks film version starring Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Ayers. Lopez talked to mediabistro.com recently about crossing the line of objectivity in his columns, his take on where the newspaper industry went wrong, and why he’s embracing the Twitter feed and Web videos he “might have bitched about three years ago.”

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You’ve worked as a columnist for many years at the LA Times and before that at the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers. What do you think are the essential qualities of a good columnist?

I don’t think anybody knows what they are. For starters, there’s so many different types of columns. Thomas Friedman and Dave Barry are both columnists, but one might as well be an engineer and the other a shoe salesman — it’s just so different. And they’re both great at what they do, and it’s entirely different. When I got to the Oakland Tribune, I was a news reporter for about five years, and then I got a chance to write a column. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to write one, but I knew I wanted to write one. It was probably because the people whose work I really, really appreciated were Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko. I can state with authority and with evidence to back it up that [my early columns] were among the worst columns ever published in an American newspaper.

The problem was that I was doing really bad imitations of people I admired and had nothing new or different or distinctive to say. I guess the key was, in order for you to have a column that matters, you need to figure out why you’re a journalist: who you are and what you have to say. That’s not an easy thing to do. It took years of reflection and it’s an evolving thing, as well. I would say that I was pretty immature developmentally as a 25-, 35-year-old and still didn’t know enough about the world to write with much authority about anything. It wasn’t until I reflected on that editor’s advice and on my upbringing that I began to figure out who I was writing for and why. I was quoted somewhere as saying the trick is not to figure out what to write, but why to write.

The first direction that put it to me in a way I could relate to was the [H.L.] Mencken line: Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. It echoed dinner table conversations I’d had as a kid in a working-class, blue collar family. My dad was certain that we were getting screwed by somebody and goddamn it, who was going to speak up for us? I think that the column has its roots in all of that. But to tell someone this is how you write a column is not an easy thing to do. It’s kind of sink or swim, and nobody knows the crazy science of it. Is it a good writer? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is it somebody really smart? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Do you have to be a great reporter? Yeah, depending though on what kind of column you write. It’s just something that, maybe, is instinctive, and you just try to find your own way through it.

You had worked as columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer for years and then you were at Time. What spurred you to take the job at the LA Times?

When I was in Philadelphia, it was the time of my life. I loved that paper; I loved that city; I loved my job. It was great smacking people around in a place where everybody knew the backstory, whether they lived in Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey or northern Delaware. If you said something about some character at city hall, whether it was Frank Rizzo or Ed Rendell, people knew the whole backstory. Everybody’s in on the conversation. Everybody’s pissed off. Everybody’s working an angle. It’s a shooting gallery for a columnist. It’s just a great damn place to write a column and I loved it. Twelve years into it, I realized that although it was still a lot of fun, I was writing about the same characters — often in the same way. It’s a place — I exaggerate, but — Philadelphia is a place nobody moves to and nobody ever leaves. To the point where you can tell which ward leader is going to become the next councilman and go to prison and come out to then start a political consulting business. So it’s just these endless cycles of similar characters and sometimes the same characters. I got a little tired of it, and in a way it began to feel like I was going through the motions.

Norm Perlstein, a former newspaper guy, was trying to change the culture at Time, Inc. and one way he was attempting to accomplish that was to hire some newspaper people with different takes on stories and how to do them. So he hired an editor from the [Philadelphia] Inquirer, Steve Lovelady, who was putting together a team of about a dozen editors and writers at large. The task was to go from one Time, Inc. magazine to another and pick the stories that you want to do and take pitches from the editors, but become involved in a discussion about what works for these magazines and what doesn’t. One week you’ll write for Time magazine, you might do something for Sports Illustrated the next week, you might do a longer takeout for Life, a narrative for Time. Some columns, some narratives, some news, some sports. It was a lot of fun for four years, and the best part about it was I got to see the country.

I struggled with the one-week cycle. Having been in newspapers for so long and thinking in 24-hour cycles, I was really frustrated to see something on a Monday that I thought would make a great column, and then I’d have to think, ‘But does it hold up so that next Monday when Time magazine comes out, will it still look fresh and good? Will somebody else have done it? Will the landscape have changed, and it’s no longer a good column?’ And the other thing is that you had to not just find something that would be okay in print a week later, then it had to last on the stands another week. So I went from thinking in 24-hour cycles to thinking in two-week cycles. That was nice to have a different challenge, but I missed the 24-hour grind. I missed stuff that was more urgent and raw, where you see it and you run out and you race back and you knock the column out and you go home. And the next day it’s a new dread: What am I going to get next? Am I going to be able to pull it together in time? I just missed that cycle. John Carroll had taken over as editor of the LA Times, and I didn’t know John, although we had both passed through the Philadelphia Inquirer. He helped convince me that it was a nice run in the magazine world, but I was a newspaper guy at heart.

“Even as a columnist, you’re expected to keep something of a distance and not become an advocate, but I broke those rules with the support of the editors.”

I wasn’t a complete tourist, having been a California native and having lived in LA for two years prior. I knew my way around a little bit but was frightened by the challenge, to be honest. It was that level of fear that prompted me to take the job. It was unlike any city that I had worked in and in some ways a very challenging place to write a column in. Not because of any shortage of material — it’s richer here than any place I’ve ever worked, including Philadelphia. Norm Perlstein, the editor at Time, Inc. said, “Half the people are not from there, the other half don’t speak English. It’s not an easy place to write a local column.” I liked the idea that Philadelphia is made, it knows what it is and what it’s going to be; New York City — the same. I thought there was something very exciting about this sprawling, in some ways, city of the future. That we’re still trying to figure out what a city can be. I liked the fact that it was at the confluence of three continents and had all of the people crashing its borders, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that. It just seemed like an interesting place to try a local column, and I just wanted to see if I could do it. I do like the idea of a fresh challenge, or at least, back then I was still thinking that way. I don’t have any regrets.

Have you seen the final version of The Soloist? What was your reaction?

It’s a really fine movie. It’s a pretty compelling drama, but it’s done artistically and there’s nicely understated social commentary in it. I don’t think you can name a lot of movies like that today. I don’t think you can point to a lot that set out to accomplish all of those things. In some ways, it’s a throwback. It was not made for the commerce part of it, although you have to factor in, ‘Is anybody going to see this thing?’ It was made because the producers and then the director believed that it was a story worth sharing, and I think they’ve done a good job. They had to make changes, just because any movie based on a book is a reduction, but I think they focused on the right things. It’s not just a compelling movie to watch, but I think it makes you think differently about things and will take the message of the columns and the book to a broader audience. I’m really pleased with it. It’s pretty strange to sit in a theater and watch Robert Downey [Jr.] saying that he’s Steve Lopez of the LA Times, but I think he does a great job, and Jamie Foxx does a great job of playing Mr. Ayers.

How did you respond when producers got in touch with you?

I ignored most of the Hollywood calls when they started coming. I just didn’t see it as a book when the calls started coming, let alone a movie. I was in the midst of this exhausting, frustrating, rewarding, wild adventure with Mr. Ayers and had no idea where it might take us. Whether I could help him, whether it was even helping him at all. When I started getting those calls, it was about six months into the story — that makes it about three and a half years ago, and I didn’t even return the calls. Two of my novels have been optioned and nothing ever came of either. I knew the odds and I thought, well, the odds have got to be even greater for a story where I don’t even know the ending.

It was an agent from Paradigm who works with my literary agent who said, “Look, the calls are still coming. What if we pick two or three producers who I think would really make a good movie with good track records and credentials?” I met with three of them. There was one two-man team that stood out. They wanted to meet Nathaniel [Ayers], they wanted to walk through skid row, and when I asked them how they saw the movie, they said it was a movie about a relationship. Two guys from completely different walks of life come into each others’ lives serendipitously and have a huge impact on each other. I said, “But it’s complicated stuff and mental illness is a huge challenge, and you don’t often see it treated or treated very well in a movie.” They said, “We think we can make a compelling, enjoyable, watchable film that subtly addresses all of that. We don’t need to end it with him conducting the LA Philharmonic.” I said, “Okay, these are the guys.”

It wasn’t long before they made a connection with Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks, and things just fell into place in a way that astonished me. They got the director that they wanted, Joe Wright. They got the screenwriter that they wanted, Susannah Grant. After some initial problems lining up the cast, they ended up being very happy to have gotten Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey [Jr.]. They started shooting on time; They finished shooting on time. The only bump in this whole ride was that it was supposed to have initially come out in November, but the market got a little too swamped, so they decided to pull it back and wait until they could give it a better push at a time of lesser competition. So now it’s [an] April 24 [release].

How involved were you and the Ayers family in the process, and to what degree did you want to be involved?

We were all consulted. Nathaniel’s sister Jennifer was a consultant on the movie. I guess you could say I was a consultant. I didn’t attend many meetings, and I wasn’t on the set all that much just because I still had a very busy life to attend to, but I was in constant contact with them. Early on, we — Nathaniel and I — hung out with the screenwriter and got to know the director. Nathaniel and I went to a concert at Disney Hall, and Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey came with us. Nathaniel and I sat together, and they sat together just watching us interact. The producer is the guy I was most in touch with, Gary Foster. Gary would call or email me virtually every week and sometimes daily throughout the entire process: double-checking on things, asking questions, and keeping me abreast of what was going on. I was never in a position to say, “Hey, this scene works or doesn’t,” and didn’t feel that that was my role at all. I was very involved to the extent that I helped educate them as much as I could on the story, and from that point it was for them to interpret what the important parts of it were and how to tell it.

Was there anything that was left out of the film that you feel was important and wish had been included?

I think that an important part of the book is me bringing Nathaniel home. It was a huge point, a huge milestone in his development and gradual recovery to be able to trust me so much and to be trusted by me that I could take him home and make him a part of my life outside of work. He became a very valued guest in our home and a member of the extended family. I thought that he prospered just having that link to the world outside of skid row, and it was a very important day for me and for him because of what it represented.

That’s not in the movie because they decided that it was too difficult in the space allowed to establish a life for me outside of the mission of helping Nathaniel. And Joe Wright’s explanation for this was that the plot dragged a bit when they had to establish me as a husband and a father, as well as a committed journalist. And he thought things really began to move when he took me out of that and made me a journalist whose editor is his ex-wife. So he gets that side of me into this but does it in a way that provides a lot of romantic tension. I’ll give him that. But that was difficult to get used to at first. One way that Joe justified it was to say that his vision for the movie was that I’m the soloist as much as Nathaniel is. That I was so committed to trying to help him and in the process figure out my own way in life and find my own passion that I was as much of a soloist as Nathaniel was.

For me, another pivotal point in the book is that Nathaniel was a classmate of Yo-Yo Ma at Juilliard, and in real life, we were able to arrange a reunion at Disney Hall. It was another great moment for Nathaniel and just the scene of those two people in the green room together after a concert… He was just so excited to meet his former classmate and such a powerful scene, the two of them having been launched from the same stage at the same time and Yo-Yo Ma just taking off, his career in orbit, and Nathaniel going off a cliff. And here they were, and as I looked at the two of them, I thought it’s worth noting that Nathaniel’s accomplishments in life have been at least as great as Yo-Yo Ma’s. Just to get through each day and figure out what’s real and what’s not. And to always find his way to the music, and he’s as passionate about it as ever. To me that’s such a great success story. I thought it was an important part of the book. The problem for the movie was that it followed the timeline of the story they told. There’s a lot in the book that happens after Nathaniel moves in off the streets, but the movie doesn’t go too far beyond him moving in, so they lost that part of the timeline. I think it would have been nice to find a way to include it, but I don’t know how they would have done that unless they just fictionalized the timeline.

It’s easy to talk about the declining relevance of newspapers, and the LA Times specifically, but the Ayers columns really seemed to demonstrate what a newspaper can do and how a newspaper can change people’s perceptions. What was it about Ayers that you think not just captured people’s attention but struck a nerve with so many people?

First of all, people like to say that something’s not what it used to be, and it’s true: the LA Times is no longer what it used to be. You can’t be that with less than half the staff you had eight years ago. But people were saying that when we were still a thousand editors and reporters. I think there’s a lot of ignorance about newspapers and people were spoiled in a place like LA, which for many, many years had had a really great newspaper. I mean, if you get around the country and you see what’s out there, there are a lot [of newspapers] that would love to be the LA Times, even now. But we are somewhat diminished, and I think that newspapers did not do a very good job of breaking down walls between themselves and readers. We never did a good job of saying, “Guess what, the people who work here are your neighbors. We live in your community.” We’re thought of as almost aliens. I’ve never worked at a newspaper that did even a halfway reasonable job of marketing itself.

Why is it that, as we began to sink but were still making 20 percent in profits each year, we didn’t plow it back into this thing and say, “Guess what you get for 50 cents?” You get somebody in every corner of the world: You get five people at city hall and 10 hounding Governor Schwarzenegger. For 50 cents. There’s nothing else in the economy that costs 50 cents, and here’s what you get for it, and these are the people who do it. I used to pitch a 30-second TV commercial in which you saw somebody in a firefight in Baghdad and somebody chasing the Governor or the President and somebody at the biggest high school game in Southern California and somebody at Dodger Stadium and somebody who’d been working on the printing presses for 40 years and somebody in the advertising section and some kid tossing the paper onto a driveway somewhere and just say, “We’re here. We live and work here.” And they’ve never ever done that. I think that we’ve dug this hole for ourselves a little bit because readers don’t know who we are. We almost went out of our way to de-personalize our relationship and to create sort of a psychic distance between us and readers. And at a time when the country is so polarized socially and politically, you’re open to all of this criticism.

I think [the Ayers story] connected because first of all, I broke some rules and I personalized it. Even as a columnist, you’re expected to keep something of a distance and not become an advocate, but I broke those rules with the support of the editors. I said, “Look, I’m personally involved in this guy’s life. Our readers have donated instruments that he’s going to get killed for, so I have to step up. I’ve got to try to find a way to help him, and I’ve got to write about it.” I think that was a different kind of story for a newspaper to be telling, one that had always kept its distance.

The other reason was because it’s essentially a story of second chances. I meet this guy — it happens entirely by chance — and now readers are rooting for him, and they’re rooting for me to find ways to help him. It was like a serial narrative that people were following, and they wanted to know what’s the next chapter. It was great for me to be doing something like that. As newspapers were dying and I was thinking, ‘We’re irrelevant now and about to become obsolete,’ it was a new way for me to engage in newspapers and a new way for newspapers to engage readers. All of that has been very rich and rewarding, and maybe there are some lessons in it. That we need to get a little more personal. That we need to, in some cases, surrender that distance that we keep. Nathaniel became a character in the life of a city, and I don’t go to many places without people asking, “How is he?” That part of it has been very gratifying.

“Here I am, 55, almost 56, sending out tweets and doing video columns. It’s something that I might have bitched about three years ago — that I was expected to do that kind of thing.”

You wrote in the book a lot about crossing the line of objectivity in writing about Mr. Ayers. What do you think are the benefits and drawbacks of giving up that objectivity?

If I had written columns about skid row and about mental health policy, nobody would have read them. A small minority of advocates and people would have read them. I had a story about a guy whose career was ascendant, who through no fault of his own was struck down, and meets somebody who might be able to help him. Not only am I able to help him, but he’s teaching me about classical music, he’s establishing for me new friends in the LA Philharmonic and a new level of experience and understanding of all of these issues that I can write about in a human and compelling way.

The benefit of all of this was that I was able to put city hall’s feet to the fire and say, “We’ve all ignored this for decades. What kind of city, what kind of society, what kind of country has thousands of people, many of them with a serious mental illness, living in the gutters three blocks from city hall in the biggest city in a state that’s the sixth-biggest economy in the world?” It was a ‘what the hell’ kind of a story. It put a light on city hall and on the county board of supervisors that this is nothing we can feel good about, any of us, so what are we going to do about it? Then it was an opportunity for me to explore the benefits of permanent supportive housing, and then write about it as a friend of Nathaniel’s and to explore the value of alternative courts for mental health. And people were engaged because I’m the guy who speaks from the experience of helping Nathaniel through this. So there are more benefits than downsides.

The downside all along has been that Nathaniel is always there and always a part of this and has to some degree lost his privacy and had never volunteered to be the poster person. He’s been fine with it, but he’s had to make a sacrifice in all of this. In some ways, it’s validated him and given him recognition. It’s honored him and given this guy some dignity who, until I met him, was just an anonymous character sleeping in the street. He likes all of that, but at times he doesn’t need the intrusion. So I’ve been extra vigilant about making sure there are not too many distractions for him, and that when there are, he can handle it.

When students ask you for advice on whether they should pursue work as a journalist, what do you tell them? What opportunities exist for them, and how might they set themselves up to take advantage of those?

I say that nobody knows where it’s headed, so if you really want to do this, if you love this and want to get into this business, don’t be discouraged. And that the best thing you can do is have a number of different experiences. Do everything but study journalism. Travel the world, travel the country. Try different things. And be very open-minded about different ways to tell stories. Don’t be an old dinosaur like me who knows how to sit at a typewriter and tap away. Be completely open to video journalism, to blogging, to any other form that’s out there, electronic or otherwise. The more ways you can tell stories effectively, the better chance you’ll have to prosper as a journalist in the future. Here I am, 55, almost 56, sending out tweets [on Twitter] related to columns and about my travels around the country on the book and movie tour, and [I’m] doing video columns now. There’s a good on the LA Times Web site that we did about celebrating Beethoven’s birthday with Nathaniel and his friends from the LA Philharmonic. It’s something that I might have bitched about three years ago — that I was expected to do that kind of thing. But now I look at it and I go, cool. What a great job where I can say, “Hey, why don’t we do a video thing on this or make a connection with somebody at KTLA [which is owned by Tribune Co.]” and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea that could work on TV,” or they’ll pitch me. So I’m embracing the new world because I know that I want to stay in this field in some capacity. I would just tell people to be open to any form of storytelling, whether they’re thinking of writing for an alternative weekly, a magazine or doing broadcast journalism.

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Five tips for finding your way as a columnist:

1. It’s not enough to want to write a column. According to Lopez his early attempts as a columnist failed because “I was doing really bad imitations of people I admired and had nothing new or different or distinctive to say.”
2. The key is to know why you’re writing, because as Lopez said, “in order for you to have a column that matters you need to figure out why you’re a journalist. Who you are and what you have to say…You have to figure out what the point is.”
3. Know yourself. Lopez left the magazine world because he realized that he was a newspaperman at heart. “I missed the 24-hour grind. I missed stuff that was more urgent and raw. Where you see it and you run out and you race back and you knock the column out and you go home and the next day, what am I going to get next? Am I going to be able to pull it together in time?”
4. Fear can be your friend. Lopez said he took the job at the LA Times because, “I knew my way around [LA], but was frightened by the challenge, to be honest. In fact it was that level of fear that prompted me to take the job.”
5. Be open-minded. “If you really want to do this, if you love this, and want to get into this business, don’t be discouraged.” Nobody knows what’s going to happen next, Lopez said. “Be very open-minded about different ways to tell stories. Don’t be an old dinosaur like me who knows how to sit at a typewriter and tap away… The more ways you can tell stories effectively the better chance you’ll have to prosper as a journalist in the future.”

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Alex Dueben is a freelance writer living just outside New York City.

Prior to starting his 26-year career as a television journalist, Marc Rosenwasser was stationed halfway around the world in Moscow, where he covered news throughout Europe for The Associated Press. Later, for the big three networks, he covered U.S. news. Now, as executive producer of the recently-launched Worldfocus, a daily international newscast airing on most public television stations, Rosenwasser has teamed up with his former NBC compatriots — anchor Martin Savidge and WNET president/CEO Neal Shapiro — to deliver news from abroad to American audiences.

A seasoned news veteran, this Long Island native leads a notably eclectic, streamlined and multi-talented staff of news producers from around the globe. That staff scours the earth daily in pursuit of a diverse mix of stories largely ignored or overlooked by traditional network and cable newscasts. Rosenwasser recently spoke with mediabistro.com about the state of the news media, building an international newscast from scratch, Al Jazeera’s “huge PR problem,” and more.

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How did you get your start in the TV industry?
I had worked for The Associated Press for seven and a half years and spent the last two-plus years [of my AP tenure] in Moscow. I was anxious to come back and had befriended John McKenzie, who’s still over at ABC News — we used to play a lot of touch football together over there in Moscow. He suggested that I contact certain people at ABC, which I did, and I got hired at the end of 1982. So I’ve been in TV for about the past 26 and a half years.

“As the newspaper industry is starting to collapse, I think it has major consequences [for TV news] because a great deal of the original reporting in American journalism is vanishing.”

I started as a clerk on the sports desk at The Associated Press. The backstory to that is: I had been in graduate school [at Northwestern University in Illinois], it was the middle of the 1974-75 recession, and everyone at that time wanted to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Unfortunately, there weren’t jobs for all of us who wanted to be that. Over a vacation I called up The New York Times on a blind call, asked for Dave Anderson, whose byline I knew, a sports columnist. He wasn’t available, so I just threw out another byline I knew who happened to be Murray Chass, who I’ve not met to this day. But he got on the phone, and I told him who I was and said I was desperate [and asked], “Can you help me?” And he put me in touch with the sports editors at the AP, U.P.I [United Press International] and The Bergen Record. I said “Can I use your name?” He said, “Yeah, just don’t say we’re best friends.” I met with all of them and four months later I got a call back at Northwestern from the AP saying they had a 20-hour-a-week clerkship. “Was I interested?” So, I left Northwestern in about two seconds and came to be a clerk at the AP.

I always felt bad about never letting Murray know how his kindness during that one phone call had helped me. So on the 25th anniversary of my start in the business, I hand-delivered a gift basket to the Times building for him. I actually never heard [from him] but trust he received it.

In your view, how has television journalism changed since then?
Well, as it relates most closely to Worldfocus, I do think it’s been documented a number of times that there’s less and less of an appetite on the networks for foreign news and less and less coverage of foreign news. That’s especially important now because television, to a large measure, follows newspapers in terms of original reporting. And as the newspaper industry is starting to collapse, I think it has major consequences [for TV news] because a great deal of the original reporting in American journalism is vanishing. We’re on the verge of losing a lot of original work and a lot of work that television takes its lead from.

Anchor Martin Savidge, WNET president Neal Shapiro, yourself and several other staff members came from major networks –NBC, ABC, and CBS. How have you been able to lead your team through its transition from network to public TV news? What are the key differences between network and public TV that have required the greatest effort to bridge?
There are a few important differences: One is there’s less ratings pressure, for sure. Not none, but less ratings pressure. As Neal’s widely been quoted as saying, you’re not looking over your shoulder minute-by-minute to see how this segment fared and that segment fared. I know the networks are trying to produce the best show they can everyday also, but I think we’re under less pressure to do this or that. And, basically, my goal every day is to try to come in here and produce the most interesting, informative, educational broadcast that I can. I think that content is even more important here. If we’re going to contrast the relationship between content and production, I would say the balance is even more heavily weighted here toward content than it might be at the commercial networks. I like to say content is king, and I really believe in that.

There is much less money to do what we do here [than at the networks], but that’s just a fact of life. Then the question is, How can we do what we want to do everyday to get the people the news we want to share? I think we’ve managed to come up with systems that enable us to produce what I hope is an interesting broadcast, from around the world, with original material every night.

Care to share those systems?
Our budget is about $8 million a year, which is a tiny fraction of what the networks spend on news coverage. So, it was vitally important to come up with a new way to do business. And the most important challenge that I faced was hiring the right staff to do that. What I set out to do was to look for people who had backgrounds that reached far beyond the United States and who were technically savvy at the same time. We only have two devoted editors, which is a small fraction of what the networks would have for a daily broadcast. We have no devoted crews.

In terms of the Signature pieces, which are our original pieces that air four nights a week and are much longer than what airs on a typical nightly newscast, we have staff producers who shoot . So it’s a lot of merging of functions. At the networks, typically, you have people who are correspondents, another group of people who are producers, a third group of people who are editors, a fourth group of people who are shooters. Here, our producers are our shooters. Our assistant producers, except for two people, are our editors. So, we shoot and edit our own stuff every night. It was important to hire assistant producers who were technically savvy and who speak multiple languages, and also to pair them with seasoned network producers who, I believe, are editorially superior. And by melding their respective skills, we have a system that works for us.

What has been the biggest surprise about your transition to public TV news? Anything much easier or more difficult than you’d anticipated?
The challenge of doing a daily show is a major one; We come in at eight in the morning and our first deadline is by four, so there’s very little time to spare during the day. That’s a challenge, but that’s also what makes it exhilarating every day. I haven’t encountered that many surprises, to tell you the truth. The process of broadcast journalism is the process of broadcast journalism, though I think we’re redefining the process a little bit. And, by the way, all the editing is done on Final Cut Pro. The last I knew, was mostly done on Avid, but all our editing is done on [personal] computers, which is fundamentally different.

Another critical difference is that we also don’t have money for satellite feeds, so a huge difference here is that if we take a spot from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — or from ITN of Britain or from Global of Brazil or Deutsche Welle of Germany — it’s all delivered by File Transfer Protocol (FTP). So in addition to the editing savings and the shooting savings, we save an enormous amount of money by using no satellites. Literally, no satellites.

Are the networks catching on to that method too?
I think they’re all moving in that direction. It’s actually easier to start from scratch than to undo systems that have been in place for decades. So, that’s their challenge. We started from scratch. It’s not that it was so simple to put together, but we didn’t have to undo something. We just had to do something.

If you were delivering a “State of the News Media” address, how would you describe media in 2009?
Critical condition: Newspapers, which are vital, are collapsing. The economic model apparently doesn’t work. I read a piece recently about local TV being in trouble as advertising vanishes. There was just a front-page article on The New York Times‘ Web site about whether the broadcast model is still viable. And within that context, news divisions are under a lot of cost pressures. That said, it’s interesting to note that people seek out the news and that the correlation between how a network fares and how a network news division fares is not so close. For instance, I always note with interest that NBC is languishing in fourth place in the overall ratings and NBC News, the evening news and in the morning, is in first place. The correlation is not so certain. But I think people are struggling to figure out how to do things more cost-effectively because they have to and still deliver the news. Again, as other people have been quoted as saying, I think our biggest mission every day is to try to make sense of it, as opposed to just string a bunch of items together. The line we like to use here is “making foreign news less foreign.” And that really is our goal.

Specifically, how does Worldfocus go about making foreign news less foreign? What are the techniques/strategies used to accomplish this?
We talk a lot about the news every day. I’m surrounded by a really talented team of seasoned producers whose judgment I rely on a lot. Martin is very strong editorially. The way our system works is that all of the associate producers who come from different parts of the world — one associate producer from Brazil, another from Sierra Leone, another from Taiwan, a Palestinian guy, a fluent Spanish-speaking person from Chicago, a fluent Russian-speaking person from Connecticut, a Turkish woman — we mostly divide the world up by continents and those are their beats. They spend the first hour here every morning going through lots of different newspapers and Web sites from their respective parts of the world. They report to Martin, supervising producer Mary Lockhart and me what they found, and we make a list of that. We look at partner contributions. We talk about interview guests that we want to have that day about one topic or another. We compile that list and have a run-down meeting at 9:45 a.m. each day. We pretty much set the run-down between 9:45 and 10:30, and then we try to react to news as it happens throughout the day. One advantage of doing a foreign news show is that the news has already happened by the time you walk in here in the morning. That’s one case where the time difference really works to our benefit.

How are partnerships with foreign press companies forged and structured? Does Worldfocus help its partners gather American-based news?
No, we don’t [help partners gather American-based news], to answer that backwards. Before the staff was hired, I was here by myself for some number of months, and I just spent that time trying to make those partnerships.

How did you go about doing that?
Well, I had some contacts. People in the building helped with a number of contacts and basically made a lot of calls, introduced myself and what the show, which didn’t have a name at the time, was going to be. I did lots of different kinds of deals depending upon how often we take their content. Some of the deals, if they’re on an ad-hoc basis and are more irregular, are non-paying arrangements. I won’t go into them one-by-one because they’re private deals. Some of the other suppliers we take material from almost on a daily basis — we do pay for that material.

Al Jazeera is one of Worldfocus‘ partners. What do you say to American viewers who are reluctant to consume news from Al Jazeera due to its perceived anti-American bias?
I think Al Jazeera actually has a huge PR problem that it’s working to address. Obviously, they were associated primarily here [in the U.S.] with the [Osama] bin Laden tapes. But the truth is, when you actually look at their office, they have a very diverse staff with correspondents around the world. The vast majority of content I see from them is completely non-ideological with high production values. And we retain complete editorial control over the material we use from them and other partners. Within various spots that they offer to us, if we think they’ve taken liberties that we don’t agree with, we edit the pieces accordingly. It’s very important to emphasize that Worldfocus is in charge of the material that airs on Worldfocus.

The tension in the daily debate about what to use from them or other partners — but especially from Al Jazeera — is, on the one hand, to tell it as straight as we can, as fact-based as we can. On the other hand, we sometimes like to show how a story is being reported in other parts of the world by one organization or another as [an illustration] of the thinking about a topic from that part of the world. But, we hold them to the same standard as anyone else. Like I said, the vast bulk of material we see from them is completely non-ideological in a way that I think would surprise most American viewers. And I would also say that we have Israeli partners — Channel 2 of Israel, Channel 10 of Israel, IBA, the Israel Broadcasting Authority — and we run a lot of stuff from them, too.

“A typical person in my position at one of the networks would walk over to the foreign desk and say, “Hey, I’m interested in a spot from Moscow tonight on what Putin said.” We don’t have a foreign bureau in Moscow, so we have to rely on some combination of our own smarts and, hopefully, collaboration with smart partners who do.”

Even in tonight’s show, back-to-back, almost by coincidence, we have a piece from Ramallah on expectations of the Obama administration going forward from people in Ramallah as reported by Al Jazeera English. And right behind that, we have a piece from Channel 10 of Israel about how everything is political in that part of the world. When two young women singers — an Arab-Israeli and a Jewish-Israeli — got together to compete in a song contest in Europe, they were both kind of vilified and viewed as suspect because they were participating together in a way that the singers thought was completely natural. The goal of the show — a line that Neal made up a long time ago — is, “Diverse voices for a diverse world.” And that’s what we try to achieve as often as possible. And that includes an emphasis on having guests from all over the world.

How does producing a commercial-free newscast affect the depth, scope and range of the stories Worldfocus covers, relative to network and cable news shows?
One big difference between public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting is there’s more time within the half hour: Our show is 26:46 each night. I think the news hole within the network news now is more like 21-something, so we actually have five more minutes to play with each night. Our show has an unusually large amount of tape in it, especially for public broadcasting. I think it’s really important to see the world, not just discuss the world. But we do also try to discuss the world and make sense of it with experts and our emphasis within that is to try to get people from around the world, as well as American experts. Hopefully, we use the extra time well and wisely to bring more depth to the topic.

Our Signature pieces, which are our original pieces that we take great pride in, are five or six minutes long. A long piece on the evening news is typically 2:45 or three minutes. I guess it would be medium-form; it’s not short-form and not long-form. We feel excited and proud of those pieces for two reasons. One is, we’re covering all sorts of stories that aren’t getting any coverage at all [by the networks and cable]. We did a piece that got a huge reaction a few weeks ago on environmental damage in Haiti. Ninety-eight percent of the trees in Haiti have been cut down. It’s the kind of story that gets no coverage at all. The next night, a story that got even more attention was children [in Haiti] who are so hungry that they eat mud cookies. Literally, cookies that are made from mud. We visited Vietnam for a four-part series recently — Mark Litke, the former ABC bureau chief in Tokyo did these pieces for us — on multi-generational damage from Agent Orange because the chromosome pool has been damaged. And people are really responding to these pieces. We really get to go into some depth on those pieces.

Some say the mainstream American news audience isn’t ready for a newscast that’s not focused on America — what’s your take?
I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that the networks talked themselves into. They declare that Americans aren’t interested in foreign news, so they do less foreign news and, therefore, Americans aren’t interested in foreign news. Our show has had pretty substantial growth since it started. The trend is only up as people discover it. If you make it accessible, if you make it meaningful, a good story is a good story. I actually just don’t accept that [Americans aren’t interested in foreign news]. But I do think it’s a higher bar that you have to cross to make it interesting. It’s literally foreign to them to start with. So, I think a goal is to make it less foreign to them.

Worldfocus has been on the air for almost five months, and has replaced BBC World News on several public TV stations. Describe the reception so far.
We got a lot of email, and I think there was some number of people who were nervous about what it was being replaced by. And, honestly, we get a lot of good email and [positive reviews]. I wouldn’t say 100 percent, but something close to overwhelming. What do ya need to achieve overwhelming?

I’d say 75 percent.
Oh yeah, easily. Overwhelming. (Laughs) Easily. I’ll take your definition.

Besides the unyielding focus on international news, what are some differences between Worldfocus and the big three network newscasts?
There are fewer people to do the work, by far, and there’s less money to be spent, so I hope we find and I hope we have found creative ways to make up for those deficits. It’s not just the staff that [network news shows] have, but the whole news division exists, all the bureaus exist mostly to serve the evening news. Now, there are far fewer people on the bureaus than there used to be, but they still exist. A typical person in my position at one of the networks would walk over to the foreign desk and say, “Hey, I’m interested in a spot from Moscow tonight on what Putin said.” And the foreign editor would call the correspondent in Moscow who would then drum up the piece and review it with a senior producer. We don’t have a foreign desk. We don’t have a foreign bureau in Moscow, so we have to rely on some combination of our own smarts and, hopefully, collaboration with smart partners who do. And those also include print partners, who we interview and, as we build our own spots, integrate their expertise into our spots, whether that’s from The Christian Science Monitor or The New York Times. So, it’s not just TV partners.

You have an interesting résumé: The AP; ABC News; NBC; Dateline; Tom Brokaw Reports; CBS Evening News. In which job, at which of those outlets, did you learn the most that you bring to bear on your day-to-day work at Worldfocus?
Honestly, I have to duck that question because I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it enough. I would like to think I’ve learned something at every job. You learn different things from different people all along the way, so hopefully you’re able to absorb what people teach you and integrate it successfully.

Describe being at CBS Evening News in the wake of the Dan Rather era and the Bush Air National Guard “Memogate.” What did that teach you?
I was there well after [Memogate] and… I really like and respect the people I work with there, so I think you should honestly talk to people from there. I was only at CBS for a little less than a year. I just wanted bigger challenges from what I was doing then, so I don’t have enough background on that.

You were brought on in an advisory role to help Phil Donahue’s MSNBC show. Why do you think Donahue’s dissenting liberal voice couldn’t gain traction on MSNBC, but Keith Olbermann’s show has been successful?
I think at the time — the war [in Iraq] started in March of 2003 — I think there was skittishness about [Donahue’s] point of view. He was very outspoken. I think the show, to its detriment, often booked people who were very like-minded. I didn’t think there was, as other networks might say, a fair and balanced debate going on. On a show of that format, what I think most cable broadcasters strive for is conflict. I don’t recall, honestly, enough about all of their guests. I can remember some guests, memorably, just being in total agreement with Donahue from the beginning to the end of the show. The other big mistake I thought they made was — and we tried to rectify it, and I thought we actually had some success with it before they pulled the show — is we brought Donahue back to the studio in front of a live audience. This was a guy who invented the form, and I truly didn’t understand why they were doing the show in a studio with no audience. He invented the form. So, the show actually gained some traction. He was in the audience, we were taking emails during the show, we were taking calls during the show. There were three other people, usually guests, one of whom was a like-minded person with Phil, two of whom weren’t. So it was two against two in a hot debate about something. But it was eventually pulled. Why Keith Olbermann succeeded — I think they do a very clever show… and the times are different.

So, are you saying Donahue was ahead of the curve?
On his political point of view? I’m not saying that, but I think, at the time, my impression was that there was actually some discomfort with where he was coming from.

Discomfort where? With MSNBC, GE?
I wouldn’t even speculate. (Laughs)

You’ve worked with some of the biggest names in broadcast news: Who’s left the greatest impression on you, and why?
I just really respect virtually all of the people I’ve worked with a great deal. I really respect Tom Brokaw greatly. The thing about Tom Brokaw that I think people pick up on — and that it’s just somehow communicated — is I think there’s a great decency about him and a great genuineness about him. It’s so important that people trust you in those positions and I think, because he’s genuine and because he’s decent, people do trust him. Obviously, he’s very bright, too, but I take it as a given that everyone at that level is very bright. I think he’s benefited greatly from personal qualities that he has and people pick up on. My guess is that he was well-raised.

What’s your advice to those aiming to break in and have a career as extensive as yours in TV news?
My advice is not to be afraid, to go hard after it, to make calls that are uncomfortable for you to make, to take any job you can get. What I tell people is, try to figure out where you want to be 10 years from now and get there, even if it’s at the lowest level to start. My overwhelming impression is that most people in the business are decent and they’re generous and, if you show that you’re smart and show that you’re interested, they will help you. Sooner or later, you’ll get your shot, and then it’s up to you to do well with it. So, my big advice is go for it and go for it hard. And don’t be afraid.

Tips for a successful career in TV journalism:

1. Identify where you want to be in 10 years. Then target that specific job title and try to take any job beneath it, even if it’s at the bottom of the totem pole.
2. Don’t be afraid. Pick up the phone, call somebody who is in a position to help you get a job, and introduce yourself. It might be an uncomfortable exercise for you, but it could help set you apart in a highly competitive industry.
3. Display your talent and interest. Most people in the business want to see others succeed, so if you prove you’re a smart and hard worker, you’ll be rewarded with greater opportunity.
4. Seize your opportunity. When you get your shot, use what you’ve learned from others and make the most of it.

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Andrew Tavani is a freelance writer living in the New York City area.

On the fly during half of the year, Michael Sedge has developed sharp worldwide vision and savvy business techniques to grow his 30-year writing business. The author of books including Double Your Income Through Foreign Sales, The Writer’s and Photographer’s Guide to Global Markets, and Marketing Strategies for Writers, he has also targeted the Internet industry, where he frequently resells his work.

After extensive travel in Germany, Sedge recently headed back to his base in Naples, Italy, where he moved from Flint, Mich., in 1973. On a brief layover after another business trip to Djibouti, Africa, he was setting off again for two days in New York and a weeklong conference in Salt Lake City. Before he was airborne once again, Sedge paused to share his tips for a smooth flight through the international and Internet markets.

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How did your education prepare you for your career?
My education gave me an excellent base for my position as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, covering military and war activities in the Mediterranean region, Middle East and Northern Africa. Having a knowledge of the history of Europe and these regions allowed me to approach my features with a better understanding in answering the “who, what, when, where and why,” which all stories should provide.

What are the greatest lessons you’ve learned to succeed?
Have confidence in yourself and your ability to write what readers want. As a professional, you should have the tools to do any type of story. Be a “pen for hire,” as it will expand your opportunities and your writing skill. The more you write, the better you get. If you fall into what is traditionally plugged as “writer’s block,” then you should reconsider a career in this business. If, on the other hand, you find yourself with too many ideas to ever complete, you are on the road to success.

Why do you stress approaching writing as a business, and what are the critical steps?
You should be telling the editor what rights are for sale and what the cost of those rights will be. For some strange reason, the writing business has developed in an opposite manner, whereby the buyer, in most cases, dictates what you will make. Certainly, you can negotiate, but the offer should come from you — the manufacturer of the product — not the buyer.

I was one of the first individuals, before the Internet, that established myself — that is, my business — as an international syndication. I had classifications of clients — newspapers, as well as travel, in-flight and military organizations — that used the same types of articles. It was, therefore, an easy task to write one article or product and sell it repeatedly in these various markets while giving the editors the rights they required, for example, first in-flight magazine rights, exclusive rights in Detroit or exclusive Spanish-language rights.

“I have one article — the second I ever wrote — that has sold more than 37 times, earning me a total of $22,000. I was able to do this because I know rights and how to give editors what they want.”

What is the secret behind your prolific writing, and how do you juggle multiple stages of various projects simultaneously?
Using the “multiple sales” method, I reached a point in my career that allowed me to complete two articles a month while working on a book. Considering that I produce two to four pages, or 500 to 1,000 words a day, on the book and articles averaging 1,500 words, that is not a lot of writing. In fact, I spend the mornings writing — what I consider the real work — and the rest of the day doing administrative tasks such as sending out queries and record keeping. I do not consider myself a prolific writer but a better businessman than most writers.

I also target clients I want to work for and might spend up to two years to get into that market using guerrilla tactics. For example, when I decided to work for the Discovery Channel, I found out what book and documentary projects they planned to produce two to three years in advance. I then did a feature story on one of these projects, the archaeological research to find Cleopatra’s palace in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, and then made a trip to the program manager’s office. When she mentioned they were working with French archaeologist Franck Goddio, I pulled out the magazine Mobil Oil Compass, which had the article on the cover and handed it to her. I left the Bethesda, Va., office of Discovery Channel with a contract.

Describe your schedule during a recent workday in Italy.
When I’m home, my day begins around 5 a.m. with a four-kilometer walk that gets my mind thinking. This activity is particularly productive if I’m working on a long-term project, like a book or television documentary. During these daily excursions through the streets of Italy, I am able to create the story, put events into a logical sequence and come up with storylines that are strong. It also allows me time to map out articles and the work to be done during the day.

I am at the computer by 6:30 a.m. and work until noon, which is sufficient time to get the daily writing completed. Then, I break for lunch, after which I normally spend three to five hours corresponding, submitting queries, researching and marketing.

Why did you decide to move from Michigan to Italy, and how has this decision impacted your life and business?
I saw friends on the street where I lived going off to Vietnam and not returning. I enlisted in the Navy to have my choice of geographical duty. I selected Europe. Two weeks after arriving in Southern Italy, at the U.S. Naval Air facility in Naples, the war in Vietnam ended. That decision changed my life forever and, ironically, I found myself during the next few years in more war zones than I could have imagined. This time, however, as an Associated Press correspondent, I spent time in Beirut, a year in Bosnia and have been in Africa 10 times during the past two years — most recently at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, where I had coffee with the U.S. Special Forces involved in fighting Somalian pirates.

How do you effectively oversee another office in Wilmington from abroad, and how frequently are you in the States?
I travel to the States every three months for various projects. Delaware is my corporate headquarters, where I maintain a corporate agent that handles registrations, licensing and mail forwarding. Most of my U.S. travel is for business development to meet with clients, editors and agents.

How has living in Italy changed your viewpoint and tactics in sustaining an international business?
Without a doubt, when I found myself a foreigner in Europe, it forced me to create a living, a business and an entirely different view of how to approach life and the writing world. By example, after writing such books as Marketing Strategies for Writers, The Writer’s and Photographer’s Guide to Global Markets and Successful Syndication, I realized I could take advantage of my expertise in this area, as well as the geographical location in which I lived, and came up with “The Dolce Vita Writers’ Holiday.” I had taught other seminars for universities and through the overseas United Service Organizations. But during this particular weeklong vacation-seminar, I gave daily lectures while participants enjoyed bed-and-breakfast lodging in Tuscany, viewed the local attractions, the food and wine — and just had a great time. I had students from around the world, and these seminars turned into a profitable division of my writing business. There are no set dates for the “Dolce Vita Writers’ Holiday.” But when the urge strikes, I’ll offer another seminar.

More than the business side, living in Europe has changed my perspective of the world and America. It allows me to write with an international view, to bring in aspects that most American writers might find difficult to understand or have the knowledge to include in their projects.

What do you advise writers negotiating different cultural, monetary, publication and payment policies while cracking the global market?
The Internet has made the world smaller. Today, I can send 50 queries in a single day to editors around the globe, although I normally stick with four or five. In the 1970s and 1980s, I would go to the post office every day with 20 to 30 letters and then wait. The response time has also been reduced to days.

At the same time, email is a dangerous tool because editors can simply click the delete key, and it is as if you never made a submission. Serious editors, however, respect writers. Similarly, writers should respect their clients. In negotiations, be honest; do not accept a low fee, if you feel it is not just. Do not get so wrapped up in getting published abroad that you lose focus on the business you are in: getting paid for your writing.

Regarding money differences, international banking is such today that you can deposit all forms of checks into your account or have wire transfers made. I became famous at my local bank because in one week, I deposited checks from Bahrain, South Africa, Germany, Singapore and the United States.

“Offer editorial packages, not just articles. Include photos and graphics in your packages; if you don’t, the editor will have to spend time and money to get them. By offering packages, you’re helping the editor while increasing your income.”

Like all markets, there are those publications that will use your work and then not pay. I feel fortunate that this problem has happened only twice to me. Perhaps that is because I first attempt to ask for the money owed. Then, I will write to the publisher of the media. If this effort fails, I normally send letters to the advertisers informing them that their money might be spent better with a reputable publisher. That approach normally does the trick, but one must be very careful, as there are legal implications involved in such a tactic.

What are your thoughts about writers focusing their energy on Internet versus print markets in today’s shifting industry?
I view the Internet as an alternative market to print. Traditionally, payment is less; so, in my view, the rights these markets receive should be fewer. I use the Internet as a resale market in most cases or a foreign-language market, where the Web editor does the translations.

What are the best ways to break into paying online outlets?
For those who have read some of my books or taken my seminars, this is not a secret. For others, here is a hint: Try to obtain the media kit of the Web publication — or even print publication for that matter. This marketing tool is used to sell advertising. Traditionally, it will include a copy of the publication, readership statistics and demographics, as well as an editorial calendar. This information will allow you to understand the readers fully and target your queries and articles to that market. These details will also give you a heads-up on what these publications plan to publish in the months and year ahead.

What are some key survival tools for writers currently navigating a highly competitive and shrinking marketplace?
Be professional. Provide what you say you’re going to and in the timeline that was agreed. Know the markets you plan to pitch. Offer editorial packages, not just articles. Include photos and graphics in your packages; if you don’t, the editor will have to spend time and money to get them. By offering packages, you’re helping the editor while increasing your income.

How do you balance your writing with overseeing two businesses — The Sedge Group and Michael-Bruno LLC — and how many [people] do you employ?
For the first business, founded in 1989, I handle editorial, photographic and marketing services with a staff of three. The latter, which I established in 2003, provides architectural design engineering services and construction management to the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization governments in Europe and Africa. We have a staff of 24.

How do I manage all of this? Long hours, dedicated collaborators and a never-ending desire to expand, grow and find new opportunities.

What are some current and future projects?
Under The Sedge Group, I have an editorial package to put together for a U.S. publication on Lac Assal, the world’s third-largest salt reserve in Djibouti. The reserve will soon be mined using a technique that will allow the salt to re-generate itself, making this source never-ending — not to mention profitable. I also have to develop a couple of new Web sites and am working on a new book idea.

What are the benefits of your global approach?
It is great to see your words in Spanish, Japanese, Arabic and other languages. Not long ago, I received a book in the mail from one of my publishers. I read four pages before I realized that this was a Korean edition of my book, The Photographer’s Guide to Making Money.

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Five tips for a lucrative global and online writing business:

1. Above all, learn the ins and outs of rights. “I have one article — the second I ever wrote — that has sold more than 37 times, earning me a total of $22,000. I was able to do this because I know rights and how to give editors what they want — that is, exclusivity within their geographical circulation area — while keeping all other rights.”
2. Consider your article as a product, much like a pie. “The more pieces of the pie you can cut up, and sell individually, the more money you make. This practice is one that I have applied to my business of writing. You — and not the editor– should take control of the ‘deal.'”
3. Be creative in your marketing, and do things that set you apart from others. “I increased my sales by 50 percent one year because I sent hang-up calendars to 200 editors. When they needed a writer and were contemplating who to call, I was ‘hanging’ in front of them.”
4. Always remember to plan ahead. “As a rule, I plan my proposals six to 12 months in advance. So I’m sending out queries on summer holidays in October and November.”
5. Think globally. “Make the world your market. You will find that you can increase sales — and income — substantially.”

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Andrea K. Hammer, founder and director of Artsphoria: Visual Word Artistry, specializes in arts and business writing.

A few years ago, journalist David Farley wrote restaurant reviews and skimmed mediabistro.com for career advice. Since then, he’s managed to achieve every travel writer’s dream: scoring a book deal with Penguin’s Gotham Books imprint and traveling to a gorgeous Italian village to write about his travels. The result hits shelves this month: An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

In an exclusive interview with mediabistro.com, Farley explains exactly how he achieved his dream. He outlines his career in step-by-step detail: the books he read for inspiration, the freelance jobs that built his career, and his survival tips from two years living and working as a writer in Italy.

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Many writers, myself included, dream of the travel-writing lifestyle you enjoyed while writing this book. Any practical advice for freelancers looking to write this kind of work? How should they scout and pitch stories?

The first thing is you won’t get rich doing this. If you have a day job, keep your day job. If you are a freelancer, write about something else and flirt with travel writing. I pay my rent writing about food and dining in New York City.

“A relatively big agent told me he didn’t think the relic had enough part of national consciousness to make a book. So I decided, ‘I’m going to make it a part of the national consciousness.'”

There are only a handful people who can make a living with travel writing. I might write about the dining scene in New York, when I travel someplace else — it’s all within the same realm of writing. Travel writing is not a real genre of writing; in some ways, there are all kinds of stories that could or could not be considered travel writing.

You had the magical experience of turning an article into a book. Could you describe that process more in-depth, explaining how you ended up with a book deal at Penguin?

It’s a fun story for every person who dreams of writing a book. But it’s a frustrating, long, and rejection-filled journey. As a freelance writer, you read these stories on mediabistro.com about somebody who writes a high-profile article and gets a book deal. A relatively big agent told me he didn’t think the relic had enough part of national consciousness to make a book. So I decided, ‘I’m going to make it a part of the national consciousness.’

I pitched [the] New York Times travel section and got an assignment, but it took a long time for the story to come out. I also pitched Slate a more straightforward piece about the holy foreskin; I got the assignment.

When it came out, I was on assignment in Tivoli, a hill town outside of Rome. When I got back to Calcata, Italy, I had a bunch of emails from friends saying the story was all over the place, on Fark, in blogs, and on the radio. For a week, my story was [the] No. 1 story on Slate, and I had a New York Times travel section story, too. I wish everything I wrote had that kind of impact.

Within 24 hours, I got an email from Penguin books editor Patrick Mulligan. In my bio for Slate, I said I was writing a book about the holy foreskin as a nudge-nudge to somebody in the publishing industry. I arranged to have lunch with him; he told his boss the idea, William Shenker, and he loved it too. After that, it wasn’t hard to find an agent.

My Sterling Lord agent Jim Rutman was recommended to me. When I got the agent, he and I worked on the proposal a lot — he helped me shape the proposal into a state he thought would work well. The successful proposal I submitted to Penguin was 41 pages long.

“That’s a benefit of living in a place that’s highly desired by traveling magazines and travelers: You end up coming up with more story angles.”

As you were planning your trip to Italy, how much research/planning/outlining took place in the United States? What do writers need to have prepared before leaving on this kind of writing trip? Any important tools?

[The] best thing to do is make contact in the place where you want to live. I emailed a guy who rents out rooms and apartments in the village. Before I even left I had a place there. I didn’t have any work lined up. Ultimately, when you live in a place like Italy — a place that’s heavily covered by travel press — editors will start writing you. Some of the assignments I pitched, others I got out of the blue from friends I knew.

They say, “Let’s pay someone who already lives there so we don’t have to fly a writer out from New York.” That’s a benefit of living in a place that’s highly desired by traveling magazines and travelers: You end up coming up with more story angles because you are actually living there, find[ing] stories that are easier to come by than searching from New York.

I would say my ratio when I’m pitching stories — for every 20 pitches I send out, I get one assignment. In Italy, I sent out less because I was more focused on pitching the book. But I got more assignments than rejections out of the pitches. The ratio was much, much higher.

Freelance writers are having a rough time right now. What’s your advice for freelance writers looking to survive the upheaval at print publications?

A lot of the markets I was writing for are on hiatus or near-hiatus from assigning stories. Somehow, I don’t really know why, I keep getting assignments from various places. I just wrote an article for World Monuments Fund; their mission is to promote sustainable tourism and awareness for historical sites in danger. It’s a guide to sites off the tourist radar. One of those somebody put out the word that they needed a Rome writer.

That’s another strategy, is to have a geographical beat, because your name will surface because you’re known for writing about that part of the world. For me, it’s Prague and Italy. You’re able to focus your [energy] to stay abreast of what’s happening in those parts of the world.

How did you build your freelance lifestyle? How has it evolved?

I started out writing bar reviews for Shecky’s New York because nobody would hire me. There are these stepping-stones as freelance writers. Shecky’s New York is a great place to start, any place like that. I told my students to look on Craigslist for writing and editing jobs, there used to be an endless supply of writing gigs for writing about bars. Starting a food blog is a good idea as well, when I started several years ago that wasn’t really an option. That is a real possibility to becoming a writer. The journalist Andrea Strong writes StrongBuzz, which is a really good example of that.

I wrote for the yearly “Bar and Club” guide at Time Out New York, and then their quasi-annual “Eating and Drinking” guide. Then I started writing some dining features for the magazine. Then, I got a gig as the New York City guide editor Gayot.com; I’m still doing that on a part-term basis, off and on for the last four years. About two years passed between Shecky’s New York and Gayot. These days, it’s tough to send somebody any place because so few places are hiring freelancers.

Besides the huge body of historical research behind this book, you are also part of a long, fascinating tradition of travel writers as well. Who are your biggest influences? If you were making a creative traveling writing syllabus for people interested in turning vacations into prose, what would you recommend?

I have to say I’ve never been a huge reader of the canon of travel writing — of writing about a place for the sake of writing about a place. I like writers who travel with some other purpose in mind. I wanted to move to this village because it was such an intriguing place.

I was going to move there and write about it, but I didn’t know if it would have a good arc. My wife reminded me about the relic. I studied medieval history in college. Then I had this larger story that transcended the place — that’s the kind of book that I read over and over.

I teach travel writing at New York University, and I have a syllabus of recommended writers. My influences include: Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Susan Orlean, The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup; David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day; Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There; and Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. There’s also “The Best American Travel Writing” series — that’s more journalistic style. There’s also “The Best Travel Writing” series that’s by Travelers’ Tales — that’s more personal.

You make history vivid and tangible, something that most journalists need to learn. How did you take these days and days of library research and make them come alive? What’s your advice for magazine writers looking to liven up historical passages?

I think one thing that helps [is to] write in a casual conversational tone, as if you were at a bar telling your friends about a historical anecdote. Simon Winchester writes history in a very casual tone. Tony Perrote writes travel books with a huge historical bent; he does a masterful job of making history accessible. It’s kind of that casual tone that helps, and not getting too caught up in academic jargon.

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Five tips for success as a travel writer:

1. Move away. The best way to find story ideas and to really get to know a place is to move there.
2. Have a geographical beat. It will keep you easier abreast to that part of the world and, eventually, editors will know you as an expert in that area.
3. Don’t quit your day job. Or at least don’t focus entirely on travel. Write about your other interests and then apply those same interests when you’re traveling.
4. Know the travel writing market. The more you’re familiar with the various columns and sections of travel magazines, the easier it will be to come up with ideas for them and the more knowledgeable you’ll appear when you send a query to editors.
5. Send finished articles to newspaper travel sections. While you generally send pitches to magazines, newspaper travel editors prefer to consider already finished articles. This is good for beginners because it eliminates the necessity of sending published clips writers typically include with their pitches.

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Jason Boog is editor of GalleyCat and the host of mediabistro.com’s Morning Media Menu podcast.

All eyes are on Washington, D.C. this year, and the focus isn’t just on politics. From sustainable food policy issues brought before Congress to growing rhubarb in the White House garden, Washington Post ‘Food’ and ‘Travel’ editor Joe Yonan is watching and ready to report. Yonan got his start as a copy editor at The Boston Globe and became the jack-of-all-trades, helping out when needed writing and editing weekly sections. He jumped at the chance to cover food whenever possible, eventually becoming a staff writer in the food section. After moving to The Washington Post in 2006, he overhauled one of America’s most respected food sections, adding blogs, fun columns, a social network for wine lovers, and more to breathe life into food coverage. We caught up with Yonan to discuss the path to his dream job, the importance of advertising in saving print media, and evangelizing Washington Post ‘Food’ through social media.

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How did you get started as a food writer?
About 10 years ago, I was working at The Boston Globe as a copy editor, trying to get noticed. I started having a career crisis and was trying to figure out what would make me happy. I figured out what made me happiest was writing about food, talking to chefs, cooking for myself, and eating. A light went off. I decided to go to culinary school while keeping my copy editing job at the Globe. I enrolled at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and three days a week, I was in class and in the kitchen during the day, then worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at the Globe. I started writing about food for the Globe as much as I could, mainly for the ‘Travel’ section, still trying to get over to the ‘Food’ section, which was competitive. My strategy at the Globe was to become indispensable at doing other things. Eventually I got to choose the section I wanted and went over to ‘Food’ as a full-time staff writer. I did that for a couple of years and came to the Post in the fall of 2006.

How did your experience at the Globe prepare you to take over editorial duties at the Post?
At the Globe, in addition to editing the ‘Travel’ section, there was a period when I edited other sections. I got the reputation for helping change entire sections, like the ‘Automotive’ and ‘Career.’ [The Globe] let me completely reinvent sections from top to bottom, which helped prepare me to tackle something as big as the ‘Food’ section at the Post. In every way this has been my dream job, to get the chance to reinvent the ‘Food’ section at one of the best papers in the country. This was something I couldn’t pass up.

“I tried to change the section to be an unapologetic celebration of food that will appeal to a lot of people, even if they don’t cook themselves.”

How have you shaken up the Post ‘Food’ section since you took over?
I have a big impact on the way photography is done. It had been pretty focused on static, highly-stylized pictures of food. I added a lot more people photography, and tried to include more naturalistic shots. We started a recipe database to help people find recipes in the archives. I added a really popular spirits column with a fun writer I knew from my travel editing days. We increased the beer coverage. I tried to make the section a lot livelier and more fun. People have a tendency to apologize for food coverage, such as worrying about how much they do or don’t cook, or how much they spend on restaurant meals. I tried to change the section to be an unapologetic celebration of food that will appeal to a lot of people, even if they don’t cook themselves. We also have a lot of recipes that are breezy and casual. I’m trying to tell more stories, and covering a lot more food policy.

What is the biggest difference between covering the food scenes in Boston and D.C.? What are some similarities?
D.C. is a great place to write about food policy. Certainly food policy affects people everywhere, but in D.C., food policy is a natural perk for us. We’re able to go to cover it close-up. The restaurant scenes are a little different; in D.C. one of the big differences is that there is more variety of ethnic food than in Boston, but a lot of it is in the suburbs. Chinatown is pretty small in D.C. The chefs [in D.C.], like in Boston, are fiercely proud of what they do, and have a sense that they have something to prove to the country since they’re not in L.A., New York, San Francisco, or Chicago.

“[Twitter] is so easy and addictive that when I have a story or edit to write, it’s much easier to procrastinate by dashing out something quick.”

What is a normal day at the Post ‘Food’ section like?

[It] depends on the day of the week. If it’s a Tuesday, I would need to go to a story meeting, in which everyone presents what will be in their sections the next day. Back in my office, if we get product samples that we would be interested in, we’ll taste and take notes. Around noon, some of the staff might bring up lunch from a place we’re researching for our take-out column every week called “Good to Go.” We’ll taste and take notes and decide whether it meets our qualifications for coverage. If it’s a Wednesday, we have our crazy online chat that goes live from 1 to 2 [p.m.]. We’ll answer questions, typing as fast as we can for an hour. There might also be a photo shoot in the studio or offsite that I or my deputy editor will go to. Then I would come back upstairs in the afternoon and try to see where writers are with the blog, edit items for the section, try to get copy over to the copy editor, weigh in on story ideas, and have other meetings. By that point, it’s 6 or 7 o’clock and I realize I have another hour or two of editing to do. Pretty long, but fun, days.

You’ve recently begun Twittering under your own name (@JoeYonan) and under @WaPoFood. Do you think social media tools have made a noticeable difference in drawing more readers or increasing reader interaction?

I can’t tell if it’s drawing more readers, but I know people appreciate the interaction. I’ve used it for research and reaching out for ideas. People are certainly using it to connect with me about things they want to talk about in the ‘Food’ section. With my personal Twitter account, I Tweet a lot about food because it’s my passion. And under WaPoFood, I primarily Tweet about what the section is doing. I’ve only been using Twitter for a couple of months; like a lot of people, I was skeptical at first. And then a mentor of mine, Ed Levine at Serious Eats, talked me into it. He said, “Just make it useful. People are interested in what you do and what you cook, especially if you give them inspiration.” The only problem is, it’s so easy and addictive that when I have a story or edit to write, it’s much easier to procrastinate by dashing out something quick on Twitter.

“We’re lucky to have retailers, restaurants, specialty markets, and liquor stores that still believe in the power of print advertising. Advertising is what keeps newspaper food sections going.”

Newspapers, as we all know, are in trouble these days, including your old paper, The Boston Globe. What do you think is the future of newspaper food sections?
I didn’t hear newspapers were in trouble. Tell me more about that. (Laughs.) I think sections are certainly in trouble. This year the Association of Food Journalists, in their annual awards competition, changed the name of one of their biggest categories from “Best Newpaper Food Section” to “Newspaper Food Coverage.” That’s an acknowledgement that a lot of food sections are disappearing, but the coverage is just going over to sections like ‘Living’ or online. We’ve been fortunate at the Post. Our advertising in ‘Food’ has remained relatively stable. We’re lucky to have retailers, restaurants, specialty markets, and liquor stores that still believe in the power of print advertising. Advertising is what keeps newspaper food sections going, by saying they want to be on those pages.

So there are your plans for WaPo ‘Food’ in the few months to a year?
The whole newspaper is integrating more with the Web. It’s the first time we’re really coming together. There’ll be more integration, more online content. I’m not planning other changes, except always looking for fun ways to do big, interesting packages. There’s some food policy stuff that we’re planning, [which] will be topical. I’m adding a food policy column, by Ezra Klein of The American Prospect, to be published every other week.

What is it like to have a new food-loving First Family in town? How much coverage is being devoted to the Obamas’ favorite restaurants and the White House garden?
Right now obviously there’s a huge amount of interest in everything Barack and Michelle [Obama] do. We’ll be with them every step of the way, not only in the ‘Food’ section. Every time they go to a new restaurant, we try to do everything quickly, even if it’s just on the blog. We’ve already covered the garden, and one of our big exclusives that nobody else had was our blog coverage of their first meal that was made from the garden.

Tips for becoming a successful food writer and editor:
1. Get clips. Prove yourself as a writer. Even if you can’t get print clips, these days you can easily get noticed by blogging.
2. Find a mentor. Connect with a benevolent editor. Even if they can’t use your writing directly they might give you feedback on a blog. Listen and try to incorporate their advice in what you’re doing
3. Read, read, read. Become familiar with writers like M.F.K. Fisher, Michael Pollan, and Calvin Trillin. Figure out what makes their writing work.
4. Eat and cook. Try as many different kinds of food as possible and learn the fundamentals of cooking. Try to understand different cuisine and ask tons of questions.

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Diana Kuan is a freelance writer who divides her time between China and the U.S. She often blogs on the road for AppetiteforChina.com.

The collective gasp, quickly followed by a multi-person whoop, that resounded when Reader’s Digest was named the winner of a General Excellence award at this year’s National Magazine Awards pretty much encapsulated the response of editor-in-chief Peggy Northrop. In the masthead’s top spot for less than a year at the time of the win, she’d gone against the grain of collective industry wisdom when she handed over the EIC reins at More to try and help newly installed Reader’s Digest Association president and CEO Mary Berner (a former Condé Nast colleague of Northrop’s) update Reader’s Digest to ensure it remained an institution for a new generation of readers.

Contrary to recent coverage, Northrop denied that RD would go in a more right-leaning direction in a recent sit-down with mediabistro.com, describing the real deal behind the company’s attempt to grow its readership and expand its content offerings across multiple channels, detailing the ins and outs of her new appointment to global editor-in-chief, and explaining why the survival of newspapers and media’s move toward paid content (she’s in favor) are matters of not just professional, but great personal import to her.

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Name: Peggy Northrop
Position: Vice president and global editor-in-chief, Reader’s Digest
Resume: Senior editorial jobs at the San Francisco Examiner, Health (then called Hippocrates), Vogue, Glamour, Redbook, Real Simple; editor-in-chief, Organic Style, More.
Birthdate: August 6, 1954
Hometown: Washington, Pa.
Education: BA, University of California, Berkeley
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “‘Business’ (because whoever gets up first gets the A section).”
Favorite TV show: “Mad Men… just watched the whole first season again. And I’m loving Nurse Jackie so far.”
Guilty pleasure: “Online Scrabble at midnight.”
Last book read: “I have several going, including Netherworld, Lark and Termite, and Rapt; just finished the new Lee Child, Gone Tomorrow (this counts as a guilty pleasure), which is the first book I bought on my new Kindle; next up on my Kindle list is Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls.”

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At the National Magazine Awards this past May, the feeling in the room when the General Excellence Award was announced for Reader’s Digest was one of excitement and, I think, some surprise. Were you surprised?
I was sitting next to my husband, and I turned to him and my mouth dropped open. It was a surprise, as much because I’d only been there for less [than a] year. I felt as though we’d made some really good changes and we’d done it rapidly, and I was very pleased with what we had done. But still, [winning in the] first year out is a surprise — a happy one, I’m not complaining. We were up against the big guns: How many times has National Geographic won? [Ed. Note: 19] They’re so good, so to go up against them, and Time in an election year, and Martha Stewart Living, with the consistency and the quality; and Real Simple, where I used to work and where I think Kristin [Van Ogtrop, editor-in-chief] is doing just an amazing job — it was a great company to be part of, too.

In your acceptance speech, you dedicated the award to friends who “thought you were crazy for going ahead and taking the job at Reader’s Digest.” What was causing their concern?
It wasn’t just my friends who thought I was crazy, it was my family. I remember when I told my father about the job he said, “Oh, you’re kidding.” [laughs] My dad was a newspaper publisher for most of his life. I think part of it was this feeling that Reader’s Digest has lost its relevance, so why would you want to do that? I loved my [editor-in-chief] job at More — I had been there for three and a half years; we’d been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the General Excellence category. I was really enjoying myself there, so why would I want to make a move [to RD]? It was seen as a really big challenge in the business. I guess what people don’t really realize is that’s what motivates me — the bigger the challenge, the more attracted I am to it.

Not that it was easy to get me to come to Reader’s Digest — Mary [Berner, Reader’s Digest Association president and CEO] really had to try hard, and I’m glad about that. But it was ultimately the chance to take on something really big. I had made a vow to myself: “I want to run something big.” It’s great to be at a flagship [like RD] where everybody has a stake in your success, so you have a lot of help — you have a lot of resources. And you have a lot of urgency about making it happen. That was the experience that I wanted.

What was Mary telling you as far as what challenges you would be coming into and what you needed to do in the position?
You always want to talk with a new boss about what success is going to look like. I think that for [Mary] it was, “Come in and make the magazine better. We need to sell more advertising. We want to grow newsstand [sales].” I haven’t done that — nobody’s done that in the last year. It’s not something I’m especially happy about. We certainly talked about the fact that it was kind of a tired old culture up at Reader’s Digest. I knew Mary a little bit from my days at Condé Nast, so I knew that she was a leader of women and men — I knew that grass was not going to grow under her feet, and I knew she wasn’t going to fail.

I knew there was going to be a big cultural change — that was probably the biggest thing that we were going to have to take on. I was convinced that I could do all the editorial stuff; that was not an issue for me. I thought I had a pretty good shot of making [RD] relevant to a new audience.

How did you go about changing that entrenched culture?
I did make a lot of changes to staff — in the first four to six months, I probably turned over 25 percent of the staff. I brought over several people who had worked with me before. One of the things that I am most happy about is that the people that I’ve worked with — not just at More, but at Real Simple and at Organic Style — were willing to follow me to a new place. That’s fun because once you get the people who you know work [well] together, there’s a bit of shorthand so you can move quickly. Of course, you can’t just bring in new people and not pay any attention to the folks who are there. It’s building a team and having everybody reach this new standard.

“We’re a heavily researched company and we did a lot of research around the redesign, but ultimately I thought about all the people that I know who have experienced huge amounts of change in their lives. The changes in their magazine are never their big problem.”

These days, what is the Reader’s Digest brand meant to deliver?
We have this enormous audience of people who those of us in New York tend to think of as folks in the fly-over zone. I know those people really well, partly because I grew up in western Pennsylvania. I grew up in a newspaper family, so I am accustomed to that kind of community journalism. Reader’s Digest is really close to a lot of the things that I have done in the past, and I respect those readers. I respect what they’re going through right now; I know what their orientations are.

They’re looking for a little bit of inspiration. They’re certainly looking for unbiased information; they’re incredibly time-pressed, so they want it in a way that’s easily digestible. [RD‘s] roots really go back to that. Now, we can’t compete with the news organizations — I’m not on a 12-hour cycle or a one-hour cycle, like a lot of people are. But we can offer context for stories that are affecting everybody and tell [them] from the point of view of somebody who’s like our readers. We can do it all with a sense of humor, which is key to who we are. There’s that sense of a real hometown, what life is meant to be about, in our pages.

Given the brand recognition and loyalty among Reader’s Digest readers, what were the challenges you faced with the redesign?
People have gone through a lot of change — they’re accustomed to seeing visual redesigns. If you respect the core DNA of the product, you can kind of do anything you want with the packaging. I don’t mean to be flip about that; of course, we’re a heavily researched company and we did a lot of research around the redesign, but ultimately I thought about all the people that I know who have experienced huge amounts of change in their lives. The changes in their magazine are never their big problem. We live in a much more visual culture now. We want information in different ways — you’ve got to break it out, and you’ve got to pay attention to the little pieces and sidebars. I felt that was missing from the magazine, and that it also fit with our DNA.

Your promotion to global editor-in-chief: How does that alter what you’re overseeing and how does it affect your day-to-day?
I’ve been running [around] more than usual. I will still be editing the U.S. magazine. I’m going to be delegating more to Tom [Prince] and Barbara [O’Dair], my executive editors. There are 50 editions around the world and there are a couple of editors who run regions — a lot of my contact will be through them. What [the promotion] allows us to do is have one brand champion around the world for what Reader’s Digest is. It has local expressions, but there are certain things we can collaborate on.

Think about how many stories are really global stories now; how interested are people in what’s going on in the rest of the world? We do “Around the World in One Question” every month. We’re able to call our [international RD] editors and say, “Your country had this result, why? Go out on the street and ask somebody a question,” and I can do that in a day and a half or less, fun little packages. We can collaborate on the big stories, too. Think about what travels around the world right now. Information about the environment — there’s a global problem we all have to worry about. Information about the [swine] flu — that’s something people in every country are concerned about. So, I’m going to have a more direct pipeline to [international RD] editors — they will hear sooner what the U.S. edition is planning, and I will hear sooner what they’re planning so we can do more collaboration.

These days, how would you describe the prototypical reader of the American edition of Reader’s Digest?
I think about my sister-in-law who lives in Washington, Pennsylvania, where I grew up; her mother, who’s been reading [RD] for years; and my niece, who lives here in New York. [They’re] all big readers, all well-traveled, all women with college educations, all interested in a little bit of uplift. They want to approach life in a particular way, and they want to have stories that they can share among themselves.

You say “they want to approach life in a particular way” — which way is that?
They’re always looking for ways to make their experience of life better. When I first came to [RD], I had a phrase I used constantly that came from a meditation teacher I once had: “It’s really hard to meditate unless you can first find some brightness in the mind.” This is part of the function that Reader’s Digest fulfills for a lot of people: Before you can think about the issues that face us, the problems that we all share — how are you going to get hold of your finances, how are you going to raise your children — first you have to be in the right frame of mind. Underneath it all, that’s what we’re doing.

In terms of modes of content delivery, formerly print-centric organizations are thinking a lot about the Internet and multimedia. How are you bringing content to the Reader’s Digest audience through those channels?
We have the advantage of never having been just a magazine — we always also published books, we made music available to people — we publish in a lot of different channels. We are in the process of integrating our print and our Web editing teams so that it’s one content creation group. We’ve been on the Kindle for about two years — however long it’s been out — we were one of the first magazines on there. We are launching a new suite of products that you’ll hear about in the next six to 12 months under the “Reader’s Digest Version” banner. You hear more and more that people are overwhelmed with information: “Give me the Reader’s Digest version.” I’m embarrassed that it took me a year to come up with this idea; it’s an opportunity for us to say, “Yes, this is a traditional strength of ours,” and it’s infinitely adaptable on these new platforms: mobile, Web, mobile apps, e-newsletters.

Does the Reader’s Digest audience want to consume the content digitally?
Yes. It’s a misperception about who our readers are: that they are somehow not up on what’s going on in digital media. Their consumption of digital products is extremely high. Ever since we introduced [RD on] the Kindle, we’ve been in the top three or four magazine downloads from the very beginning — people really like it. Many of them say, “I remember reading Reader’s Digest when it didn’t have any advertising, and if you like that, you can go to the Kindle and get it that way.”

“Hot-button conservative ideas don’t resonate, even with the people who identify themselves in surveys as very conservative. What they want from their media products is different.”

The “brand transformation,” as you call it — what is Reader’s Digest in light of this?
I don’t think that the brand itself has changed that much — we have always aimed at a particular customer. It’s much more about leveraging all the assets we have so we can slice and dice them in new ways. How do we make sure that the reputation for authority and trustworthiness comes through on what is often seen as the Wild West of the Internet? Transferring that sense of trustworthiness and authority [to online] is going to be a challenge because I have lots of fact-checkers working on the magazine, and the Web publishes like this [snaps]. When people are saying, “give me the Reader’s Digest version,” you know what they mean. They don’t mean “give it to me dumbed-down,” they mean “give it to me quickly because I don’t have time for the long, complicated version.”

An article in The New York Times early this summer suggested there was a conservative shift happening at RDA, and that there would be an increasing amount of content aimed at a more niche readership. What do you have to say about that?
Let me ask you a question: When you think about conservative, what do you think?

There’s conservative as in a conservative dresser, a modest dresser. Then there’s politically conservative, with right-leaning values and interests. It can mean different things.
Right. My big issue with the New York Times story was that it put [RDA] in a context where it seemed to say we are moving right politically. It was very easily misinterpreted. The context made it sound like we were aiming for Obama-haters or we’re aiming for people who are angry conservatives, when indeed what we’ve always done — it’s not really a big shift — is aim at a middle American audience. Yes, a lot of them care deeply about faith, but they are very tolerant people who don’t necessarily want to read about faith in a magazine. They are people who support the troops — they don’t necessarily support the war. It’s a more nuanced view of who that reader is.

We survey our readers constantly, and what I find is that hot-button conservative ideas don’t resonate, even with the people who identify themselves in surveys as very conservative. What they want from their media products is different. Again, they’re looking for a sense of humor and optimism. Our readers are interested in examples of people who are living meaningful lives, who are doing good things, who are giving back to their communities. Those are the kind of hometown values that, if you call them “conservative values,” it sounds like “if you are politically liberal, you don’t have them.” I reject that. Ultimately, I think that’s insulting to our readers.

There’s obviously a lot of industry contraction: Reader’s Digest itself has decreased circulation and frequency, dropping to 10 issues a year from 12. What’s the strategy to offset the downturn in advertising and other factors diminishing revenue?
For a long time, Reader’s Digest didn’t have any advertising — advertising was almost an afterthought for many years. We have diversified our advertising, we’ve introduced advertising into some properties that never had it before, so I think we are bringing new things into the company. All of us in this business are trying to figure out: How do you make money on the Internet? I’m thrilled that people are starting to talk about pay models for content. I’m now back on the board of my family newspaper in western Pennsylvania, and little newspapers around the country — if they don’t have a pay model, they will go out of business. So it’s a quite an urgent question for me. The rule on the Internet has always been you’re trading dollars for dimes, yet there is a desire for people to consume content on these different platforms, and new pay models are coming up. I’m convinced it will be part of our strategy — it won’t be the only strategy, but we’ll be ready.

So you’re saying there are plans to introduce paid content at certain levels?
Yes, absolutely — we’re already doing that. Kindle is one paid content model. My editorial budget gets richer by the month because of the subscriptions we’re selling to the Kindle. We are experimenting with digital downloads that we’ll not charge very much for, but that will be around specific content areas — like SIPs [“single issue publication,” or single-topic issue], but digital. We’ve got a couple of those on deck.

Do you envision micropayments working? Do you see tiered subscription models working? Any ways into paying for content you expect to be more successful than others?
One model I think is promising is for us to be more like a cable channel — where you buy certain access to information, and then you might have to pay a little extra for premium. I think that can work for a lot of us. I think [online publishing] is a technological shift for a lot of people in my position, but it’s not one we can’t master — I’m convinced that we can. It will allow us to be much more nimble. It will certainly change the shape of who’s doing what.

There have been staff cuts at RDA — a company statement early this year said there would be 280, and they would wrap up in June. Have they been completed?
I think they have been [completed]. I mean, I’m speaking about my division — given this economy, nobody wants to say “That’s it — we’ll never have to [cut] again.” But we took a hard look at staffing, we took a hard look at our costs, and we did what we needed to do. We did it pretty fast, and we’re doing okay — I feel like we’re right where we need to be.

“The people who survive through this next year or so are going to be just an incredible group of journalists and editors and packagers.”

You mentioned combining the print and online effort — was that part of those earlier cuts?
No, it’s something that we are deeply engaged in right now. We literally put a team of people together that we’re calling our “print and Web editing integration team” where we say, “Okay, so what do you do? How can I work with this person in a slightly different way?” to understand our processes and figure out new ways to work together. You’ve got to start at the beginning: “We have an idea, which platform does this make the most sense for?”

Will combining Web and print efforts, finding these new ways to work together, create additional redundancies, with further cuts as a result?
I don’t think so but, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know the answer to that question.

How do you keep morale up as you’re trying to enact substantial change — you’re doing a lot of retrenching, and there have been changes within RDA…
It helps that I was an anthropology major in college. Culture’s really important; what you say is really important — knowing what you want, communicating clearly, then saying it again: “Here’s where we’re going, here’s why it’s good, here’s how you can help me/us do it” — then being able to turn around and say, “Now, how can I help you?” My style of management is not so much top-down, but, “We have a problem — let’s all solve this together.” For the most part, people respond to that with great energy and enthusiasm.

Any launches or new products you’re excited about?
One goes back to what you said about user-generated content, how you’re starting to see things posted online inside magazines. We’re doing similar things by going out to our readers and asking them, “Give us the Reader’s Digest version of –?” For example, in August it was “the best advice you’ve ever received.” People take it very seriously and yet they’re really funny — we got everything from “never go to bed angry” to “never cut your hair after three margaritas.” In the July issue we had the six-word contest, [which asked]: “Tell us what you love about America in six words or less.” So there’s that — bringing more user-generated copy into the magazine itself.

Then, we’re going to take over Best You, a magazine launched under the health and wellness group. We did a very successful newsstand test, and we’re going to give that a full launch next March. It will be quarterly the first year, then we have plans to ramp it up quickly after that. It’s a lifestyle magazine aimed at women in their 40s and 50s, and I’m really excited about it.

Who are some people in the larger media world doing things you want to try, things that you are finding interesting — who are you looking at?
I look at people in our industry who’ve managed to make alliances with television; they come up with their own show the way my old friend Joanna [Coles, editor-in-chief] at Marie Claire came up with the show Running In Heels. That’s a great brand extension and it gets you into a platform where people can really see your brand in action. I would love to do something on TV.

Are you talking or thinking about that at RDA?
Of course — we’re always thinking and talking about it. These things take a long time to pull off, as I have learned. I would love to do something like that.

Where are the pockets of growth and opportunity within the media industry for people, as they’re looking at their careers?
Anybody who doesn’t get themself some digital experience is going to be left out in the cold really fast. [If] you’re in a company where you have the option to work on some digital stuff, you should take it. Working harder, working smarter, serving your readers better; being more fun, more accessible, more responsive is really going to help you succeed in the marketplace. That’s a good kind of pressure to be under — I think the people who survive through this next year or so are going to be just an incredible group of journalists and editors and packagers.

Coming from a family immersed in newspapers, what do you think newspapers have in front of them to stay viable?
Newspapers that are able to really figure out what their readers need — not simply [saying] “we’re the journalists, and we are telling you what to think” — are going to be the ones that survive and thrive. You’ve got to be really local and serve that local audience. The idea that that is cheaper is just wrong — it takes a lot of time and energy to report local news. The easy, cheap thing is to put a bunch of AP reports in your paper. There’s a lot of talk in the newspaper business about how hyper-local is going to save us all, [but] not if you don’t give it any money, it’s not.
A number of nonprofit investigative reporting arms/ groups are starting up; the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, ProPublica, there are a couple others. There will be that kind of enterprise reporting — whether it’s privately funded, or funded by universities. There are a lot of people who have to get over the idea that what they produce is something on paper.

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Rebecca L. Fox

Even while covering the TV and entertainment beat at the Raleigh News & Observer, Maile Carpenter found herself sneaking epicurean features onto the front page. Determined to pursue her passion for food, Carpenter moved to New York to become a magazine writer by day and culinary student by night. After stints as food editor at Time Out New York and senior editor at San Francisco, Carpenter became executive editor at Every Day With Rachael Ray. In January 2008, Carpenter left Rachael Ray to launch Food Network Magazine as editor-in-chief. A test issue hit newsstands in October 2008, just as the economic downturn was gaining steam and causing publications to fold. But the magazine seems to have found a working formula, with the highest direct-mail response in Hearst’s history and a growing tally of ad pages. Since climbing to 400,000 with the June/July official launch issue, the magazine will more than double its rate base in October and just announced it will reach 1 million in January, six months ahead of schedule.

Now that the title is gaining momentum, Carpenter aims to build more awareness for the magazine, capitalizing on the synergy with the network’s TV and online content. On August 2, Food Network will name the newest addition to its on-air team in the finale of The Next Food Network Star. The winner will be featured in the October issue of the magazine and, Carpenter anticipates, will join the other chefs as a fixture in its pages.

Carpenter, who is seven months pregnant (her husband is chef Wylie Dufresne), recently spoke with mediabistro.com about conceptualizing a print iteration of an established TV and online brand, how her culinary training influences the way she runs the magazine, and what it’s like to get in the kitchen with Bobby Flay, Ina Garten and Guy Fieri.

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Name: Maile Carpenter
Position: Editor-in-chief, Food Network Magazine
Resume: Staff writer, the Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, N.C.); staff writer, the Raleigh News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.); writer then editor, FYI (Time Inc.’s in-house magazine); senior editor, San Francisco; food editor, Time Out New York; executive editor, Every Day with Rachael Ray; editor-in-chief, Food Network Magazine
Birthday: August 17, 1973
Hometown: “We moved every few years with the Air Force, so I never had a hometown. I’ve lived in NYC since 1997.”
Education: BA in journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1995); Culinary Arts degree, French Culinary Institute (1999).
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “‘Real Estate.’ I can dream!”
Favorite TV show: CBS Sunday Morning
Guilty pleasure: “Candy corn, year-round.”
Last book read: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

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You’ve had a 14-year long career in journalism — in food journalism in particular — how did you break in?
I didn’t start in food. I started in newspapers, actually, on a straight news [editorial] track. But then I after a couple jobs at newspapers I moved up to New York, and while I was working at Time Inc. I went to culinary school at night. I didn’t think I’d end up cooking in a kitchen — I thought maybe I’ll fall in love with it and become a chef — but really in the back of my mind, I just wanted to specialize and focus my writing career and editing career in one area. After that, I moved to San Francisco, and that’s where I first started doing more serious food journalism.

What made you decide to choose food as your specialty?
Since I was little, I’ve always loved cooking, I’ve loved food magazines. I used to go to the library when I was really little and flip through food magazines and copy recipes to take home and try.

Can you tell me a little more about your career path? You said you started in newspapers…
Everyone always asks me, ‘Well, how did you get this job?’ My original intent was to go into straight newspaper reporting, but the more I wrote, the more I found myself writing feature-style stories, even for the front page. So I eased into the features section, and I became a television and entertainment reporter at the Raleigh News & Observer. It’s funny, even then, I was covering television, but I would always skew toward food. The Food Network was just starting, and I just always took an interest in it. In my extra time, I would always do food stories. I very gradually steered that way. Then I moved up to New York to work at an in-house magazine at Time Inc. — it was called FYI. I really got to see how all the magazines at Time Inc. worked and meet a lot of people, and that’s when I started going to cooking school and deciding I wanted to be in magazines and I wanted to do food. From there, I went to San Francisco and then came back here to work at Time Out, which was a totally different experience because that was very street-level reporting. It was weekly, so the pace was very fast. So I’ve really done the daily reporting, and then weekly at Time Out and then monthly at San Francisco magazine and then — the most specific training for this was at Every Day With Rachael Ray.

“It’s really supposed to be a print version of the network, and I think the popularity of the network proves that this is a good time for it. And obviously, things are going on economically — it’s a natural fit for that, too. It doesn’t feel forced for us to say, ‘This is easy, this is a great value, do this with your family instead of going out.'”

Food Network Magazine launched in October 2008 and you left Every Day With Rachael Ray in January. What was that interim period like?
To Hearst’s credit, the way we launched this magazine was really interesting in that we produced a full-blown prototype of this magazine that we took out to focus groups that [the public never] saw, which is great, because we were able to make all of our mistakes then. Sometimes you’ll see a magazine launch and you’ll notice it’ll change drastically in the first few issues because you get feedback from readers and you work out kinks. We were able to make huge changes because only a few dozen people around the country had seen the magazine. Instead of a focus group where maybe we were showing fake stories on boards with dummy text, this was a case where people were holding something that felt exactly like [the magazine], and they were able to flip through it. We got real reaction from them, like, ‘Well, this doesn’t make sense following this,’ or ‘I don’t like this design,’ and we came back with tons of information. The focus groups were in May, so we really spent the summer fine-tuning everything, changing our creative direction.

Was there anything you thought was going to blow away the focus groups that you found they absolutely weren’t pleased with? Or something you took from their feedback that specifically you think is really working well?
What I thought might have been a weakness going into the project, which is, ‘How on earth are we going to take all these different personalities and find one common voice?’… What the focus group said is, ‘We kind of want all that.’ So I was thinking that the person who likes to watch one show would never watch this other show [which] is completely different, and that wasn’t the case at all. We asked, ‘Okay, just spit out words that describe Food Network’ — and every single one of them said ‘diversity’ — as a plus. Obviously we knew there’s a mix of stars, but what I saw as a problem of trying to consolidate the stars into one voice, they kind of gave us a license to just let all those voices be those voices, in one place, because that’s why they like the Food Network. They expected to get the magazine and see everything from Guy [Fieri] to Ina [Garten] and Sandra Lee and Iron Chef and Ace of Cakes. They’re strong personalities, and they’re really different. So, that was the best takeaway.

What was it like to make the jump from working with one personality specifically, Rachael Ray, to tackling this diverse group of celebrity chefs?
In a way it was good training, because you just become aware of how incredibly busy these chefs are and how respectful you need to be of their time. I was already in the habit of booking things really early and being flexible, but it’s great to have this mix of people because you can really have some fun with the different voices.

Food Network is an established television and online brand, and it would seem like a natural extension to have a magazine. Why now?
I say, ‘What took so long?’ It’s just such a perfect fit right now in terms of the strength of the network and the popularity of the network, and just in terms of the way people cook. It’s really supposed to be a print version of the network, and I think the popularity of the network proves that this is a good time for it. And obviously, things are going on economically — it’s a natural fit for that, too. It doesn’t feel forced for us to say, ‘This is easy, this is a great value, do this with your family instead of going out.’

How do you translate the brand identity of Food Network into a magazine format? How much input do you have in the editorial mix? What’s coming from where?
We work really closely with Food Network. In fact, I’m meeting with them in a few hours. What we decided early on was that we didn’t want to take the show[s] and just turn the magazine into a print version of the show[s]. You see [the stars] live and it’s exciting to see them on television, and we didn’t want to flatten that. From the beginning, we said, ‘We’re not going to have a column based on this show and that show. What we want to do is be flexible enough to go where the network goes.’ So as people leave and come, as they build new stars, we build new stars. But we’re kind of on a similar schedule… We’re able to keep in touch with them about, ‘What’s going to be huge this fall?’ so we can plan the magazine around that. But you’ll notice as you flip through that we haven’t boxed ourselves in in any way. You’re not going to see one show appearing in every issue. It’s meant to be that if Bobby [Flay]’s doing a huge [show] on burgers this summer, great, [the magazine is] in, too.

What was it like to launch in such an established category of magazines? You’ve got some real giants like Gourmet, Saveur and Bon Appetit — what is it about Food Network Magazine that brings something new to the group?
That’s the hardest question I had to answer. I worked alone, just in an office with the door shut, thinking, ‘Oh my god, how’s this going to go?’ I had stacks and stacks of magazines — not just U.S. magazines but European and food magazines from all over the world. I was just tearing them apart, saying, ‘What’s common about all of these, what’s different, and how can we stand out?’ What it really comes down to is this cast of stars. It’s what makes Food Network Food Network. It’s about personality, and the fact that these recipes and ideas are coming from people you know and see all the time. We knew that we could leverage that. What’s interesting about that magazine is that when you see TV, the voices change from hour to hour, and yet we were charged [with] trying to find, ‘Okay, what is Food Network’s voice?’ because it’s all in one place. It’s friendly, it’s accessible, and I think that’s the strength of the magazine, but it really comes down to the personalities.

“I love candy corn and cheap chocolate. I’m not a food snob, and neither are these readers. That’s what Food Network is all about.”

In October 2008, you told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that chefs “can do stories with [Food Network Magazine] that they wouldn’t be able to do on the air.” Can you tell me what you meant by that and give me some examples?
It’s a place for them to give you tips and step-by-steps to keep with you. We have a column called “Try This At Home,” where a star really walks you through step by step. Television is fleeting, and this is a way to have the tips right on your counter. Same with the “Star Kitchens”: You might just happen to have seen this kitchen on their show all the time and wonder about the little secrets in there. Ina [Garten], for instance, built this amazing new studio barn right next door to her house in East Hampton. You’ve seen it on the air, but this is a nice way to really get into how she organizes her kitchen.

What have you learned from your experience in culinary school and your chef training that informs the way you run a magazine?
Going [to culinary school] originally gave me confidence in my knowledge about food, but it comes in handy all the time. [We’re] a small staff and I always say that everyone does everything, and it really is true. Everyone pitches in whenever they can, and every once in a while, I run into the studio and slice vegetables for a shoot. And I don’t mean to imply we do that all the time, but… there was a piece of sausage or something, but it needed a clean slice — it’s just little moments like that you feel confident in your knife skills, going in to cut the sausage.

How does it help you identify what will and won’t work as content for the magazine?
I’m sort of a funny mix, because I don’t have necessarily high-end taste. I like a very wide range of food. So while cooking school and my life with a chef and all that… I love that world and I eat in that world often, but I also kind of cook and eat in a simple way, too. I love McDonald’s French fries, and I love candy corn and cheap chocolate. I’m not a food snob, and neither are these readers. That’s what Food Network is all about. It’s about loving food without being a snob about food.

Speaking of your tastes, what’s your favorite dish to cook with your own celebrity chef husband, Wylie Dufresne?
We don’t cook together! (Laughs)

Do you have cook-offs? Is it like a Battle Royale?
No, no, no no. This is a good example of our tastes: When we do eat together and cook together at home, it’s super simple. We made meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and I made the meatloaf and he made the mashed potatoes.

You don’t collaborate on a dish?
No. (Laughs) That keeps the marriage healthy. But honestly, he doesn’t cook when he’s home, either, because he cooks all the time.

Do you have a favorite local haunt?
Well, he will never say it, so I shouldn’t either. He’s like, ‘If I say it, everyone will go!’

I can respect that.
We have a Sunday brunch standard that he will never reveal.

So, you touched on this a little bit before, but given the many ways that Americans are cutting back on spending, how do you incorporate those adjustments and translate it into the magazine, keeping it fun and light and compelling?
That almost wasn’t a problem because it fits so naturally with the brand already. So whereas I think if you were a different type of magazine, you’d have to work hard to make it fit naturally with your identity — that wasn’t the case here. Food Network always thinks about things like value and ease, and it’s just such a natural fit. We have cheap eats, we did weeknight meals for $3 or less in [the August/September 2009] issue. That doesn’t feel like a forced concept.

How do you motivate your staff amid this forecasting of the demise of print?
Wow, jeez! What demise of print?! I am a believer in print. I worked very briefly online, and I just had to get back to print because I really believe in it and the ability to hold something in your hands. Especially something like this, that you’re used to seeing on television, to be able to put it in your hand and feel it and touch it and have it on the counter. I love that. The staff is small. Honestly, what I think keeps everyone motivated is just that: We’re small enough so everyone has their hands in everything. When an issue comes out, unlike a huge staff where you might not have ever seen one of the stories in the magazine, chances are, if you’re on the staff, you had something to do with it. You either designed part of it, or you were on the shoot, or you wrote the headline — that’s how we operate, so I think everyone feels really vested in the final product.

What’s your take on the overall state of the media industry?
There’s more information out there than ever, and your access to information is instant and can be completely overwhelming. In the very beginning of this project, a lot of people said, ‘Well, you can go get recipes online.’ And I said, ‘Well yes, but if you type in ‘chicken parmesan’ — and we can find out exactly how many hits you’ll get, but my guess is upwards of a million hits — for chicken parmesan… To me, that amount of information and the speed at which it’s coming at you is stressful and overwhelming, and I need someone to curate the information and hand it to me, and just tell me what I need to know. And I see [Food Network Magazine] in the food world as that. Like, ‘Here’s a month’s worth.’ We’ve done the work for you, we’ve thought through what you need, it’s cleaned up, it’s photographed, and it’s in your hands. And I see that as a strength and not a weakness, in terms of how much is out there right now.

The magazine is more than doubling its circulation rate base with the October 2009 issue. Are there any particular goals or targets that you guys are looking toward?

That’s a big question. Awareness is one thing. My goal is for more people to be aware of the magazine and know it’s out there. My real goal is to nail it for the Food Network fan, because they know better than anyone what the network feels like and should feel like in magazine form. I want to continue to look at it from both sides, because you know, you can get involved in a project and suddenly become an insider and forget. So I try to pull myself out a little bit, and I put the network on all the time. Sometimes while I’m cooking or cleaning the house, I watch it like a real person and hear little snippets, and try to come up with, ‘Okay, What would I like to do? What do I want to hear more about?

Back to that point about awareness, I want to talk about the interplay of Food Network Magazine and this season of The Next Food Network Star. I understand that part of the prize is an exclusive feature in the magazine…
In our October issue, we’re featuring the winner, but that’s not meant to be a one-time thing. What’s great about the magazine is now that we’ve been around for a few issues, the stars are suddenly realizing that this is all part of being a Food Network star, and they’re excited about doing stories with us. In the very beginning, we had to say, “Okay, here’s what we’re thinking about doing, and here’s what the story might look like,” but they didn’t have a sense of how they’d look and sound in print. Now they do, so it’s been great. It’s about being part of the Food Network family and having the talent realize that the magazine can just extend them even more. The winner will first appear in the October issue, but assuming this winner becomes — you know, Guy Fieri was a winner on that show, and obviously he’s a huge part of the Food Network. He’s done several stories with us and we have more in the works. So I assume that the same will be true of this year’s winner.

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Blake Gernstetter is mediabistro.com’s editorial assistant.

Alison Adler Matz has been around the magazine block: With two separate stints at Condé Nast — first as an ad salesperson at Self, most recently as publisher of Brides — she’s eked her way up the food chain in multiple magazine categories, at a variety of companies, and over the course of hundreds of sales calls. At Brides for a year this May, she now works in concert with a 15-year veteran of the magazine (editor-in-chief Millie Bratten) at the company where she began more than 23 years ago, strategizing partnerships, positioning the title, and ensuring the waning economy doesn’t take as big a bite out of the advertising market in the bridal category that many in the industry bill as “recession-proof.” While that may not be the case (see: the spate of scaled-down nuptials this year), Matz remains bullish about the spending power of the newly-engaged, and their affinity for Brides‘ “iconic” brand. She recently spoke with mediabistro.com about what it took to climb the ladder on the ad sales side, her greatest professional coups and gaffes, and how previously “small wins” are today’s smashing successes for any magazine salesperson seeking to secure an ad spend.

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Name: Alison Adler Matz
Position: Publisher, Brides magazine
Resume: Started career at McCann Erickson as an assistant media planner and then worked as a media planner. “I was assigned to the L’Oreal account, where I had a lot of exposure to the print media, particularly beauty/fashion magazines.” After two years working on the agency side, jumped over to first ad sales position at Working Woman magazine. Then held various sales and sales management positions at Self, Mirabella, Country Home, US Weekly, House and Garden, Teen Vogue, and Glamour.
Birthdate: February 9, 1961
Hometown: Spring Valley, NY
Education: BS, Public Communications, advertising major, S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, Syracuse University
Marital status: Married
First section of Sunday Times: “Style section (including the wedding announcements, of course!)”
Favorite TV show: Weeds
Last book read: Breaking Dawn (the last of the Twilight series) by Stephenie Meyer
Guilty pleasure: Getting into bed before 9 p.m.

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Describe how you got started working in magazines.
I always loved magazines growing up. As a teenager, [I had] incredible passion for magazines in general, and I knew that I wanted to do something to do with them, but I didn’t know in what capacity. I majored in advertising, and found my first job in the media planning department of McCann-Erickson. And I worked on a heavy print account — L’Oreal, which actually bought a lot of women’s magazines. That was the first interaction, and after doing that for about two years, I totally knew what I wanted to do, which was to jump over to the other side of the desk and sell for a magazine. I used all the contacts I made from being on the agency side and got my first job selling magazines for Working Woman magazine in 1985.

You started at Condé Nast in 1988 at Self. Then you left the company in ’93, you worked at other magazines, becoming associate publisher at Us, until you returned to Condé in that capacity. Why did you initially leave Condé?
There was an opportunity for a bigger job outside the company, so I took that bait, did it, and then ended up kind of jumping around to a few other places. Then, the opportunity came to come back at Condé Nast, in 2000. Once I was back I thought, ‘Why did I ever leave?’ because if you love magazine publishing, this is the place.

Did the company feel different when you returned versus when you left?
It had changed over the years, yes. It had grown dramatically, which changed the culture. But there’s an inherent culture here of quality and passion for magazines. Always working with really incredibly smart, passionate people [is something at Condé] that has stayed true for 20 years.

Do you find a different vibe at Condé’s offices on Third Avenue [home of Brides], versus the company headquarters at Four Times Square?
It’s smaller [on Third Avenue]. In the other building, [nearly] the whole elevator bank is Condé. It’s a little different vibe [on Third]. It’s a little less glitzy.

When you started working in sales, what did you learn on the ground in entry-level positions that still informs your day-to-day work now that you’re a publisher?

Time management: My first publisher at Working Woman used to say (because this was the mid-’80s), “always have a pocket full of dimes,” because when you’re between sales calls and there’s no time to come back to the office, you want to hit a pay phone and start making calls to schedule your next appointments. Now, with technology, you can be extremely time-efficient.
Always being out on the street in front of clients as much as possible was a very basic lesson. Thinking about client’s businesses strategically was another invaluable lesson, and building lifelong relationships with clients.

“In the 20-plus years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a tougher [ad] climate. But, I’m very much of a glass-half-full person, and I see it as an opportunity — there are magazine brands that will always be here, and there will always be advertisers who love and believe in and need print to drive their business.”

Do you still work with clients whom you worked with in your early years in magazines?
Yes. Sometimes the assistant media planner from 20 years ago is running an agency now, or a media department, or is a high-level client. And some of the people who were in mid- or even high-level positions back then are still in important roles.

What was it like working on a weekly schedule at Us, versus the monthly schedule of most magazines where you’ve worked?
Weeklies are actually easier in a way, because you’re just always closing. [At] a monthly, there’s that buildup to closing, and then intensity of the close. And with a monthly — and Brides is bimonthly, so one-sixth of our year is riding on each close — a monthly’s close represents one-twelfth of a year. [At] a weekly, if your current issue isn’t that great, there’s always next week to improve, so it’s actually simpler.

The professional trajectory on the sales side: You start out selling ads, you move on to a director role, and you move on to associate publisher. How do the responsibilities deepen?
Generally, if you start out as an advertising salesperson, you’re given an account list, a territory, a category — whatever it might be — and it’s your job to manage that account list, increase the business and so on. Then, oftentimes the next progression is a director capacity, where it’s really more of a senior-level position — you’re given the plum accounts and the category, and sometimes you’re given other responsibilities on a project manager basis. Then, one of the biggest challenges is jumping from sales into management, where you’re then managing others who are managing an account list — you’re no longer managing a list yourself — which is a whole different skill set. Then there’s kind of entry-level manager roles — an ad manager, an ad director kind of role — then the move to associate publisher, which is where you’re really directing overall strategic direction for the ad sales initiative. [That’s] obviously led by a publisher but, in my roles as associate publisher, it was really manning the day-to-day and keeping the machine moving so that the publisher could be working on the marketing, the brand positioning — all of the other elements of running the business side of the magazine.

What’s your take on the advertising climate out there for magazines?
It’s really challenging. In the 20-plus years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a tougher climate, and it is affecting every sector of business. Not only are budgets really tight, but people are personally challenged, so their own personal finances or their whole mindset makes people tentative about their positions and their jobs. But, I’m very much of a glass-half-full person, and I see it as an opportunity — there are magazine brands that will always be here, and there will always be advertisers who love and believe in and need print to drive their business and to drive their communication goals.

How do to the challenges you mention play out within the bridal market? Is it more or less challenging than the market for general-interest consumer titles?
What we hear from many of our advertisers is that their bridal portion of their business is the bright spot. The jewelers tell us thank goodness they have bridal jewelry to sell. The travel destinations tell us thank goodness for honeymooners, because that is the bright spot. Retailers tell us thank goodness for their registry portion of their business, because that’s again what’s driving some volume right now. Where it affects us is if the jewelers’… fashion jewelry business is soft overall, it affects their budgets in a negative way, so there’s just less money to spend [on advertising]. Same thing with travel, same thing with retail. So, it affects us differently, and again, where it becomes an opportunity for us at Brides is that by investing with us now, they can continue to drive some sales immediately. But there’s just less money to spend.

Would you say that for retailers, advertising in the bridal market gives them a way to remain in front of customers, because people get married regardless of the economy?
Absolutely. People get married regardless, and if you are a jeweler or a retailer or whomever, and you’re selling a bride-to-be something today, not only are you ringing your cash register right now, but you’re also building a future customer. The woman who’s walking into a store to register is potentially going to be coming back in a few years to furnish her house, and buy furniture and bigger-ticket items. Or, the person who’s buying your jewelry today may be back for other items in the future from your brand.

That’s a counterpoint to the fact that as readers of bridal magazines, you’ve got people only for however long they’re in the planning phase of getting married, then you’re courting new readers all over again. How do you position the magazine to handle such frequent reader churn?
In terms of readership, the number of people getting married every year is projected to stay constant, so we have a constant, a natural churn of new prospective people coming into our market as well as going out, so it’s just a matter of finding that girl on the newsstand. She gets her ring, she gets her manicure, she buys Brides magazine. [We’re also] soliciting subscribers through places where we know we can find her, through partnerships, through online outreach, et cetera.

Condé Nast has multiple bridal books: Brides, Elegant Bride, Modern Bride. How do you ensure that brides-to-be buy them all?
There are some alternating schedules, just from a real estate perspective, so sometimes we are alternating on sale/off sale with our sister publication, Modern Bride. But basically, it’s up to the editors-in-chief to have the right cover looks and the right cover lines to grab that reader. I’m thrilled to say Brides is the one that seems to be grabbing the most readers. We are hands-down leading the charge when it comes to newsstand performance. More brides-to-be are buying Brides when they’re going out there to that sea of magazines and making their choices.

To what do you attribute that?
The power of Brides — that sort of trusted, tried and true brand, the authority that we have, that [readers] know they’re going to get the most of what they need from Brides — seems to be showing up in terms of that behavior at the newsstand.

How do you sustain your own interest over time in all things bridal?
I mean I’ve been at the magazine since May [2008], and I’ve been married for over 20 years, so I don’t have friends that are getting married and it hasn’t really been a part of my life. But it’s a really happy subject, and it’s really been fun to see the evolution of how things have changed from back from the day when my friends and I were getting married and what goes on now — how weddings have changed.

Also, being out, talking to advertisers, talking to agencies, people who are getting married, and just the excitement that people who are in the market have — it’s really contagious. No matter where you go, you meet people who want to talk about it. I was in a taxi in another city [with] a female driver. She asked me what I did, I told her and she [asked], “I bought my dress at Priscilla of Boston 35 years ago — are they still in business?” I’m like, “Yes, they are.” People love to talk about it.

You mentioned things have changed in weddings of 20 years ago versus right now. How?

The biggest change is the personalization and individualization. Twenty years ago, I was a relatively young bride. A lot of my friends were getting married at the same time, and our weddings were kind of cookie-cutter. The only thing different was the date, the place and the dress. The invitations all looked the same — very traditional. [Now], people are really using this moment [of getting married] to make it their special day and customize, and use it as another way to express who they are to their family and friends.

“A couple of years ago, you could be raking in new business on a constant basis. Now, you look for measures of success in terms of long-term account building, as well.”

What about the advent of the Internet and online media, and the speed with which people can get lots of specialized information?
The way that you can gather information — you can get ideas from magazines or online — all of that has changed everything in terms of [wedding planning]. I started working at Condé Nast five weeks before my wedding, and pretty much everything was done, but at that point I had four weeks to get the job started, then I was taking off for a couple of weeks. I remember saying to my mother, “Whatever is not done yet, I can’t care. I can’t go meet you to look at flowers. I’ve got to focus on this job, and then I’ll show up [at my wedding].” But if I had access to technology, she could have sent me pictures. But I kind of had to cut off the planning.

Now that we’re talking about the Internet, what’s the thinking on that here at Brides? What are you striving to offer readers online? What’s the strategy?
Brides is such a strong, iconic brand, the communication with the bride-to-be really starts with the [newsstand] title. That’s the trusted authority and the place she’s going to first. There’s an experience that she’s going to get with the magazine that is irreplaceable. Particularly when it comes to fashion and beauty, there’s nothing that replaces the printed page in terms of that experience of luxuriating, fantasizing — you know, the glossy images. We know [our reader] is reliant on the Internet for a lot of her planning. In fact in the current issue we have a cover line, “75 Web Sites We Swear By.” What Millie [Bratten], our editor-in-chief, says is that it is the world wide Web — it is vast, and people need it edited for them.

With Brides.com, it’s there to provide another interface for the bride-to-be, and the experience she gets there is very different than what she gets in the magazine. We might do an article on great hairstyles, but we’ll [say], go to Brides.com to get even more great looks, more dress looks, interactive planning tools — things that can’t work in print. So it is really a very strong inter-relationship between how the two media work together.

Given Brides‘ status in the marketplace, do you find yourself having to say no thank you a lot to prospective partners? And what’s the ratio of those who come to Brides and say, “We want to do something with you,” and those to whom you and your team go out to, saying, “We have an idea …”?
I can’t really speak to a specific ratio of yeas or nays. It’s all about whether we feel that it’s going to be something that’s going to be on brand, that the alliance is right, that Brides the brand will be represented properly. If that’s the case, we’re pretty much open to anything. We have to make sure it doesn’t cannibalize other businesses.

What would be your advice to those starting out in sales within magazines?

Persevere. For someone young starting out in the ad sales business, right now is really challenging. Those of us who have been successful in this business are competitive by nature and like to win. And the measures of winning and of success are a little bit different than they were a couple of years ago. The smallest win is the biggest right now. [My team and I are] celebrating those successes, and having both a short view and a long view — you may not break a new piece of business every day. A couple of years ago, you could be raking in new business on a constant basis. Now, you look for measures of success in terms of long-term account building, as well. It takes a lot of inner strength to muddle through [in sales] right now. At the end of the day, it’s still a really fun business.

What makes it so fun?
You work with creative people. You get to represent a product that is fun and brings joy to people. You are aligning marketers with consumers that can help grow their business. You get to get inside the strategy of so many different kinds of companies and understand their businesses, which is fascinating. If you love to learn, you can learn something every day when you’re selling ad space, because if you’re inquisitive — which I think is a requirement for being a good salesperson — you get to know so much about the inner workings of so many different companies and brands. And it’s a social business, too, which is great.

To what do you attribute your own professional success?

Part of it is having incredible passion. For every magazine I’ve ever worked for, even if they weren’t [my] personal reads, I developed a great passion and respect for the editorial product and truly believed that its readers had a strong relationship [to it], and that could make a difference for marketers. You have to have passion — you have to believe, or else it shows. Aligning myself with really smart people — I would attribute a lot of my success to that, just being a sponge, learning as much as I can [from them] every day.

Specifically, who really had an impact?

I worked very closely with Gina Sanders, who was an amazing mentor. Bill Wackerman, who I currently work with, is another terrific mentor. Larry Burstein is someone who I worked closely with twice in my career, another great person who I learned enormous amounts from.

[Bratten] has this lengthy tenure at Brides of 15 years as editor-in-chief. What was it like for you to come in just last year and work with someone who has such a longstanding relationship with this magazine?
While I was new to Brides — and [Bratten’s] certainly the expert on Brides — I certainly have great knowledge of how Condé Nast works, having been here for so long, and working at Glamour, working at Teen Vogue, House and Garden. I had really an understanding and respect for those iconic brands and the role that the editor-in-chief plays. That gave me insight.

[Bratten’s] the expert — she knows this market better than anybody, and I respect that. I think she respects my abilities as a marketer to figure out how to best navigate this brand to the advertising community, while always staying true to who we are and being respectful of her role as the editor.

Many who work in magazines say editors are increasingly taking on some of the thinking and tasks that traditionally fell to publishers, particularly as times get tougher. Do you ever find that as a publisher you’re called upon to put on more of an editor’s hat?
Not necessarily, but I do think that sometimes a great editorial idea could come from someone from the business side and sometimes a great marketing idea can come from someone on the editorial side. But no, I’m not editing the magazine. Trust me.

What’s the professional accomplishment of which you’re proudest?

Being a part of the launch team of Teen Vogue. That was an unbelievable experience that is up there on the list of history-making accomplishments: What we did in the teen magazine category, taking over a 60-year category leader in three years of existence — it was pretty awesome.

What about your biggest mistake on the job?
Recently I was leaving a message, and I had the phone on speaker, and then we [thought we had] hung up the phone and there were pieces of the conversation that were not meant to be recorded on voicemail. There were two of us in the room, and we were having minor coronaries when that happened.

So how’d you defuse the situation?

We got the voicemail erased.

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Rebecca L. Fox is mediabistro.com’s managing editor.

In advertising, the role of assistant account executive is about as low on the totem pole as you can get. That’s where former Ogilvy & Mather CEO Ken Roman began his career back in 1962, but unlike his 20-something counterparts, Roman was 32 when he started. “I was probably the world’s oldest assistant account executive,” recalls Roman, now retired and focusing on writing. “A couple of lessons come out of this… never take a job for money or title. Never. You take a job that has two things: It’s a great company or a great brand, and it gives you great training.”

Rising to the top of Ogilvy & Mather was never in Roman’s plans. He studied English at Dartmouth, and hoped to become a newspaper man. “The newspapers were going out of business,” he says. “This was in the ’50s.” The best reporting job he could get at the time paid $35 per week, so when he got an offer to write advertising materials for a chemical company at $60 a week, he took it. “I spent 10 years succeeding at dumb jobs,” he says of the roles he held in his 20s. “So I quit my job and started over at the very bottom.” After working his way up the ladder, Roman retired in 1989, exiting as chairman and CEO of the agency. He spoke with mediabistro.com recently about the impact his game-changing boss David Ogilvy had on his professional development, writing Ogilvy’s first-ever biography, and the need to direct the advertising industry away from holding companies during these economically challenging times.

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Name: Mr. Kenneth Roman (Ken)
Position: “Chairman and CEO of Free Range Chicken.”
Birthdate: September 6, 1930
Hometown: Boston, Mass.
Education: Dartmouth, B.A. in English, class of 1952
Resume: International Printing Ink Co., RCA, Allied Chem. Corp.
Marital status: Yes
Favorite TV show: This Week with George Stephanopoulos, 60 Minutes, Masterpiece Theater
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports section
Last book read: The Age of Heretics, by Art Kleiner
Guilty pleasure: Squash, gardening

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You’ve written the first-ever biography of advertising legend David Ogilvy. Were you always a writer or, like Ogilvy, did you pick up the skill some other way?

I was always a writer. That is, I was a newspaper writer. I wrote for my high school paper, I was the editor of the daily newspaper at Dartmouth — six day a week paper, pretty big deal. At the time I was editor-in-chief of this thing, the head of Young & Rubicam… sent his personnel director to see me. He said, “If you ever want to go into advertising, let me know and I’ll make it happen for you at Y&R.” I said, “Well, thank you very much, ah, but I’m not sure what I want to do with my life. I think I want to be a newspaper man. But there’s one thing I’m certain I don’t wanna do, and that’s go into advertising.” So much for career planning. I think of myself as a journalist, not a creative writer; so writing a book comes fairly natural to me.

You spent 26 years working with legendary ad mogul David Ogilvy, and later took over his agency, Ogilvy & Mather (pronounced MAY-ther). What are the most important things Ogilvy taught you?

The most important thing he taught me was not about advertising. He did some great ads, which were at the time [a] real breakthrough in print advertising. What he taught me about was leadership. That was the real message. Some people believe that the best ad he ever wrote was not the Hathaway shirt; or Schweppes; or Rolls Royce: It was a house advertisement called, “How to Run an Advertising Agency.” Ten years after that ad ran, people were requesting reprints. And it laid out the principles of, ‘How do you run a great services organization?’ He was an instinctive business leader. He didn’t go to any business schools; he didn’t use mission and values statements the way corporate America does. He had memorable ways to inculcate principles which really, more than any other single things, involved people. How do you take care of people? A quick example: When Shelly Lazarus took over the agency, they had lost a piece of the American Express account, which was our largest account in the world. So David called her up and said, “How are you?” and she said, “Well it’s tough, we lost a piece of business, and here’s what we’re going to do to fix the situation.” He said, “No no, I didn’t ask that. Clients come and go, there’s nothing you can do about that. Are you okay? Because if you’re okay, the organization is okay.” With clients, it was about business: He became friends with them, he charmed them. He insisted his employees use their products.

“[Ogilvy’s] central concept for the clients was, ‘We sell. Or else.’ If we don’t sell, the client’s not going to be healthy, and we’re not going to be healthy.”

“360 Degree Brand Stewardship” is the modus operandi at Ogilvy & Mather, essentially meaning the agency will use all the tools at its disposal to foster relationships between consumers and the brand. How did you arrive at this principle originally? Also, since many agencies observe it, how should they balance the clients’ needs during these economically difficult times when an agency may need to conserve resources in order to survive?

That’s not a line he wrote, and probably wouldn’t have written, but the heart of it is right. He was the “Apostle of the Brand Image”; in 1955 he brought the whole concepts of brands into the business. He didn’t write it, he took it out of an academic journal. Every ad is part of the investment in the brand. People later came and said, “360 degree means it uses all media, brand stewardship means the agency has to take care of the brand.” His central concept for the clients was, “We sell. Or else.” If we don’t sell, the client’s not going to be healthy, and we’re not going to be healthy. And that came out of his days selling stoves door-to-door in Scotland, and in studying the great direct mail writers — John Caples, copywriter Claude Hopkins.

Ogilvy’s longest standing clients are Nestle (since 1956), Unilever (since 1954), and American Express (since 1962). What do you think is responsible for the longevity of these relationships, since few clients stayed with an agency for more than a year prior to O&M?

It’s a misconception in the business that accounts jump around from year to year. The fact is that the advertising business is different than any other in one respect. It’s the only business that runs its trade paper news in the daily newspapers. There’s an advertising column every day in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times. There’s no accountants column, lawyers or bankers either. People like to read about advertising, and so it’s often filled with non-news — Rogers Carpet Company in New Jersey changed its account. Well, have you ever seen a story in the newspaper about McKinsey winning or losing an account? Never, ever. So you have this impression of all these accounts moving around and in fact, most of the major agencies have had their clients a long time. From time to time you do lose them. You don’t lose them because the creative gets bad — you lose them because the relationship gets broken down. When you win new business, it’s the total opposite. “We have some ideas that will build your business.” That’s central. You win business on creative, and you lose it on relationships.

“Today the business is much more complex — there are so many media. At the same time, clients are squeezing the agency because they’re under pressure. So the agencies are getting less money to do more work, and the luxury, if you will, to make sure an ad is perfect isn’t there. “

“Big ideas” are central to Ogilvy’s thinking on the ad industry. How would you define them, and do they occupy the same role in the agency’s business these days?

The most important thing about a big idea beyond the fact that it is successful in building business over a period of time is that it lasts a long time. Ogilvy says a big idea has to last 20 years or more before you’re going to consider it a really big idea. Somebody who has a great commercial or a print campaign that lasts a year or two and earns money, that’s a good idea. And you’ll take it every time. But a big idea is, well, Dove. It’s what, 40 years, 50 years old now. That’s an incredible length of time — to have an idea that’s so big that you can add line extensions [and] new products all under the umbrella of Dove. So it’s not a limiting idea.

All because Dove contains 25 percent lotion?

That’s right, one-quarter cleansing cream. Doesn’t dry your skin the way soap does.

Are there any big ideas today?

You know I’ve thought about that. I’ve tried to come up with them. It’s very hard unless you know the business. But let me show you the problem with the absence of big ideas — and that’s a real issue. You have an example right straight staring you in the nose: It’s called Detroit; there are no big ideas in Detroit advertising today. You look at the commercials, you look at the print ads and they’re talking about engineering and prices and there’s no identity, as opposed to the introduction of Volkswagen in this country, by the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency [now known as DDB]. God, that was an idea. Volvo, which stood for safety for years, that was an idea. The Rolls Royce and its engineering. Mercedes. You always saw a Mercedes on a test track, doing impossible things on the open road. You never saw Mercedes on a driveway; that was Cadillac. So those were ideas, “engineered like no other car in the world.” You look at Detroit advertising and I challenge you to find me a campaign which has an idea; furthermore, the cars don’t look like big ideas.

In the book, you mention how Ogilvy had exceptionally high standards, due in part to his parents’ Scottish upbringing and his time as a sous chef in a premier restaurant in France. To what extent is advertising still a standards-driven industry? Should it be? Why or why not?

There used to be a saying that you could write a media plan on the back of an envelope. It was that simple. Today the business is much more complex — there are so many media. At the same time, clients are squeezing the agency because they’re under pressure. So the agencies are getting less money to do more work, and the luxury, if you will, to make sure an ad is perfect isn’t there.

Advertising is an industry that often favors youthful inspiration over the wisdom that comes with age and experience. In what ways was this notion true during your tenure at O&M?
Age is a state of mind. Advertising has always been a business of young people, historically, all the way back. There’s something about people coming in fresh. But there are a lot of very talented writers and art directors who go on well into their senior years, still doing great work. I think [Ogilvy] was going for the energy. It was not the age. It was the mental age, and the phrase he would use, “We’re looking for people with fire in their bellies.” I mean, think about that, “fire in their bellies.” Well, a 22-year-old might have fire in his belly, but finding a 52-year-old with fire in his belly is going to be harder. [Ogilvy] wanted young people, in their attitudes.

What did you do to keep the agency focused on creativity?
I put two creative people on the board. And David said, “Well, what are you doing? What are those guys on the board for, they don’t know how to read a financial statement!” I said, “Well, I don’t know David, but it was supposed to be a creative agency.” I just felt better with them here. They made enormous contributions. One of them came to a meeting, Hal Riney. Very talented guy [from] San Francisco — a curmudgeon, a contrarian, strange guy, enormously talented. And he came to the first couple of meetings, then he didn’t come to the next meeting. He sent a video tape of these two little puppets, and these two little puppets are visiting this thing called Ogilvy & Mather and they kept on talking about cash flows and margins and they said, “This must be a bank.” Well, we looked at that, and he said, “You know, he’s right.” So we changed our board meetings, literally changed the agenda. The first thing we did… was look at the ads. Why isn’t it better? Then we discussed the other things. That was a way that really helped us become much more creative.

Ogilvy & Mather has had its share of memorable campaigns. Which spots or campaigns do you consider major accomplishments of your career, and why?

American Express (“Don’t leave home without it”) has to be one of the great case histories. There’s a message here. Advertising agencies don’t take their ideas and go to clients and shove them down their throats to sell them. Agencies react to clients who give them big questions. The best advertising we’ve done is because a client asked us a big question or gave us a big challenge. When Lou Gerstner showed up with American Express as our client, he was told that the American Express card was kind of a mature business and that it wasn’t going to grow. He was told that the travelers cheque business was a vestigial business that was dying, and the travel business, forget it. When he [took his business out of O&M] after 10 years, that business was growing 25 to 26 percent a year. He had added new products, new promotions, but he also got us to create campaigns for each of these and he gave us the funds to invest in building a worldwide business. In a few years, American Express was our largest client in the world, the most profitable client, our best creative showcase, our best way of recruiting attractive people. But it was a client who saw beyond the numbers to the big idea.

How did you get your start at Ogilvy & Mather? What was your exact role, and how did you progress to assume larger responsibilities?

I had this offer at Young & Rubicam, and I turned it down. At that time, the newspapers were going out of business. Have you ever heard that before? This was in the ’50s. The newspapers were merging, and the best job I got offered was $35 dollars a week. And somebody offered me a job for a medium-sized chemical company for $60 a week writing their employee and customer magazines. I moved to an RCA distributor in Philadelphia. Ugh. I came back and worked for a big chemical company, I was the manager of corporate advertising. I spent 10 years succeeding at dumb jobs. At the age of 32, I said, “I’m on the fringe of the advertising business,” — corporate, industrial. So I quit my job and started over at the very bottom as an assistant account executive at the only agency in Manhattan that would hire me which was [then called] Ogilvy Benson & Mather. I was probably the world’s oldest assistant account executive. And a couple of lessons come out of this. The first is never take a job for money or title. Never. You take a job that has two things: It’s a great company or a great brand, and it gives you great training. All of these jobs I had were for companies nobody had ever heard of, and I knew more than the people there — I was teaching them out of college. Nobody was teaching me. The other thing that happened, there were these people younger than me with bigger jobs, and that can make a person go crazy. So I didn’t look left or right, I made a list of the 10 things I wanted to accomplish that year that would make a difference either in my own personal development or in my contributions to the agency, the client. And I worked at them all year, and at the end of the year I’d give myself a grade — I never gave myself better than 70 percent. It enabled me to focus on what I could do to accomplish something. I did that for almost my entire career.

What did you enjoy most/least about leading O&M?

I guess winning a new piece of business is a great thrill. It shows you’re a winner; people like working for a winner. You want to win new business in competition. It’s very simple. What do you enjoy the least? Losing clients, or losing key people. Those are the things that just ripped me apart.

Would you take it personally?

Yeah, yeah I did. Which is why you want to pay attention to good people.

Today’s economy is hurting many within the media world, including the ad industry. What advice would you give concerned Ogilvy employees if you were still leading them?

I’d probably say, we’ve been through this before, it doesn’t last forever. We’re going to try not to cut people too hard. The thing you try is to keep your costs down so you can hold people. In an ad agency business, there are only two major costs. One is people, one is rent. I moved Ogilvy from Fifth Ave. to Eighth Ave., to Hells Kitchen – -the first major building west of Eighth Avenue.

What would you tell Ogilvy & Mather Chairman Shelly Lazarus if she came to you for advice on where to take the company?

Shelly doesn’t need me for advice. She knows how to handle WPP, and knows what David Ogilvy told her.

Why did you pursue a career in advertising, and would you today if you were starting over as a 23-year-old? Why or why not?

Because as I observed it, it appeared to be a business that used my skills: writing, leadership. College paper editors were good at dealing with a creative product and working with peers. You have to be a good leader early. Yes, I would do it again. It was a fun, exciting field — and it still is.

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Matt Van Hoven is editor of AgencySpy.

While Howard Bragman fashions himself an outsider (he often cites growing up fat, Jewish and gay in Flint, Michigan), he has been operating on the inside for a long time — at least when it comes to the peculiar vagaries of entertainment publicity.

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Bragman started out in journalism but turned to PR when it looked like his only option was working for a magazine about guns. He worked for a smaller PR firm in Chicago before joining Burson-Marsteller, which was then in its heyday as the most influential PR firm in the world. He transferred with Burson to Los Angeles, ultimately striking out on his own and founding Bragman Nyman Cafarelli in 1989.

After growing BNC to the largest entertainment PR firm in the world, he sold it in 2000. In 2003, he started anew with Fifteen Minutes, a boutique firm that specializes in not only crisis management but celebrity representation (for Paula Abdul, Ed McMahon and Mischa Barton, among others), media training and brand management.

Bragman also writes a regular column for The Huffington Post and serves as a go-to guy for media outlets looking for an expert’s take on the dish du jour (Sarah Palin, bidding wars for celebrity baby pictures). His upcoming book, Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?, details how anyone can use PR to their own advantage.

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Name: Howard Bragman
Position: Chairman and CEO, Fifteen Minutes Public Relations
Resume: Author; media pundit; adjunct rofessor at the Annenberg School for Communications and The University of Southern California; crisis counselor; publicist; mentor
Birthday: February 24, 1956
Hometown: Flint, Michigan
Education: B.A, The University of Michigan, School of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1978
Marital status: Married (Unless or until the courts or the voters of California try to take it away)
First section of the Sunday Times: Style
Favorite TV show: Unscripted, Project Runway; Scripted, Weeds
Guilty pleasure: Weeds (not the TV show)
Last book read: Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence — and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene M. Pepperbert

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Describe how you originally got into PR.
I was lucky to get into it; I didn’t know what it was when I graduated college, really. I got a job at Rogers Park Publisher in Chicago and this guy put out a magazine called Chicago Elite, and it was society and culture and arts. I’m this young gay guy who’s just graduated college and I’m thinking, “This is a pretty good place.” He basically put out a gun magazine for gun dealers, and his wife wanted to go to a better caliber of parties, so they started this society magazine. [But] they’re closing after a year; they’re losing their shirt. So they said, “Do you want to work at the gun magazine?” And I’m like, “I’m a nice Jewish boy, I’m not working at a gun magazine.” So I said I’m going to try to go into PR — these people pitch me stories and they don’t even read the magazine. It can’t be that hard.

I got a PR job with this small firm in Chicago, it was probably 25 people. Right after I got there, they got the Anheuser-Busch account — the Budweiser account for 10 states, the whole Midwest. There was this senior woman working on [the account] and it didn’t work out, and I’m this kid with less than a year in PR doing the Anheuser Busch account for 10 states. I’m doing events and celebrities and news — it was just like an MBA in PR.

After three years of that, I was at the snowmobile races in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, it was 25 below zero, and I was like, “OK, I get it — next!” I went to work for Burson-Marsteller — at the time it was the biggest firm in the world. I was there in Chicago, and they moved me to LA. I didn’t feel like Burson was well-branded in the LA marketplace, and I was frustrated. I saved up enough money, went in the back of my house, and opened a PR firm. I figured if I didn’t make it in six months, I’d get a job. And it took off. I brought in multiple partners and it became Bragman Nyman Cafarelli.

I sold it in the end of 2000, worked there for a year, and I realized it wasn’t really a good idea for me to be an employee. There’s a lot of things I do in a business that publicly traded companies don’t do. I’m better as an entrepreneur.

What is it about your personality that makes you well-suited to PR?
You know what, I say “15 Minutes” and people think it has to do with Andy Warhol and fame and all that — it’s my attention span. [laughs] No, not really. When I used to do standardized tests as a kid, I would flatline it. I could do well in a lot of different subjects. The thing that I feel I’m an idiot savant about is doing PR; it was the perfect gig for me.

“If you don’t define yourself to the world, somebody else is going to define you — and you’re probably not going to like it as much as if you did it yourself.”

So it’s being well-rounded in a sense?
My mantra, and the essence of the book, is really that we all have images — whether we think we do or not. You don’t have to be Angelina Jolie to have an image. You’ve got a Facebook page, or you’re the president of the PTA, you’re trying to clean up a river or run a dry cleaners; we all have something that we want to get out there. If you don’t define yourself to the world, somebody else is going to define you — and you’re probably not going to like it as much as if you did it yourself.

Did you see that recent study that the MacArthur Foundation did about teenagers and the Internet? It said that one of the skills that kids are learning is to deal with their own public image. And in this millennium, and certainly the first part of this millennium, a public image is a very, very, very big thing. And you can’t just manage a public image, you have to communicate with your fans and buyers, and you have a different responsibility. Just because you don’t want to become Internet savvy and deal with the world that way doesn’t mean you get to. The rest of the world is, and they’re going to pass you by.

How you think your role and public relations’ role has changed since you started, in terms of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet?
The metabolism of the media has gone berserk, meaning the speed at which things happen. You used to have time to take a breath, see what was going on, get the big picture. Now you barely have time to do that — then the video’s on TV. They’re digging this hole for you so quickly. I’ve never seen reputations shattered so quickly in this world. Did you see how stunningly quick the governor of New York went down? A very powerful man — did you see how quickly that happened?

I have a story in the book about Howard Dean, and I talk about what the media did to his presidential campaign. What happened was he was at an event and he was screaming, and they made it look like he was a crazy man. But they were playing the ISO mic. If you played the same sounds you heard as if you were in the room, you couldn’t even hear the man it was so loud in there. It’s like altering a photograph. I felt it was really offensive. Howard’s probably one of the most rational people you’ll ever meet in your whole life, and for them to portray him as something other than that — I thought the media screwed up there. The media can screw up very quickly because it seems to me many media outlets are more interested in speed than they are in accuracy.

I like journalistic standards. I’d rather take a breath and get the story right rather than get it out quickly. This is the way the world is now. I can’t bury my head in the sand. And the Internet has great value because, trust me, there ain’t a lot of print space left, you know? When you’ve got to get publicity for a client, and they’re paying you because they want to get their image out there, you don’t have the same opportunities you did 10 years ago.

“There’s a lot of PR people in this town who seem to be proud that they’re inaccessible. I’m sort of proud of the opposite.”

What have you learned in dealing with the media, in terms of the best approach to meet your goals and also help journalists meet their goals?
Number one is have a sense of humor. I used to represent LA Gear when they were having a spate of bad publicity, before they got into real trouble. A story in Business Week appeared, and it was a bad story, and I’m like, “Oh shit, this is not pretty.” My business was less than a year old, and I thought, “My business is going to go down, and I’m going to be unemployed.” I was telling a friend and he said, “Howard, it’s tennis shoes.” Most of the time, it’s tennis shoes. Sometimes it’s not; sometimes it’s a client who’s dying from a disease, or a client who’s losing a house, or a client who’s been accused of something. I know what’s really serious, and I know what needs to be done.

In terms of dealing with the media, I believe integrity is very important, and I’m pretty proud of my reputation. I’m in the communications business. There’s a lot of PR people in this town who seem to be proud that they’re inaccessible. You can’t talk to them and they don’t return emails, and I’m sort of proud of the opposite. If a journalist approaches me, even if it’s a “Sorry, we’re going to pass on that,” they’ll generally get a communication from me.

You’ve represented a few celebrities in some tough situations, like Isaiah Washington through the homophobic slur flap and Mischa Barton and her DUI. In crisis PR, what is it absolutely essential not to do?
Not to do what I did with Isaiah Washington. [laughs] We had just found out that ABC was not renewing his contract, and I needed to make a statement to the media. And I’m saying right here what I said on the record and what I stand by today. I’m very good friends with the PR people at ABC, but I didn’t appreciate the way that was handled.

We were told he wasn’t getting renewed, and then we were told there was a call coming from People magazine within 15 minutes. It wasn’t even like, “Isaiah, we’re not renewing your contract, let’s come up with a statement.” We weren’t given that opportunity; we had literally 15 minutes. And I wanted to say something about the irony of the situation, and all I could think of was the movie Network: Peter Finch out the window screaming, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it!” And there were so many reasons he shouldn’t have lost his job, okay? And if they wanted to fire the guy, he had offered to quit when everything happened. He said, “I don’t want to be a distraction to the show. I’m happy to leave.” And they wouldn’t do it then, it was just — I felt bad for him.

I think my client is not perfect, but I know in my heart of hearts — I know this man pretty well, we spent a lot of time [together] — he may be a lot of things, but he’s not homophobic. If I truly thought he was homophobic, I wouldn’t have represented him. His mother used to be a cleaning lady for a Jewish family in Houston, and I was at a dinner party at his house, and his gay decorator was there and I’m there, you know — and the next day we had a breakfast meeting and he said, “I told you I know more gay people than you and I speak better Yiddish than you.” And it’s true.

So I made the statement, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it!” Unfortunately, it reinforced the angry black man stereotype — and I played into it, and it worked against me. Ultimately, I think Isaiah came out pretty well, and he got work right after… [The experience] could have been an episode of a TV series on PR.

“We used to talk about crisis control. Now it’s crisis management. You can’t control the blogosphere and the Internet. I could maybe corral it.”

There is sometimes tension between journalists and PR people. In your experience how does that play out? What should PR people do to avoid or thwart that?
Listen, I still come from a time where PR people need media people. I’m not a bully PR person, and I think those times are gone. I think there was a few years when if you were a big celebrity publicist you could use the bully pulpit to rule. You could say, “If you write something bad about my clients…” Well, guess what?

We used to talk about crisis control. Now it’s crisis management. You can’t control the blogosphere and the Internet. I could maybe corral it. I could maybe get it to flow into the ocean like lava to a place where it’s not going to do too much damage. But I can’t stop it. There’s ways to bury it once it’s out there. There’s tricks of the trade, but it’s a different world.

I’ve never looked at it as a contentious relationship. Some of my dearest friends are journalists. I think we’re all communicators. All I’ve got to do is figure out what you’re trying to do and make your life easy. One of my friends calls me “Quotetron” — “I saw you in The New York Times today, Quotetron.” I think I’m like a character out of Network because I speak in sound bites. I think I just watched a little bit too much TV as a kid and that’s what happened. But I have a face for radio, that’s the problem. I’ve enjoyed the concept of putting a face on PR and telling people how it works.

Your book aims to teach readers how they can make public relations work for them in their own lives.
Whether they want to do it for their own career, if they have a skill or something they want to promote — it’s for people who want to go to the next level. PR no longer stands for public relations. It stands for perception and reality. And the job of the PR person is always, always, always to manage the relationship between perception and reality. The concept is like the scales of justice, and you’ve got perception on one side and reality on the other — you want them in balance. Because if perception exceeds reality, we call that hype — or Dr. Phil. And that means the wind’s going to come under your balloon and the balloon’s going to pop. As I always say, you want a career made in a crock pot, not a microwave.

If your reality exceeds your perception — that’s what most people come to me and say, “I’m a great doctor and nobody knows it.” Or “I have a business and my competitor keeps getting quoted. Why?” When they’re not in stasis, you get cognitive dissonance. That little feeling in the pit of your stomach that things don’t always match up the way they’re supposed to. It’s important to understand because if you’re working on someone’s image, you have to start with the perception of where it’s at, even if it’s not accurate. If I’ve got a client that’s got a perception challenge or they want to change the perception or modify it, I’ve got to start where we’re starting. I’ve got a baseline I have to work from.

Along with the speed of the media, that’s one of the most important things that’s out there. People have got to use the Internet, they’ve got to read a lot of things. We all tend to get [lost] in our little wormy worlds. So if you’re a Democrat, you read The New York Times and you go to the Daily Kos and you read The Huffington Post, but you don’t go to Drudge Report, you don’t go to the right-wing places. And it’s silly. Because I don’t [care] how right- or left-wing you are, you might as well read what the enemy’s saying about you.

I think the gay community just lost Prop 8 because they ran a horrible campaign. I don’t want to say we deserved to lose because we don’t deserve to lose our civil rights, but we could have won if we’d run a smarter campaign.

What would you have done differently if you were running it?
It’s been well-documented and I’m no expert, but it was a top-down campaign, meaning, “Donate money and we’ll make all the decisions and basically buy advertising,” as opposed to a bottom-up campaign, which is what Obama ran. [A bottom-up campaign] is one that motivates people, getting them to knock on doors and make phone calls. The gay community didn’t do a good job. They did a good job of fundraising.

We had mediocre advertising. We were always on the defensive, and we were too busy being politically correct to protect our civil rights in the right way. I’ve been involved in the gay and lesbian issue in the media for 20-something years. My first client sued the Naval Academy because he was gay. It was pro-bono and the first client I took when I started my first company, and I’ve always been involved. I just know this is another speed bump.

What I do think Prop 8 did was, I think there’s a whole group of people, probably under 35, who didn’t see the worst of the AIDS ravages and don’t remember a time when gays were invisible or all depictions of gays were homophobic. Well, I do. And all of the sudden they said, “The world’s not perfect, and there’s homophobes out there.” When I went to some of the marches, I saw a lot of the young people, and I thought that was really cool.

But it’s just bullshit. I’ve paid many millions of taxes to the government. I’m happy to take less civil rights, just tax me less. [laughs]

You do a lot of different PR, and part of your portfolio is helping well-known people come out, like WNBA player Sheryl Swoopes and Bewitched‘s Dick Sergeant. What are the particular PR challenges that you face when you take on these?
In this day and age, coming out is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for Patrick Swayze coming out that he has cancer, Arthur Ashe coming out with the fact that he has AIDS, or somebody coming out that they got married or divorced, or a life-changing situation. It’s just a metaphor for getting ahead of the information curve, but putting it out there in a controlled way before it gets out there in an uncontrolled way. What’s most interesting about coming out is it’s non-formulaic, I promise you, because every situation’s different. One’s got a book to sell, one’s got a message to get out, one’s doing it for an endorsement, one’s a diva, you know — they[‘ve] all got different reasons.

I’ve always made sure that I do mainstream and gay media when I do it. There’s people who come out in the mainstream media and have not given the gay media their due, and I think that’s sort of wrong. I’ve done it different ways. When [former NBA player] John Amaechi came out two years ago, we did a week of interviews and then [former NBA player] Tim Hardaway made his homophobic comment, and we went nuclear with this thing. It was huge — for a guy who was a journeyman basketball player but wasn’t a superstar by any stretch, and he’ll be the first to admit it. With Rosie Jones, the golfer, we did it in an op-ed piece.

After being in the business for over 25 years, is there anything that still shocks you?
Just humanity. Humanity is pretty interesting. I’m at a point where I can see irony in a lot of things. If you grow up fat, Jewish and gay in Flint, Michigan, and were born when I was born, and you don’t see irony in the world, you’re going to have a lot of problems, okay? I can find the humor in things, but truly shocked? My grandmother had a saying for it: We do things to ourselves that our worst enemies wouldn’t do. I think there’s a lot of truth to that; usually our worst enemy is ourselves. There’s been phone calls that have truly shocked — I will admit it, and I’m not going to say which ones, but I admit it.

So it’s still possible.
It’s still possible. I’m not that hardened. I’m still a kid from the Midwest — albeit a twisted one.

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Julie Haire is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.