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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor-in-chief of the public relations industry’s largest trade publication, PRWeek, Keith O’Brien hasn’t yet reached the ripe old age of 30. Getting his reporting start at the then-Jason Calacanis-owned and now-defunct Venture Reporter, O’Brien has been with PRWeek since 2004.

The PR industry continues to report growth numbers, despite current economic conditions, which bodes well for his publication. While O’Brien thinks PR has “done itself a service by explaining its worth in a very specific way to the ‘C’ suite,” the fourth quarter this year will reveal much in terms of economic realities. O’Brien spoke recently to mediabistro.com about rolling out new digital features while still getting people excited about a print product, former PRWeek reporter Hamilton Nolan’s defection to Gawker, and whether he thinks people should heed Julia Allison’s PR advice.

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Name: Keith O’Brien
Position: Editor-in-chief, PRWeek
Resume: Researcher, then analyst at Venture Reporter. Started as editor of PRWeek.com in 2004, and then became news editor, and subsequently, executive editor.
Birthdate: March 19, 1979
Hometown: New Providence, New Jersey
Education: Syracuse University
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Magazine
Favorite TV show: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Fantasy football
Last book you read: Blindness by Jose Saramago

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You recently wrote on the PRWeek editor’s blog, “I talk to a lot of agency leaders who are very proud of their blogs, but don’t really talk much about what value it adds to the business.” The responses to your question about blogs’ return on investment (ROI) ranged from “education” to “SEO” to “the ROI is indirect.” How would you have responded in terms of PRWeek‘s own blogs?

I think there’s an ROI in a couple of different ways. One, I think, which is really unique in the history of the publishing industry, is that a blog allows you to float story ideas out. In the past, journalists and media organizations were much more guarded with what they were working on for fear of being beat by competitors, or people not wanting to see how the sausage is made, but we are in a unique time, where blogs allow you to find sources that you may not have had, to check the validity of the story you’re pursuing.

I remember one story: We were writing about a major company hiring a new agency and we tried unsuccessfully to get the old agency to talk. I almost absentmindedly was blogging that I was waiting for what we call “the splash” — the main, front-page story to come in — and I mention verbatim, “I’m waiting for the splash to come in,” and the agency who lost the account saw that, and realized there was still an opportunity to comment and they called me. It’s not necessarily life-changing, but it made it a better story and that was something that probably wouldn’t have happened in the past.

Another ROI is that there are some people in the public relations industry who are not as well-acquainted with [PRWeek] the print publication, and perhaps they are more likely to get their public relations news and opinion through an RSS feed. I felt like we needed to be part of that conversation and be reaching that audience, with hopes that if they’re not already, they’ll turn into subscribers of the print publication.

Third, the ability to cover more stories with the same amount of resources: How you can write for blogs allows you to call attention to work of other publications and add your two cents. Again, in the past, publications may have loathed to link to competition or other sources, but I believe we’re here to educate the PR industry however we can.

Former PRWeek reporter Hamilton Nolan left for Gawker earlier this year. Obviously, there will be some change in a reporter’s writing style when making a move like that. What are your thoughts on Hamilton’s reporting for Gawker?

Well first off, I’ll say Gawker obviously looks at the PR industry in a different way than we do. I’m really proud of the work that Hamilton did here. I think that he is a brilliant reporter, and if anyone has the opportunity to look at some of his past work, the economy that he had with words should be taught at journalism schools.

As far as the work he does now, they have a different approach to covering this industry, and he’s obviously doing really well there, and the commenters there seem to agree with his point of view. I wish him luck there. Hamilton and I still talk a lot, and I think it’s a good fit for him.

PR pros have been involved in TV as long as the medium has been around, but the real heritage is in the print medium. I think all publications should be dabbling in both multimedia and new media, and what I think is refreshing is that there isn’t that major fear of failure there.

PRWeek has added numerous digital features recently, including main-page video interviews, blogs and podcasts. How did the decision come about to implement those features?

I think in some respects it’s — again — a unique time in publishing industry, that you don’t necessary need a four-month plan for rollout of technology. Obviously, we wanted to serve an editorial purpose. We share a camera with one of our sister publications, a more proper traditional camera, but I’ve also equipped some of our reporters with the Flip camera, which I see proliferating throughout agencies. It sounds like I’m doing product placement, but it’s a great device to shoot video quickly.

While we are shooting a lot of video, we’re trying to think how we can go beyond just Q&As. It’s interesting because the PR industry itself is contemplating how it can go beyond a text- and audio-based environment. PR pros have been involved in TV as long as the medium has been around, but the real heritage is in the print medium. I think all publications should be dabbling in both multimedia and new media, and what I think is refreshing is that there isn’t that major fear of failure there. There is an opportunity to try to stuff out, and we — like any other publication — have our goals for it. It’s not merely throwing some stuff up and seeing what sticks.

I went to a conference recently where a PR professional did a video segment interviewing me, so it’s really a unique dynamic. It seems both journalists and public relations people — pretty much everyone that has a blog — are out to try. I mean you’re interviewing me right here.

Exactly. So, what has reader reaction been to these new digital features?

The video part is relatively new, but the feedback that I think is best to us in some respects is the feedback of acceptance. Anyone who is a reader of our publication knows that for our major features, where we highlight the public relations and corporate communications functions of major companies like CA, GE, and Pfizer, it takes a lot out of those busy people’s time to work with us on the feature, and one of the things we started doing is to extend the features through podcasts. We really try and get things with the podcast that aren’t covered in the print edition. When we propose a separate podcast interview, people are like, “Yeah, let’s do that.” Again, it’s an interesting environment covering public relations — in some respects they’re curious of how we as a publication are using multimedia and new media, because it will inform them in some respects how other media might use it, and they can see how it looks on their perspective.

How do you feed readers’ thirst for constantly updated online content while still keeping people excited about the print product?

That’s a question we have to ask ourselves daily. We decided a long time ago: Nothing waits for news. News of a company selecting a new agency or a crisis communications situation like we’ve seen with the airlines industry, or we thought with the tomato — but now perhaps jalapeno — industry. That news is out there, and we need to be out there covering it.

What we can do to make sure our subscribers are getting the product that rewards them is to focus the analysis for print publication. I would be lying if I said I had the exact formula for how to balance those two. A lot of it is trial and error, and we made the decision to un-gate our news because news is out there and we had to be competing. We, like any other publication, will attest to power of being first or second on a Google News search for a high-ranking term.

However, pretty much all of our features are gated. A two-page spread with major company is something takes a lot of effort and really provides an enriching product, and that is something that is only available to our subscribers. It’s always remembering about the subscribers, while also making sure you’re relevant online and also looking to certain aspects of online product as ways to engage and alert potential subscribers and people interested in the industry about all the news that’s happening out there.

PR people pitch you about PR. What are three things they could do better when pitching PRWeek?

One would be — and we’re not unique in this — to know their audience. It’s interesting because we get a lot of pitches from PR agencies or corporations that are pitching the general-interest pitch, which holds little interest for us. So that’s one: just being mindful of what we’re covering, or the list that you’re sending things out to.

Two is not being afraid of talking about strategy. I think the industry has historically looked at the tools behind its success as something that should be guarded, and the industry has an unofficial charter of being more transparent, and I think that goes beyond making sure you identify yourself on blog comments. It’s about treating the profession like any other when you’re doing something successfully; it talks about it in a balanced and informative way.

The third thing is, I always try and get more people that work with us that are pitching stories or working with us as a person trying to get his or herself or his or her client into the publication — to really think about interacting with us as a reader, not just sending feedback when you think we got something wrong, or praising us when we got a story right, but to think about type of things they would want to read, that doesn’t have to do with their own personal work.

What percentage of pitches to PRWeek, roughly, would you say contain some sort of digital content, besides just a link to the agency’s home page? For example, a link to an online newsroom, video, blog post, etc.?

For all of the conversation, a woefully small percentage, I’d say — probably single digits. Press releases have worked in the past and a lot of people still see some success in them. I’m a fan, as is any reporter, of a personalized message and putting the salient bits at top. Then, if it’s necessary, putting the narrative release beneath, but you really have to get bullet points of info at top. Considering how many press releases a reporter is reading a day, it’s a lot.

Are there any areas of the industry where PRWeek is looking to expand coverage?

We’re trying to do more coverage of how PR intersects with other marketing disciplines. I think we’re covering enough digital — that’s to say, I think we’re extremely cognizant of the importance of digital in public relations. We’re just trying to be much more focused on what the story is, what elements are relevant to our readers. We tell potential and current reporters that anything can be a PRWeek story, because ultimately public relations is about communications, and everything has a communications aspect. That doesn’t mean we’ll cover everything, but everything has that potential. Their can be a public relations angle for any story out there — the question is finding it, and making sure that we’re adding something relevant to the conversation.

What stories over the last few months have received the most reader feedback, positive or negative?

I wrote a piece recently about diversity, not just gender diversity and multicultural diversity, but also cultural diversity. When you talk to companies, they talk a lot about their culture being important. While I understand that, a lot of times that seems shorthand for, “We’re looking for people who will join our softball team.” What I came to hypothesize is that a company or an agency — as my story was more geared towards — that is looking for the next team softball player might miss out on the opportunities to hire someone who is completely unique to the organization, and therefore will provide insight that it’s not getting elsewhere.

My assertion was that if you have all the same people, you’re not going to have anyone that notices this trend that might become huge, and you might miss out. Or, if you’re looking for people that are all early adopters, you may have everyone saying, “Oh my god, this is going to be the biggest thing ever,” and not have anyone say, “Well, I don’t know, this might fizzle out.”

Obviously, there are a lot of people, thankfully, who are very vocal about gender and multicultural diversity, and I got a lot of feedback on those points, but it was good to get some feedback from people who also talked about the need to make sure that you have as diverse a firm as possible, in every different permutation.

What about something that got a lot of criticism?

I think we wrote an editorial about Fox News and the David Carr column and there was some commentary that [said], “Well, they’re just advocating for their bosses.” Since they’re client-side, the boss is the client. And — fair point — people were pointing out that it’s an often-attacked company, so their PR strategy is different than that of, say, a Stoneyfield, or Seventh Generation or Apple.

I always welcome commentary like that, because I think our editorials are the places where we have to be most concerned about taking the broad view. We try not to write editorials that deal with particular companies. If there is a particular news element that allows us to extrapolate into a broader commentary, that is what we try and do.

You got your start working at Silicon Alley Reporter, run by current Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis. What was it like working for Calacanis? What do you make of his ability to draw in a large audience online? What can PR pros learn from that?

Working with Jason was interesting. It was my first job out of college, and Jason has always been — as far as I can tell from anecdotes and my own experience — an incredibly driven businessman. I think, what’s helped my career is that he wasn’t much of a micromanager — he probably should’ve been more of a micromanager when I was 23 and writing these reports for him.

What I’ve learned from that whole experience is that being given a good first opportunity to be responsible for one’s actions is pivotal for self-development. If you look at some of the alums from there, Rafat Ali was one, who just sold his company [PaidContent] which, in a bit of a tweak, the valuation might be more than Jason’s, although no one has the official numbers. Will Leitch went on to Deadspin [which he left in July for New York].

Jason had Silicon Alley Reporter — it turned into Venture Reporter, which is when I was there. Considering the height of Silicon Alley Reporter and the success of Weblogs, Inc. and the much buzzed-about Mahalo, I don’t think it’s incredibly unfair to say that Venture Reporter was the time where he was sort of regrouping. He may disagree with that, but the fact was that his drive allowed him to seize upon a completely new idea. When you really think about it, he went from running and owning a publication that dealt with very specific venture capital investments, and then he we went on to make his success through automobile blogs and Engadget. The fact that he could completely remake himself; people just knew that if he were to try an idea, he would devote a lot of energy to make it work.

When I think back to that time, I think about the ability. In the journalism field, there is a lot of doomsday [talk] and nay-saying, but if you put in the effort and have a concrete idea that people want, you’re allowed to be successful.

Think about it this way: If you think about number of people at Gawker Media, for instance, that have been hired because of their own personal blogs, it seems so completely different than what I imagined the case would have been before I got out of college. The equivalent, pre-blogs, would be to have your own pretend publications and just send in Word documents to a potential employer and say, “Hey, this is my publication.” Obviously, blogs are public and I don’t mean to belittle blogs because they’re great, but the fact that people are getting hired based on their own publication means that it is a great time in the industry for hard workers.

PRWeek is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall. Are there any celebration plans underway?

We’re still finalizing things — we’re going to have a special edition and roll out some specific content online. But we’re starting to get really excited about it, and I think the industry is starting to get excited about it. Stay tuned, is all I’ll say.

You became editor-in-chief of PRWeek in March 2008, with then editor-in-chief Julia Hood moving to publishing director. How much is Julia still involved with the editorial side of PRWeek?

[With] the publishing director, as in any publication, I report to her as [does] my colleague in sales, and it’s sort of hard to quantify. I certainly look to her for advice, but as far as day-to-day editorial decisions, they are handled by me. She is spending a lot of her time thinking about long-term brand strategy.

What are some of the most important things you’ve learned since becoming an editor-in-chief?

The most important thing about being an editor-in-chief is a simple thing: always having a reason for any edits that you have. You do the publication and you do your reporters and senior editors a disservice if you just go through things with a red pen without explanation. I try and include as many people [as possible] — if I have question about particular issue, I solicit as much advice as possible, and I think that’s the smart way to run a publication. Of course, it helps when you have a great staff that is eager to learn and thinks of the process of putting out a great publication as a team effort.

One year from now, will the PR industry still be in growth mode?

The big question mark is how long this economic uncertainty [continues]. I think Q4 is really going to be telling moment, because just think about it: The business industry went into 2008 with pessimistic views for the year, and I think the fact that — the current problem in the financial services industry and some pessimistic news from some of the blue- chip companies [aside] — it’s been a more positive situation than we previously may have anticipated.

A lot of agencies were reporting just phenomenal Q1’s, and Q2 was a little down from Q1 but still success. There is a concern that in Q4, if things aren’t looking up — and especially in industries that depend on Q4 for a bulk of sales — it could be a much lower period of time.

I think the industry has really done itself a service by explaining its worth in very specific way to the ‘C’ suite. We just wrote a story about GM that they are looking across the company for ways to trim costs, but they realize the importance of the communications function and — should things require it — that they may look to increase the work that they give the communications function.

In July’s Wired cover story, Time Out New York dating columnist Julia Allison said of her Internet celebrity status, “Now we are all our own publicists, and we all have to learn the tricks.” How do you think technology and “DIY” PR will continue to change the industry?

It’s all a matter of context. Do I think that CEOs of major companies should heed her advice? Probably not. If you’re in the New York media industry, and certainly I’m not in the Gawker, New York, Vanity Fair-type media industry… so, everyone that follows media in New York is aware of Julia, and she is pretty transparent in talking about the downfalls to her quest for celebrity. I think that if you were to ask some PR professionals how they would handle Julia’s celebrity or quest for whatever it is she’s looking for, they might have different answers.

It’s not just about the technology — it’s about culture in which we live in now. A perfect example is the just-out-of-college woman who saw Emily Gould and Keith Gessen at a party and wrote a blog post on how she was so disillusioned with the scene that she had yet to enter. That may have been an email that she sent to her friends and that’s it, but then New York asked her to write a blog post about it. The culture we live in now — [one of] perseverance and willingness to put oneself out there, good or bad — is what’s getting people jobs in the media.

How often, if ever, do you get confused with Keith O’Brien, staff writer for the Boston Globe?

I never do. Let me just check. Every now and then I check Google and I’m in third behind the Boston Globe reporter and the Scottish Cardinal. I’m No. 2 now. I’ve never met him, but he’s been at it [longer] than I have. If I’m looking at the most recent Google search, I’m showing up there through things like blogs and other things that we’re doing here. That’s proof positive that new media works.

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Joe Ciarallo is co-editor of PRNewser.

Photo credit: Devon Banks (2008)

Anyone for a game of elephant polo? How about laughter tourism? Culture+Travel, editor-in-chief Kate Sekules likes to surprise her readers: “Our first thought was, ‘Don’t be dull,'” she writes in her editor’s letter of the magazine’s recent Asia-focused issue. Sekules and her team’s dedication to delighting readers with something unexpected — whether it’s off-the-beaten path travel writing, lush photography, or jaw-dropping design — has helped Culture+Travel build a cult following as “the magazine for people who love the arts and travel with a passion.” For Sekules, who previously served as travel editor at Food & Wine, “It was very important right away to establish a very distinctive position — a niche — and I feel we’ve done that.” We spoke with Sekules about her go-to travel destinations, life at Louise Blouin Media, and how a cuddly-looking polar bear ended up on the cover of C+T earlier this year.

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Name: Kate Sekules
Title: Editor-in-chief, Culture+Travel
Resume: Travel editor, Food & Wine; Web editing/writing for Concierge.com and ForbesTraveler.com; guidebook author, memoirist, novelist.
Birthday: August 20, 1961
Hometown: London, England
Education: Manchester and Middlesex Universities
Marital status: Married, one daughter
First section of the Sunday Times: Real estate
Favorite television show: Doctor Who; “Historically speaking, Buffy“
Last book read: Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Guilty pleasure: Reality TV, as long as it’s about dance or models; Sci-fi (see above)

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You just returned from Europe, which seems fitting, given that the current issue of Culture+Travel (May/June 2008) is ‘The Europe Issue.’ Where did you go on this most recent trip and where are some of your favorite places to travel?
This was just Paris to do a story — and a half. Well, two stories. So that’s not very unusual, is it? Personally, I haven’t been traveling as much as I have in the past, because I’ve got a child, so that has really slowed down my peripatetic adventures over the last five years, so I send other people more now. I can tell you things from the front but not from my personal travels, from the Culture+Travel standpoint.

First, London is such an obvious favorite — I’m from there. I consider that the hub of cultural travel, even though it’s completely unaffordable. We had Bangkok in an issue recently, which is not somewhere you’d immediately think of for culture, but a contributor, Lawrence Osborne, who has lived there and is writing a book about it, had a lot to say about just the life there, because culture as we approach it here [at Culture+Travel] is not just capital “C” culture but the culture of a place. So if you’re looking at a place, the real life of a place, then really anywhere has culture — and that’s just as much the kind of culture that we’re interested in: the soul of a place, the way the real people live, and especially what’s changing right now in any particular place. So in that way, just about anywhere becomes interesting. And that’s our baseline, I think.

You came from a travel writing background. Describe your professional trajectory. How did you come into your job as travel editor Food & Wine, and did you originally see yourself in the editor-in-chief role at a magazine?
The short answer is no, but the trajectory went something like this. I was actually deputy editor of a travel magazine in England before I left London. It was Departures. I came here [to the United States] and had no green card, so I wrote guidebooks. I did tons of guidebooks. I wrote 12 from scratch and edited and contributed to a lot more — mostly Fodor’s, also some Frommer’s, and others. So I did the five-star reviewing for the Mobil guides when they switched — when Fodor’s bought them — and that was sort of an interesting summer of five-star hotel reviewing. Not such a bad job.

Then I freelanced and got to know editors through that, and then I got a green card and the Food & Wine job came up almost immediately. So I was the travel editor there for five years, then I had a child so I left, and then I did a whole load of invisible stuff online. I was the pre-launch editor for the relaunch of Concierge.com. I did a big project for ForbesTraveler.com. And that pretty much takes us up to here.

You’ve been editor-in-chief of Culture+Travel for about a year now: how does your editorial vision for the magazine differ from that of the previous editor? Did you come in wanting to make substantial changes?
Editorially speaking, I just thought there wasn’t enough travel in it. That was my first thought. And I thought it didn’t feel to me very focused. It had a voice, but it was a little bit muted — well, quite a lot muted. So, I felt there was a lot of space here for something that filled a gap in the market. I mean, I wasn’t really thinking of it in terms of gaps in the market. I was thinking of what I’d want to read and what others would be passionate about finding in a magazine.

And what are your larger goals for the magazine?
Where to start… The one thing in this climate and in this publishing company [Louise Blouin Media], which is small and unusual, is that there’s a challenge to keep it going. So first and foremost, I want Culture+Travel to survive and thrive. That said, and assuming that we can do that, I like the direction. I feel that we’re on the right track, and I think it was very important right away to establish a very distinctive position — a niche — and I feel we’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of things that are quirky and unusual, and I think that’s to make the statement, “This is culture, too,” as I was saying before. And we can do more mainstream things. We can include more obvious destinations, like Paris, and we can also do more of the major arts and also more of the classics — the major destinations for the arts with a capital “A.”

You mentioned that Culture+Travel has done some quirky and unusual things under your editorship. Can you give some examples?
In the current issue, the Europe issue, there’s an outsider art facility [the Art/Brut Center Gugging] just outside Vienna, which is extraordinary. The work that they produce is amazing, and it somehow failed to cross the radar of many people. It’s really an insane asylum, but the director feels that his artists are potentially art stars wherever they go — not just because it’s outsider art, they’re just good artists. So he runs it as an art retreat where the people just happen to be crazy.

We did a feature on that [“Mad Skills”] and actually Daphne Merkin wrote it, who writes a lot for the Times, especially the magazines. She said that she was talking to her editor there, and saying that she was about to do this [piece] and they said, “Why didn’t you bring that to us?!” So I guess it isn’t quite so quirky and out there, but not every travel book would do that story, but I feel that it’s perfect for us.

Was there a unique Culture+Travel approach that you brought to that story?
We accompany nearly everything with what we call a compass, which brings everything down to earth. You can go out there and do a very specific story and then you have a compass — in this case, it’s about Vienna, because it’s 10 minutes outside Vienna — and it’s got the latest and relevant to our readership openings, hotels, restaurants, shops, museums, and whatever else. Sometimes on the compass we’ll have a related story that is a side story, and it’s like an extended sidebar, but it sort of fits very nicely in this format.

Another example from this issue — and here’s another example of something that’s a bit quirky — our Madrid story, it’s very soccer-oriented, because Euro [the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship] is going on right now and in any case, we’re interested in that culture as well. So this story is not about Real Madrid, one of the most famous and successful teams in the world, but the other Madrid team [Atlético Madrid] and their loathing of Real Madrid. We’ve also got portraits of the fans, and we’ve got the stadium, and through this I feel we get a really strong sense of what it’s like to live there — one side of the culture. And then we have the compass, with information for visiting, and this one is focused so if you do want to discover more about soccer, we’ve got places for you to go. And then there’s Zaragosa, the water expo which is opening right now in that not very well-known city. So we have an extra story within a story on that.

Has the magazine added more gastronomic pieces (such as the May/June issue’s piece on the Barcelona wine conference and the trio of chef profiles)? Has food been a new focus? Are there other areas you seek to boost coverage of?
Yes there are, and yes, food has been not so much a focus but just a “let’s not forget,” because the magazine has always had a little bit of wine [coverage]. And when I say “always,” there were only five issues before me, so there wasn’t really that much history to mess with. It wasn’t exactly a redesign. It was an evolution.

Wine and food will continue to be a focus, and I want to bring more arts into it. We’ve started, as you can see with the opera story in this issue. That was the first opera story we’ve done in two years. I’d like to do more about movies, and again in this issue we have a story about the new Harmony Korine film that was written by one of the actors from the perspective of living in this highland castle where they did the shoot. And then at the end of that, we have “You too, can hire a Scottish castle!” Just to bring it down to earth.

I can’t think of an area of culture that I have a blanket ban on — except for golf.

But I feel that there’s a lot of culture within that art form that isn’t really covered by — well, sadly, Premiere is defunct now, I thought that they did a good job of covering the [film] business in a cultured sense. But I think that there’s a huge amount of scope for approaching art forms from a different angle from those who cover art forms and approaching travel from a different angle from those who cover travel — and meeting in the middle.

We haven’t really gotten a good theater story yet. Or dance. And more music — music of all sorts: world music is obvious, and we’ve done some of that and we’ll do more; jazz, haven’t done that yet; opera we’ve started, classical not so much yet. I can’t think of an area of culture that I have a blanket ban on — except for golf.

Culture+Travel is a visually stunning publication. In terms of photography, what kind of lead time do you typically work within, and when in the process of conceiving/developing a story do you commission the photographs?
Let me first make sure to mention Emily Crawford, the genius creative director. I’m so lucky that she was here when I arrived. We have a good rapport and it’s very exciting to work with her. Also Cory Jacobs, our contributing photo director, brings a lot to the table. And our beloved and now departed — stolen by The New Yorker — former photo editor Natalie Matutschovsky. These people are very important, especially Emily.

There’s a whole variety of lead times. We do and can pull things together very fast….An example is the Mali piece [“Mali Maestros”] in the previous issue, March/April. It has photographs by Malick Sidibé. This photographer is a legend but not so well-known, and the photographs are so beautiful. They’re about the clubbing culture when it was starting in the ’60s, when the country gained independence. So right there you’ve got a moment of extreme cultural evolution happening, visually, and I wanted to add that to the story about the music. And that’s just one example — that came together in literally three days or less, putting all of the pieces together. It was one conversation at the last minute — very quick.

And then there are things that we’re shooting now for next year, as all magazines do, but now we’re beginning to be able to do that, because we’ve been through one cycle.

I had to ask you about the polar bear cover from the January/February 2008 issue. We seemed to notice a lot of people out and about in the art world (perhaps subconsciously) hugging this issue to their chests. How did you choose the image, and why do you think it resonated so strongly?
There’s certainly a story there. That’s something else that we’re doing and want to do, which is very much a part of everyone’s culture, and that’s the issue of the environment, and there are various ways to look at that. I was just hearing so much about the polar bears, but I realized that I don’t really know what is happening with them, where they live, so we sent — well, actually, he was going anyway — Joe Yogerst, a very seasoned travel writer, to Manitoba to this tiny town which survives on the polar bear migration. It’s where the ice floes first form, so the bears hang around in this town, and there’s a big tourist industry there around that. So this was simultaneously a look at the town and at the front lines of the polar bear situation and global warming.

I found it completely fascinating, and I had seen that the brilliant photographer Jill Greenberg had a recent show called “Ursine” [at ClampArt in New York City] that was actually up at the time when we were putting this issue together. I had just seen the black and Kodiak bears she had photographed. Then I discovered that she had also photographed polar bears, so we found those images and got extremely excited. At that point, that’s when we realized that this story would work, because we don’t want to do anything when the visuals don’t work. It has to be extremely strong visually. We use art photographers.

So Jill Greenberg is a very successful commercial photographer but also an art photographer, and she does not cross the beams — ever, or at least that’s what she said. So I had to beg her. I pointed out to her that we’re not really like other magazines, and we have very much an art focus. After my begging for some time and some back and forth, she said yes. So this was from her art show. They weren’t shot for us, but they just worked perfectly.

How do you make Culture+Travel‘s content scan for an online audience? What is the overall strategy?
It’s a huge area. As part of Louise Blouin Media, we have two sister magazines, Art+Auction and Modern Painters, and the Web site Artinfo.com. We just have a placeholder [site] at the moment, because the Web is an enormous focus of this place, and we are about to be really getting in there. There’s so much going on right now, and our part in it is exciting. Artinfo.com is a really good site, but it’s all art, so we’re going to be colonizing it with travel. We’ll have our own site, which will start being more interactive — it’s really static right now — and we will start to imbue that whole site with culture and travel, both with the magazine and as a kind of traveling.

It’s about making the world a better place — through the arts, through culture.

When can we expect to see the new Culture+Travel site and what will it involve?
We’ve got lots of plans, and I should think you’ll start to see things online probably starting in the next month or so [August 2008]. And it will be gradual. It’s really evolving as we speak. Artinfo.com is thriving, and I think that as soon as Culture+Travel appears there and we start having input, that whole site has so much potential to be appealing to an infinitely larger group.

We’re really a cross between culture and travel. That’s where we’ll be, and I can’t think of another site that does that specifically. So we’ll link to people and do all sorts of things to become an online presence, and we’re really not right now. It’s barely started.

Louise Blouin Media experienced several executive departures in 2006-2007. Did you have any apprehensions tied to that going into your EIC role? What’s the mood like within the organization these days?
My apprehensions going in were more about “Do I want a job?” because I was quite happy freelancing. I knew a lot about the company, had heard rumors, and had heard from people who were already here about the challenges of working here. They exist. It’s an unusual place. But I was just so focused on what we can do here — on the positive side — that I didn’t let it bother me, and it hasn’t been a problem.

There is some refocusing going here on the moment, and I know that [the company] has got a reputation of a big revolving door, and the thing is, it’s a very quirky place. It doesn’t suit everyone. There are various reasons why people leave, and most people have not left with any bad blood. It just wasn’t right for them.

What’s your working relationship like with Louise Blouin? She’s perceived as being a challenging personality, according to various media reports. Does she get a bad rap?
She does get a bad rap, and I think that it’s quieted down some. She is very, very unusual and amazing. She has a foundation [the Louise T. Blouin Foundation] and this annual event called the Global Creative Leadership Summit, the third one of which will be held in New York this fall.

It’s very interesting, and really, it’s important to me, and to most of here, that the foundation exists and that she has this very passionate side to her of working to improve the world. She really sees everything globally and there’s a bigger picture here because of her. Really, it boils down to the fact that she wants to change the world, and that’s not the norm for most media companies. For her, it’s about making the world a better place — through the arts, through culture. And that side of her is inspiring.

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Stephanie Murg is co-editor of UnBeige.

I didn’t initially plan on having a writing career, despite coming from a literary family. But after eight years as a songwriter/musician/singer and traveling all over the Western world, I felt I had something to share in life experience, so I bought a Mac and read all those books at Barnes ‘n’ Noble on how to break into professional writing. I published a few CD reviews in a free New Jersey newspaper, then got a couple of first-person pieces in The New York Times, one about being hired to do an Elvis impersonation at a Korean wedding, the other about trying to get my elderly dad to give up driving. So I knew I could do this.

I liked writing in the first person, but I’m also knowledgeable about cars, and made auto reviews my specialty. I introduced myself, clips included, to some top people at different major print media, and sent postcards to them whenever I was on vacation and around the holidays. My name is really short, and I just kept it in front of them: Josh Max, Josh Max, Josh Max.

None of these cards read anything but “Hello,” though. If I was at the beach, I’d draw a cartoon of myself on the sand waving, for example. I didn’t ask for anything except via email, when I had what I thought was a good story. Finally, an editor at Newsweek told me to come in for a meeting to talk about some car and bike articles. When I got there, she said, “It was the postcard that did it.” But I also had some solid publishing behind me, so I wasn’t just some flake bothering them. I also have a very understanding wife who believed in me and supported me until I broke through. I just wanted a column of my own, and a writing career, more than anything in this world.

After four years of freelancing for the Times, Newsweek, Forbes.com and other media outlets, I became a full-time columnist at the Daily News — PC, phone, press pass, business cards – the works. I test-drive and review a different new car each week — everything from Kias and Toyotas to Model T’s, Bentleys and Ferraris — and do about 10 motorcycles a year. I’ve had about 400 test cars in the last seven years. Here, I’ll answer some key questions about how I keep my column humming along.

How do you get assignments like test-driving the Goodyear Blimp over Manhattan?

The blimp story was something I approached Goodyear about on a whim. They don’t offer rides to the public, but they were receptive to my pitch, so I leaned on ’em over the course of a few months. The timing wasn’t right — it was the middle of winter when I first contacted them — and then I didn’t hear back for quite a while. But I kept sending hello emails. When the ride finally happened, it happened quickly: “Are you available on Sunday?” So I drove out with my camera to an airfield on Long Island at 8 a.m., and soon I was in the air. I had only wanted a ride, and they ended up letting me drive the thing.

How do you come up with five articles a week?

I start the soup Monday, after meeting a 12 noon deadline for all stories that will run the following Tuesday, eight days later. Then I pick the car that’s going on the cover of “Your Drive”, and brainstorm the other four stories based on leads. The leads come from press releases, but everyone helps — colleagues, family, friends and strangers. People write to me, saying, “You should check out my friend’s car — it runs on vegetable oil!”, or “I got a ticket for doing something that’s legal.”

I also am a member of I.M.P.A. — the International Motor Press Association — and get releases from people in the auto industry who peruse IMPA’s mailing list. I actually get very few direct pitches from the auto manufacturers themselves, which surprises me. I usually have to go and check their Web sites to see what’s coming up. I also look for short stories I can expand with an interview, more information or a different take. I drive 300 or so miles a week, all over the city, the surrounding states and in other parts of the country, and generate leads based on things that happen to me. Since I also shoot some of the photos for my section, sometimes the story will be photo-based, and I’ll write the article around it. Other times, the story is the story and I’ll shoot to illustrate it. I would say out of the five weekly articles, two to three are ones I think up, and the others are from leads.

After deciding what the articles will be for the following week, I let the design people and the publisher know, and start roughing them out. As the week goes on, each story gets more and more into focus, I add more seasoning, more color, more flavor, fact-check it and by Friday, all five are more or less cooked. Then I leave them to boil over the weekend without opening the lid. Monday at 8 a.m. they get the final go-over, and by noon, they’re served to the copy desk. Repeat.

I’m still a working musician, too; my wife Julie and I just finished recording “The Maxes Sing Al Hoffman”, a big-band CD of the music of my great Uncle Al, a hit New York-based songwriter of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, and got a publishing deal out of it, which is great. I’m also in the middle of writing a memoir, “Confessions of an Ex-Seeker” about living in an Indian ashram for five months and other adventures that brought me to where I am today. I’m really good at multitasking — I have to be. And every now and then I leave the house on a motorcycle and don’t come back all day.

It’s been an unbelievable learning experience. Working for a newspaper at the volume I do, you really learn to get to the point quickly and to chop what doesn’t serve the story. You also let go of thinking your words are gold — the story is the star, you just get out of the way and tell it.

How do you reconcile writing about cars in an era of increasing awareness of global warming?

I don’t reconcile it or justify what I do; I am perfectly aware that these machines are helping to blacken the skies all over the world, though burning coal is an equal culprit (so I read). That said, you’re going to see some enormous changes in the auto industry in the next few years, and to whoever manufactures a cheap, solid car that doesn’t pollute and runs on water, air, sunlight or peanut butter is going to make billions of dollars. That’s going to happen very soon, and I am going to tell people to go and buy the good ones and skip the lousy ones. My section also usually contains at least one and as many as three tests of alternative or hybrid vehicles each week. In just the past two months, I’ve reviewed vehicles that run on ethanol, hydrogen and air. I also, for a variety of reasons, turned vegan six months ago.

What advice would you give a writer who wants a column?

When I was first starting out, there was a free alternative weekly I thought I would be great for my first person stories, and the editor was receptive. But every single story I sent him was rejected for one reason or another. He liked the stories; he just didn’t love them. After seven attempts, he finally sent me a note saying, “Maybe you should try elsewhere.” It was nice of him. Most guys would just stop emailing you back. I sent him a thank you and went on my way.

Then one night I had an amazing New York adventure that lasted from 2 a.m. until noon the next day. I went home, wrote 3,000 words and sent it to him. He put it on the cover of the paper the following week with an illustration, and ended up buying, over two years, all the articles he’d previously rejected. He’d forgotten he had already read and rejected them.

Rejection sucks, no question about it, but the proper response is the same as it is during the days when I was living between far-and-few paychecks: “Get to work.” My late father, whose gravestone reads “50 years on the writer’s rockpile”, said, “You have to eat, sleep, s–t and write, and that’s it.” Everything else comes second.

Point your cannon and keep firing until your ball goes through the wall. Be as obsessed with being a great writer as you are with sex or money or music or whatever it is that runs your life day and night. Refuse to be interrupted. Give editors unbelievable stuff they can’t get anywhere else, give it to them on time and be easy to work with, and you’ll find work.

How can we get your job?

Kill me.

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Josh Max writes the “Your Drive” column for the Daily News.

MTV recently reported that “Pierce Brosnan and Nicolas Cage will star in Roman Polanski’s next project, The Ghost. The film is an adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel about a ghostwriter hired to write the memoirs of an ex-prime minister.” Who are these ghostwriters and how do they get work? We spoke with Madeleine Morel, who represents ghostwriters exclusively, and with more than 100 ghostwriters in her roster, she haunts bestseller lists. Established in 1982 shortly after Morel moved to America from England, 2M Communications Ltd. is a literary agency specializing in non-fiction titles. Morel matches ghostwriters and professional collaborators with high-profile authors, and she frequently works on a confidential basis.

“We are especially skilled in the following areas: parenting, multicultural issues, memoir and personal growth, pop-culture, health and beauty, cooking, relationships and psychology, and business,” Morel says of her preferred genres.

Houses Morel has worked with include: Avery, Avon, Atria, Ballantine, Broadway, Chronicle, Clarkson Potter, Crown, Doubleday, Free Press, Grand Central Publishing, HarperCollins, Meredith, Penguin Putnam, Regan Books, Rodale, Simon & Schuster, Simon Spotlight, St. Martin’s Press and Wiley. In addition to 2M Communications Ltd., Madeleine is also a partner in Lowenstein-Morel Associates, a literary agency that specializes in developing nonfiction books, particularly in the multicultural market.

This spring two books of Morel’s collaborations reached the New York Times bestseller list including Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer, and a second book which, Morel says, “I can’t tell you the title because of the confidentiality clause, but it’s a medical book aimed at women written by Maggie Greenwood Robinson, author of the bestselling Biggest Loser.”
We spoke with Morel on the phone to discover what it takes to make a bestseller written by a ghostwriter, and what makes a good ghostwriter, as well.

How do you turn a ghostwritten book into a bestseller?
What turns a ghostwriter into a bestselling ghostwriter is [when]: the author is a major celebrity; they’re on every TV and radio talk show; they’re covered by all the periodicals or, they’re someone like Elissa, caught up in the eye of a media storm. In other words, someone with whom the public is really familiar. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve helped put eight books on the Times bestseller list; collectively the authors with whom I work have put close to 50 books on the list.

How did Stolen Innocence come about?
HarperCollins signed up Elissa Wall after seeing her on television and then came to me to find a ghostwriter and crash the book through. It was a complicated book because the author was in the witness protection program during the trial, making access even more difficult.

What made Lisa Pulitzer a perfect fit in your mind to write Stolen Innocence?
Lisa has an uncanny ability to capture someone’s voice; she had already written a No. 1 Times bestseller on the Scott Peterson case, and she makes women feel very comfortable. She was working with a girl who was forced into marriage at the age of 14 and was completely traumatized by the incident. This book needed a delicate touch.

How fast do ghostwriters generally turn projects around?
Right now, I have two projects where the editors want the books delivered in a month to six weeks. Some ghostwriters can do two to three books a year; others are more deliberate and write one book a year. However, publishers are demanding books be written in even shorter time frames to coincide with media events — be they TV shows, movie premieres, court cases, Mother’s Day etc. As a ghostwriter, you have to have stamina to deal with the increased stress inherent in these short deadlines.

Do you have a stable of ghostwriters you turn to?
I have well over 100 — they have all been previously published by the major publishing houses. I don’t rep anyone exclusively because I work with so many. In this respect, I’m different [than] everyone else — I function more like a talent agency. It also means that when an agent or editor comes to me I can offer them four to six writers from whom to choose because I have many writers in different fields.

If someone comes to me for a specific project and I don’t have the right match, I will contact other agents or editors in the field and we split the commission on their writer equally. Conversely, agents come to me increasingly when they represent nonfiction writers who are so prolific that they can’t keep them busy. If I find their writer a job, we again go 50/50. I am really only interested in people who have already been published. I do keep a B list of people not previously published for smaller jobs. I don’t like doing the small books because it takes about the same amount of time as a big book and it pays less.

What about new additions to your roster?
I’m always looking for really qualified new writers; however, I don’t like getting involved with ghostwriters who find me on the Internet unless they already have a proven track record. I no longer sell and am not interested in selling.

Are your writers generally from a nonfiction background?
Pretty much, yes. I occasionally take a person from fiction. Fiction is so arbitrary in terms of taste. To sell it, the editor needs to see at least 150 pages of manuscript – this can be expensive for the putative author, since they have to pay for the work. I prefer to stick to nonfiction: agents can sell on the strength of a full-blown proposal and a sample chapter. Since I’ve never worked in fiction, it’s not my strong suit.

What about credit for the ghostwriter?
Sometimes the writer will get cover credit. Most importantly, the industry people know which books are written by someone else and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Agents are looking for writers with a platform — and even if they don’t get cover credit, they all receive credit on the acknowledgment page.

Any tips for ghostwriters looking to break into the biz?
There’s a real art to ghost writing. Number one, they have to have no ego, and they have to be able to capture the primary author’s voice. Get your name out there, write as many articles as you can online or in magazines. Once writers have a good resume of articles, they have a much better chance of landing a book contract. Initially, they might start with the smaller, independent houses, but if they are sufficiently aggressive, they can move upward. I would also recommend that writers specialize in a particular field — I find it much tougher to place writers who’ve written a little bit in many different areas. Writers have to decide on their area of interest and expertise and concentrate on it. Right now, I’m working on everything from a book with a stripper to a title with a famous American religious leader.

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Andy Heidel is a blogger for GalleyCat.

In 2003 on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright talked his way into a berth with the elite Marine unit tasked with leading one of the charges up to Baghdad. Wright spent the next two months with a 23-man platoon from the First Reconnaissance Battalion, racing in Humvees ahead of the main invasion force and serving as ambush bait to locate Iraqi army positions. He observed the Marines’ exhilaration at surviving enemy attacks and at doling out as much as they got, their frustration at equipment that didn’t work and at the decisions of certain officers who sometimes seemed determined to get them killed, their desolation when their actions felled Iraqi civilians, and the intricacies of their relationships with each other, with the military, and with the war. The three-part series published in Rolling Stone the following summer, titled “The Killer Elite” and edited by the magazine’s current managing editor, Will Dana, won that year’s National Magazine Award for reporting.

In the summer of 2003, G.P. Putnam’s Sons commissioned Wright to pen a book about the experience. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, Wright’s first book, quickly became a bestseller. Over 200,000 copies have been sold so far, and the work has been compared to Dispatches, Michael Herr’s acclaimed grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War. The book was showered with awards, including the PEN USA award for best nonfiction book of 2004, Columbia’s Lukas Prize for nonfiction, and — perhaps the most meaningful to Wright — the Wallace Greene Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Society. The Christian Science Monitor called the book “exceptionally compelling,” the Financial Times called it “an adrenaline rush of intelligent prose,” and The New York Times called it “nuanced and grounded in details often overlooked in daily journalistic accounts.”

HBO Films snapped up the movie rights to Generation Kill, tapping The Wire‘s David Simon and Ed Burns to produce, and hiring Wright help Simon and Burns craft what has become a seven-part miniseries. Billed as “the ultimate road trip,” the miniseries begins July 13.

Wright started his reporting career in the mid-90s manning longtime Hustlercolumn Beaver Hunt. Today he is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His first-ever piece for that magazine, about a Hollywood agent turned right-wing documentary filmmaker, won this year’s National Magazine Award for profile writing, and Wright is currently adapting the piece for Fox Studios. mediabistro.com caught up with Wright to find out how he turned his Iraq assignment into writing’s triple crown — an award-winning article, an award-winning book, and now an HBO film.

How did you get a book contract for Generation Kill?
I arrived in the Middle East in January 2003 [two months before the invasion] and filed some stories for Rolling Stone. During that period, a book editor contacted me. He knew my work [from Afghanistan reporting Wright had done for Rolling Stone the previous year]. He said, “If anything interesting happens, keep me in mind because we might be looking for an Iraq War book.” When I got back and published the three Rolling Stone articles, I did contact him.

[In the meantime] I had a nominal relationship with a film agent — nominally an agent, no contract or anything — at ICM. ICM had no interest in the first “Killer Elite” article, which I had sent them. They were not interested until I sent a follow-up email saying that there’s a book editor who maybe wants to do a book with this. At that point, ICM said, “Oh yeah, this is great.”

They put me in touch with a book agent named Richard Abate [then at ICM, today at Endeavor]. As a lot of writers will testify, the agency did nothing until they figured out that I actually kind of already had interest. It’s not like they were out there pounding the streets for me. But Abate really kicked ass.

“When I did my last phase of corrections, I spent a 14-hour phone call with the copy editor, manually reinserting the most vile passages that the editor wanted cut. He’s a great editor, but still to this day, I don’t know if he realizes that that’s the book that he published.”

What did Abate do for you?
He had me write a book proposal to the publisher that was already interested. They made what Abate thought was a really low offer for the book. The reason was — this is an interesting fact for any writer who’s thinking about writing a book — my first contact with the publisher was a conference call with an editor and their head of marketing. It was to their marketing woman that I had to sell the worthiness of this book, not the editor. In my proposal, I pointed out that, at the end of the book, there were all these troubling things we encountered in Baghdad and that I would discuss the fact that the Iraqis I met in the first week of the occupation suggested that there might be a civil war between Sunni and Shi’a. And the marketing department of this publisher thought that my book seemed far too negative. I remember her saying back in July of 2003, “But the war is going really well. You’re being too negative.”

So what next?
My agent then went to Putnam, which came in with a higher offer. They really seemed interested in the book, and I didn’t talk to their marketing department. They just seemed really stoked. [We went with Putnam because] their offer was higher, but they also just seemed more interested in it.

Did you run into any challenges during the editing process?
My editor wanted me to remove some of the profanity and some of the more scatological references. He actually marked those to remove. When I did my last phase of corrections, I spent a 14-hour phone call with the copy editor, manually reinserting the most vile passages that the editor wanted cut. He’s a great editor, but still to this day, I don’t know if he realizes that that’s the book that he published.

Why were those passages so critical?
The scatological humor is critical, because that is the humor that prevailed. It’s also critical because, if you’re in a combat zone, on the front lines, or behind the lines, as we were, your life is reduced to these elemental things. One of them is: How can you go to the bathroom? Where can you go? So the humor itself speaks to the realities of these guys. To have removed that wouldn’t have just sanitized the book for aesthetic reasons, it would have sanitized the reality that these guys operated in.

How did the HBO miniseries come about?
In July of 2003, I went into HBO and I pitched them. I’d sold my book, but I hadn’t written it.

How did the pitch go?
HBO had my three-part Rolling Stone series, and they had my book proposal. HBO had everything, but here’s the irony: When you go in to pitch your own article, the first thing they ask you is, “Well, what’s the movie?” And you want to say, “You’re holding the articles on your desk. You’re the moviemaker. I’m just the lowly reporter.”

But I had already figured this out. I’d already figured out my answer. They really like short, pithy answers. I said, “My movie would be the ultimate road trip. It’s really not about the war. It’s about these guys going from Kuwait to Baghdad.” And then the second level of my pitch was, “It’ll be like ‘Jackass Goes to War.’ ” And they loved that.

I understood that you just have to say something that they like, because marketing departments rule. In the movie industry, people want to be able to see the poster. They don’t want to see the movie; they want to see the poster.

“What really improved my reporting was being unplugged from the 24-hour news cycle and not knowing what I was supposed to be thinking about. It was a lack of awareness of other reporting that improved my reporting.”

How did you get the idea to pitch HBO?
For years I would publish an article and get calls from people in Hollywood who were interested in maybe having a discussion about turning it into a film. Nothing had ever happened, but I’d had many of these meetings in the past.

So you met with HBO. What happened next?
The project didn’t really go very far. It wasn’t until a year later that an HBO executive called my agent and then had a meeting with me. He said, “We had trouble figuring out what to do with this. We have a new idea,” which was to have me meet with David Simon and Ed Burns. This was about January 2005. They were then doing The Wire. But they had previously done The Corner, a miniseries based on the book they wrote of the same title, about a drug corner in Baltimore. The idea was these guys had already adapted reporting into a miniseries, and they had this awesome show.

I flew out to Baltimore, sat down with David Simon, and asked him, “What do you want to do?” And he said, “We want to make your book.” I was kind of stunned. Several people had called me after I sold the book to HBO — suddenly all these other people wanted it even though I couldn’t sell it, really, but I had all these meetings with people, and they wanted to take it and do their own thing. Everybody wanted to use the book as source material but then create a new story. David Simon said, “We just want to make your book.” And then he said, “I don’t really want to do this unless you’re going to be very involved in the process.”

How involved were you in creating the miniseries?
First I was just going to be a consultant, but as it turned out, I worked as a co-writer on the scripts. I spent about 15 weeks living in Baltimore and writing with David and Ed. I would meet with one of them every day. We wrote some of it, literally, in a trailer on the set of The Wire.

What did you learn from working with the creators of The Wire?
What I really learned from David and Ed is believing in the primacy of your source material when adapting it into a miniseries. They both had so much confidence in the material, and they both had a cocky, sort of “fuck-you” attitude to the idea that we would have to alter our narrative of the war to conform to people’s expectations of it.

For example, in the book, in one of the later chapters, we were leaving a town called Baqubah, and we got ambushed on the way back, a small minor ambush, and Colbert [the team leader in Wright’s Humvee] opened up on the ambushers and was very confident that he’d killed the guy that shot at us. When I wrote that in the book, I almost started to write something like how it disturbed me that I’d probably just witnessed a human being being killed. But the truth was that, at that moment, I was so tired, and I was so sort of pissed off that we’d just been shot at, that I couldn’t care less that there was probably some guy dead or bleeding to death in a ditch by our Humvee — because he just shot at us.

In writing that passage, I probably did start to type the first half of a sentence softening the fact that I felt nothing, or maybe hiding that fact. But I remember that moment of writing that passage, and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to write what I felt. Nothing.” When I wrote the book, I almost stopped myself from revising. I decided to go with my first instinct. Because my first instinct in writing about this war was often more honest than my later instinct.

I think that David and Ed had the exact same methodology in dramatizing this. For instance, when the guys use racist language, we didn’t go back and try to explain to the audience, “Actually these guys probably are not really racist because they get along really well.” We just decided to use the language and depict them, and hopefully people in the audience will understand that maybe their language is at variance with who they really are and how they relate to each other.

What surprised you the most about the whole process, from magazine article to book to HBO miniseries?
I have to say, I really thought I was going to die in Iraq. I became convinced that I was going to get shot. Sounds a little crazy, but that’s the truth. Having just lived through those three weeks, that was a big surprise.

There was a lot of reporting on the invasion of Iraq. Your Rolling Stone series distinguished itself by winning the National Magazine Award for reporting, and Generation Kill has been one of the more successful books about the invasion — and certainly the first to be made into a movie. What was different about your reporting?
People have always said, ‘Your reporting on Iraq was different.’ I’ve always said, ‘Well, I was a magazine guy, and I was with this small unit, and I stayed with them for two months, and I took really good notes.’ It was very intimate, and it was a great unit to be with.

There’s another factor in why my reporting was different. I didn’t have a sat-phone, and I didn’t have Internet. [Marine officers required Wright to give up his sat-phone as a pre-condition to embedding with the unit, to ensure their location would not be divulged.] While I was doing all my primary reporting, I had no idea what the dominant stories were. What really improved my reporting was being unplugged from the 24-hour news cycle and not knowing what I was supposed to be thinking about. It was a lack of awareness of other reporting that improved my reporting.

What did you learn from that experience?
It’s led me to wonder if perhaps that’s a problem with the current 24-hour news cycle reporting that everybody’s locked into, where every reporter is constantly having to look over their shoulder to make sure they’re getting — or creating — the dominant news story of the day.

It’s not just [a problem with reporting a particular] story, but [with generating] the dominant take on the war. That dominant take is often totally wrong. It negates the instincts and work and perceptions of the reporter who’s on the ground.

Years later, I do suspect that our impressions of the war are increasingly being driven by editors and producers who are back home and not doing the reporting, and their perceptions of the war are often shaping what reporters are saying.

Your book stood out because you wrote very intimately about the people in the unit you were with — the dramatic, the mundane, but also stuff they might have preferred “stayed in the family,” as it were. And yet, you still have good relations with those individual Marines. How do you reveal, as you did about one Marine, for example, that they have a David Spade-like nasal whine and are partial to Barry Manilow and Air Supply, and not have them want to punch you in the face the next time they see you?
If you’re accurate, it’s much harder for people to react negatively. They can be unhappy with it, but they have to agree, “It is true, I did sing ‘Copacabana’ while we were rolling up past the Gharraf canal that day.”

What’s interesting in that example is that [the Marine in question] was okay with [what was written in the book]. But later on, I gave some interview, and I paraphrased that and said he had terrible taste in music. I editorialized, and he’s always been pissed off by that. So I’ve found that it’s best to describe people in details without characterizing it, without saying what you think it is, and just say what it is. And you know when you’re writing it, some people will think [Barry Manilow] is ridiculously bad music, but as soon as you say what you think of it, you’re in more dangerous territory.

If a budding reporter were starting out on an assignment to do exactly what you did, what would you tell them about how to report on the ground, going from Kuwait to Baghdad with a platoon of Marines?
Get as close to one person as you can. Don’t worry about the big story. Just find one person who will let you follow them around and who will be your guide into this world.

Don’t let your editor tell you what the story is, but also try to understand that your editor ultimately has to sell the story to his boss.

Also, I told the guys, “This whole ‘on the record, off the record’ thing? The truth is anything that you say or I see is going to be hard for me not to use if it’s really good. So if you really don’t want me to write something, don’t tell me.” And it’s actually the truth. Because, as much as I have affection for these guys, at the end of the day, my loyalty was to the story, not to them. And I had to tell them that right up front.

One other thing: reporters often want to show off how smart they are. So when we reporters go into an alien culture like the military, and someone is like, “This is an M77-K2. Do you know what this is,” a lot of reporters like to show their subjects that they’re knowledgeable: “Well actually I do know what that is, because I wrote an article about it.” What I find is always better is, even if you think you know, let your sources tell you what the situation is. Don’t try to impress them with your knowledge. It’s better to be ignorant and let them educate you.

Finally, when I disagree with my subjects, I often tell them. A lot reporters, faced with the military, assume they’re conservative and Republican and pro-war. They’ll try to act like they sympathize with the troops and agree with them. If I disagree with my subjects, I’ll actually exaggerate the disagreements openly. I’ll be like, “Well, I’m actually like a communist.” They respect that more. It also leads to debate. It’s always healthy to debate with your subjects.

So how do you like how you’re portrayed in the miniseries?
[Actor] Lee Tergesen does a great job, because he’s comic. In the book, when I go into the first person, it tends to be a little bit comic. I wanted to have the first-person narrative to validate that I was an eyewitness to what I was reporting on, but I didn’t want to be the pompous reporter. The things that happen to [the character in the miniseries] — he has to swallow his chewing tobacco, he gets tied up in his MOP [chemical warfare] suit — that’s from the book. Lee does it in the film, probably with more slapstick than I did it, but to great effect. I thought he was dead on.

Tips on how to get your article turned into a book and a movie:
1. Get a foothold at an agency. Even if you can’t get an official contract with an agent, an informal relationship can create the opening you’ll need down the line.
2. Get popular. If your agent isn’t already rustling the bushes on your behalf, scrounge up some interest — any interest — to whet their appetite.
3. Pitch early and often. Before Generation Kill, Wright had had a number of meetings with Hollywood folks about potentially turning other articles into movies. Though those projects went nowhere, the meetings taught him how the game was played, and he was ready when it came time to pitch HBO.
4. Know your tagline. When pitching a movie studio, realize that marketing reigns supreme. Have a one-sentence summary of what the movie will be about and know what your movie poster tagline is going to say.
5. Trust your gut. To have something to sell to book publishers and movie producers, you first have to have a compelling story. Listen to your editors, but at the end of the day, trust your own instincts about what you’ve seen and heard, and write your story as it was, not as you — or anyone else — think it should be.

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

There is a certain personality type that pursues a job as a foreign correspondent in a war zone. After all, there are foreign correspondent jobs in Paris. But for Richard Engel, NBC’s Middle East correspondent and the only television reporter who’s continually covered the Iraq conflict since it began, it’s clearly less a job than a calling.

Especially when you consider, upon graduating from Stanford, he picked up and headed to Cairo with only some small savings and a passion for finding the story. Born and raised in Manhattan, Engel has now lived in the Middle East for 10 years. After a three-year stint covering the Palestine uprising against Israel, he was freelancing for the BBC and ABC in 2002 when he signed with NBC, and he’s been there ever since.

By most accounts he’s a thorough and dogged reporter; he speaks and reads fluent Arabic (in addition to Spanish and Italian) and has been known to go house to house to report a story. As Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote, “Among the small circle of journalists who risk their lives in the region, Engel commands considerable respect.”

Despite eluding death enough times to know his reserve of luck may be depleted, you get the feeling there’s no where else he’d rather be. Here, he shares some of his thoughts on working, living, and surviving in war.

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Name: Richard Engel
Position: Sr. Middle East Correspondent
Resume: “Reporting from the Middle East since 1996”
Birthdate: September 16, 1973
Hometown: New York City
Education: Stanford University
Marital Status: Single
Favorite TV show: MTV Music Countdown
Last book read: “Biography of Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia”
Guilty pleasure: “Blackjack”

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What is your typical day like — if you even have one?
There are really two kinds of days. There are the times when I’m with the military and I would say, maybe that’s about 30 percent of the time. On an embed, you’re living on the soldiers’ or marines’ schedule. You’re up very early and you go out on patrol with the troops, sometimes they come back for a break in the middle of the afternoon, they go on more patrols in the late afternoon and generally get to bed pretty early, or sometimes we’re filing late in the evening. When you’re with the military you live with the troops, sleep on cots; sometimes on a big base, they’ll give you a trailer. Other times it’s just sleeping in a very abandoned building that the soldiers have turned into a combat outpost or a forward operating base.

When I’m back at the bureau, which is not in the Green Zone despite what many people still assume — it’s just in a hotel in Baghdad — we try and go out into the streets. I go out every single day. Now that things area a little bit safer, we’re venturing out more. I was at a hospital today. Yesterday I was at a mosque, and I was doing an interview with someone and I went over to his house to have an iftar, the Ramadan break fast meal with him. So when we’re here in Baghdad, we go out and do meetings, do interviews to stories, go out in the city, and then come back and file from the bureau. Violence in Baghdad is down considerably so we are venturing out more, still with security, but for awhile it was very difficult. The violence was so intense. I mean, literally, you’d go out and drive past bodies in the streets. You’re not seeing that anymore. There is a bit more freedom of movement now than there used to be, but there’s not really a typical day. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing a story on doctors, you spend time with doctors. If you’re doing a story on Blackwater, then you try and talk to the police and embassy officials. It depends on the story you’re chasing.

And to what do you attribute the reduction in violence?
I would say it’s four things. One, there are more troops on the ground — or more American troops on the ground. Two, the troops on the ground, and this is according to military — not only [the top US Commander in Iraq] Petraeus’ office but also field-grade officers, you know, commanders who are in the field — they like the new security plan more. They think it makes more sense. The new security plan not only has more troops on the ground, but it has the troops spread out throughout the city much more than they were before. The troops used to be concentrated on big bases from which they would patrol; now they’re spread out in the city in dozens of smaller bases. And the idea is like oil — you drop oil on a piece of paper, and then there’s oil spread out until they’re all interconnected. The concept anyway. So that strategy appears to be more effective. That’s two things. Three: The Sunni tribes, or some Sunni tribes, have decided to fight with the Americans and fight against Al Qaeda. And four, Muqtada al-Sadr has decided to call a truce and cease fire for the time being. So you have four things coming together all at the same time, which are all very fortuitous and all have an impact in reducing the violence. The question is, How long will it last? And no one can give me a clear answer on that.

In the beginning, the challenge was just having the energy and the time to report all the stories. You could just walk down the street and collect them like leaves that had fallen off of a tree.

You’ve had a few close calls yourself. Is that always on your mind?
No — I’m not obsessed about it, but I’m not letting my guard down yet. Right now we’re in a situation where it does feel safer and we’re putting our toes in the water, but I know that that water is very deep and you don’t want to go too quickly too fast. So I am cautious, and I think as a result of having been here for about five years — this will be my fifth Christmas coming up soon — you get cautious. So I go out every day; I’m not paranoid about it. I spent all day out today and yesterday, so it’s not like I’m just sitting in here under my blanket, because otherwise what’s the point in being here?

Do you feel like you have enough access there to report the stories effectively?
It’s not ideal, but it’s … I think if you read the newspapers and you watch the television and you read the magazines and you read the analysis, I think you will get a fairly accurate vision of what’s going on in Iraq. So I think that journalists have done a very good job in covering this war despite the hardships. Is it perfect? No. I think there’s often too much punditry and Washington stories written about Iraq, and I think the stories written from Iraq are the ones that have more merit — but that’s also because I’m writing from Iraq.

How do you feel like the job has changed over the past five years? Can you say if it’s more difficult, or less difficult because of your experience?
It’s not even the same job. Each year has been totally different. The first year was invasion. And then there was exploration. People ask me, “Do you get bored? Aren’t you getting sick of it by now?” Not at all. Each period has been totally, totally different. Saddam Hussein was in power when I first came to Iraq. So we’ve gone from Saddam’s in power to Saddam’s being hanged by an elected Shiite government of his former enemies. We’re not even on the same planet as we used to be. And each period has had its own challenges. In the beginning, the challenge was just having the energy and the time to report all the stories. I mean, they were everywhere. You could just walk down the street and collect them like leaves that had fallen off of a tree. There were stories because this country had been closed for decades. And then tension started building and then — bang — it snapped. And for the last two years, it’s been a civil war period phase. At least the last year and a half. Now, are we in a truce or a holding pattern or at a turning point? I don’t know. We’ve entered a new phase of the game right now, but I’d be foolish to say where I think it’s going. I don’t know how long this period of calm will last. I hope it lasts for a long time.

And how do you sift through the information you get — like from the Iraqis or the military? I’ve spent some time overseas in developing countries, and I think it’s really hard to get information from people.
Well, I know a lot of people. I’ve been here a long time. I get called, I know people, I have dinner with people. Getting information is not the problem. Getting accurate information, I don’t know. It’s hard to confirm things. I mean, I’m on the phone or out all day long — which is all I do. I don’t do anything else.

I guess I didn’t really mean getting the information; I meant how do you know what’s accurate? How do you sift through peoples’ agendas?
You just call lots of people, speak to lots of different people. Certain things are straightforward. There were two women killed yesterday in Karada. There’s no debate about that. I was there. I saw the blood on the streets. I saw the glass. I saw their hair on the pavement and it’s covered in blood. And I spoke to seven witnesses who all told me the same thing. Did the car try and stop? Yes. I could see a skid mark on the street. I was able to look at it. I’m not a crime scene investigator, but this was pretty clear cut what had happened. Other times, it’s more complicated when you’re talking about political agendas and the reasons things happen and the political maneuvering within the Iraqi government and the long-term objectives of people like [Iraqi Prime Minister] Maliki and [former Iraqi Prime Minister] Allawi. Then it becomes more Byzantine.

The fact that you know Arabic seems like it would be an incredible advantage. Are people surprised that you know it?
Most Iraqis I speak to, yes, they’re very surprised. Most people I speak to assume that I’m from Lebanon or Egypt or my parents were from the region or something like that. I frankly think it is the critical advantage and I would recommend to any young reporters to do that immediately — that that would be the critical thing, is the language.

And how do people generally receive you as 1) an American, and 2) a reporter?
Usually you can break away from that. Obviously when I show up to a scene with a camera, it’s clear what I do for a living. But it’s not that I’m perceived as some sort of American presence. If you show up and you’re speaking in Arabic and you talk to people, and you ask them questions and you greet them in a way that makes them comfortable and implies that you know where they are — because when you interview someone on the street, they talk language that’s very local. They’re referring to names of streets where an event happened or particular neighborhoods, so if you’re familiar with the names of the streets and the names of the shop owners who own the streets and you know what happened there three weeks ago, it doesn’t make you perceived as such an outsider. You can just talk to them and have more of conversation on terms that they’re comfortable with.

Do you find the people are welcoming to you?
Oh yeah, very much so. Absolutely. In general the people here are incredibly nice and welcoming. The problem is getting people right now who are willing to talk and have their faces shown because so many people feel threatened, and that has been the real difference. In print, you can use a false name or bring them into your place or talk to them over the phone. I need to interview people on camera in their place of business or in their homes. In this society right now, that puts people at tremendous risk and we do sometimes, we will agree, “OK, we’ll shoot you in your home, but not expose the outside where we are. We will come in with the camera in a bag so nobody sees that we’re coming in to interview you.” We’re working on a story right now on doctors. It took me three days to find a doctor who would be willing to let me interview him and have his face shown on camera. And it is an incredible act of bravery that he’s letting me do that. He has no interest in doing that. We’re not paying him anything. He just wants to have his story told and he’s willing to do it.

There was an article recently where former military spokesman Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who’s generally in favor of openness between the military and the media, said that journalists don’t spend enough time getting to know the troops. What do you think about that?
That is a problem. Oftentimes on embed, because of the restrictions or our need to file, sometimes we’re asked to go in and do an overnight embed. It’s worthless. You need to spend three, four, five days, a week with them, get to live the situation. You need to spend time with them; otherwise you’re just running in, grabbing some sound bites and leaving, and you don’t do a service to them, you don’t do a service to the viewers. It’s unfortunately sometimes a necessity of the business with deadlines, but he has a point.

Is there is an issue at all with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
I think we all suffer a little bit from it, from post-traumatic stress. [There’s] this theory that every person goes through four stages of covering the war in Iraq. First stage — I’ve mentioned this before, it’s been written about quite a bit — but stage one is, “I’m invincible, I’m Superman. Nothing can happen to me.” Stage two is, “This really is dangerous and something might happen to me.” Stage three is, “You know what? This is really very dangerous. I’ve been here so long; something is probably going to happen to me.” And stage four: “I’ve been here too long, I’m pushing my luck. I’m going to die out here.” And depending on where you are psychologically, I think that is reflective of your post-traumatic stress. And I’ve been all over the charts, from one to four — I usually settle in around three.

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Julie Haire is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

In this age of movie mega-hits, it’s difficult for any independent film — let alone one without big-name stars — to get made and find an audience. Writer/director Adam Rifkin hopes the front-page issues explored in his new film, Look, an feature shot entirely from the point of view of security cameras lurking everywhere, hits home with movie-goers when it opens December 14 in New York and L.A. The small-budget film was financed and distributed via a new company called Liberated Artists, the brainchild of former AOL CEO Barry Schuler and producer Brad Wyman, who made the Oscar-winning film Monster. Rifkin earned cult film status with The Dark Backward before writing Mousehunt starring Nathan Lane and Small Soldiers with Tommy Lee Jones. Below, he tells us how Look, which is about the things people do when they think no one is watching, scored on the all-important film festival circuit.

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Where did the initial idea for Look come from?
The spark came about four years ago when I was driving through Los Angeles and got a ticket from a red light camera and got a photo in the mail from the police department of myself singing to the radio, making an idiotic expression, looking embarrassing. The idea that a photo was taken without my knowledge and sent to my home address was a little unnerving and it got me thinking: How many times a day do cameras I’m not aware of take my picture? Today, the average person is captured 200 times a day, more in big cities, and the numbers are growing exponentially. I thought this could be a really cool way to shoot a movie that I’d never seen it done before. I really wanted to throw a bucket of cold water on the public’s obliviousness to just how many surveillance cameras are out there and to use the film as a means of starting a conversation. Everybody wants to live in a safer society but at same time everybody is concerned with their right to privacy.

You shopped Look to film festivals like CineVegas, where it won the Grand Jury Award, Chicago International, where it was an official selection, and Fort Worth, where it won a special jury prize. How important are festivals to success in today’s overcrowded movie market?
Film festivals are a great way for independent films to get seen by audiences and buyers. You can make the greatest film in the world but if you have no place to show it and nobody sees it, it just sits on a shelf in your basement. Festivals are how lots of films get discovered. When we screened the film at CineVegas and it won, which was fantastic, we suddenly got inundated with offers from other distribution companies, big ones, but we turned them all down. All the plans submitted to us were completely in the box, nothing particularly creative — they were just going to feed the pipeline a product. We believed starting a new company, working together, and really being passionate about nurturing a success out of the film was essential, especially because the film is different, because the film has no names. It’s a lot easier to distribute a film if Will Smith’s face is on the poster.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of films compete each year on the film festival circuit, hoping for a shot at the big time. How did Look break out of the pack?
Hopefully, the cream always rises to the top. But that isn’t always the case. I’ve seen wonderful films get turned down at film festivals and never get seen. That said, you’ve got to keep trying. If you make a film that’s great and it doesn’t connect, you gotta make another film — and another. You can’t ever quit.

Walk us through the film festival process. How many did you submit to and who were you competing against?
We submitted to four and got accepted to all of them and now the movie opens December 14. The neat thing about festivals is you’re competing with all kinds of films. You’re competing with the kid who made a film in his backyard with his home camcorder for $50 and you’re competing with big budget independent films like I’m Not There, starring Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere. Film festivals are a great way for creative films to find their audience. You wouldn’t necessarily see a movie like Underdog [which Rifkin wrote] at a film festival because it’s such a populace film. Film festivals are a great way to introduce a film that’s artistic to a crowd of people who appreciate something different.

Big Brother is an easy target, but in this day and age it’s Little Brother who’s more of a threat.

That said, how do you market your film so that it resonates with festival judges as well as a wider audience in middle America?
We believe Look is a film that will not only appeal to cinefiles but anyone who’s a citizen of any civilized country because this proliferation of surveillance cameras affects us all. If you’re walking down the aisle at any Wal-Mart you’re on 40 different cameras. So it’s not just a film for urban movie geeks. It was also very important to me that the characters be real people that any of us could relate to: a mini-mart clerk with big dreams, a department store manager trying to score with all his saleswomen, a high school teacher trying to be a decent husband, and a lawyer struggling with a sexual dilemma. I didn’t want the characters to be so quirky or so outrageous that people wouldn’t be able to connect with any of them. There’s a number of different story lines that interweave and I hope everybody will relate to at least one of them.

How do compare your experiences making this film with the big budget Disney film, Underdog?
I love working on big studio movies. There’s lots and lots of money to play with, lots of very nice hotels to stay in, lots of delicious catered food, and lots and lots of time, which is fabulous. Also, big budget movies often open the first day on 3,500 screens. It’s a really exciting way to make a movie. Look is a very independent film that cost about the budget for lunch on Underdog. The crew was really small and everybody was there because they believed in the project, believed in the script, and believed in the opportunity to do something different. Nobody was in it for the payday.

What did you learn about the use of surveillance cameras while making this film?
True story. During research, I visited a bunch of malls and department stores to see how their offices worked and how the cameras looked. I’d always assumed the people behind surveillance cameras were trained professionals, responsible individuals who take their job as security experts seriously. I found out that’s not always the case. One mall security office, which had dozens of cameras, was run by a bunch of high school kids and dropouts who weren’t always zooming in on shoplifters — they were also zooming in on girls’ boobs. They showed me their highlight reel of the funniest things they captured people doing and if they found something particularly egregious they’d post it on YouTube. As a private citizen, I was unnerved. As a filmmaker, it got me very excited. Big Brother is an easy target — the issue of the government invading our privacy. But in this day and age it’s Little Brother who’s more of a threat. Because everyone has a cell phone camera, everybody has access to YouTube and in a second a world audience can have access to any piece of video.

What do you want people to take away from Look?
I hope they think about it and talk about for long time. Whenever they’re in an elevator or a department store I want them to remember the movie, turn around, and see the camera peeking at them. Every time I show the movie I get emails, calls, and text messages weeks later from people saying “Damn you, I can’t go to the bathroom any more without being paranoid someone’s watching.”

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Tips on scoring an audience for an independent film:
1) Make the best film possible.
2) To generate buzz and help find a distributor, shop it to as many film festivals as you can.
3) Explore innovative, out-of-the-box marketing ideas and traditional and online media markets.
4) Consider the issues your film explores and pitch reporters who cover those issues instead of concentrating solely on entertainment writers.
5) If all else fails, try, try again.

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Dawn Shurmaitis is a freelance writer whose stories have appeared in Salon, New Jersey Monthly, and numerous newspapers. After seeing Look, she regretted every indecent act she ever committed where cameras may have been watching.

New York Fashion Week: Any tricks to staying fresh through what much of the fashion media experiences as an eight-day all-nighter?
Four hours sleep [nightly], obscene amounts of junk food and the only trick to staying fresh is being completely in love with what you do, which I am. In fact, during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, work is like being with a bunch of kids at camp. We love it!

Describe the different niches filled by The Daily and the monthly Fashion Mini version.
The Daily is the insider treat for the fashion show guests — the media, designers, models, photographers and buyers. Our consumer magazine, Fashion Mini, with its newsstand distribution and subscriber base, also invites bona fide fashion lovers to experience the fashion insiders’ world. Now we have a fast-growing readership base in cities like LA, Dallas, Houston, Miami, places where there is a passionate fashion reader and consumer. Ever since 2004 we also deliver fashion news every day to about 200,000 faithful readers, via our Web site FashionWeekDaily.com. In September we introduced Daily video on our site, which we update constantly, and we launched a new blog, Chic Report — very visual, cheeky, scoopy, and full of surprises.

You grew up in Romania — what spurred you to come to the United States?
Growing up in Romania during the communist years in the 70s, the greatest possible dream a young person could have was to come to the USA, since this country symbolized freedom and opportunity. It’s a privilege for me to be living in the USA — I still feel this very poignantly, even after more than 20 years here. A lot of my friends and colleagues who came here from Romania took jobs in the press, like I did, because freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and a free press were — and always will be — the most important things in the world to us.

Former employees have characterized you as “fiery” — how does that serve your work?
I am passionately, head-over-heels in love with what I do. I consider myself very fortunate to be going to work every day thinking, “isn’t this something, another day in our newsroom!”

In 2000, you told New York you didn’t consider WWD a competitor — what distinguishes the publications these days?
WWD is the leading trade newspaper, covering all the minutiae of business. The Daily and Fashion Mini are glossy magazines for the fashion elite and for fashion-loving readers. Together with up-to-the-second fashion news, we deliver a highly entertaining experience, full of photos, color, lots of quotes, lots of reporting, original stories and a great sense of fun.

“Have you ever seen a house organ be this funny, cheeky, and cover shows from outside the tents?”

How does The Daily‘s online output differ during high fashion season? Also, how does content shake out between print edition and online edition — are stories repurposed?

Every day on average we run about 20 or so items online, with about 100 pictures and several new videos each week, year-round. Naturally during the Fashion Week season (New York, London, Milan, Paris) we ramp up our coverage — we usually have about 100 new videos that month [February or September]), then, literally, thousands of photos, runway, front row, parties, etc. We have 50 people on staff nowadays for all of our publications, so we are able to cover all this — print and online — pretty much without repurposing content. Some of the print features will be repurposed, not out of necessity but because there is a lot of demand for the Dailies during fashion week from readers who are not able to access the magazine, and the Mini also sells out pretty fast, and so we offer some of those stories online after they run in print.

A recent New York Times article reported that you aim to grow the Mini‘s guaranteed circulation from 25,000 to 75,000 this year — how do you plan to do that?
We’ve already increased the circulation of the Mini to 50,000 and we aim to hit 75,000 in ’09 as planned. We have increased our newsstand draw and our controlled distribution.

You also said a weekly TV show inspired by Fashion Mini is “likely to happen this year.” Would it be a reality show?
Yes, it is likely. As of now [mid-January, when this interview was conducted] it is not going to be a reality show, but we are actively working on it and are not allowed to announce details yet.

The Daily‘s parent company IMG also produces Fashion Week events and has a modeling agency arm. Back in ’03, when US made a play for The Daily‘s place with Fashion Week readers, then-editor of that offshoot Joe Dolce accused The Daily of being “the house organ” of show producer/IMG division 7th on 6th. What’s your response to those who still wonder to what extent The Daily can report on its sister divisions during Fashion Week?

Have you ever seen a house organ be this funny, cheeky, cover shows from outside the tents, put models on their covers that aren’t from IMG? We are completely and proudly an independent publication. We are fortunate to be a part of a company that respects our editorial independence and I believe that this is obvious to everyone who reads our publications and Web site.

What do you seek in a fashion reporter? What must he or she know how to do/be capable of in order to excel at The Daily?
We expect a lot of our writers, reporters, editors: a passion for the subject, more than anything; great competitive spirit; great writing talent; huge sense of humor; the ability to ask smart and funny questions even from the people who stare them down forbiddingly; fighting the good fight against publications who try to steal our exclusives, yet always being collegial, friendly and remaining through all this a quality person, a person of integrity. I know it’s a lot, but that’s what we expect, and we get this from our staffers. We don’t like mean people and we are good to each other around here. Our coverage reflects that.

What’s your take on the surge in online fashion content?

I love that there is so much fashion content online — it inspires us and also inspires the readers and young generation. It makes fashion as important as it should be. Also, for someone who fled a communist country, like me, the internet is the perfect expression of freedom, it defies censorship, it gives everyone the ability to speak up and be heard, and as such I consider it the most important invention of humanity since the wheel.

IMG recently acquired Tennis Week, which now more closely resembles The Daily in layout, format, and voice — what are IMG’s objectives with it?
In one year since we’ve acquired Tennis Week we increased both the readership and advertiser base enormously, and we’ve re-launched an accompanying Web site that is now the hottest magazine site in the sport. With live video, live scores, live audio, constant stream of news, scoops, on and off court reports, it’s incredible fun to watch and even more fun to produce. We’ve adapted our unique voice and style and look to tennis, and it’s worked very well for the magazine as well as the site.

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Ways to keep the fashion scoops coming

Strike a different tone from others on the same beat
WWD is the leading trade newspaper, covering all the minutiae of business. The Daily and Fashion Mini are glossy magazines for the fashion elite and for fashion-loving readers,” Niro points out. “Together with up-to-the-second fashion news, we deliver a highly entertaining experience, full of photos, color, lots of quotes, lots of reporting, original stories and a great sense of fun.”

Give readers all the info they crave
“Naturally, during the Fashion Week season — New York, London, Milan, Paris — we ramp up our coverage,” Niro explains. “We usually have about 100 new videos that month [February or September]), then, literally, thousands of photos, runway, front row, parties, etc. We have 50 people on staff nowadays for all of our publications, so we are able to cover all this — print and online — pretty much without repurposing content.”

News is news, no matter who it’s about
“Have you ever seen a house organ be this funny, cheeky, cover shows from outside the tents, put models on their covers that aren’t from IMG?,” Niro asks rhetorically to disabuse notions of skewing favorable for a parent company. “We are completely and proudly an independent publication. We are fortunate to be a part of a company that respects our editorial independence and I believe that this is obvious to everyone who reads our publications and Web site.”

Stare down intimidators and imitators
As Niro tells it, Daily reporters need “the ability to ask smart and funny questions even from the people who stare them down forbiddingly; fighting the good fight against publications who try to steal our exclusives, yet always being collegial, friendly and remaining through all this a quality person, a person of integrity. I know it’s a lot, but that’s what we expect, and we get this from our staffers.”

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

When Ethan Riegelhaupt’s daughter picked up a call from The New York Times one morning in 1997, he thought it was circulation trying to sell him a subscription. Luckily she insisted that it was Times corporate calling. It was about a job.

Since then, the seasoned pol has been crafting speeches for the Times‘ top executives, and working hard to communicate the paper’s innovations within the company as head of speechwriting and internal communications.

Riegelhaupt began his career in politics on the 1980 as the New York issues director for Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign, as “Lion of the Senate,” is among the most fiery speakers stumping for any of the major candidates this season.

Though he is new-school in his use and enthusiasm of new media (he’s on Facebook and has a stellar Times Quiz ranking), Riegelhaupt is decidedly old-school about communications professionals remaining silent partners in the PR process.

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Name: Ethan Riegelhaupt
Position: Vice president, speechwriting and internal communications
Resume: Prior to joining The New York Times in 1999 as VP of speechwriting and internal communications, he had his own public affairs consultancy, EMR & Associates. Prior to that, Riegelhaupt was chief of policy for the office of the public advocate, Mark Green, New York City. Also a lawyer by trade, he served as general counsel and corporate secretary to the New York Convention Center Operating Corporation and Convention Center Development Corporation (Jacob Javits Center). He aserved in the administration of New York State governors Mario Cuomo in a variety of positions, and was a VP at Robinson, Lerer, and Montgomery.
Birthday: July 22, 1953
Hometown: New York, NY (born in Queens, primarily grew up upstate New York and Framingham, Massachusetts)
Education: Colgate University, JD Brooklyn Law School
Marital status: Married
First section of Sunday Times: Week in Review or Book Review
Favorite TV shows: The Wire, West Wing, Meet the Press
Last books you read: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks; The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa, War Made New by Max Boot, and Unstoppable by Chris Zook. (“I have a wonderful local bookstore, Arcade, in Rye, New York.”)
Guilty pleasure: Rotisserie basketball and baseball; last year joined the original league founded by Daniel Okrent, Peter Gethers and their pioneer roto-colleagues.

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Where did you begin your career?

After graduating from law school and passing the New York State bar, I began my career working on Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential campaign staff as the deputy director of issues in New York — the back story of how this actually happened needs to be told over cocktails.

How did you make the transition into full-time speech writing?

Being part of Mario Cuomo’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1982 was an important first step. When I initially joined the Administration, I was the program associate for regulated industries and had supervisory responsibilities for banking, insurance, and a variety of other departments. A few years later, I was appointed executive director for the Council of Fiscal and Economic Priorities (New York State’s long range planning unit).

During this period, I assisted Governor Cuomo with his major addresses. One of the nation’s great orators and a brilliant writer, the Governor thoroughly enjoys a rigorous debate (I use present tense, as he continues to tour the world speaking) about what a particular speech should achieve and how it could change the national narrative.

I learned the value of working for extraordinarily ambitious chief executives, who had the inclination to aim high. I also came to appreciate the difference between contributing to a speech process and taking responsibility for it — speech kibitzers throughout the land take note.

After spending about six years in the Administration, I was about to move into the private sector to take a position in either public relations or investment banking. One morning, I called the Governor and asked what he thought I should do and he suggested that I stay around and supervise his speech staff. Now I would learn all about responsibility.

What was your biggest triumph on the campaign trail? Your biggest mistake?

Success: Working on Mario Cuomo and Mark Green’s winning campaigns for Governor and Public Advocate were my major triumphs, but I will get a little more granular.

I was always an issues director during campaigns. I was supposed know about half dozen paragraphs worth about every imaginable and unimaginable topic, from organic dairy farming and Medicaid and Medicare to the state of New York State’s relationship with Kazakhstan (always a little convoluted).

In this capacity, I also drafted platforms, and dissected the policy proposals of the opposition. The 1982 gubernatorial campaign in New York provided a good example of how these skills were employed effectively. The day after Cuomo, then Lieutenant Governor, defeated Mayor Koch in the primary, my phone rang off the hook with desperate offers of assistance. Soon thereafter, I asked folks in Albany to take a look at the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lew Lehrman’s economic strategy and determine how it would affect New York State property taxes. Fueled by the desire to make amends, a group of savvy analysts — in their free time, of course — contributed a very useful report and it turned into a very effective campaign issue.

Candidates and elected officials are always disappointed that their finely-crafted speeches are not the lede story in either The New York Times or the Washington Post. This is because there was no effort to break news, which is what newspapers do for a living.

Mistake: Spending too much time in the headquarters inevitably clouds the visions of issues people. To be effective, you need to leave your desk, and spend time in the field and find out what the voters are actually thinking about. (By the way, this also applies to private and public sector speechwriters; too often headquarters can be one big echo chamber). It broadens your perspective and allows you to offer better analysis and counsel. This is significantly easier to do now with all the technology at your disposal.

How do all the new technology tools affect how you do your job?

There short answer is a lot. The technological corollary of not getting out of the office enough is not becoming intimately familiar with what the entrepreneurs and scientists of Silicon Valley and Alley have been inventing. If you are writing and thinking about the new digital era, which we all are in one way or another, you must have a hands-on appreciation of what you are trying to say. Having a monthly subscription to Wired and regularly reading the Techcrunch and Gizmodo blogs is useful. Touching and feeling the stuff is critically important, especially for those of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era.

Taking my own counsel, I joined the Times‘s Facebook network. While my college-age daughters were horrified, I’m proud to say that they both did “friend” me. I also conducted podcast interviews — developing a much bigger appreciation for radio announcers, helped create a multiplatform newsletter focusing on the interest of our advertisers, and spend a lot of time talking to the research and development folks. (Our guys won the Hack Day competition sponsored by BBC and Yahoo! in London last year.)

What did you learn from Mario Cuomo about how speeches are dissected and reported in the media?

The media will cover a serious speech if it changes the way that we think about a particular issue or recommends an important solution in a vital area. News begets news coverage. Candidates and elected officials are always disappointed that their finely-crafted speeches are not the lede story in either The New York Times or the Washington Post. This is because there was no effort to break news, which is what newspapers do for a living.

Moreover, reporters like to be inspired and an enthusiastic audience will affect their stories. Along the way, if you happen to appeal successfully to the better angels of our nature, you can significantly enhance the coverage. What absolutely will not work is a white paper posing as a speech; long, dull lists of policy recommendations do not make good copy. The speech should also have a compelling rationale, tight logic, and strong supporting themes.

How important are the other things, and do you teach them, such as body language, pacing, lighting, and wardrobe?

Successful presentations are 75 percent speech and 25 percent delivery. You need to understand your speakers’ styles and what makes them more comfortable and happier. This necessitates thinking about the different components of the speech environment. The podium and lighting are critically important. You also want to ensure that additional elements, such as video and PowerPoint are going to work flawlessly. And then there is the teleprompter.

You also need to have a good sense what the audience is expecting. The speaker is invited into the audience’s “home'” and has certain expectations. This is especially true for commencements. Too often, speakers forget what a special day this is for the students and are then surprised by the somewhat indifferent response.

Overseas events present the added challenge of simultaneous translation. That’s a challenge for those speakers who look for immediate audience response for affirmation, which they all tend to do. Fundamentally, when preparing for a speech, it is necessary to take a holistic attitude towards the event. If the speaker is relaxed, and has a good rapport with the audience, it’ll be much easier to achieve your goals.

The word “integrated” gets bandied about a lot in communications. How can a speechwriter be sure their work is integrated with the other parts of the PR plan?

It is all about adhering to your main corporate themes and reinforcing them in all your communications. (This is where boring is good.) I work very closely with our senior vice president of corporate communications, Catherine Mathis, and my staff, executive director of employee communications Judy Jones and manager of internal communications and public relations Stacy Green, to ensure that we use external and internal speeches, our internal Web site, and a steady stream of employee emails to support our long-term strategic communications plan. (Yes, you can do all this without sounding like a 1950s corporate drone or a Soviet-era apparatchik.)

Do you adjust the messages and plan as you go?

While closely adhering to the main components of a strategic communications plan is essential, we live in a volatile world and communicators must embrace a degree of intellectual flexibility. Think about what was happening in the presidential election last September or the prospect of the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl just a month ago.

An effective speech should reflect the changing economic, technological, political, and cultural landscape. You need to take a postmodern Renaissance mindset — okay, a tad oxymoronic — and reflect what is currently happening: the macro political/economic stories of the week combined with a few Access Hollywood headlines. The audience knows that the speaker has come to tell a story, but it is also looking for this individual to make an intellectual and/or emotional connection. This usually requires at least acknowledging the main headlines of the news cycle.

Good speechwriters should also constantly look for new developments in their company/government/nonprofit — new products and services, new metrics and new achievements — to strengthen their arguments. They should pay close attention to what is happening throughout their organization to bolster and enliven their arguments. The strategy must remain the strategy, but there should be a consistent effort to add new supporting evidence.

Start with a joke, yay or nay?

Sure, crowds like to be entertained; we all do, but that should not be your first priority. It slows down the writing process too much. The humor should flow as the speech is being drafted. As you get closer to the event, you can better see where jokes can be used most effectively.

Are considerations different now that all speeches are reported nationally?

Actually they are disseminated internationally (proving Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat thesis), if they achieve a certain degree of significance. The Internet has transformed the playing field. All information, including speeches, is global and immediate. With popular new Web sites such as NyTimes.com and Boston.com (sorry for the commercial interruption), social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, blogs, and phones with screens, an exceptionally good or awfully bad speech will be distributed far and wide. Then, of course, there is YouTube, which is giving everyone around the clock video access to a surprising number of speeches, especially in the political realm.

How important are internal communications to the Times?

Our executive committee, under the leadership of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York Times, and Janet Robinson, president and CEO, takes internal communications very seriously. They know that we are living in a complicated, transitional period for the media industry, and it critically important for everyone in our company to know what is happening.

To achieve this goal, we think both vertically and horizontally. We try to provide an opportunity for the senior executives to explain where the company is heading. We also provide vehicles, such as podcasts and panel discussions, for our colleagues to tell each other what they are doing and how different segments of our organization are meeting the needs of our audiences and our advertisers.

Given everyone’s time crunch, there is a significant emphasis on entertainment value. We want to do more than simply providing the text of a speech. We want to give our colleagues a multidimensional sense of what their senior executives are and what each other is doing.

Is there a difference between private and public sector speechwriting?

After having spent half my time in the private sector and the other half in the public sector, I have learned applies equally to corporate and public sectors.

Executive speechwriting has become a far more multidimensional responsibility. A successful speech has many elements. It is about applying your knowledge of public relations, crisis management, and your organization’s financial, advertising, and marketing operations. It is also about working closely with an increasing array of professionals — from your clients to those individuals who provide you with necessary information, (such as budget, legal. and accounting), to the event folks. While it is becoming a more complicated process, it is also more necessary and more personally satisfying.

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Jason Chupick is co-editor of mediabistro.com’s PR blog, PRNewser.