Young adult author Kerry Madden says her gift for storytelling grew out of her distaste for housework — as a kid, she’d make up tales while doing the dishes or cleaning the kitchen. Growing up as daughter of a football coach, Madden moved around quite a bit, continued her roaming ways as an adult (she and her husband taught in China), but has settled down in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. Louisana’s Song, the second book in her Smoky Mountain trilogy has just been released, with the third scheduled to be published in 2008.

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Name:
Kerry Madden
Position:
Children’s author, teacher of fiction writing workshops of all ages
Resumé:
Offsides, Writing Smarts, and the Smokey Mountain trilogy: Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain
Company:
I teach at Vroman’s and the UCLA Writers Program … that’s as close to a “company” as I get. Does it count if Jim Henson Productions optioned my football novel, Offsides, a million years ago? [1997].
Hometown:
Ten states, and England & China. I grew up on the gridiron in football towns — my father is NOT John Madden. Now, I’d say my hometown is Silverlake where we’ve raised our kids — all our friends are here — but I’ve got this pull to go back to the South one day. That’s where all my fiction is set.
Education:
BA from the University of Tennessee with a junior year at Manchester University in England. MFA in Playwriting from the University of Tennessee.
Family:
Married to husband Kiffen for 20 years, with three kids: Flannery, 18, Lucy, 16, and Norah, 8
Favorite TV show:
Life on Mars. Every year, one of my best friends from England, Mike Tait, brings us must-see DVD seasons centered around Manchester, so I won’t forget. I love the show. And I love watching Gray’s Anatomy with my daughter, Lucy.
Last book read:
To Kill A Mockingbird…again.
Guilty pleasure:
Pie. I love pie: lemon meringue, cherry, blueberry. My son makes a mean pie from the Elvis Cookbook, Are You Hungry Tonight?

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What is your average media day like?

If I’m on a book tour, it still ain’t much. I did Alive at Five in Chattanooga at the crack of dawn, and I was on after the “cornbread segment” in Knoxville on Channel Ten last year during the Dogwood Arts Festival. My kids’ novels are set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia, so it’s regional media.

How do you carve out time to write?

I write everyday or try to…but the best is when I can go away to a cabin and write (no wireless), and I get so much done without the distraction of home, chaos, kids, email. But this happens so rarely that I just have to be disciplined and not answer the phone or check email. The house here, sadly, is often a wreck.

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mediabistro.com: How did you arrive at your audience — YA, middle school, kids? Madden: Desperation.

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Describe your writing ‘area’ — any rules for yourself? Schedule you try to adhere to? Special pens, paper, pets? Strange routines we would delight in hearing?

When I begin a book, I surround myself with the maps, pictures, books of the region. I have a wall covered with old photographs of bookmobiles from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I have Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams photos on the wall from Ernest Tubbs Record Shop in Nashville. I try to collect things my characters love — I even have some old comic books with “Saturn Girl” from the “Legion of Superheroes” because in my book, one of the boys is crazy for Saturn Girl. I have some old dolls and fairy rocks, mostly for our youngest, Norah, to play with when she comes in while I’m working. The Synonym Finder is a must book. It’s also a comfort to have Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor stories nearby. I write downstairs or sometimes at the kitchen table — a big teakwood table where I can spread out and use my laptop. The light is better in the kitchen. Sometimes, I play old Carter family tunes [on] a running loop until it’s time to come back to the 21st Century and pick up kids at school or go watch Lucy throw the shotput. She’s discovered shotput and she loves it — it’s a word and an activity that never even entered my realm of consciousness until a month ago. Our oldest, Flannery, is a freshman at UCSB, and it’s been on odd year with him gone, but he comes home plenty for his rock band, The Flypaper Cartel.

How did you arrive at your audience — YA, middle school, kids?

Desperation. My first novel for adults, Offsides, came out in 1996 and went through the Hollywood mill for years, but died eventually, both in print and pilot. I wrote a book for American Girl, called Writing Smarts, which was fun and easy to write. But I was also writing such dreck to stay afloat — my husband is a teacher, and we have three kids. My stories included: “How To Stay Healthy if You Sell Insurance” and “How to Stay Healthy if You’re an Agent.” I basically wrote a series of health stories. The lifeguards and camera operators were interesting, as were the coalminers and stonecutters, but those stories didn’t make the cut. Then, I was writing “What’s Hot and What’s Not for 2000” for a fashion thing online discussing plasma TVs and crap. It was so boring — and then I got desperate and began ghostwriting to make money — worst decision of all! But it turned out to be the best because I was writing for such crazy people that when it all blew up, I vowed never to write anything again that I didn’t love and care about.

How did you come to this story?

I thought about how Kiffen, my husband, grew up one of thirteen children. I thought about his father struggling with all those kids — playing fiddle on the Grand Ole Opry but mostly at honky-tonks and even with gospel singers. (My father-in-law said the gospel singers could cuss the best of all). I thought of Kiffen’s mother trying to hold it all together and I figured I could write some novels about a big family growing up in the Smoky Mountains, because I miss Tennessee and North Carolina. I picked one of the kids to be the storyteller and songwriter of the family. She writes songs about everyday life from “Daddy’s Roasted Peanut” and “Mama’s Biscuits” to “Grandma’s Glass Eye.” And that’s how I came to write Gentle’s Holler, the first in the trilogy. Louisiana’s Song comes out in a few weeks, and Jessie’s Mountain comes out next year. My own kids were editors and inspirations. Kiffen’s great uncle, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was a songcatcher and banjo player in the mountains, so I thought about him too.

What are you working on now or next?

I am writing the YA biography of Harper Lee for Viking/Penguin’s Up Close Series for Teens to be published in 2009. Now I’ll be making several trips to Alabama. I am just back from one.

Who’s the biggest influence on your work?

I really love Flannery O’Connor. I discovered her in college after England when I had to face life in Knoxville again. After her, I began to read southern writers all the time. I even went to Milledgeville, GA a few times to see where she lived. Anyway, Flannery O’Connor said she was seated at her typewriter every morning whether she felt like it or not — and she also didn’t outline. She said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I’m like that. It’s messy and plotless for a longtime, but story begins to emerge.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do?

I don’t know. I love reading work aloud. I read Gentle’s Holler on tape for the Braille Institute. I also wish I could play guitar or banjo — maybe be a musician? Or work in the Special Collections of the New York Public Library. There is something mystical about that place.

As a follow — what would you love to do?

I’d like write a book the requires a passport. I haven’t traveled out of this country in so long, and I’d love to do that again. I’ve been on the road to Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina, but I sure would love to go to Paris or Rome or Istanbul. I’d love to travel for months too.

Work’s over, kitchen’s clean, kid is occupied — how do you kick back? Music, book, DVD? What’s your relaxation preference? (And please don’t tell me you go for a nice 5 mile run.)

A glass of wine and Life on Mars, or if I’m ambitious, I’ll go to the movies and eat Junior Mints. Thank God for Laemelle and Arclight! When I’m in the mountains, I love driving the back roads listening to Lucinda Williams. My sister and I came upon the Cross Garden outside of Prattville, Alabama last week, which was like walking into a Flannery O’Connor story of the Southern Grotesque.

This interview has been excerpted for length and clarity.

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Kate Coe is a blogger at FishbowlLA

Name: Tom Curley
Position: President and CEO, the Associated Press
Education: B.A., Political Science, La Salle University, Philadelphia; MBA, Rochester Institute of Technology
Hometown: Easton, Pa.
First job: Intern reporter, Evening News, Perth Amboy, N.J.
Last 3 jobs: President and publisher, USA Today; director of information, Gannett; night city/suburban editor, The Times-Union
Birthdate: July 6, 1948
Marital status: Married to Marsha Stanley
Favorite TV show: The Wire
Last book read: Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel

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You were director of information for Gannett. How did you wind up in that position, and what were your responsibilities?
Gannett was embarking on major expansion and was looking to coordinate several corporate functions.

Can you talk about what you were doing prior to landing that position, and why you pursued it? Which corporate functions were they looking to coordinate?
I had been night city/suburban editor for Gannett’s then-largest newspaper, The Times-Union. The functions that were lumped in included investor relations, corporate communications, and news research.

As director of information, you coordinated several newspaper research projects. In the end, the project yielded 50,000 interviews on media use. What did you learn about how people use the news, and the role that news plays in people’s lives?
The critical finding was the extraordinary importance of hard news and people’s dependence on the daily newspaper. Additionally, we discovered considerable variability in media consumption patterns from city to city.

Those interviews took place in the late 1970s. Thirty years later, has there been another project as ambitious as that? How do you now assess how people use media?
Several of the large media organizations collect local as well as national data, so it’s highly likely that the same basic information is being gathered. Media consumption has changed dramatically. Younger and older readers exhibit major differences in how they get news. The Internet is having a revolutionary effect. The markets for news are growing, but people are not waiting for it to arrive in a newspaper or evening newscast.

You were the original news staffer on the project that led to the creation of USA Today. What was your responsibility, and how did that project evolve into USA Today?
The role was to understand what content would draw a national audience and how content could be different from what people already were receiving.

You came to the AP as an outsider, having spent most of your career at Gannett. What were the benefits of coming in with a fresh perspective? How did you integrate your new ideas and direction without disrespecting the culture that had previously been a part of the AP?
Celebrating AP was easy to do. AP journalists demonstrate courage and commitment every day. The challenge at AP and every media organization is to adapt to the digital era. AP has existed for 161 years, and everyone at AP is hell-bent to make certain it transitions with its mission and values in place.

USA Today was originally seen as a radical departure from how news was usually produced and presented. Now, of course, many other papers have copied USA Today‘s structure and components. Did you know at the time that the design of USA Today would be so controversial?
Certainly. The design had to be distinctive. If it weren’t different, nobody would have read it a second time. We knew we had to push the envelope. That’s what innovation is about. No apologies.

How has the adoption of USA Today-like graphics and style in papers across the country validated your judgment as a journalist?
USA Today arrived at the same time personal computers, color printing techniques, and graphics packages entered a new era. The newspaper embraced those technologies. Other newspapers quickly adopted them as well. That’s the nature of competition.

USA Today was a newspaper designed for a generation of TV watchers, hence the shorter stories and graphics-heavy copy. How should current newspapers adapt to appeal to a generation of Internet users and new media aficionados?
Storytelling is still about balance and appropriateness. One size doesn’t fit all. Happily, the new technologies allow for customization. Those who are satisfied with headlines can get their fix. Others may want depth and sophisticated multimedia graphics packages. The critical element is personal choice. In many ways, our goal is to enable people to choose.

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“History has taught us that we will have our fill of war coverage, calamities and the powerful trying to exploit opportunities. Journalists at AP and elsewhere are targeted as never before. I would hope that eases, but I fear our sacrifices will be even greater in the years ahead.”

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In September 2005, the AP launched asap, a multimedia service that targets younger readers. How have members responded to that content, and how have younger readers responded?
Members have embraced the storytelling approach, which was a departure from AP classic. Members have found figuring out how to go to market with the content more of a challenge. Do they create new brands or do they try to capture young people with a medium that’s got a distinctly older readership? These are not easy questions when advertising revenues are shrinking.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: After this interview was conducted, the AP announced that asap will be shuttering in October 2007. Though Mr. Curley was away and unable to comment for this interview, the AP’s director of public relations directed mediaBistro.com to an AP article written about the decision. The article references an internal memo from executive editor Kathleen Carrol, in which she calls asap “terrific journalism success… Economic success, however, has proved more elusive.”]

You’re a classic newspaper man — you started doing sports reporting for a local paper at age 15, then worked for Rochester (N.Y.) Times as night city/suburban editor before moving onto director of information at Gannett. But the AP isn’t a newspaper — the work your reporters produce includes both print and video, and the stories are printed in papers and Web sites all over the country. How does producing news for the AP compare to working for an outlet that produces all its news in one place for the same set of readers every day?
Nearly all media has become multimedia. Every newspaper is pursuing Web and broadcast storytelling. We’re all there. That’s part of the opportunity. Those of us who grew up in text certainly are learning from our electronic colleagues.

Is there a difference in creating and producing news for a well-defined audience — that is, the readership of a certain city — versus a readership as wide and diverse as the AP audience?
There is one huge difference. AP is global.

Is your job at the AP to serve the readers, or to serve the members who use your content in their papers?
Our job is the same as at every organization: to understand and serve customers. AP has a complicated, global client set. We sell to businesses who then sell to the public. We must anticipate the change in public appetites, so we stay current for our business customer set. We will remain a business-to-business provider.

With the Internet, local news is accessible to everyone — for instance, during Hurricane Katrina, many people went to , the Times-Picayune site. Is this a threat to your business model? Have you found a way to compensate for this?
Everyone has to understand the extent to which the market for content is growing. There are more users than ever in more places than ever. They are seeking content more frequently than ever about more subjects than ever. The challenge is to adapt the business model to the emerging content markets. It’s hard work, but we are seeing significant growth in revenues and customers.

In David Halberstam’s introduction to the AP’s new book, Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, he cites one of the problems with journalism as journalists “come to a story too late and then leave too early.” In other words, the coverage is no longer as thorough and painstaking as it once was. Do you agree with this assessment? How does the AP fit into that description?
Certainly coverage can be too superficial or herd-like. The Duke lacrosse case is an example of a herd gone wrong. But generally coverage is better, deeper, and broader than ever. That’s because we have access to more information than ever in seconds.

The AP, like many news organizations, has had to close a lot of foreign bureaus in the past few years. How can an organization live up to a mandate of covering international stories early and well when it’s no longer cost effective to have reporters stationed overseas?
Wrong. AP has not closed foreign bureaus. It has added to its international coverage in important ways. Last year we opened a new bureau in North Korea — the first western news organization to have one there — and this year we expanded our bureau in Beijing. We see international coverage as a major opportunity.

My mistake. In fact, the AP has long had a practice of training and hiring locals to help staff international bureaus. How does this improve coverage?
They provide us cultural understanding, access, and insight we couldn’t get otherwise on a real-time basis. They are every bit as committed to providing an accurate record of their country.

Can you give us an update on Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer held without charges by the US in Iraq?
The latest effort has been a direct appeal by me to Secretary of Defense Gates. I await a response.

Breaking News also covers a lot of the AP’s “greatest hits” — that is, stories you’ve broken, AP reporters who have faced down oppression or opposition from government agencies, and times you got the facts right, while everyone else was reporting misinformation. When Breaking News: Volume 2 comes out in sixty years, what are the big victories that will be highlighted from this era?
One can only guess at the news stories. My hope is that our contribution on general news remains as important as ever, and that our impact on financial and emerging content areas (such as health/medicine) is greater. History has taught us that we will have our fill of war coverage, calamities, and the powerful trying to exploit opportunities. Journalists at AP and elsewhere are targeted as never before. I would hope that eases, but I fear our sacrifices will be even greater in the years ahead.

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Kate Dailey is a freelance writer in Philadelphia and former editor at Men’s Health and Women’s Health. She will attend Columbia graduate school in the fall.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview has been excerpted for length and clarity.]

It seems like every other piece Vanity Fair international correspondent William Langewiesche writes gets nominated for a National Magazine Award. His pieces have been among the finalists for nine years running, and two of them have nabbed a prestigious Ellie, including last year’s “Rules of Engagement,” about the U.S. Marine killings of civilians in Haditha, Iraq. Langewiesche first gained recognition while writing for The Atlantic, where for 15 years he covered everything from the crash of the space shuttle Columbia to the clean-up of the World Trade Center site. He is also the author of six books of non-fiction, including his latest, The Atomic Bazaar, published this year, about the proliferation of nuclear weapons among poor states and non-state actors.

Before taking his place among the leading writers of literary journalism, however, Langewiesche struggled for what he calls ten long years “in the wilderness,” writing every day but getting almost nothing published and flying planes to pay the bills. Langewiesche talks to us about the risks of failure, his job at Vanity Fair, and why he believes these are the golden years for magazine writing.

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Name: William Langewiesche
Position: International correspondent, Vanity Fair
Last three jobs: National correspondent for The Atlantic. Pilot and freelance writer (simultaneously)
Hometown: Princeton, New Jersey
Education: “None [laughs]. Effectively it’s true, but nominally, I graduated from Stanford University.”
Marital status: Married, two children
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page
Favorite TV show: Doesn’t watch television.
Last five songs listened to on your iPod: Doesn’t have an iPod.
Last book read: Everest by Walt Unsworth
Guilty pleasure: “I have pleasures, but I don’t feel guilty about them.”
Last five stamps in your passport: Brazil, France, U.K., Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador

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You’re in Brazil right now. Are you working on a story down there?
Yes, but I can’t really talk about work I’m doing. I’m doing a very light piece, for a break.

The title “international correspondent” evokes images of jetting off to exotic locales, hobnobbing with dictators, and canoodling with beautiful women. What’s it really like?
It’s just like that [laughs]. What’s it really like? There are probably many forms of this and probably very few that are like mine. I’m not a newspaper writer, doing daily news from Beijing. Mine is a job in which I consult with my editors, [Vanity Fair editor-at-large] Cullen Murphy and [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter, and we decide on the next subject. Then I head out into it, with very little preparation, intentionally somewhat naïve about it. I read a little about it, but not too much. And then I go to ground. I’m allowed to take as much time as I need on the ground to look into a story, and then from there I proceed to write.

How do you decide what you’re going to work on next?
I typically have a running list of 10-15 ideas, in other words, years of work that I could move on to, that I’ve discussed with my editors. And then eventually we choose one. I’m always dropping ideas because new things come up, so there’s always a rolling list of subjects, most of which I never get to.

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‘We’re living in a time when the best people are not cynical, when the dollar is not absolutely ruling things, when there’s a lot of deep intelligence and integrity being applied to our business. It’s a great time to be a magazine writer.’

Do you wrestle with your editors about what you’re going to work on?
I don’t remember them ever telling me they really wanted me to do a story that I didn’t want to do, and I don’t remember ever really wanting to do a story that they didn’t want me to do. Typically, if I have an idea, I discuss it with them, and they may have reason to tell me they don’t think it’s a good story, and I listen to them because they’re very smart people. I’m lucky, because I’m working with some of the best editors of the past 50 years. These are the golden years. If only people knew it. We have some very, very good editors at work today, and I’m just lucky that I’m allowed to work with some of these guys.

These are the golden years?
There’s a tendency to think always that the golden years in publishing, in magazines, in almost anything, probably, were some time probably 50 years ago. Before our generation. Those were the golden times when really good work was being done, when the really dedicated editors were working, when the dollar was not ruling, when people were not as cynical as they are now. I find that’s actually wrong. We’re living in a time when the best people are not cynical, when the dollar is not absolutely ruling things, when there’s a lot of deep intelligence and integrity being applied to our business. It’s a great time to be a magazine writer.

But the news coming out of the publishing world is so gloom and doom.
It always has been. But look, it’s a very rough racket. It’s a very, very tough business to be in. It’s a tough job to be a writer, to be an editor, to run a magazine, to make money of any kind, to publish books. It’s a crap shoot. We know it. But we are the people who decided we weren’t going to become doctors and lawyers. So it’s a very difficult road to walk. Always has been. Always will be.

You have an unusual resumé for a magazine writer. After college, you worked for a flying magazine for a few years and then left and became a pilot.
I left the magazine in order to become the next John McPhee [laughs]. John McPhee, of course, being one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, and I thought: “I can read this stuff easily enough. Why can’t I write it?”

I, being young and naïve myself, left my job and began to fly airplanes and to write, always writing. I wrote a bunch of stuff that wasn’t published, and I continued to struggle. My goal was never to become a pilot. My goal was to, well, become exactly what I am now, interestingly enough. I failed at that for many years, but I was lucky because I had a skill which allowed me to stay dry when it rained.

Were you pitching stories to magazines during that time, or were you just writing for yourself?
I knew that there was this magazine world in New York, with lots of slick magazines, and I knew I didn’t want to write for those guys, so I never approached them. I thought I’d rather fly airplanes than do that. I don’t know why I had a strong aversion to it. I wanted to write serious stuff, long stuff, not fast stuff. I wanted to write with quality, both quality of thought and literary quality, and I knew I couldn’t do that in that world. I felt they would not have given me that opportunity. They would have asked me to do it fast, and make it slick and catchy, and I didn’t want to do any of that.

I had some very small contracts for books, which I wrote, and were unpublishable. And then I was able eventually to begin to publish some of the kind of writing I wanted to write, after many years. I must have spent almost 10 years in the wilderness, a long time, never giving up. I was traveling a lot internationally. I would take a job [as a pilot] for a while, and then I’d quit and travel. I was looking for things to write about. I was trying to expose myself to the world. A lot of what I was doing was getting older, but I didn’t see it that way at the time.

Getting older how?
One of the reasons my writing was not good enough when I was 25 years old was that my thinking wasn’t good enough. One of the reasons my thinking wasn’t good enough was that I wasn’t old enough. I didn’t have enough experience. Why would a reader, a mature reader, an intelligent reader want to read the work of a 25-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears kid, at least on serious subjects? I was trying to write about the world in which we live on a more serious level. But I was too young. But that’s just me. I was a late bloomer.

Giving hope to late bloomers everywhere, given where you are now.
[Laughs] Yeah, well, I don’t know where I am now. Certainly I don’t have to fly airplanes anymore.

Eventually you sent two pieces to The Atlantic. They liked your writing and gave you an assignment.
I was actually doing some work by that time for The New York Times Sunday sections. I’d written a piece on a town in Algeria. I intended it to be for The New York Times Travel section, but after I wrote it, I thought, “This is pretty good.” So, completely blindly, I sent it off to The Atlantic, hardly knowing what The Atlantic was. I just knew it was a good magazine.

So, The Atlantic assigns you a story, and you haven’t had a lot of experience being published. Now you’re writing for one of the top magazines in the country, and the first story you give them is 17,000 words [“The World in its Extreme,” November 1991]. Were you nervous about your ability to deliver?
No. It didn’t cross my mind to be nervous. They sent me back to North Africa. I wasn’t worried about what the result was going to be. I was just worried about working. I also didn’t think they were going to make that big a deal out of it, and then they turned around and made it into a cover story. That was really a surprise.

Once you joined The Atlantic, did they throw you in a particular direction because you were the “new guy”? Or did they leverage the experience you’d built up and have you do certain kinds of stories?
They treated me then the way Vanity Fair treats me now. They were all in favor of my doing what I wanted to do. They were very enthusiastic about my work. They were more positive about my work than I was myself, and they still are.

Walk us through a three-month period in your job.
Having launched out with the approval of my editors, I typically will go out with a little bit of research — either I will have read or some people will have done some reading for me. I try to stay off the Internet. It’s a huge time-sink. I try not to get involved in reading everything about a subject, but I may have a few books with me. I never underline anything. I absorb what I’m absorbing, and if I forget it, I figure it was worth forgetting. It’s a very loose approach.

So I go into it and try to understand what I’m seeing. There’s a stage I go through when I’m rubbing my eyes, and I can’t understand this world that I’m in now. I feel like I don’t understand anything. I can’t see anything. I start asking questions, and then I very much listen to people. I listen to people very carefully. I never prepare questions in advance. I never email questions to people. I just talk to people and listen carefully and respond to what they’re saying and try to give of myself as much as I’m asking them to give of themselves, so that a true conversation can develop. These conversations typically will go on for weeks, on and off. Sometimes I take notes. Depending on the sophistication of the people I’m talking to, I record what they’re saying. When I’m on the ground, I’m working anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day.

Then comes the conversation with Cullen. We have complex conversations about structure, and then I start down the road. The real work is not done in the research. The real work is done in the writing. That’s when you really begin to think about the subject clearly.

How so?
Writing is thinking. Writing is a form of thought. It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing. I really begin to think most profoundly about a subject that I’m writing about when I write about it. The problem of expression forces the thought to clarify itself, and that’s where the real work is done.

The real work is not done in places like Kinshasa or here in Brazil on the ground. The real work is done outside. What you’re doing here on the ground is trying to provide yourself with the resources necessary to think about the subject clearly later on.

David Halberstam’s standard advice to young reporters was that you should always ask the person you’re interviewing: “Who else should I talk to?” What’s your advice about reporting?
What matters is to listen very carefully. Just listen to people. There’s no formula to it. And then if they themselves are overgeneralizing or feeding you a lot of bullshit, you need to pick up on that and make it real. If they’re not willing to tell you what happened [in concrete detail], maybe the whole thing’s bullshit. Put it to ground. Make it practical and real.

What impact does having had a completely different career before coming to journalism fulltime have on the reporting and writing you do today?
I did very specialized kind of flying for a while, bad weather flying and storm chasing. The kind of decision-making that has to be done in the heaviest weather probably affects my ability to function in some of the more hostile environments where I find myself, like Iraq.

I never took courses in how to do this job, and I think it’s probably to my advantage. Maybe I’d be a much better writer, had I taken the courses. But I suspect that the effect of too much schooling or too much reading of the how-to manuals is to channel people into standard ways of approaching problems. I don’t suffer from that problem, because I don’t know what the standardized stuff is. So coming at this job from the experience of being a pilot maybe it helped me — or maybe it hurt me [laughs].

Your articles have been nominated for nine successive National Magazine Awards, and they’ve won two. Is that currency of any kind? Does it get you anything?
No. [laughs]. It’s very nice of them. I appreciate the compliment.

Do other writers hate you because just about every other story you do ends up getting nominated?
[Laughs] There are people who hate me, but they tend not to be writers. I don’t hold myself up to be superior to anyone, certainly not other writers. Coming from where I’ve come from on this long and difficult road, my inclination is to help other writers to the small degree that I can.

What is the highest level of success you can imagine?
It’s to write really, really good stuff, and to hit it on a sustained basis. One of the great tragedies for all of us is that the day is going to come when we’re too old to do it well anymore. Luckily in writing, that age is late. Short of senility, or alcoholism, or the other traps of this business, we all tend to get better as we get older. That’s one of the best things about this job. Age pays.

What’s the difference between writing for The Atlantic and writing for Vanity Fair? Are they interested in different kinds of stories, or different angles on the same stories?
The work I did at The Atlantic is very similar to the work I’m doing now. There’s a subtle literary liberation. I can go a little farther. I can be a little more myself. But I don’t think there’s a significant difference.

Does Vanity Fair ask you to sex up your stories?
Never. Vanity Fair never asks me to sex up my stories. It’s a much, much higher standard than that. The writing that goes on there is the writer’s writing. The writers who write for Vanity Fair would never stand for that, and Graydon Carter would never do that. He’s a great editor. He’s as good as it gets.

What advice do you give people who ask you how to become an international correspondent?
I get this question all the time, and my heart goes out to them. What can I say? First learn to fly? I have no idea. I don’t think there’s any one route. All I say is it’s a very hard road. I would never want my son or daughter to go down that road because the chances of failure are too high. The rewards are enormous if you succeed. Not financial rewards, but the more important stuff. But it’s a very difficult road, and anybody who’s got the courage to go down that road, thank God that those people do have the courage. But I don’t know what the formula is.

Do you have any secrets for kicking jet lag?
[Laughs] I wish I did. The older I get, the worse it gets. Eat carrots.

Really?
No, I was kidding.

Well, maybe as a placebo.
Definitely. If you believe carrots are going to work, go for carrots.

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

[Editor’s Note: This interview has been excerpted for length and clarity.]

When Tony Ortega was named editor-in-chief of the Village Voice, he was charged with doing what many thought was an impossible task: Turn around the Village Voice. After coming on board as the venerable alt-weekly’s editor-in-chief following David Blum’s ousting, Ortega became the sixth editor at the Voice in less than two years. He spoke with mediabistro.com about the transition.

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Name: Tony Ortega
Position: Editor-in-chief, Village Voice
Education: MA Cal State Fullerton
Hometown: Los Angeles
First job: College English instructor at a few California colleges
Resumé: Phoenix New Times staff writer (1995-1999), New Times Los Angeles staff writer (1999-2002), Phoenix New Times associate editor (2002-2003), Kansas City Pitch managing editor (2003-2005), New Times Broward-Palm Beach editor-in-chief (2005-2007), Village Voice editor-in-chief since March 9
Birthdate: “I’m 44.”
Marital status: Married, to Fatimah Ortega
Favorite TV show: “This week? Flight of the Conchords.”
Last book read: Hitchens’ God is Not Great. “Tons of fun.”
First section read in the Sunday paper: The front page
Favorite thing about New York: “Not owning a car, and walking to work — for an Angeleno a lifelong dream.”
Guilty pleasure: Celebrity news Web sites. “What the hell, I guess I want to read about Paris and Britney as much as the next schmuck.”

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You arrived at the Village Voice during a tumultuous time in the paper’s history. What were your first few weeks on the job like?
I didn’t find tumult, so much as a group of people wanting to end the distractions and simply put out a newspaper. They made it very easy for the new guy. Those first few weeks were busy, but almost right away we were focused on the things that matter, like developing good stories.

What accomplishments are you most proud of so far at the Village Voice?
We’ve brought a newsier focus to the front of the book, and the public seems to be noticing. I was fairly shocked to see that a paper like the Voice didn’t have a metro column (to take nothing away from Nat Hentoff, who focuses more on civil rights than local politics), so I made adding one a priority. Tom Robbins has jumped into the role beautifully.

How do you define the Voice‘s mission circa 2007?
Total world domination.

A typical week in the life of the Village Voice. How does it go?
Not really different than anywhere else I’ve worked. At a staff meeting on Monday, writers pitch new story ideas so we can plan things like the Runnin’ Scared column and upcoming features. Then the writers go back to their dissipated, bohemian lives while we editors remain chained to our desks and move copy the rest of the week.

mediabistro.com: How do you define the Voice‘s mission circa 2007?
Ortega: Total world domination.

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You run the city’s best known weekly paper. Forget alt-weeklies… What’s your take on New York’s daily newspapers? If you were in the editor’s chair at the Times, News or Post, what would you do?

I enjoy all three of them, actually. (Keep in mind, I’ve lived in places like Phoenix, where the daily newspaper is absolutely wretched.) With dailies struggling to survive around the rest of the country, it’s hard not to have some respect for papers that seem to be thriving and that have created such recognizable styles. It would be easy for me to say I’d do things differently with them, but that’s pointless — they’re each massive operations with completely different sets of pressures and goals than I’m familiar with. And with so many good people losing their jobs these days, I’ve lost some of the desire to second-guess what the dailies are up to.

Of all the stories that you worked on, which is your favorite?
Well, the cliché answer is “the next one,” and there’s some truth to it. But a story I did in 1997 at the Phoenix New Times about a reclusive author and Lowell Observatory astronomer is still my favorite. Robert Burnham Jr. was something of a legend in his field who had painstakingly typewritten a 2,000-page, three-volume encyclopedia of the night sky which is still a bible to people who own telescopes. I set out to interview him, but found that he’d died in 1993 and almost no one knew it. After leaving Lowell, his life had fallen apart just as his books were becoming hugely popular (but not lucrative). He’d spent the last seven years of his life destitute, selling paintings of cats in San Diego’s Balboa Park. His ashes had been buried in a military cemetery there, his name misspelled on a plaque. I located his living sister, people he’d worked with, even his only girlfriend. The astronomy world was pretty shocked when the story broke, and to this day, I still get emails from around the country. I’m currently helping a group of people who are raising money to create a memorial to Burnham at Lowell.

How do you feel about the current state of alt-weeklies nationwide?
While the dailies are struggling, the mood at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention in Portland, Oregon, last month seemed to be cautiously optimistic. The dailies, after all, are being told by consultants to go free, increase local coverage, and write with some attitude — all things we’re already doing. But like everyone else, we’re doing what we can to make better use of the Web, and our sales folks are looking for creative solutions to some of our traditional markets drying up. (Goodbye, record stores — an alt-weekly mainstay — for example.) That’s why stories like the recent one in The Nation about our company are so silly. It may be tempting for some to keep flogging New Times/VVM for supposedly betraying the alt-weekly progressive agenda, when what’s really going on is that we’ve chosen a focus on local, investigative reporting over writing political essays and endorsing candidates for a simple reason: survival in the age of the Internet, which is already saturated with political opinion.

Do you ever miss working as a reporter as opposed to being an editor?
Sure, I miss it, particularly at a newspaper like this, where writers have so much freedom to find and develop their own stories and craft narratives. The trade-off was very obvious when I first became an editor, but at some point, you want to have more influence on the direction of the paper itself.

What was your first journalism job like?
I’d been a college instructor while doing graduate work, and journalism was a career change for me. I had moved to Phoenix and was stunned by the level of work being done by the New Times there. So I managed to get a freelance gig and eventually became a staff writer with the paper. And even though I was only beginning my career, I was encouraged to go after the most important stories I could find. It was a revelation to me that this company didn’t enforce some kind of apprenticeship or weird hierarchy — from the first day, you were urged to shake up the town with your reporting. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed with these guys for 12 years.

What’s the best part of being the editor of the Voice?
There are so many things. The city. The paper’s history. The people working here. But I guess the best thing is the sheer dedication that everyone in the building seems to share. People are here because they believe in the paper in a way I’ve never experienced.

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Neal Ungerleider is a contributing editor for FishbowlNY.

When we last asked Allison Arieff “So What Do You Do?” way back in 2003, she was editor-in-chief of a three-year-old magazine named Dwell, the little shelter publication that went on to become a hit with a growing design-crazy audience. But after citing differences with the magazine’s mission in August of last year, Arieff left her position for a role as senior content lead at multidisciplinary design firm IDEO. Leaving Dwell also opened up other opportunities for Arieff: She currently writes a TimesSelect blog and will begin writing the regular “Living Design” column for the Op-Ed section of the New York Times in September. The author of the books Prefab, Spa, and Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America talks to us about life after Dwell, what’s exciting about design today, and why the prefab industry is like organized crime.

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Name: Allison Arieff
Position: Senior content lead
Company: IDEO
Education: B.A. in History, UCLA; M.A. in Art History, UC-Davis; Ph.D coursework in American Studies, NYU
Hometown: Fort Hood, Texas
First job: Valet parking attendant
Resume: Editor-in-chief (2002-2006) and senior editor (2000-2002) at Dwell; editor, Chronicle Books; assistant editor, Oxford University Press
Birthdate: October 29, 1966
Marital status: Married, one child
Favorite TV show: “Invariably the quality drama that gets cancelled.”
Last book read: No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Most interesting media story right now: “Maybe the media itself and what’s happening to it — and of course the ’08 campaign.”
Guilty pleasure: “The Project Runway/Top Chef/Top Design genre on Bravo.”

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You’ve made a pretty unique career move: You were an editor-in-chief of a magazine covering design, and now you’re working at headline-making design firm IDEO. How does it feel to be on the other side?
It feels great. After seven years spent writing about design, I’m now able to take part in the process rather than just reporting on the finished result. And that process part is what I’ve always been most intrigued. I feel like I can get in at the ground level, so to speak, and help influence the way design (of buildings, services, environments) is thought about and executed on from the beginning. I’m working on projects related to affordable housing, sustainability, and community-building right now. These are exactly the kinds of things on which I want to be focusing my energy. It’s a luxury to have the time to research and think about this stuff — that doesn’t really happen when you have to produce 140 pages of magazine content every four or five weeks.

What’s it like working at IDEO? As cool as we think it is?
Yes, I think it probably is. There is such a fascinating mix of people with different talents and backgrounds. All the work is hugely inter- and multi-disciplinary. You could find yourself working on a project with a team consisting of an anthropologist, an architect and an MBA. That diversity of knowledge and perspective truly brings new thinking to old problems, and makes for lots of interesting conversation in the lunchroom.

You seem to have your own diversity of knowledge and perspective from having three very different degrees: a B.A. in History, an M.A. in Art History and a Ph.D in American Studies. How have these areas of study come together to inform your career?
I just kept pursuing what was interesting to me. I guess I was, naively perhaps, not thinking too hard about the practical applications. I was attracted to NYU’s American Studies program, for example, because it was completely interdisciplinary; I could take classes in film, art history, performance studies, anthropology. For a variety of reasons, I was getting frustrated with academia and I didn’t end up doing my dissertation. A year and a half into my Ph.D program I attended a panel at the College Art Association called “If Not Teaching, What?” — five incredibly interesting people who’d received their Ph.Ds in art history but were not teaching told the story of their respective career trajectories. One woman had moved to Spain, worked as an art critic, married a bullfighter, and had then gone on to become a museum director. It was an inspirational moment — I realized I could leave grad school and still be OK.

I got a job with Random House and started at the absolute bottom of the ladder there but all the interests I’d cultivated and the skills I’d acquired over the years really seemed to come together at that time. Editing just made sense — and in just about five years I moved from editorial assistant there to editor-in-chief of Dwell. Though all the paths I took seemed quite disparate at the time, it feels like everything I’ve learned along the way resurfaces just when I need it.

And you were also at Dwell from the very beginning, which started an incredibly interesting chapter not only for shelter and architecture magazines but also for design and sustainability in the U.S. What was it like? Could you feel the country start to warm up to the Dwell message?
I was part of such a super-smart and amazingly talented creative team — the chemistry just worked. We were just so excited to have this opportunity. The fact that most of us had almost zero magazine experience, I think resulted in a far more creative endeavor as no one had deeply ingrained ideas about what a magazine should be or how it should be done. We each brought our particular strengths and quirks to the table and pretty much made it all up as we went along.

In the beginning, I think architects and designers appreciated the kind of unslick-ness of Dwell, and really responded to our interest in not just showing stuff but in telling the story behind the design process. Dwell‘s growth felt (and was) gradual — first it seemed no one had ever heard of the magazine. But then, I’d get on an airplane and see someone reading a copy and feel very excited to be a part of it all. When the media became interested in the whole prefab thing, I could most definitely feel the country start to respond to Dwell and it was pretty great. And the fact that the magazine really began to expand the larger conversation about things like prefab and sustainability has been super exciting — certainly more than I could have hoped for.

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“Prefab has become like the mafia for me.”

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You’ve been writing about design for the Times, too. Has explaining design to a more mainstream audience helped you to see it in a different way than you did at Dwell?
With the Living Design column I can write about any and all aspects of design. It’s a great opportunity to show how integral design is to our daily lives. The more research I do, the more and more fascinating interconnectedness of things emerges — such as how might the introduction of agricultural parks into “shrinking cities” like Detroit help not only in urban renewal but also in fighting the obesity epidemic? Though that may not initially seem like a design issue, it involves landscape architecture, urban planning, systems design, the whole localism movement, etc. Also, because Living Design is part of the Op/Ed section, it means that people who don’t normally read about this stuff may read about it here — and that only expands the audience for good design.

You wrote a book, Prefab, which came out in 2002, way before the industry was transformed by the current boom of consumer demand. Almost five years later, what changes have you seen in the way prefab is perceived? Will there be a Prefab II?
Prefab has become like the mafia for me — I try to step out and they keep pulling me back in! But seriously, I could never in a million years have anticipated the interest this topic would generate. It’s been a pleasant surprise to say the least. Food + Wine even did a prefab issue a couple of years ago. So I think it is safe to say that the perception of prefab has changed quite dramatically.

But it hasn’t changed for everyone. The majority of prefab houses are just as cookie-cutter now as they were five, 10, 20 years ago. There is indeed a great interest in prefab; however, the transformation you mention in the industry has not really occurred, and the number of modern prefab homes actually built remains quite small. The housing industry is not the most innovative or groundbreaking — I mean really, how much have houses changed in the last 50 years? They’ve just gotten bigger!

Change can happen, but it isn’t happening as fast as anyone would like. I remain optimistic about the future of prefab though I am perhaps a bit more realistic about what is possible and how fast. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is organizing a prefab exhibit, which is very exciting. As for a Prefab II, I’d like to wait and see what emerges from the fascinating work being done with digital prefabrication and rapid prototyping.

You mention two areas of technology that are really going to change the way designers work. What designers and architects, or maybe even bigger trends, are exciting to you at the moment?
Sustainability — the interest in which I hope is not a trend but a paradigm shift. Not long ago, it still felt like people were just paying lip service to it, but now real change and innovation seems to be happening. I recently wrote an article for Travel + Leisure on green hotels (June 2007), and it was great to discover how much proactive change is taking place even by the major hotel chains. I am also particularly interested in the notion of community — to what extent can community be designed/created? — and to that end am looking at a lot of work and research on self-sustaining neighborhoods, innovative multi-family housing structures, and the like. This may not be trendy, but it is very exciting to me.

Are these two of the concepts you’ll be looking at through your work at IDEO?
We’ve just finished a project with developers of affordable housing and have a number of other housing-related projects in the pipeline. I’m also doing a lot of work/research connected to sustainability and media.

Here’s the one question that I’m sure everyone wants to ask of a design maven, former Dwell editor and prefab expert: What’s your own house like?
A few years ago I wrote my editor’s note in Dwell about how much I liked living in my Edwardian apartment. Several readers wrote in to express the betrayal they felt upon learning that I didn’t live in a modern home. I moved in 2005, but those same readers would still be disappointed because now I live in a 100-year-old house!

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[Alissa Walker is editor of mediabistro.com’s design blog UnBeige.]

Faith Salie, the host of Public Radio International’s Fair Game, definitely does not have a face for radio. The Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar and one-time Star Trek star took some time out of her hectic media day to answer our pointed questions.

Name: Faith Salie
Position: Actor, comedian, host/co-creator/writer/producer of Fair Game with Faith Salie from Public Radio International
Birthdate: April 14th, a.k.a “the day the Titanic sunk and Lincoln was shot.”
Hometown: Born in Boston; grew up in Atlanta, GA. “But I’ve been living in Santa Monica, CA for the last 11 years before working in NYC. (You know the adage: ‘Home is where most of your clothes are.’)”
Education: Harvard University, B.A. in History and Literature of Modern France and England (1789 to the 20th century); and Oxford University, M.Phil. in Modern English Literature (1880 to 1960). “I include the time periods so you don’t ask me any tough questions about before the French Revolution or after my parents hooked up.”
Marital status: “My stars, that’s more personal than my birthdate!”
Last book(s) read: “Oh god. I have to read so many every week. I just finished Rickle’s Book by, um, Don Rickles, bad-boy chef Marco Pierre White’s The Devil in the Kitchen (apparently ‘bollocking’ your underlings makes food taste better), and am starting Unburnable by Marie-Elena Johns (she appears gorgeous on the back cover, so the book must be good) and am loving the galleys of Jeffrey Frank’s latest, Trudy Hopedale (I like to read galleys with a red pen, as if I can be helpful).”
First section of the Sunday Times: “Which Times? I object to the assumption that everyone reads the New York Times! But okay, it’s Style. I love going to the wedding column to see if any same-sex couples made it in.”
Favorite TV show: “I almost never get to watch TV anymore (that is not at all a point of pride; it is a sad, sad testament to how busy I am). But I can’t wait for Weeds season 3 to start. Yikes, I need to get Showtime in my NY apartment.”
Last 5 songs listened to on your iPod? “Sadly, I can’t remember the last time I listened to my iPod. Probably girly tunes, like ‘The Long Way Around’ and ‘Easy Silence’ by the Dixie Chicks, ‘Perfect Girl’ by Sarah McLachlan are a few. But the last music I listened to at home was a sneak-peek recording of the cast album for Legally Blonde, created by my brilliant friends Nell Benjamin and Larry O’Keefe and Pink Martini’s latest, ‘Hey Eugene!'”
Most interesting media story right now: “I don’t know if ‘interesting’ is the right word, but to me, the so-called ‘honor killing’ story is the most disturbing and worthy of much greater coverage. It recently happened in London and continues to happen all over the world. Women’s rights issues need much more attention. It’s hard for us to cover on Fair Game because there just ain’t nothing remotely risible about it.”
Guilty Pleasure: “On Fridays and Saturdays I read Star and Us Weekly at the gym. But I really don’t feel guilty about that. I need to know how the stars beat cellulite. Let’s see … I put ice in my white wine. I always have to apologize: ‘I swear, I heard a sommelier on public radio say that this is appropriate!’ (I did.)”

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You are a Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate. Let me try to phrase this nicely — what the hell are you doing on public radio??!?!
Um, I think that’s a compliment, so … thanks. What’s a Rhodes scholar supposed to do? I don’t have sensible hair, so I can’t get elected (yet); I’m not interested in being a lawyer or running a hedge fund. Actually, Fair Game has offered me the best opportunity to use my brain, my comedy, and my curiosity all at once. When I think about it, going to Harvard, winning the Rhodes, and co-creating and hosting this public radio show are commonly linked. That is, I didn’t specifically plan for any of those blessings, but when I look back at how they evolved, they seem somewhat inevitable. As far as public radio goes, all my education, acting, producing, writing, and improvisational experience logically lead me here now.

What was your first experience doing standup like?
Nerve-wracking and intoxicating. I was amazed at the laughter — it was like a tennis game: I’d lob them a joke and they’d laugh it back. I didn’t always have receptions like that, but that first time got me hooked for a while. I did a lot of personal material, including a game I invented for my family called “Gay Brother/Straight Brother” in which the audience has to guess which of my brothers I am describing. My gay brother told me it made his scalp sweat when he watched.

Are there any female comedians out there you emulate? Male comedians?
Emulate, no. Admire, yes. As far as funny women, I bow to Madeline Kahn. I really respect how savvy and smart Sarah Silverman is. I love Kathy Griffin’s balls and Megan Mullally’s acting chops. I love how comfortable David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jon Stewart are in their skins — that’s why they’re the best at what they do.

Based on the photo gallery on your Web site, you definitely do not “have a face for radio.” Why radio?
That’s for sure a compliment, so thanks again. I endeavor never to have an ass for radio either. Radio is currently what’s most immediate, challenging, and fulfilling for me right now. I’m also still doing television, as an actor, writer, and producer, so the punim is out there.

How does radio compare with your television and film work?
What I really miss on the radio is doing physical comedy. That’s always been a trademark of mine, and for some reason, it doesn’t work on the radio. As far as tone, I’ve learned to pull back and trust that the microphone picks up the littlest thing. At first that was counterintuitive: I thought that since the audience couldn’t see me, I might have to express more. Not so. There’s power in having the smallest inflection mean a great deal.

Bottom line: radio is harder. Doing an hour-long show every single weekday that has 3 guests and has to be smart, bleeding-edge topical and funny — it’s insanely taxing. I give massive props to my team and executive producer, Kerrie Hillman. The only aspects of doing radio that are easier are that I don’t have to memorize any lines, and I don’t have to factor in time for hair and makeup — though I always apply lip gloss before we begin the show, as a courtesy to my guests.

What was the first time (on the air) like for you?
My heart was racing when I heard the opening music for the show and the whole thing was a bit like an out-of-body experience. I didn’t know some of the things I said until I listened later. It takes practice to be able to read a script like you’re not reading, to conduct an interview with someone while a producer is talking to you in your ear, and to improvise, digress, and be funny — all with a strict clock on you. But it was an extremely cool thing to sit at that mic and say, “From Public Radio International, this is Fair Game. I’m Faith Salie.” I still get a kick out of hearing it when the show airs. Mostly because now people will pronounce my name correctly.

“Q: Have you ever edited your own Wiki?
A: No, gross!”

Do you feel like you can get away with more on radio?
Ha! Are you kidding me?! On Significant Others I did a scene using an electric toothbrush as a “marital aid” during prime time. Or I shave my legs in the sink to get sexy for my gynecologist. Television is so much more fearless than radio, and therefore, I think, funnier. On the radio, a passing reference to bulimia (um, who doesn’t love an eating disorder joke?), race, or anything resembling innuendo pretty much gets left on the radio equivalent of the cutting room floor.

Is there anything that isn’t “fair game”? Is there anywhere you won’t go? Any taboos?
There is nowhere I won’t go, in theory. However, I’m also not interested in being a contentious, “gotcha”-style host. Nor do I want to be snarky in my humor. I take my role as a host quite to heart. If I could send every guest a handwritten thank you note and a Coca-Cola cake, I would. So with that in mind, even as I’m asking the tougher questions or calling people out on their preposterousness, I like to do it with playfulness.

What was doing Star Trek like?
Out of this world. First of all, I was “genetically enhanced,” which meant I didn’t have to spend hours getting prosthetics applied to my face. Secondly, I was part of a quartet of genetically enhanced mutants and our role was to bring some comedy into the show, which was a delight. When the producers brought us back for a second season, I got to break out of the quartet — in song. I had an aria with the camera circling me, Sound of Music-style. Dream come true! And then, as if to gild the Star Trek lily, I got to be beamed up. After the show aired, it was an astonishing thing to become part of this cult community. Trekkers know my character, Serena Douglas, and I’m on a trading card. Between doing Star Trek and Sex & the City, I feel like I got to be a part of two cultural phenomena.

Do you listen to NPR? Or is NPR now a mortal enemy?
The only deep brand loyalty I have is to Coca-Cola. And I’m new to public radio, so the NPR/PRI thing doesn’t really mean that much to me. Obviously, I’m grateful to PRI for getting behind Fair Game, but I learn from listening to all kinds of shows — on the rare occasions I get a chance to listen to the radio at all. And when I do, I don’t just listen to public radio … I love to hear what Dr. Laura and Sean Hannity have to say about what kind of woman and American I am, respectively. I really miss my drive time in L.A. As my carbon footprint has gotten smaller, so has my daily exposure to hilariously infuriating conservative thought.

How would you say you’ve gotten to where you are?
Platitude alert … Luck and hard work. The luck part happened early on … like way early on, because I was lucky enough to be born to the best mother and father in the history of history. Really, everything good in my life can be traced back to their support, encouragement, generosity, and, yes, faith. Then I worked my ass off. When I was young, I followed all the rules. Home before curfew, no drinking, no drugs, no sex, went to church, never cursed, never pulled an all-nighter. I was rewarded academically and professionally for that kind of behavior. And then I think around turning 30, it was, well, not so much breaking the rules, but departing from them. Not trying to fit into a mold but embracing all of who I am: feminist and girly, Yankee and Southern, raised Catholic but now a Very Bad Catholic, educated yet salty-mouthed, pop-cultured obsessed as well as politically and scientifically aware, and an actor who also writes and produces.

Have you ever edited your own Wiki?
No, gross! I don’t know who put that up there. If I had, it would be infinitely more interesting. It would detail my entire oeuvre — including my winning the title of Miss Aphrodite in my high school pageant — display a fetching photo, and include lots of fascinating trivia, like the fact that I can recite the titles of all of Shakespeare’s plays in under 30 seconds.

According to your Wiki entry, your brother worked for the Howard Dean campaign. What are your thoughts on the 2008 race?
Oooh, I like this question because it allows me to brag about my brother David Salie, who was a real pioneer in grassroots fundraising. He created a model for taking online political communities and bringing them together in the flesh — and for making small contributions aggregate into something significant. I think the Dean campaign changed the face of American politics, and my big brother was a part of that. (My other big brother Doug is extraordinary too.) There’s this general eyerolling about how early this presidential campaign has started, a good year and a half before the election. I love it! I can’t get enough of it. It’s like a really important reality show, the kind you feel smart for watching — we get to watch these 18 or so people try to prove to America that they’ve got talent, that they think they can dance, that we should give them the rose. All we’re missing is seeing them in bathing suits. I think Wolf Blitzer should get them drunk in a hot tub for a debate. Actually I’d rather see that Rob Marciano moderating in a hot tub. He’s the CNN weather guy, but he must know a bit about politics, right?

I am excited about watching all the candidates on both sides of the aisle. They’re demonstrating so much energy, and I think it’s infectious and hopeful for the country. It’s also great for comedy. I just interviewed Senator Mike Gravel on the show. This is a 77 year-old man polling at 1 percent, and he is determined to win. That’s so American — I love that!

What do you think about the potential of an XM-Sirius merger?
I don’t think about it. Sounds sexy though.

What’s your media day like? (Be specific as possible — wake up, read The New York Times, watch the Today show, etc.)
I wake up at 7:00 a.m. to the siren call of Morning Edition and keep it on as I check news online. Then I head to the gym for an hour where I am on the treadmill or the elliptical, reading either a book or a series of articles for that day’s guests while I am listening on my headset to CNN and a few of the network morning shows (multiple TV sets in the gym). I perform my ablutions and maquillage while listening to BBC World Service (Robin Lustig’s voice makes me giggle). As much as the height of my heels allows, I dash to the subway and continue reading on my commute — the day’s paper or an article or book by a guest.

Then while I’m writing, editing, and preparing that day’s show, I am checking the news all day long on the Internet and on our closed caption TV. Although sometimes we like to change the channel to Jerry Springer and read the closed captioning: “What do you mean you work at a midget bar? [Laughter. Angry women smackdown.]” After the show tapes, I place a quick call to my dad on the way to the subway — for an update on extremely local family news. Then I read while commuting to whatever I have to do that night — go to a play or a screening or an event for Fair Game. If I get home with any energy left, I might turn on The Daily Show or Colbert to see if/how they covered the same stories we did.

That’s my media diet. I’m sure it could use more fiber.

What’s your dream (onscreen) role?
Well, I began my career (at 13) as an actor and remain an actor at heart. So my dream role is to be in a movie with Meryl Streep, if she’d have me.

Finally, The Sopranos ending — love it or hate it?
Do all “Media People” watch The Sopranos after they read the The Times? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of The Sopranos –maybe just parts of one or two. I did follow the furor over Mr. Chase’s cut to black; and I think it was brilliant — offering mystery to some and closure to others. It’s the premium cable version of the ending of The Turn of the Screw. And please, what’s more genius than the most critically-acclaimed television show in history ending with onion rings and a Journey song?

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[Dylan Stableford is mediabistro.com’s managing editor, news. He can be reached at dylan AT mediabistro DOT com.]

David Rensin’s twelfth book, All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki “Da Cat” Dora (HarperEnt 2008), takes his readers on a four-year journey in search of the life of the late, mid-century surfer king of Malibu.

Along with show business legend Bernie Brillstein, Rensin has also co-written It’s All Lies and That’s the Truth: and 49 More Lessons from Fifty Years of Trying to Make a Living in Hollywood (Gotham 2004) and Where Did I Go Right?: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead (LittleBrown, 1999), Brillstein’s best-selling memoir. Rensin is the creator and co-author of the cult hit The Bob Book, a hilarious and groundbreaking sociology of men named “Bob.”

Rensin is also a long-time contributing editor for Playboy, for which he’s done more than a hundred interviews with celebrities including Jerry Seinfeld, Marty Scorsese, Chris Rock, Sean Penn, and Julia Roberts. He has written extensively for Rolling Stone, Esquire, TV Guide, and US, among others

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Name: David Rensin
Position: Author
Company: Self-employed
Hometown: Born in Manhattan; Los Angeles since 1964.
Education: BA in Political Science
Family: “Fortunately — a wonderful wife and 17 and a half-year-old son.”
Favorite TV show: Friday Night Lights
Last book read: Wanderer by Sterling Hayden.
Guilty pleasure: “Stealing chocolate from my mother’s nightstand.”

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What is your average media day like?
Read the LA Times over breakfast. Check the Web. Think about commenting in various comment sections; decide not to. Read the New Yorker, Business Week, the Economist at random. Watch the midday news. Check the Web. Watch Brian Williams while thinking about Katie Couric’s suddenly bad makeup. Listen to KPCC or KCRW in the car.

How do you carve out time to write?
Not a problem. I actually start early, and work until I get interrupted or fall asleep. When there’s work, I’m relentless; when there’s none, I noodle. I don’t get writer’s block.

Describe your writing “area” — any rules for yourself? Schedule you try to adhere to? Special pens, paper, pets? Strange routines we would delight in hearing?
I have a nice office at home. I can’t write with a pencil anymore and still hope to read what I scribbled. The dog wanders in at odd times to assure me that someone still loves me. I get a great view out the sliding glass door to the green and forested back yard. My one writing extravagance is a 21″ pivoting monitor, which I put in the vertical position so I can see more on the screen. I keep a notebook of everything I talk about on the phone that I need to remember, as well as occasional revelations about the meaning of life. Of course, written in pencil, I can’t decipher anything later.

How did you decide what to write about?
Sometimes it’s just so obvious; a passion, an interview that screams to be done; someone who needs a book collaborator and has a handful of cash — okay, not cash, but a topic or a life that really interests me, that I think will open new areas of experience and knowledge. I also like to constantly do different types of books so I don’t repeat myself. After an opening run of collaborations with big time comedians, I did a Hollywood mogul, a war hero, a musician, then my own book, The Mailroom (Ballantine 2004) — an oral history covering 65 years of what it’s like to start at the bottom in a talent agency mailroom, dreaming of making it to the top. And my upcoming book, All for a Few Perfect Waves, is about the once and forever charming, charismatic, enigmatic late surfer king of Malibu, Miki “da Cat” Dora. It’s an oral bio that took four years.

How much research did you do for All for a Few Perfect Waves?
More than I thought I could do. I surfed in the mid ’60s and early ’70s, so I knew the subject. Still, I read all the surfing books I could get my hands on, watched DVDs, read everything about Dora, including piles of his letters and faxes, his articles, his travelogues. I then interviewed over 300 people; traveled to his beach haunts in southern France and on the African cape, and called everywhere else in the world where people ride waves. I drove the length of California, Googled incessantly, and tried to make sense of it all. Thank goodness I didn’t have to transcribe all the 300+ tapes! (Oops! There goes the advance.)

What about collaboration — hardest thing about co-writing?
The hardest thing is trying to convince people/readers/reviewers/pundits without protesting too much that it’s not ghostwriting but co-writing. Collaborating. I don’t invent their stories and go off and write on my own. The subject doesn’t get to phone it in. It’s hard work, we’re in it together, and there’s lots of blood and guts on the floor (in a positive sense) to sift through. But that’s what I get for insisting that the book’s subject tell me everything, so that I can pick what I think works — all of this subject to argument and their final judgement, of course. The best thing about collaboration is the chance to go deep into a subject, to find nuances you don’t have room for in a magazine profile. Also, the “subject” always discovers that they don’t have to be so afraid of talking about what they were initially concerned about, that once the words are in their mouth instead of rattling around in their heads, it isn’t so terrible and they see how it all fits together. The trick is to walk a fine line between obvious glad-handing and obvious trash talk. The reader has to believe you’re being honest, so self-effacement is good.

And you’ve worked with show biz folk — harder than we might think? Or easier?
No problem, once you create the proper atmosphere and earn trust. With older “show folk,” it’s like sitting at the Passover table listening to a wonderful story. With comedians, I remember that they told all the jokes, even if they didn’t. Garry Shandling used to compliment something I’d written and ask who’d thought of it: him or I. He did, of course. And even if he didn’t, he still did — and he always made my humor much better. The big thing to remember: listen, listen, listen. Your subjects always ask follow-up questions based on what they said, not your next written question.

Ever tempted by fiction?
Always. Every time I think there’s nothing else out there to write about that is worth a damn (which means that the longer I’m at this, the less it’s about doing anything to get established and more about doing something that might matter to the world or me), I think maybe it’s time for fiction. Maybe it’s a last resort because I have to keep writing. I have some stories. If I live long enough to draw down on my retirement savings, I’ll give it a shot.

What are you working on now or next?
Between 2000 and 2003 I did three books overlapping each other. Then I spent four years on All for a Few Perfect Waves. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of writing “in the seventh year he rested.” Now I’m hard at work on my next book. It answers the question: What really happened to the high school student voted most likely to succeed? And more. To start, I’m looking for people who graduated in 1967. I’m also putting together a chapbook of stories about the transformative effects of doing good works of any sort. How did the decision to leap from positive thinking to positive doing change your life? I’ve also been working with a well-known lawyer on a book about his analysis of the shortcomings of the justice system. We’ll get it done if he ever gets out of the courtroom. I’m waiting to see if a potential celebrity collaboration is in the offing — someone I really want to work with. And I’m always looking for young writers who want to graduate into books and might want to take a crack at some of my long-lingering ideas and help make them a reality — for a piece of the action.

Who’s the biggest influence on your work?
Oral histories: Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s Edie. Studs Terkel. Whoever I read last who has a real voice. My brother-in-words Bill Zehme. My wife.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do?
Iron shirts, vacuum rugs, pull weeds, eat, read — all things that lead to immediate gratification. But that still leaves many hours. So I guess I’d write. To be perfectly frank, I’m a writer by accident, a guy who wanted to meet women and go to rock shows for free in college, way back in the late ’60s. One thing leads to another. About seven years into it, I realized I better take it seriously. That paid off in pieces for many major mags, a contributing editorship to Playboy since 1981, hundreds of interviews, and twelve books. Or, as I like to put on my high school reunion questionaire when it asks, “What is your greatest achievement?” “Never had a job.”

As a follow-up, what would you love to do?
Keep traveling the world with my wife. Pass along my knowledge and experience. And I’d like to retire — so I can write.

Work’s over, kitchen’s clean, the kid is occupied — how do you kick back? Music, book, DVD — what’s your relaxation preference? (And please don’t tell me you go for a nice five-mile run.)
I do a nice five miles — maybe more — on my rear-end satiating my addiction to mindless television viewing, while also checking emails, snacking on fresh fruit, and playing games on my Treo. No wonder I sometimes feel I’m out of the loop and need to get out and meet more LA writers! Then my wife and I wander off, and leave the rest to your imagination.

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[Kate Coe is the co-editor of FishbowlLA.]

Known for her saucy language and pioneering role in turning the average diner into a well-versed foodie, Gael Greene has been covering all things edible since she became New York magazine’s “Insatiable Critic” in 1968. She wrote the column through 2000, before she relinquished the weekly deadline to have more time to travel. Her
current commitment to New York has her writing a weekly column in the
food pages, where she offers up-to-minute critiques. Along the way, she also wrote two bestselling erotic novels, Blue Skies, No Candy and Dr. Love, as well as the nonfiction guide Delicious Sex. Her latest book, Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess (Warner Books), chronicles her own culinary, erotic (she bedded Elvis, Clint Eastwood, and Burt Reynolds, to name a few), and travel exploits, was recently released in paperback. Greene also just launched Insatiablecritic.com, which promises to feature behind-the-scenes info, “golden oldie” columns and articles and dining secrets from Greene and her peers.

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Name: Gael Greene
Position: Contributing editor, New York magazine
Education: University of Michigan, BA in Literature, Science and the Arts
Hometown: Detroit
First job: “In college, I worked for my father in his dress shop. I made the tags for the dresses.”
Birthdate: “I can’t remember; I guess it wasn’t memorable.”
Marital status: Single
Favorite TV show: Weeds
Last book read: “Marco Pierre White’s memoir The Devil in the Kitchen. He’s one of the original bad boy chefs of England.”
Most interesting media story right now: “The eminent global crisis is fascinating and terrifying.”
Guilty pleasure: “I suppose juje fruits.”
First section you read in the Sunday Times: “I’m so shallow — the Style section.”

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How did you get started doing food writing? Had you done any previous journalism?

I was a newspaper reporter. I worked for UPI in Detroit and came to The New York Post for a one-week tryout.

Did you apply for that?

I came to New York every three-day weekend, and I only took [the UPI job] because I couldn’t get a job in New York. I was stunned to discover nobody wanted me since I had been the stringer in Ann Arbor, Mich. for Time and Life and the Detroit Free Press. I thought it would be a cinch. Finally, somebody offered me a one-week tryout at the Post — a very different Post from today’s. I got a second week, then they gave me a month, then they wanted to give me three months, and I said, “Hire me, or I’m going to Italy, where the men are so wonderful,” so they said, “Okay, you’re hired.”

What were you doing at the Post?

I was a general assignment reporter. I did a lot of features, but I also covered murders. I actually covered Elvis when he passed through in a train on the way to Germany.

How long were you at the Post?

I was there three years.

What did you do after that?

I freelanced. I started a novel that was totally impenetrable — not even I could understand it. I freelanced for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, and McCall’s.

How did you transition from freelancing to becoming a food critic?

One day I got a phone call from [original New York editor] Clay Felker asking if I’d be the restaurant critic for New York magazine. I was shocked; I don’t know where he got the idea except that I had written one piece on the re-opening of La Cote Basque.

I said to Clay, “I can’t afford to work for you, I hear you’re not paying very much until the magazine starts making money, and I’m making so much money writing.” He said, “People are begging for this job so they can charge all their meals to us.” Before he could change his mind, I said yes.

Did you get to pick the places you covered?

Mostly I decided what I wanted to cover. Once in a while, Clay would come up with an idea such as an article on how to beat the menu rap. He’d say, “Why don’t you go to the most expensive, great restaurants and see what happens when you order a soup for lunch, or a salad?”

Did you continue to freelance?

Yes, I did.

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“It seemed like everyone [who] read New York magazine turned first to the food page and loved my writing. It was very heady stuff.”

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Was there a point when that became your primary job?

At some point my then-husband [Don Forst] said, “Why don’t you stop doing all this freelance stuff. Write for New York and write your book.” I’d been talking about writing a novel since I was 18. I started working on Blue Skies, No Candy and pretty much stopped doing a lot of the freelancing, and just worked for New York magazine.

Is food writing your true love?

I always felt I was just earning pocket money until the point when I would write my bestselling novels [laughs]. I was so sure that if I ever sat down and wrote a novel, that would be it. But there’s no question that there’s so much instant gratification in writing the restaurant reviews — especially in the beginning when most people were just learning about food and beginning to fall in love with eating out, and the whole restaurant revolution was in its infancy. There I was in the major spotlight of New York magazine. The timing was great; every day brought some incredibly new discovery, and people really looked to me to tell them where to go.

Today, everyone’s a critic and so much has happened, people take it for granted. I remember when the first great bread came to New York; today, we have 100 great breads. Back then there was just cotton fluff. There was one sorbet: cassis sorbet at Lutece. People think sorbet came with the pilgrims, but it didn’t. That was intensely gratifying. It seemed like everyone [who] read New York magazine turned first to the food page and loved my writing. It was very heady stuff.

Do you still feel that excitement about it?

I do always expect something wonderful to happen every time I sit down at a table. I’m always hoping and expecting to discover some really talented new chef or have a dish that is just beyond anything I’ve ever tasted like it before. I think everyone expects at some point that a restaurant critic is going to become jaded because it’s [eating out] every single night, but in fact, I can’t say I’m jaded. I did get tired of that Monday morning deadline and reaching a point where editors were telling me what to do. There were some editors along the way who were extraordinarily brilliant and made everything smarter and funnier, but one or two of them were killers, and that was horrible too. One, especially, was so mean — that’s when I decided I should stop being the weekly critic.

Interestingly, most of my travel pieces are focused on food, partly because that’s what people expect of me.

Do you have a weekly schedule? How often do you eat out?

I go out to eat, as my guy says, “eight nights a week.” We eat out six to seven nights a week, and if I have some business to do, there might be a lunch or two. I don’t need to do that for the columns that I’m writing, but I love it and it’s a chance to see my friends, to get out after a day at the computer, and just be social. There are lot of New Yorkers going out at least five to six nights a week just to be social, to see their friends, or for romantic reasons. Not a lot of people I know are still cooking.

I can go to dinners at people’s homes now. I have to let people know I’m available; all those years, I turned down all these dinner invitations because I had to work.

Do you expense all your meals?

Not anymore. Some of them are New York magazine meals, but mostly they’re not.

Where do you look to stay current about food and restaurants?

Besides the press releases — which often talk about restaurants that aren’t opening for months — columns in New York magazine and The New York Times, which cover what’s happening and what’s about to happen. I have a couple of folders in my computer that are nothing but [lists of] restaurants that are opening or have opened to remind me. Then when I want to go someplace in a particular neighborhood, I can see what’s new and exciting.

I have other lists, too. We go to a lot of places that are affordable for people who are going out seven nights a week, who are paying for their own meals. I have a list in my head, for my Web site. There’ll be lists of my favorite places in the neighborhood; favorites when you’re pinching pennies; favorite places worth a major splurge where I don’t mind paying $150 for dinner for two. Maybe I will ask some of the chefs or restaurateurs I know, “Where do you eat out when you’re just the two of you [out] in your neighborhood? Somewhere reliable when you’re not catching up with what’s new and hot?”

Do you have any particular favorite columns?

The column on my visit to the Troisgras, “The Gourmaniacal Detour.” The nice thing about New York magazine is they let me make up words like that. I think that is so hilarious and wonderful, and it really helped my memory to have all those
old articles in my files and all the old magazines on the shelf. It helped me remember specific meals that I ate, and it brought back the thrill of discovery. It reminded me about times that we cried because it was so beautiful that we could hardly stand it. That’s one of the articles that I love.

How did you decide the time was right to write a memoir?

I’d thought about it for a while, and in fact it was suggested by Michael Korda: “Why don’t you tell the story of the revolution in dining and tie it into your own story?” Which is what I did: What happened in the four decades when America was falling in love with restaurants. I love the title: Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess. The actual writing took four years and a year of the editing process — going back and forth, cutting, changing, adding and copy-editing, un-copy-editing the copy editor who didn’t quite understand some of my style.

How was that process different from the other writing you’ve done?

I found that writing the memoir was the least painful writing that I have ever done, and I think part of that was remembering in some cases terrible sadness, and in other cases, remembering incredible love and lovemaking. So for a while, I was just wallowing in some mostly wonderful memories, and it seemed to flow onto the page in a way that the daily stuff doesn’t. The daily stuff really has to be shaped, especially now that it’s short. When you’re writing 1,200 words on one restaurant, it’s easier than when you’re writing 246 [words].

You said earlier that now everyone’s a critic…

It’s amazing. That was Zagat’s brilliance — to figure out that people would like to be a critic and were ready to be critics. And people do eat out a lot now and they’ve been exposed in travel and in the sophistication of restaurants that are available… Everybody has an opinion.

Do you think that’s a good thing?

It’s not a bad thing. Of course, some people have no taste, but they have a lot of opinions. And certainly in some of the blogs, people don’t have a lot of knowledge, but they maybe have good taste and an opinion.

One of the things that’s not too good — and I’m guilty of being a really naughty critic along with the rest of them — is the big rush to be first. It doesn’t give restaurants a chance to find out what they’re doing. Craig Claiborne, the great critic at The New York Times, had a rule: He’d never go to a restaurant [until after it had been open] three to six weeks, and he would taste their food a minimum of three to four times before he’d finally write the piece. I was always first because he took his time.

As a weekly critic for 30 years, I made it a policy never to go into a restaurant until it had been open three weeks. Now for my column, “Insatiable Critic,” I may go very early to do a “First Tasting,” or I may even attend a “Friends and Family” tasting to report on what a new spot will be like when it opens. The final judgment comes from New York magazine’s critic, Adam Platt, although with my new journal “Bite” on InsatiableCritic.com, I will have a few last words myself again.

If someone wanted to become a food critic, what advice would you give them?

I would say if you’ve got a restaurant dining column in your high school or college paper, that’d be a great way to start. And also cooking: I think it’s important to cook. I was definitely a foodie for many, many years before I became a restaurant critic. I took cooking classes, and my friends and I who were early foodies were competitive cooks. I would read a lot of what’s been written, and some of the old collections of the earlier critics, so you have some sense of history. Probably much of it is online now. One of the most important things, certainly for New York magazine, is writing. I think they spent two and a half or three years looking for someone to take my place after I said I wanted to stop being the weekly critic. They read dozens of columns and stories submitted by people who were dying for the job, and they chose Adam Platt, who was a writer who really loved food and had written enough food and travel pieces.

Eat, cook, read, travel. If there are too many things you don’t like, I can’t imagine that you could really be a restaurant critic. There was one New York Times critic who didn’t eat dessert, and he’d say, “and my wife thought dessert was wonderful.”

What do you read to stay current?

I couldn’t miss the Times and I’ve started reading the blogs. I thought I didn’t have time, but I wanted to see what everyone was doing on their Web sites. I read Gourmet and Food and Wine and Bon Appétit. I read Food Arts, a magazine for professionals basically aimed at chefs and restaurateurs. It’s full of inside industry things that are good to know. I read nation’s Restaurant News, not for reviews but for trends and business stories. I read the dining section of The New York Times. It’s fabulous, it’s like a magazine every week. I read the business section of The New York Times because I’m always looking for who’s doing well and might become a donor to Citymeals-on-Wheels. I used to just throw it away with the sports section.

How did your novel Blue Skies, No Candy come about?

A man that I was mad about challenged me to write the novel. He said, “You’re 40 years old, you can’t be a childhood wonder anymore, so if you’re not gonna write it, why don’t you stop talking about it?” And so I thought, “Oh my God, he’s right.” I took some time off and started working on the novel. I went to The MacDowell Colony, wrote the first hundred pages and sold it to William Morrow. I should’ve just taken a leave of absence and written the book, but I was having too much fun, going dancing every night after dinner and having the gratification of being in the middle of so much happening in the food world. I took summers off and finished the novel mostly in the Hamptons in different little houses that I rented.

How did the novel-writing compare to what you expected?

First of all, I was very lucky. I had a contract with William Morrow to do a biography and was way behind, and then I didn’t like the guy I was writing about. It wasn’t going anywhere, so I asked if they’d take the novel instead. They read the first hundred pages and changed the contract. A lot of people at that time were curious about what kind of a novel Gael Greene, that restaurant critic, would write. It was pretty shocking to them that it was very erotic, very graphic. I thought it was erotic, they thought it was over-the-top sexy; some people thought it was obscene. I was really shocked. I thought it was just wonderfully revealing, and if it would let you know what a woman felt sexually in bed, a lot of women would be excited to read it. The very negative reviews very quickly got everybody rushing to the stores to buy it. It was on the bestseller lists.

It took me four years to do the first novel and five years to do the second [Dr. Love], which was briefly a bestseller in hardcover, and then also a bestseller in paperback. I got a lot of money for it based on the success of Blue Skies, so I was pretty spoiled. Then I immediately started on the third novel, which I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, and nobody liked it, so that was a shock.

Do you have a favorite out of the various kinds of writing you’ve done?

I’m proud of Blue Skies, No Candy. It’s not as well-written as Dr. Love, but it’s more compelling. I read it myself and I enjoy it as if I hadn’t written it. Sometimes I wonder, “Did I write that?” Once in a while, I think the reason it was so hard for me to write the column was me thinking, “How I am I going to be as good as I was last week or last year?”

Probably the best thing I’ve done is Citymeals-on-Wheels, which does take advantage of my being a writer. It began from feeling that I couldn’t live the way I live and spend so much time and money eating when people on my block might not have anything to eat on the weekends. At that time [1981], it was clear that the government funds were not adequate to bring weekend or holiday meals to the homebound elderly. I called James Beard, he called a few friends, and we started raising money. It just felt wonderful to be able to do something like that, and what our money bought was a Christmas meal for several thousand people who would not have one otherwise. It’s been 25 years now, we’ve raised a couple hundred million dollars, and Citymeals delivered its 32nd millionth meal last Christmas Day. That’s really a very worthwhile thing.

Maybe I changed the way people talk about food or write about food. People never used to say, “Oh I can’t believe what I have in my mouth,” when they’re sitting at a sushi bar and they taste some extraordinary texture or contrast of texture. We didn’t talk like that in the 70’s, we didn’t think like that in the early 70’s. It wasn’t considered proper to carry on about food in many homes, so I think that the sensuality of food was really something that I was among the first to talk about; James Beard expressed it, as well, in his columns. But maybe I used the words of the bedroom more. People said I confused sex and food, but in fact, I have never confused sex and food. I like keeping them separate; they’re just two great pleasures.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a writer, editor and blogger.

[NOTE: This interview contains excerpts, and has been edited for clarity.]

No matter where your media interests lie, it’s probably safe to assume that at one time or another, Merrill Brown has had your dream job. Reporter at a big-name paper? Check. (He covered
finance for the Washington Post.) Magazine editor-in-chief? Of course.
(He was nominated for a National Magazine Award when helming Channels.)
TV executive? You bet. (He was one of the original founders of CourtTV.)
Publishing strategist? Sure thing. (He was a consulting editor at both
Money and Time, as well as several other media companies, and now
runs his own consulting firm.) New media visionary? Been there, doing that. (He
was the founding editor of MSNBC.com, the launch director for DesktopVideo,
and is the chairman of Now Public, a Vancouver-based Web company that could
change the face of news reporting. “It wants to be the premium acquirer and
distributor of citizen journalism around the world,” he says).

So is there a method to Brown’s resumé madness? “My career switches are more
based on exciting opportunities that were presented than on some clearly well-developed plan,” he says.

Brown’s also looking toward journalism’s future by helping to train
tomorrow’s reporting superstars. He’s editorial director of News21, a news
initiative sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation. In
that role he ensures that student journalists from five journalism programs —
Columbia, Northwestern, Berkeley, USC, and Harvard — have the tools they need
to produce investigative content on issues relevant to American democracy in
principle and application.

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Position: National editorial director of News21; Chairman of
NowPublic.com; founder and principal of his own consulting business, MMB Media
LLC
Education: BA in political science from Washington University, St.
Louis, 1974
Hometown: Born in Philadelphia, grew up in Silver Spring
Maryland
First full time job: Newspaper reporter at the Winston Salem
NC Sentinel
Resume: Senior vice president of RealNetworks; founding
editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com; SVP of Court TV
Marital status:
Married
What’s your favorite TV show: Curb Your
Enthusiasm
Last book read: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by
Frank Rich
Most interesting media story right now: The accelerating
decline of the American newspaper
Guilty pleasure: New York
restaurants
First section you read in your Sunday paper: “The reality
of reading the Sunday paper is that it begins on Saturday with the inserts, so I
guess Arts and Leisure.”

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You’ve moved back and forth between reporting and publishing — you were a
finance reporter for the Washington Post, then the director of business
development for the Washington Post Co., and then went on to being the
editor-in-chief of Channels. Why and how did you make the switch back to
editorial?
I’ve gone back and forth as interesting opportunities
presented themselves, because I’m passionate about both media products and the
business components that make them successful. The other part of it is I
consciously decided that I wanted to leave the business of daily reporting
because I wanted to be more of a participant in making things happen than acting
as just an observer. I wanted to be one of the people pushing the boulder up the
cliff and solving hard problems, rather than observing other people doing so and
reporting on it in journalism.

You helped create Court TV.
How did that network come about, and what was your role in creating
it?
In the late 80s, I was quite exited about the opportunity to develop
new things in cable TV because the industry was booming. I wanted to be part of
the early stages of an exciting cable opportunity. I got to know, socially, the
guy whose idea it was, Steve Brill. He called me with the idea and said, “What
you do think?” It sounded like a great idea, and I went off to do it. I had
covered antitrust litigation as a business reporter, and I was comfortable in a
courtroom, even if I didn’t have any real legal training.

You seem to be involved in almost all aspects of media — from Web sites
to magazines to newspapers to television. Which medium is doing the best job
evolving?
That’s pretty easy. The Internet was a blank screen in the mid-90s, now it’s evolved in a short period of time to a very specialized delivery
mechanism for news, and it’s the best delivery platform for news that’s ever
been invented.

But has it found a way to make money?
The New York Times
continues to report rising and significant amounts of revenue on their digital
operations. The MSNBC and CNN sites are significantly profitable; evaluating the
profitability of a lot of newspaper Web sites is hard. When you see the revenue
of the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Boston Globe‘s site, you see
their revenue number and the cost of operations of the Web site, but you don’t
see the payroll that involves hundreds of journalists who write the
content. But the biggest standalone kind of news sites are showing good revenue
growth and margin. Internet news is making significant amounts of money in many
places.

Do you think your career path is an anomaly, or do you think future media
players are going to have to do it all — whether it’s editorial, programming or
business development?
I don’t hold myself up as an example of anything in
particular. However, in helping journalism schools develop curriculum, I’ve
realized that it’s important that journalists think of themselves not just as
people creating content but as entrepreneurs. In the brave new world, the
opportunity to start things and create business models exists for journalists.
People in journalism need to have serious knowledge about how the business works
and what the entrepreneurial opportunities are that the business presents. It’s
really important for today’s future journalists and young journalists to
understand.

Where has your diverse background better served you: does your business
knowledge better help your journalism skills, or does your journalism background
make you a more creative businessman?
I guess my journalism skills have
made me a fast study and have given me the ability to understand the art of
analyzing challenging issues in a very helpful way. On the flip side, in helping
develop MSNBC.com as editor-in-chief, the fact that I could assess the business
opportunities of starting from scratch on the Web was enormously helpful in
making MSNBC.com successful.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate for ad sales people and editors and reporters to intermingle, as long as they know where the lines are. One of the failures of media today is the way “church and state” is implemented.

Is there danger in crossing over from business to editorial and back
again? Did you ever feel undue influence from one sector over the other, or that
your loyalties to either the news or the bottom line were affect your ability to
do your job?
No, because job definitions are just that, and when you play
one role, your commitment is to precisely that role. Although when you’re the
EIC of a media property these days, especially on the Web, you need to both
influence the business process and figure out how to adapt to the changing
nature of the newsroom in ways that didn’t exist in the past. I don’t believe in
the traditional interpretation of what church and state means. I don’t think
it’s inappropriate for ad sales people and editors and reporters to
intermingle, as long as they know where the lines are. I think one of the
failures of media today is the way “church and state” is implemented. Journalists
with good ideas and sales staff with good ideas should be able to collaborate in
a creative process. I’m for a complete breakdown of what church and state means,
as long as ethics remain. I’ve walked that line, and I’d like to think that I
haven’t crossed it. Editors need to understand the right place to draw that
line, especially in the current environment.

You were the first editor-in-chief at MSNBC.com. What was the site like
then? Was it a very planned out, focused-group effort, or like the Wild,
Wild West?
Much closer to Wild, Wild West. We did research about users’
interests and how they were using the site and so forth, but the challenge of
getting pictures and words on an Internet page in 1996 was not insignificant.
The mere act of publishing had challenges in itself. Think about how easy it is
to start a blog today compared to what it took to start a Web page in 1996. One
of the challenges was to create work that took advantage of the capacity of the
Internet as a medium. It was really important to turn stories around as quickly
as possible — to be really good at breaking news. So if you hear something
happen, you come to the Web site and get the story, and your experience is
satisfying. Something happens in Congress, a plane goes down, war breaks out —
it was with those situations as a premise, creating materials for the medium was
important, and with those premises we set off.

Back then, mainstream media thought that Internet news was trivial, and
thought it was a passing fancy and would never be a major competitive platform.
Lots of friends couldn’t believe I moved my life from New York to engage in this
odd thing of delivering news to a machine on a desk. The public was curious but
not engaged. We had real small number of people in 1995 and ’96 using the stuff,
but there was already a community of early adopters into it, and their
communications with us helped the whole category develop.

In your career, you’ve done a lot of consulting. Is there a common problem
in media environments that arises from the same team working together for too
long, and which can be easily solved with a fresh pair of eyes?
The print
business in general has moved way too slowly to embrace and implement the
cultural change that the digital era requires. Only now with profit and loss
issues so dramatic are they waking up to the reality of the changes that are
required. Across a lot of my work, one of the things they talk to me about, and
I try to help them with, is how you can rapidly change the old culture of print
and turn it into more of a digital environment. People have a lot at stake; it’s
hard, but the process of doing it is accelerating and managements need to do it
more aggressively and add more resources to it.

Why are they so slow in embracing it? Is it a sense of superiority, that
print and old media is better than print? Or just unfamiliarity with the
medium?
There are a number of issues: one is the fact that for lots of
media companies, the bulk of revenue produced comes from print and that needs to
be protected and developed and not ignored. This is issue number one — the
traditional media business remains very large and can’t be ignored. Number two
is that there are still many executives and editorial people in key positions
who are not yet comfortable with new technology. There are executives who rarely
look at video online, and who certainly don’t have a strong engagement with Web
2.0 issues, like social networks, and who still see the Internet function as
being about distributing conventional programming rather than developing new
content. If you go to any number of newspaper and magazine Web sites for large
publications around the country, basically what you get is re-edited and
republished work from another platform put on the Web. That is totally wrong.

How did you come to work for News21?
I developed a project with the
Carnegie Corporation of New York to do a research paper on young people and how
they use the news. So I started working with them to develop that paper, which
got a lot of attention when it was completed. In engaging with Carnegie and in
the context of my relationship with them, I learned they were part of developing
this initiative with a bunch of journalism schools, and they asked me to sit in
on some meetings and participate in thinking about the initiative. When it
finally came together, I had a relationship with them, had been an adviser, and
had been networking for both the Carnegie and Knight Foundations. The initiative
came along, and the opportunity to run the program was part of the grant, and
they asked me to help put it together, and I was happy to. It was a natural
extension of the work I’d been doing.

My role is to help the universities and the faculty and the fellows to set up
a summer program — we have four newsrooms that allow the fellows to create
important stories around a given topic. The program starts with a course in the
spring or winter semester on the topic of the summer program. Students then go
out and report for ten weeks over the summer and with a goal of creating high
caliber content about those topics. I make sure that they get what they need to
create those newsrooms and the accompanying Web sites — the appropriation of
resources like cameras and Web application software. I do what I can to help
pull that together.

Obviously, the students get a lot out of the experience, but what do they
bring to the project that more seasoned journalists don’t have?
They
bring a sense of what digital media can do to improve storytelling that
certainly many of their older colleagues don’t have, because digital tools —
whether it’s flash or Internet video or animated applications — a lot of that
is second nature to many journalism grad students. They understand the world of
the Web, and have a somewhat different approach to conventional storytelling.
They see the world through a completely different perspective. That’s really
helpful in seeing and creating stories that work across multiple platforms.

What are some of the projects that have come out of News21 that have
impressed you?
Last year, the first summer, the project was on liberty
and security, the tension between the traditional American view of civil
liberties and the need for national security. We broke it down into topics and
products. We developed a deep relationship with the Associated Press, got seven
or eight stories on the AP A wire, one of which won awards and got lots of
attention. It was about the education department improperly going through
college funding reports and taking out data about students. When we revealed the
program, they discontinued it.

We did great investigative reporting, doing work about topics like that, or
like how outsourcing worked in military intelligence. I mean, really terrific
investigative stories that got a lot of attention. We did an hour-long
documentary for CNN on the lives of U.S. military men and women abroad. They
reported on immigration in Southern California, what immigration is like there,
the drama and the challenges people face. We had stories in many major
publications and TV shows — we did a series of stories on immigration on
California public television. We broke stories. It was precisely the kind of
media opportunity we were trying to create for them, and we hope to repeat that
success this summer.

Many journalists struggle with going back to school and learning
journalism versus just jumping in the mix, pitching and writing and reporting.
What benefits to journalists come from a formal education in
journalism?
The benefits of journalism grad school include access to the
best teaching they could possibly have. Journalism organizations are rarely
known for their ability to mentor people. Students are getting training from
world-class experts. There’s also value in allowing journalists to expand the
nature of their skills, and expand the level of those skills, whether it’s in TV
production or writing or new media. Journalism school can also give students
exposure to lots of different media opportunities. They get to engage in these
opportunities and mediums while they’re in school, which is valuable in shaping
career decisions. World-class teaching, skill development, and exposure to media
— all of this can do a world of good for the right kind of students in
journalism school.

Traditional media is at risk in part because younger people don’t consume
news the same way their parents did. How is the media industry going to have to
change as a result — and will the face of the media industry change when it’s
Yahoo and Google who provide people with most of their information?
There
is no evidence that Yahoo and Google are going to be major original sources of
news content. They remain distinct vehicles for the work of mainstream media
organizations. No matter how many people go to Yahoo and Google for their news,
their work is going to come from someone else. Yahoo News has a few dozen people
on staff, and most are in producer roles, not fact gatherers. Readers still
depend on wires and newspapers and TV networks for content, and that’s why it’s
so important that the business models evolve quickly. They remain the principle
source for what people read every day. The blogosphere is healthy and getting
healthier, and citizen journalism, like the site I’m involved in, Now Public, is really taking
off. But the news that we get from sites like Google and Yahoo comes from old
line, organized, mainstream media organizations, and that’s not going to change.

In addition to Now Public, you’re also an adviser to BackFence, which is a
Web-based, community journalism project. Leasing out news coverage to citizen
journalists is almost the opposite of the work being done at News21, where
students are given very specific training and guidance. Can both models
co-exist?
It’s critical that the two coexist and work as collaborative
enterprises. In order to make the newspaper model work, newspapers have to,
because of their declining resource base, use citizens to help cover large
metropolitan areas and communities. Around the world, Now Public has 90,000
registered contributors in 150 countries. NowPublic has the opportunity to fill
some of the void left by some of the major media organizations who are feeling
like they have to close down bureaus around the world. Now Public can be eyes
and ears in lots of places around the world not covered.

Figuring out how to make the old and new work together is critically
important, so I’m excited about Now Public. Now Public is a great opportunity
and a great enterprise. Now Public takes material in real time, whether it’s
from a camera phone or notepad or digital camera or computer and brings it into
public consciousness in ways conventional media isn’t and can’t. In the
presentation we just gave to investors recently, we showed pictures from
Heathrow Airport when Heathrow was closed after the liquid scare. The airport
was closed off, and media couldn’t get in, but we had pictures from citizen
journalists who could get there when the media couldn’t.

All of that needs to be put into a journalism and news content that makes
sense for those of us surrounded by a cacophony of stuff, and we now have a
public forum that is going to make that happen. It’s very important that the
journalism community get this right.

Before editor Daniel Peres was summoned to Details from Paris (he was Fairchild’s European bureau chief), the magazine had gone through five editors in 10 years, failed numerous relaunches, and carried a voice that seemed to change with every issue. Critics were many. Seven years later, Peres is still at Details, having solidified the masthead and aligned the magazine’s style sensibilities with his own. But, like every print magazine editor, Peres is faced with a tumultuous landscape and traversing the “Wild West” mentality of the Internet, while maintaining his own sanity.

Name: Daniel Peres
Position: Editor, Details
Birthdate: October 14, 1971
Hometown: Baltimore
Education: B.A., NYU, double major, Journalism and History
Marital status: Married actress Sarah Wynter in 2005
Favorite television show: Real Desperate Housewives of Orange County — “It’s spectacular, you have to check it out. It’s amazing how regular people allow cameras into their lives thinking they’ll become famous.”
Last book read: Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon
Last song heard on your iPod: “More Than A Feeling,” Boston
Guilty pleasure: Also Real Desperate Housewives of Orange County
First section of the Sunday Times: Styles

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What is the most interesting media news story out there right now?
New York magazine’s piece on Time magazine was very well done. As a magazine editor, I think we’re all looking at what is going on at Time with great interest. That story has gotten, frankly, very interesting — the competition between newsweeklies. Terrifically interesting story to watch.

What’s a typical day for you?
I’m up at 7:00AM. I catch the beginning of the Today show. Outside my apartment door are copies of The New York Times, New York Post and Women’s Wear Daily. I do a quick scan of the papers, then, at 8:00AM, I begin breakfast meetings in lieu of the “business lunch,” which I try to avoid at all costs. When you do [business lunches] you end up being out of the office for two hours, minimum, and so many people are depending on me for projects to move forward I can’t afford it.

In my office waiting for me are the Washington Post, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety, and USA Today. I scan those papers. Then, in the office, the day is anything but typical. It’s a series of meetings with my staff — it could be talking about upcoming covers, story ideas, fashion coverage — it’s like a revolving door of various departments. My homepage is a newsmap that updates every 5-10 minutes. Right now, I’m reading about Halliburton. I tend not to look at the popular media blogs (Gawker, Jossip, Fishbowl) unless someone tells me to.

How would you characterize the state of the industry?
It’s a bit tenuous. The close of Premiere recently, the third or fourth magazine to fold. It’s certainly not seeing a boom. But, on the whole, I actually think it’s healthy. I take issue with people who say the print medium is an endangered species. Technology means you have to adapt to the times, get stronger. I’m not a fatalist. Smart editors need to react and adapt to the online space.

I’m editing a magazine for men like me, with my interests. I know what my interests are. And, if I can do that online, we’ll draw more readers to it.

What’s the toughest thing about being a magazine editor in 2007?
It’s no secret that the magazine industry is going through a tremendous period of change, and a number of big magazines have folded.

Do you feel added pressure?
That added pressure is met with excitement. I think I have a tremendous advantage in that I’m editing a magazine for men like me, with my interests. I know what my interests are. And, if I can do that online, we’ll draw more readers to it. So, I’m embracing the challenge with excitement and enthusiasm.

What is Details doing online?
Details and GQ — our homepages have been at men.style.com. It’s what people in the company call a “destination” site. But, we’re rethinking that. I had to reconfigure my masthead, and now two people are solely dedicated to the Web. And, they are constantly online, thinking about the Web. In 2008, we’re going to be breaking away from men.style.com, and we’ll be standalone sites.

For years, people have referred to Details as a magazine for gay men. How do you respond to that?
I think it’s something that lives in the press, the media. It’s not something our readers dwell on. My job is to create a great magazine that appeals to our audience — straight men, gay men, everybody. Like I said, I’m editing a magazine for men like me, with my interests. To be honest, I don’t think about it much, except when the media — like you — asks.

In the past you’ve had — at least superficially — an adversarial relationship with Maer Roshan. So, what do you think of the new Radar?
We tweak each other, but [we’ve become] great friends. I think Radar looks good, and I think Maer is incredibly smart, even stubbornly so. And, he’s gotten a tremendous amount of press and created this buzz around his launches. He’s better at PR than most of the PR people I know. I know if I were ever to have a fall from grace in the press, the first person I’d call for advice would be Maer.

What’s next for you?
You know, I’m incredibly happy creating this magazine. I’d never say never, but right now, I feel great about my job, and am excited about the future here.

[Dylan Stableford is mediabistro.com’s managing editor, media news. He can be reached at dylan AT mediabistro DOT com.]

[NOTE: This interview contains excerpts, and has been edited for clarity.]