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.

---

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”

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

“It’s proven to be a dream come true,” says Maggie Rodriguez of her new gig, as co-anchor of CBS’ The Early Show. It’s a long way from her start as a “one-woman-band” at a Miami cable station, which had her lugging her own camera as she covered breaking news.

The station was Dynamic Cablevision, and Rodriguez worked there part-time while also employed at WLTV-TV, Univision’s Miami affiliate, as an associate producer and assignment editor. Her big break came in 1992, during Hurricane Andrew, when many reporters at WLTV literally weren’t able to get to work. According to Rodriguez, her bosses said, “Let’s give her a shot”, and put her on the air. Her stories were then picked up by the Univision network broadcasts, and she was on her way.

Rodriguez was born and raised in Miami, where she was anchoring (for WFOR-TV) when she got the call from CBS to move to New York. “I was in Miami, thinking I would stay there forever — because I met my husband there, we settled there, we were happy there — but then a wonderful curveball came my way late last year!”

Distance has not separated her from her Miami-based mother — the two talk each day to discuss that morning’s show. “Everything from my outfit to the questions I ask,” Rodriguez says.

It’s evident that her family is a source of pride for Rodriguez, whose parents fled Cuba to settle in America. “I’m very, very proud to be a Cuban-American, representing my community — and Hispanics — in such a high-profile way. I really am. Especially because I know that my parents worked so hard and overcame so much to give me the opportunity to go this far.”

---

Name: Maggie Rodriguez
Position: Co-anchor, CBS’s The Early Show
Resume: Rodriguez began her current job in January of 2008, after joining CBS News as co-anchor of the Saturday Early Show in June of 2007. Previously, she was the main anchor at Miami’s CBS O&O, WFOR-TV (2000-2006) and an anchor/reporter at KABC-TV in Los Angeles (1994-2000). Prior to that, Rodriguez reported and field produced in Miami for the Univision Network (1992-94) and reported for cable station Dynamic Cablevision (1991). She got her start at WLTV-TV, Univision’s Miami affiliate, as an associate producer, field producer, and assignment editor (1990-91).
Birthdate: December 12, 1969
Hometown: Miami, Florida
Education: B.A. in Broadcast Journalism and Spanish, University of Miami, 1991
Marital status: Married with a two and a half-year-old daughter
First section of Sunday Times: The front page — “I read it every day. On Sunday, my guilty pleasure is (the New York Post‘s) Page Six. But the Times I devour cover-to-cover every day, Sunday included.”
Favorite television show: How I Met Your Mother
Guilty pleasure: Chocolate. Chocolate cake. Chocolate anything.
Last book read: I’m still reading A Thousand Splendid Suns

---

You’ve made the jump to the ‘big dance’ — network TV — what did it take to get there?

It took 15 years of honing my skills. It took a solid foundation of news reporting and anchoring, coupled with all my life experiences. I was just ready. At 37 I was ready for this job — it was perfect for me.

Why do you think the CBS brass chose you as co-anchor?
They tell me they chose me because they recognized my experience, my versatility, and they could tell that I feel comfortable in front of the camera, which I do.

With your new job, and moving to New York, what has been the biggest adjustment for you in all this?
The biggest adjustment has been getting used to apartment living versus house living! In Miami, we lived in a large house — we had five bedrooms — and in New York, we’re renting a two-bedroom apartment that costs more, and is about four times smaller, than our house in Miami. So it’s tough — you’re living in cramped quarters — but in a way, it’s made our family closer. Literally and figuratively.

Your executive producer on The Early Show is Shelley Ross, who has been described as talented, and intense. How do you find Shelley’s style?

I agree that she’s both talented and intense, and I wouldn’t have her any other way. She is infectious. She doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. She works as hard or harder than anyone on that staff. She’s exhilarating in her ideas and in her pursuit of furthering the story and making it better than you would see it on the other stations, finding a different angle. I learn from Shelley every day, and [working with her every morning is] one of the things I’m most excited about, because she helps me think outside the box and just reach for the stars when it comes to getting a guest or furthering a story.

I have found Shelley to be an asset. I have seen a change in our show since she got there and I directly attribute it to her energy, enthusiasm, and tireless work. I’m a huge Shelley fan. And I think that she expects a lot, because it takes a lot to be No. 1.

Why has it been so difficult, over the years, for both The Early Show, in all its incarnations, and for Good Morning America, to compete in the mornings against the juggernaut that is Today?
People are used to watching the Today show, and it’s very hard to break people of their habits, especially when the Today show is a perfectly good show. But I think that people are always open — in fact, hungry — for something fresh, and new, and better. And if you put the best show on TV in the morning, and word gets around, I firmly believe that eventually, people will tune in, and check it out. You have to earn it, slowly. It’s tough to break people from their habits.

What does The Early Show do differently than its competitors — why should a viewer take a time-out one day from GMA or Today or Fox & Friends and check out your program?
Well, hopefully, you will like the team. Hopefully you will like Maggie, Harry [Smith], Julie [Chen], Dave [Price], and Russ [Mitchell]. Hopefully you will see that we all get along well, you will see that we all bring something different to the table. You will immediately notice our experience — which we all bring to the table — and you will see that The Early Show is getting more and more exclusives with top newsmakers. You will see that we are tackling stories that are fresh and current and relevant, not doing the same old morning stories in the same old usual way. We’re thinking outside the box. And I really believe that you’ll see the energy and the enthusiasm and the hard work just by watching it. I hope, anyway.

We have a really aggressive team of producers and bookers who are out there, and they are fighting to get people to talk to The Early Show before they talk to anyone else. We got the son of Osama Bin Laden to do his first live interview with us. He had done the Today show, but he had only agreed to do that on tape. We got him to do it live. And he spent five minutes live with us, on TV. That’s just one example of many that I’ve seen recently.

Do you watch the competition? What do you think they do well?
I do, I TiVo all the morning shows — you have to know your competition. That’s just smart on my part, I think. I think anyone should know their competition.

I think they have talented people on their staffs. I’m a big fan of Matt Lauer and Diane Sawyer. And to their credit, they are well-known names. They have that advantage. And the rest, I don’t think they do better than we do.

Tell me about your first job in television, when you were a one-woman-band.
I lugged a big deck, because I used three-quarter inch gear — so it was a big camera deck on my shoulder, the size of a heavy suitcase. You’re eager, so you’re decked out in your suit, and you’ve got all your makeup and your hair is done. And then you have this thing hanging on your shoulder, you’re carrying a tripod, and a camera.

I appreciate freedom of the press in a way that I think maybe other people don’t. And in a first-hand way, because I saw freedom taken away from my parents.

I think that all the other local crews felt sorry for me. Because they would watch me come in, carrying all this stuff … and setting it up … and I would shoot my own stand-ups. I’d press record, I’d run around, and I’d stand there, and record it … and I’d go back and I’d look at it … and half the time I’d discover I chopped my head off. Then I’d have to re-shoot it.

It was absolutely grueling. But there’s nothing that can replace that experience, because I know how to do everything. I have an appreciation for every single step of the process, because I’ve been there. It was invaluable, it really was, but thank goodness I only had to do that for eight months — it felt like eight years.

You are a first-generation American — your parents were born in Cuba. How has this shaped your perspective as a journalist?
I appreciate freedom of the press in a way that I think maybe other people don’t. And in a first-hand way, because I saw freedom taken away from my parents. As they left a Communist country, they left everything behind, their homes were seized, they had to start over and build their lives in a new place, and speak a new language because they didn’t have the freedom to express themselves in their homeland. So I have an appreciation for that that maybe others don’t.

I try to keep the focus and highlight issues that relate to the Hispanic community, because it’s my community. So I want to make sure that nobody forgets about it. And we’re obviously a major player in this country.

You speak English and Spanish fluently, and you speak Italian and French conversationally. How have you benefited personally and professionally from being multi-lingual?
I’ve benefited from being bilingual in the obvious way — I got to start my career in Spanish TV and successfully crossover to English television. But in small ways, speaking a little bit of Italian and French helps me when you go on stories and people speak that language … I feel that it helps me better relate to more people, and that’s always your goal.

You met your husband, a Telemundo ad sales executive, when you both worked for WFOR-TV in Miami. Do you talk shop at home a lot, or do you fear you’ll OD on the television business?
We talk about it all the time. He helps me more than anyone. My husband is my biggest fan and my biggest critic, and my mentor and my sounding board. Because he’s in the business, he ‘gets’ it. He has such a unique understanding of exactly what I’m talking about, and he helps me through it. It’s not all we talk about, but I consider it a blessing to be able to talk to him about it.

You keep journals in your spare time — what was your last entry about?
My last entry was when I had just gotten the job (as co-anchor of The Early Show) … and the next day, or two days later, they sent me to Nebraska to cover the shooting at the mall. And I was writing about it — I took my journal on the plane — and I was writing, I said, “I just got this job, and my first assignment as anchor of The Early Show is this…” And I remember that [NBC’s] Natalie Morales and [CNN’s] John Roberts and [ABC’s] Chris Cuomo were all on the plane with me. It was just very exciting. And I wrote, “I hope I nail this assignment.”

In our pre-interview correspondence, you mentioned that you wrote in your journal once about your daughter’s conception, which happened on the same day you anchored wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Jeanne [in 2004].

I keep a journal for my daughter — ever since I found out I was pregnant I’ve kept a journal for her. And I think the entry that she’ll find most interesting, when she’s old enough to read it, is the story of how she was conceived. My husband and I had been trying for a long time to get pregnant — so we were being very strategic about everything. So I had to be at work covering Hurricane Jeanne. And we were on the air wall-to-wall. They gave us a very short break during which we stayed at the station and slept on a cot, or went to the hotel next door and slept for a few hours, and went right back on the air.

During my break, I chose to go home in the middle of the storm, dodging palm fronds, my car shaking from the wind, because I knew that if I wanted to get pregnant that month, that was probably my only window.

So I’m risking my life to get home — very important business to take care of! — I got home, and then I raced right back to work. And nine months later, my daughter was born, during Tropical Storm Arlene. So she was conceived in a hurricane, born during a tropical storm.

Any hint of a future broadcaster in the family?
No … she’s been on TV several times. Maybe she’ll be a singer — she’s very musical. But I don’t know that she’ll be a broadcaster. And that’s okay.

Who goes to bed earlier, you or your daughter?
I go to bed earlier. Is that sad or what? I’m the one with a bedtime. I always say to her, “Mommy’s got to go to bed, good night!” and she says, “Good night, Mommy.” And she shuts the door, and then I hear her and my husband chatting away in the living room, and I think, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

---

Alissa Krinsky is a contributing blogger to TVNewser.

Eager to browse reviews of Barack Obama’s latest book? Or to find text and video of the candidate’s rousing victory speech after the Iowa caucuses? Forget CNN. Instead, log on to www.redroom.com, a new social networking site for readers and writers that welcomed the presidential candidate as one of its authors in mid-February. Writers of all levels and aspirations (like “leader of the free world”) come to the site to meet, discuss, debate, find encouragement, and even hawk upcoming work. Launched in December and spearheaded by San Francisco-based founder and CEO Ivory Madison, the “Red Room” already boasts more than 600 author pages — with another 500 jockeying for a spot. Ivory and her editorial board strive for a far ranging demographic (from French nationals and presidential hopefuls to the over-70 set) and genres that reach beyond mystery and memoir all the way to sports history and fine art criticism. With 5,000 registered members, Madison aimed to hit 1,000,000 pageviews in February. By late March, journalists and not-quite-published members will be able to secure their own corner of the room with Member Pages similar to the invitation-only Author Pages. Below, Madison talks about her hands-on approach to reading, writing, blogging, being a geek, and carving an on-line niche.

Where did you get the idea for the Web site and what’s it mean to be in the “Red Room”?
To be in the Red Room means you aren’t out there all alone. You’re part of a community, like mediabistro.com, with people you can ask for help and support. It’s also a place where new readers can find you. Writers need to promote their careers, and that means they need a Web presence. Many writers have been “meaning to” put up a site for years. Others have an outdated site, but it’s mystifying and expensive to get their Webmaster to update it for them. We wanted to create something affordable — it’s free — that made the technology so easy, the writers could update their own site, say with upcoming events or new pictures, in a minute or less. I always say to writers, if you can order a sweater online, you can use this Web site. The interface is that easy to use.

Where does the name come from?
Redroom.com was actually named in part after the literary tradition of the “Red Room” of the White House. When Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t allow female reporters at his press conferences, Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conferences at the same time for the women. The conferences were so popular that the male reporters starting attending, and the president had no choice but to integrate his press conferences in order to get any attention. A tradition of civilized revolution on behalf of disenfranchised writers is carried on in the modern-day redroom.com.

Amy Tan wrote her first blog ever on redroom.com.

The site calls itself “the online home of the world’s greatest writers.” That’s a pretty bold statement. How can you back that up?
Well, you know, sometimes we couch it a little and say, “the online home of some of the world’s greatest writers,” but at the end of the day, I believe the vision we have will come true. I’m already astounded at the talented writers who have joined us, and the incredible blog posts you won’t find anywhere else. So far, we have at least 20 literary icons who I think are rather universally thought of as the world’s greatest living writers. How many do we have to have to make it official? Seriously, if you have any suggestions of who to invite, we take them.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Web sites for writers. What sets you apart?
One thing that sets us apart is our social mission — we will be giving back to all the causes our authors support; while we do help writers market themselves, we also help them change the world through the nonprofit groups they believe in. Another thing that sets us apart is that we’re invitation-only and the content is moderated to create an appealing, entertaining atmosphere. And frankly, by entering the market at this juncture, we can use what we’ve learned from the evolution of online communities going back a decade. We have the luxury of learning best practices from both the writing community and the online social networking leaders.

Red Room is the online home of authors such as Alice Walker and Salman Rushdie. Was it hard to get such high-caliber authors on board?
It’s funny. Some of the most famous authors can be the most gracious, enthusiastic, and involved. Khaled Hossieni sends the most lovely notes to our staff. James Patterson is mentioning us in his newsletter. Amy Tan wrote her first blog ever on redroom.com; she has another Web site, but had never blogged before. Po Bronson gave me advice that led directly to the development of many of the features you see up there. Alice Walker and Salman Rushdie’s involvement was absolutely crucial in securing our early support. Fame doesn’t affect character or personality. The authors I mentioned have generosity and vision as part of their character. Some self-important barely published writers have turned us down, while Pulitzer-Prize winners have thanked us profusely … we never know until we ask. My advice to people is to ask kind, smart people for help, whether they are famous or not, and you’ll succeed.

Will writers ever be considered cool?
This shows what a geek I am. I think writers are cool. Always did. Still do. All my heroes are writers. I will say this: I don’t like when some writers think they are cooler than other writers. No one in the world is actually “cool,” so why not be the kind of writer who is supportive of people with similar dreams?

Red Room promotes numerous causes. Do you think writers should be political?
Our site provides a platform for writers to highlight the causes that matter most to them, especially those that support children, literacy, and positive social change globally. In the beginning, we’re donating our ad space to the authors’ causes, but soon we’ll have paid advertising — our business has an advertising revenue model so that the services to writers and readers can remain free — and each writer will be able to see how much money they’ve raised. And if you’re offended by the causes an author supports, get off their author page, because viewing it raises money for their causes. Every choice a person makes is political. What to write about and how is inherently political. Our philosophy is that the greatest writers transform individuals and whole societies.

Among many other things, including torch singer and attorney, you’ve founded a writing program where you were an editor and writing coach — even won an award for it. Can you teach someone to be a good writer?
Absolutely. It’s simple: Make them sit down and write. There is no amount of talking about writing, thinking about writing, reading about writing, or studying writing that substitutes for sitting down and writing. And I mean writing, not editing. Most advice I see about writing is really advice about editing or marketing, which drives me crazy. You want an example? “Have a great opening hook!” Well, that’s only going to come during the editing process. If you tell that to a writer starting a project, you’ll shut her down and she’ll never write it. The method I developed, which is the opposite of how most journalists write, is to teach people to separate their writing from their editing from their marketing. Those are three very different skills and they can all be taught in a very short time. Writing requires vulnerability and self-awareness. Editing and marketing require critical thinking and knowledge. That’s a whole other interview.

These days, it seems like everyone — from preteens to plumbers — has their own blog. Why do you think we’re so obsessed with information?
People have a need for self-expression; it help them process or clarify things. People also want validation from others, and to find others like them. Also, I always say, you know, an essay is a piece of art you created with your hands. So, remember that all kinds of people want to make a piece of art and say, “I did that.” And that’s great. Some of them, the real writers, it turns out they can’t not do that, they are obsessed with doing that, with translating their life into pieces of art they made with their hands. Do I sometimes wonder why someone would bother writing something so irrelevant? Sure. But that’s relative. The original blog entries we’re getting from our writers are so outstanding it makes my jaw drop. Really world-class essays, hilarious behind-the-scenes looks at writers’ lives, fun exchanges from old friends. Far, far better quality than I was expecting. But maybe that’s just my taste and someone else thinks that stuff is irrelevant.

On your “About Us” page everyone listed claims to be 29. Hmm. What kind of statement are you trying to make?

Most writers have this idea in their head that they will write their first, serious, award-winning novel before they are 30. I find this endlessly amusing because very, very few brilliant writers do this. Invariably, they don’t have the humility or hubris or whatever to do it until later in life. So, my entire staff really does have a novel or screenplay or something they are working on, and they were very happy to find out that I promised no one turns 30 before they get published. My graphic novel comes out later this year, from DC Comics, so then I can turn 30.

Red Room is geared toward writers and readers and yet you also offer video and audio podcasts. Why do they belong on a site devoted to words?

Our site is all about authors, whatever the authors want, and not just a list of their books. Authors want to tell you what they are up to, what they’re reading, show you the video from a great reading they did, have you listen to a podcast of an appearance they did on the radio, see their favorite still photos, see upcoming events. Soon, we’re rolling out tons of new features for readers and writers to have their own pages to scrapbook their favorite multimedia and books, and to showcase their writing. To find the community they need until they get invited to have their own author page. There was a neat blog comment exchange between two of our writers, Amy Tan and Belle Yang, in which Belle gave credit to Amy for helping her get her career off the ground 15 years ago. I want to see more of that. We aim to build something that helps make it happen every day.

---

Tips for building a successful internet company:
1. Leverage your existing talents, interests and relationships into the online space
2. Forget about venture capitalists
Secure angel investors who believe in your vision and are in it for more than just the money.
3. Solve a problem for a large group of people that you like, and build something you wish existed for you.
4. Let your market drive your features and alliances

“Red Room gives a portion of proceeds to authors’ favorite causes, not ours, and sell through their favorite bookstores, not ours,” Madison says.
5. Make the technology so easy for users to understand and use
No one should feel excluded, and the design should be so attractive, it feels more like the real world than the Internet.

---

Freelance writer Dawn Shurmaitis last interviewed director Adam Rifkin for MediaBistro. After interviewing Madison, she’s inspired to finally finish that novel — before she turns, ahem, 30.

Covering Tokyo since 1992, Julian Ryall says he’s “so happy” in Japan he’d be “mad to leave.” Originally from London, his background in international relations and his natural wanderlust fueled his interest in reporting abroad. Today he contributes regularly to The Telegraph, The South China Morning Post and The Hollywood Reporter (all in different time zones) and writes upwards of a dozen stories a week. Though he touts his inability to remember Japanese grammar rules, Ryall looks past the language and customs barriers to the beauty of being his own boss.

---

Tell us about your background. Where is home?

I was born in London but moved to the rural southwest of the UK at the age of 11. I went to Wolverhampton Polytechnic to read politics, international relations, Russian and French (all of which I have forgotten). I spent a year at a university in the south of France, in the town of Aix-en-Provence, which I blame for not wanting to subsequently live in Britain ever again. I had to return to do a one-year master’s in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, where we had to complete the courses provided by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. A year in France had given me wanderlust, so I decided to travel for one year to earn some cash and pay off my student debts before returning to the UK to get back into the profession in the traditional way — [through a] local paper [or] agency, Fleet Street, possibly.

Why Japan?

I chose Japan because it was pretty much as far as I could get from Britain without ending up in a country with a similar culture and language to the UK, such as Australia. I never realized there were journalism opportunities where I arrived to teach; within two days I knew I was a terrible teacher and was looking around for journalism jobs. I wrote some freelance stuff before being in the right place at the right time when The Japan Times was hiring. That was 1992, and I stayed with them until I returned to the UK in 1998, intending to “settle down.” I joined The Times but knew after six months that I wanted to get back to Japan. I got back out here in 1999 and have been here ever since. I initially rejoined The Japan Times but went freelance in 2004 and have been very happy ever since. I live in Yokohama, which is only an hour south of central Tokyo.

Which publications do you contribute to, and how regularly?

I’m the Tokyo correspondent for The Telegraph [in] London, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and The Hollywood Reporter in LA. I write for them at least a couple of times a week, on average. It’s not as tough as it sounds as they are all in very different time zones.

I write for dozens of other places as well, although they are mostly magazines and it is usually on a monthly basis — the Japan Airlines magazine [Skyward], the American Chamber of Commerce magazine, Cosmopolitan, Review Asia, et cetera, et cetera. I’m also linked to an agency in the UK called International News Services and they ask me to provide copy on a fairly regular basis; it’s mostly trade and industry publications, so I’m working on a 2,000 word piece at the moment on safety issues in Japan’s nuclear power industry and completed one a couple of days ago on the cosmetics market for the mature sector of the market. Not wildly exciting, but they pay the bills.

The beauty of it all is that I never know what stories I’m going to be writing tomorrow and that never gets dull.

How did you get your foot in the door? Any interesting anecdotes about first starting out?

The Telegraph gig came about when their previous correspondent left to write a book last year. I had covered for him for a couple of years when he was away so it was a pretty natural and smooth transition. Similarly, I’d been writing for the South China Morning Post for several years, submitting features, when their correspondent left, so I took that on. And the Hollywood Reporter job came to me through a paper in Ireland that I wrote for; the features editor there knew that they were looking for someone out here as his brother is a senior editor in LA. So as you can see, complete chance in all three cases.

I think it’s just a case of having what you know is a good story, finding out the name of the person you need to pitch it to and doing it. Pick up the phone, tell the person that you’re sure he/she is busy so you’re going to send him/her an email with a pitch, and then send it straight away. Don’t keep them on the phone to explain it, but do make the effort to speak to them; it makes it harder to ignore the email.

Working overseas for a major news organization is a dream job for many of us. Does the dream match the reality?

When I was a kid, my dad — who is a London taxi driver — told me that I should do a job that I really enjoyed because I’d have to do it for a long, long time. He’s not the deepest of thinkers, but he was absolutely spot-on. I’m very lucky to do what I do — and I know that I owe a lot of that to my parents, who put up with me as a stroppy [Britspeak for “ill-tempered”] teenager and helped finance me through five years of university. I certainly wouldn’t be doing this now if it wasn’t for their support.

Yes, this is the best job I could ever hope to have. I can’t imagine doing anything different. I’d say that 90 percent of mornings, I wake up and think to myself, “Great, I’ve got to go to work!” How many people are lucky enough to say that about their jobs?
I’ve interviewed film stars and authors, football players and politicians, singers and ordinary people with extraordinary tales. The beauty of it all is that I never know what stories I’m going to be writing tomorrow and that never gets dull.

What are the best and worst things about your job? Your biggest challenge?
The toughest thing remains the language; I’m not a natural linguist and it comes hard, but I can get by. I know it should be better than this after 15 years, but I keep plugging away at it!

[Starting out as a journalist] takes a lot of self-belief and gumption, but it will pay off.

What unique challenges do you face reporting in Japan? Do you think it’s easier to do your job here as compared to Britain or other parts of Asia?
It wasn’t really a conscious decision to come to Japan — as I said, it was more a desire to get as far away from England as possible and to try something completely different.
The language remains an obstacle, along with some curious cultural differences between journalists here and where I was trained. Here, the press doesn’t really ask many questions and is rarely truly hostile. In the UK, the royal family is fair game for the tabloids; here they’re untouchables and any magazine or paper that writes anything negative about them sees its advertising revenues drop and right-wingers mailing bullets to the editor (I kid you not).

Dealing with PR types here can be a nightmare, even when you’re trying to produce a positive story about their company or organization. They’re more like gatekeepers of the company than promoters of the good things that it is trying to do. That’s frustrating.
On the plus side, us foreigners are cut an awful lot of slack here; the Japanese accept that we can’t be expected to know or abide by all their customs or niceties, so they just shrug when we make social or professional faux pas.

What is the hot story in Japan right now?

At the moment, the family of a British woman who was murdered one year ago is top of the news agenda. Lindsay Hawker was a 22-year-old teacher who was beaten for 36 hours by her abductor before being strangled. The guy, a Japanese [man] called Ichihashi, escaped from the police and has been on the run for one year. The police appear to be clueless and the family have traveled to Japan to try to raise the profile of the case again. It’s a tough story because they’re just ordinary people in a terrible situation.
I interviewed them yesterday and I have to go to a vigil this evening. Looks like it might be a late night by the time I send the story over.

How accessible is Japan to foreign journalists? Are sources at all hesitant to give information to foreign journalists vs. local journalists? Would this be different in Britain?
I actually think it’s quite easy once you have made good contacts in all the places that you’re going to need them. After all this time, I have the names and numbers of people at all the ministries, plenty of universities and companies, think tanks, etc. that I know I can go to for a comment. That makes life easier.

Of course, there is always the magazine that phones up from the UK and asks me to interview the emperor tomorrow without the slightest inkling that it’s utterly impossible. Things work differently here and there is often little appreciation of that. I also had a foreign desk reporter in the UK ask why I couldn’t get to Xian in the next hour or so and was stunned to find that it was in a completely different country.

What was your most recent story? And your favorite story?
I write on average 12 stories a week and, in my busiest week, once turned out 33 pieces. Hopefully I won’t have to do that again soon. This morning I completed a feature piece for the South China Morning Post about the British family out here to look for their daughter’s killer. And I guess the story that I still get a kick out of was the one where I went looking for the fabled World War II treasure of General Yamashita in the jungles of the southern Philippines. That was an adventure.

Do you pitch ideas to your clients, or take assignments? What is the ratio? Has that changed as you’ve worked longer there? How do you get ideas for your stories?
For the Post, Telegraph, and Reporter, I pitch a list of three or four pieces that I think they might be interested in. Sometimes they take nothing; usually it’s one or two. On exceptional days I’ll get three. They also come to me with stories they have seen elsewhere and want followed up and updated. Magazines usually come to me now as they know my name. Some of the big publishers have a database of writers in any given territory and that’s available to all their titles. So from a Cosmopolitan story, I might get a request from Fish Farming Monthly.

I think that often an editor finds it very hard to have a writer in a far-flung part of the world, so they hang on to ones who they can rely on. And I would say that being reliable — turning in what you’ve been asked to provide and on time — is almost more important than being able to write scintillating prose. Their sub-editors can do that for you and knock raw copy into their style for publication; you need to get the story to them in the first place and on time. Nothing drives editors to distraction more than late copy, in my experience.

In the States, I would email the appropriate editor with a short pitch and follow up with an email and/or phone call. Have you found a format that works better in Japan?
I’m not actually sure how it would work for Japanese publications as I already have my links with them and they’re all English-language publications — although they are sometimes translated into Japanese. I know the editors personally now, and they just email me with a story they want, a deadline and a word count.

What is the best way for an unknown writer to get an assignment?
In my experience, editors are always open to approaches to ideas for stories, but they have to be packaged correctly. The travel editor of The Times once told me that she received dozens of unsolicited stories every day — and that most of them were very poor. It was people who had been on holiday and thought they would write about what they had done. She told me that she read the first three lines; if it hadn’t grabbed her by then, it was never going to. So you get three lines.

I don’t dislike a cold call to an editor — just keep it very brief (as mentioned above) and tell them that you will send a fuller outline by email. Have a clear outline of what you want to do with the piece; offer photos to accompany it, if possible — and make sure you deliver if they take you up on the offer.

Can you give us an idea of your typical day?
OK, well, today I got up at 5.15 a.m., [slept on] the train into central Tokyo and went to the gym for an hour. Then I went to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan where they have library facilities and a working room. It’s very convenient for when I need to work in Tokyo — plus it has a decent bar. I had a one-hour Japanese lesson from 9 a.m. and once again shocked my teacher at my ability to forget the simplest of grammar points.

Back in the workroom, I wrote the 600-word feature on the family who are searching for their daughter’s killer for the SCMP, I’ve been trying to pin down some movie companies about the titles they are sending to Cannes, with little luck so far. I have set up a meeting for 5.30 p.m. with a guy from the public broadcaster NHK to talk about a new show that they will begin in April; I’ll have to write that story pretty quickly, although it’s only short.

There’s a court case today involving a Japanese man who killed a British woman back in 2000 (another case, not the same as above) and I’ll have to find out how that went and then file a short-ish story, maximum 300 words. The family who have come to Japan are having a vigil in the bar where their daughter used to drink, so I have to go there with a photographer from 8 p.m. to talk to the parents and find out what the police told them today and the state of the investigation. (Update: The vigil with the family got a little rowdy, with dozens of Japanese journalists and TV crews in a very small bar. I’d heard a whisper earlier in the day that the father of the only suspect in the killing had committed suicide, so I pulled the father out of earshot of the other UK reporters and put it to him. I got some reaction and got a front-page exclusive for The Telegraph. By the time I got home, wrote the piece and then got to bed it was 2.15 a.m. Still, a good day.)

I have also spent much of the day swearing at my computer as it has apparently given up on me.

Do you work in an office or out of your home? How often are you traveling?

I split my time between home and the club; I generally start the week at home and get a lot of work done when there are fewer distractions. By Wednesday, I’ve got cabin fever and I need to bother someone, so I go to the club and get a lot less work done. But at least I’m sociable.

I do get to travel with work and these last couple of months have been pretty busy: I was in Hokkaido, in the far north of Japan, in early March, followed by 10 days in Vietnam and Cambodia and five days covering the film festival in Hong Kong. I was meant to be in South Korea in April but that looks to have fallen through.
I’ve managed to wangle a few good trips — North Korea in 2002, Iwo Jima in late 2006, the soccer World Cup in South Korea in 2002 come to mind. One of the beauties of being your own boss is that you can pick and choose the good stuff.

When did you know that you wanted to be a journalist? What, if anything, would you have done differently?
In the summer of 1982, Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. I can still remember listening to Robert Fox and Brian Hanrahan of the BBC reporting from the conflict and thinking that was what I wanted to do. It seemed so exciting, so out-of-the-ordinary. And no, I don’t think there is much I would have done differently in terms of my career. But if we’re talking about my personal life, then how many pages do you have?

Any advice for journalists who are just starting out?
Choose a country that is under-represented in the global media coverage, go there and set yourself up as a correspondent. If you have the basic skills, it is easy as that. It takes a lot of self-belief and gumption, but it will pay off. It may take a while and you may end up doing something in the meantime that you never planned to, but it will be worth it in the long term. And if anyone is thinking of coming to Japan, you might be shocked at how much work there is available. I passed the notice board at the FCCJ this evening and there were five adverts for reporters or editorial assistants. Obviously, the language is a major bonus, but it’s not everything. I’m not sure what other advice I can offer, but I’m on jryall2@hotmail.com if anyone is thinking of taking the plunge and coming to Japan.

What next?
I’m here for the long haul; I’m divorced, but I have two young children — 9 and 5 — that I get to see every weekend and turn the house upside down with. To be honest, work is so good and I’m so happy in this culture that I would be mad to leave it and try to start over. I get back to Europe once a year to see family and friends, and that’s sufficient. My life is here and I’m very comfortable. And I know I’m very lucky.

---

Ryall’s do’s and don’ts of being a foreign correspondent:
1. Set up camp. Choose a country that is under-represented in the global media coverage, go there and set yourself up as a correspondent. If you have the basic skills, it is easy as that. It takes a lot of self-belief and gumption, but it will pay off.
2. You get three lines. “The travel editor of The Times once told me that she received dozens of unsolicited stories every day — and that most of them were very poor. It was people who had been on holiday and thought they would write about what they had done�. She told me that she read the first three lines; if it hadn’t grabbed her by then, it was never going to.
3. Pick up the phone. “Tell the person that you’re sure he/she is busy so you’re going to send him/her an email with a pitch, and then send it straight away. Don’t keep them on the phone to explain it, but do make the effort to speak to them; it makes it harder to ignore the email.”
4. Follow up. “Have a clear outline of what you want to do with the piece; offer photos to accompany it, if possible — and make sure you deliver if they take you up on the offer.”
5. Don’t be late. “Turning in what you’ve been asked to provide and on time is almost more important than being able to write scintillating prose. Nothing drives editors to distraction more than late copy.”

---

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

The Wall Street Journal‘s Bangkok-based correspondent Patrick S. Barta talks about getting started, new media, the best and worst things about working for a major news organization overseas, and what happens when two-plus billion people in China begin to eat as much beef as Americans.

---

Can you tell us about yourself and your position at The Wall Street Journal? How long have you been there? Where is home?

I’m 36 years old, born in Dallas, Texas. I attended the University of Texas at Austin for my B.A., then spent some time working as a freelancer in Costa Rica. Later I got a Master’s in journalism at Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1997. I then got an internship in WSJ‘s Houston bureau working for the paper’s “Texas Journal” section — a now-defunct, four-page section focusing on Texas news. After three months, I was promoted to staff reporter (which remains my current job title), and I covered real estate, agriculture and the environment across Texas. Two years later I moved to the national edition in NY covering housing and the U.S. economy. Much of my work in that period focused on the emergence of a nationwide real estate bubble and accounting scandals at Freddie Mac, the large government-sponsored company. In early 2004, I moved to Bangkok to be a regional natural resources reporter, focusing on the growth of China and India and their impact on the world’s natural resources. My stories have focused on the search for oil to feed China; the rebirth of the world’s mining sector; the current strains on world food supplies; the race to create new alternative energies; the growing scarcity of water; and the environmental implications of China’s and India’s rise.

Home for me is still Dallas, where my parents live.

Why Bangkok? What unique challenges do you face reporting in Thailand vs. other parts of the world? Did you select Bangkok as a base, or did the WSJ send you there?

My bosses and I decided upon Bangkok together. The idea was that we wanted a central location that would serve as an easy hub for traveling across the region. As a crossroads in the middle of Asia, it’s ideal for bouncing to places like India, China, Indonesia, Australia, etc. It’s also a very interesting and culturally rich city — in other words, just a more interesting place to live than some of the alternatives. WSJ has two other full-time correspondents there. One covers Thailand itself, including local political, economic and corporate news stories. The other is a regional correspondent, like me, writing mostly about travel and leisure across Asia for our Weekend sections. As for unique challenges, Thailand is generally a very easy country to operate in. Communications infrastructure is generally good, though we do have some phone and internet problems from time to time, and as noted, the air transport links are generally quite good. It’s a relatively cheap city, though that’s changing somewhat, especially as the U.S. dollar declines. It’s hard for me to say [whether it’s hard or easy to report from Thailand] — I don’t actually do much “Thai” reporting. Most of my time in Thailand is either spent writing or setting up trips and reporting in other countries.

What is the hot story in Asia right now? What sort of stories do you usually cover?

With regards to my beat, the big story simply is that China and India are booming, and their emergence as major economies is going to totally transform the world economy. What happens when two-plus billion people suddenly start entering the middle class and demanding the same conveniences and luxuries common in the U.S. and Europe? Can the world survive if they all get cars? Or air conditioning? Where will we get the oil? How will we contain the carbon emissions? And what will happen when everyone in China eats as much beef or corn as Americans? How will we provide those foods? What environmental implications must be considered, especially since growing more crops requires more water, more chemicals, more land? What problems are being created? What opportunities — for new investment in “green” technologies, for instance — are being created? I feel like I’m right in the center of one of the biggest transformations in history — the emergence of China and India — and it’s incredibly exciting. It also involves travel to fantastic places, because WSJ believes strongly in sending its reporters out into the field. In my case, editors want to know how the growth of China and India is affecting not just people who live in those two countries, but also across the world, from the small-time miner in Africa who is producing copper for some Chinese factory to the Australian outback entrepreneur who’s looking to profit. Over the past four years I’ve traveled to 20 or more countries, including Mongolia, Congo, Brunei, Laos, and Sri Lanka.

How did you get your foot in the door? What was your first story for WSJ?

While in graduate school, I basically sent my resume to anyone who would look at it. I was just trying to get a summer internship that would, I hoped, serve as a foot in the door for something bigger later. Two newspapers offered [me] internships: the Miami Herald and WSJ. Both, I presume, liked my Latin America freelancing experience. Although my bosses at WSJ never told me this, I think they thought it showed initiative and the paper at the time (as now) was very interested in the Latin American economy. I think freelancing overseas is a great move for young journalists, especially given how competitive newspapers can be, because it can help set you apart from other candidates who have been slogging away at small dailies. Working for a small daily can be a great move, too, since it gives you good, practical experience. But by going overseas, you set yourself apart as someone who’s willing to take risks, and you get a very wide field to roam. If something big happens — a coup, or an economic meltdown, or even just an election — you can be the lead reporter, especially in places where there isn’t much competition from other freelancers.

In any event, I selected the WSJ internship because it was closer to home, and I liked that WSJ stories were deeper and more analytical. I also liked that WSJ had more overseas jobs — even back then I knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I never thought I’d actually get a full-time offer from WSJ, of course; my plan, at the time, was to knock out some good stories during my three-month internship, get some good clips, and then hopefully use them at some later date to get a good job with a reputable paper. I thought a lot about going back overseas as a freelancer, armed with WSJ clips to help me get good freelance assignments. But then WSJ offered me a full-time job, to my surprise. There was a bit of luck involved. At the time, the Internet was just emerging as a new force, and many WSJ staffers were leaving the paper to take jobs (and stock options) providing content for new Web sites. It was one of the only times in recent years (indeed, perhaps decades) when there were lots of job openings at major papers, all because so many senior people were bowing out. Two months into my internship, WSJ offered me a full-time job, and I took it. I quickly wondered if I had made the right move: working as an intern was one thing, but as a staff reporter, the pressure went up about 10 notches. WSJ is intense and the amount of reporting we do for stories is enormous. If we aren’t 100 percent certain about something, we don’t write around it — we write more.

Although I don’t recall my first story, precisely, I do recall having my editors cut my stories to shreds as they found all the reporting holes, etc. It was incredibly hard work and it took me a very long time to start to feel comfortable; even today I find some stories to be a struggle, and our editors are no less demanding today than they were back then.

The one key lesson I learned in terms of getting the job is that you basically just want to get your foot in the door with a major news organization any way you can, whether it’s an internship, or answering phones, or whatever. Once you’re inside, you’re a known quantity, and a known quantity is always better than an unknown quantity. WSJ had a number of jobs to fill in those days, and it could have picked from a wealth of great reporters; for my first job, for instance, they could have gone with any number of experienced veterans from the many great newspapers in Texas, including the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle, or others from outside Texas. They picked me, not because I was any better than those folks — quite the contrary. They picked me because they were already getting to know my personality, strengths and weaknesses, and as an intern I was already learning their system. That made me a known quantity, and therefore less of a risk to them than bringing in a more experienced outsider. Bottom line: Just get in the door somehow.

I’m picturing lots of late nights and rounds of beers at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand with other Bangkok-based correspondents. Do you know, or collaborate at all with, the writers from other news organizations?

Yes, we’re known to put back a beer or two at the FCCT. One of the great things about Bangkok is that it’s a hub for “regional” correspondents, for all the reasons I picked the city — it’s cheap, has good infrastructure, and is a good jumping-off point for other locales. There are a lot of folks in Bangkok who come and go from really interesting places — Vietnam, Indonesia, even Iraq. So there are always people coming back from fascinating trips, and it’s great to have a central place to meet and swap stories. I regularly run into correspondents from The Economist, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Financial Times. We don’t collaborate much on local stories — I don’t cover Thailand, anyway — and as always, there’s a bit of competition. We don’t want NYT to pick up one of our ideas, for example. That said, I think there’s less competition and more collegiality when you’re working overseas, because the field of operations is big and we’re all working on very different stuff a lot of the time. We’re not all competing for some little scrap of news — often, we’re off chasing stories that fit our own particular reporting responsibilities, which often don’t overlap. It’s great then to come back to Bangkok to swap tales, and that’s one of the great things about being a foreign correspondent. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the supposed demise of the foreign correspondent — and yes, newspapers have indeed cut staff overseas. But in the case of Asia, the institution is alive and well. Global interest in our part of the world is big, and there are lots of great journalists roaming the region, writing fantastic stories.

How accessible is Thailand and southeast Asia to foreign journalists? Are sources at all hesitant to give information to foreign journalists vs. local journalists? Do you work with a fixer?

It all depends on where you are. Thailand itself is quite accessible. There are some hurdles you have to jump through to get a press visa or work permit, but for the most part Thailand is open to foreign journalists. Some other countries are also very easy, including Australia. But generally speaking, it’s much harder to get information in Asia than in the U.S, and it takes longer. Large institutions — companies, government offices — aren’t as accustomed to dealing with the press, and they’re often suspicious of Western journalists. Many of the countries in the region don’t have a free press and respect for reporters is low, so some high-ranking officials and corporate executives don’t feel any need to interact with the media. In the U.S., a public official or CEO may try to avoid a question or duck a reporter for a while, but sooner or later, they know they are accountable to the public and have to engage the media. In Asia, often, it’s not that way. Some higher-ups feel that newspapers exist only to reprint their press releases, and so they’re taken aback when reporters actually ask tough questions. It’s not good form to question authority in some areas. So you have to be more persistent and you sometimes have to wait a lot longer to get stories done.

Language can also be a barrier. Although English is commonly spoken in some areas, it’s not used everywhere, and so I often must hire a fixer/translator. They do more than translate, though. Good fixers can help cut through red tape, or figure out who to call, or basically just explain why certain things work the way they do. Sometimes I hire fixers even if language isn’t an issue. It’s like hiring a local expert to travel with you, pointing out things you might not have noticed, encouraging you to ask questions you wouldn’t have thought of. They’re also key when you leave major urban areas, as I often do, to get to know people in small villages affected by the big global trends we’re writing about. Interestingly, for all the difficulties in pinning down CEOs, politicians and other “important” people in Asia, I find that everyday citizens are actually more open there than in the U.S. They’re less familiar with the media – and perhaps less cynical about it– so they’re less guarded, and in places where politicians and other wealthy people sometimes pay very little attention to their needs, they’re pleased that someone from the press is actually taking the time to get their say. My trips to rural areas are often the most rewarding part of my job.

How has your job changed, for better or worse, with the adaptation of new media, such as podcasts and online video? Are certain types of stories best presented in a certain format?

The job has gotten better. There’s a bit more work, yes, but the results are very satisfying. At WSJ, we regularly do online video presentations, audio clips, photo slideshows, and I feel that it makes my stories far richer and more interesting than before. Although I’ve always loved print, a short video clip or photo selection can really make a story come alive, and it allows you to use material that might have fallen on the cutting room floor before. I now carry a small video camera and ordinary digital camera with me everywhere I go on assignment, and it’s great fun thinking up good ideas of things to shoot. Often I’ll plan an extra half-day of reporting to roam around a region getting more visual elements. For example, for a story about a mining project in New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific, I spent four or five hours roaming around both the mine site as well as the main city to get snapshots to show readers. The main city wasn’t really an element in the story, but I thought it would be interesting to the reader to get a sense of what this odd place was like, since few if any WSJ readers ever get a chance to go to New Caledonia. In other words, if WSJ is paying me to go to a place and be a reader’s eyes and ears, I want to make the most of it. And the photo slideshow was indeed very popular.

Sometimes shooting video and photos can be a hassle — you’re trying to interview someone, notepad in hand, and then you have to fiddle with the camera to make sure they’re on tape. Some interviewees stiffen up when a camera is turned on. But that just means I have to discipline myself to shut the cameras off when I really need to be focusing on making sure I have the basic story — the print story — which is still the most important piece of the puzzle. I can go back to Bangkok with holes in my video reporting, but not in my overall print story. I find that even if key elements are missing in the video, whatever I provide to WSJ.com is still interesting.

One other thing I really like is the viral nature of these online offerings. Before, I’d mention to my friends that I had a big story in the paper and some would read it, while some would forget. Once the day’s paper was gone, the opportunity was lost. Not so with our online offerings. Friends or sources now email my stories to other friends or sources who then share them with other people and so on and so on, giving a story a much longer shelf life and wider distribution. I still get emails from people who stumble upon on one of my stories months after publication. That never happened before.

Do you pitch ideas to WSJ or take assignments? Or both? If pitching, how do you get ideas for your stories?

Most of the stories I write are stories that I come up with and then pitch to my editors. This is just the nature of my particular assignment. Other jobs at WSJ are far more news-driven and involve more reactive stories. For example, if you cover Google, you can’t exactly escape writing up a story if Google announces a big acquisition. My job is driven less by day-to-day news and is more about trying to identify longer-term issues that matter to our readers, and then finding ways to show them in stories. In some ways Bangkok isn’t ideal for generating ideas — none of my sources live there, and few ever come through. But there are ways around that — it just means you have to be resourceful. I get some of my ideas chatting on the phone with economists, analysts, and academics. I attend a handful of conferences each year, which also allows me to interact with key people. Then I read the competition carefully, with an eye on what they may be missing. I read NYT, Financial Times, and The Economist, and often you can come up with interesting ideas by simply concentrating on what other journalists didn’t ask, or by connecting dots that they might not have connected in their own stories, or just by asking a few more questions that then lead to a new conclusion that takes you beyond what the other guy wrote. But by far the biggest way I get stories is simply by getting on the road. Typically I’ll start off with one main story idea in a place — say, Australia– and then pitch it to my bosses from Bangkok. They’ll say yes, and then I’ll go. When I’m there, I keep my eyes open for everything, and just being in a place inevitably leads to new ideas. You’re running into random people you might not have talked to before; you’re reading local publications you never dealt with before. I usually come back from trips with more ideas than when I started.

How can a new writer, without any contacts at the WSJ, get an editor’s attention? Which “rookie mistakes” will send a pitch straight to the rejection pile? And is there a certain type of story, or section that’s more accessible to new writers?

It’s a cliché, but anything that’s bold and different is good. WSJ shies away from anything that looks or smells like something the competition is writing. Stories need a new twist, or you need to be taking the editor to some place he/she has never been to before. I did a page one story last year about how the Maldives, the resort island destination, was building a new island to save itself from rising sea tides. It was topical, given all the concerns about climate change. But most importantly, it just seemed like something new, something they didn’t know about, in a place reporters rarely go to. While it helps to read other publications to get ideas, it doesn’t help much if you simply copy what they’re writing — those ideas go nowhere. You have to push the ball further. I think that anything that shows initiative and originality gets rewarded. That said, WSJ does not use a tremendous amount of freelance copy; in fact, it uses very little, and close to none in its normal news pages. We do use some in some of our lifestyle sections, like the Weekend edition, but it tends to be well-established writers who have standing relationships with the editors. If you’re just getting your feet wet, local daily papers are probably the best way to go.

What’s the best thing about your job? The worst?

I have tremendous freedom to roam the world, writing about big issues, and WSJ is willing to spend what’s required to make sure its reporters truly understand what they’re writing about. I’ve been to incredible places and seen things I could never have seen in the U.S., from the small villages of India to the nomadic steppes of Mongolia to the diamond mines of Botswana. I sometimes can’t believe I get paid to do this job. I also like the day-to-day flexibility; I mostly make my own hours, and I decide how, when and where I want to work. Sometimes it’s from home. Sometimes it’s by the pool. Sometimes it’s in a suit, sometimes it’s in shorts.

With that freedom comes pressure and lots of challenges. I work extremely long hours, and it seems like I never get to totally shut down. I interview sources in all time zones — Asia, the U.S., Europe, and if the source can only call me at 8 p.m. while I’m having dinner with a friend who I haven’t seen in two years and is visiting from the U.S., I have to take the call. Sometimes, I’ll work until 8 in the morning handling questions from editors in the U.S. who are working on New York time. And while the travel is extremely fun and exciting, it’s also tough — physically and mentally. I can go several weeks living out of hotels in strange countries, far away from my friends and relatives. Technology is often a problem on these trips — my laptop breaks down, or I can’t get a phone connection on deadline, whatever. It’s very exhausting — but satisfying.

Describe your typical day, if there is one. How many hours per week would you say you work, if you can even quantify that?

I more or less always work — the line between work and play is very thin in my job. When I’m in Bangkok, I get up around 7 a.m. and spend a couple of hours going through emails that came in overnight and reading the day’s papers. I usually head to the office (though sometimes I work from home) around 10 and begin making calls for whatever stories I’m working on. What happens from there depends on what I’m working on. If I have to interview someone in the U.S. — as I do often do — I’ll schedule that for 9 p.m. or so; in those cases, I might take a bit of time out during the day to take care of personal things. The schedule depends very much on what I’m working on, and when the work needs to happen. Sometimes I’ll be on a boat on the main river in central Bangkok heading to a dinner, but doing a work call as we go. I don’t work the entire weekend, but I almost always do some work during the weekend. When I’m on the road, it’s more or less the same. I try to maximize my time in a location, so I don’t really take a lot of down time — I basically report straight through. I’ll get up early, try to log on somehow to find out what’s going on in the world, and then I’m off chasing meetings. The one exception is that if I’m going somewhere particularly interesting or exotic, I usually try to take a day or two off — usually on the weekend — to see some sights.

Bangkok is your home base, but you don’t seem to be there often. How often are you traveling?

It depends on what I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll be in Bangkok for a month at a time; then, I’ll be away four of the next five weeks. I’ve probably spent about four weeks in Bangkok over the past three months. Sometimes, I’m there more. On average, I spend about 60 percent of my time in Bangkok and 40 percent on the road. In Bangkok, I’m either writing or making phone calls to set up more stories and trips; that can be done from home or the office, though I try to do a lot from the office just to be around other people. On the road, I’m working from wherever I can — the car, the hotel, the office lobby, wherever. Roaming mobile phones and Blackberries make my job a lot easier than it would have been ten years ago.

Any advice for aspiring journalists?

Try to think up stories that no one else is covering, or angles that no one else is thinking of. Originality stands out. Even on stories that everyone else is doing, look for a different angle, or an unusual person to interview, or whatever — just show you’re curious and thinking of different ways to look at the world. Often, just setting foot in a place is half the battle, because so few reporters actually take the time and expense to go places. You always see and learn things you would not have thought of back at the office. If you’re debating whether to reach out to that one additional source or to go that site that’s a pain to get to, that means you should probably just do it. As for building your career, always look for ways into the door at big institutions — big papers, big TV stations, whatever. There’s absolutely no dishonor in covering the local school board for a tiny daily newspaper — it’s great experience. But I’d always trade that kind of job for a low-level gig at a major paper, because you’ll be rubbing shoulders with top talent and you’ll become a known quantity to them.

What’s next?

More stories.

---

How to Get Started:
Just do it: “Often, just setting foot in a place is half the battle. If you’re debating whether to reach out to that one additional source or to go that site that’s a pain to get to, that means you should probably just do it.”
Become a known quantity: “Get your foot in the door with a major news organization any way you can. Once you’re inside, you’re a known quantity, and a known quantity is always better than an unknown quantity.”
Think differently: “Try to think up stories that no one else is covering, or angles that no one else is thinking of. Originality stands out. Show you’re curious and thinking of different ways to look at the world.”
Set yourself apart: “I think freelancing overseas is a great move for young journalists, especially given how competitive newspapers can be. By going overseas, you set yourself apart as someone who’s willing to take risks, and you get a very wide field to roam.”

---

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

Though New Yorker writer Tad Friend files the “Letter from California” from Brooklyn Heights, it is his gift for being able to knowingly capture a time and place that led editor David Remnick to tap him for the job in 2002. From San Quentin’s Death Row and televised car chases in Los Angeles to suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge and the inner workings at William Morris, Friend gets in there in a way that makes you think, “How did he do that?”

Friend grew up in Buffalo, NY and Swarthmore, PA (his father was the president of the college), went to Harvard and got a job at Steve Brill’s The American Lawyer out of school. Next came stints at Spy, Esquire, Vogue, New York, and Outside, before landing at The New Yorker in 1998.

One of Friend’s most resonant pieces for The New Yorker was “The Playhouse,” an intimate look at his mother, Elizabeth Pierson Friend. Out of that came the idea to write a book for Little, Brown on his family and WASPs, with a focus on the themes of ambivalence and dissatisfaction. Now Friend is in the middle of his year-long book leave, which gives him more time with his 18-month-old twins and for pursuing his plans for world domination.

---

Name: Tad Friend
Position: Staff writer
Publication: The New Yorker
Education: “Some”
Hometown: Buffalo, New York
First job: Reporter, The American Lawyer
Previous three jobs: Contributing editor to Outside; editor-at-large at New York; contributing editor to Esquire
Birthdate: September 25, 1962
Marital status: Married, two children.
Favorite TV show: American Idol
Last book read: The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz
Most interesting media story right now: Coverage of the Times‘ story on John McCain and the lobbyist
First section of your Sunday paper: A1
Guilty pleasure: The Wire

---

What’s your typical day like?
It varies a lot, depending on whether I’m reporting or writing. I cover California for the magazine, so if I’m out there reporting, I’ll spend about 10 hours a day reporting, either hanging around with the person I’m writing about or driving around to conduct interviews. For a longer, 8- to 10,000-word story, I usually fly out from Brooklyn two or three times; the last piece I did, about executions at San Quentin prison, I went out three times across the course of nine months. The writing part has changed since my wife and I had twins 18 months ago. I used to just write monotonously all day and night long for 10 days in a row and then turn something in. Now there’s a lot more time where I have to be — and am happy to be — taking care of our kids, so it’s harder to find the uninterrupted swaths of time I need to make real headway. Some people write by polishing each sentence as they go, like a jeweler. I tend to spend lots of time painstakingly making an outline that I realize, a dozen paragraphs in, makes no sense, and then I put my head down and type nouns and verbs and quotes in a kind of grumpy blur, hammering out an extremely rough, totally un-publishable draft that I then go over and over and over before I hand it in.

Do you tape interviews or take notes?
I carry a recorder with me, always, but I mostly take notes, particularly if I’m spending days and days with someone. I tape if I’m only going to be seeing someone once or twice, or when a number of people are talking at once — a meeting, for instance — or if someone has an idiosyncratic vernacular.

How do you write that fast?
If someone says a number of interesting things in a row, and I’m falling behind, I’ll say something like, “I’m sorry, but your brain is faster than my hand. Can you hold on a second while I catch up?” But most of the time it’s not a problem, because not everything people tell you is a candidate for inclusion in the piece, and you start writing only during the periods when the “this is interesting” bell is ringing in your head.

How many people do you typically interview for a profile?
For a long piece, I probably have 60 to 100 conversations.

Are you serious? Wow. And a lot of that is just background — people you’re not even going to quote?
Yeah, a lot of it. I over-report so that I feel confident, when I sit down to write, that I know what I’m talking about. That confidence may be misplaced, of course, but I need to feel it. We have a bit of a luxury at The New Yorker in that you can take some time — two to three months — with certain kinds of stories and try to be authoritative.

How do you figure out who to talk to?
At the end of an interview, I always say, “Who else should I talk to?” And then they tell you two people and then those people tell you two people, and at a certain point everyone’s telling you the same people you’ve already talked to and you think, “OK, I’ve kind of got it.” Or everyone’s telling you things you already know, which is comforting. You could probably write a profile that’s three-quarters as good about two weeks in, but I like the feeling of knowing more, of giving myself more choices and collecting the little nuance-y details that encourage the reader to relax and trust you as a guide and companion. There is also the possibility that I’m just neurotic.

And I imagine probably some of the interviews you do are probably a complete wash — you talk to some people and they really don’t give you anything interesting.
When I was spending time at San Quentin, I talked to a number of correctional officers who weren’t that helpful because they either didn’t want to be that helpful or didn’t know how to be. They’re trained in their job not to talk to anyone, really, particularly to the inmates — if they reveal any personal details to inmates, it’s an offense called “overfamiliarity.” So I’d have to talk to them for hours before they’d give you much beyond, “Officer Johnson, C block, Sir!”

That leads me to another question, which is what happens when you’re talking with someone who’s either boring or rambling or evasive — do you have certain tricks you use to get them to open up, or is it just by nature of hanging in there?
I sure hope that person isn’t a profile subject, because there would have to be an incredibly compelling, Jack-Bauer-lives-are-at-stake reason to spend all that time with someone who is deeply boring. I try not to profile someone who I’m going to be bored by because that would be deadly for me and probably not fair to them because I wouldn’t be doing my best to figure them out. And it wouldn’t be any picnic for the reader, either.

For a secondary source, you can always use what seems to me the classic way of shutting down an interview: “Is there anything else I should have asked you?” Usually people say no because they can’t think of anything; they’re not used to being asked to think like an interviewer, suddenly. And then you’re done. But it’s also a good question to ask at the end of a useful interview, because sometimes people will say, “Well, actually we never talked about Bob’s childhood and how he reacted to coming down with polio,” which you never knew about. So it works both ways.

Getting past the guardians [of celebrities] is part of the challenge, and once you do that you can start to tell a real story about what someone actually does.

Do you feel that you’re a good interviewer?
Um, I do, actually, though it feels unseemly to say so. Mostly, being a good interviewer consists of keeping your mouth shut and really paying attention to what people are saying, while asking an occasional clarifying question. It’s the same thing therapists do, not to compare journalists to therapists lest I get a stern letter from Janet Malcolm.

More theoretically, in a longer profile, the interview process with a subject often changes about halfway through the reporting. I think of it as a pivot point. In the first half, people tell you what they want to tell you about their lives: the authorized, resume version. And it’s not that you’re sitting there waiting to go, “Gotcha!” or expose them as a fraud, but the truth is that most of our friends, let alone our enemies, don’t see us the way we see ourselves. So you talk to a lot of other people around the subject and they tell you things that they don’t necessarily know they’re not supposed to tell you, or just stories and insights they have. And then when you go back to the subject and discuss some of those things — well, the pivot comes when the person you’re writing about realizes, not always consciously, that you know a lot more about them then they thought you were going to know. And then they begin saying, “What Larry told you only makes sense if you understand these following three things,” and suddenly they begin to enlist you, trying to tell you the full backdrop so you’ll have the context necessary to understand why they did what they did. So they often go from not wanting to tell you too much to wanting you to know everything.

What’s the pitching or assigning process at like at The New Yorker — do you come to them with ideas or they assign them?
I would say of the last 10 long stories I’ve done, probably nine of them have been my ideas. And I think most writers will tell you they’re happier working on a story that’s their own idea because they’re passionate about it and convinced it’s going to work — and because they’re not trying to simply service someone else’s concept, one that the reporting may not bear out. The New Yorker editors are wide-ranging and culturally omnivorous and they have lots of very good ideas, but for me it seems to work out well to pursue my own hobbyhorses. Of course, I have to convince the editors of the value of my story idea before I start to work.

When you’re dealing with the entertainment industry, because you cover that a lot, I would imagine the subjects are notoriously image-focused and media-savvy. Can you tell me if you’ve had a really challenging interview — is it hard to get people to open up and be real?
Behind-the-scenes entertainment stories often take much more time than any other kind of story because the people you need to speak to are very busy, usually have big egos, and almost always erect sizeable barriers to entry — if you want two minutes with the guy who played Horshack on Welcome Back, Kotter you have to go through his publicist and then you’ve got to send a fax or an email saying why you want to talk to them, and the publicist may or may not get back to you three weeks later. It’s a very complicated, annoying, time-consuming process, and it helps to explain why many of the stories written about the entertainment industry are fairly puffy, or else conversely are just shock video of Britney Spears yelling at the cops. Getting past the guardians is part of the challenge of it, and once you do that you can start to tell a real story about what someone actually does — as opposed to a celebrity “profile” that consists of six questions over coffee at Peet’s.

As to a really hard interview: I did a piece a couple years ago about an agent at William Morris. He was great, but I also had a number of conversations with the powerful and cagey former agent Mike Ovitz. There was a lot of slaloming on and off the record because he was very knowing about how it all works and he kept saying he just wanted to talk to me so I would be smarter, which is a big Hollywood thing you hear, you know, “I’ll talk to you out of the goodness of my heart, but I make it a policy not to be on the record,” which is sometimes more or less true but often means, “I want to find out what you know and how I’m going to look, and then steer you in a direction that will be useful to me.” So this was all followed by at least four subsequent conversations in which I tried to pull him back on the record on certain points, which he finally agreed to — and then he would call me from the ski slope or late at night when I was trying to have dinner with my wife seeking to take his remarks back off the record, and I would end up saying, “Mike, Mike, you’re being crazy — Mike, do you not have a life? Would you like me to try to find someone for you to talk to about some of these issues?” Because we both kind of saw the humor of it even as we were playing out this bafflingly intense, low-stakes chess game.

And speaking of Britney Spears, what’s your take on the current media culture, specifically entertainment coverage, like all the video and the paparazzi and insane intrusiveness of it all?
It makes my job harder because people in the entertainment industry feel routinely violated by the press — by a wing of the press that I don’t happen to associate myself with — but nonetheless by the press. A half-century ago, when Lillian Ross wrote a great piece for The New Yorker about the making of The Red Badge of Courage, directed by John Huston, my sense is she was able to go out to Hollywood, tell them what she wanted to do, and start doing it. That is, she could hang around endlessly, spend all this time with the stars, the director, the producers, and the studio executives and no one was worried about it — indeed, they were flattered by the attention. Because no one had really been doing that before, no one thought it was that interesting. And so she could do that and write a wonderful piece that became the book Picture and there were no publicists constantly holding her hand, and no one was worried about her taking a cell phone video of John Huston drunk that would end up on TMZ.

Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis has said that since you wrote that Dave Wirtschafter [president of William Morris Agency] profile she’s gotten resistance when she tries to do Hollywood stories because people are a lot more wary. When you were doing that story, did you have any idea it would be controversial?
It seems to be there’s always a little two-day kerfuffle when a Hollywood piece comes out, so I thought it would just be that. And I hoped readers would like the piece, because I was proud of it. I was surprised the reaction got as big as it did, simply because Dave committed the sin of being candid about the box-office power of some of the stars who were represented by William Morris — information that everyone in Los Angeles knew, and that the stars themselves knew, though they may not have wanted to hear it to their faces. I thought it was interesting how divergent the reactions were. People who were not in LA who read the piece usually told me something like, “Dave Wirtschafter is a great agent. I’d love to have him represent me.” People in the entertainment industry in LA who read it said, “I can’t believe Dave would talk to a reporter.”

I know people at William Morris urged Dave to do the classic thing and blame the reporter, that is, me, saying that he was misquoted or this and that conversation was off the record, because a couple of clients ultimately did leave William Morris — partly because other agencies made it their business to wave the red flag in front of the bull and try to cherry-pick clients [and] inflame the situation, which is what agencies do every day, anyway. And Dave said, “No, I said all that stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I totally did that,” which I thought was a stand-up, menschy thing of him to do. As far as consequences, when I’ve gone back to Hollywood since then, people sometimes joke about it, saying “Why should I talk to you?” But I think I have a reputation for being fair and not screwing people over, and these things do eventually blow over. Vanessa Grigoriadis seems to still be working, and so am I.

To what extent do you keep in touch with subjects or sources — do you have relationships with them? And I’m not even talking about notable people, just regular people you’ve covered.
Yeah, quite often we stay in touch. I go back to people, particularly sources who I think are knowledgeable, and some of them in the entertainment industry have been helpful on a number of different stories. As far as subjects of profiles, I’m not friends with any of them, but I’ve certainly stayed in touch with some of them. The ones who felt like the story was not entirely positive may be less inclined to stay in touch.

Do you hear from them in those instances — do you get a call or a nasty email?
I’ve never gotten a really nasty call or a really nasty email from someone because I believe in no surprises. I feel like it’s dishonest to have spent all this time with someone and write something where they have no idea you were going to say X or mention Y. If there’s some bombshell that someone else told me about the subject, it’s my duty to check it out with the subject to get his or her response, which alerts them that it’s going to be in the piece. And I make sure they know about the difficult stuff, both because of the no-surprises rule and because I want and need to get their response to it. And we also have a very thoroughgoing fact-checking process that goes over everything for the third or fourth time. So I think people can read about themselves and feel like there’s more emphasis on X than they would have hoped or even than they personally may feel is justified, but I’ve never had anyone complain about being totally submarined.

Since you’ve been on book leave, have there been stories you’ve seen or news developments you really wish you could have tackled, that you were sorry you missed out on?
Since I’ve been on book leave, I’ve actually kind of kept my head down. I was relieved not to have had to write about the writers strike because I couldn’t figure out a way to make that interesting: “What’s it like being a writer who now has all this time to check email, here at Starbucks?” When I’m normally working, I’m reading a lot of papers online, the various Bees, Sacramento and Fresno, and the Chronicle and the LA Times and a couple other California sources, so I have a little more input tickling me and making me wonder about stuff, but I’ve actually not been doing that since I’ve been on leave.

What’s your typical day like in terms of media consumption?
The papers I mentioned earlier. I read The New York Times — in an actual papyrus version. I guess I check out Romenesko like everyone else. I watch Jon Stewart sometimes, because it’s the only filter through which I can stand to see video of George Bush.

You’re an old pro, but do you still have embarrassing moments — I was going to say when your recorder doesn’t work, although you take notes — or getting someone’s name wrong during an interview?
I was writing a feature about police pursuits in Los Angeles and how people watch them on TV. I was talking to a head of a local news channel and he said, “You should talk to so-and-so” — he’s the guy who came up with idea for America’s Most Wanted. And he was reading from his Rolodex, and he said, “Linder Michael — call him.” And so I called the number and asked for Linder Michael, and kept calling him Linder when we met, and when he gave me his card at the end of the interview I realized that his name was Michael Linder. In other words, “Linder, comma, Michael.” I guess he thought it was some stuffy last-name-only thing I did, but he was very nice about it.

You’re married to New York Times journalist Amanda Hesser — do you read each other’s work, bounce ideas off each other? [Editor’s note: Hesser left the Times after this interview was conducted.]
We do. It’s all part of our plan for world domination.

How’s that coming?
Not as well as we would have hoped. We haven’t really expanded our empire beyond Brooklyn Heights. But, yeah, we read each other’s stuff before anyone else does, and it’s very helpful to me to have her read a draft and tell me, “I don’t understand what’s going on in this part,” or “you could cut this whole section that you worked on for so long.” I think it’s fortunate that while we work in the same general field, we’re not in the same area. She’s on book leave now too, but when she’s at the Times, she writes many shorter things and I write fewer longer things. And she writes about food and I don’t. So we’re not direct competitors, and there’s none of that “Get out of my way” feeling of striving for priority, which would probably be deadly.

Among journalists, writers and bloggers, who do you admire?
In the department of ass-covering-but-genuine log-rolling, I like the work of a lot of my colleagues at The New Yorker. Mark Leibovich at the Times is funny and deft. Ditto Jennifer Steinhauer, who actually set up Amanda and me on our first date. In Hollywood, I think Lynn Hirschberg can be very knowing about the internal forces that an actor has to struggle with. Online, Nikki Finke has been very good on the writers strike. And Michael Cieply has been a real addition to the Times Hollywood coverage. But lately I’ve been reading a lot of books, with particular admiration for writers such as J. Anthony Lukas and Rian Malan who can gracefully weave together a complex narrative.

Do you rely on any certain tools in your work? I know people are really passionate about their chair or their notebook.
I’m weirdly addicted to my blue medium-point Paper Mate pens. Not so much for their line as for the fact that I like to chew them. It would be great if they gave me an endorsement deal and sent them over by the crate, since I chew them out of usefulness pretty quickly. I’m not doing it in public and grossing people out, but when I’m writing, that’s my little tic or oral need, chewing pens to ribbons. I have a sofa in my home office where I write with a laptop on my lap while listening to bad 70s music. Having “Chevy Van” or “Afternoon Delight” blaring in my ears as I write really helps because I’ve heard them so many times, I don’t really hear them, but they keep the bad things out of my head.

That’s interesting because a lot of people need complete quiet.
There’s two camps of people: There’s the fire-watcher-on-a-mountain-top camp and the drowner-outers. And I’m firmly with the drowner-outers.

---

Julie Haire is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

It may have slipped Jonathan Alter’s mind to go to law school or enter the public service, but this Newsweek veteran didn’t exactly stumble into journalism. As a young boy, Alter graced his neighbors with the editorial enthusiasm of his very own “little newspaper” — acting as the sole reporter, writer, and oftentimes main subject.

Now, nearly 30 years after graduating from Harvard University, Alter boasts a resume that includes The Washington Monthly, NBC, author, and senior editor and columnist at Newsweek. This year marks his seventh round of election coverage, 25 years at Newsweek, and surpassing 50 covers at the news magazine.

Whether through his weekly column, posting online, appearing on NPR, or frequenting NBC as a talking head, Alter says he aims to help his audience think outside the box. We chatted with this seasoned journalist about the 2008 election, what it’s like to break news, the “YouTube factor,” and how to posture yourself for success in the business.

---

Name: Jonathan Alter
Position: Senior editor and columnist, Newsweek; Analyst and contributing correspondent, NBC News.
Resume: The Washington Monthly, 1981-1983. Newsweek, 1983-present. Author, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Birthday: October 6, 1957
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Education: Harvard University
Marital status: Married to Emily Lazar. Three children: Charlotte, 18; Tommy, 16; and Molly, 14
First section of Sunday Times: Week in Review
Favorite TV show: The Colbert Report
Last books read: Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America, by Donna Foote
Guilty pleasure: Walnut chocolate cookies

---

Describe your start in journalism. What did you want to do initially and why?
I was interested in journalism as a kid. I used to make up a little newspaper about what was going on the neighborhood and distribute it. Usually I was the only reporter and the primary subject of the story. I remember one headline was “John loses baseballs one summer.” In high school, I worked for the school paper and then I worked for the Harvard Crimson. After I got out of college, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I thought about public service and law school, but that all slipped my mind. I ended up traveling, landed in Washington, and then started to do freelance for various newspapers and magazines. By that time I had fallen in love with The Washington Monthly and, after considerable effort, I was reluctantly hired in 1981. I did everything from taking the garbage out to writing cover stories. By the time I started there, I had appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and a couple of other magazines, so I had a fairly good file of pieces going. About four years after I had graduated from college, I was hired by Newsweek and I’ve been there ever since — for 25 years.

Given the media landscape these days, what’s important for a journalist starting out who wants to follow a similar path to yours?
It’s not a one-size-fits-all business. I think the Internet opens up a lot of career opportunities for people but I do think that writing for a lot of different publications is a good way to put together the clips you need to get hired. I really believe that you only need about five to 10 really good clips, it’s not like you need to have 40 articles. You just need some that show you have strengths in different areas. This is a merit-based business, so what you’ve written tells a lot. If you can write stories and tell them in a thoughtful way, then there’s going to be a place for you.

You joined Newsweek as an associate editor after being an editor at The Washington Monthly. What was it like moving from a monthly to a weekly?
It was an interesting jump. I was 25 years old and I was hired in Katharine Grahams’ office in Washington. It was steady for me at the time. A weekly was ironically less stressful because there were about a hundred times as many people who worked at Newsweek than worked at The Washington Monthly.

You recently celebrated your 25th anniversary with Newsweek. What has kept you there for so long?
I would say it’s the people and the company. Newsweek has always been open to my ideas and interests. Also, starting in the 1980s, the editors realized that it was helpful to Newsweek to have people from the magazine appear on television. So I’ve been able to use Newsweek as a wonderful base for a wide-ranging career in journalism. Basically, I do online, television, magazines, radio, and book writing. Another reason I’ve been able to stay here so long is that news magazines allow you to meld reporting and analysis in a way that’s proven to be very appealing to me over the years.

I think bloggers are answerable to other bloggers and to their readers. My belief is that the age of no accountability is over.

I come from the school of journalism where you go out and do your reporting and collect facts, and then you owe it to your readers to provide some kind of context and even to give them some ways of thinking that maybe hadn’t occurred to them before. I don’t think I would’ve been able to stay at a newspaper this long, and I don’t think I would’ve been able to stay within the confines of television storytelling for this long. News magazines basically give you a lot of freedom in the way that you cover the world.

As you said, you’ve worked within multiple mediums — print, television, radio, and the Web. Do certain mediums require you to rely more on particular skills than others?

I signed with NBC News in 1996 and I’ve been with them for nearly 12 years on a part-time basis. When it came to producing two-minute television pieces, I was good at certain parts, like script-writing, and not so good at other parts, like stand-ups. Now I do more of the talking head end of the business, for which there’s a large appetite. That transition hasn’t been that difficult.

In the 1980s, you were Newsweek‘s media critic and were among the first in the mainstream media to hold news organizations accountable for their coverage. That role is now filled by blogs. What has the emergence of the blogosphere meant for publications like Newsweek?

When I started covering the media in 1984, there were very few media critics in the United States. At one point, I was named one of the top ten media critics in America and my parents were very pleased — but I had to tell them that there were only ten media critics in America. So the honor wasn’t tremendously meaningful because that aspect of the business was tremendously underdeveloped. The media just basically wasn’t held accountable. Today, the blogosphere does a good job of holding the media accountable for its mistakes and its misinterpretations. This means that there’s one less thing for Time and Newsweek to have to do, which is fine because we can always use the space for something else. But yes, there was a time when news organizations didn’t have to answer to anybody. And I thought that was wrong. So I wrote a lot of pieces that don’t actually look a lot different than blog entries today. I’m actually going to have a collection of my media columns put together sometime later this year, going back 20 years. I also put out another paperback recently, actually.

That’s the book called Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, right?
Yeah, it’s going to be a movie.

Wasn’t that the book Kurt Vonnegut said was like crack-cocaine for his generation?
Yeah, isn’t that a great quote? He called me up a month before he died and invited me out for dinner. The only agenda was to talk about Roosevelt. I really had a great time with him.

Back to blogosphere, how is Newsweek keeping pace with the demand for online content?
I think we’re doing well. Like I said, just a few minutes ago I posted a story on Newsweek.com about how some Democrat is urging Hillary Clinton to run for governor of New York when this presidential thing ends. It gives me a chance to put things out there without waiting until the following week. For the first 15 years that I worked at Newsweek, we didn’t have an online presence so there wasn’t the opportunity to do that. It also means more work for everybody. We have many fewer employees than we used to and we also do more work. I think that’s something that’s shared across the business right now. People are working harder. The beast is always hungry.

At a recent New York University media event, you and the other panelists addressed the issue of credentialing and accountability. How does that factor into the blogosphere?
I think bloggers are answerable to other bloggers and to their readers. My belief is that the age of no accountability is over. I think the lack of credentialing is a good thing — I’m an anti-credentialist. Credentialing has run amok in America. In many instances, credentials are just barriers to entry and they’re ways for people who are already in a particular craft or profession to keep other people out. I think it’s insane that Bill Gates can’t go into a public school in the United States and teach a computer science class because he hasn’t got some Mickey Mouse teacher’s credential. I think it’s wrong that I can’t teach journalism in a school. You should be judged on what you can do and what you know, not by whether you have a piece of sheepskin.

It used to be that when something didn’t make the evening news, it didn’t happen. Now when something doesn’t really make it on YouTube, it didn’t happen.

So I don’t have a problem with the lack of credentialing. Where I do have a problem, is a lack of standards. There are certain standards in our business, like calling the subject of a story for comment, providing some elemental sense of fairness in the criticisms at some level, avoiding cheap shots and kicking people when they’re down. I’m talking about picking up the phone once and a while, which is something that, unfortunately, a lot of self-styled journalists and bloggers just don’t do. There’s a slippage in the basic standards. Having said that, there’s a lot of great stuff that’s being done outside the mainstream media. For example, I look at things like Talking Points Memo, I think they should figure out how to give Josh Marshall a Pulitzer Prize — but of course online content isn’t eligible, but that’s a different story.

On that note, which blogs do you read regularly?
I read Talking Points Memo, Ben Smith’s, and some of the other political blogs depending on the day. I read Drudge, Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics. I’m a little bit skewed to the campaign and election content right now. I’m pretty obsessed with the campaign. I do read some media blogs like Romenesko, mediabistro.com, and TVNewser.

This is the seventh time you’ve covered an election season. How does this one compare to the previous ones in terms of coverage you’re seeing across media outlets, access, appetite for the news etc?
This campaign is the most compelling of any of the seven that I’ve covered. There’s the freshness of change and possibility in the United States. Arguably, the most fun was 2000, mostly because of the aftermath and because early in the season John McCain gave us unprecedented access that we’d never seen before and that I don’t think we’ll ever see again. 1992 was a lot of fun too, I covered a lot of the Clinton campaign that year. I think people kept waiting for the first real Internet election, and I think 2008 is the year. The Internet has transformed fundraising. It’s taken power away from the fat cats and given it to average people. The YouTube factor is also huge. It used to be that evening news programs were the spine of a campaign. Now YouTube is the spine of the campaign. It used to be that when something didn’t make the evening news, it didn’t happen. Now when something doesn’t really make it on YouTube, it didn’t happen. Obama gave a speech yesterday in economics. It was important to a lot of people, but it wasn’t important to the horserace. Whereas his speech on race was. It’s like when a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it — it’s like it never happened. The same goes for when something doesn’t register on YouTube.

Would you say that Obama has best capitalized on what YouTube has to offer?
I think he’s been more viral and more attune to the Internet than other candidates. Although Mike Huckabee was too. YouTube has also hurt Obama. If the Reverend Wright issue had happened and you just heard about it on the nightly news, it wouldn’t have been so powerful or so harmful to Obama.

In your experience with this year’s candidates, what distinguishes them in how they interact with the press?
McCain is still more open than the others. I think he probably gets an easier ride for that reason. Hillary started very inaccessible and she has gotten more accessible in direct proportion to her decline in the polls and in the primaries. I think she recognized after Iowa that she had to open herself up more to reporters. That’s usually the way that it works �- the frontrunner usually starts off the most inaccessible and then gradually opens up as the campaign goes on. Obama isn’t inaccessible, but he’s less accessible than the other candidates.

So you were on The Colbert Report in 2006…
Yeah, my wife works there.
What’s your take on the role of “fake news shows” in the election season?
I love “fake news” — it helps pay my mortgage. I think the idea that we should be wringing our hands because people are getting their news from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert is ridiculous. If people watching those shows hadn’t already consumed the news from other sources, people wouldn’t get the jokes. The news that they get from other sources is parodied and contextualized in a humorous and often brilliant way. And there are ways in which being the subject of ribbing by late-night comedians can elevate a candidate.

Moving back to election night 2000, you went on NBC News to break the story of a problem with “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County, Florida. What does it feel like to be the first one reporting national news on that scale?
That was kind of a fun moment for me. I was one of dozens of NBC people who were on standby on election night. It was hard to get on the air unless you had something fresh. I saw that Florida had shifted from Al Gore to “too close to call” which is kind of unusual after a state is called for a candidate. So I phoned the Miami Herald and asked, “what’s going on in Florida?” and he said, “I don’t know, but I think something’s going on in Palm Beach County.” Then I called the Palm Beach Post and they said that there had been irregularities because people were voting for Pat Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore. Nowadays, they would’ve posted that on their Web site and everybody would’ve known about it. But at that time, they were still in the rhythm of old-media thinking and they were holding it for the next day’s paper. So it turned out for them to be a mistake that they told me. I went on the air immediately with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric and I told the world that there was a serious problem in Palm Beach County with something called the “butterfly ballot.” I explained what that was. After that, it was off to the races.

I suppose the Post might have regretted passing along that information before it hit the paper the next day�

I’m not sure they even knew that they had a scoop because they probably thought that a lot of other people had the story too. That’s a strange story and one of the highlights of my career that wasn’t exactly a lot of hard digging, but sometimes things fall on your lap when you make a few phone calls.

What are some other stories that you’ve done that stick out as highlights in your career?
I’ve been a columnist for 17 years now. One of the more memorable stories that I’ve reported was in 1986 when a colleague at Newsweek and I broke a story on the cover that there was what we called a civil war at CBS. The board of directors was unhappy with the way things were going inside the company and there was an overhaul at CBS. In the 1980s, that was a big media story that we broke. Several years ago, someone at The Washington Monthly, Josh Green, and I broke a story about William Bennett’s gambling jones. In 2006, I was the first person to say that it was likely that Barack Obama was going to run for president.

How did you acquire that information and when did you feel confident to break with that news?
I posted it online in late September of 2006, maybe early October. I heard from somebody he was running. They were trying to keep the cat from getting out of the bag so they said it was only “fifty-fifty” that he would run. I posted that it was only fifty-fifty, but that was about 49 percent more likely than anybody had admitted to at that time. I first got onto that when I saw Obama in September around Labor Day and I said “so are you not going to run if Hillary Clinton runs?” and he told me on background that I shouldn’t make that assumption. That was the first time that I got the sense that he was going to run and later I was able to confirm it. In retrospect, I wish I had written it harder and just said “he is going to run.” I think I could have done that. I think I could have been a little bit bolder because I had good authority that he was making plans to run. But part of the reason was that Michelle Obama wasn’t entirely on board so there was a slight chance that he was not going to run.

Eventually the deadline comes around and you just have to do it. Nothing concentrates the mind like feeling that you’re going to leave a big hole in the magazine if you don’t get it done.

I think another interesting story that I broke was in the last year — that Ted Kennedy had harsh words with Bill Clinton on the phone after New Hampshire telling him to tone it down and that he was introducing race into the campaign, and that Ted Kennedy was likely to endorse Obama. In the time since then, people have gone “well so what, Obama didn’t carry Massachusetts,” but if you talk to the Obama people they’ll tell you that the endorsement of the Kennedys was instrumental in their success so far because it came at a point when they needed it after New Hampshire.

How did you get wind that Kennedy made that call?
I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.

Moving right along then�What kind of story do you find most difficult to pursue and why? Is it a political story? A breaking story?

I’m not as nearly as good at breaking stories as someone like Michael Isikoff, and I’m not nearly as good at writing cover stories as Evan Thomas — although I’ve written a lot of them over the years. I’m most comfortable trying to get at subtext of events in a column form but it’s sometimes difficult for me to get it out. Sometimes it takes me an hour to write a column and sometimes it takes me 12 hours. It varies. I can’t really explain why, except that sometimes I’m not pulling my thoughts together in the way I’d like to or sometimes the re-write didn’t go as well I’d hoped. I strongly believe that re-writing makes for good writing. Other times it comes more easily.

In those times that it takes you longer to get the column going and you find yourself frustrated, how do you move beyond that?
Eventually the deadline comes around and you just have to do it. Sometimes it pays not to start too early. Nothing so concentrates the mind as contemplating one’s own impending execution, so I think it’s also true that nothing concentrates the mind like feeling that you’re going to leave a big hole in the magazine if you don’t get it done. The trick is to make it look like you dashed it off, to make it look easy and casual. There are some people who are so wonderful at that like Maureen Dowd or Gail Collins. They have an informal style that makes it look like they dashed it off and that it didn’t take tremendous effort. I think that’s part of the challenge is to make it look like it’s not labored — but you have to labor at it to make it look unlabored.

Back to the campaign, what is your impression of Senator Hillary Clinton and how she’s running her campaign? How does it reflect what you saw of her when you had access to Bill Clinton starting in 1992?
Well, I had a lot of access to Bill Clinton. I interviewed him as much as anybody else when he was president. And then I was granted the first interview he gave after he left the presidency. In terms of Hillary’s campaign, on tactical and strategic grounds, I’d say that she’s a better candidate than the campaign would suggest. She’s a good candidate but her people have not been running a good campaign.

How did you gain such close access to Bill Clinton?
I met him in 1984. In the years after that, we connected on a policy basis. He has different relationships with different people. With some people he has golf relationships with, with some he has political gossip relationships with, with me he always boiled down the policy issues that both of us were interested in — whether it was welfare or relations with China, we connected and talked easily on many occasions. I wouldn’t say that now would be one of those times when we would be connecting very well because of what I’ve been writing lately. But one thing that I really respect about Bill Clinton is that he’s made so many mistakes himself and requires so much forgiveness that he’s very forgiving toward other people.

It came up at the New York University media event that some people credit the writers’ strike for the unprecedented election coverage. Do you think that a lull in regular television programming had anything to do with viewers’ appetite for election coverage?
I don’t think so. I think the appetite started earlier. It’s an unprecedented situation. First major female candidate, first African American candidate, growing involvement of the youth voters �- all of those things are much more important than the writer’s strike. Though it was frustrating in my family because my wife is not a member of the guild and when Colbert went back on the air, it was hard to keep the quality of the show high when they were so short-staffed. For our family, the strike was a big deal, and it affected the writing of the movie of my FDR book.

Speaking of books, in general do you believe all the doom and gloom about the print industry? What is your take on that?
I think that there is a big issue because old media is so much more expensive to get into the hands of readers. There’s a basic economic issue there. But having said that, the history of the media in the United States is that new media does not destroy old media. It simply pushes it into an often lesser niche entirely. When radio came in, people thought it was going to be the death of newspapers. When television came in, people thought it would be the death of radio and movies. Reading a magazine in your hands is a different experience than reading online so I think there will always be some taste for that tactile experience of reading a magazine. Newspapers are a greater peril because a lot of what they do, from classified advertisements to breaking news, is done so much more easily through other media. They will survive as long as long as baby boomers survive, which is another forty years or so.

Thinking back to your fifty Newsweek covers, of which one are you the most proud?
I would say that the very first one I did on a homeless American in 1983 showed me that I can take a social problem and bring attention to it. That showed me what a news magazine cover could do. I’m still proud of that one and it sticks out in my mind because it was my first one. I’ve done many stories over the years on things like mentoring and the problems of at-risk youth — I’m very proud of those stories. I guess I’m proud of the historical context I bring to a lot of different stories. I think it’s really important to the understanding of an event to have historical context.

---

Kathryn Carlson is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com and a graduate journalism student at New York University.