With President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration just six days away, Jake Tapper’s new role as ABC News’ White House correspondent is sure to be a high-profile one. But as he transitions to this major position at the network in 2009, he leaves a beat in which he was just as busy: spending 2008 on the campaign trail. His path to the White House may not have been the most traditional (he’s hosted shows on Sundance Channel, VH1 and moderated a WWE debate), but his political obsession certainly helps with the job. His writing at the Political Punch, his highly-active, well-read blog, may make him one of the most accessible White House correspondents to those that follow political happenings as much as he does.

Three hours before we talked to Tapper last Thursday, Jan. 8, he was on the air on ABC reporting from an Obama news conference. A few hours after the interview, he was on ABC World News with a report. In between what were just a couple of the countless appearances he has had on the air recently and is sure to have in the future, Tapper talked about life on the campaign trail, media bias and how a Seinfeld episode can teach a young journalist about watching what you write.

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Name: Jake Tapper
Position: ABC News’ senior White House correspondent
Resume: Senior writer at Washington City Paper, Washington correspondent for Salon.com, host of CNN’s Take Five, correspondent for VH1, freelance writer for GQ, NPR, and the Weekly Standard, freelance cartoonist for Roll Call and the Los Angeles Times, host on Sundance Channel. Hired as correspondent by ABC News in 2003, named senior national/political correspondent in 2005, named senior White House correspondent in November 2008.
Birthdate: March 12, 1969
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Education: Graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1991 with a degree in history modified by art.
Marital status: Married to Jennifer Tapper with one daughter, Alice Paul Tapper. Two cats, Pink and Walter.
First section of the Sunday Times: Section A
Favorite television shows: Mad Men, Lost
Last book read: Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett
Guilty pleasure: Facebook.

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You’re now ABC’s senior White House correspondent, covering a historic person occupying the White House. What are your feelings about the new job?

The response I get from a lot of college classmates is ‘what a cool opportunity, you’ll get to see all of this from the front row,’ and that’s true. But I also think that everything is so precarious right now in terms of war and peace and the economy that there’s an extra burden on the White House press corps to be especially vigilant and professional. It’s daunting. I’m honored to have been given this job by ABC News, to be entrusted with this, but it’s also intimidating.

You’ve taken an unusual path to the White House correspondent role and in the world of broadcast journalism. You started as co-host of Take 5 on CNN, an issues show aimed at a younger audience, were a correspondent on VH1 news specials in 2002, and host of The Sundance Channel’s 24 Frame News in 2003. You hosted a WWE debate. What do take from all these different positions you’ve had, and what do you draw from as you start your new role?

It wasn’t a traditional path because I was relatively late in coming to journalism. I didn’t start full-time as a journalist until I was in my late 20s, as opposed to right out of college. I always loved politics, but the openings for jobs in broadcast came not just about politics but also about pop culture. But I was always at least writing freelance stories about politics, even when I was doing a lot of the entertainment stuff. A lot of that work was about developing broadcasting skills, or trying to develop them. There’s no doubt that part of that is just the process of storytelling as well as how to speak on camera, how to track, how to interview somebody. But as a side note, I will say that the special I did for VH1 on Lynyrd Skynyrd definitely won me some Republican sources.

“Everything is so precarious right now in terms of war, peace and the economy that there’s an extra burden on the White House press corps to be especially vigilant and professional.”

Let’s talk about the campaign trail. You described covering the election this year like “[your] SportsCenter”, in that this was the pinnacle for someone who’s interested in politics, to be on the campaign trail during this election.

It’s grueling in a lot of ways, the schedule and the way that the experience just beats you up physically, in terms of sleep deprivation and time away from your family. On a professional level, there’s nothing like it because you’re not just sitting in a room watching cable and getting your wisdom from what you read in the paper or see on TV. You’re actually there with voters and in cities and rural areas across the country. It beats you up, but it’s worth it.

You talk about the long hours. According to the Tyndall Report, you went from the No. 19 most-used reporter in 2006, to No. 1 in 2007 and No. 2 in 2008. That’s a lot of airtime, but also a lot of time spent reporting it all out. How do you handle the long hours and the massive workload?

The tough part about it is being away from my family, my wife and daughter. In terms of professional curiosity, I probably would be spending almost as much time even if I were a doctor or an account executive or something else. I probably would be spending as much time trying to find out stuff, trying to report things, either by reading other publications or making phone calls, just because I’m really interested in news and current events. It’s just one of these things that’s in my DNA. I love to find out what’s going on. So obviously I’m channeling the energies in a slightly different way, but I’m the kind of person that reads the newspaper on vacation.

“Nobody likes to be lied to, but it’s just part of the process. It would be like a designer complaining that all the models are anorexic. It’s unfortunate, but this is just how it is.”

Can you turn off the Blackberry?

I can turn off the Blackberry, but I can’t turn off wanting to know what’s going on.

World News EP Jon Banner said “no one is more obsessed with politics” than you. And when thinking about how much you love politics and want to know about it, you must be dealt a lot of spin, especially in your new job. So how do you negotiate that? Does it frustrate you as a journalist, what you have to cut through?
Nobody likes to be lied to, but it’s kind of just part of the process. I guess it would be like a designer complaining that all the models are anorexic. It’s unfortunate, but this is just how it is.

But how do you do that, as a news consumer, but also as part of the group putting the news out there? What kind of responsibility do you think you have being someone who is such a fan of news, from the outside looking in?
It’s an incredible responsibility and when you get something wrong or it’s not as accurate as you wish it had been, for any number or reasons including spin, it’s a horrible feeling. So I don’t think there’s any reporter worth anything who doesn’t try their best to get it right as often as they can, to shoot for 100 percent. But it’s an awesome responsibility, of course.

During the ’08 campaign, the media was sometimes accused of favoring Barack Obama. Do you think it was a fair accusation?
I don’t think it’s fair to say ‘The Media was in favor of Barack Obama,’ the media writ large, capital T, capital M. I think there were a lot of people in the press who were tougher on Hillary Clinton and tougher on John McCain than they were on President-elect Obama. I can’t understand anybody who would disagree with that. It’s not to say that everyone in the media was [biased] or that even that most members of the media were. But I think that the coverage in general was not balanced because there were some people and organizations that were so caught up in the story of Obama — or the narrative or his policies or the fact that he sold magazines or got eyeballs to the TV. Whatever the reason, there were enough people that the playing field was not even. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t have won anyway.

Do you think it’ll change once Obama is in office?
He thinks it will change. He said to John Harwood that he thought the media would change. It’s different selling a product than it is delivering a product. Once you’ve made the sale, that product better work. I think there’s a certain patience that the American people will have just because everything’s so messed up right now. He will be held to a higher standard as a President by the press and the public than he was as a candidate, just because it’s much more consequential making a promise when you actually have responsibility. Anybody can say ‘I’m going to do so-and-so’ when they don’t have the job yet.

A lot of TV news personalities now have a blog, but you’ve really been blogging on the Political Punch for a longer time and more frequently than pretty much anyone else in the field. What draws you to the medium?
I am at heart a print reporter, and I think that that’s where it comes from. A lot of the stuff I blog is either stuff I’m reporting anyway for ABC News internally and figure I might as well put it up on the blog. Or it’s stuff I’m just interested in, or I read about it, or I hear about it, and I’m just curious. In trying to satisfy that curiosity, I end up writing something, and I put it on the blog. So it’s time-consuming, but a lot of it I would be doing anyway.

It does seem like the tone of the blog has changed a little bit over the years, maybe gotten a little more serious. Do you agree with that?
The tone has definitely changed, but so has my role at ABC News and so, more importantly, has the country. I have to say, a lot of it was experimental — I used to do things that didn’t seem to work or didn’t seem to attract that many readers. I used to have a lot more pop culture on it. But it’s tough when — especially in the last year and a half — when you’re covering a very important election and very consequential issues and an economy that’s tanking, to work up the will to then do a blog post about whether I side with Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie. It’s also that there are big important things going on, and I’ve been entrusted with an important job at ABC News. While sometimes the blog is still lighthearted, keeping that stuff to a minimum is probably appropriate given the times.

Yeah, it seems there are fewer poems and cartoons.
I actually have a stack of cartoons that I did during vacation that I just haven’t scanned, so that I will change. The haikus — it’s kind of like that muscle’s out of shape. I don’t philosophically have a problem with it, I just haven’t thought about it much lately.

Your writing at Salon was more opinionated in tone. Was it an adjustment to move to your quote-unquote unbiased role at ABC?
No, because I’m not a particularly dogmatic person. I have not found it difficult. In fact, I’ve found it much easier — even when I was at Salon, but certainly much more so since, — to try to be as politically agnostic as possible. It’s much more interesting anyway if you don’t think you know the answer to what is right or wrong in politics. And that’s not to say there are not rights and wrongs, but just that they are not dictated by any one particular point of view. So no, actually it suits me much better. I never felt completely comfortable; I never fit in perfectly at Salon, as much as I loved writing for Salon. I never fit in perfectly because I didn’t have an established point of view, and I didn’t view the world as automatically ‘so-and-so should be elected and such-and-such a view is wrong.’

Talking about views, you were asked in August about some negative comments you had written about George Stephanopoulos, who is now your colleague, and you said you wouldn’t sign your name to it now. What do you think the lesson is for journalists?
That’s a great question, as much as I hate talking about this because George is a friend and somebody whom I respect a great deal. The lesson is, for any young journalist, that generally speaking, things don’t vanish after you write them, and you’re not going to be 28 forever. It’s not a particularly unique story — I think most journalists have something they’ve written they wish they could go back and erase. But especially those people who start off in the quote-unquote alternative media might feel that way. Seinfeld had this great routine about people who get drunk and go out and live all night and they think that “Sunday Jerry” is a different person. Like, ‘Oh, Sunday Jerry will have to deal with this hangover or get up at seven in the morning,’ as if it’s an entirely other entity. And in a broader way, younger journalists just have to remember that eventually they’ll become Sunday Jerry.

And the “Saturday Night Jerry” still exists.
Right. A lesson that at least one former president would have done well to absorb.

Unlike most journalists, your career actually started in publicity. What does that experience bring to your work as a journalist?
I was really bad at that job, so I don’t know that there was any great lesson. I don’t know if I learned anything from that job. I wasn’t particularly good at spinning. So I think the only thing I really learned from it personally was I wasn’t very good at it.

It almost seems like the opposite of journalism.
It is the opposite of journalism, and I wasn’t good at it.

Another area you’ve gotten into is the publishing world. You’ve written books on subjects ranging from Jesse Ventura to the 2000 presidential election. Are there any projects on the horizon, or anything under consideration?
Not right now. All my energy that isn’t devoted toward this job is devoted toward my family. It’s a lot easier to write a book if you don’t have a wife and baby. Eventually I’d like to write another one. There are about 3,000 Barack Obama books that are coming out right now, and we’ll have to see. The recount was an amazing thing, and I just happened to be there covering it. It was just a rare opportunity. It’s better to wait for an opportunity like that, where I’m in the right place at the right time, and not just write a book because somebody offered me money and I could sell a few.

Alright, last thing. In your first newspaper job, your editor was New York Times media guru David Carr. Can you close us out with a good Carr story from that era?
If you’ve ever met David Carr you know he’s not just a columnist and reporter, he is a force of nature. Even calling him a force of nature does a disservice to him, because there are some very minor hurricanes that are forces of nature and Carr is certainly beyond that. You become enveloped in his dialogue, his world view, his enthusiasm for journalism. I’d never met anyone like him. It was our first meeting after I had written a few stories for the Washington City Paper on a freelance basis, he basically convinced me to do what I wanted to do but hadn’t had the guts to do — to take a substantial pay cut and become a journalist. And then for that year-plus I worked for him, he was a one man J-school. I often tell young people seeking to break into the business, ‘Before you go to journalism school, I recommend you start at a small local newspaper.’ That probably overestimates editors in general out there, but I was really lucky that I had this guy who was in the process of becoming a legend as my first editor. I remember the triumphs we shared and I remember the times he yelled at me. I remember what he yelled at me about. It’s all there. And I’m a lucky guy that I fell into his world when I did, because he wasn’t really at City Paper all that long, and neither was I. But I invited him to my wedding. He’s a very important figure in my life.

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Steve Krakauer is associate editor of TVNewser and a contributing editor of WebNewser.

This Beijing-based correspondent reported for The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and NPR from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma, and covered Ethiopia, the Western Sahara, and Bangladesh for a number of other outlets. She was NPR’s Southeast Asia correspondent and their first China correspondent before landing a gig at BBC/Public Radio International’s “The World” in 2003. Here, Mary Kay Magistad tell us how she writes stories about the 2008 Olympic Games, earthquakes and government crackdowns, despite government censorship and limited Internet access, and gives us her take on what a New China could mean for aspiring journalists.

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Describe your role as a correspondent for “The World.” How did you land that gig, what were you doing prior to that, and how long have you been based in Beijing and why?
“The World” is a co-production of Public Radio International and the BBC, an international news and current affairs program that broadcasts weekdays throughout the United States. It started in 1996, the same year I opened NPR’s Beijing Bureau, after years reporting for NPR in Southeast Asia. The NPR “Morning Edition” editor with whom I’d worked, Bob Ferrante, eventually went over to become executive editor of “The World,” and asked if I was interested in joining. I first took a breather, doing the Nieman and Radcliffe fellowships at Harvard, and joined The World as China correspondent in early 2003.

It’s been a big year, covering Tibet, earthquakes and the 2008 Olympic Games. What tactics do you use to report on such extreme topics, in a vast country known for its distrust of foreign press?
I’ve now reported in China for three and a half years for NPR and almost six for “The World,” and I think the difficulties of reporting in China are sometimes overstated. Yes, the Tibet crackdown posed unusual challenges in terms of access, and yes, foreign journalists are from time to time monitored or followed, and sometimes even detained. But the vast majority of the time, we’re able to do our reporting with very little government interference. This has been especially true since a new set of reporting regulations came into effect in January 2007. Before that, it was technically illegal for foreign journalists to talk to anyone or go anywhere without first asking permission from the “appropriate authorities” — whomever they might be — if you’re, say, interviewing a cab driver, or a street vendor, or a farmer. By contrast, the new regulations say foreign journalists can interview anyone who agrees to be interviewed, and can travel anywhere where there are not specific restrictions. Of course, those “specific restrictions” were called into play during the Tibet crackdown; the government said that as a matter of national security, it could not allow foreign journalists into Tibetan areas.

The ‘new’ regulations — which are now almost two years old — were created for the period leading up to and during the Beijing Olympics. They’re due to expire in mid-October. The foreign correspondent community in China has been urging the government to make these or similar regulations permanent, as a sign that China has the confidence to adopt international best practices. We’re waiting to see what happens.

Meanwhile, there’s been a trend — that’s concerned many of us — that while public security officials can no longer go after us as much as they used to, they have taken to intimidating or threatening or even detaining people we talk to, particularly on sensitive stories. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has been vocal about speaking out against this and for a more open media environment in China. If you’re interested, you can read FCCC reports on press freedom in China.

How has Beijing changed (in attitudes towards foreign journalists, and other) since you’ve lived there? How were the Olympics a catalyst for that change?
It’s much easier now to do substantive interviews with ordinary Chinese people than it was when I opened NPR’s Beijing bureau in 1996. Back then, I remember a lot of wariness and nervousness, and if I was doing “vox” — people on the street interviews — particularly on a sensitive subject, I’d have to be prepared to approach half a dozen or more people to get one of them to talk on tape. Now, I would say two out of three are happy to give an opinion on most things.

Why the change? Part of it is that China has steadily opened up. People have more access to information, and are more used to interacting with foreigners. Also importantly, there’s less direct government oversight of people’s day-to-day lives, and as a result less fear of retribution for saying the wrong thing. That’s especially true of the younger generation — those under 30, who have grown up in a stable and prosperous time, with no personal experience of political upheaval. Many of them feel they have a right to have an opinion and have it heard. It’s refreshing.

“The instinct to stand up for one’s rights is there, and growing, and comes out on such issues as property, and the environment and health. It comes out as citizen journalism.”

I don’t think the Olympics were the catalyst for this change. It’s something that’s been happening gradually over the past decade. If anything, in the run-up to the Olympics the government stressed “social harmony” — code for people not criticizing the government, not demonstrating, not doing anything other than presenting a united and happy face for the world’s Olympics fans to see.

But there is a growing feeling, especially among educated, urban Chinese, that they deserve to have a say, and to hold the government accountable. The government tries to limit how much civil society can organize, particularly on a national level, lest such organization transform itself into a political movement. A case in point is the current tainted milk scandal. Lawyers around the country have organized to help families whose kids have been poisoned by melamine, a toxic chemical added to watered-down milk to make it look like it has more protein. Some of those lawyers say they’ve received calls from their local governments, telling them to stop helping the families, or being part of this lawyers’ coalition, or risk losing their licenses to practice.

The milk scandal is the kind of issue people could rally around, nationally, and it seems government doesn’t want to let such a movement take off. Even so, the instinct to stand up for one’s rights is there, and growing, and comes out on such issues as property, and the environment and health. It comes out as citizen journalism and online postings, as street demonstrations, and even as lawsuits against government officials. It’s gradually changing the rules of the game, and the government has had to at least partially change with it, even as it tries to contain such efforts. It’s a fascinating dynamic to watch, and in the long-term, I think, a positive trend for China.

Does the Great Firewall of China really exist, and how do you access information that hasn’t been filtered by the government? How has said information become more or less accessible post-Olympics?
Ah, the Great Firewall. Yes, it exists. And it’s annoying, but not insurmountable. Foreign correspondents, and many Chinese citizens, use proxy servers to get around the censorship. That is, you get onto a Web site that then lets you surf anonymously from that Web site. The censors see only the address of the proxy Web site, and not the addresses of the Web sites you’re going to from there. The censors do try to keep up with what proxies are out there, and block them as well. But it can’t get to all of them, so there’s always a way to access what you need, as long as you’re willing to be resourceful.

“You’ve got to leave your assumptions and generalizations at the door, or be prepared to test them, rigorously, on a daily basis.”

During the Olympics, the government was barraged with criticism for continuing to block sites like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, so it lifted those blocks even as it continued others. Many thousands of supposedly “sensitive” sites are blocked. The best way to deal with it is to circumvent it through a proxy server or something similar.

There’s also something of an attempted “Great Firewall” when it comes to satellite television. If a report or an image the censors don’t like comes up on CNN, or BBC, or even Discovery, viewers will suddenly find that their screens have gone black. And they’ll stay black for as long as the ‘offending’ part of the report is on. The funny part of this is, I have young Chinese friends who just buy their own black market satellite dish and watch whatever they like. It’s the foreigners in hotels and apartment blocks who see their screens go black. And since they have access to the information through other means anyway, the impact is not, as the Chinese government presumably hopes, that people retain a positive view of China, but that foreigners know what the Chinese government is feeling sensitive about and is too insecure to let people within China see.

Besides government censorship, what other challenges do you face in your reporting that are specific to China?
China is an extremely complex, multifaceted country, where some things change with lightening speed while others endure — often in surprising combinations. You’ve got to leave your assumptions and generalizations at the door, or be prepared to test them, rigorously, on a daily basis.

I spent two weeks in Beijing this February, and the city didn’t seem prepared to host the games six months later (lots of buildings in progress, including the Bird’s Nest, as well as heavy pollution). How well do you think Beijing pulled off the games, relative to its intended levels of success? Any telling anecdotes?
When China’s leaders throw their political will behind something, it generally gets done. You can question the way it gets done, the human cost of tearing down many neighborhoods and moving hundreds of thousands of people, the physical assaults on demonstrators and the journalists covering them during the Olympics, the fact that Beijing’s day-to-day pollution is so bad it took nothing less than taking half the cars off the roads and shutting down factories in and around the city to reduce the smog during the Olympics. But by the time the Olympics opened in August, the buildings were built, the red carpet was rolled out, and coaches and athletes and others involved in previous Olympics whom I interviewed said they were extremely impressed with the host’s level of organization and efficiency.

As I look out my window, while I’m typing this, I see that the smog has returned — there’s a gray haze making buildings just a couple of blocks away look out of focus. But Beijing never promised to permanently clean up its air. It just said it would deliver breathable air for the Olympics, and it did. Of course, as a Beijing resident (now also wondering how much melamine I’ve unwittingly ingested over the past few years) I really wish they would clean up the air — as do most Chinese I’ve talked to — but some of the same people are aghast at the idea that they should be part of the solution by leaving their cars at home and taking public transportation. This is one thing in China that’s not changing as quickly as it could.

In June, Madeleine Albright joked that China would win all the medals, because no one else would be able to breathe. As China did actually win more gold medals than any other country, do you think Beijing’s poor quality did actually give the home team an advantage?
Nah, although the Cambodian marathon runner did say that he trained by running on the streets of Phnom Penh, behind cars, so he could get used to exhaust fumes. I think there are a few reasons why Chinese athletes did so well. First, they trained extremely hard for years in state-run sports schools. Second, they had a home-court advantage, in that most of the fans in the stands were Chinese. Third, there were times when the announcers would let fans chatter and make noise while a non-Chinese athlete was competing in a sport that required concentration, but told fans to be quiet when the Chinese athletes took their turns. And fourth, there’s the still unanswered question about whether several of the Chinese female gymnasts who medalled were underage.

In China, do you find sources to be more tight-lipped, mistrusting of foreign press and/or afraid of government persecution?
As mentioned in an earlier answer, I think that used to be much more the case than it is now.

Greenpeace’s Olympic Report, issued early August 2008, says, “China has launched impressive green policies in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics but has also missed crucial opportunities to kick start ambitious environmental initiatives across the city.” As far as you can tell, are there plans to continue these initiatives, or were they temporary measures to prepare the city for the international spotlight?
China’s leaders have said repeatedly that it’s time to adopt a more environmentally-friendly approach to development. But old habits die hard, especially for local officials who personally profit from polluting industries, and whose promotions and raises depend in part on how much GDP growth their area has. The central government has said it will start judging local officials on “Green GDP growth” — in other words, subtracting the cost of environmental damage from total economic growth — but it’s not been very rigorous about putting this new policy into practice. It says these things take time, and that’s no doubt true. But a strong signal from the top could have a decisive effect on how local officials make decisions from here on out. We saw it during the SARS epidemic, and in the run-up to the Olympics. If the central government makes it clear that something is at the top of its list of priorities, the provinces generally fall in line.

Have you ever felt unsafe working as a foreign correspondent in China? As a female? Describe the situation when you felt least safe while reporting.
I personally have never felt physically threatened while working in China, and it’s generally quite safe to work and travel as a woman here. Some of my colleagues have been roughed up by plainclothes thugs when covering sensitive stories, sometimes even roughed up by uniformed security officials. Cameramen and photographers tend to have the hardest time, because they’re the ones who have to get closest. But reporters do occasionally get shoved around too.

How is your Mandarin? Do you conduct interviews in Mandarin, or in English through a translator? If you’re able to do both, how do you decide when to use a translator and when not to?
My Mandarin is conversational, and an enjoyable work in progress. When it comes to language, there are two kinds of foreign correspondents who come to China. The first did Chinese language and/or Chinese studies in college and/or studied Chinese intensively for a year or two in China before becoming a journalist here. The second — myself included — were journalists first, with no prior Chinese studies, and were given a limited time by one’s editors to come up to speed. In my case, NPR gave me one summer to learn Chinese. Even an intensive boot-camp program like Princeton in Beijing, which I did, that gives you a basic foundation, not fluency. The New York Times is the most generous — it gives a full year of language training — but that’s still only half the amount of time the State Department gives foreign service officers who are going to work in China. Those of us who didn’t start out as China scholars do what we can, taking lessons and practicing and building on what we have, but it takes time to reach true fluency. At this point, I can do my own interviews on simple subjects, but I use a translator for anything complicated or where a regional accent is involved. Even though I understand most or sometimes all of what’s being said, ‘close’ counts only in horseshoes, not in reporting. If I’m out talking to a farmer in Sichuan province, and then I get back to my office in Beijing and find that I seriously misunderstood some phrase he used, and that changed the meaning of an important point in a story, it’s not like I can go back and re-ask him. I need to get it right on the spot, where I can ask the right follow-up questions and do whatever additional reporting is needed.

Working overseas for a major news organization is a dream job for many journalists. Describe the best and worst things about your job.
It really is a dream job, working with the creative, cohesive, supportive team at “The World.” I have great freedom to report on one of the most interesting places in the world, and I get to indulge on a daily basis my long-standing loves of writing, travel and learning. To be in China at this historic moment, when the world’s political and economic center of gravity appears to be shifting East, but when it’s by no means clear how well China will be able to navigate its own internal challenges and contradictions, is a fascinating challenge and opportunity. The drama and complexity is played out in many an individual’s life, from a Tibetan nomad to a young dot-com multimillionaire. I talk to them, and get to know them, and tell their stories, and through their stories, tell the story of modern China. There’s many a day when this is so interesting and enjoyable, I kind of chuckle to myself and think, “Wow, I’m actually getting paid for doing this.”

The worst thing about the job? It’s got to be the late nights. Beijing is 12 hours ahead of Boston, where “The World” is based, 13 hours ahead once Daylight Savings Time ends. That means when my editors are in a position to edit my stories, it’s already 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. here, and I might end up working until midnight or after to get all the sound sent. Luckily, I’m more of a night owl than a morning person, but it would still be nice to have a few more evenings free after already working a full day. Still, it must be said, as ‘worst things’ about jobs go, this one is certainly manageable.

Do you pitch ideas to “The World,” or receive assignments? How does that process work, and what is the ratio of stories you do that are pitched versus assigned? How do you generate ideas for stories you pitch?
I pitch almost all of the stories I do. I’d say less than 10 percent of my stories start with suggestions from editors at “The World.” Mostly, they rely on me to come up with interesting, original and timely story ideas. To do that, I keep my eyes and ears open at all times. I read widely. I talk with Chinese friends and acquaintances. I use my own decade’s worth of experience in China to spot subtle new trends that could otherwise escape notice in day-to-day reporting.

One of the pleasures of reporting for “The World” is that we don’t do a lot of straight news along the lines of, “This is what happened today, this is what this person said.” By the time we go to air in the afternoon, NPR and the wire services have already done that. What we try to do is take a step back and say, “Okay, but what does it mean?” and “What are the ripple effects?” and “What else might we want to think about related to this story?” Sometimes, such stories are turned around on the same day, and sometimes, a news event one day might spark an idea for a longer analysis or feature piece or even a series down the line. For instance, early this year, I read a short news piece in a Chinese newspaper about how the percentage of Chinese living in cities had increased from something like 20 percent three decades ago to close to 50 percent now. That dramatic population shift has a massive impact on the economy, the environment, on culture and on politics. It’s a shift Europe experienced in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. From mulling over that small newspaper article, I decided to do a six-part series, which aired in July (and is still available as a podcast) on how the urbanization experience is affecting China, and how that in turn could affect the world.

What is the best way for an unknown writer to get an assignment doing foreign reporting (at “The World” or in general)? How did you land your first non-U.S. assignment?
What I tell young aspiring freelance foreign correspondents is to put themselves in a situation that is inherently interesting, but not so interesting that major news organizations have already put their own staff correspondents there. There are freelancers here in China who are trying to break in but are having a hard time, because there are already hundreds of staff foreign correspondents based in China. Freelancers might do better, at this point, in Seoul, or Islamabad or Jakarta.

I started as a freelance foreign correspondent in Bangkok in 1988. Before that, I’d been living in London, and did a few reporting trips, to places like Ethiopia, the Western Sahara, Bangladesh and Cambodia. For the first couple such trips, I paid my own expenses and just about broke even, by offering articles to newspapers, magazines and radio outlets. It turned out to be worth the investment — because this gave me valuable experience, decent clips, and the beginnings of working relationships with a number of editors. By the time I moved to Bangkok, the Boston Globe agreed to take me on as a stringer, and gave me a letter to get me accredited in Thailand. The Globe already had a staff correspondent in Tokyo, but he was covering a huge area, including Afghanistan, and wasn’t able to get to Southeast Asia often. Still, there were interesting things happening. The Burmese junta had just cracked down, and killed a couple thousand pro-democracy demonstrators, prompting thousands more to flee as refugees to the Thai-Burma border, Vietnamese troops were still occupying Cambodia, where a war with the Khmer Rouge continued, and hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees were parked in camps on the Cambodian-Thai border. Thailand was just beginning its fight with AIDS, and the US-Vietnamese relations remained frosty, but with signs of thawing. I ended up doing all these stories and more, and had a great time doing them. Once editors saw the stories I was doing for The Boston Globe, I also became a stringer for The Washington Post, NPR, CBC in Canada and other outlets, until NPR eventually offered me a full-time position.

“It’s more important than ever that Americans develop a better understanding of the world and their place in it. As long as I, as a foreign correspondent, can help in that process, that’s what I want to do.”

The key point here is, I set myself up in a place from which there was demand for stories, but not many correspondents supplying them. Also — and this is important for a freelancer just starting out – living expenses were low enough that I could afford a start-up period of a few months when I wasn’t flush. If you’re going to do this, try to have three to six months worth of savings to get you over that initial hump.

Many newspapers and other media organizations are now reducing the number of staff foreign correspondents they have overseas, and this actually opens up opportunities for aspiring freelancers. Just think strategically about where to base yourself, and plunge in.

Would you report in the States again, or elsewhere? Or is it Beijing or Bust, so to speak? Why?
I’ve never actually reported in the United States, except on internships when I was a journalism/history student at Northwestern University. I went to the UK to do my MA in international relations, and stayed overseas from that point onward, aside from a couple of fellowships at Harvard. I’ve reported from dozens of countries, primarily in Asia but also in Africa and Europe, so it’s by no means Beijing or Bust. I just happen to think that China is one of the world’s most interesting stories at the moment, and I’m enjoying the ride. When that’s no longer the case, or when another story seems even more interesting to me, I’ll make the change. Might it be to the United States? At some point, sure. But for now, I think it’s more important than ever that Americans develop a better understanding of the world and their place in it, and of how others in the world see them. As long as I, as a foreign correspondent, can in some small way help in that process, that’s what I want to do.

Any advice for aspiring foreign correspondents, or ones who are just starting their careers?
Tenacity is a virtue. So is patience. It takes time to build up your credibility, and your expertise as a foreign correspondent. And to do that, there’s no substitute for getting out in the field and doing your own hard work. Don’t try to match what everyone else is doing. Look for stories that should be done, but that others aren’t doing. Those are the stories that, if done well, will catch an editor’s attention and make him or her receptive to using more of your work. Editors get calls from would-be freelancers all the time. What will set you apart is that you show an editor, over time, that s/he can trust you and your reporting, that you’re reliable, that you work hard and report rigorously, and that your stories show creativity and depth. Those are also the qualities that will eventually get a freelancer hired.

Professionally, what do you hope to do next?
I especially enjoy doing longer projects, including the number of radio series I’ve done for “The World,” on subjects ranging from how China’s younger generation is changing China to how China’s rise is affecting traditional US allies in the region. I look forward to doing more such projects, in China and in the region. Casting forward beyond that — possibilities abound. But no rush; I already have one of the best jobs in journalism.

Magistad’s Tips For Aspiring Foreign Correspondents.
1. Don’t follow the crowd. Put yourself in a situation that is inherently interesting, but not so interesting that major news organizations have already put their own staff correspondents there.
2. Just go. Many newspapers and other media organizations are now reducing the number of staff foreign correspondents they have overseas, and this actually opens up opportunities for aspiring freelancers. Just think strategically about where to base yourself, and plunge in.
3. Be patient. Tenacity is a virtue. So is patience. It takes time to build up your credibility, and your expertise as a foreign correspondent. And to do that, there’s no substitute for getting out in the field and doing your own hard work.
4. Look for the stories that haven’t yet been told. “Don’t try to match what everyone else is doing. Look for stories that should be done, but that others aren’t doing. Those are the stories that, if done well, will catch an editor’s attention and make him or her receptive to using more of your work.”
5. Show an editor s/he can trust you. Editors get calls from would-be freelancers all the time. What will set you apart is that you show an editor, over time, that s/he can trust you and your reporting, that you’re reliable, that you work hard and report rigorously, and that your stories show creativity and depth. Those are also the qualities that will eventually get a freelancer hired.

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Jen Swanson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Transitions Abroad, Weissmann Travel Reports, and Star Service Online.

During his action-packed rise from graduate school playwright to television producer, Chad Gervich has worked in nearly every genre the boob tube has to offer. In fact, this Los Angeles-based producer and author literally wrote the book on breaking into television — boiling down years of television wisdom into his new book, Small Screen, Big Picture.

During his industrious career, Gervich has worked on countless classic shows — Love, Inc. (UPN), Malcolm in the Middle (FOX), Like Family (WB), Time Tunnel (FOX), Star Search (CBS), and Do Over (WB). In addition to those scripted shows, he’s done reality television and talk shows: developing and producing Foody Call for the Style Network and executive producing the pilot Celebrity Drive-By for E! Entertainment Network.

He’s also carved out a name as a writer: His columns have appeared in Daily Variety, Fade In, Moving Pictures, Writer’s Digest, and Orange Coast, and he has written a number of plays that were produced at theaters around the country. In recent years, Gervich has moved into the Internet realms of television production, joining the writing staff for Warner Brother’s Web show, The Daily Grind, and developing FOX’s Web soap opera, Dirty Laundry.

Earlier this week, Gervich sat down for an exclusive telephone chat with mediabistro.com to give readers a sneak peek at his new book and some practical advice about the television business.

How did you break into the television business?
I actually moved out to Los Angeles right after college, in 1996. I went to graduate school at UCLA’s graduate playwriting program. It was a two-year program. In the second year, they had a mentor program for theater and television students. They would hook up graduate students with working professionals. I ended up with Warren Littlefield, who at the time was president of NBC Entertainment. He was president for all of the ’90s — he put on classic shows like Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld. He worked his way up the ladder with shows like The Cosby Show and Cheers. He was the best mentor you could ask for. Shortly after that he started his own production company, the Littlefield Company. He gave me a job as an assistant. I got incredibly, incredibly lucky.

How has the television industry changed since you first arrived on the scene? What challenges do aspiring television folks face today? What advantages do they have?
I think the industry has changed in massive, cataclysmic, and unimaginable ways. One change was the advent and explosion of reality TV — it totally changed the landscape of television. There was this format that was very cheap to make that was just as entertaining (or just as popular) as regular shows — all of a sudden it was hugely, hugely popular. The three shows that broke the mold were: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, Survivor, and American Idol.

“Developing and actually producing is like the difference between a military executive sitting back in his office helping to strategize a war, rather than a general actually fighting in the trenches.”

Another massive change was the rise of cable. Cable was always the redheaded stepchild, but now, thanks in a large part to reality TV, it is nipping at the heels of mainstream channels. There’s literally a channel for every interest. In a short time there won’t be any differentiation between cable and broadcast television. There will simply be 500 channels.

The other massive change, which is still happening, is the rise of the Internet — not only as a distribution mechanism, but also as a creative and artistic format. Nobody knows how this going to pan out. This is a marathon, and we are only at mile three.

So you’ve written a book of practical advice for breaking into the television business. What will your book offer to the uninitiated reader?
When I wrote the book, I wanted to begin at first giving readers a bird’s-eye view of the entire industry. There are six or seven media conglomerates that control everything. They are making the financial and commercial decisions that affect the shows that get on television. I begin by explaining life in television at the top of the food chain, and I slowly go deeper and deeper into the system.

We talk about how networks function, then studios, then production companies, and finally, how production companies and writers create shows. After that, we literally follow a show from the moment it’s pitched through production. We follow it from doing the deal to developing the show as a pilot; through the pilot pickup to shooting the pilot. We watch that show get picked up, as the show runner hires his crew, what happens in the writers’ room, how the show is physically produced every week, and how the show is marketed.

“Many executives think that Internet shows are just shrunken television shows. I think that couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

After, we bring all that to life, showing how the aspiring writers take all that information and use that to break into the business.

You produced and developed Foody Call for the Style Network. That’s a big job — can you describe that experience, from the early days of development to the time when the show actually aired? What would you do differently?
That was a big step. I wasn’t the show-runner, but I worked hand and hand with the show-runner. I developed that show as an executive at Littlefield, and I left to work on the show. It was a huge learning experience. Developing and actually producing is like the difference between a military executive sitting back in his office helping to strategize a war, rather than a general actually fighting in the trenches.

Looking back at it, I made tons and tons mistakes. For example, I had to do my first firing on that show. It was one of the most horrible things I ever did, and I did the worst job of it. In my head I kept thinking, ‘I want this to be gentle, I want to maintain a relationship,’ but this firing should have been a swift dropping of the axe. It became a long drawn out 45-minute experience. It was the worst firing ever.

You were working on Internet soap for FOX. How is this kind of work different or related to straight-up television work?
The thing that makes an Internet show so different from a television show — this is why television executives haven’t been able to crack it yet — is that it is an entirely different medium. People go to the Internet for a totally different experience than television. It’s a highly interactive medium.

Many executives think that Internet shows are just shrunken television shows. I think that couldn’t be farther from the truth. People go to the Internet because they want to interact and chat with other people. You have to build some interactive component into the fabric of the program. That might be allowing audience members to chat and interact with characters or allowing the audience to connect with other viewers.

When you look at the tiny handful of successful Internet shows, the ones that put themselves on the map — they all had some sort of interactivity. LonelyGirl15 was so thrilling because the producers made it feel like it was interactive. In her videos, LonelyGirl15 would supposedly respond to readers. It was all fake, but it felt very real — that’s what made the story so compelling.

You’ve worked with numerous pilots. What’s that nerve-wracking process like?
Working on pilots is simultaneously nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing, and a complete blast. First of all, you are creating something from scratch. It’s not like you’re coming on the third season of Scrubs. You are experimenting with jokes and styles, that’s what makes it so fun. You’re thinking this could be the next Seinfeld, but you also know everything you are doing could all be for naught. You could be crushed, heartbroken, and out of a job.

How did your playwriting experience help or hinder your work in television? Any advice for playwrights looking to move into television?
I don’t think having an MFA in playwriting impressed anybody. Having said that, being a playwright can help. The other day, my boss told me that my background in playwriting gave me stronger storytelling skills. Telling a story is a craft. You work hard to get better at it. My skills of being a playwright have been helpful, but I don’t think the degree itself was helpful. At the end of the day it’s all about storytelling and writing.

What differentiates Small Screen, Big Picture from other TV-related books on the market?
I think there are a lot of good books that focus on the actual writing of television. But there aren’t any books that explain how the business of television works. At the end of the day, television is a business with very unique corporate structures. I meet so many aspiring writers who don’t have the first clue about how television works as a business.

The unique way the television industry works affects how you create develop and write a television show. In order to be successful, you need a roadmap to navigate the maze that you are entering. However, the roadmaps are all in flux now; they are changing in massive ways — thanks to Internet, cable and the economy.

How is the economy affecting the TV business? In light of contraction across a number of industries, what would aspiring TV writers do well to pitch/keep in mind as they’re striving to enter the industry?
Advertising is down; product placement is down — especially at the broadcast networks. When there’s not as much money coming in, the companies can’t spend much money on new shows. Fewer new shows will be bought, and fewer riskier shows will be bought. Networks are going to buy less from new writers, and buy more from proven veterans. NBC has already told all their shows that they have to cut their budgets by 10 percent. The good news is no matter how bad the economy is, people will still be watching television. Cable, because it’s cheaper for advertisers, I think may be less affected by the recession than the broadcast networks.

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How to break into the television business:

1. Move to LA.
2. Get a job in the industry, whether it’s a PA job or an assistant job. Use that job to move to the next job.
3. Meet everybody you can and forge really strong relationships. The industry is based on relationships.
4. Never, ever under any circumstances, stop writing. The real writers get up at five in the morning and write and then go to work.

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Jason Boog is editor of GalleyCat.

In 2006, World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation) had a problem. Despite a booming business on television and an audience of 14 million, its two magazines couldn’t seem to hold on to their readers. So WWE‘s brass turned to men’s magazine veterans Tony Romando and Rob Bernstein to help them turn the publications around. Romando and Bernstein merged the two magazines into a single publication, ditched the fanzine approach, and instead turned WWE into a lifestyle publication more along the lines of Maxim or FHM.

Two years later, the new strategy is showing results. Not only was WWE profitable within its first year, but during the first half of 2008, when many consumer publications watched their circulation flatten out or continue to plummet, WWE grew 13 percent, and their ad revenue is up 22 percent. In the meantime, WWE now has seven international editions, and this year, it launched a new publication, WWE Kids, aimed at younger fans.

We caught up with WWE editor Rob Bernstein, who previously worked at Maxim, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Ziff Davis’ short-lived Sync, to give us the inside scoop on how they did it.

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What did you do when you first got to WWE?
We came in and thought it would make more sense to combine the two magazines, since the two audiences overlapped so much, and give them one publication that covered the entire world of wrestling. We also wanted to take that men’s lifestyle vibe and apply it to the WWE magazine product. A large portion of the WWE magazine audience is male. Although there are female readers, we’re really targeting that male audience. When we arrived here, the magazines were really like fanzines, with low production values.

Why did they have two magazines to begin with?
There were two shows on TV — Raw on the USA network and Smackdown on MyNetworkTV. [WWE has since added a third show, ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling), on the SCI FI channel.] The brands are very different. They have different Superstars (male wrestlers) and Divas (female wrestlers). But there’s a large crossover. Some fans like wrestling so much they watch both shows. So those fans had to purchase both magazines in order to get their wrestling news. We decided to increase the newsstand price for the single publication to $6.99. I believe it was $3.99 or $4.99, but for two publications. So it’s now a little bit cheaper for fans.

What have you heard from your readers about the new approach?
They love it. Before, the magazine only had dated wrestling information. They just regurgitated matches the fans had seen maybe two months before. We transformed it into a highly polished magazine that not only celebrates the world of wrestling but reaches outside the ring and tackles issues of health, grooming, cars, video games, music, movies, DVDs — you name it. It’s now like some of the celebrity magazines that allow readers to enter the world of the Hollywood elite. What we’re doing is allowing readers to spend quality time with the Superstars and the Divas.

“Tapping into a global brand does at least half the work for you.”

Why is the lifestyle angle so important to the readers in a way that that the other approach wasn’t?
It allows the reader to identify with these individuals they see on TV. It allows them to say, “Hey, I like that film too,” or “Hey, I agree with them, that’s an awesome band.” It allows us to connect the readers with the wrestlers on the show, the same way that section in US Weekly, “Stars are Just Like Us,” helps the fans connect with celebrities.

Did WWE know they wanted you to do this? Or did you and Tony come in and say, “Here’s what we think we should do”?
The corporate brass here realized their magazines were broken. They didn’t know how to fix them, but they definitely knew they were broken. Readership was on the decline, as was advertising. So they contacted Tony, with whom I had worked at Ziff Davis, and brought him in as vice president of publishing. Under his supervision and game plan, we turned it into a lifestyle publication. He thought that would allow us to reach a wider audience.

How long did you think it would take to turn around?
We were hoping to get an increase of about 25 percent in readership early on. We didn’t expect to break a profit in the first year. We were investing in photography, editors, and writers. But in the first year, we were profitable, which is pretty unheard of in the magazine world. Most publishing houses have three-to-five-year plans where they hope to break even. We broke even in year one. We more than doubled our audience in the two years we’ve been here.

This year, Wal-Mart, which has more than a thousand magazines on its news racks, wanted to increase profitability, so they started cutting back on titles. One of the publications they cut was Sports Illustrated for Kids. But when we added a new publication, called WWE Kids, we were able to get it on the newsstand to replace SI for Kids. SI is a strong brand. That Wal-Mart would drop them and replace them with WWE Kids is an awesome win for our team.

“We encourage readers to call us any night of the week. When the phone rings, the editor has to pick up the phone and respond to feedback. We can take that information and incorporate it back into the magazine. Fans love it.”

How do you explain the growth in readership? What are you delivering that readers want, that other pubs aren’t giving them?
There are two different things there. First, we’re providing content that the readers were starved for and not getting before — interviews with the talent at WWE and a level of access they never had before with the old publications.

Beyond that, we leveraged the resources of what’s really a global brand. Specifically, its national television exposure. You can’t get better advertising. Other publications, they don’t have that outlet. But three nights a week, we’re reaching over 14 million fans and putting the product in front of them. The producers find ways to expose the magazines to fans in the shows. Sometimes, it’s the Superstars carrying the magazines and reading them on the shows. Sometimes it’s an advertisement that pops up during the show. It’s a level of direct contact with the fans that other magazines just don’t have.

A couple of other things we do that are really cool that I haven’t seen at other magazines: We actively reach out to our fans. We actually ask them what they think about the magazine and what they want to see in the magazine. We publish a phone number in every issue, and we encourage readers to call us between the hours of 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST any night of the week, seven days a week. There’s an editor who’s actually carrying the phone with them everywhere they go, and when the phone rings during those hours, the editor has to pick up the phone and respond to feedback, field questions, address criticisms, take detailed notes of whatever is on the reader’s mind, and report back to me and Tony so we can take that information and incorporate it back into the magazine. Fans love it. They feel like they have an active role in the magazine, that they’re helping guide its direction. That’s key. They’re a part of the process.

Really? You have your readers call you at night?
Yeah, that helps get rid of all the young kids who just call up to see if they can get an autograph. It allows us to get a more adult response. When we first started that phone line, we did it between 2 and 3 a.m. The phone would ring off the hook. That’s how badly fans wanted to get in touch with the company to provide their feedback. The point of doing it that late at night was to get the really dedicated fans. If you’re willing to stay up between 2 and 3 a.m., you deserve to be heard. But it became impossible after a while to get editors to stay awake during those hours, so we moved the hours up.

What else do you to get to know your audience?
Every day, editors scour the message boards, we Google ourselves, we read hundreds of letters that land in our magazine inbox, and we read what our dedicated readers are saying about us.

If you were to go back to a more mainstream magazine tomorrow, what would you take from what you’ve learned in this niche?
If I were to go back to a publishing company, I would probably say, “Listen, one thing that seems to be working really on newsstands now” — and it’s pretty obvious to say, but it’s worth repeating — “is that global brands seem to translate really well into the magazine world.” Oprah. Martha Stewart. ESPN. Rachel Ray. Brands that people believe in and feel comfortable with.

There are probably some pretty strong untapped brands out there that publishing houses could tap into. Ellen DeGeneres, maybe? Women seem to love her. My wife loves her. Would people be willing to read a magazine spearheaded by her? Yeah, I think so. I think it would be wildly successful.

The other thing about global brands is that they have other mediums in which they can leverage the product. WWE has national television exposure and a really successful Web site. We can take those really strong arms of the company and use them to promote the magazine and drive subscriptions and readership — and just let fans know that we exist. That’s half the battle. The newsstand is so cluttered; how do you stand out? Tapping into a global brand does at least half the work for you.

That sounds like it would be bad news for unaffiliated magazines.
It’s certainly a challenge for magazines that are just trying to break into the newsstand. Publishing houses are trying to launch titles all the time and figure out ways to build mass audiences and excite Madison Avenue. It’s pretty hard to do when you can’t tap into an existing brand.

So at WWE, is the Web site totally its own thing, not a mirror of the magazine, as Web sites are for many other publications?
You have to remember that WWEis a television company and a television brand. So the Web site provides up-to-date results and breaking stories. The magazine provides something that a Web site can’t. That tactile feel. Those glossy photos. There’s a poster in every magazine that we print. That’s part of the value we offer.

What kind of writer does well at the magazine?
You have to have a good sense of humor. It’s a men’s lifestyle magazine. It’s filled with fun captions and pop culture references. You need to be able to entertain and make people laugh. WWE is all about entertainment. You need to able to come up with great ideas that wow the reader, both visually and editorially. We tapped editors that we’ve worked with before because sports entertainment is foreign to a lot of people in the publishing world. People from Rolling Stone, FHM, and Maxim — they just get it.

Where does WWE go from here? How do you grow further?
We already have seven international editions, and we hope to add another 11 by the end of 2009. That would give us 18 international editions of WWE magazine. Wrestling is an international phenomenon. You think it’s a U.S. thing, but it is so popular abroad. They do shows in Europe and South America all the time. Wrestling translates. People get it.

So which Superstar or Diva should we be keeping an eye on?
John Cena. He’s probably among WWE’s top three. You may know him from Gillette or Subway commercials. He’s an incredible entertainer. He really connects with fans. He has a top-selling rap album, and he’s broken into film. He has a new movie coming out next year — an action movie called 12 Rounds, directed by Renny Harlan, who directed Die Hard 2. Cena is poised for mega-stardom.

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How to create a successful magazine on top of a successful brand:

1. Add value: Use the magazine to give readers something they aren’t getting on the show, rather than just a regurgitation of what they’ve already seen.
2. Get vain: Seek out what your readers are writing about you — on your forums or elsewhere on the Internet — and read it.
3. Pass out your number: Give the brand’s fans a way to get in touch with you. Then listen to them, and make them feel like they’re helping shape the magazine.
4. Get symbiotic: Use the television show, and its Web site, to promote the magazine. Reader awareness is half the battle in a world of crowded newsstands.

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E.B. Boyd is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

He’s interviewed Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama. He’s reported from both the DNC and RNC and each of the presidential debates for NBC News. And six months ago, he was graduating from college. Luke Russert is one of NBC News’ newest, and certainly youngest, correspondents. Russert is assigned to cover youth issues, and with youth registration up significantly this year, he has had no shortage of material. But in political terms, just as some on the right and left have questioned Gov. Sarah Palin or Obama’s experience, similar questions have been raised of the 23-year-old.

Of course, Russert is also a, well, Russert. When journalism icon Tim Russert died suddenly at the age of 58 on June 13, his son Luke was on the air paying tribute to his dad less than 72 hours later. He certainly looks like him, and with the NBC News job, he’s headed down the same career path. But there’s more to Russert than just the name. Luke has more than two years of experience as a radio host on XM, and, as he tells us, “This is a business I was raised around.”

When we interviewed Russert in a conference room at 30 Rock, it was another busy day: That morning he had been a guest on The Martha Stewart Show, and in the afternoon, he was appearing via satellite on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on MSNBC. In between, mediabistro.com talked to Russert about how networks can gain youth viewers, the future of Meet the Press, and more.

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Name: Luke Russert
Position: NBC News correspondent
Resume: Interned at ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Has co-hosted 60/20 Sports with James Carville on XM Radio (now Sirius XM) since March 2006. Joined NBC News in August.
Birthday: August 22, 1985
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Education: Double major in history and communications from Boston College
Marital status: Declined to comment
First section of Sunday Times: Week in Review
Favorite television show: Sportscenter
Last book read: Children of Jihad by Jared Cohen
Guilty pleasure: Chipotle

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It seems that every election storyline is always, “young people will be coming out in record numbers,” and it never seems to happen. Do you think this year will be any different?

I do. From what I’ve seen on the ground, it certainly looks like kids will turn up in bigger numbers this year. But if you just look at the trajectory of the numbers, if we go from 2000 to 2004, there was a nine point increase in the number of kids who came out to vote. [For] the midterm elections in 2002 to 2006, there was a substantial increase as well, I believe in the range of eight to 10 points. At the primaries, 6.6 million young folks turned out to participate. So, given all of those statistics and those numbers, on paper it certainly looks like the youth vote will come this election.

That being said, no one really knows for sure. There [are] massive new voter registration numbers. If you look at the state of Virginia, there’s been since January, I think, about four or five hundred thousand people who have been registered to vote. Of those hundreds of thousands, people under 34 make up 62 percent of that new number. So if those folks come out to vote in a place like Virginia, it could really sway things. And I think they will. I mean, if they don’t come out in this election, I don’t know when they ever will come.

Let’s talk about Virginia. After a Today show segment, you seemed to imply smarter kids went to UVA, and favored Obama. On your blog you described the comment as “dumb” and called the experience one of your first lessons with the “perils of live television.” What did you learn from that?

Yeah, it was dumb, it was an absolutely dumb comment. I learned that when you’re going to go on live TV, you have to really, really prep yourself, and be prepared for anything. We were originally going to talk about the fact that there were some questions about young folks being able to register to vote in the town where their college is. If you remember, there was a story that came out, I think it was at Virginia Tech, where some election officials told kids, “If you vote here, it affects your tax status back at home,” and that sort of thing. That’s what I was prepared to talk about. And then we sort of switched it up — to, if you could say that UVA was an adequate microcosm of the state. And Matt [Lauer] said there were a lot of smart kids there, and he said smart and I went off of that. What I was really trying to say was that kids that go to UVA come from very, sort of, affluent educated households, who statistically support Obama. That being said, I took a lot of flak for it from Newsbusters, from kids who went to William & Mary, got a lot of emails from them. They actually sent me this thing that said the SAT scores at William & Mary are higher than those at UVA.

To prove they’re smarter?

To prove they’re smarter. And I learned to never really wing it to a degree. You obviously always have to be prepared to think about different things that you could be asked or that you could say. And avoid being very blunt like that. I think that’s something I stepped in, just saying, “Oh, of course smart kids do that,” and that’s something you kind of have to draw out. You have to learn that your audience is not thinking the same way you are, and you really have to explain yourself. I made the mistake of assuming people would understand what I meant and just forgetting that at face value, that looked really bad. And that’s why it was dumb, and that’s why it was stupid. And hopefully I won’t make another mistake like that again, but who knows. We all wish we’d never make mistakes again.

“Did my name get my foot in the door? Absolutely, I’ll be the first to admit that. But has my performance and ability got my butt through the door? Yes.”

You have been out there covering youth issues for months now. What do you see as something the mainstream media is missing when trying to connect with these potential viewers?

I think what they’re missing is they don’t necessarily provide a forum for young kids to speak out themselves. I really like what MTV did recently; they had a forum where you have a panelist and young folks grabbing the microphone. But I would take one hour of primetime and make it sort of a debate format, where you have a debate for young folks. Where the candidates have to answer young folks’ questions, have the networks cover it for an hour and young people would be engaged — they would tune in to that.

This isn’t about mainstream media in general, but I think that a lot of stories stereotype young people as being apathetic, or smoking pot, watching Entourage, playing XBOX all day. Just not caring. And then you have these stories where so-and-so did something in the community or someone who’s really politically active, and it’s sort of this novel concept, when in reality I think if you were actually on the ground, it’s widespread. I mean, kids are involved in all different facets of this democracy. Whether it be through community service, whether it be through political participation, and the one thing I would like to see is that it’s normal to see a young person contributing. Young people are productive members of society; they’re not just leeching on the government and their parents.

NBC News president Steve Capus called you one of the rookies of the year during the 2008 election. How does that make you feel?

It makes me feel really good. On top of that, it’s humbling to hear that from someone like Steve. He is a tremendous boss to work for. It’s rare in the news business to have someone who is understanding, who listens, who is willing to hear out new ideas. And he is someone who encompasses all that’s good in the business. I had someone come up to me once and was like, “What do you think of Capus?” And I said, “He’s a great guy,” and they go, “He just seems way too nice to be in that type of position for broadcast news.” And it’s a credit to what he’s been able to do. It shows that you can run a news division and not be, shall we say, a hardcore… I’m not going to say the curse word. [It shows] that you can run a news division and not be an overzealous micromanaging individual — that you can actually listen to people.

At the same time, it begs the question: Should a “rookie” be reporting for NBC during this election in the first place?

I agree that I have a very unique position. And I think I’m an interesting case study because I come from radio. I’ve been doing the radio show with James Carville for two and half years, so it’s not like I’m just being plucked from the ocean and thrown in front of a camera and they’re saying “Oh, what do you think about youth issues?” I was actually going to do a lot of stuff for a channel called POTUS for Sirius/XM doing much of the same stuff — talking about youth issues, young people’s concerns, engaging their reaction. I was approached by NBC News to bring that perspective to television. I understand people who say it’s a big jump, but I also think its territory that’s never really been explored before. It’s an area where news divisions and news networks definitely want to get involved because we are the future. In many cases we are future viewers and media consumers, but we are also future members of this democracy and this country. And for that reason, I think they were sort of trying to get in at the ground level with the new demographic. I think I’ve been able to do that.

“If I didn’t want [this], I could be in a log cabin right now, blogging.”

Is it the kind of thing where you think having someone who is technically “youth” cover youth issues is important, rather than having another correspondent assigned to youth issues?

Without a doubt, and studies prove that when you have peer-to-peer communication, people view it as a lot more authentic. We’re roughly the same age, when we’re talking to each other, we have sort of our own types of language because we’re young and you sort of view me as being more authentic because we’re in the same age range. When I’ve gone to college campuses, a lot of kids have come up to me and said, “We like that you’re here, a lot of times we’ll have some 35-year-old that comes up to us and says, ‘So, what is it really like to be young?'” And you know I’m only a few months removed from school — I know what kids are going through, and I try to bring that perspective. Look, in news, 35 is very young, without a doubt. And I think people in positions of power look at 35 as being very young. College kids don’t see 35 as being young. 35 is old to a lot of people. And I think that’s where I’ve been able to come in and say “Here’s someone who’s 23, here’s someone who’s learning almost with the demographics he’s covering.” That’s an interesting perspective. I’m right there with them trying to absorb information on the same scale that they are.

The other side of it is also the nepotism thing. Can you talk a little about that?

Sure. A lot of people have said that if he is not Luke Russert, he doesn’t get where he is. I respect their opinion. But in regard to that, I did have a radio show, for over two-and-a-half years, that was re-upped with a contract recently for two more. I don’t think that people in power at Sirius/XM, at NBC, would throw money at someone simply for the reason that their last name is Russert. Or is Zucker, or is Capus, or is Brokaw. If you are going to be in a position where you are representing the network, you have to know what you’re doing. Did my name get my foot in the door? Absolutely, I’ll be the first to admit that. But has my performance and ability got my butt through the door? Yes.

And one thing that I think is very important is we hear about self-made individuals and I think it’s a wonderful story. But nowhere in the course of human history — maybe the guy who invented the pet rock is an exception — has anyone made it from the bottom to the top without any help at all. There’s always been some sort of connection, some mentor that has brought them along the way. And so I understand the nepotism charges, and I know it’s something that will always be a part of any article that’s written about me for probably a long time, probably if I’m still doing this 20 years down the line, it’ll still be there. But it’s important to understand: this is a business I was raised around. Something I know in many ways like the back of my hand. I think if you look at other examples in media, Chris Wallace is a perfect example, who was raised in a media household who has done extraordinary things. If you look at the sports world, Joe Buck was getting one of the Games of the Week at FOX at age 25. And look at Jeff Zucker, 26, being the executive producer of the Today show, albeit not by name, but I think if there’s younger folks that have a certain talent, it’s not a disservice, especially if they do have a name, to put them forward.

Have you seen any pushback to your rise at NBC from people within the network?

Not overtly. As there is at any company, I’m sure there’s people speaking behind my back, but I’m sure there’s people speaking behind your back at TVNewser. There’s people speaking behind people’s backs at Wal-Mart, at Goldman Sachs, wherever. So no, has anyone ever come up to me and said anything snotty or rude? No. But is it being said? Absolutely. But that’s going on everywhere.

You signed a one-year contract with NBC just before the conventions. What do you see as your role with the network after the election, and also beyond this current contract?

My role, first and foremost, is to see if whoever is president keeps a lot of the promises being made to young folks. In the case of Obama, I think this $4,000 to use towards college in exchange for community service, I want to see if that program actually gets passed and gets put into place. You know, a lot of young folks are voting on that issue, solely. Apart from that I definitely want to try my hand at some different types of reporting. There’s a possibility of doing a Dateline piece, possibility of having more presence on the Internet, maybe MSNBC, and just see if I’m comfortable in television. But I really am going to try to learn more about TV and learn if I want to be a part of it. And I’ve said before, radio is my first love, my true love, it’s what I enjoy doing the most. At the end of the year, if I don’t necessarily see myself in television, I have no problem walking away. Obviously, I’d like to stay here for 50 years, but if I don’t think I’m doing a good job or I’m not happy, I’ll go to radio and be more than pleased to settle down.

MSNBC and NBC have become a focal point for those who charge liberal bias in the media during this election. Do you think that’s a fair point?

I don’t necessarily know if it’s fair to categorize the entire network as having a liberal bias. I think what you have, much like you have at FOX, is MSNBC has opinionated journalism in time slots. [Keith] Olbermann is opinionated journalism. Rachel Maddow is opinionated journalism. And they’ll be the first to admit, they take on the current administration, and there’s definitely a left-lean there. Do I think they speak for the whole network? No. And I think that when you have folks from the right that say “MSNBC has become the liberal version of FOX,” I don’t think that charge is accurate when describing NBC News, and I don’t think it’s accurate when describing MSNBC during the day — nor do I think it’s accurate when describing Fox a lot during the day, because I think during the day a lot of the stuff is just news. Sure, there’s some commentators on, but we’re talking about prime time hours. And prime time hours are there to attract viewers. There’s a lot of conservatives in the United States, there’s a lot of liberals in the United States, and I think what MSNBC has done, which is brilliant, is bring those people into the fold. I don’t think in any way do Olbermann and Maddow speak for the whole network at all.

Well a difference between Fox News and MSNBC is that Fox doesn’t have this other outlet, which is a network. Do you think that some of what people charge about MSNBC ultimately hurts the NBC brand, or do you see it as separate?

To some people, possibly. I don’t necessarily think the general public sees them as intertwined. I mean, the people on the right will make the case that what’s happening on MSNBC bleeds over into the network, but if you can find me an example of Brian Williams, Chuck Todd or Tom Brokaw or any stapleholds actually on the network broadcast, or Lee Cowan, Kelly O’Donnell, as being biased or even showing any hint of bias, send me the tape — I’d like to see it.

What do you see as the future of Meet the Press?

I think it’s entering a different time. My dad was a real staplehold there for 17 years, and I think it’s a show that is probably, most likely, going to change in format, whether they have two people asking questions, whether or not they bring in more panelists. But I see it as a show with a very successful formula, a blueprint that if someone goes in there and works hard, they can without a doubt achieve ratings success.

How closely have you been monitoring the program that is most directly associated with your father?

I don’t watch it as much as I watched when he was on, obviously. It’s still tough, to some degree, to watch it all the way through. I see who they have as guests, and I tune in. I think Brokaw’s been doing an absolutely outstanding job. Honestly I think, given the situation being dealt, it was so nice of him to essentially come out of retirement and lend his veteran presence. So yeah, I pay close attention to it. I care about what happens to it. I think it really is — and all the Sunday morning shows are — really the last frontier in terms of a format that is watched by millions, in which people can actually have a conversation. I just hope it stays in that realm.

We live in a culture now where a public person’s privacy is fairly nonexistent. If you look back to 2005, Gawker and other sites picked up on your Facebook page, the hot tub picture. Do you think its fair that you have to combat these private things in your life being on display?

In 2005, when Gawker did that, I don’t necessarily think it was fair, because I wasn’t involved in any sort of public media. I was just “son of, going to college.” And they’ve done other things where they’ve taken pictures of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter having a glass of wine in high school and putting that out there, and we remember the stuff with Judge Alito’s son and sort of tearing down the kids of celebrities, and I don’t like that. Now, you know, post-radio, post-TV, I’m totally willing to accept them writing anything and them saying anything, because I’m a public figure, I’ve put myself in that position and I chose to live that life. If I didn’t want it, I could be in a log cabin right now, blogging. But I chose to put myself out there, so by all means. If they feel inclined to take shots, I can accept them. I’m a big boy. If you spend your time reading sites like Gawker, and Jossip, and letting them get to you, you’re not going to go very far in this business.

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Steve Krakauer is associate editor of TVNewser.

“Queen of the Internet.” That’s how Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour described Candy Pratts Price, executive fashion director of Style.com, in the tribute video shown before the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) presented Price with its 2008 Eugenia Sheppard Award. The award is traditionally given to either “a writer, photographer, or editor who has used his or her craft to further the profession of fashion reporting and coverage, or to a creative director, fashion editor, stylist, or artist whose exceptional creativity has shaped fashion visually.” Pratts Price fits both categories for a recipient, having championed and shaped fashion from her early career as a window designer at Bloomingdale’s to her tenure at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and, after a stint at Ralph Lauren, jumping into the online world as executive fashion director of Style.com (Vogue‘s online home), a position she has held since 2001. Pratts Price took time out of her busy New York Fashion Week to talk with us about what the accelerated global news cycle means for the fashion and media worlds, how she honed her own global vision, and why brevity is the soul of blogging. It’s good to be the queen.

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Name: Candy Pratts Price
Position: Executive fashion director of Style.com
Resume: Designed award-winning store windows and displays for Bloomingdale’s; fashion director at Harper’s Bazaar; fashion director of accessories at Vogue; vice president and creative director for Ralph Lauren; creative director, VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards; executive fashion director, Style.com
Birthday: February 18
Hometown: Manhattan
Education: Graduate of FIT
First section of the Sunday Times: Book Review
Currently reading: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, on her Kindle
Favorite television shows: “My favorite network is NBC, but I love CNN and I also love cooking channels and Turner Classic Movies. I’m a TV girl, so I don’t just watch one thing. I’ll tell you what I don’t watch: reality shows. Dancing stars, none of that stuff interests me.”
Guilty pleasure: “I’ve got very little guilt. I love food: pork, chicken, meat, wine. Fancy cars. I love glamour. I don’t have a lot of guilt.”

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Thanks for taking time out of your New York Fashion Week to talk with us. What’s your take on the media presence at the tents this year? Are you encountering a lot of bloggers? Have you seen a change in recent seasons?
There’s no doubt that the market has gotten larger in attendance and in distribution — with more blogs, a lot of little boutiques — but basically it’s part of the process. If you’re taking a central forum to do anything, you’re going to have that. And isn’t that what we all want — to call attention to fashion and call attention to the small people and the big people?

How do you think the economic situation is affecting the fashion world — are you seeing the effects of the slowdown in the spring collections?
My point of view is that the designers are looking at satisfying many eyes. Not so much the financial eye, but they’re looking at satisfying all the global eyes that are paying attention. They are very aware that information is distributed very quickly and that information is very global. And now you’re addressing it for a crowd that’s looking at it from either Japan eyes or Russian eyes or Middle Eastern eyes or Canadian eyes, American eyes — you have a very global platform. So that make designers — I think it has made designers — pay attention to that, and maybe when they’re designing they’re trying to please more than others.

“More attention means more brand awareness. There are three monitors in this world: your cell phone, your television, and your computer. You’ve got to deliver that message.”

You’re known for your great eye and what designer Bruno Frisoni calls “a global vision.” What experiences, jobs, or influences helped you to develop this talent? When were you challenged to find your own vision?
Well, it’s curiosity first. You have to start somewhere, when you were a little girl, and that’s about curiosity, but I think my tenure with Marvin Traub at Bloomingdale’s when I went to different countries to do those promotions I saw how that works, and I think also because when working for a magazine, you have a lead of three to four months, so you get to see information very quickly. You’re in a meeting with a book editor or you’re in a meeting with the arts editor. You’re planning four months in advance so you know what exhibition is going to be somewhere. So I think that kind of magazine training just activates your curiosity more and more, and if you have an appetite for it, you go for it. Certainly, I have an appetite — not to know more necessarily, but I really want to know. I’ve got to find out.

The long lead time of magazines is a little bit of a luxury — to look ahead three or four months. The Internet has really changed the pace at which the public gains exposure to collections and trends. How does this new sense of immediacy affect fashion and media?
If you had four months to look at it, and you were getting information, it was being distilled or filtered or whatever word you want to use by a certain group of people. Now you’re getting information unfiltered and at a rapid pace, so you have — as a viewer and as a reader — choices, so many more choices. It’s going to be up to you now. You’re getting a lot of what you wanted; now make up your mind.

I think it’s healthy both ways. Obviously, you realize that I’ve given this a lot of thought because I’m on both sides of the coin. For example, I love miniatures — you know furniture sellers used to walk around with little miniature [versions of the furniture they were selling] and it took them days to get to someone’s home to tell the ladies what the new furniture was, and then you ordered it and you had to wait. Today, if you want a sofa that sits eight you can find it on the Internet and get it, but is that it? No, there’s still value in the option of going to look at it and in customizing it. I don’t think we lose what people are. People are still very important in all of this. It’s the human aspect.

In a panel last spring at FIT, Vogue editor Sally Singer said that this accelerated pace is challenging publications like Vogue to be better curators and focus on more special things. Do you agree?
Yes, but I would say that Vogue has always, always sought to be the standard. I think that the pride I have in Condé Nast is that you can get it first, you can get it fast, and you can get it exclusive[ly]. We have that power. We have that access. I think that if you talk to any fashion designer today, what are their wishes and dreams? Their wishes and dreams are to be in Vogue, and after they are in Vogue, they’ll say, “If I could only have a cover.” It’s what he or she can take home, either to the Midwest or to Japan and China and show, “I’m in Vogue.” There is that, and I think [the accelerated pace] is going to make for great magazines, because you are going to sharpen your point now. You’re going to be able to demand different things and you’re going to look at it a lot more, because you know five people have talked about the same thing as you. If you talk about something, I talk about something, and three other people talk about it too, one of us is going to try to make the story a lot more interesting or edgy or colorful. It challenges us.

Describe the career path that led you to your current position as executive fashion director of Style.com.
Went to FIT, worked for a photographer, worked at Bergdorf Goodman… Then designed windows and went to Bloomingdale’s, where Marvin Traub took me, had a fantastic career at Bloomingdale’s with all of their branch stores and the New York stores, basically reinvented windows with Bob Currie, then went to Harper’s Bazaar. When I was at Bazaar, Anna [Wintour] asked me to join Vogue as the accessories editor, and then I became the accessories director, did four or five years there, and then it was sort of, “Am I really good, or am I just comfortable?” Many offers came, and I had great admiration for Ralph [Lauren] because I thought that no one could have their signature about what they were doing in an American house as well, so when he called, I answered. I did a year there, did a movie [executive produced, in conjunction with E! Networks, a documentary about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jacqueline Kennedy exhibit]. Then, the Internet was in its infancy. Some [early Internet companies] won, some of them lost. Style.com happened to have been one of the winners, and eventually Anna said, “I think you should go there,” but in the meantime, I was doing all of the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards, and I still am the executive in charge of programming for anything that’s Vogue, but Anna [Wintour] said, “You should go to Style.com,” and here I am.

What do you see as the role/editorial mission of Style.com?
To be editorial. Our role is to be a magazine on the Web. We are definitely not just a pick-up page, and we are not just dropping information at random. We do have content. We have an editorial staff. We do generate our own portfolios. We shoot. We have holiday portfolios, shopping portfolios. We run it like a magazine. We do have the [coverage of fashion] shows, which are basically how Style.com began, but we’ve added so many things, and we’ve changed the format, but I think if you were to say, “What site has an editorial point of view?” We certainly do. And we are the online home of Vogue, so we have the amazing access that Vogue has. I think that that’s why I’m there. I’m a Vogue girl that gives Style.com the Vogue access.

And it’s a testament to the authority of Style.com that WWD routinely indexes the popularity of designer collections based on the number of hits received on Style.com. What do you think are the key drivers of Internet traffic to certain collections? Sometimes the numbers don’t square with what I would expect in terms of the popularity of certain collections or designers.
Well, I think that culture plays a big part of that. For example, Marc Jacobs’ show is always going to up there, but it’s a phenomenon with Marc Jacobs. Whatever he does, his hits are phenomenal. It can be whatever he’s doing [in his Marc Jacobs line] or the Marc by Marc Jacobs line. He has a fan base, and even before he was at Vuitton, Marc had that kind of iconic, music/pop star value. And today, when you consider the Internet, it’s a very key thing that designers either want to or need to have. Marc has been everywhere, in music and different areas, so he’s kind of built himself a history and his own Web search in a way. There are times when you see things that are at the pulse of culture. Take politics today, look what’s happening. How does popularity in two days go from here to there? How can one person change the beat in minutes? That’s what it is, and it certainly has a lot to do with exactly what you and I are doing right now, bloggers, publicity.

Do you think that online popularity is correlated to commercial success for fashion lines or designers?

Basically, what I think that everybody who is designing fundamentally wants is attention. More attention means more brand awareness. More brand awareness means more people who go to the store and says, “Oh, that’s by Thakoon, I read all about him.” I think that there are lots of ways that this works. It’s maybe not as ching-ching right away, but it definitely builds an awareness, a familiarity. It’s a TV commercial. It’s television. You know, there are three monitors in this world right now: on your cell phone, your television, and your computer. You’ve got to deliver that message. People are walking around, plugging in, and sharing. And sharing is a great thing, because it’s word of mouth. So fashion as word of mouth. We’re making it in the electronic world sound like it’s the newest thing since cream cheese, but it isn’t, that’s word of mouth!

“If I could have 64 television monitors in front of me at all times and know what’s happening around the world, that would be thrilling.”

Do you read fashion blogs (other than those on Style.com)?
I read PopSugar, Fashionista, PopMatters, and The Huffington Post.

What do you think makes a good fashion blog?

Short and to the point. Not just wanting to hear yourself speak in print, and I think there’s a lot of that. We need writers.

What’s your advice to aspiring fashion journalists? What should they know about this field as they strive to progress within it?
You’ve got to love it, and you’ve got to want it. You’ve got to have passion. I always love someone who is not sitting there seeing the same thing as others, that thought to look beyond that, to find an angle to make their mark or to report something, and say, “Gotcha. Hey, those weren’t buttons, they were snaps!” That is a good fashion journalist.

Do you think that there are any jobs or organizations that serve as particularly good training grounds for aspiring fashion journalists?
Well, I think magazines, just because you see a little bit of everything. You see the clothes, you see the books, you see the art, you see the meetings, you see the traffic, you see the changes that occur within hours. You see editors editing words, you see the sense of urgency. The hours are long, the glamour is big. The demand is large. Also I think that any newsroom is good. I think [of] young interns in an NBC production suite. I think that anywhere news is being created is a fantastic arena to be in if you have that personality — that you can turn on a dime. For me, if I could have 64 television monitors in front of me at all times and know what’s happening around the world, that would be thrilling. I love breaking news. My major thing is, “What’s breaking now?” And if I can find that out and I can hang my hat on that and run, I can turn that into something interesting for you. You have to like that kind of stuff. Breaking news can affect fashion very quickly. The world is looking at fashion, and that’s great.

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Stephanie Murg is co-editor of UnBeige.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum write Unshelved, the library comic strip. Their book nerd humor cartoons have become a successful cottage industry. Their daily comic strip is made available for free to their loyal fans. That is subsidized by selling their own quirky shirts (“Read Irresponsibly” is one), ad space and their self-published books of their cartoons. What started as a Web site with 40 readers is now 40,000, and it’s an enormous success in its niche.

This past March, Barnes quit his day job at Microsoft to write and draw full time. But the old business model of being a syndicated newspaper cartoonist no longer exists. Barnes discusses the benefits of self-publishing, self-promotion and giving away content for free.

How did you become a full-time cartoonist?
Everybody has to create their own business model these days. Create something with a particular relevance to a specific audience. We appeal to book nerds and librarians. I can go to a convention with those people — BEA, American Library Association conferences, Comic Con. If you were to start Peanuts today, it’s hard to find those people, I don’t know — people with kids. But when people find our stuff, they know who it appeals to, and they’ll forward it to them. Before we send it out we think, “Will this be funny to anybody?” It’s character humor, and that’s what appeals to the core of our audience. Your core audience shares your humor and your interest. Maybe only one in 10,000 share our humor, but that’s good enough to support us.

How do you appeal to book nerds? What subjects are appealing to ‘them’ (I’m implying I’m not one)?

Censorship, National Novel Writing Month, local Authors, graphic novels; we tackle it all, and we do it with character-driven humor that makes the strips funnier the more of them you read. We strive to be addictive.

“I always wanted a comic strip and thought I’d use the old syndication model. Now I find myself folding shirts and selling ads.”

How were you able to finally quit the j-o-b?
There are four things that we need: Book sales, merchandise, speaking engagements and ad sales. We need all four to be full-time. Everybody has to be a merchandiser, Web designer, artist, writer, publicist and ad agency for their content. And not everybody is good at all those jobs. The cartoonist really has to be all those things. I always wanted to have a comic strip, and I thought I would use the old syndication model. Now I keep finding myself folding shirts and selling ads. It’s all fun. It’s just not what I imagined I’d be doing. I sleep well at night because I’m exhausted.

What about those who aren’t exactly (ahem) ‘Renaissance people’?
There are many successful, bright and capable cartoonists out there. Then there are talented cartoonists who can write up a storm — there is not right now a good business model for them. The great thing about the Internet is that it’s easier than ever to find people that want to hear your voice.

Do you have competitors? If so, who are they?

For advertising sales, I suppose we compete with Library Journal and the like. Shelf Awareness might be a competitor if they weren’t a partner. Above all, what we’re trying to do well is to create a top-notch comic strip with a big, loyal audience, then make money in as many ways as possible. I don’t view us as competing against other cartoonists for audience, though I do feel competitive on a creative level.

How do you integrate advertising into your site?

We do everything we can to make the ad a part of our content. We embed a relatively small banner within a word balloon “spoken” by a different character ever week, and each we introduce that week’s sponsor in the blog.

Our advertisers are companies trying to reach library workers and book nerds — mostly publishers (e.g. Macmillan, Random House, Harper Collins, Harlequin), but also service providers (W.T.Cox – sells magazines subscriptions to libraries). We tend to hand-pick sponsors we think are a good fit for our audience, and turn away ones that wouldn’t be.

But you’re a self-publisher — a successful one? What are the benefits of that?
We just sold over 25,000 books. The thing is I know where all my fans are. I have all their email addresses. I know they subscribe to the RSS feed. So when I want to sell a book, all I have to do is tell them that I have a book for sale. I’m not the greatest cartoonist — but I am a great self-promoter.

You guys do cartoon book reviews. Last I checked — 52 a year. Are there any other comic strips that review books?
Unshelved book club is unique. It just felt out of place not to be talking about books.

Do you ever give bad reviews?
We don’t review every book we read, if you can believe that. We only feature books that we are promoting. There are so many good books out there, why would we want to spend time on something that isn’t good?

What else do you read?

I read about a dozen comic strips regularly, watch some TV or movies on Hulu.com, and listen to a lot of music while I draw.

If I wanted to be a cartoonist, what would you recommend I read?

Three books: Making Comics by Scott McCloud; Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel, Matt Madden; and How to Make Webcomics by Scott Kurtz, Kris Straub, Dave Kellett, and Brad Guigar. The latter also do a great podcast called Webcomics Weekly.

I have to ask this: Where do you see your business in a year?

By the end of the year I want (and expect) Unshelved to be capable of supporting both Gene and me. I don’t know if he would quit his day job, but I’d like him to have the option.

And in five years?

In five years, we’ll have expanded our audience quite a bit and taken on a couple of other creative projects. The good news is that my day looks much the same whether we have 45,000 readers or 450,000. I’ll just charge more for ads, and maybe we’ll leverage the Unshelved brand a little more widely.

What would be the top — the pinnacle for you professionally?

An “I-can’t-live-without-this-comic-strip” review from a creator I really admire, cartoonist or otherwise (some possibilities: Scott Adams, Bill Amend, Garry Trudeau, Joss Whedon).

Final question: Can I be you?
Sorry. I’m taken.

Five tips for becoming a full-time cartoonist:
1. Be distinct. Make high-quality comics with a distinct voice.
2. Be reliable. Post comics on the Internet on a regular schedule.
3. Go viral. Distribute as virally as possible (email delivery, RSS feed, “send to a friend”).
4. Be relevant. Your cartoons should have broad appeal, but particular relevance to a specific group.
5. Get support. Give your readers lots of ways to support you.

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Tina Dupuy is co-editor of FishbowlLA.

Susan Johnston was a published playwright living in sin in Los Angeles, voting liberally, and writing scripts about her native West Virginia when she was hired by Nicole Sexton to write the book Party Favors. Her “fictional” inside look at the world of fundraising for the Republican Party (cue air quotes, eye-rolling and puh-leases.) This book is, in fact, a thinly veiled tell-all of extreme proportions. Let’s just say after reading it, I know who Senator Griswold really is. And after only using about a sixth of the 800 pages of transcribed interview material to write the book, the things Johnston (a yoga-practicing resident of Santa Monica with a bumper sticker announcing her “Redneck Liberal” status) knows about the apathetic, lazy and racist behavior of the rest of the country’s elected officials are sad, embarrassing, and yet somehow not surprising. More surprising is that Johnston’s debut novel as a ghostwriter was sold on a proposal, with her name right there on the cover.

The novel follows Temple Sachet, Sexton’s alter ego, all the way from girlhood to her rise to power as the director of finance for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to her present position raising money for a celebrity do-gooder. Sachet’s a tiny woman with incredible strength, bucket loads of sass, and layers of political savvy who sacrifices everything — her love life, sleeping in a bed, even all her earthly possessions — for a job she excels at, yet is increasingly unfulfilled, even horrified, by. Luckily, only those first couple things also apply to Johnston’s experience writing the book.

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Watch Susan Johnston offer her tips on being a great ghostwriter:

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When did you start writing Party Favors?

I was hired to write Party Favors in July, 2006. I had been working for Marty Richards’ company, The Producers Circle, (who produced Cabaret, Chicago, Sweeney Todd, and La Cage Aux Folles) developing new material for musicals and TV. [Richards] would hand me books or people, and ask me to interview them or look at the material and create treatments. From there he would decide whether or not it was something he wanted to actually produce or commission a script for. I’d done that for about three projects while interviewing celebrities for Interview and writing for A&E’s Biography series, so I had one foot in journalism, one foot in theater, and one foot in TV.

That’s three feet!

Yes, I had three feet — I’m remarkable that way.

“The only rule was: Just tell me the truth and then we’ll start from there. Those recordings are now locked up somewhere very safe because they could get some people in trouble!”

So is that how you connected with Nicole, through Marty Richards?

Yes, Marty had met Nicole’s mother and they went to the President’s dinner for George Bush. Marty is a liberal and he ended up on the dais table. He was so impressed being at the front of that room and seeing Nicole running the 7,000-person event, he thought, “Her life would make a good story.” So he asked me if I would talk to her. We had a few phone conversations and I said, “I think we need to meet in person.” I flew to New York and interviewed her for a week solid. The only rule was: Just tell me the truth and then we’ll start from there. Those recordings are now locked up somewhere very safe because they could get some people in trouble! After two hours of interviewing her, I knew we had a book.

Was Marty still involved at that point? When did you separate from him?

We just met and were doing exploratory interviews to figure out if there was a project there, and in that process Marty’s company shuttered [and] he retired. So we went ahead and continued to work on our own. He hadn’t optioned the story from her.

Who realized that there was a book there?

I’m not quite sure [of] the details. Either Nicole or Marty took the project to Darren Star Productions and said, “We think this is a television show.” This was before I even came on board. They took Nicole, brought her to the room and had her meet Darren Star and he said, “You need a book for this to work. You should do a book.” It makes sense that Darren Star would say that because he made Sex and the City, which was a book originally, so he felt that they needed source material. That’s why Marty brought me into the process. But to say that Marty ‘brought me into the process’ makes it seem like he was paying for me to be there, which he wasn’t. He just asked me to come meet with her because of other stuff I was doing for him.

When he suggested that you meet with her, was he suggesting that you write the book?

No, Nicole and I just clicked. When we spoke on the phone we just had a really good rapport with each other. Marty had spoken very highly of me and I think she felt she could trust me. We’re both Southern women [and] we had a very similar sensibility, so I think she just trusted that I was going to be the person for the material. Once we did a week of interviews, I mean, that’s like a week of intensive therapy. I tell people that I interview for the book process, “You’re going to tell me things you’ve never told your husband. You’re going to tell me things you’ve never told anyone.” And they do.

So after you stopped working with Marty, you formally started working for Nicole on a book proposal?

Yes, my contract was directly with Nicole. She hired me to take the interviews and turn them into a book proposal. Originally, the proposal was under the name ‘Anonymous with Susan Johnston.’ She didn’t want her name on the book at all because she wasn’t sure whether she was going to do it as a nonfiction book or a fiction book. Once she saw the fictionalized materials I created for the proposal, she was okay putting her name on it.

At what point in this process did you get an on-cover “with” writing credit instead of being an anonymous ghostwriter?

She just happens to be a very fair person, so the contract from the beginning said, “Nicole Sexton and Susan Johnston.” Once we sold the book to a publisher and they started dealing with publicity, they changed it to “Nicole Sexton with Susan Johnston” in order to make it clearer who needed to be the face of the book.

But it’s highly unusual — it’s not like I’m Hillary Clinton’s bio writer. This is essentially my debut novel and her debut novel. So it’s highly unusual for me to be credited on the cover, and it’s outrageously unusual to sell a fiction book off a book proposal.

How did you sell a fiction book off a book proposal without having a manuscript?

There were several issues at play: Nicole was highly placed within the Republican Party. Because she was so highly placed, people felt that she had a tell-all in her back pocket, so they were willing to listen to a pitch or look at the proposal even though the materials weren’t complete. It’s an election cycle, and this is a book about raising money for elections, so it was very timely. We knew we had to move really quickly. We met in 2006 and we sold the book in July 2007. Most of the publishers that we met with felt they didn’t have time to see an entire book — they needed to know whether they wanted it then.

“The day I got the edits back on the first half of the book, I stayed in bed for two days and cried. I had never seen so much blue on a page in my life. It was very tough to push through that.”

You had six months to write the book after you sold the proposal. What was your writing schedule like?

The writing schedule was insane. Relentless. I was very lucky — during the selling process, one of the things that was on the table, at my request, was a project editor. Because it was such a fast process and I had never written a novel before, I didn’t feel confident about doing that by myself in a room. I wanted to make sure that I had a really strong editor working with me directly to shape the book. So I ended up with an editor named Vanessa Mickan; I would take the raw interview material, write a chapter, send that to Vanessa, Vanessa would send it back with notes, I would rewrite, and that went on for six months. At the first draft I was writing 12 pages a day, on the second draft I was covering 24 pages a day, and on the third draft I was covering somewhere between 36 and 40 pages a day.

So you wrote three drafts in six months?

Oh I wrote way more than three drafts of the book. I would guess that some sections of that book have been rewritten 12 times. Probably the prologue was rewritten at least eight or nine times.

What was that process like for you? Was Nicole involved with the writing?

I would show her large chunks. Vanessa and I would work on the first 100, 125, 130 pages. Then I would send it to Maura [Teitelbaum, Susan’s agent at Abrams Artist Agency] and Nicole, then Maura would send me notes, Nicole would send me notes, Vanessa would send me more notes. Nicole would also send that chunk to her lawyers, and the lawyers would give us notes because they had real concerns about the material that was being put down on the page. So there was lots of feedback. Constantly.

How did you push through all that writing?

Well, I gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand! The day I got the edits back on the first half of the book, I stayed in bed for two days and cried. I had never seen so much blue on a page in my life. It was very tough to push through that. And then the last week of the book I was on Xanax, so that helped! I made it all the way to the last week, and then said, “I surrender! Somebody give me something!”

Because so much of the book seems to be based on real life people from the world of political fundraising, how much liberty did you have to fictionalize the material?

Campaign finance reform makes people fall asleep at their desks. I was encouraged to fictionalize as much as possible. We changed everything we could change — details of a person’s appearance, how they dressed, their ethnicity, age, weight — to ensure that no one could point to a character and say, “That’s me.” None of us want to be sued; the more I changed the better off we were, legally.

I think truth is more interesting than fiction, so I tried to keep the details of events she described as accurate as possible. Also, she’s a political insider, so there are details I have no possible way of knowing. I had the vice president and the president at the same dinner. She read that and said, “You need to change this. The vice president and the president are never in the same room at the same time. Secret Service will never allow that to happen because God forbid something were to happen, the country would be leaderless.”

What does it mean to have a platform, and how did you and Nicole draw on that to get the book deal?

This is the hot word in publishing right now, “What’s your platform?” When a writer comes into the room, a publisher wants to see what resources they have to sell their own book. Platform is ‘How are you, the writer, going to sell your book to the country?’, not ‘How is the publisher going to sell your book?’ It’s, ‘If we publish this book for you, how are you personally going to sell the book for us?’ Nicole was the finance director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, so we knew that she had resources in D.C. in terms of her political connections. Part of our platform was [that] she could get jacket cover quotes from politicians, senators, and political pundits who are famous names. The publisher wants to hear that you have a publicist already on your team, that you will hire a media coach so that you’re prepped for your interviews on television, that you’re going to do radio interviews, your own book tour, and book parties. They want to see that you are going to be the marketing engine behind your book.

Basically, “Are you going to sink a lot of your own money into your book?”

Yes. They’re asking, ‘How much money are you willing to put behind your own book?’ And it applies to everything, not just memoirs. It’s absolutely the way that publishing is being done now. You have to be able to prove that you can get the press done for your own book and get your own media buzz created, because really, the publishers don’t do that anymore.

We’re very lucky because we’re a debut novel that was picked up by a publisher that’s never done fiction before, and they wanted to use us as their anchor book. We wanted to go with a smaller house because we knew we would get more attention than at the bigger houses. We ended up with a smaller publisher that was trying to break into a new market, and they’ve put a great deal of support behind us in ways that most people who have a debut novel don’t get. What we’re experiencing is definitely better than the industry standard.

What kind of advertising and promotion did the publisher provide? How much have you and Nicole done on your own?

The publisher has done a Web site for us, put ads in several newspapers and magazines, sent galleys out for book reviews, and brought us to the Book Expo of America. Nicole has hired her own publicist; she threw the New York book party, she’s throwing a D.C. book party, there’s going to be an L.A. book party which is being hosted by a donor friend of hers, and we’re tagging along to the One Campaign parties that are happening at the conventions. It’s almost like the icing on the cake is what you have to do, and the publisher bakes the cake. They get the book done, they get the jacket cover done, they do all the production elements of it, and all the basic sales and marketing within their own world of publishing and book sales — they got us on the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It’s that extra push of getting yourself on television, radio and in print media that you have to take on and do.

How has the amount of press that you’ve been able to get affected your career and the trajectory of the novel so far?

The thing that has happened from the press that we’ve gotten is TV and film interest in the book as a property. So just from the limited, I mean it’s only been on the shelves three weeks? Four weeks now? We had a bunch of meetings with production companies in Los Angeles who are interested in taking the book and adapting it to television and film.

With film companies and TV studios vying for the property, will you be able to stay attached as the writer? Will Nicole stay attached in some way?

We’ll have a better shot of staying attached if we move towards television. It’s essential for Nicole to stay attached because there are no other fundraisers in the business who are telling these stories. They just don’t do this. They take 15 percent off the top of everything they raise; if they’re raising $95 million, they’re walking away with 14 of it at least, so why would anybody ever leave the business? It’s really essential to have Nicole in the room with you as the writer. TV moves so quickly, [and] you want the authenticity of the world. So yes, I think Nicole will stay attached as a consulting producer. I absolutely want to stay attached because I feel so connected to these characters that we’ve created. There’s nobody that knows those characters better than I do — I lived with them non-stop for almost two years! Plus, I’ve been writing dramatic material for 10 years as a playwright and television writer. It’s funny, after working as a dramatist for 10 years, now I’m being referred to as a novelist.

Is it Nicole’s decision which production company you go with? How much input do you have?

We present ourselves as a team to these companies. Nicole wants to keep me attached because she feels I’ve been very protective of her and her story. She’s comfortable with me and the way I handle the material. Ultimately, Nicole owns the project because she’s the one who has the contract with the publisher. But whatever ends up moving forward, I’m lucky enough to get 50 percent of the royalties. The story is based so much on who she is that we have to be protective of the material so that we can guarantee the authenticity of what gets put on the screen. Sometimes, unfortunately, you take it to Hollywood and authenticity goes flying out the window at the expense of dramatic action or —

Sex, drugs and rock and roll?

Yes, exactly. For TV the material will get sexier and dirtier, and it has to. That’s okay.

How else will the material change from the form it takes in the book if it moves to the screen, big or small?

The first half of the book is entirely flashback. It’s the story of how she got into the job that she’s in. For film and TV you don’t have the luxury of being able to go back 15 years and explore. So the book gets us to go inside her head, which you can’t do for film and TV. It allows us to go back to when she was kid and talk about how she ran for Little Miss Valentine and how that was her first Get Out The Vote experience. Those things are part of her back story as a character in television, but they’re not relevant to what you’re going to see on the screen. Half of the book gets tossed out as soon as we walk into the room for a TV meeting. So the second half of the book is what we’re looking at — a moral woman in an immoral world.

Many characters in the book are thought to be inspired by real players on the political scene — who on Capitol Hill and beyond inspired you and Nicole as you developed your characters?

I can’t legally answer that question since I signed a confidentiality agreement, but I would say anybody, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, who does a minimal amount of research about Nicole’s career will be able to figure out where the events took place, when those events happened, and who might have been in the room.

So for Nicole to do what she’s doing is really an act of bravery. She wanted to expose what’s happening when the guy at TJ Maxx writes his $50 check once a month and sends it in. She would look at those SEC reports and she would start crying because she knew where that $50 was going. It was going to build condos for other fundraisers in Sedona, Arizona, it was going to pay polling companies, it was going to buy a chicken dinner for a donor who’s given more money. It’s not going for politics or to the candidate you believe in. So at a certain point she said, “I can’t do this anymore and, in fact, I actually have to shine a spotlight on it and say, “Something here needs to change.” So what we hope we’ve done is create this little beach read of a book that actually turns out to be kind of subversive. At the end hopefully you say, “Wow! I don’t think I should write anymore checks because now I know where that money’s going.”

Do you think the people who are upset about the book, are so because they think the reader will be able to discern people’s identities or because, and I guess it could be both, now they need to change how they do their jobs?

The fundraisers have said to her, “You’re making our job harder. And you’ve told our secrets.” During our pitch meetings in Hollywood — Fundraisers just see this [Hollywood] as a bank, they don’t care what your politics are, they’ll take a check from you whether you’re on the right side of the aisle or the left side of the aisle. So, we had a meeting with a producer who was very active within the political fund-raising community. And when we walked out of the room I turned to Nicole and said, “That person’s a bundler.” And she started laughing — that’s a fundraiser term. I had said that he is someone fundraisers look at and say, “That person can get 50 people to write a check.” They’re considered a ‘bundler.’ It was so easy to reduce that person’s power with one word. And that’s how fundraisers talk about their donors. Revealing that in a book is damaging because donors like to feel like they have a personal relationship with their senators. And that personal relationship happens through the fundraiser. And if they knew the fundraiser was just seeing them as a financial dollar amount they probably wouldn’t feel so good about handing that check over. They consider it a personal relationship and it’s not. They’re just a dollar amount. It’s not true with every fundraiser, but for the most part it’s a business. I probably should not have told you that.

What’s next for Susan Johnston?

The book that I’m working on now is an examination of San Francisco socialite society, Knob Hill. Hopefully the next step is to move into television for Party Favors. We’d get to show a part of D.C. which is all about the parties, and the drinking, and the who’s sleeping with who, and who’s cheating on whom, and these are the people that you’re paying to run the country and they are just as flawed and just as human as everybody else. To see the money you’re sending in to these parties believing that it will help, turned into tuxedos and sequined gowns and parties that you’re not invited to. I also have a play, How Cissy Grew, starring James Denton from Desperate Housewives, which will be at the El Portal Theatre in Los Angeles in October, and then possibly adapted into a movie.

Susan Johnston’s five tips for being a good ghostwriter:
1. Learn how to be a good interviewer and listener. If you can get people to talk, and keep talking, you can get some really great stories.

2. Figure out what your platform is before you even write the book proposal. You will not sell your book unless you can convince them that you yourself can sell the book.

3. You need to know how involved you want to be with your material. For me I really loved this world, I liked Nicole a lot, and I wanted to stay attached. So when I came to the contract process I really fought to stay attached. But some ghostwriters just want to write the thing and hand it over and not have their name on it.

4. Make sure Hollywood knows it exists. Don’t assume that they’re going to find you. Make sure that every press clip gets forwarded to everybody in the industry. You have to let them know. Yes, some of them are doing their jobs and snooping around trying to find material, but why not just hand it to them? It makes it easier on everybody. So it’s like learning to do publicity within your own market, within your own trade.

5. Once the book is out on the shelves, your job is not over. You have about three months for the book to be successful before the bookstores start sending it back. So you have to do everything in your power to get as much press as you possibly can in the first three months.

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Andrea Wachner is a Los Angeles-based TV writer.

For someone who says she got into writing for lack of any other discernible job skills, Mary Roach has done pretty well for herself. After whipping out stories for the likes of Wired, Discover, Vogue, and GQ, Roach launched a book-writing career in 2003 with the runaway bestseller Stiff, which looked into the myriad ways cadavers are used in science and medicine after their previous occupants have passed on. Her latest book Bonk, about sex research, made a splash earlier this year, especially after reviewers and talk show hosts discovered that, as part of her research, Roach (and her husband) agreed to be the first-ever subjects for a study using ultrasound to scan genitalia “in the act,” as it were.

An early PR gig for the San Francisco Zoo primed the Bay Area-based Roach to explain obscure phenomena, like elephant wart surgery, to lay audiences. She freelanced on the side, initially with Image, the former San Francisco Chronicle / Examiner Sunday magazine, and eventually with national glossies like Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, and The New York Times Magazine. Roach, who’s known for her quirky take on subjects at the periphery of polite discourse, gained celebrity for her former health and medicine column at Salon, where editors gave her the latitude to write about whatever caught her fancy. In return, they received pieces on subjects other publications might never have touched: vaginal weight-lifting, amputee bowling, and ultra-helpful Japanese toilets.

Stiff became a New York Times bestseller and made the 2003 best books lists at Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Seattle Times, among others. Her second book, Spook, about research into the paranormal, was also a NYT bestseller and notable book of 2005.

Roach is currently at work on a fourth book, the topic of which she is currently keeping to herself. mediabistro.com caught up with her to discover the secret of how to springboard from freelance scribe to bestselling author.

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If you had to boil it down, why do you think your books have done so well?
Part of the reason the second two are successful is because the first one was. It establishes you. It makes it a lot easier. The difficult part is the first book, getting people to pay attention and check you out, because no one knows who you are and what you do.

The reason Stiff was successful was a combination of things. It’s a subject that people are inherently fascinated by, because everybody dies. Also, it’s a taboo subject. Especially at that time. Six Feet Under had just debuted. I remember saying the in the proposal, “There’s this new series Six Feet Under that seems to be doing pretty well. The taboo is breaking down. It’s becoming OK for people to indulge their curiosity about being dead.” There was that timing phenomenon. That was serendipity. That wasn’t me figuring out, “Here’s a good time to pitch a book.”

“For a first book to succeed, word-of-mouth is critical.”

So it’s a topic that’s of interest, a taboo topic, that everybody is curious about. But I don’t think that’s enough, because there was another book that came out around the same time called Corpse which did well, but didn’t do as well. I think the combination of death and humor was so unexpected that it got people talking. And I think for a first book to succeed, word-of-mouth is critical. Norton did a fantastic job with publicity. They gave it a good launch. I did a book tour. But nobody showed up at my readings. Nobody knew who I was. And the book didn’t hit the bestseller list until months later. It was a good launch; they did everything right. But the book began to snowball due to word-of-mouth and the strangeness of freshness of that combination of tone — humorous — and subject matter — dead people — that was unexpected. People talk about books that are surprising and fresh.

When you came up for the idea for Stiff, had you been looking for a book idea?
I’d been looking for a book idea for five years — or more. It was probably in the back of my mind the whole time I was in magazines. But I have a very short attention span, and I don’t do narrative stories. I don’t do the kind of feature that you see in the New York Times Magazine or Vanity Fair, which is an in-depth profile or narrative story. My style is a strange hybrid of science writing, humor, and first-person. I didn’t see it as lending itself to a book. There were no books out there that seemed to be a role model for me. So I would try to come up with something that would seem like what other books out there were like, and I couldn’t picture myself doing them.

[An agent] once contacted me and said, “We want to pair you up with a professor who’s written a book about how the apple in the Garden of Eden is really a pomegranate.” And I’m like, “First of all, who’s going to read this book?” And second, “Why would I do this? How does that overlap with my work or my style or my interests?” I was frustrated by the whole thing.

The other thing that happened was that I told an agent, “I don’t know how to do a proposal. I need some guidance.” And they sent me the proposal for Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which is that thick [her thumb and forefinger are an inch apart]. It put me off books for years. I thought, “My God, you have to spend two years researching and writing this thing. It’s all on spec. What if no one buys it?” Well, as it turns out, you can throw together a 10-page piece of crap, and as long as it’s snappy and interesting…

“It was really shame and fear of failure that prompted me. I said, ‘Alright. You’re just going to write a frickin’ proposal.'”

Is that what you did?
I wrote 10 pages, 15 pages, double-spaced. Most of the stuff in the proposal didn’t end up in the book, because I really hadn’t done much research. But it’s a sales tool, and I threw the most interesting, intriguing, sexy dead-body stuff I could find at them. And they said, “Yeah.” My agent took it around, and people were interested. But for a long time, I was just intimidated by the whole process.

What was the a-ha moment with Stiff?
You want to know why it happened? It’s really pathetic. When I was at the Grotto [a writing community in San Francisco], every New Year‘s, three of us would go to lunch and we would make predictions for other people in the Grotto. So-and-so will have a movie deal. So-and-so will be married. So they made the prediction for me that I would have a book contract.

So time goes by. It’s October, and I realize I don’t have a book contract. In January, we would take out the list and go, “So-and-so didn’t get a book contract. So-and-so did get married.” So it was really shame and fear of failure that prompted me. I said, “Alright. You’re just going to write a frickin’ proposal.” An agent had contacted me, based on the Salon column, and said, “Do you have any book ideas?” We had a bunch of conversations. Stiff grew out of one of those conversations — and a desire not to be humiliated at the January 1 Grotto lunch. You need something, because the thing with a proposal is you don’t have a deadline. A deadline is a great motivator. But there’s no deadline on a book proposal, so you put it off.

The timing with Stiff was perfect, though, because I announced the deal at that lunch.

How did the Salon column come about?
David Talbot, the founder of Salon, used to be an editor at Image. Somebody at the Grotto had just gotten a contract to write a column there. So I sent him an email and said, “I hear you’re handing out column contracts. Let’s have lunch.”

Salon was so great. He was just like, “Yeah, OK, whatever you want to do, however you want to write. Just go ahead and do it.” It was so liberating because I’d been used to writing for more traditional magazines.

Do you have any takeaways based on your magazine experience?
The great thing about writing for magazines is that editors move around a lot. They don’t stick in one job that long. They tend to move up the ladder, and, logically, if they tend to like working with you, if they like your work, they’ll take you with them — which is so much easier than trying to write a query letter to an editor that you don’t know and who doesn’t know you.

I read somewhere that part of the initial idea for Stiff came out of the Salon column.
There were three cadaver-related columns, and the hit rates were really high. So that was a consideration. [It meant that] obviously I wasn’t the only person who found this stuff interesting. And that’s important when you’re thinking about a book — unless you just want to publish a book for your own personal satisfaction. If you’re trying to earn a living as an author, it’s important to consider the subject matter and try to envision who’s going to buy this book.

So Stiff was very successful. How did that play into Spook‘s trajectory? Did the publishers come back and say, “Hey, it’s been a great success. What do you want to do next?” Or were you already thinking about it?
I submitted another proposal. When you’ve done your first book, the proposal for the second book can be very sketchy. You know, they’re eager for you to get another book out there. If the first book is successful, they don’t call you up and harangue you about, “When are you going to get the book out?” or “When are you going to have another idea?” But they definitely like to have the second book. When the second book comes out, it boosts the sale of the first book.

So it’s like pitching. Once you have a relationship with an editor, you don’t have to submit fully fleshed-out queries.
Exactly.

So did you pitch Spook before Stiff came out, or after?
I sent the proposal for Spook just before Stiff launched. There’s a certain amount of strategy that goes into that. Nobody knew how well Stiff was going to do. So you can wait to see if your stock shoots up and then get the proposal out there. But if the book fails miserably, then you’re doomed for the second book. So I was riding a certain amount of anticipatory momentum for Stiff. People were excited about it, so we pitched it then, rather than waiting to see how it did. It was more of a sure thing.

“With your second book, you’re flying high. You’re thinking, ‘I can write about anything. People love me. They’ll buy my book.'”

Where did the pre-launch excitement come from?
There was a certain amount of buzz in the industry. They have a pretty good sense of how things are going well before a book comes out. From the sales reps, from the bookstores. All the ordering has been going on for a couple months beforehand, so there’s feedback going on in the industry.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Many writers toiling in the trenches assume that, if they can get a bestselling book, they’ll be set financially. But money is sometimes a funny thing in this racket, especially when advances don’t always cover the several years it takes to crank out a book. Do you make a living at this?
I make a very good living. The books have done well. But when all I was doing was freelance magazine writing, I always managed to make a living at it, sometimes even a good living. I would do a mix of things that I really loved doing and that didn’t pay all that well, like Salon, and then I would work for the women’s magazines, which paid very well, but were annoying, for various reasons.

What you’ve accomplished is what a lot of writers would like to accomplish. There’s always the fantasy that, “If I could just do what she did, then my life would be perfect.” And yet, there are downsides to any job. So fill in the blank: Don’t do this job unless you like or can deal with X.
Don’t do this job unless you like or can deal with chronic self-doubt, anxiety, self-loathing. (Laughs) It’s like what I’m going through right now with this new book: This nagging sense that nobody’s going to be interested in it, so it constantly needs to be better — that I need to get out there and find better stuff.

So it never goes away?
No. What happens is, with your second book, you’re flying high. You’re thinking, “I can write about anything. People love me. They’ll buy my book.” Well, no, people have to be interested in the subject matter, and it’s got to really work. It’s not enough that your first book did well. With your second book, you are somewhat immune. And when it doesn’t do as well as the first book, then you’re completely horrified and brought down to earth. And then you go back into the cycle of self-doubt and self-loathing.

I’ve got volumes of stuff for the first half of this next book. I know what I want to include, but I can’t figure out how to order it, what’s going to work as the narrative structure for this chapter, following on that chapter, while enabling me to pull this stuff in. I know I’ll figure it out, but it’s just driving me crazy.

Do you have a methodology for working through that?
No, it’s just time. I write outlines, and I abandon them. I write another outline, and I abandon it. And I keep thinking along the way, “Now I’ve got it.” But I get more information, and I’m like, “No, I don’t have it.” It’s getting there. I’m much closer than I was before, but it’s really agony. The end result, though, if you beat yourself long enough and stick with it, is that it will work, and it will be good. And people think, “Hey, this reads like you just sat down, and it all came out.”

So what you’re saying is, it’s not really as easy as it looks.
Yeah, it’s not as easy as it looks.

“I knew that that’s the scene that people will talk about and would absolutely drive the publicity. So, even though it was incredibly awkward, it had to happen.”

Bonk just launched. What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened since it came out?
A number of sex researchers have written to me to say how much they loved it. I didn’t expect it. I thought the reading public would enjoy it. But I thought that sex researchers, because they are MDs or psychologists, and the books and papers that they write, there’s no humor in them obviously — everything I’ve read is quite soberly presented — I thought they would not appreciate the tone that I took and feel it was somehow belittling. Anyway, it’s been really nicely received by that community. And people have even written to say, “Thank you for writing a book that’s funny.” That’s been really gratifying, because those are your harshest critics, people who already know all this stuff. They know the material.

Any insights into why they had that response?
I just think they enjoyed it. It was funny, but it was also accurate.

You’ve talked about how, with Stiff, you were trepidatious about approaching researchers who work with cadavers because they don’t necessarily want publicity.
Yes, same with Bonk.

You’ve also said you’re so grateful when people actually do agree to be interviewed. When they have all the reasons in the world to say no, why do you think they say yes?
I think they say yes because, by and large, people are decent and giving. I can’t come up with any other reason. To a certain extent, people are flattered that you are interested in their work. Or they feel that their work should be given more notice. They would like to have more recognition. These people work really hard, and I think sometimes they feel under-recognized. So if somebody’s going to take their work and expose it to a broader audience, they’re grateful for that. But I always figured that would be tempered by the fear that you would present it in a way that doesn’t take it seriously or isn’t accurate. I’m always amazed that people tend to, ultimately, say yes. And that they’re optimistic about the end product.

Now, though, a lot of them have read Stiff. I expect them to go, “I’ve read Stiff, and I don’t want anything to do with you because what I do is sensitive, and you’re not very sensitive.” But, in fact, people are wonderfully receptive to being in another book. Of course, there are a tremendous amount of people who never return my emails. But I don’t know if the emails have gone into a Spam box, or somebody just looked at my bio and said, “Yeah, I don’t think so.” But it is extraordinary to me the number of people who say yes when there’s every good reason to say no.

Tell me about a killer element in Stiff, Spook, or Bonk where you’re like, “Thank God I got that, because the book would have been so much less without it.”
For Stiff, I really, really, really needed to have the severed head lab [where Roach observes plastic surgeons practicing surgical techniques on human heads that have been separated from their bodies]. That’s the scene that everybody remembers. A roomful of people working on severed heads. It’s an inconceivably surreal, bizarre, fascinating scene, and I needed to get it. It was really hard. I initially contacted the organizer of the seminar who said, “You need to talk to the surgeon.” The surgeon never wrote back; surgeons are busy people. Finally, I found another surgeon who was going to be there, and I tried flirting with him. I ended up having to cash in a favor. I had done a story that had to do with a plastic surgeon, and I emailed him and said, “Do you know anybody on this list and can you help me?” And he did, and he got me in there.

For Bonk, the [sex] scene with Ed and me, which just fell into my lap. I’d read this one line in a Lancet article, saying, “In the future, I’m going to do a scan of human genital organs in coitus.” I wrote them and asked, “Can I be there for this historic event?” And [the researcher] said, “Well, we don’t have any volunteers.” And I knew that that’s the scene that people will talk about and would absolutely drive the publicity. So, even though it was incredibly awkward, and I feel so guilty putting my husband through it, it had to happen.

I noticed that you do a lot of interviews with random bloggers. That’s very generous. It takes time. Why do you it?
Blogs are equivalent to word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is how books catch on and do well. I also do it because, for the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, “I’d like to interview you,” who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, “Hello, you don’t know me. I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?” I think it’s this golden rule of being a writer/journalist, so I say yes.

Do a search for “Mary Roach” on Google, and the results are 50 percent you and 50 percent the semi-notorious American Idol competitor from Season Four. Has that ever caused any complications in real life?
Only in that, around the time I wanted to do a Web site, American Idol had bought one of the main Mary Roach URLs. It pissed me off. I had to wait until it expired.

What has happened more is that there’s another Mary Roach in Oakland [who has a very similar email address to Roach’s]. She’s kind enough to steer people in my direction. And she’s listed in the phone book, and I’m not, so she gets calls from people asking her to come to their benefits.

How to leap from magazine writing to books:
1. Entertain yourself. Find a subject you’re excited about, not just something that you know would make a good book. “You’re going to be with it for at least two years,” Roach says. “Hold back until you find something that is really compelling to you.”
2. Entertain others. Choose a subject that’s going to be interesting to others as well. If your topic doesn’t have an audience, the book is not going to sell. Try looking at past articles you’ve written. Which ones got really good responses? If possible, check Web logs and find the pieces that got lots of hits. Roach knew she was on to something when the dead-body-related columns she wrote for Salon generated spikes in traffic.
3. Do your thing. Trust your own voice and own way of writing. Roach put off writing a book for years because the kinds of nonfiction on the market weren’t the kind of writing she did, and she doubted she’d be successful trying to shoe-horn herself into a style that didn’t come naturally to her. Instead, she waited until she and an agent came up with an idea that was a good fit.
4. Just do it. Force yourself to sit down and pound out your proposal. It’s easy to procrastinate when no one’s actually waiting for your document. If necessary, do what Roach did and create an artificial reason for urgency. If the prospect of humiliating yourself in front of friends isn’t enough of an incentive, try the wallet. Promise five people you’ll pay them $100 each if you haven’t completed your proposal by a certain date.
5. Think “word-of-mouth.” When no one knows you, your best marketing is going to come in the form of personal recommendations from one reader to another. Include material in your book, like the severed head lab in Stiff or the sex scene in Bonk, that will get people talking. And be generous with bloggers who ask for interviews. You’ll get more bang for the buck doing an interview with a blogger — even if they only have 50 readers — than you will flying across the country for a bookstore reading where only two people show up.

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E.B. Boyd is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

Recently laid-off staffers at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, the LA Times and The Seattle Times might want to pay attention: a buyout does not necessarily mean a slow, painful march to journalistic insignificance. Sometimes, it’s just the thing to reinvent your career.

Last November, after more than 20 years as a TV critic at major newspapers, David Bianculli found himself out of a job. The Daily News, where Bianculli had worked for almost 15 years, failed to renew his contract for reasons both financial and creative (more on that below). When it was first suggested that he start a Web site, he discounted the idea as “so LA.” But as more and more people recommended it, he made the move — despite having no Web experience.

The site launched on Nov. 5, 2007 — the same day the writers strike began.
Called TVWorthWatching.com, it focuses on reviewing and discussing quality television — not on panning the latest reality crap. “It says something when the domain name TVWorthWatching.com is still available,” he said. “It’s an underreported area.” The site includes daily recommendations on what to watch, a frequently updated blog, DVD and TV reviews, and the highly entertaining TV jukebox, which plays WAV files of classic TV themes.

This isn’t Bianculli’s only gig — he writes a column for Broadcasting and Cable, frequently subs for Terry Gross on the National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and will start teaching full-time at Rowan University this fall. Now that several other critics are finding themselves without a paper or magazine to call home, and since other newspapers as a whole are having trouble adjusting to the Internet, Bianculli’s foray into online journalism is an experiment worth watching.

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Name: David Bianculli
Position: TV critic
Resume: NPR’s Fresh Air (1987- ), Broadcasting & Cable (2008- ),
TVWorthWatching.com (2007- ), New York Daily News (1993-2007), New York Post
(1987-93), Philadelphia Inquirer (1983-87), Akron Beacon Journal (1980-83), Ft.
Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel (1977-80), Gainesville Sun (1975-77)
Birth date: November 15, 1953
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Education: B.S. (Journalism), M.A. (Journalism & Communications), both from the University of Florida, Gainesville
First section of the Sunday Times: “Week in Review” – specifically, Frank Rich
Favorite TV show: Lost, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Guilty pleasure: Sleeping
Last book you read: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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As your own editor, how do you keep yourself from going overboard after being a slave to column inches and deadlines for so many years?
I’m not as caught up in the length — I realize it’s bottomless, but the excitement for me being my own boss is if I think something is a good idea, I don’t have to justify it, and I can do it. There are ways where it’s good, and there are ways where it’s bad. The bad way is I think ‘Well, during the writer’s strike, I’ve got to write all of the late night talk shows.’ That’s an additional six hours a night on top of everything else I’ve been doing just to stay current. Had I still been working for the New York Daily News, I wouldn’t have done that. There would have been no reason to, because it wouldn’t have gotten in the paper. Figuring out what to do with my freedom has been one of my biggest challenges — not to go too far.

Has your critical voice changed?
No matter what paper was employing me, I’ve always written for myself. I’ve never changed my voice or tone to match my employer. So I don’t change the way that I’m writing, but I have found that there’s a freedom in that whatever I want to write about, I can. That minimizes the pain of writing for yourself and being under-compensated.

What’s your readership like, and how does that affect revenue?
At this point, the number of readers you need for an ad base is like 60,000 readers, and this past month I was below that, at 30 [thousand]. I was larger before. It’s like when you try to lose weight and you don’t look at the scale; I haven’t looked for months. The daily traffic is between one and 3,000. It’s still what I consider very low based on what I was used to at the Daily News and what I hope it will grow into. The people who have it as favorites and signed up for the email blasts is up to 1,000-2,000 readers, but I haven’t emailed anyone. I don’t want to annoy anyone!

One thing I didn’t expect that’s become apparent now that it’s nine months in: the readers that I do have are gratifyingly intelligent. The comments, the responses — especially when I’m asking for opinions — has been really heartening.

Did you sit down and write out a business plan?
I had a two-point plan, and it turns out the third point is the one that came through first, and was the only one I hadn’t considered. The first thought was, ‘There’s only two ways of making money.’ If I’m reviewing things — box sets, CD, theme songs — and I put a link to Amazon.com and they go straight from my site to buy it, Amazon gives you this four percent kickback. It’s nothing if you do it with 100 people, it’s not much if you do it for a 1,000, but if you grow exponentially, after a while that’s a good thing. I don’t expect that, but I wanted to review the stuff anyway, so I figured [I’d] at least implement that.
The other thing was the potential for advertising. There’s a division that should always exist between editorial and advertising. I’m doing it partway the right way in that no advertising will ever influence what I write or don’t write. But where I [thought I would] allow the wall to be semi-permeable is [by not accepting] any advertising for any show or network that I don’t support.

The funny thing is I got my first ad and, in terms of setting my ad policy, I asked my readers. They had a different plan than I did. They weren’t concerned. I was saying that my idea was I wasn’t going to accept any advertising from any show I didn’t like and seeing if they would trust me as readers, but the feedback I got from them was that if ABC was foolish enough to advertise Wipeout on my site, then I ought to take the money and run.

The third way that I haven’t thought of is that the Web site would advertise me. I hadn’t considered that. I thought ‘Well, I’ve been around.’ But the Web site has people seeing me in a different way. Now I’m writing a weekly column for Broadcasting and Cable and doing two or three blog things for them, and all of it will refer to the Web site. A couple of times, I’ve been interviewed by [Fresh Air] host Terry Gross, and she was kind enough to mention the Web site and ask me about it, and horary for public radio. Every time there’s a mention like that, there’s a big spike in people who check it out.

“I would love for this site to be the Gilligan’s Island for castaway TV critics.”

Is it difficult to get into the business aspect of marketing the site after having spent so much time in editorial mode?
I’m right at the phase where I’ve got to find someone to do marketing and advertising. Since I’ve launched, I’ve focused on nothing but editorial. My focus was to have something new on the site every day, having a reason for the readers to come back, and to build a reputation — then to deal with my everyday life, and if I have time, do the other stuff. [PBS’s] POV came to me and wanted an ad, and it’s now running for the second month. Now I can go to places and say look, this is a place where people advertise. In my career, I have a lot of friends at the networks that I could ask, but I don’t want to go to them. I want someone else to — but I don’t know who that is. If it’s not me, it’s easier to say no, but I suppose in these economic times, it’s easy to say no to everyone.

It’s still very early. I don’t know if I’m being too patient, but I always thought it was a two-year launch. I had to prove to people that I would still be here, and then have enough of a body so that if a cable network wanted to advertise, they could go back through one or two or three months and see what I was about.

When you left the Daily News, you were quoted as saying they gave you an offer you couldn’t accept.
Yes, a “reverse godfather.”

A lot of people were talking about the decision in financial terms. But in some interviews, it also sounded like content-wise there were some considerations in play.

I think it was a mixture of things. I tried not to take it personally, and you look at what’s happened [to] so many TV critics of my era with decades of experience. This is happening to a lot of us, where people are saying it’s cheaper to get someone else or we want to go into a different direction. Or the history that we know maybe doesn’t resonate with the readers we want to attract. Diplomatically the best thing I can say is, where I was trying to work it out so that I could stay, it really did became clear that where the paper was planning on heading: ‘No.’

Do you think mainstream criticism is going down a snarky route, being nasty for the sake of nastiness?

Mainstream stuff not so much. I see a reliance upon more of that in stories. The reviews, the TV Critics Association as a body I think is still in pretty good shape. It’s just really nobody knows — no one in the television industry, no one in the newspaper industry –knows what’s happening next. A friend of mine, Jon Storm, (who is still the television critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer), [and I] came out of some news conference where they were talking about how to attract young people to evening newscasts, and he looked at me and said, “We’re an industry that doesn’t know what it’s doing, covering an industry that doesn’t know what it’s doing.” Newspapers are all trying to do the same thing — attract the next generation of readers and in some ways repelling the readers they do have and not playing to their own strengths. On the Web site, I’m really finding different ways to do what I know how to do, and hoping there’s still enough people who want it.

So what is that?
I can see how you’d be befuddled. It’s presenting a clear and hopefully authoritative point of view and being as journalistically objective as possible.

“I didn’t know at the time where I was going to land, if I was going to land, I was basically out of a plane with no parachute. My approach, rather than curl up in a fetal position and die, was to say, ‘Here are all the different things I can pursue.'”

What has the response been to your site?
It’s been really gratifying. One of my favorites: two months in, one of the people writing in just complimented the other people who were writing in. They said, I just wanted to say, ‘I like your site and everything, but I really like the people who write back to you, because they write in complete sentences and have interesting thoughts.’ And I went back and looked over the letters, and I’ll be damned, there was no shorthand and they knew how to spell and I took that for granted, but you don’t see that on a lot of sites. That’s been really gratifying, and I think some people have been following me in one place or another for 15-20 years, and they thought it was fun to come along. It’s still young – it’s a mom and pop operation and there’s no mom, so it’s still coming along.

Do you have technical staff?
I have two people that are helping me do the site — one guy that’s designing it and one guy that’s done all the computer magic. Those poor guys… The designer is Eric Gould — an architect in Boston. He never designed a Web site before. He’s an old friend of mine, and I was talking to him about the difficulty in finding a designer. I’d found one that was willing to do in six months for 40K, one who couldn’t start for three months and would do it for 30K. And it was like, this is not what I’m imagining. I talked to [Eric] and said I guess if I’m going to have to find a designer, I’m going to have to come with really good visual aids as to what I want. What I do is the equivalent of cave paintings and stick figures, and I do things on my computer that aren’t anything like real web sites.
I sent him a couple of pages, and he said, ‘Let me play with this.’ And what he sent down a few hours later looked like a Web site page. I called him up and said, “What do I have to do to get you to not do this just to show it to someone else, but just to do this for me?”

He’s really brilliant, but he doesn’t know anything about computers. So I found another guy who’s brilliant with computers but doesn’t know anything about design — Chris Spurgen. His day job is programming with Disney Web sites, so I talk to him and he says, ‘Sorry, I had to spend the day putting up a Hannah Montana Web site, and I got a million and half hits in the first 20 minutes,’ and its like, okay, now back to mine.

Are you learning the technical end?
I’ve learned the technical stuff to put up the photos and put up the article. It’s annoying, but it’s going okay. It’s not what I was trained to do, not perhaps the best use of my time, but if you don’t get it up there, the readers won’t come back.

Why a Web site? Why not just teach, or write a book, or find work at another paper?
In retrospect, that’s a very good question. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t know at the time where I was going to land, if I was going to land, I was basically out of a plane with no parachute. My approach, rather than curl up in a fetal position and die, was to say, ‘Here are all the different things I can pursue.’ I don’t know what will happen, I don’t know what will become a reality, I don’t know what will become satisfying, so I went in a lot of different directions. And the Web site was one, where perhaps because it was more under my control than most, was realized. It won’t be smart unless it’s a financial success, but I’m proud of it.

Between getting another writer and getting the advertising, it’s evolving. What I should be doing right now is getting the word out about the site and getting money into the site. It should be a high priority. I’m hoping to find an ad director or marketing director in the next week or two. I’d love to get ads while I still have an ad to show them that I have an ad.

How much time are you spending on the site a day?
A minimum of two and a half, three hours a day, It’s more than I expected. I’m writing a minimum of two stories a day, five days a week and doing all the uploading.
Everything to me is triage. There’s still a couple of elements that aren’t there, but most of them are. When I started I envisioned a site that was so much grander than it should have been. It’s not just one page, it’s 10, 12, 15 pages. I thought it would be no problem to do an interview once a month, but I finally got rid of that because I didn’t have time to update it. Instead, I had the space to bring on a new writer — and I hope to add two or three more.

You recently brought on writer Diane Werts — how did that come about?

Diane took a buyout at Newsday. She was another New York critic like I was, and wanted to keep her voice out there. She just filed her first report from the Television Critic’s Association, so the site is breaking news. As more and more critics take buyouts or get downsized or get fired or get “reverse godfathers”, there will be more people who will want to do things and keep their voice out there. I know who the good voices are. I value their experience and talent. If they want to write for me, if I can get the money in the site and the ad revenue going and compensate them, I’d love to have them. I would love for this site to be the Gilligan’s Island for castaway TV critics.

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Kate Dailey is a freelance writer and former editor at Men’s Health and Women’s Health.