Welcome to our new series, “Hey, How’d You Do That?” walking you through how those in the media industry navigated key professional junctures, achieved career-making coups, tackled spur-of-the-moment scenarios and made the decisions that furthered their work. This time, the coup belongs to Meredith Peters, who’s made speedy headway in her music industry career. By the time she graduated from Syracuse University with a communications degree, she had five music industry internships under her belt, countless business contacts and multiple mentors. She was thrilled when The Agency Group — a full-service booking agency that handles bands including The White Stripes, as well as comedians and more — offered her a full-time position fresh out of school, but was disappointed when she learned the job was for a receptionist. Here’s how she gunned for and got a promotion mere months later.

You took a job with a company that you loved, but the position wasn’t exactly what you were hoping for. What did you love about the company so much?
I’d interned at The Agency Group the summer before my senior year of college and saw that the company is very much based on team work, communication and integrity. Those things can be rare in the music business. For example, the agents at The Agency Group have their own roster of bands. [The agent] is responsible for those bands nationally and worldwide, meaning they handle all of the tours and shows. It gives them the ability to pay much more attention to their individual roster. At other companies, agents can be organized in many ways — often regionally. This means one agent may handle a band’s tour in the Northeast, while another agent handles it in the Midwest or Southwest. A third agent might handle their college shows.

Another thing that’s different about The Agency Group is that each agent designs their own roster, which allows them specialize in a specific genre. That being said, some agents have eclectic tastes and they work with a wide range of bands. For example, my boss’ roster has some hip-hop groups, some indie rock and some punk. I love that the company gives agents the freedom to work with bands they love.

I had to make a very quick decision, but I knew this was something I couldn’t pass up. It was my chance to show the company I could shine in the role I told them I wanted.

After so much experience, I’m sure you didn’t see yourself as a receptionist! Why did you decide to accept the offer?
It can definitely be tough to get a job in the music industry — I think a lot of it depends on your contacts, the connections through your school and internships you’ve had in the past. It’s also a lot about luck. We’ve had interns at our company who have stayed for months or even close to a year, hoping for a job. I saw the offer as an opportunity to get my foot in the door, impress the bosses and show them I had great attitude and could work hard. I loved the company so much I was willing to take a chance.

After two weeks on the job, the person who assisted one of the top agents at the company left. The agent needed someone to step up immediately and he asked me to fill in. Even though it was a temporary gig, I knew it would be a lot of responsibility. I’d be working much longer hours, handling contracts, dealing with band payment, promoters and band managers.

I was nervous. If I didn’t do a good job, or he didn’t like me, nobody else would want me to be their assistant! I had to make a very quick decision, but I knew this was something I couldn’t pass up. It was my chance to show the company I could shine in the role I told them I wanted. Within two weeks I was asked to continue working as an assistant permanently. I was absolutely ecstatic!

Were you worried it would be difficult to transition from receptionist to the role of an agent’s assistant?
To be honest, not that much. I think the fact that I started as the receptionist was more of a surprise to them than when I became an assistant! I’d gotten a lot of good feedback from [my coworkers] during my internship, and after I went back to school, I did a pretty good job of keeping in touch with a lot of them. I believed people liked me and knew what I was capable of.

I’d also made it clear in my [initial] interview that I wasn’t taking the receptionist position at with the intent of being a career receptionist. I told the vice president, as well as the office manager, that I had every intent and confidence that I could thrive in an assistant position.

When I accept the initial temporary assistants’ position, I put a lot of time and effort into the work, not only do what he needed in to order for him to do his job efficiently, but to impress him. I was working 11-hour days, asking questions, really focusing on internalizing everything I was learning from him and one of his former assistants. In those first two weeks, I learned more about time management and efficiency than I did in college. It was worth it because within a month of being made a permanent assistant, I’d helped sign [a new band] to the company.

Ways to parlay the job you’re offered into the one you really want:

1) Don’t be afraid to try out a job that isn’t 100 percent what you had in mind. As Peters puts it, “You never know how things will turn out.”

2) Be upfront about your goals. “During the interview I said, ‘If I take this job, I’m taking it with the hope that I’m going to move on and do other things with the company,'” Peters recalls.” The people I spoke with were encouraging about making that happen.”

3.) Don’t get overly comfortable in any one role. “Never stop trying to learn new things within and above your current role. When I was hired as the receptionist, I asked about taking on more responsibility. I still do that now as an assistant,” says Peters. “I want to learn and do as much as possible, and I always try to maintain a hardworking attitude.”

4) Network to create opportunities for yourself. “Intern as much as possible and stay in touch with everyone and anyone you meet along the way,” Peters advises others new to the workforce. “The trick to getting a job is forming and cultivating relationships.”

Stephanie Burton is a New York-based freelance writer.

While she may make near-hourly appearances on the Food Network these days, there was once a point when the nascent network aiming to reach home cooks didn’t have the ebullient E.V.O.O. slinger-cum-magazine editor on their radar. Back in 2001, then-publicist Jennifer Pullinger was charged with getting Ray TV and radio appearances to promote the cookbook she’d just released. With an aggressively strategic approach and lots of videotapes, Pullinger scored Ray a coveted Today Show segment and a meeting with a Food Network programming exec. She tells us just how she did it, and shares her key tips for crafting publicity campaigns to catapult promising unknowns to stardom.

In 2001, as a publicist at National Book Network, you were assigned to work on two early Rachael Ray cookbooks, Comfort Foods: Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals and Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals. How much publicity work had you done prior to that assignment? Did these books/Rachael Ray represent any special opportunity for you?

At that time, I was new to book publicity. Before I was hired to be a book publicist at National Book Network (NBN), my professional experience in the media consisted of working as a volunteer media and marketing director for a small film festival in Orlando, and as a radio news reporter at WINA-AM in Charlottesville. Both, however, prepared me for the fast pace of book publicity. The “foodie” craze then wasn’t what it is now, but it was gaining popularity.

I had been with NBN for less than six months when I was assigned to work on Lake Isle Press’ Comfort Foods and Veggie Meals. Since the publication date for Veggie Meals was pushed back, I was primarily publicizing Comfort Foods.

To start off, NBN’s publicity director and I met with Rachael and her publisher in New York City (we were based in Lanham, MD) to discuss the publicity plan. I think everyone in the room, including the NBN sales rep who attended the meeting, knew that Rachael had the innate talent and personality for TV, so it was a great opportunity for me to develop a publicity plan that had lots of potential.

Describe the publicity plan you crafted for Rachael and the two books she was releasing at this time. What kind of resources did you get from Lake Isle Press to do this?

The publicity plan involved equal parts strategy, a talented, charismatic author, and luck. The publicity plan was about being in the right place at the right time, and hitting the right synergistic notes. I like Woody Allen’s quote: “80 percent of success is showing up,” and I think that applies here. It wasn’t quite that simple, but the plan was successful in part because I got the information about who Rachael was into the hands of the right people. Rachael took it from there by just by being herself.

The cookbook itself was the kind that wouldn’t daunt your average cook. That’s part of the reason why people like Rachael—her style of cooking is fairly easy and doesn’t intimidate. My pitch focused on Rachael’s personality and likeability, and how compelling she was on camera and in person.

My assignment was to secure Rachael radio and television interviews and appearances—no print. I also set up some book signings for her in upstate New York, where she was from, because they loved her there. At the time, she was a local television personality with WRGB-TV in Albany where she hosted a weekly cooking segment. So she was known regionally. I was given roughly 25 to 30 video cassettes as a demo to send to television producers. I sent about 20 of them to the Food Network. I just blanketed the place as much as I could, and started with follow-up. I sent them to shows that I thought would be open to a guest host or guest cooking segment. I also sent the tapes to the three major network morning shows, among others. For radio, I used the contacts that Rachael provided me, and also researched other topical radio shows that I thought might be interested in having a cookbook author on to talk about such.

What exactly did it take to land Rachael an NBC appearance? Walk us through the back-and-forth between you and the network, as our understanding is that nabbing a publicity opportunity like this is no small feat.

As any good book publicist does, they send their titles to the book producers at the major morning news outlets—The Today Show,Good Morning America, and The Early Show. I did that, but the book producer at The Today Show turned Comfort Foods down at first. She must have passed it on to a colleague, because shortly thereafter, a special projects producer from the show called me to see if Rachael was available to do a cooking segment. It was winter, so it was the right time for Comfort Foods. It’s just the kind of stuff people crave when it’s cold outside. I don’t mean to make it sound that simple, but the back-and-forth kind of was. Because it wasn’t that long before the book producer passed and the special projects producer called me to book her, at that point it was just a matter of nailing down the date and time, and then Rachael getting to the Today Show studios. Seeing Rachael on tape was likely what cinched it for the producer, as well as the timeliness of the release of Comfort Foods. Any time you have good video that shows how well your author presents themselves, make sure to include that in the press materials you send out.

Even before her Today Show appearance, I thought she had national TV potential… I always got positive feedback from the booksellers who wanted her at their store for a signing—nothing like I had experienced with the authors I had worked with up until then.

At the time, how did you and Rachael think her first TV appearance went? Did it seem to either of you that she had great TV potential? Why?

Within days of her Today Show appearance, Comfort Foods shot to the top five in Amazon.com sales, so I think it went really well! As a publicist just starting out, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. You could tell Matt [Lauer], Katie [Couric], and Al [Roker] liked her a lot too. She came across as real and approachable and full of energy. But as I said, even before her Today Show appearance, I thought she had national TV potential. She was a natural before the camera as demonstrated by her WRGB tapes and I always got positive feedback from the booksellers who wanted her at their store for a signing—nothing like I had experienced with the authors I had worked with up until then.

How did the NBC spot lead to a meeting between Rachael and the Food Network? Back in 2001, the Food Network had a far more minor media presence than it does now—how did Rachael, in that stage of her career, and the network complement one another? What was the original thinking on what a collaboration between Rachael and the Food Network might look like?

It was synergy. As mentioned, I sent as many demo tapes as I could to the Food Network, so if they hadn‘t heard about her by then, then they would by the time I started follow-up. That “blanket” strategy paid off, I believe, because a day or two after her Today Show appearance, I scheduled her to be on WAMC Public Radio’s “Vox Pop” in Albany. This was a contact of Rachael’s. Someone associated with the Food Network was listening to the WAMC interview, liked what they heard, and called some other folks at the Food Network, who, fortunately, had already heard about her because I had sent them the tapes and press materials. So her appearance on The Today Show, coupled with her next-day WAMC Public Radio segment, led to her first meeting with Food Network executives. Right place, right time. Right around that time I also got her an interview on WHYY radio in Philadelphia, and I’m sure that didn’t hurt either.

It was a day or two after her Today Show segment that I got a call from Bob Tuschman, vice president of programming and production at the Food Network, inquiring about scheduling a meeting with Rachael. This meeting would involve discussion beyond the scope of publicity—it was to talk about a possible opportunity for Rachael to host her own show. So I had accomplished my goal for Rachael, the cookbook, and more. The 2001 publicity plan for Comfort Foods was what got her foot solidly in the door at the Food Network, and she took it from there.

What’s the nature of your relationship with Rachael Ray, currently? Do you keep in touch? Does she acknowledge that you were instrumental in connecting her with the Food Network? What is your title/affiliation now, and how did it evolve from what you were doing at National Book Network back in 2001?

A few months after the Comfort Foods campaign, I moved to Atlanta to attend graduate school at Georgia State University, where I studied communications. I didn’t keep up with Rachael, other than what I saw or read in the media myself. In her book, Rachael Ray: 30 Minute Meals 2, which came out in 2003, she does thank me. As to what I do now, not long ago I was a freelance writer and book/film publicist, but soon I will join the staff of a publisher in Washington, D.C.

Are there any other clients you’ve seen since Ray whom you believe has the same kind of star power, and is poised to break out as significantly as she has? What are the qualities or elements that lead you to believe someone has this kind of potential?

I have worked with some authors who have a great story to tell, but may not be as compelling as an in-person interview. And there are others who have something unique to say, but beyond the release of their book, will only be of value to the media as news warrants. Some of the recent breakthroughs for me professionally have come from the publicity campaigns I contributed to in the indie film arena when I was a full-time freelance publicist.

I think the most important quality in an author or potential media personality is to know what you are talking about inside and out, because people can tell when you are full of hot air. Having a certain presence is important. It doesn’t hurt to be likable on some level too. Then again, there are a lot of unpleasant personalities in the media today that people are drawn to, so maybe it’s not always critical to be likable. But overall, it’s hard to list specific “star power” qualities, because I imagine it’s the same instinct that casting agents have when they see talent. They just know.

Five Tips on Launching Successful PR Plans

1) Trust your gut. To me, the words “media savvy” mean the same thing as having an “instinct” or “second sense” about what‘s going to catch not only the media’s attention, but also, that of the public or the specific audience you are trying to reach. That may sound obvious, but it’s up to you as the publicist to convince the reporter, editor, or producer that their audience needs to know about your book. As such, any media professional should trust that they have a handle on what’s current or popular in the marketplace. During our first meeting with Rachael, I think everyone in the room [myself, the publicity director, the editor/ publisher, and the sales rep] knew she was a natural fit for the Food Network. It wasn’t said out loud, but we knew. It was just a matter of letting [the Food Network] know that.

2) Use your author’s contacts. The WAMC Public Radio contact was integral to the success of Rachael’s campaign. Don’t thumb your nose at the smaller, regional radio and television stations, because you never know who’s going to be listening.

3) Maximize your resources. Make sure your media list is tight. When you have few resources, you have to make sure you are sending your press materials to the best and most appropriate people. But then again, don’t be afraid to take some risks. If the Food Network hadn’t responded, I could easily have been questioned about why I sent so many tapes to one place. But that strategy worked.

4) Stay on top of emerging trends. You have to keep yourself plugged in culturally—the so-called “finger on the pulse” analogy applies here. Cultivate your ability to see emerging trends and how to connect your authors with the media who cover those areas. That means you’ll be doing a lot of reading and monitoring of the media. While cooking shows weren’t as wildly popular to the mass audience as they are now, people recognized that the Food Network had the right idea about programming then, and clearly, they do now as well.

5) Don’t give up If your book publicity campaign is rough going at first, but you believe strongly in your author and what they have to say, then continue pushing and keeping the momentum moving forward. You never know when your hard work will pay off and someone will say “yes.” While it doesn’t always happen for other authors like it did for Rachael, it just takes one good media placement to start the domino effect of getting other media interested and on board.

Jennifer Pullinger holds a BS degree in marketing from Virginia Tech and a MA degree in communications from Georgia State University. She has been a media professional for over 10 years.

Rebecca L. Fox is mediabistro.com’s managing editor, service and features. She can be reached at rebecca AT mediabistro DOT com.

After 20 years of work in some of the biggest, glitziest, star-studded restaurants in New York City, Abbe Diaz never imagined she’d one day pen a tell-all book, contribute to the New York Post, and host an exclusive, members-only Web forum for restaurant insiders. Below the former hostess, maitre-d, and self-proclaimed “potted plant” explains how she landed in the throes of New York media.

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In May 2004, you published PX This: The Diary of a Potted Plant, a personal narrative chronicling your years working at Mercer Kitchen, The Park, Smith, Lotus, Theo, 66 and several others. How did this all come about and what does the term “PX this” mean?
The literal translation for “PX” is in French: personne extraordinaire. In the restaurant industry it means just that: a VIP. When an important person comes into a restaurant, a celebrity, an editor, a political person, whoever, it’s the maitre d’s job to recognize this person. At most restaurants there’s a special slip of paper that the maitre d’ will quickly fill out, noting the name of the person, what table they’re sitting at, and why they’re a “PX.” Then they’ll slip it to the waiter as quickly as possible.

The term “PX this” is sort of a little stab, almost like an industry curse word. If you’re a server and it’s the end of a long night, the last thing you want to deal with is a PX. You’ve been on your feet for hours, dealing with everyone’s requests all night and now you’re going to have to be extra careful and alert. In your mind you’re thinking, “F*ck having to deal with this PX!” which becomes, “PX this!”

Publishing a book was not planned. I didn’t go to journalism school. [Diaz graduated from Rutgers with a B.A. in economics.] I was out to dinner one night with a group of friends and we were gossiping about one thing or the other. It seemed like every celebrity or VIP that was mentioned, I’d had some kind of experience or interaction with. I’d spent 20 years working for some big-name restaurateurs, especially Jean-Georges [Vongerichten], and there was always a lot going on in his restaurants.

Someone said, “You should write a book about all of this!” I’d been keeping a journal on my computer [in Word documents] for years, but I’d never thought about it before. This whole conversation took place around the same time Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada was published [early 2003]. The idea of a New York City restaurant roman á clef seemed very possible. A few days after that dinner, a friend of mine called to say she had contacts at Ballantine [Publishing Group] and if I was willing to let her act as my independent agent, she was very confident she could push the book through to the right people. [Diaz asked not to name this particular friend as they are no longer on speaking terms]. Within days, I sent her over 30 or 40 pages from my journal.

Since this was your private journal, weren’t you worried about revealing things that were excessively personal? Did you change any names or details before sending everything over?
Not really. There were some parts where I thought, “Well, I don’t love the fact that everyone might read about this, but I can live with it.” As far as names and details, I’d already given a number of the “worst” characters pseudonyms because I didn’t want to look at their names in my own journal. Just dealing with them in real life was enough.

Your friend was confident she could put your book in the hands of the right people, but she wasn’t a publisher or author. Why did you decide to take her up on her offer?
First of all, this woman wasn’t blowing smoke around when she said she could help me. She did have very influential friends and she’d helped people before, so her suggestion wasn’t far-fetched. There was no real promise of money — more a suggestion that a book could lead to bigger things like a movie or publicity. The writing was already done, so I didn’t see a risk in taking a chance.

The thing that was truly important to me was the chance to expose the injustices going on at Jean-Georges’ restaurants. More times than I can remember, I saw servers lose hard-earned tips because management was taking a share of it. The people who should have been encouraging morale could not have been less interested in the staff.

The subtitle of my book, “The Diary of a Potted Plant,” is in reference to how I felt when I was working as a hostess for Jean-George. I was as invisible as a potted plant. I thought if a book could publicize any of the wrongdoings, I was more than willing to put my name on it.

Within a few days your friend came back to you with changes and suggestions from the editors she knew. What was the biggest challenge in meeting their requests?
There were grammar and spelling issues, but the main thing they wanted was to bold-face all of the celebrity names in the book. They wanted it to be very Page Six-esque. I made three pages worth of changes before I had to stop.

My writing had a totally different look and feel. It wasn’t the same voice — it wasn’t me. I sounded pompous and vain. I tried to explain to [my friend], “It’s not the same book. It’s not me!” but she wouldn’t listen. Her feeling was, “If you want this to be commercially viable, you have to get over it.” My opinion as the author was completely irrelevant.

When did you finally decide you couldn’t get over it?
The publishing house put me in touch with a lawyer to help protect me any against libel charges. Obviously, he saw I wasn’t making the edits. One afternoon, I broke down crying. I told him flat out, “I can’t go through with this.”

At that point, I feel like he stopped being my lawyer and started being my friend. He asked me what I was hoping to accomplish by publishing my work. He asked me the questions that no one else had.

He explained that even though I wasn’t expecting to make much money from the book, I should consider the profits. After the publishing house and my friend took the fees, taxes, and all the other royalties, I wasn’t looking at much of a payday.

I asked myself, “Why would I make myself look like an asshole, even for $10,000? Is it worth it?” I didn’t think so. That’s when this lawyer explained to me I had other options. He gave me information about smaller, independent publishing companies that would give me a lot more freedom to publish the book the way I wanted to.

Were you worried what your friend would think when you decided to go your own route with a lesser-known publisher?
At the time I wasn’t scared at all. I never in a million years thought she would take it as a slap in the face, but that’s exactly how she took it. She thought I was ungrateful, that I was going behind her back to set up my own deal. I never thought she would see it that way. I was naïve. She was furious. To this day, we don’t speak.

This July, former employees at eight of Vongerichte’s restaurants filed a lawsuit claiming they were paid sub-minimum wages, cheated out of overtime, and forced to share tips with their bosses. How does that feel?
It’s great, although I’m sure they’ll settle before it ever reaches court. I have documented proof that, yes, those things were going on. I wouldn’t hesitate to testify.

The book also affected your personal life. Lois Freedman, widely regarded as Jean-Georges’s “right-hand woman” had you thrown out of Mercer Kitchen when you went in for drinks one night. If you were going to do it all over again, would you still make the same decisions?
I have no regrets. When I decided to publish the book, I knew there was no way in hell I was going back [to work] for Jean-George. Despite any criticism or backlash, I’m happy. The best thing about PX This is that it’s my own and it’s the truth. People can say I created rumors or tried to pump out a salacious novel, but the simple reality is everything I wrote is dated. There’s no question about my motives. For that, I always will always be grateful.

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Five Things To Know Before Publishing a Tell-All
1) Take a closer look.
You might have a book on your hands and not even know it.
“It wasn’t until my friend mentioned the idea that I realized I had hundreds of stories sitting around doing nothing,” Diaz says.

2) Your idea of a “memoir” might be vastly different from the people who are considering publishing it.
“The [traditional publishing] system is structured to give the author very little control,” Diaz says. “You’re going to have to play by their rules and make their changes. It’s a losing battle to fight what they want. Your work won’t be commercially viable to them.”

3) The stigma is lifting: Don’t be afraid to consider self-publishing.
“There’s an inherent integrity in self-publishing that doesn’t exist when you take a more traditional route,” Diaz says. “You can exercise much great control over your work. Basically, self-publishing is putting your money and reputation where your mouth is. I believe there will be a day when self-publishing is even more respected than the traditional route.”

4) If it’s a memoir with your name on it, you better be able to stand by the content.
“After you publish, there’s no going back,” Diaz warns. “There are going to be critics, but no one can touch you if you write the truth.”

5) Fight for a product that is true to you.
“Maintain your integrity,” Diaz says. “The final product must be true to what I was going through at that time. No one can take that away from me.”

The continuing “sequel” to PX This can be found on Diaz’s weblog.

Stephanie Burton is a New York-based freelancer.

Despite an around-the-clock work schedule and a standard daily reading diet of at least 26 Web sites, Fashionista.com editor Faran Krentcil swears she’s “not on crack.” Trading fashion reporting for The Daily for blogging Fashionista.com into existence early this year, her editorial focus now requires her to reach a younger audience that “care[s] more about Jessica Stam than Jessica Simpson.” Prior to her second New York Fashion Week at the helm of Fashionista — one in which she’ll lead a “fashion army” rather than cover the endless cycle of shows and parties solo — Krentcil told us about the intimacy she curries with readers, even while covering an aspirational industry that keeps so many at arm’s length, marveled at fashion mags’ many missed opportunities, and revealed her own fashion media crush.

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Name: Faran Krentcil
Position: Editor, Fashionista.com
Education: Duke ’03
Hometown: Andover, MA
First job: From ages 10-18, I was a working actress. Mostly theater.
Last three jobs: Editor, Fashionista.com; senior writer, The Daily; fashion

contributor, New York (Web site, still going…)
Birthdate: August 8
Marital/relationship status: Not today
First section of the Sunday Times: Styles
Favorite TV show: WKRP in Cincinnati
Last book read: Summer’s Crossing, by Truman Capote
Guilty pleasure: Flats with pants

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It’s your second New York Fashion Week as editor of Fashionista.com. What will you be doing differently this time around?

Fashionista.com was two weeks old during the last Fashion Week. Everything was very seat-of-our-pants, and I wrote the entire site from 4 a.m. – 8 a.m. Plus, I felt like I had to be at every show, because our brand was new, and I was its only representative.

This time, we have a “fashion army” covering the shows with me. That’s fun for me — more breathing room — and fun for you — more points of view. We have stronger brand recognition, but the seat-of-our-pants vibe will stay, because it’s our signature.

I’m also guest blogging for Teen Vogue this season. They’ll link back to Fashionista and we’ll link back to them. I’m so excited!

You were a reporter at Fashion Week Daily, prior to being hired by Elizabeth Spiers as Fashionista.com’s inaugural editor. How did you and Elizabeth initially connect, and what were your early conversations about Fashionista like?

I got a text from a friend — nobody in fashion, just a guy who’s good with his liquor. It said, “Elizabeth Spiers is looking for you.” And I texted back, “So what?” I was exhausted — I just wanted to write a book and a few plays, and breathe.

But I met her anyway, because I was curious. Our initial conversations were about voids in the Internet fashion world; what people wanted to read that didn’t exist yet.

How close is today’s blog to that original vision?

Well I think in the very beginning, Elizabeth expected the site to be little more caustic, but I never gave into that expectation because it seemed too obvious, and also very far from my own style.

For me, looking at our January archive now is like seeing a baby picture. You recognize small bits of who we are, and understand how we’ve grown. But we didn’t have an editorial goal in the beginning, except to reach the girls and become part of their routines. And that’s happened.

Which are your closest competitors, and what sets Fashionista.com apart?

In advertiser meetings, we’re put against magazine Web sites a lot. But we’re obviously quite different from those outlets, and I don’t consider them to be editorial competition. We have a rougher feel, so our connection to readers is more intimate — and certainly more volatile. They take things very personally with us — or I should say, with me! It’s as if we’re a favorite indie band that everyone thinks they’ve discovered on their own…

How do you think the fashion print media is handling the Web? Which outlets are getting it right, and which have a ways to go?

I talk about this every day. Print media has so much access and they don’t take advantage of it! Magazines take hundreds of photos that never get used. Letting all that beautiful information disappear — it’s like the Internet answer to wasting gourmet food.

When Elle put Lindsay Lohan cover outtakes on their Web site, I was like, “Finally!” And TeenVogue.com does a nice job of behind-the-scenes slideshows from cover shoots. But there can be even more. Also, the Web could acknowledge a simple fashion truth — magazines exist to sell things.

When I see a fashion spread online, I want to click on the shoes, click on the dress, and go buy them. ShopVogue allows you to do this, but only with ads — I don’t want the ads! I want the shoes that Lily Cole is wearing on page 243! You know?

“Our contributors are really just the girls we wanted at our lunch table, so to speak.”

Elizabeth left Fashionista.com’s parent network, Dead Horse Media (which she co-founded) in mid-April. How has that affected your day-to-day?

Elizabeth wasn’t very involved in Fashionista’s day-to-day, so there hasn’t been a big blip in our routine.

You’ve run more international coverage in the past few months, as well as gotten more people filing to the blog in general. How do you find and vet contributors who complement Fashionista?

We want to keep Fashionista a very social experience — but not in a MySpace way. Our site is based on the idea of girls passing notes under the table. But instead of notes about boys and teachers, they’re notes about clothes, designers, models…

Everyone remembers that initial feeling of getting a note. It meant you instantly belonged to a clique, and to a conspiracy. So our contributors are really just the girls we wanted at our lunch table, so to speak. They were all readers of the site before they became part of our group, and when they contacted me, it was very clear they understood how they fit into Fashionista’s world. Right now, that’s more important than a resumé.

As for the tone of the site, it’s very easy: We write the way we talk.

What’s coming up for the site?

Near future: Redesign. The content won’t change, but the site is going to look incredible. This happens within the next two months.

Far future: Look for more TV, more visual components, and more personal parts of the site that you can only access by invitation.

Walk us through a typical non-Fashion Week day, starting with the first things you read each morning…

Well, the fun/sad thing is, I’m always working. Whenever I read, shop, party, watch TV, walk to Whole Foods, whatever, I’m always thinking how it could fit into our site. I don’t start or end my working day; the work winds through my life.

At some point every day, I will read all of the following for work:

Style.com, Vogue.com, WWD.com, Elle.com, Nymag.com, Runway.blogs.nytimes.com, Teenvogue.com, Nylon.com, Fashionweekdaily.com, Vogue.co.uk, Vogue.fr, Style.it, TheFashionSpot.com, Fabsugar.com, Dazeddigital.com, Vmagazine.com, Showstudio.com, Myspace.com/fashionistadotcom, Technorati.com, Gawker.com, Jezebel.com, Netaporter.com, Bluefly.com, Topshop.com, Forever21.com, and Flickr.com.

I swear I am not on crack.

Back in 2005, you told us about your crazy Fashion Week production schedule at the Daily. How does blogging the shows and related events for Fashionista compare?

Fashionista lives for its readers, and our readers are younger than The Daily‘s. We build our stories around what they want to know, and so our Fashion Week coverage begins with a question:

“If you’re 26, if you’re obsessed with fashion but also have a life beyond it; if you care more about Jessica Stam than Jessica Simpson; what do you want to know?”

So we chase the younger designers, the messier celebrities, the 5 a.m. models… and we show everyone our experience through smeared eyeliner, because it’s how our girls already frame their lives.

My job now is to get that experience, over and over again, during Fashion Week — and then to imagine 50 different ways to share it online.

Another difference between my work at The Daily and Fashionista is that now, I don’t have a boss. Imagine the difference…

To go all Daily on you: What are your personal Fashion Week survival tips?

Be really polite, remember to eat, realize your seating assignment and your self-worth aren’t connected, and go to at least one party just for fun.

Best and worst experiences covering Fashion Week?

Best: This is so expected, but I always think Marc shows are best because they remind me of great theater — a group of people coming together to experience communal beauty. You leave thinking you’ve seen the world change. It’s a rush.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that meeting celebrities is hysterical. Once, Hilary Duff gave me a ride in her car. It was a really fun drive, though I never wrote about it — I just told my mom.

Worst: Last year, I asked Ashley Olsen if I could interview her for The Daily. She said no. Actually, she gave me this HUGE smile, and said, “But I hope you have a nice day!” You know, in her Olsen voice? I was SO mortified. And she SO didn’t want me to have a nice day. I’m still haunted.

Which big fashion media name is as intimidating as the grapevine would have us believe, and who’s actually a big teddy bear, contrary to his/her reputation?

Cathy Horyn is so funny and so cool. I wouldn’t call her a “teddy bear” — in fact, I think you wrote this question specifically to discuss André Leon Talley (Not consciously. -Ed.) — but she just crackles. She’s like the conversational equivalent of Pop Rocks candy. I have a huge fashion crush on her.

Conversely, I find Carine Roitfeld to be the only fashion editor who can freeze you. Her clothes are so incredibly die-hard that she can invoke the “I’m-not-good-enough” feeling if you’re in a casual outfit. But you have to get over it, because you’ll never dress like Carine.

How do you handle hanging with fashion editors whose clothing budgets are the size of some bloggers’ annual salaries?

My father is the inventor of toaster strudel.

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Rebecca L. Fox is mediabistro.com’s managing editor. She can be reached at Rebecca AT mediabistro DOT com.

Say what you will about San Francisco Chronicle executive editor Phil Bronstein (and many people do), but the man has some serious mettle. With a background as a war correspondent in revolution-era Philippines and El Salvador among other places, not to mention one highly publicized marriage and divorce to actress Sharon Stone, he has tangled with the best of them.

Bronstein started his journalism career doing movie reviews for a local paper in Davis, Ca., (where he made the seemingly inexcusable error of omitting the movie’s title in his first review). He started at the San Francisco Examiner in 1980 as a beat reporter and then did investigations before becoming their foreign correspondent, where his work covering the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos regime earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1986. After nine years overseas, he returned to a desk job and swiftly moved up the ladder, ultimately landing at the Chronicle when, in an anti-trust maneuver, Hearst sold the Examiner and bought the Chronicle.

He’s managed to stay atop the Chronicle‘s masthead in times that could only be described as punishing. Current economic realities have not been kind to Northern California’s largest paper, with dropping circulation rates, ever-shrinking budgets and recent buyouts that saw the 400-person staff reduced by 25 percent.

Despite the gloom, doom and downsizing, the 142-year old paper is looking to the future; Bronstein points to recent innovations that marry service, advocacy and interactivity, like the popular outing-public-officials feature “ChronicleWatch.” Now the buzzword around the newsroom is “journalism of action,” a Hearst-era phrase that casts the newspaper as activist-cum-solution-generator. Here, Bronstein talks about the paper, the profession and his detractors.

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Name: Phil Bronstein
Position: Executive vice president and editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Education: “Virtually none. I was thrown out of at least two schools before I even got to college. And I dropped out of college.”
Hometown: Born in Atlanta, grew up in a variety of places
First job: Reporter for a TV station (First “real” job)
Last 3 jobs: Managing editor, San Francisco Examiner; executive editor, San Francisco Examiner; executive editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Birthdate: October 4, 1950
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show: Curb Your Enthusiasm
Last book read: God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell
Most interesting media story right now: “For us the most interesting media story is the killing of this editor in Oakland [Chauncey Bailey] — fascinating. There are some cultural aspects that I definitely want us to get out of there.”
Guilty pleasure: “I would say relaxation, but I don’t remember the last time I really relaxed. Guilty pleasure is probably reading the tabloids, though not nearly as fun since News of the World went out of business.”

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What is a typical day like for you? How much actual editing do you do on a day-to-day basis?

We just went through staff cuts — pretty significant — so I’m doing a lot more. We have a continuous news desk, which is in charge of getting stories that are breaking and getting them on sfgate.com. So I talk to [the editor] — she gets in at 7 am., [and] usually by then I will have looked at the stories in the Chronicle; I get a couple other papers at home and I will have looked at them and some blogs and other Web sites. The next major thing that happens, other than informal conversations, is we have a 10 o’clock executive committee meeting with all of the company, so I represent the newsroom. 10:30 is our first formal news meeting. And then there’s another meeting at 3 that kind of formalizes what’s going to happen the next day, and I’ll usually look at the pages either here or I can do it from home later on in the evening. And everything that goes on in between could involve the editing of stories, particularly Page One stories or special projects, investigative pieces. I’m always the last set of eyeballs on those.

You have an impressive history as an investigative reporter. Do you ever miss being out in the trenches?
Every day. Every day. Foreign reporting too…

Right. You were in El Salvador and the Philippines…
And a few other places… Peru, the Middle East. All the interesting places at the time.

When you came back to the US, did you immediately go into being an editor or did you spend more time being a reporter based here?
No, no, it was like windsheer. I immediately went into being an editor.

I’ve always thought not all reporters make good editors.
That’s very true. And I think you’d have to ask the people I work with if that has to do with my case or not.

Do you feel like you had certain skills or tendencies that enabled you to make the jump?

Well, I think certainly think being a war correspondent doesn’t hurt. You certainly learn how to deal with crises and [have to] attempt to remain calm in difficult circumstances. That’s very helpful, especially these days in the newspaper world. I think what I brought with me from reporting, which I think all journalists and particularly all reporters ought to have, is two basic traits — one is an abiding curiosity, like really, almost an obsessive curiosity, and the other is an open mind. There’s a tendency in journalism to want to make things black and white — this person’s a bad guy, this person’s a good guy. It just makes for more of a great Walt Disney tale, but life is not like that and people are not like that. And I think that’s a valuable piece of information to have absorbed.

You seem to take a very practical approach from what I’ve read, like “People just don’t tell the truth sometimes.”
Well, especially, public officials. I think one of the key things that’s made [Jon Stewart and] The Daily Show popular is that he seems to have an overarching principle, which is, if I’m reading it right, never take a public official at their word. I think that’s not a bad way to go. Because people in a position of power and authority and institutions that are powerful and authoritative, their job is to create some mythology. And so one of the things we exist to do is to try to pull back the curtain on the mythology and see if it’s just a little guy cranking up the wheel.

It’s interesting you say that because I read — you did that interview with SFist.com — and I read all the responses from the people…
You enter the blog world today, especially as an editor and probably particularly me because I have a slightly more unusual history than some, and you’re just asking for it. And I knew that.

Some people were just so angry in response to your interview, talking about how they felt the Chronicle was very aligned with local politicians and government and sympathetic to the Bush Administration.

Boy, I tell you, I think if you ask any of those people you would not at all get that same reaction. We have had very contentious — appropriately contentious — relationships with a string of San Francisco mayors. If you ask [San Francisco Mayor] Gavin Newsome today if he felt the Chronicle was helpful to him, you would get an answer very different than what these folks think.

It’s sort of like a no-win situation. You don’t get love from any angle.

I think the expectation of love professionally is something that an editor should just not aspire to. I think it’s an unrealistic expectation.

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We do things like we sent Sean Penn to Iraq and Iran. We want to have some fun, and that’s a good thing. Newspapers have taken themselves very seriously, this kind of “higher calling disease.”

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You recently told SF Weekly that you thought you’d negotiated enough buyouts with the staff to avoid any more forced layoffs. So you think it’s good news for the foreseeable future?
Yeah, I think the foreseeable future is all we can talk about.

How do you think all these cuts — almost 100 of 400 staffers — affect morale?
Any kind of cut that size isn’t going to make people happy. [But] I think people were not shocked — maybe with the size of it, but we had put off cuts for quite some time when they were going on at a lot of other newspapers. It’s always really difficult for people, you know, when it’s their lives, their families, their livelihood involved. So we said in this meeting “It’s over” and these are buyouts, not layoffs… But I do think, in discussing last week what kind of things [are in store for] the future, people actually clapped, which is pretty rare in the newspaper world.

Shortly after you joined the paper, you said you wanted it to lose its unserious or “goofy” reputation. Do you feel like you’ve done some things to succeed in that direction?

I hope I haven’t succeeded completely. There’s a question of credibility, which is more what I was trying to address. We’ve got a guy named Don Assmussen who does a cartoon called “Bad Reporter.” He’s so out there, in the great tradition of San Francisco satirists. And we do things like we sent Sean Penn to Iraq and Iran. We want to have some fun, and that’s a good thing. Newspapers have taken themselves very seriously, this kind of “higher calling disease.” Higher calling disease often [means] newspapers completely losing touch with the people they’re supposed to be serving. The example I use, which may or may not have ever happened, is a reporter who says “I have a reader on the line, but I just don’t have time to talk to them because I’m writing my story.” I think there’s been this piety in journalism that evolved I don’t know where that has a lot of rituals that go along with it that people take very seriously, and I think there’s been too much of that. So we’ve done some fun things. We took some people’s calls, voicemails — in essence audio letters to the editor — and we put them in a podcast we call “Correct Me If I’m Wrong.” One of them, this guy called up, ranting about how we used the phrase “unmanned drone” and whether it was redundant. [Ed Note: The actual offending phrase was “pilotless drone.”] He just started yelling — really interesting phone call. It was the first one we had and it went crazy all over the Web, people made ring tones out of it and t-shirts. So we like to have some fun, but that’s a little bit different than credibility.

That leads me to my next question about your online presence and your recent promotion of former SFist.com blogger Eve Batey [for the new position of managing editor of online]. Where do you see that going?

I think Ben Bradlee said not too long ago that “It’s still about telling stories,” and he’s right. Only now we have all these useful technological tools that help us provide those narratives in a variety of ways, both in the telling and in the presentation — on the screen, phones, Blackberries. So you combine our expertise at sussing out the story — understanding what its essence is, vetting it — with the wide variety of multimedia options and you get something that’s much more interesting and much closer to the truth.

Are there plans to ramp up or expand what you’re doing?
What we’re doing is ramping up. Let me give you an example. A guy falls off Half Dome [in Yosemite National Park], and we sent a reporter to interview the rangers, report on the scene, come back, and do a very nice story about it. We also had Tom Stienstra, who is a very well-known outdoors writer, [do] a blog, and the blog got hundreds of responses, including from eyewitnesses. So suddenly you have, if you verify these, much more than just the ranger talking about what he understood happened, you’ve got people who were actually on the Half Dome — above the guy who fell, below the guy who fell — and you can create a much broader picture, a much bigger story of what actually happened. You also had people talking about what was wrong, why such a thing could have happened.

The next step is: Here are the problems and suggested solutions so then we can use the editorial page and whatever other means are appropriate and push for those changes. William Randolph Hearst created this thing called “journalism of action.” Journalism of action is really about — it’s not about advocacy, which people particularly in the priesthood say you can’t do in newspapers — but journalism of action was described as connecting people to solutions. You don’t just say, “Here’s the information, good luck, see you later.” Journalism of action is, in Hearst’s case, they talked about his newspapers injecting themselves routinely and conspicuously correcting ills in public life. But in our own way, journalism of action is “How does this story affect me?” But the second important question is, “What can they do about it?” So we started this thing a couple years ago called ChronicleWatch. It’s this little graphic box on the front of the local section. Basically people send us in problems — pothole on my street, graffiti on the mural, light switch in my kid’s classroom won’t work — and we have a little picture of the problem and then we find out who the public official is who’s supposed to get paid to fix it, and we put his or her picture there along with phone number and email. And we run it until they fix it.

And how’s the success rate on that?
Like 90 percent. It’s huge — and, by the way, the most popular feature in the paper. So people want that, and what’s interesting, in a nice convergence, is that the Bay Area has probably the highest volunteerism rates of any place in the country. People want to get involved here. So this journalism of action, we sort of adopted the phrase, we can do it obviously in a contemporary way with all these other tools — these technological tools. You don’t have to just do the reporting; you can find out what the problems are, get a sense what the solutions are, and then, if you want to, push for the solutions.

It’s like your readers are giving you your next angles.
Right, but then we in turn are giving them the information so they can go fix it. It’s not like we’re going to go fix it. It doesn’t hurt that we have leverage as a major metropolitan newspaper and you don’t want your picture in there next to a problem day in and day out if you’re a public official. But it’s really just a pass-through — it’s like we’re saying to readers, “Here is the guy responsible. Go get him. Go make him fix it.”

And they do.
And they do.

And that was another thing in the SFist.com article. A lot of people felt you weren’t doing enough local coverage.

Well, I did see that, and I think to some extent that’s true because I think we were trying too hard, like a lot of major metropolitan papers, to be “buffet journalism” — give you a little bit of everything. So we would have reporters in Iraq, the Middle East, in China, or Mexico. And I think there’s so much that needs to be done here in the way of reporting and in the way of this journalism of action idea that we’re going to be concentrating much more on that. And I think we’re going to pick, with the staff’s input, what we call “master narratives” — major topics that are of significance here. Technology would certainly be one of them, green living is huge here. That doesn’t mean we’re only going to do those, but those are going to be areas where we’re going to concentrate resources and time.

And does that mean more investigative journalism?
Investigative journalism is absolutely essential. You want to take some of the aspects of investigative journalism and use them every day. Certainly ChronicleWatch does. But we have a very good team — you know the BALCO story came out of two reporters here. We will continue to have a strong investigative team, there’s no question about it.

What’s your response to [San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher] Bruce Bruggman’s blog entry about the PG&E story and your consumer reporter David Lazarus — he said the Chronicle totally avoided the biggest consumer story in San Francisco history?

That’s been Bruce’s line for 30 years, and I love him for it. Maybe one of these days he’ll find another topic to complain about. I think he’s single-handedly almost maintained this sort of curmudgeonly alternative weekly in San Francisco, and I think it’s a great thing.

Which stories excite you the most?

I’m big on cultural stories, and I don’t mean arts. I mean the culture of the place — what is the underlying culture? When I was in the Philippines, I tried very hard not to just talk to the usual suspects — the politicians, the clergy, the people who were directly involved in the battles over there — but also the artists, the playwrights, the filmmakers and so on to get a real sense [of the place]. The Philippines was such a unique kind of culture — it was a colony of Spain for 400 years and I think it was the only colony the United States ever had. And it was in the middle of Southeast Asia, so you had this strange interwoven tapestry. So understanding what that was about, and I think that’s true of any story anywhere, you have got to understand the culture. News events are like pin balls — boing-ing around, and to understand why they happened you have to have some sense of the underlying cultural story. So I love it when we’re able to capture that.

To me I’d think having a diverse staff would then be very important.
Its’ very important, and we’re like a lot of newspapers — we’re really, really struggling with that. It’s not just recruiting journalists from different communities but retaining them. And it’s very difficult when you get talented minority journalists, and any paper that’s not The New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post — those three publications are going to come and scoop them up. Now that’s not an excuse; that’s just a fact. I think that’s very critical, and we’re a city that’s 30 percent Asian, so I think if you don’t have people on your staff — and we do — but if you don’t have people on your staff who are a part of that community who understand or speak whatever languages are spoken, then I think you’re going to miss something.

What will the Chronicle be like in 5 years, 20 years?
If I knew that I would be retired now doing consultant work when I felt like it. I have no idea. I do know that this paper is going to be much more of an activist, much more of an aggressive paper in the way that I described. And we’ll use all the multi-media tools that we can get our hands on and use the web in whatever ways we can.

Do you see yourself with the Chronicle for the short and long term? Or that’s not up to you?
A) It’s not up to me, and B) I think it remains interesting to me. And I think as long as it’s interesting, I’ll have an interest in doing it.

I also wanted to ask you what your reaction is to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal?
I think people have a big investment in puffing up their chests and offering opinions. And again, people like to see things in black and white. And Rupert Murdoch in some instances [has] been a bad guy, particularly if you’re a fan of in-depth journalism. I read something today that said the head of the editorial pages is going to maintain some autonomy, but the editorial pages of the Journal are pretty conservative anyway. I’m not sure that that would be a big switch. It’s a great, wonderful, raucous debate. Anybody who says they know for sure what the Journal will look like and be like in five years is blowing smoke. So I’m not going to sit here and be one more person offering a useless opinion.

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Julie Haire is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

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.]