James Othmer grew up thinking he’d go nowhere. A kid with zero direction, his only career advice came early on from his older sister, who suggested that his wise-cracking personality might be suited for a copywriting job in the advertising industry. To her credit, Othmer says, “She spent five minutes more than anyone else spent in my life at that time thinking about what Jim can do with his future.” But it was the writing he later honed as a reporter for The Boston Globe and New Haven Register that truly propelled him into the field as a copywriter, and later creative director, leading campaigns for clients like KFC and AT&T.

Fast forward to today and Othmer has become an in-demand author. As his debut The Futurist is being prepped for the big screen, his recently released Adland is a tell-all of his days in the advertising world. Drawing on his experiences watching Young & Rubicam miss the ‘Internet’ boat along with almost everyone else, Othmer takes us through what it was like knowing his once-Herculean shop couldn’t compete with smaller, nimbler agencies. And he was partially to blame. Those stories and others were the basis for Adland — in which he describes himself as an average copywriter. Things haven’t been any easier for him as an author. From one agent that quit representing him to go to clown school to another that passed away, Othmer’s been to the bottom more than once. We sat down to discuss how he got back up and where he’s going next.

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Name: James P. Othmer
Position: Writer/creative consultant
Resume: Started out as a reporter for The Boston Globe and New Haven Register. Later did stints as a copywriter and creative director for several companies, including Dell Publishing, Franklin Spier, Grey Entertainment & Media, and Young & Rubicam. Author of The Futurist, Adland, and Holy Water. Also a freelance contributor for Esquire, Condé Nast Portfolio, New York Times, Forbes, and more.
Birthdate: October 17, 1960
Hometown: Mahopac, NY
Education: B.S. in Journalism from Northeastern University; MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.
Marital status: Married 26 years.
First section of the Sunday New York Times: “Week in Review.”
Favorite TV show: CBS Sunday Morning
Last book read: Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Guilty pleasure: “Going out and pretending I still have an expense account.”
Twitter handle: @jamespothmer

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Tell us a little about your background in advertising and your transition to published author.
I got into advertising in a roundabout way — unlike people, say at Creative Circus or VCU Brand center, who are fixed on it and know what they want to do and are locked in on advertising as a career. I started as a journalist. I left The Boston Globe and the New Haven Register and gave up on some sports writing because I didn’t want to work nights and weekends, and the money wasn’t so wonderful. So I went into publishing and then eventually writing ads about books. And then I went to a mainstream agency; my first big mainstream agency was N.W. Ayer. I left newspapers so I didn’t have to work nights and weekends, but I immediately realized that advertising was all about working nights and weekends.

I never looked at [becoming an author] as a change; I looked at it as a goal. I realized that if I wrote a nice little jewel of a novel that would have a small readership and was well-reviewed, I would never come close to making the money I was making, even as a copywriter. I realized it was an unrealistic goal to say I’ll be a self-sustaining writer of fiction. So I kept at it, and I wrote three novels. I had several agents. One agent died, one agent quit to go to clown school.

Clown school, seriously?
Yeah. She quit to go to clown school. We were going to talk about auction strategy [for my first book], and soon after, she informed me that she would be going to clown school. So I went home to my wife and I said, “My agent is going to clown school. If I really want to write at this point, when your agent goes to clown school, you must really want it bad.” Because if there was ever a time to completely be psychologically crushed, this would be the time. I even thought, you know, “Can you do both?” I wanted to, like, beg [my agent] to stay and, “Just make sure to take the little red nose off and the big shoes before you go into pitches,” but I realized that even if I wasn’t guaranteed success or publishing, being published, I was going to stick to it. And ironically that’s when I wrote the first chapter of The Futurist, and that set things in motion.

“Writing radio copy [for] the ear while there’s a clock ticking and a pissed off client and a celebrity talent in the next booth… is a really interesting exercise that has to make you a better writer.”

Could you ever go back to advertising?
I have gone back. It’s funny — I Tweeted the other day, “What’s the difference between freelancing and consulting?” I guess pay, a little bit. And you feel a little bit better about yourself consulting. But I’ve been asked to come in and not knock out ads, but take a look at a brand, and lift the hood up and see if there was something I could bring to it.

What motivated you to write Adland?
I did not write Adland as a love letter to advertising, nor did I write it as a condemnation to advertising. I just thought that as a novelist, as a journalist, and as a writer who happened to spend 20 years in advertising during this really amazing transitional time, it would be great for someone to get it down who was on the inside, wasn’t a CEO, wasn’t a legendary ad person, and wasn’t an embedded journalist. It’s kind of a middle manager’s story of what it’s like, and that’s the part where I realize the timelessness, timeliness of it wasn’t important, because if you can do that and say, “This is what it’s like.”… When you get a job, think about what it entails, what the implications are, what the consequences are, what the choices are. If there’s a good thing that I’ve noticed, [it’s that] younger people are asking those questions before they start, unlike sad people like me who ask these questions 20 years later having a 48-year-old midlife crisis. I think that the fact that it’s written by a relative nobody, truthfully without an agenda to say, “This is how I did this, and how I translated this industry, company,” is kind of good.

You explain in Adland that you were nudged into advertising by your sister. Is there anything about your youth that stands out and shouts that you were meant for advertising, or writing?
A friend who followed me a long time in my advertising read [Adland], and he had read a couple of pieces of the fiction and some of my earlier ads. He said, “You tapped into your inner wise-ass.” It’s not this great story about how I found my voice, but I think he’s right, and I think my sister saw that I had a gift with language, I had a vivid imagination, I had a smart mouth and I was curiousTo her credit, she spent five minutes more than anyone else spent in my life at that time thinking about what Jim can do with his future, and she said advertising would be good.

What was the worst experience you had in the advertising business, and what effect did that have on your career as an author?
I think my worst experience was the KFC experience. I was asked to help out on a pitch, [and] I enlisted my nephew to help. He was going to school in Florida State at the time, and he did the demos for me in his garage. The next thing I know, my nephew was driving from the suburbs, 50 miles, to work with me every day and watching me get yelled at by clients. I think we had just lost Citibank and I had to build something that was ours again, so I said, “Okay, I’ll do KFC.” And it was not the most rewarding creative experience. It was lots of travel, lots of tension, and lots of stress because the account was about to walk. We saved it, but they ultimately walked while I had it.

“[While] researching Adland, I found shops still saying, ‘This is our digital side, and this is our other side.’ It’s really surprised me that it wasn’t incumbent upon everyone to be versed in all of it.”

You are a copywriter-turned-author. Talk about the transition from short-ish form to long form.
I think advertising was great training for fiction, and fiction was great training for advertising. I would pilfer freely from both sides. Writing radio copy [for] the ear while there’s a clock ticking and a pissed off client and a celebrity talent in the next booth — and you had to cut 20 seconds out and still maintain the concept — is a really interesting exercise that has to make you a better writer. I was great at writing the vision statements, the strategic pitch thing, but I did not have some wonderful ad career or killer reel or anything. People who knew me in advertising knew I delivered good work, smart strategic work, creative work — stuff that usually came in second place.

In Adland you reiterate that in the mid-late ’90s, Young & Rubicam wasn’t ready for the digital advertising changeover. What did it feel like to know that the techniques you’d used for years would need a complete overhaul?
Part of the problem with Y&R at the time was they were encumbered by legacy people, and teams, and systems, and satellite offices, and they would buy an Internet play rather than seamlessly integrate it into the program. And then I went walking around the country in 2007-2008 researching Adland, I found shops still saying, “This is our digital side, and this is our other side.” It’s really surprised me that it wasn’t incumbent upon everyone to be versed in all of it.

How did you get permission to tell Y&R’s stories in Adland?
I did not. It’s funny ’cause most of the people are gone who are in the book. Most of the people, I think, I reflected upon them pretty well. If I complain about something, I’ll usually give context and say, what I realize now is what strain they were under, or what they were hearing from their boss. I wasn’t out to hammer the industry, or [to] hammer any individuals. But nah, I didn’t ask permission.

It was already written?
It was already written. Yeah. So it was about a 16-month turn around just from a written book. Adland was very frustrating in that I really felt that there was a born-on date, or a shelf life for a book like this, and I urged my publisher to try to get it into print as quickly as possible. I put pencils down when I got back from Cannes in 2008, and [the book] didn’t come out until mid-September of 2009.

How did you get your first book published as a relative unknown?
I published the first chapter of The Futurist in the Virginia Quarterly review. It came out in November of 2004, I believe, and it was then picked with Salman Rushdie and a couple of other writers as a finalist for the National Magazine Award for fiction. So after clown school agents and agents who died and all that stuff, I had agents calling me for the first time. The guy I ended up with is John Grisham’s agent.

What’s next for you?
My next novel will be called Holy Water; it’s coming out in June. That’s about a water-filtration salesman who gets transferred to a third-world nation to open up a back office in a drought-plagued nation. His wife has thrown him out of the house because he lied about his vasectomy. It’s one of those books. But he’s vice president of Underarms and Sweat at a P&G Colgate-like multinational. It’s this kind of droning job. It touches upon globalization, consumerism, ‘What are we doing with our lives?’

I have TV projects in the works. The Futurist is being produced as a feature film by Reason Pictures. It’s not on any schedule yet, but it’s been optioned, there’s a film option for that. There’s a good director attached to it, there’s a really good actor that I can tell you off the record, attached to it.

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Mathew van Hoven is editor of AgencySpy.

In 2005, The Atlantic published an essay by Walter Kirn titled “Lost in the Meritocracy.” The story about Kirn’s experiences in education both before and during his time at Princeton elicited a flood of reader response from people who identified with both the personal and structural problems that Kirn identified. This year saw the publication of Kirn’s memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, a project which spurred from the ideas in his initial essay.

Regardless of how he spent his time at Princeton, since graduation Kirn has established a two-tiered career as a journalist and a fiction writer. Kirn has contributed to The New York Times ‘Book Review,’ Time, GQ, Esquire, New York and many other publications. He’s also written five novels and one collection of short stories including Up in the Air, which will be released as a film this Christmas starring George Clooney. Kirn spoke with us about writing a memoir, getting his personality reviewed, and the constant struggles of a freelance writer.

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Lost in the Meritocracy began as an essay in The Atlantic in 2005. What about these experiences did you feel was important for you to write about, and why did you wait until now to do so?

I’m mostly a novelist, but as a storyteller, I’m always looking for underdeveloped territory. I felt there was a real lack of honest narrative about educational experience, the college years. The ratio of rhetoric and PR to truth telling is skewed. I had a particularly hard time at college for reasons that were personal, but also somewhat structural. And over the years I’ve come to feel that people are less than candid or forthcoming about the college years as a phase of life. I felt like Ivy League education had really come across as a lot of B.S.

“Turning myself into character and turning my actual experience into a story while remaining faithful to actuality was a huge challenge for me.”

Was the perspective of more than two decades necessary for you to write this story? In what ways do you think that distance affected the telling of it?

I don’t know that I ever achieved much perspective on the matter, because I never thought about it. College was one of those experiences I was told I should feel one way about. I was supposed to be happy all the time. I was supposed to be grateful. It may speak to my limitations as a person that I felt as miserable as I was. It was only the occasion of starting to think about it again 20 years later that I had any perspective whatsoever because I just blocked it out of my mind. The reason I wrote a book was that after I wrote the essay, I had a sizable response in the letters of personal outpourings. Everyone, it seemed, had been less happy than they were supposed to be and less well educated than they were pretending to be. It seemed a rather widespread experience in college of trying to keep up with people you haven’t decoded yet, doing far more social studies of campus than sociology in your academic classes.

In what ways has the experience of having children affected your thinking on your own education and its value?

In the book, I tried to look at education in the longer term structuring of personality, and I saw that a lot of my personality, and a lot of my generation’s personality, had been engineered, so to speak, by the ideologies and technologies behind our education. It turned out a certain kind of person, of which I was typical, in a way. Of all the forces on the personality we’ve examined in the memoir over the last 20 or 30 years, family dysfunction, etc., perhaps the most obvious had gone unexamined: Education. What we do in school all day. The kind of person they present as ideal to you that you try to be or rebel against being. As I saw this in my children’s lives, I did come to think about it more. In their public elementary school in a small town in Montana, not unlike the small town in Minnesota that I grew up [in], I was surprised at how much more nuanced the elementary school curriculum was compared to when I was a kid, which seemed to be about turning out junior astronauts or something. Between the physical fitness certificate and the IBM-generated reading comprehension kit, I felt like we were being trained for some sort of un-uniformed army of future corporate-nauts.

You’ve written a lot of nonfiction over the years, but never anything book-length. In what ways did the experience of writing novels make the process of writing a nonfiction book easier?

It made [the process] much harder. You don’t have a novel without a story or without a character or all these other classical elements. You think when you sit down to write a memoir that you have a story to tell because you have yourself and what happened to you, but that doesn’t make a character in a story. Turning yourself into a character and making the story story-like are still jobs that you have to do when you’re writing a memoir or nonfiction. You can’t just record a sequence of events and have a narrative. In other words, turning myself into character and turning my actual experience into a story while remaining faithful to actuality was a huge challenge for me.

You realize that the conventions of storytelling are even more important when you’re telling a real story than when you’re telling a made-up one. It’s tempting in the memoir to just set down a dull list of events. In telling the story, you really have to decide what’s important [and] what’s not important: which events speak to the themes of the book, and which aspects of your own personality can be focused on so as to create a coherent character, and what scenes seem to distract from the telling.

“I feel like I got into whaling five years before whale oil was replaced by petroleum. In the late ’90s, I had very lucrative magazine contracts in several places of the sort that aren’t offered anymore.”

The book has a very different structure than the essay, but it does start and end with the same scenes. Did you think of the framework of the book as the same as the essay or was it just by coincidence that it worked out this way?
[The book] takes a much broader cut of time. I start with my earliest memories of what I considered my education and I do come to the same end point. The essay was much longer before it ran. It had to be cut to run in the magazine, and there was a lot of stuff that I sacrificed that I just didn’t want to sacrifice. There’s a lot of the formative influences on me could be traced to a time earlier than my admission to college, and the essay doesn’t make a lot of sense because you didn’t completely understand the person. I wrote it just wanting to get down a few things, but on re-reading it, I was made this way at a much earlier stage than I thought. I was part of an effort to statistically segregate and promote American youth that starts when kids are about five and starts much earlier than college.

What do you feel are the essential qualities of a good critic and in what ways did Princeton teach you what not do?

Deconstructionism was in the air at Princeton. There was still a somewhat classical English department probably, but in other arts and departments, philosophy, comp. lit [comparative literature] and so on, deconstructionism had a huge prestige and it was starting to infiltrate the English department. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I came to see criticism in a much more pedestrian fashion. I would say there’s a difference between a book reviewer and criticism proper. I’m a book reviewer. Small “b” small “r.” I have to produce a piece of writing that’s entertaining and absorbing and even perhaps enlightening in itself. You’re a journalist in a sense. You go somewhere others haven’t been and bring back the news and something of the flavor and maybe do a little analysis too that helps you understand why things are the way they are there.

Criticism was held out to be such a high-faluting game in college. It was a way of subverting and deconstructing these texts which had been the instruments of the power structure for so long and would now be exposed as such. I’ve taken a consciously modest approach to it. I reviewed the Thomas Pynchon novel for The New York Times that I was quite aware most people will never go read. They may have never read a Thomas Pynchon novel. Maybe they’ve tried to read one and given up. Maybe they’re huge fans. The best I could do was put the thing in a snow globe and deliver it to people so that whatever that enterprise that Pynchon’s engaged in, it has some life out there even for those who aren’t going to read the thing itself.

“[The Colbert Report] is a high-intensity experience for the writer because you have to go up against this stylized, ferocious comic genius who starts out at 100 miles per hour and goes to 150 while you’re still trying to catch up.”

Being a fiction writer, does that affect how you review books? Do you review books in the manner that you would like readers and critics to read your fiction?

One thing I try not to be is at all personal. I realized, when you write a memoir, as opposed to a novel, a lot of the reviews are of the main character as a person rather than as a character. I’ve never had the experience of having my personality reviewed before.

I was writing fiction before I was writing reviews, and I have certain practices. I don’t read any other reviews of a book; I don’t read any of the material that the publisher sends along. I prefer to know as little about [the book] as possible. The notion that novelists are working out certain questions in their work, that the sequence of novels that they create are related to others in some coherent way seems, in my experience, to be exaggerated. Not even the writers of most novels know where the heck most things came from. I try to take each novel as a discreet mysterious object that deserves to be inspected purely on its own terms without reference, usually, to the writer’s other works.

As part of your publicity, you appeared on The Colbert Report, which has become a very sought-after slot for authors. How did this happen, and what did you make of the experience?

I got on [The Colbert Report] because I had originally been on about a year and a half before to discuss an essay I wrote in The Atlantic on multitasking [“The Autumn of the Multi-Taskers“, November 2007] and apparently showed up well enough that they asked me back. [The Colbert Report] is a high-intensity experience for the writer because you have to go up against this stylized, ferocious comic genius who starts out at 100 miles per hour and goes to 150 while you’re still trying to catch up. It does sell books. It’s what they used to call a gas, really, to interface with pop culture on that level when you’re used to doing your work alone. I was on there really because I’d been on there before — and why I was on the first time, I really don’t know. Somebody read something I wrote and thought I might be interesting. But, you know, writers should be at least as amusing characters as politicians, and we see politicians on TV all the time.

How has living in Montana affected the way you work or pursue work compared to a freelance writer who lives in say, New York or Los Angeles?

I never set out to live in Montana. I was living in New York, and I got out to Montana for a story and I couldn’t go back. I think living in Montana allows me to see America as it sees itself. Sarah Palin was not such a surprise having lived in Montana. When I moved out here in 1990, Montana really was far away. I wrote about books for New York magazine where I had to fax my reviews in. There wasn’t a Starbucks. There were few chain outlets or national franchises. Over the years, Montana has been knit into the great cyber fabric of the whole culture. It let me be an outsider, and I think novelists are by nature outsiders — certainly critics are. Criticism implies a distance on the object being criticized, and I feel like living in Montana allowed me to live at a distance from mainstream America.

I also found that frankly there is a parochialism to the media that I found kind of shocking. I wrote a big article on methamphetamine in 1998, I believe, on what was a kind of ubiquitous plague everywhere in the Midwest that I’d been hearing about for years and coming up against for years. My editor in New York didn’t know what I was talking about, as if I was reporting from Burma. I’m very glad that I live in Montana after living in New York because I think that the virtues of living as a writer in a major media center are the sense of standards of excellence that are required in various fields and they breed a certain professionalism and devotion to higher standards that might not feel so urgent in other places, but as far as places to gather material about the human experience, they could be somewhat limiting.

Has the economy had an affect on your contracts with different publications or altered how you pursue work?

Totally. I feel like I got into whaling five years before whale oil was replaced by petroleum. In the late ’90s, I had very lucrative magazine contracts in several places of the sort that aren’t offered anymore. I was able to support myself as a freelance writer. I made a decision early never to teach, so I decided I would support myself freelancing as a journalist. It was possible to do in a way it just isn’t now. People at least as talented as I am who happen to be 15 years younger have to work so much harder, write so much more, and take for it so much less than I had to. It’s really disconcerting. It takes a long time and a lot of concentration and energy and a lot of time to do this well, and the compensation for that time and energy has declined dramatically. I was fortunate in that I got a start when things were a little bit healthier, but if I were starting out now, I think I’d be scared witless.

The other big news right now is a film version of your novel, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney is about to be released.

This is every writer’s wet dream of what happens to a novel of theirs. It so far exceeds what was created from my expectations of what could be drawn from that material that I’m almost speechless. Even if I weren’t involved. It’s a great movie. I couldn’t be more delighted. To be in this declining industry at this somewhat depressing time and have the good fortune of having one of your books turned into a wonderful movie is one of the acts of grace that keeps you going as an artist.

Three tips for transforming a story from personal essay to memoir:

1. Identify underdeveloped territory that strikes a chord with readers.
2. Look at different ways to explore the subject and restore elements that had to be cut from the article.
3. You can’t just record a sequence of events and have a narrative. “You really realize that the conventions of storytelling are even more important when you’re telling a real story than when you’re telling a made-up one, because it’s tempting in the memoir to just set down a dull list of events.”

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

Writer Lena Katz knows the process of landing a book deal can be both wrenching and rewarding. The LA-based Katz was already a travel writing tour de force — contributing to Orbitz, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, and Forbes Traveler — when she decided to try her hand at a book project. After landing an agent, she spent over a year reworking her proposal and trying to rein in a publisher. Her efforts have paid off; the three books on California travel, Sip, Sun, and Snow were recently released by Globe Pequot Press. Here, Lena discusses the book proposal process, navigating the publishing world, and the celebs she interviewed along the way.

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How did you get started as a writer? Do you specialize in topics other than travel?
I’ve always written, and I also was one of those weirdos who came out of high school with flawless grammar. (It has since gotten much worse.) So during my first administrative job for an Internet startup, I crossed over into copy editing fairly quickly, then convinced the owners to give me a writing job. That was the beginning.

I don’t consider myself a travel writer; I much prefer writing character-driven stuff. The more eccentric my subjects, the happier I am. I’ve interviewed an alchemist, a white witch, various sorts of scientists, artists, chefs, etc. I have a soft spot for fighters, anyone specializing in hand-to-hand combat. They’re not always the brightest, but they are such sweethearts to be around when they’re not working (so to speak).

“The shopping process was long and painful. I even went to New York to meet publishers, but the publisher that wound up signing me was not one of the ones I met. I got 20-plus rejections, all of which my agent forwarded to me verbatim.”

How did you land a three-book deal with your first book project?
I got the name of an agent, Andrea Somberg of Harvey Klinger, from a friend of mine who worked with her and had nothing but great experiences. So I contacted Andrea with a quick note, [and] followed it up with an email pitch for a travel book series. She liked me as a writer but was on the fence about taking on a travel concept, but as I elaborated, she got behind the idea and asked for a full proposal. I spent the next eight months working on the most thorough and detailed proposal anyone had ever seen. It included an overview, complete table of contents, competitive analysis, demographic and marketplace statistics, links to articles and studies published on travel industry Web sites, a list of all print and Web publications with a similar focus or demographic, and five sample interviews. The entire thing wound up being about 25 pages long, not including the sample chapter.

The original proposal was for one book with the hope to spin it off into others if the first was successful. But from the start, it was obvious the concept would work better as a series. So I was asked to rework the proposal to be for a series.

The shopping process was long and painful. I even went to New York to meet publishers, but the publisher that wound up signing me was not one of the ones I met. I got 20-plus rejections, all of which my agent forwarded to me verbatim. Some of them were very nice and even requested other ideas in different genres. Peter Greenberg’s publisher said they would absolutely sign me except that I would be viewed as direct competition to him — I thought that was a big compliment considering he’s got 15 years of experience on me.

All in all, it took more than a year to write the proposal and find a buyer. By the end I was begging Andrea to stop pitching it because I couldn’t stand to have my ego crushed by one more rejection, but she said, “No, no, I have a good feeling about this. It’s going to sell.” And she was right.

What makes your series different from other travel books on California?
First of all, it’s in a completely different format than any other book. The books are organized by theme: Sip, Sun, Snow. The regions are split up by chapter, but within each chapter, I organize my material by experience. Just like a tour guide or trip planner would, I look to create cohesive three- or four-day experiences for my reader. So if you’re going to Napa with a date and you don’t really care about finding killer Cabernet — you just want a wonderful romantic getaway with no stress and lots of great scenery — then stick with the Cuddle & Canoodle venues. If you’re on the hunt for that killer Cab above all else, then do Cab Hunters. If you want to mix and match, go for it. I call it a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for grownups.

How did you manage to juggle writing three books at once, while still writing for Orbitz?
I had very patient editors on both ends, and I worked all the time. It was extremely stressful, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

“In-house book publicists are notoriously lacksadaisical. Mine actually used inaccurate copy for my one and only press release.”

Was it difficult to gain access to high profile subjects like Thomas Keller, Kerri Walsh, etc.?
Oh yeah. It took me months and all kinds of strategic campaigning to get some of them. But now I have them in the files forever, so it was more than worth it.

Who are some of the most interesting interview subjects you’ve had?
Gold Country and Eastern Yosemite have a high concentration of passionate lunatics. I had great fun interviewing George Wendt, the 70-year-old man who owns the biggest whitewater company in Gold Country; and John Wentworth who runs the Mammoth Lakes Parks & Trails coalition. On the completely other end of the spectrum, Chef Michel Richard in Carmel (and Hollywood… and Washington D.C.) is always a blast to interview. He played along with my “Sexy Dining Times” theme like a champ. Of the winery folks, Louis Foppiano was the most colorful. He had some great stories of bootlegging and turn-of-the-century lynch mobs. And then of the famous ones, Thomas Keller was wonderful and so was Gina Gallo, Violet Grgich… they were actually all stars. Once you got them started giving recommendations and opinions, they just didn’t stop. Chef Keller even called me back on the next day (Saturday!) so he could finish.

Did you get to steer your own course with the series?
Yes, 100 percent.

What is it like to do your own publicity for your books?
I wouldn’t if I had the choice. Unfortunately in-house book publicists are notoriously lacksadaisical. Mine actually used inaccurate copy for my one and only press release, which I had to correct. I’m a total control freak about things like that, so when I found out I decided to take it all under my own jurisdiction. I’m blessed to have a lot of publicist friends who are helping me out in all sorts of ways. Nonetheless it’s overwhelming, and I can’t wait till these books make me a millionairess and I can hire a crack PR team. Or, more likely, I scrape together enough money to hire an assistant.

What is next for you?
I just taped a segment for a new E! show, and several more shows have approached me to be a guest judge or color commentator. Plus, three treatments of my own are in development. I’m also partnering up with a San Francisco company to convert my book content into mobile format. I’m busy with a dozen magazine and Web clients. I have a couple more nonfiction books I’d like to write some day — actually the outline of one is already finished — but I’m in no hurry.

Four tips for aspiring authors on landing a book deal
1. Make your query as thorough as possible, and include a competitive analysis.
2. Think like a marketing person. You may not ever need to be one, but you will have to get readers on board.
3. Learn the basics of grammar and punctuation before you ever submit anything anywhere.
4. Stay positive. If you get 10 “No”‘s for every one “Yes,” you’re still beating the odds.

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

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman are busy women. They are both major network television journalists — the former a Washington correspondent at BBC, the latter a senior national correspondent at ABC — and they are both mothers, wives, and, you know, individuals. Somehow with all of that, in the midst of an election year, no less, the two came together to write a book.

Released by HarperCollins on June 2, Womenomics is part testimonial, part research findings, and part how-to guide. In it, the authors put forth their notion that a new age has arrived for women in the workplace, that now is the time for women to use their professional assets as leverage in forming the kind of work life that they’re looking for, to find a way to skip the 60-hour weeks without missing out on professional prestige. mediabistro.com caught up with Kay and Shipman to ask about the Womenomics world and how these journalists-turned-authors shopped, wrote and marketed their first book.

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How did you develop the idea for the book?
Katty Kay: It really started when we used to have these whispered conversations on the edges of Washington parties about how we sometimes wanted to be on TV less or turn down promotions or not take that big step in our careers. We were trying to find how to have our jobs, but also have more time for our families.

I guess that’s how our friendship started, and I remember one particular conversation, where ABC News asked me to be White House correspondent, and everyone from my agent to my peers were saying, ‘Of course you’ve got to take that job! They’ve never had a foreigner at the White House before,’ and, ‘It’s a huge compliment to you’ and that this would kind of ‘launch my career in America,’ as if I was some kind of rocket that needed a fuel boost. I remember having this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I already had four kids by then and this job was just going to take up so much time. I was going have to be a slave to the organization and travel with the president. So I didn’t feel like this was the right move for me, but I had all these people telling me to do it. So I rang up Claire, and she was the only voice of sanity for me. She said, ‘You’d be absolutely crazy. It would not work with your family life.’

That’s when we really realized that we had these issues we were both dealing with, so we started talking to other women. We realized that all of the working women we knew were dealing with the same issues — that they had a job they didn’t want to quit, but they didn’t want to do that old-fashioned, 60-hour-per-week career ladder.

Claire Shipman: We thought there was something to this issue of having success, but maybe not aiming for the very top. We had the feeling that we have great success and maybe we could talk to other women who are doing the same thing.

There is stunning research on the power women have in the workplace, the attitude about women in the workplace, what people are looking for these days, that it’s not just about success but also about flexibility. That’s really when we knew that this was a much bigger book than we had realized. It’s not just a how-to book or a personal book, it’s really a trend book, and that’s when we really got excited about the project.

The main idea of the book seems to be that women have the power here, and now they can use that power to form the work life they want. Is that something you found that’s been the case for a while, or is it the result of a recent shift in other forces? How did we get here?
KK: What we discovered was a group of fairly recent biz studies that found that companies that employ more female employees make more money. And that really led us to think about the power of women in the workplace, and that we have much more clout than most women realize. We have more undergraduate degrees than men, we have more post-graduate degrees than men, and we even have more Ph.D.s than men. We have a vast amount of power as consumers — we make up 83 percent of consumer spending in America and we buy more cars than men do now. I think a lot of women aren’t aware of just how valuable they are, not just in the economy generally, but to their companies, as well. We wanted to give women this information so that they could start to shape their work life in such a way that they could avoid that crunch of career versus kids.

We wanted to find a way to keep women in the workforce, but the workforce has to change. The old-fashioned model just doesn’t work anymore. We think because of the power women have in the economy, and because of the studies that have come out showing that they have this power, then we have more of a voice than we thought we had to start changing that workplace. Our companies can’t afford to lose us, frankly. They need us, and they need our talent. This gives us the ability to go in and negotiate.

Kay: “What initially started out as a personal book became a big idea. That’s what the publishers latched onto — that this was not just about our stories, that it wasn’t just a how-to book, but that it was announcing a shift.”

CS: When we started really digging around in the data, we realized that there is a revolution going on. It’s the start of the revolution, to be sure; it’s all fairly new. Things are really changing, and they’re changing in a big way. Some companies get it and are focused on retaining women and have realized that the magic formula is more flexibility, but many have not, and so women have to negotiate these one-off arrangements on their own. So we’re trying to empower women to give them the knowledge, the information about what’s happening, and then if they work in a hospitable environment, great, and if they don’t, then they can start to try to carve out their own new reality.

Is that idea feasible, though, for women who aren’t at the top of the ladder? Can a personal assistant, or a mid-level accountant, use this strategy?
KK: Well, if you are poor in New York City or you are poor in New Delhi, you have much fewer choices than educated, professional women, and we should be clear about that: it’s much, much harder if you are working on a line job somewhere. Although we did have companies calling us, asking us how they could give some control to employees, even those working on a line, so this is really a retention strategy some companies are looking at across the board. So that’s encouraging. But obviously, you have more choices the better educated you are, and you have more bargaining power the longer you’ve been in the job. So women particularly in their mid-30s to mid-40s are in a particularly good position because they have more years under their belts and are much more expensive to replace. They also have the knowledge bank that companies want to hold on to and don’t want to lose to their competitors.

CS: We’ve also had a number of questions that suggest that, well, it must be easier for you guys because you’re known TV personalities, but we profiled women across professions. We’ve talked to sales reps, engineers, power plant managers, and this something that’s happening for women across all professions. There’s no doubt that it was easier for me and Katty to negotiate this, because we were older and more established when we did it, but our profession is certainly not one that looks favorably on people wanting to cut back or be on TV less. There’s always some risk involved. It’s a bit like jumping off a cliff, no matter what profession you’re in, because you’re making these counter-intuitive moves. But if it ultimately reflects what you want to do and what you feel good about, then it’s a good move.

Shipman: “In her new role, [Michelle Obama] really doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder about being [in] the back seat as a first lady, rather than being caught up in the ‘is it a job, is it not a job’ question.”

Is that true for all age groups?
KK: It’s been very interesting during the book tour, because we’ve told younger women in their 20s that, yes, that’s a good time to be able to stack up a bit of credit in your career, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be a total slave. And that’s also really the time to start thinking about these issues for the longer term.
When I was in my 20s and first starting my career, I just never thought about work-life balance issues. The message to me was that I could have it all: I could have the glittering career, be president of my company, work 60 hours per week, have a fabulous husband, cook delicious meals, and have a couple of kids. And then I had my first child when I was 29 and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t having it all, I was doing it all!

It’s interesting to us that younger women are really looking at this work-life balance issue in a way that we never really did when we were their age.
What we’re saying to them is that, ‘Okay, you might have to stack up the hours then, and it’s not a bad time to do it because you have fewer commitments in your life,’ but you can do things in our book that apply whether you’re 25, 35 or 45. Do things like choosing the high-profile projects and doing the things your bosses are interested in. You can get more bang for your time in the office by working on something that your boss is interested in, rather than saying yes to every administrative office that comes across your desk.

The very fact that young women are even looking at these things shows that we’re moving in the right direction.

So the book is really a blend between research, but also a guide for other women, a how-to.
KK: Oh yes. We definitely felt that the research we had found wouldn’t be valuable in individual lives unless there was a section in the book on how to use that power that we have. We wanted it to be a blend of a business trend book and advice we had on how to get that kind of balance. We wanted to book to be very practical, as well.

In the book you cite Michelle Obama as an, obviously, very high-profile example of a woman who has struggled with this sort of back and forth of success and a balanced life. What exactly has she shown us?
CS: We interviewed her on the campaign trail because she spent some time talking then about work-life balance issues and women’s issues. In the personal choices she made, she echoed what so many women are feeling and doing. She’s an incredibly highly trained, successful lawyer, and she’s quite ambitious. She had jobs at a top Chicago law firm and then went to work for the mayor’s office, but at a certain point, and especially once she had children, she felt that she wanted to dial it back. So she very specifically chose a job at the University of Chicago hospital system that was quite flexible. In fact, in one story that I love, she went out for the interview for that job with Malia in tow because the babysitter hadn’t shown up. She could have rescheduled, but that really showed the employer that she needed to be able to be around for her family.

In her new role, she really doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder about being [in] the back seat as a first lady, rather than being caught up in the ‘is it a job, is it not a job’ question. She seems perfectly confident doing what she does now, and can then move on and do something else later.

Was it ever hard to work with a co-author? How is that different from doing this kind of project solo?
KK: A lot of people have told me horror stories about two people writing a book together. You do have to wrestle with your ego a little bit. But I have to say it was an incredibly smooth collaboration. I remember when we got our contract in February of last year, I was talking with a friend who had written a book with another woman and she said, ‘You’re absolutely crazy. You’ve taken on a book contract in an election year, and you both have full-time jobs, and both have children, and you’re writing a book with your friend. You’ll never speak to her again!’ And actually, the friendship has really benefited.

Once you both decided that you wanted to write this book together, how did you pitch it? How did you form your proposal, and who did you go to?
CS: Katty and I talked about it and had the idea. I called a friend of mine who’s a book agent, and I had been in touch with him before about writing a book. My husband [Jay Carney, director of communications for Vice President Joe Biden] and I were supposed to write a book about the 2000 campaign, and then we just thought it was really tedious and that no one needed one more book about the campaign, so we bailed on it. But I still knew this agent, and so we called him. He was enthusiastic right from the start and really understood why this could be interesting and a big idea. He encouraged us and told us what we needed to do for our proposal.

For people who are looking to shop a first book, even if they already work in media, what’s the best way to sell that product to someone?
KK:For us just working through the proposal was very important. We did do several drafts of it, and what initially started out as a personal book became a big idea. That’s what the publishers latched onto — that this was not just about our stories, that it wasn’t just a how-to book, but that it was announcing a shift, a change.

So I think crafting that pitch that will really catch the eye of a publisher is very important.

Especially for a nonfiction book, you have to have an idea and then back it up with interesting stories. Neither of us had actually written books before, so in that respect, even though we both had media profiles and contacts, we were kind of a gamble for publishers because they had no idea whether we could actually complete this thing. We had never done it before, and the deadline was pretty tight.
We had to really focus on that proposal-writing stage to make sure that we had something sellable. And we can’t praise our agent enough, because he really guided us from something we didn’t know. Having somebody who’s your advocate in the publishing industry is essential. And this is a tough time to be selling books.

Once you had a deal set, how did you manage to meet your deadlines?
CS: You have to turn it into something that’s manageable chunks. You can’t sit down every day when you’re writing it and think, ‘Okay, now I’m writing an entire book.’ Our editor helped us enormously with the structure and the outline. We had a good idea, but we really went through that with her so that we could work on it piece by piece, and then it felt much less intimidating.

I also think that working with a partner was amazing. I don’t even think that I would have a book done by myself by now! Knowing that she was working on chapter one and already had it done really forced me to stop procrastinating about chapter two because I knew I had to get it done. I think that sort of dynamic really helped, because otherwise you might just get lost in the abyss.
It depends on personality, too. Neither of us had big ego issues — we just really wanted to get it done.

Kay: “We were going to be published by Collins Business, and I remember getting an email one morning saying that Collins Business no longer existed.”

As first-time book authors, was there anything surprising about the process?
KK: The writing and research stages were easier than I thought they were going to be, and the marketing process was more time-consuming than I ever thought it would be. Don’t think that when you’ve written the book and it’s at the publisher its over, because actually then we had to take three weeks off to market it. And you want to sell it, it’s your baby, so it’s really like another full-time job at that point. It’s a long process.

CS: You sort of think that once you think you’ve turned in the final draft that it’s done, and it’s actually so far from done that it’s not even funny.

Were there any big roadblocks in this process? What or who stood in the way of getting this book out?
KK: The big challenge right at the beginning was the mental one of thinking, ‘Do we have the book in us?’ It would have been very easy for us to say, ‘Well, we have our jobs, we have our kids, we can’t get this done.’ Maybe for me, that might be a lack of confidence issue. I’ve never seen myself as somebody who would write a book.
But once we had the contract, I would say that that it went really smoothly.

CS: We did have a major bump in the road when the recession hit, right in the middle of writing. Because this is an economic book, so there was the question of, ‘How is this going to affect our thesis?’ So we spent a lot of time revisiting people we talked with, the HR heads and the CEOs and others. Luckily for us, we think that the recession is really hastening these changes. I think the biggest issue was that in October, we didn’t know what the book industry was going to be like, but nobody ever said we’re going to delay publishing or this and that. Now I think people are eager for a slightly more optimistic, empowering message.

KK: One hurdle was that the imprint at Harper Collins that we were going to be published by was shut down. We were going to be published by Collins Business, and I remember getting an email one morning saying that Collins Business no longer existed. But luckily another imprint picked it up [Harper Business] and our editor stayed on board, which helped a lot.

What has the marketing strategy been?
CS: Talk to as many people on as many media outlets as possible. It’s a bit of a mystery to us exactly what seems to sell books best. But at the same time, it’s pretty obvious. It’s getting on TV shows with the biggest audience, and radio is very important. We really want this to be seen as a business trend book and also a women-friendly book, so we’ve been trying to push the business audiences, corporate audiences, but also The View‘s audience, and Katty’s been on The Colbert Report. So I think it’s key to widen your audience and target as many different kinds of people as possible.

What about the Womenomics blog?
KK: Well, that’s also part of the marketing side. It’s fairly clear now that you can’t market anything without an online presence. And one thing we have discovered is that we’re not the best bloggers in the world! Our online presence is not as strong and dynamic as it could be.
We are trying, and we update the blog when we can.
So one thing I would say to people who want to write books is that, if you’re strong online, that’s great. You’re already light-years ahead of Claire and I.

CS: And part of it for us is that we’re still in the older generation of traditional media, and we do struggle with this. We recently met with this group of “Mommy Bloggers,” really brilliant women, and we were asking them all these questions. Katty and I feel that we need to have something really incredible to say, and if we don’t have anything brilliant to say, we shouldn’t be blogging, and these women just said, ‘No! No, it’s a conversation.’

Who came up with the book’s title?
KK: Our agent. We had thought of calling the book The New All, the idea that women had always thought they could have it all, but actually were looking at the wrong kind of all, and maybe we just needed to redefine what ‘all’ meant.
Our agent suggested Womenomics. It’s interesting — at the end of our meeting with Harper Collins, which we really liked, they loved the book and then said, ‘How committed are you to the title?’

So we said we like it, and that they should give it some time and it would grow on them. And that’s exactly what happened, and now everybody loves the title.

Five tips for publishing a salable book:

1. Ask! “The number one reason women don’t get the flexibility they want at work is that they don’t ask,” Kay says. “There is nothing wrong with approaching an employer — or a publisher — and trying. The worst they’ll say is no.”

2. Make sure the idea speaks to you… The seed of Womenomics lay in Kaye and Shipman’s own experiences.

3…and that it speaks to others, as well. But the idea wouldn’t have worked without the stories of other women and the hard data to support their directives.

4. Once you’ve got the book, sell it. The marketing process for a book is surprisingly exhausting, Kay says, but essential. Power through!

5. Don’t overthink it. “There is something to just executing and not thinking too much about it,” Shipman says. “The more you think about it, the more intimidating it seems, so taking action is half the battle.”

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Megan Stride is editorial assistant at Portfolio Media’s Law360.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five tips for finding your way as a columnist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for a successful career in TV journalism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five tips for a lucrative global and online writing business:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five tips for success as a travel writer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rebecca L. Fox