Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent of The New Yorker, but his National Magazine Award nomination for Reporting was bestowed upon a story that appeared in National Geographic, “China’s Instant Cities,” where he’s a contributing writer. Although the title might lead one to think he wrote a sweeping analytical study of the country’s unprecedented urbanization, Hessler instead built his narrative around a year in the short life of a single factory in one of the country’s youngest factory towns. The product of roughly 100 days of on-the-ground reporting, the story will be folded into Hessler’s third book on China, after River Town and Oracle Bones. mediabistro.com spoke with Hessler (who has since moved back to the United States) about his meticulous reporting and writing techniques.

Considering you’re The New Yorker‘s Beijing correspondent, why did this story appear in National Geographic?
I started writing for National Geographic even before I did work for The New Yorker. The first time I wrote for them was in 2000, and I always had a good experience with those stories — it’s a different audience. The New Yorker doesn’t let me write for other people, but occasionally they let me do a story for National Geographic. That [permission] is written into my contract.

I’ve always felt that, as a writer, it’s nice to have outlets, but you don’t want to have too many because it can be exhausting and you’re juggling relationships. In this case, I just decided these were the two magazines I was interested in. I primarily write for The New Yorker, but this is the fourth story I wrote for National Geographic. It’s a slow magazine as far as producing each issue goes, and sometimes that leads me to do a different type of project for them.

The other reason I embarked on this project is that I wanted to work with a particular photographer who’s a friend of mine, Mark Leong. We worked together on The New Yorker stories, but that’s usually one photo for him, and it’s not shot simultaneously with the story. We were interested in trying to capture — both visually and in the text — the changes in China. I guess it ended up being more ambitious than we originally planned, partly because of the way things unfolded; I happened to stumble on good material and the magazine let me stretch the project out, so I just went from there. That’s the working pattern I often have with The New Yorker — just explore something and let it take its own form.

How did you find the story — or even find the town of Lishui — in the first place?

I had been in China for a long time, and at that point I was planning to leave and only wanted to start projects I was really interested in. One of the gaps in my knowledge was the factory town. I wanted to find something in that area — southeast China — and I wanted it to be something I could follow over time, something that would allow me to return to the same place every year or so and track the changes through that. There was a link to driving — the reason I began to explore this region was because they were building new highways there, and I had always heard about how regions adapted very quickly to new roads. I looked at how a village responded to a new road outside of Beijing, but I thought it would be interesting to see what happens in the factory world. They were building a new highway [outside of Wenzhou] and we knew it would be finished in a few months, so what would happen in the first year or two after it was done? The first thing I did was to fly down to Wenzhou and rent a car.

When and how did you meet Wang Aiguo and Gao Xiaomeng, the factory bosses who were the catalysts of the story? And I assume you speak fluent Mandarin, because there never seems to be a language barrier in your reporting.

Before I met them there was a lot of groundwork involved. Mark and I pinpointed this region as a part of China we know has a big factory economy, and we knew a highway was being built along this stretch, heading northwest from Wenzhou. So we started exploring. My first trip down there was very open-ended. I rented a car in Wenzhou and spent two weeks just driving, stopping in towns, talking to people, and looking for a place to focus on. When I passed through Lishui, they had a few things that really jumped out at me. They had a factory zone that was in the process of being built, a new dam, and you could tell it was a place about to boom. And we had found it at this interesting stage of development. So, by the end of that first trip, I decided this town was the focus.

On the next trip, two months later, my goal was to find some people or some particular institution I would be able to follow for the rest of the story, hopefully. It’s a little bit frightening when you go into something so open-ended, but I also kind of liked that because I prefer that to having focused on something too early in the process. It allows me to respond to what I’m seeing.

So I went back, lived in the hotel for a while, and just got up every morning to drive around the region talking to people. I spent a lot of time talking to construction workers because I originally thought I would follow a group of them. I also talked to some government people, and to people setting up little restaurants and shops, and I stopped at the factory district as well, where I happened to meet the young man whose name is Boss Gao.

I was just walking around, and I saw this guy who was dressed pretty nice, which is unusual in a place like that, where everyone is pretty much a construction worker, and they all look like people from the countryside. This guy was different, so I walked up and started chatting with him. He said he was from Wenzhou and had come to open this factory, and he was a little distracted and nervous. People are quite friendly in these areas, and if you’re a foreigner it works to your advantage, because you’re a bit of an oddball and they’re interested in you.

But in this case, he and his uncle showed up, and they were so distracted by what they were doing — they had to set up this factory — that they didn’t care too much about my hanging around. I spent two hours with them — we had no introduction, and they didn’t know me beyond my name. I showed them I was a journalist, but really they were intent on other things, and it was neat to watch.

I felt very fortunate — at that point I had already spent a month in the area, so there had been a lot of investment already. That’s how things work — you can’t predict these. By the end of the trip, that was the most vivid scene I had, so I thought, “Well, maybe this will be promising; let’s see how I do the next time.” I showed up the next time and they were setting up the machines. At that point, they had seen me before, they were getting to know me, and we had a relationship developing. Later, I was closer to their workers than I was to them, and at various points they seemed to get worried about my presence. Often in China, they aren’t nervous when they find out you’re a journalist; they’re concerned later, about what’s going to happen when your story is published, and whether it’s going to get them in trouble.

How did you overcome that and build trust? I would think that any journalist reporting overseas must work twice as hard to build trust and ensure steady access. How did that work with the bosses?

One of the things I had to deal with, repeatedly, was the concern that maybe I wasn’t really a journalist. Maybe I was an investor, or maybe I was a competitor and I wanted to steal the plans, because I was spending a lot of time with their equipment, which, as you can tell from the story, was acquired in a surreptitious fashion. In this world, that’s how things work, and people often say they are people they are not. So I was constantly fighting that battle.

I became very close to the person in the story identified as the mechanic. He was probably my closest friend among those groups, and when I would take him out to dinner, the bosses seemed very nervous about it. I thought, “God, this guy has been poached so many times, they can’t trust anyone.” So I would show them things I had published, copies of my books, and so forth. In the end, they trusted me to a degree, but there were some things they wouldn’t let me see.

The fact that it had developed organically helped a lot. If I had gone through an intermediary and said, “I heard you guys are starting a business and I’d like to follow you for a year,” I don’t think they would have gone for it.

How much time did you put in at the factory? The story spans a year, you’ve mentioned several trips already — how many visits did you make, and how much time and money did you ultimately invest in this project?

I made 10 trips, and spent a total of almost exactly 100 days on the ground. And that doesn’t include any research I did in Beijing. There were a couple of factors involved when it came to expenses. One was that I was living in China, so National Geographic didn’t have to pay for a trans-Pacific flight every time I went. While the flights aren’t cheap, their stories are well-funded. It’s pretty cheap on the ground, however. Renting a car down there costs $25. I stayed in the same hotel in Lishui every time, so I had a relationship with them and they charged me $20 a night. It’s not that much, and meals are dirt cheap.

The larger issue is that it’s not a smart way to spend more than a third of a year on one story. As the project went on, I began to realize this was something that would be part of the book I was working on, and at that point I figured, “Well, even if this doesn’t make sense for a magazine story, that’s fine, I’m going to invest extra time in it.” Even after the story was published, I went back twice to follow up for my book.

The magazine was willing to do it because I’ve done stories for them in the past and they trusted me; I give them a lot of credit for that. We couldn’t tell where the story was going, and I couldn’t tell them until about the third or fourth trip. By then, I could sketch out something I thought was going to happen, but there were points when the factory might go bankrupt, and I didn’t know what that would do to the story.

Well, the factory did go bankrupt in the end, not that it hurt the story. What else did you think was going to happen, and how did you prepare narrative contingencies plans for each?

By the third trip, I had a pretty good sense that it would work, one way or another, and in some sense, it didn’t really matter what the final outcome was. It’s going to tell you something, and it’s nice, in a way, that you can’t choose. I can’t decide if the factory is going to be a success or a failure, and that means I’m not making judgments about that — I’m looking to see how it unfolds. In the meantime, I’m looking at a lot of research on the side, because this narrative is only the skeleton of the story, and you can hang a lot of things along that structure — things like the real estate deals in town and how that works with funding — so you know you have lots of stuff that’s going to contribute to your portrait of this place.

It’s a mistake to look at it, when you’re in the middle of it, and say, “everything depends on this one factory.” It’s never that way; it’s very important that it’s there, but there was lots of stuff I was researching on the side, and I had faith that it would work out. I became very careful about the timing, and I would call people there all the time so I could be there and see things that were happening, whether they were hiring workers or testing a machine, or whatever�.

Did they try to cut off your access at any point? How did you manage to win their trust so completely?

If it had been Nike, this wouldn’t have happened; if it were a big factory, no way. That’s sort of how I envisioned this when I was planning the project — I thought about finding entrepreneurs, but I realized a big plant wasn’t going to give a lot of access. So I had my eye out for smaller entrepreneurs, because I knew that was my best chance. When you’re at that level, the relationship is what matters, so they’re more tolerant of me because we hang out and share meals, and it doesn’t take long for you to talk to 20 people. I know everybody there quite well, ranging from the young women on the assembly line, to the main mechanic, to the bosses.

That must have produced a stupendous amount of material over the course of a year. How did you set about streamlining the story? You ultimately chose a chronological structure, which sounds like the simplest in retrospect, but did you consider any others while you were writing?

There was a lot of material, obviously, so the challenge is focus. But I guess I’ve been through this before, gathering material that’s ready for a book while working on one story, so I just needed to be judicious about it. In this case, I remember that this one came pretty naturally. I was on a tight deadline, because when the factory was moving, I needed to see that, obviously, and the magazine’s deadline was right after that. I made the trip down there, watched them move, and then I immediately flew back to Beijing and went to my place in the countryside and wrote it. But it was relatively easy to write because things had fallen into place and my structure was going to follow a linear narrative, so it was just a matter of whittling down the material and calling out the key themes I wanted the reader to understand.

I thought it was very important for people to understand the seat-of-the-pants aspect of China — this amazing resourcefulness, which can be a type of inefficiency. Everybody in that factory — from the bosses to the lowest worker — came from a farm. It’s really stunning in that it says a lot about what’s happening in China, all these people leaving the countryside. They have to recreate themselves, acquire new skills, and do things they’ve never done before. The other thing I wanted people to think about is all the energy that goes into these products that you’d never pay attention to — a little ring on a bra strap, something you’ll never think twice about.

Three tips for reporting an in-depth feature
1. Shoot low
Hessler knew he wouldn’t have access to a big factory like Nike so he found a smaller one.
2. Build trust
Hessler spent 100 days on the ground reporting, during which he spent hundreds of hours talking with the subjects of his story.
3. Let the story develop
“The fact that it developed organically helped a lot,” Hessler says.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

The evolution of presidential campaigns from whistle-stop tours to televised spectacle to post-modern Mobius strips of narratives and meta-narratives has forced a similar evolution in campaign reportage. Read The New York Times on any given day this primary season, and you will find (especially online), various strains of typical “horse race” reportage, boys-on-the-bus-style meta-media coverage, and even minute-by-minute bloggy coverage of debates, practically scored like a boxing match. But what you will not find is the journalism of rage.

Rage was Hunter S. Thompson’s specialty, and he may have been its sole practitioner (at least in its most lyrical form.) Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 has its rightful place on the (short)list of great campaign books, but no one has ever been able to channel his bitingly funny rage, disgust, and thwarted aspirations since then. Not many have tried.

His closest heir may be Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who has spent the last five years on the magazine’s National Affairs desk — Thompson’s old beat at the magazine — chronicling the worst aspects of American politics and having a wickedly good time doing it. When he wasn’t busy skewering one candidate after another this primary season (which seems like it started sometime in 2006), Taibbi was writing his third book, due out in May. The Great Derangement is his immersion into the far-Left and far-Right wings of American politics, as makes the argument that a shared middle ground has simply fallen away.

While no one can replace Hunter Thompson, Taibbi openly aspires to one aspect of his legacy. “When the other reporters came home from the campaign trail, their wives had to ask them what it was really like out there,” Taibbi says. “But Hunter Thompson’s wife didn’t have to ask him, because she just read his pieces.”

Name: Matt Taibbi
Position: Contributing editor, Rolling Stone
Resume: Prior to Rolling Stone, he was a columnist for the New York Press and before that the founder of The Beast, a Buffalo-based alt-weekly. He spent 1991-1994 and 1995-2002 in the former Soviet Union and Mongolia, playing professional baseball in the former and basketball in the latter before resettling in Moscow to co-found an English-language newspaper, the eXile.
Birthday: Born 1970; “I’m 37.”
Hometown: Hingham, Massachusetts
Education: BA, Bard College
Marital status: Single
First section of Sunday Times: “I don’t read the Sunday Times.”
Favorite TV shows: The Wire
Last books you read: Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal; The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl
Guilty pleasure: “Hours-per-day scanning of obscure sports Web sites like Baseball Prospectus.”

The dominant tone or emotion in your Low Post columns — and just about everything you write — is disgust. With that mind, who or what disgusts you the most this primary season?

That’s a tough question. I think Hillary disgusts me more than anyone else. Obviously, I wasn’t a big fan of Rudy Giuliani and I’m still not a fan of John McCain, for a lot of reasons. The way he talks about the war is unbelievably irresponsible and kind of scary, but Hillary is the one who really, really gets to me. I was at an event that she did in Youngstown, Ohio the other night, and she comes in there ranting and raving and presenting herself as this great ally of the working man, and she’s talking about how NAFTA has to be fixed and free trade agreements have had such a terrible effect on communities like yours, but she supported every free trade agreement that ever crossed her desk.

Three months ago, she voted to expand NAFTA to Peru, and she’s got one of the biggest union busters in the country, Mark Penn, working as her chief campaign strategist. She’s sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart for years while they crushed unions, one after the other, and without skipping a beat, she presents herself as a modern day Samuel Gompers. All politicians do that — I get that — but there is something about the way Hillary Clinton presents herself as a critic of the war even after she voted for it. People forget before the war that she was one of the first people to talk about how Saddam Hussein was harboring Al Qaeda. I guess it’s normal political behavior, but there is something about the way she does it that really, really gets me.

Are there any actual heroes in this campaign? Barack Obama has been cast in that role by the press, but does he deserve the tongue bath he’s gotten from the media?

He’s running an unbelievably cautious campaign and has really worked hard to not say a thing. I think there’s deliberately a lack of substance in a lot of his policy proposals, and it’s hard to say what he’s all about on the issues. My sense of him — and this comes from talking to people in Congress — is that he’s real on enough issues to take him seriously when he talks about change. I know people in the campaign finance reform community, for instance, who think he is the best in Congress on the issues. When they want to get something done, they go to his office. I genuinely believe that his feelings about the war were more critical from the beginning, and I think he’s probably more in line with most progressives about the war than Hillary is. I think Hillary, deep in her heart, believes the Democratic party needs to be more aggressive and militarist to survive politically.

If there is a hero, I really like how John Edwards ran his campaign. The thing that bothers me about American politics, more than anything else, is that these guys know what goes on behind the scenes. They know how legislation gets passed, they know how the money works, and they never, ever educate us about any of this stuff. They just get up there and pander to us — they talk about themes they think we’re going to respond to — and Edwards didn’t do it this time. In the Iowa campaign I watched, he was very explicit about how the money game works in Washington, and how companies pour cash into both parties and to obtain very specific results. In one speech I watched, he pointed out that when the pharmaceutical industry was heavily supporting the Democratic Party, they convinced the Democrats to slow down legislation that would have sped up the production of generic prescription drugs. He was giving specific examples that were really teaching people about what was happening, and regardless of the fact he didn’t win, it was a public service.

And yet that message didn’t resonate enough with Iowa voters — maybe Edwards’ most natural constituency out of any state. So whose fault is that? The electorate? The candidates? The press?

It’s all three. For the candidates, the easiest route for them to win an election is to identify through polls what voters respond to, and just hammer them again and again. That comes down to the specific words like “values” and “security” and “strength,” and saying those words over and over again is soothing to a lot of voters. They try very hard to do that, because they know they can be criticized by taking specific positions on things. On the flip side, the mainstream media doesn’t really have a strong interest in covering heavy issues, because for the most part it’s boring and it’s much harder to sell tabloid newspapers or to keep the 24-hour cable news cycle buzzing. If you just watch television, you’ll notice that you never see poor people on TV unless they are being chased by cops, and that’s because poverty is depressing. And depressing things don’t sell advertising.

So there’s never any overt commands from the editors to the writers, but it’s built into how reporters perceive reality. They can tell what’s a juicy “news” story and what isn’t. So when, for instance, Hillary takes a shot at Obama that’s a little bit personal, the media immediately gravitate to that moment because they know it’s going to be the headline. It’s not because they’re consciously trying to hide the truth — that’s just the way the business works. And it is a business.

And so is Rolling Stone. With that mind, who are your editors there, why did their hire you, and what are your marching orders on the campaign trail?

I have three editors I deal with. At the top is [editor-in-chief] Jann Wenner. [Managing editor] Will Dana and [executive editor] Eric Bates are the two I deal with on a day-to-day basis, mostly Eric this week.

I think they hired me because they were familiar with my writing and because I have the same sensibility as these people. They said, “go call it as you see it,” and it just so happens that I happen to see it in line with their point-of-view. There’s an argument that Rolling Stone isn’t counter-cultural anymore, and that we’re a part of the mainstream now, but I think we are trying to provide something that other publications and news organizations can’t. We have the license to talk about things that other people won’t because we’re a music magazine and we don’t have to worry about access for anything. The Washington Post can’t be completely over the top about how it covers the Bush administration because they need to be traveling with Bush all the time. We don’t have to, so we don’t worry about it. We say whatever we want, and the best thing about the American media is that if there’s a market for something, it’ll exist. People still apparently want this, so we get to give it to them.

So what kind of access do you have? The inevitable fallout from taking a hot poker to seemingly everyone in the political establishment must mean that a lot people won’t return your calls. How does trafficking in angry journalism affect your ability to do day-to-day reporting?

Obviously it’s hard on that front, because some politicians don’t want to deal with me, or anyone like me. But there are some who will. There are a lot of guys in politics who are really mad and really committed, and they’re primarily motivated by disgust over what’s happening. [U.S. Senator] Bernie Sanders [D.-Vermont] is a great example of a guy I can talk to as a person because we mostly feel the same way about things. He’s a guy I really admire, and he’s given me a lot.

Hillary Clinton is not going to tell me anything I don’t know already. When I’m talking to politicians, I’m trying to learn something. And if I can’t do that, I don’t see the point. There are people out there who have got a hold of an issue they think they’re on the right side of, and they are more than happy to talk to me. And that’s refreshing.

Is writing with anger and scorn and disgust really the best way to connect with readers? Or is the problem with American journalism the absence of that?

It’s funny; I lived in Russia for 10 years, and there reporters are given license to editorialize as much as they want in their stories, even the investigative reporters. They’re allowed to write with style and a point of view. I don’t think it adversely affected the product at all, and in fact it enhanced it, and people become attached to their favorite writers, who they responded to as they would to a character they could trust.

I haven’t really tried to consciously imitate someone like Hunter Thompson, but I do remember one line from the Boys On The Bus, that when the other reporters came home from the campaign trail, their wives had to ask them what it was really like out there. But Hunter Thompson’s wife didn’t have to ask him, because she just read his pieces. That’s the way I’d like to do it. If we’re presenting a version of reality that’s different from what we actually experience, then what are we doing out there? If we’re adding an element that isn’t really there, then there is some kind of deception going on.

It’s better to show it the way it really is. And the way I perceive it is that there’s always a lot of fakery and falseness, and it’s kind of disgusting and offensive. I’m not trying to make people angry, I’m just trying to show them the way I see it, and I think most readers appreciate that. I think some people find the style abrasive, or disrespectful, but those people have plenty of other coverage they can read.

I take it that’s your approach in The Great Derangement as well. What was the genesis of your and how much (if at all) will it reflect your early coverage of this campaign?

It’s not really a campaign book, and it’s not a collection of pieces; it’s all original. Basically, while covering Congress and Washington politics, I noticed the book’s basic theme, which is that Washington doesn’t really work for the voters at all. It’s a very closed, money-driven dynamic that’s been described as “politicians get elected and serve their financial masters the entire time, and as a result you get a dysfunctional situation where the voters want one thing and get something completely different.”

What’s happened on both the Left and the Right is that people feel alienated and distrustful of mainstream politics, and they’re gravitating towards extreme and paranoid politics instead. On the Left you have the 9/11 Truth movement, which has developed tremendous momentum, and a lot of that is driven by the fact they feel sold out by the Democrats. On the Right, you have the Christian conservatives and these apocalyptic cults that have popped up, because a lot of these Christian conservatives elected the Republicans to cut spending and have small government along with enacting conservative social policies and they got none of that. So they gravitated towards something more extreme. I did some undercover stuff on both sides, and talked about Washington dynamics at the same time, how laws get passed and how the money thing works.

Is it still possible to even write a classic campaign narrative at this point? As The New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai put it in January: “I don’t feel like reading the vast majority of political books that are being written right now, and if I don’t feel like reading them, then no ordinary voter will feel like reading them.” Is it still possible to write such a book that anyone would want to read?

I’m primarily a comic. I was away from the United States for so long, I thought I would love to go home and cover a presidential campaign because it looks like such a disgusting black comedy from the distance. But one of the things that I’ve found is that since Joe McGinnis or Hunter Thompson or Tim Crouse were covering them, is that people are aware of the other story out there — the behind-the-scenes thing. Everyone is so much more tight-lipped, because everything is in play now. It’s much more antiseptic on the bus, and the whole atmosphere of the aides and the reporters is not a whole lot more interesting than what you’re seeing on television actually.

You have to go a bit further to find out what the story is, and what’s funny about. The real story on the campaign trail is unfortunately not the candidates, because what’s really happening is these politicians are taking an enormous amount of money behind the scenes, and four years down the road, after they get elected, they have to start delivering on those favors. And we don’t see that dynamic. That’s the real story, if you could cover it. In the meantime, you have to try to find on the surface whatever evidence you can, and whenever you get a chance to talk about it, you take it. But it’s mostly hidden from view, and you’re deducing it, as opposed to covering it. It’s definitely harder than it used to be, that’s for sure.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

When Stephen Drucker was hired two years ago to remake Hearst’s House Beautiful, he decided to chart a third path between his predecessors two extremes. Marian McEvoy had attempted to be avant garde; after 9/11 and a million trends stories on “cocooning,” she was replaced by Traditional Home‘s Mark Mayfield, who was traditional to the point of terminal dullness.

Enter Drucker, the former editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living, to reboot it with a Q&A format and a formula that blends the best of traditional shelter ‘porn,’ i.e. richly photographed rooms, with the unstuffy service to younger competitors like Domino. It seems to be working — ad pages are up so far this year, while Hearst has doubled down on the title by increasing its trim size and its cover price to chase more affluent readers. More to point: Drucker found an identity for a magazine that, by his own admission, “had lost its way,” which is more than can be said for the late House & Garden,” which Cond� Nast closed in November after reportedly losing nearly $100 million over the past decade. Shelter editors were shocked, but not surprised at the decision, which begged the question: What is the model of a modern shelter title?

Name: Stephen Drucker
Position: Editor-in-chief, House Beautiful
Resume: Editor, The New York Times Home section; launch editor, NYT Styles section; editor-in-chief, Martha Stewart Living
Birthdate: June 24, 1953
Hometown: New York City
Education: BA Vassar College; MS Historic Preservation, Columbia
Marital status: 14 years with Frank
First section of the Sunday Times: Real Estate
Favorite television show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: London at the current exchange rate
Last book read: John Fowler: Prince of Decorators by Martin Wood

I’ll cut to the chase. What does the untimely death of House & Garden — if not quite the doyenne, then the former belle of the ball — mean for the shelter category as a whole? When you consider the rise of ‘makeover’ television, the advent of interiors shopping magazines like Domino, and the invention of design blogs, are the classic shelter magazines’ days numbered?

It doesn’t necessarily say anything about the rest of category. It’s terrible to see any magazine die, but you can also read too much into it. It’s a reflection of one magazine’s strategy and one company’s business. It’s like saying, because one store goes out on Madison Avenue, that “Uptown is dead.” They’re not really connected. There’s always competition, there’s always turmoil in media, things are constantly changing, and that’s the ins and outs of running a business. We’ve had enormous successes here in the last two years at House Beautiful, that really show you that it’s about creating a magazine for what the marketplace wants.

And what do the readers and advertisers want, exactly, from a classic shelter magazine today? How will they be forced to evolve?
House Beautiful has been around since 1896; this is not the first time it’s evolved to reflect the times and the current marketplace. What’s happening now in shelter magazines, is that there used to be a few, and now there are hundreds. How people think of their homes has changed enormously when you live in a world where people go to work in short sleeves, and get on airplanes practically in their underwear. They’re not necessarily living in homes with Georgian furniture, either. What they think of as “home” is different, and you have to reflect that. I’m trying to create a magazine that is a reflection of American homes and American life, right now.

But you can’t rewrite the magazine’s DNA, either. How do you strike a balance between readers looking for DIY information and the decorator crowd?

Well it’s an over-simplification to say that it’s either for do-it-yourselfers or decorators. What really has happened is: everybody is involved in every decision. Nobody says, “I want that decorator’s look, give it to me.” Everybody is involved, and you never know who’s going to do what. A person with all the money in the world can get their kicks from painting a room themselves. A person who has more modest means can go out now and buy a $5,000 or $10,000 bathtub because that’s what their dream is. It’s the high/low thing that happened in fashion — there really are no rules anymore. The only rule is that people do it their way, and you have to give people a lot of choice. You used to be able to tell people what that was, and now people really want to choose.

You recently increased the page size and the cover price while cutting back on the circulation. It seems like you’re trying to move more upscale. Is that your strategy?

It’s really very simple. People buy shelter magazine because of the pictures. That’s what it’s all about. They want beautiful photography, and they want to see every detail, in every corner of the room, and with a bigger page, the more they see.

Does that help make shelter magazines Internet-proof?

They are safer in a lot of ways. In a funny way, shelter magazines are like books — readers keep them, and they really can’t bring themselves to throw them away. It’s not the same looking on the Internet at a photograph of a room. The Internet is a stimulating medium, and when people read a shelter magazine, they go into a very introspective, relaxed mode. It’s like the opposite of being on a computer, they want to get lost in the magazine.”

That’s very Marshall McLuhan of you. You’re saying the Internet is a hot medium, while magazines are cool?

It is, in a way. It’s almost as if the Internet is too hot for the core readers of shelter magazines. The Internet is still great for commerce, and it’s great for that needle in the haystack search. We recently launched a fresh design of the Web site. We have this amazing tool called “Paint a Room,” where we give you this library of rooms and about a thousand different paint colors, and you can change the colors of any of room into any color. Now that’s great use of the Internet.

The most endangered parts of print are the really time-sensitive ones. There’s nothing urgent about a shelter magazine. You can’t become yesterday’s news; you never feel like you got it out a month late. But nobody wants to read business news a month late.

You once said in an interview that some shelter editors “over-intellectualize” their subject in an attempt to imbue it with significance. How do you strike a balance between being that and just being a resource for someone who wants to decorate?

It really isn’t that hard. I’ve been involved in shelter magazines for nearly 30 years. One of things I’ve noticed over the years is that editors feel the need to make it really important, and they make it important by over-intellectualizing it. It’s really about pleasure. It doesn’t need a big intellectual justification. It doesn’t have to be puffed up into something big and important. What often happens is that while everyone is intellectualizing, all the reader just wants to know is, “What’s that great color blue on the wall?” Every good design magazine is a balance of some level of service, and some level of dreaming and aspiration. Even the magazines you think of as compete dream books are filled with the service; it’s just a question of how you package it. People want to see beautiful pictures, but you also have to give them some tools to get them there. For us, the main tool is color. Color is to decorating magazines what sex is to women’s service magazines. There is an endless fascination with this unknowable subject. It’s always mysterious and one step ahead of everyone, and no one has figured it out. As with everything else in our world.

How have the skill sets for shelter editors changed over the course of your career? My understanding is that the staff is composed of visual people — the stylists — and words people, the writers and editors. Are those skill sets merging, or is your staff still composed of editors who do one or the other?

When I started, it was really very simple. You started as an editorial assistant. You hoped your boss left, retired, or died, and you stayed, stayed, and stayed, and the last person standing, with luck, got to be editor-in-chief in their 40s or 50s. [Ed. note: This is almost exactly how Margaret Russell became editor-in-chief of HB rival Elle D�cor.] It was really a very linear career path. It was about digging in, and one person rose to the top.

Now, it’s very different. It’s much more of a meritocracy. Staffs are much smaller than they were 25 years ago. It used to be that every assistant had an assistant, and jobs were incredibly specialized, and you started out writing one caption an issue, if you were lucky. Now, there is much more respect for people at every level of a magazine, because the staff is smaller. It’s recognized that a 24-year-old editorial assistant may have a lot to contribute with voice, their knowledge of the Internet, and what they like, because it’s an indicator of what’s to come. It’s very different from what it was. It used to be, “Go stand in the corner and be quiet until you are spoken to, 10 years from now.” As staffs have gotten smaller, the specialization has ended. A person who is a stylist may jump in there and write a story. Look at our magazine; it is a Q&A magazine. It’s very deliberately not about formal writing and word-smithing. It’s about good ideas and straight talk, and the way people say it is the way we print it. You can do that whether you are an editorial assistant or a senior writer, you can be equally good at it.

Where have you looked for staff? Are shelter books a very self-contained world with a self-contained pool of talent, or have you looked outside the usual suspects when hiring?

At a national magazine you have the advantage of being able to recruit from other publications, even for the entry-level jobs. Very often we’ll recruit from regional magazines, where we’ve seen people that show real talent. Or we’ll recruit people from interior design offices, people looking to make a career switch. They started off as interior designers but decided they don’t like being designers, although they do love the industry. We usually don’t get people who just want to work at a magazine.

Yes, shelter magazines always struck me as being similar to fashion magazines that way. Each is a universe unto itself in terms of the talent.

It’s a great art to write fashion copy. It is a really specialized and under-appreciated skill to write those haikus that go into fashion magazines. To write captions for magazines like ours, they have to sound really musical. It’s all in the ear, and you either have it or you don’t. There is such a thing as a natural writer. Writing is all in the ear — people think it’s in the eyes, but it’s not. When you read, you are really hearing it as you read, and it’s like having perfect pitch; it’s a musical talent. You can teach a person to be a serviceable writer, but you can’t teach them to be a good writer.

You’ve been on the job for two years now, and you were essentially brought in to lead a turnaround effort at a magazine that had lost its way, at least editorially speaking. The turnaround would appear to be over, and a success, but is it? When you arrived, did you have a one-year plan, a two-year plan, or a five-year plan, and when did the magazine stop “turning around” and find its stride?

When you come to a magazine, it’s a mistake to think you can just walk in and succeed. No matter how much experience you have, you have to come in and get to know the reader of your particular magazine, even if you’ve worked at five other magazines in your category. The reader of your particular magazine has very particular likes and dislikes, and it takes an ear to learn what they are, no matter how astute an editor you are.

I would say the rebuild of any magazine is about a two-year process. The first year, you’re learning. The second year you get to put it all into action and see if it’s working. From then on, it’s just fine-tuning and evolving it. Personally, I hate it when a magazine changes its identity all the time; it drives me crazy. It is to your benefit as an editor-in-chief to get it to where you want it to go as fast as you can, and then just keep fine-tuning it, but the key is you can’t change the it of it.

Here’s a good analogy for you. Think of a hit TV show. Hit TV shows usually do not generally become hits out of the box. The first year, you are getting the rust out of your faucet. You are learning what works and what doesn’t work, and everyone on the team is learning to work together, while just a few people out there are discovering the show. The second year, you start to hit your stride, and audiences start to talk about it. The third year, that’s when a show really becomes a monster. It’s not until the second or third year that cast and writing team are firing on all cylinders, and it spreads like fire through the culture. It’s really the same as a magazine. It’s not fair to an editor-in-chief to think, “Oh they just put out their first issue, and it’s brilliant and they are there.”

Greg Lindsay is a freelancer writer and frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

I met Will Connors this past July, the night I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A few weeks before, The New York Times had run a front page story about the Muslim rebellion brewing in the country’s eastern desert. While the story had been written by the Times‘ East Africa bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettleman, out of Nairobi, there was a second name appended to the bottom of the story, an “additional reporting by” credit given to someone operating out of Addis Ababa. That was Will. My fianc�, worried that I knew absolutely no one in the city, promptly tracked him down through (what else?) his blog and introduced us.

Will was The New York Times‘ de facto Ethiopia correspondent at the time and the paper’s only reporter on the ground there. This despite the fact that he’s 25 years old. After graduating college, he decided the action was on Horn of Africa, and set out to find it, landing in Ethiopia, learning the local language (Amharic, native only to the Christian population there), and working his way up through the local papers before getting one tiny break from the Times. It struck me that he fulfilled the dream so many journalists have of being foreign correspondents, and he had done it without suffering the tedium of rising through a paper’s ranks. Shortly after my visit, the dream turned into a nightmare when the government cracked down on “dissidents,” including journalists, forcing Connors to flee the country. (Our Q&A was conducted via email from his temporary quarters in Nairobi.) Now he’s on the road, stringing for the Times from Congo and next from either Nigeria or Indonesia. Magazine editors looking for their own foreign correspondent should get in touch.

Name: Will Connors
Position: Solo
Resume: “A work in progress”
Birthdate: January 10, 1982
Hometown: Sugar Hill, New Hampshire
Education: University of Chicago, “where the fun goes to die.”
Marital status: “Monk-, hermit-, eunuch-like”
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports — “if the Yankees lost.”
Guilty pleasure: “R. Kelly, H-Town, Ginuwine, Isley Brothers … except,
wait. I don’t really feel guilty at all.”
Last book read: A couple of Mahfouz’ [i.e. Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist]

What originally made you want to move to Africa? Why did you want to move overseas in the first place, and how did you choose Africa?

After college — I studied English and Sociology at the University of Chicago — and an anti-hunger fellowship spent in Alaska and D.C., I was extremely restless and wanted to travel abroad, specifically to Africa. I started reading as much as I could get my hands on, and pretty quickly began focusing on East Africa, then Ethiopia. The only African country never to be colonized, Ethiopia has an amazingly unique culture and history. Plus, the food and coffee are fantastic. I didn’t have a job at the time, or any prospects at all, really, so finally I just bought a one-way ticket and went. Earlier I had arranged to have lunch with someone who was moving to Ethiopia a month before me, solely to ask if I could crash on their couch when I arrived. I didn’t know anyone except them, so despite feeling bad about being a total mooch, I was desperate. And like almost all Ethiopians, they were wonderful and endlessly hospitable.

Once you were on the ground in Ethiopia, how did you set out to be a journalist? Did you hook up with the local papers or the NGOs first? How did you make ends meet in the early going? How did you make contacts? What was the media scene in Addis like?

I hadn’t planned to become a journalist, although I think the impulse had always been in the back of mind somewhere. Almost unconsciously, as soon as I touched down in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, I began looking for jobs at local English-language papers. I quickly found a gig as a copy editor at a very small regional paper, then with a lifestyle magazine.

I arrived in 2005, immediately after contentious elections and during continued post-election violence, so a bunch of local newspapers had been shut down and their editors arrested. It was not a great time for the free press in Ethiopia, but the paper I started at had a pretty good reputation for remaining independent. I got into the shit a month after my arrival. A colleague and I were detained for shooting pictures of government soldiers beating some kids, and though we were only held for about 12 hours, it was still freaky. Plus I felt like a total ass for getting my colleague, an Ethiopian, beaten up. Typical na�ve
American stuff.

I did a bunch of other writing and editing jobs for the next year, most notably for the BBC and an online paper called the Middle East Times. To pay the bills I also wrote two books for the NGO Save the Children, which I was hesitant about at first due to some of my own personal reservations about NGOs. But the gig afforded me the opportunity to travel extensively in rural Ethiopia and really get to know the country and the people better. I got to sleep on tanned cow-hide mats outside, under the stars, with the friendliest and hardiest peoples. It was an amazing, humbling experience.

How did you first make contact with The New York Times, and how did you cultivate that relationship to the point where you were writing features for the paper? What is your relationship with Jeffrey Gettleman like?

I’ll admit it. I was taking a nap when The New York Times called me for the first time. I panicked when finally I answered and ran outside in my boxers to get better cell phone reception. The neighbors were not amused. The Times correspondent in Nairobi wanted me to do some work on the ground on an American citizen who was being held in a secret prison in Ethiopia. That was my first big break, and I did a good job, so they were willing to use me again. It was a good thing they couldn’t see me napping and drooling on myself over the phone.

The downside of working the Times, of course, is the negative attention it must bring in countries unfriendly to the press. What were the chain of events that forced you to leave Ethiopia?

From then on, the news continued to come from Ethiopia, so I was working steadily for the Times. The correspondent was very generous with shared bylines and even let me do a few of my own stories. Shit got intense when we started working on a story about a rebel group in the eastern part of the country. That’s when the government began tapping my phone and following me. The Ministry of Information said I could never work as a journalist in Ethiopia. I said, “Never?” They said, “Never!” Eventually things got so intense that people high up started recommending I leave the country. I never wanted to, and hesitated until the last minute, but finally did, with regret.

Did you ever feel your life was in danger?

What I feared for most was not my own safety but that of the Ethiopians who knew me and worked with me on various stories. Any Ethiopian seen with me would be questioned, and sometimes much worse. Even my roommate, who is Ethiopian and works for the post office, was interrogated, threatened, and followed for weeks after I left. He and most others did not have the luxury to flee.

What are your plans from here? Are you hoping to work full-time for the Times? Where are you headed next?

The Times has been great to me, giving me chances to get my own pieces in the paper and continue working. I’m headed for either Nigeria or Indonesia, or both, next, to continue freelancing. Hopefully a full-time gig with a paper or magazine will happen soon.

What advice would you give to journalists hoping to become foreign correspondents (or even work overseas)?

I’m still relatively green, but if I had to give advice to aspiring journalists I guess it would be this: If you’re restless or don’t want to work for years getting coffee for editors, and want to work abroad, then just go. In a strange, new place, you’ll be forced to figure it out quickly. Oh, and if you’re in a foreign country and your local colleague tells you not to take anymore pictures of soldiers, listen to him!

Greg Lindsay is a freelancer and frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently at work on his first book.

Sarah Lacy’s new book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 tells the story of what happened after the dot com era’s implosion at the beginning of the decade. She spent a year trawling startups you might have heard of — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Yelp, Slide, Digg, Six Apart — and crawling inside the heads of their founders, many of whom had escaped the crash unscathed or even come out ahead, but were desperate to prove their success hadn’t been a fluke (or worse, a con). Lacy has spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley as a reporter, first at the Silicon Valley Business Journal and later at BusinessWeek, where she’s retired from the grind of beat reporting but continues to write her biweekly column “Valley Girl.” She’s since branched out into video as the co-host of Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker and as a blogger herself. And she continues to climb on stage as a moderator and host even after her infamous fireside chat with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at this spring’s South By Southwest conference.

Name: Sarah Lacy
Position: columnist, BusinessWeek; co-host, Yahoo’s Tech-Ticker; blogger Sarahlacy.com; author OYLTYG
Resume: Memphis Business Journal, San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal, BusinessWeek, all as staff reporters covering finance/tech. Now self employed and contracting
Birthdate: 12-29-1975
Hometown: Memphis, Tenn.
Education: Rhodes College, B.A. Literature
Marital status: Married to photographer/designer Geoffrey Ellis
First section of the Sunday Times: “Ha ha ha New York question! It sits in a bag on my front step. I’ll check out business stories online though.”
Favorite television show: “I love TV and it changes all the time. Re-discovering Gilmore Girls on the days I work from home. It makes for a nice lunch break.”
Guilty pleasure: “Books by Stephanie Meyer. Yes, even the teen ones.”
Last book read: The Road

What’s it like to attempt (and unlike some, actually finish) a book that tells the story of Silicon Valley? Is yours a sequel of sorts to the ones that came before? And what are the themes shared by your book and the Silicon Valley canon?

A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone’s books are incredible. I think his Infinite Loop is the best book that’s been written about Apple. I read it nine years ago, and it really made me want to write my own. You know, these are stories that are so iconic — American Dream stories. The people who are building these companies are, for all of their flaws, so likeable because they didn’t come from money, and they’re trying to build something greater than themselves. The complaint is always that these stories are rose-y, but that’s because ultimately these stories are so tied into our core values as a society. So you can hate them for a lot of personal reasons, but people really want to believe these guys were flukes. But if you reason how hard these guys worked, you can’t help but respect them. And that’s hard for me, because it’s easier to write about a total fluke.

Is it really accurate to portray these companies as psychological extensions of their founders? Journalists have always made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates act as stand-ins for their companies, and I would think that’s an even less effective tactic in the era of Web 2.0 and social media. It’s not like Facebook and has thrived because of a cult of personality around Mark Zuckerberg.

You know, I think it really is that easy. One thing I learned in the past nine years of covering the Valley is that they really are outgrowths of their founders. They are very, very personal projects, and they take on the personalities of their founders in the way public companies can’t. There’s a place late in the book that looks at everyone’s offices and how much they mirror their founders. You can blindfold me and put me in any one of them, and I could tell you immediately where I was because of the sounds and the smells. And it has nothing to do with what these companies actually do — it’s because of the founders. If you walk into Slide, you’ll see these engineers designing hearts and glitter and weird, frivolous things, but it’s a dead-quiet room full of people staring at Macs intensely. Everyone is in battle mode. And whenever Max [Levchin, Slide founder and PayPal co-founder] says something — he’s always surrounded by this group of his main engineers — it’s barely above a whisper. It’s very intense. So people have to be incredibly quiet just they can hear what he’s barking at them.

Whereas if you walk into Yelp — which Max is an investor in and which shares a lot of similarities with Slide — it’s completely different, as it’s very reflective of [cofounders] Russ [Simmons’] and Jeremy [Stoppelman’s] personalities. It’s very joke-y, very hip. There are a lot of women who work there, which happens to be more reflective of their site. And if you walk into Facebook, it’s a like a gross dorm room. It’s changed a little bit now that they’ve brought in other management, but up until a year ago, the main engineering floor was a dorm, and it was very much about what Mark likes.

Considering the workaholism that’s endemic to the Valley, how much time did you manage to wrangle from each of the major characters in your book, and how did you manage to even obtain so much access in the first place?

To this day, I don’t know, because these are people that won’t even do an hour interview with a reporter. And my average interview was four to six hours — it was an incredible amount of time. I think that these guys think people get them wrong a lot of the time, and that’s frustrating for them. They knew me well enough to know I live in the Valley and I’m not just a New York reporter parachuting in and spending an hour with them before trying to write a book. And I think they had a vested interest in wanting the story to be told correctly. The shocking thing for me during the time that I was writing my book was seeing how much of the coverage was wrong. I was frustrated by it, so I can only imagine how they felt. Beyond that, I think we just had a lot of fascinating conversations. It was almost like a therapy session for some of these guys. We talk about childhood, about relationships, about what drives them. They are so locked in, fighting for day-to-day survival as a startup that they don’t get a lot of time to sit down and be forced to be so reflective. I think a lot of them enjoyed it. I was always surprised at how much time I would get. I would show up thinking I would be there for an hour, and then I would be in someone’s office until they kicked me out six or eight hours later. And that was necessary — everyone can hide who they are for an hour, but beyond that, it becomes difficult.

In the past, reporters like The New York Times‘ John Markoff and Fortune‘s Brent Schlender leveraged their early access to Jobs and Gates into sterling careers as chroniclers of the Valley. Is that your goal with this book?

Yes, and no. I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I’m a business reporter — that’s what I do, and what I enjoy — and I don’t know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover. The reason I enjoy being a business reporter is that it’s basically about people playing a huge role in our day-to-day lives, ultimately, and I don’t know where else you’d find that besides Silicon Valley. I have such an issue with people covering the Valley who aren’t actually here that it would be hypocritical for me to leave and continuing to cover it. People always tell me the next stage of my career means moving to New York, but I never will. I don’t care how that affects my career, and I think it’s stupid that it would. But I would never call myself the next John Markoff because I think that convention has been broken; the media has changed too much. And I’m in a fortunate position where I don’t have to be a staff reporter or in New York to have a steady salary and have access to write stories with a wide distribution. I’m in a position now where I can write a column for BusinessWeek in which I can choose to write about Facebook or Slide or Digg. I also have my Yahoo job, where I can tell stories in video that are completely different, and then I also have my own blog, which is more narrowly techy and insidery than the Yahoo audience. So I have more freedom and I make way more money then I would anywhere else. Ultimately, this is the only way we as reporters have any leverage in the business, because revenues are shrinking and shrinking and our responsibilities at any given publication are growing and growing.

If you were starting your career over right now, would you even attempt to work at a major publication and pay your dues, or would you hook up with some blog network or similarly newfangled enterprise? What would be the fastest path to where you are now?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I think a lot of those blogs are having trouble expanding from one voice or personality, and the main problem is that it’s hard to hire away the top people from certain publications — if they’re going to go to a blog, why don’t they just start their own rather than work for you? By the same token, there’s a temptation to hire young people who are very enthusiastic, and then give them a voice and training, and that’s probably the way I would go. But that being said, you can really tell the difference between someone who’s worked at a mainstream publication and someone who hasn’t. Someone who’s worked at a major publication or daily goes through certain rigors and knows the rules of the game. You know when someone is trying to exploit you, and because there’s such a high bar of what you can publish in any given issue, you learn how rarely rumors turn out to be true.

I do worry about people who come right out of school and just start blogging, and it’s not because they aren’t good at what they do, but because I would never have learned as much as I did. So, if it were me, I would go about it the same way I actually did, working very intensely at different publication, and working my way up. But I would blog at the same time, and I would probably try to do some sort of video at the same time. But I didn’t necessarily have a glamorous career. I worked for maybe six or eight years in business journals and at the Silicon Valley Business Journal. And one of the reasons I have the career that I do is that all I covered was venture capital, day in and day out. If I was working at a bigger publication, I wouldn’t have done that because no one would have cared, and working at small publications is great because you get to learn a lot and make mistakes on a small stage. You also don’t get access granted to you. You learn how to steal it from large titles and you know how to see through a lot of things and behaviors when you do go to a large publication later. The one thing I didn’t do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn’t like that kind of journalism and I’m glad I didn’t, because that’s the business model that going totally extinct.

Your awkward interview with Mark Zuckerberg at South By Southwest this year raised the ire of an audience that was transformed into a virtual mob by the use of Twitter, thus making the event something like a scandal online. Did you find it ironic that the very phenomena you praised in your book and have spent years covering was used to tear you to shreds in front of a live audience?

It was funny. My husband had a really different reaction than mine. He wasn’t in Austin, but he was obviously horrified and upset and he never wanted to use the Internet again. I guess in covering the book, I had come across so many other examples of things like that happening to other people that I wasn’t particularly shocked by it because I was very aware there is an ugly side to empowering people so much. It was more hurtful and stunning on a personal level then it was a case of “Oh my god, how did this happen?” There was no real awakening about social media.

I think this was very exclusive to SXSW. I’ve been on stage several times since then and never been abused. I mean, SXSW is known as “Internet spring break.” There are a lot of CEOs who are very big into that crowd, and then there are stuffy business people who would never speak there for that reason. A ton of powerful Valley CEOs and others wrote me after the conference and said ‘I never want to do that conference after watching what happened to you.’ I’d be stunned if Mark Zuckerberg did it again.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

In his 25-year career, investigative reporter Richard Behar has written exposés on the Church of Scientology (igniting a decade’s worth of lawsuits), the Russian mafia, terrorist networks in Pakistan, the World Bank, the IRS, New York City’s garbage mafia, and how the FBI ignored its own agents’ early warnings of 9/11. This year, Fast Company* sent him to Africa to document China’s systematic strip-mining of the continent’s natural resources. He returned with an exhaustive account of social and environmental degradation, one in which we are all complicit. The photo above, for example, was taken outside a Zambian copper mine where a Chinese-owned explosives factory exploded in 2005, killing an unknown number of Zambians. Their unidentified remains are buried in the cemetery behind him. The copper extracted is eventually used in products exported to the U.S. While he was in the Congo, he caught an intestinal bug (not the first in his career, nor likely the last) that nearly killed him, but did provide the overarching metaphor for the piece, the longest in the magazine’s history.

Behar spent more than 20 years at Forbes, Time and Fortune before striking out on his own in 2004. That summer — four years ago today, in fact — Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov was shot dead on a Moscow street by unknown assailants. It was assumed their motivation was to silence once of Russia’s few independent and most voracious reporters. Upset by this blatant attempt to squelch Russia’s free press and the murky circumstances surrounding his death, Behar launched Project Klebnikov that summer. A worldwide confederation of journalists volunteering their time and expertise, Project K. is dedicated to bringing the killers to justice, and to demonstrating that murdering a reporter will not necessarily silence him. The model for Project K. was the “Arizona Project” organized in 1974 by legendary Newsday editor Bob Greene. After an Arizona Republic reporter was killed by a car bomb that spring, Greene assembled an all-star team of reporters and spent six months in Phoenix assembling a 23-part series on the links between state politics and organized crime. Greene, who assembled the first full-time investigative team at a national newspaper, was Behar’s first mentor. Perhaps one of the last of a literally dying breed, he passed away this spring at age 78. We spoke with Behar less than a week after he attended a memorial service for Greene on Long Island.

Name: Richard Behar
Position: Investigative journalist; director of Project Klebnikov
Resume: Forbes (1982-89); Time (1989-95); Fortune (1995-2004); freelance (2004+)
Birthdate: Age 47
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, grew up in Levittown, NY.
Education: New York University (journalism)
First section of the Sunday Times: Frank Rich (Week In Review)
Favorite TV show: Entourage
Guilty pleasure: Entourage and Lifetime (which I refer to as MSN, the “Men Suck Network”)
Last book you read: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, by Steve Weinberg

I’d like to talk about the “China in Africa” article for Fast Company first. It’s certainly no secret that China has been busy in Africa securing access to oil and other resources, but no one has questioned Chinese intentions on the continent as pointedly as you have. You didn’t just let the facts speak for themselves — you really issued a call to arms. Did you set out to write an overtly political wake-up call, or was this a natural extension of your investigative work?

I think every piece of investigative work is a wake-up call by its nature. It’s “Wake up everyone!” and “Look how this is working; look at how this system, or this agency, or this company is functioning”. A good piece does that — people raise their eyebrows and learn something.

Yeah, it was a wake-up call but it was also a pox on both your houses. It wasn’t China-bashing, it was “Look at what America has done, look at what the West has done, look at what African society is doing to itself.” It’s just a cesspool of problems: You’ve got so much corruption in the sub-Saharan, so much corruption — China at this stage of economic development is a corrupt business culture — and our track record in Africa hasn’t been great. I have always felt that if a reporter really puts in the work, the piece can and should have a point of view — if it is backed up by the facts, of course.

While you were in Congo, you contracted an organism, Entamoeba histolytica (or “Eh” for short) that could have killed you but instead provided an elegant framing device for the entire package. But from what I’ve heard, that wasn’t the first deadly disease you contracted in the line of duty…

I didn’t know if it would work, journalistically speaking. You know, you get too close to things, so you don’t know if they’ll work. That’s when you need an editor to slap you around after you try it.

Yeah, I tend to have a hard time when I go to exotic places. When I was in Indonesia in the rain forest during the Bre-X gold scam [in which the discovery of an immense gold deposit turned into a multi-billion dollar hoax], I didn’t know it was a scam yet. No one knew it. I caught something and was in bed for weeks. I couldn’t write the piece, and thank God it was delayed, because two weeks after I got back, one of my sources leaped out of the same helicopter we had flown in and committed suicide — or maybe he was pushed, it was unclear — and the whole thing unraveled as the biggest gold and mining scam ever. This was the story that my editors at Fortune sent me to cover saying “You know, Rich, don’t do anything investigative right now. Go have some fun.” My antennae were not up on that one. When I finally got into work, [then-Fortune managing editor] John Huey walked into my office, stared at me, and after a long pause that felt like forever said, “Saved by an amoeba….”

When I got back from Pakistan after 9/11, I was also in rough shape. I was there 10 weeks, and I left just a few weeks before Danny [Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter] was kidnapped. There weren’t that many of us in Karachi on the terror money trail, actually — just a few of us. Everyone else was holed up in Islamabad with the press corps. I knew people who were killed over there; I think that must have gotten to me. I was caught in riots against America and had my first experience with tear gas. I was crawling on the ground in Rawalpindi while there were flames and rocks being thrown in my direction. I’ve got a camera from CNN and I’m thinking to myself “What the hell am I doing here? I’m a business reporter. How did this happen?”

They actually aired the footage on CNN that night. I was the only American reporter — certainly the only CNN reporter — in the riot. Anyway, I came back from Pakistan and I couldn’t write for a month. I was feeling sick and miserable. So yeah, I get hit hard.

I find it interesting that the glamour beat of journalism — high stakes investigative reporting — is also one of the most miserable….

Is it sexy? I always thought of it more as public service. I grew up with the generation that looked at journalism and the First Amendment like they were religion, and still do. I tell people my god is transparency. I really believe that the more there is, the better society will be. I guess that’s what led me to those areas — that’s what led Bob Greene there.

But the foreign correspondent, war correspondent, and muckraker are also the most respected and romantic roles in the profession. That part doesn’t appeal to you?

Of course it does, especially the excitement of something suddenly coming together. There’s no more exciting feeling than that. So maybe there’s some romance in the sense of that, but more than that, I have the sense that this could and should be a better planet, as naïve as that sounds today.

How much should we read into Bob Greene’s death as a metaphor for the investigative wing of the profession? Is your kind a dying breed because of newspaper and magazine cutbacks and shrinking news holes?

I’m hoping it’s cyclical because of the technological changes and what’s happening with the journalism economy. I’m not going say that it’s always going to be dying (or dead), but at least it’s temporarily dying. There really isn’t a lot of good hard stuff going on, there just isn’t. Most of the pieces that I’ve done over 20 years would not get published today in the magazines they were originally published in.

Wow, really? In Forbes, Fortune and Time?

Most of the stuff wouldn’t. It might have run in a scaled-down form. Many of my pieces were eight to 10 pages. Look at my Scientology cover story for Time. Maybe it’s not fair for me to sit here and say this, but I just don’t see it happening today given the page counts, the [drop-off in] advertising, the move to the Internet, and so on. And most people don’t have the patience to read a 10-, 15-, 24-page story on the Internet without getting a sore back.

I don’t know where it’s going. Look, there’s always going to be a need for this reporting; I just don’t know how it’s going to play out. I used to talk to Bob Greene about this, and he was just mortified. He was mortified by what was happening at Newsday, where everything he built was stripped down and destroyed.

Have you looked into efforts like ProPublica that are attempting to find nonprofit models for long-form investigative journalism? In some ways, it sounds a lot like the Arizona Project or Project K — reporters doing great work and then giving it away to whoever wants to run it.

Yeah, I think it’s a good move. It’s a little bizarre that the old model isn’t working, so Paul Steiger has to take money from a wealthy individual to do this, but that may be where this is going. David Kaplan, who was the chief investigative correspondent for U.S. News for years, was laid off at about a year ago when they closed their investigative team. He’s now running a nonprofit unit of the Center for Public Integrity. He contacted me recently and stated, “I’ll be running a network of 100 top investigative reporters in 50 countries — and it should be great fun. Yah, nonprofits… the last refuge of aging muckrakers.”

Well, is the kind of journalism you do ever cost-effective, especially at the individual level? Even if you were assigned 7,000 words on Africa with combat pay on top of your fee, that hardly seems to justify a 45,000-word first draft and the hospital bills. What’s the temperament of an investigative journalist? Beyond the desire for truth, you must have fantastic organizational skills and discipline. I shudder to think what the outlining process for your Africa series was like.

Yeah, but like with anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I couldn’t have done this kind of work in my twenties. It just takes time. I filled up 1,128 pages of notes in Africa. That’s just what I do. It may only be the first draft of history, but damn, I’m going to try really hard to get it right. I’m just not comfortable turning in something unless I really, really feel comfortable with it. I just have a hard time with that. I also have a hard time with closings. I had a reputation at Fortune where they would try to lock me out of the copy desk at night when it was time to close one of my pieces. There’s always a better way to say something. I used to make friends with all the people in the imaging department, bringing them food, cigarettes, anything just so I could be there before they transmitted the story to the plant, just to tweak one more word.

What’s the status of Project K. at this point? What’s it been like trying to manage an ad hoc network of unpaid reporters around the world? And how much progress do you think the project has made?

Nick Stein did a big piece for Men’s Vogue on the case, and he and I have done some interviews. I talk to reporters around the world — people overseas who do digging for us — and we move an inch at a time, which is just the way its got to be. This could take an absolute lifetime, which is fine — I have a lifetime. I imagine that I’ll be doing stuff on this case for the rest of my life, and that’s alright, because what’s the alternative? Just advance the ball a little bit at a time and try not to get down on yourself, which isn’t easy to do. I look at progress that we’ve made or haven’t made over the past few years, and it’s easy to kick ourselves and wish we could do more, but it’s a brutal environment here, and it’s a brutal environment over there, even since Paul was killed. Like we talked about earlier, investigative reporting has been sliding downhill. There’s so little interest in doing this stuff and even the Western news agencies that are in Moscow aren’t doing it.

A major American news company — I won’t say who — made it very clear to us when we formed Project K. that their bureau in Moscow would not, and is not doing long, in-depth probes of Russian organized crime. Because they will not put their people at risk, and they need them there for other stuff.

That’s incredible. They actually told you that?

I thought “Wow” — not only is that all the confirmation I needed that we were right to form this project, but that is so upside-down. That’s like having a bureau in the Bronx Zoo and saying, “We’ll do everything but cover the animals.” You’ve got to do organized crime in Russia. It’s infested everything.

On the other hand, it’s only human to not want your reporters to take unnecessary risks. I have to ask, considering you followed the same trails as Paul Klebnikov and Danny Pearl, how close to death have you come in the course of reporting a story?

I don’t want to comment on that.

Has someone ever threatened to kill you?

I’m not comfortable talking about that. I don’t see where that gets me. Look, after 9/11, I was very eager to help, and I felt that I could. I had a lot of contacts in banking in Pakistan, and they were going to open doors for me, big doors, in terms of following the terror money. I told Fortune, I gotta go. [Then-managing editor Richard] Kirkland said “You don’t need to do this,” and I said “Yeah, I do.” I mean, I’ve been trained as a journalist, doing this stuff for umpteen years. It’s 9/11; I’m going.

There are things that all of us did over there that were risky in hindsight. I met with very dangerous killers privately, sitting around with our legs folded on rugs. Often I had some armed security nearby, maybe a floor below me or in the street, but in retrospect it wasn’t enough — if somebody wants you dead, you’re gone. But you know, it’s like that old saying, “If Americans didn’t take risks, we’d all be speaking German today.”

But that gets back to the temperament question. I’m a journalist, too, and I can bring my writing and analytical skills to the table, but I have no idea whether I would be so cool under pressure and have the nerve to keep putting myself in danger that way. They try to teach us in journalism school how to be investigative reporters, but you can’t teach someone how to behave in extreme situations like these.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s a temperament. It’s beyond just the desire to write, the desire to report, the desire to learn; all of that’s there, but I think you’re right — maybe it’s just a part of the personality. It’s a calling, it really is. I have found that among colleagues of mine who do similar work, they feel the same way. It really is just in their blood, and something they have to do. This is going to sound really naïve, but it’s genuinely about public service — a real belief that the press is very important to the democracy. Democracy’s not going to work without a strong, powerful, functioning press.

What stories do you think are under-reported, or would make for fertile ground for your next project.

Hmm… everything.

(Laughs.)

I’m serious.

I know. Sadly it’s the truth.

Every single important subject is barely reported. Pick an agency. Pick a giant business. There isn’t enough in-depth stuff going on — Exxon, the IRS — it’s all out there. It’s all out there waiting for a good reporter to go in. Who will publish it, though?

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

Tyler Brûlé’s name will forever be linked with Wallpaper*, the jet-setting lifestyle magazine he founded in the mid-90s while still only in his late twenties. He was hailed for capturing the era’s zeitgeist before he had even published a dozen issues, by which time he had sold the magazine to Time Inc., the company’s first overseas acquisition. He’d conceived of the magazine while lying in a hospital bed, recuperating from wounds sustained as a freelance journalist operating inside Afghanistan on behalf of the BBC. What once seemed like a deeply ironic contradiction — that he had dreamt of luxury living after his brush with geopolitics — have since merged into his latest project, Monocle. Best described as “The Economist meets Wallpaper*” Monocle is the magazine Brûlé has been dreaming of since his bitter departure from his first love in 2002. Published by Winkreative, the brand consultancy he has run full-time since then, Monocle marries the achingly tasteful and internationalist mindset for which he’s known with a news slant that relentless looks for opportunities and curios abroad rather than threats. The result is a manual-sized magazine that sells subscriptions for $150 a year and has a readership that’s also so well-curated that luxury advertisers are beating down his door. Brûlé replied to mediabistro.com’s questions from (we think) an overnight train at midnight last week as he raced to the next appointment in his jam-packed datebook.

Name: Tyler Brûlé
Position: Editor-in-chief & chairman, Monocle; chairman & creative director, Winkreative
Resume: Foreign correspondent, BBC; founded and served as editor-in-chief of Wallpaper*; created and anchored the news program “The Desk” for BBC 4; launched Monocle
Hometown: Winnipeg, Canada
Education: Attended Ryerson University in Toronto

When did you first have the idea to create Monocle, and how & when did you finally decide to launch the magazine? What made you think that a fusion of international reportage with a jet-setting luxury lifestyle component would be an editorial and commercially viable magazine?

Jet-setting luxury lifestyle component? Are you reading the same magazine that we’re editing? I don’t see any of that in what we’re doing. The magazine’s international but hardly jet-set. In many ways Monocle‘s the magazine I’ve always wanted to do. In fact, the basic concept pre-dates Wallpaper* by a good six years. We started work on rough layouts, structure and costs in the spring of 2005 and started raising finance in early 2006. I was convinced that the concept would work because I’ve spent many years watching consumers’ magazine purchasing habits at airports and it was frequently Wallpaper* and The Economist. I decided to merge elements of the two but refine the package.

Who reads Monocle? What do you think is the maximum readership of the magazine worldwide. I understand that the eventual circulation target is 150,000 readers, which is more than Wallpaper* has now (and about the same as during your tenure as editor). Is the readership of Monocle the same as the readership of Wallpaper* during your era? And considering their geographic dispersion, is it truly possible to speak to them as a coherent community?

We invited all of our London subscribers to a shopping evening at our offices earlier this week so I can tell you that our readers are predominantly male (70 percent) and work in finance, public policy, assorted academic fields, media, and assorted travel sectors. They’re over 30, are probably leaving in a different country from where they were born, and are on the hunt for opportunities. They’re also looking for smart media.

I think some day we can take this up to a circulation of over 200,000 globally. That’s a dream, not our business plan. There’s definitely a constituency of readers who left Wallpaper* who’ve picked up with us and a whole new group of readers who’ve never even heard of Wallpaper*. I think Monocle‘s readership is more interested in bigger ideas and doesn’t see a wall between politics and culture.

As for geography, I feel it creates an opportunity. While many media brands go more local we can talk to a group of readers who want to feel connected to the world’s major cities.

Considering how wired (and wireless) your readers are, why is Monocle a magazine and not an electronic publication? What opportunities does print afford you that digital publishing does not? And please discuss your business strategy in light of your extremely high cover price ($10 US is what I’m paying every month) and even higher subscription price, which I don’t think exists anywhere else in the media landscape. What does that mean for your business model in terms of the contributions of circulation revenue, ad revenue, and digital revenue? I imagine it doesn’t look like any other magazine out there.

It’s both. As of today, Monocle‘s ranked as the number three news/politics brand on iTunes. I feel that’s quite an accomplishment having only been present on the newsstand for 10 months and on iTunes for ten weeks. Print still sets the agenda but it needs a digital wing to give it a different, more varied metabolism.

Who said subscriptions should be cheaper than getting a title on newsstand? I think it’s a business model that simply doesn’t work when you’re shipping magazines to 79 countries. At the same time, when you offer up every single story archived there’s a value to that — hence the 50 percent increase on subscriptions. Today there is a consumer out there who will pay for quality journalism and recognizes that it can’t only be the advertiser that pays the bills. As for the business model, we’ve only assumed newsstand sales and ad revenues. We left the digital component and subs blank because we knew we were doing something different. 5,000-plus subscriptions at $150 has had a lovely year end effect on our plan.

How were you able to recruit a global network of contributors reporting on location from Rwanda, the former Soviet Union, Japan, etc. in an age where most magazines, television networks, and newspapers are cutting back on their international staff and coverage? I see that some of your staff, like Fiona Wilson, have been with you since the Wallpaper days, but how did you go about recruiting new correspondents in out-of-the-way places? How do you manage them? Are they essentially stringers pitching stories? Or are you assigning them?

Cut-backs elsewhere have created our network. There’s no shortage of good talent as a result of bureau closures and shrinking international news sections. While we started out by commissioning writers we’ve known for some time, we now have journalists all over the world contacting us with ideas and thrilled that there’s a new platform for international reportage. That said, 90 percent of the stories start at our hub in London.

How would you describe your editorial point-of-view with regards to news? American magazines’ tend to cover international news through the lens of the “War on Terror,” the Iraq War, and the damage to America’s self-image. This view is, of course, noticeably absent from Monocle. How would you describe the political and socio-economic stance embodied in the magazine?

Our view has a distinctly eastern side of the north Atlantic flavor. This means we sit in London but are influenced by the currents that have made this city more European and increasingly one that looks to Asia. Commercially, this viewpoint is proving to be a hit in America as readers are tired of seeing the world through the prism you mention.

How would you describe your point-of-view with regards to the design, fashion, and lifestyle coverage within Monocle? Your incarnation of Wallpaper* is justly famous for being so out-of-step with other fashion and shelter magazines and so locked-into its own vision of the world that it became an iconic, Zeitgeist magazine. Where and how did you develop this sensibility, and why — a decade after Wallpaper* burst onto the scene — are you still somewhat on the fringe?

Mmmmm, fashion. For starters, we hired a Japanese fashion editor to ensure we had pages with wearable, fresh brands and not spreads devoted to building the careers of photographers and stylists. I have a very clear view of who’s reading this magazine and as a result we want to shoot garments that are relevant and also have a story. Slowear’s a good example of a Monocle brand — it focuses on being best in class and is not consumed with being the brand of the season. I think Japanese fashion editors are more like buyers — they want clothes to sell and not linger in fashion cupboards. On a related note, our Porter bags have now sold over 1000 units (mostly to men) and we keep hearing that people like our vision because we introduce brands that are new, forgotten or rarely seen. There’s a political message here as well, you’ll note that brand provenance and legitimacy counts for a lot with us.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

Not every journalist covering the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing this month is busy broadcasting an eye-glazing 3,600 hours of coverage (2,200 of which concern Michael Phelps) or sporting a “J”-is-for-journalist visa in their passports. But finding coverage of these Games that hasn’t been pre-packaged along the jingoistic story lines of the country of your choice has so far been hard to come by. One of the few highly visible outsider attempts at coverage is the sports blog Deadspin’s “Beijing Bureau,” a trio of recent New York University graduates who have already spent more than a year in China living, working, and gearing up to cover the Games. Like any enterprising young stringer, they approached then-Deadspin editor Will Leitch about filing regular dispatches covering the broader issues surrounding the Games, written in a voice that’s neither pompous nor overly sensitive of offending the host nation with inconvenient truths.

They are just sensitive enough, however, to request anonymity. Not willing to be the ones responsible for their arrest or deportation (all three are carrying tourist visas which do not allow them to practice journalism), they are presented here as the Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief, and Correspondents #1 and #2. The interview was conducted via email, with past and present Deadspin editors Will Leitch and A.J. Daulerio confirming their identities and backgrounds.

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”
Hometown: Poconos, Pennsylvania
Education: BA, philosophy, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports
Favorite television show: Deadwood
Last book read: Collected Short Stories of Jack London ($2.50 USD at the foreign bookstore!)
Guilty pleasure: Reading the Times‘ Sports section

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”
Hometown: New York City
Education: BA, metropolitan studies, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: The City
Favorite television show: The Wire
Last book read: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Guilty pleasure: Cheese

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”
Hometown: Des Moines, Iowa
Education: BA, journalism, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: “Movies, because I’m nerdy when it comes to Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, so on.”
Favorite television show: Chapelle’s Show
Last book read: “Trying to finish Ghost Wars. It’s dense but awesome.”
Guilty pleasure: Vice magazine’s Dos and Don’ts

What was the genesis of your project? How did you meet, what are your backgrounds? What drew you all of you to China in the first place, and what’s your take on China and the Games?
“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”: The three of us got to know each other during a semester abroad in Shanghai. Neither [Correspondent #1] nor I really knew any Chinese before we arrived, though [Correspondent #2] had studied Chinese since high school. I was a philosophy & linguistics major, and when one gets [to] one’s third year or so in the program, he or she starts to think about post-graduate, professional plans. I thought learning Chinese might be a good career move. I’d always been interested in the Far East and planned to spend the summer in Beijing. But when NYU announced the opening of their Shanghai program during the spring of my junior year, I decided to jump on it. I put off my Beijing summer plans and took a job in New York for the summer (working with AJ Daulerio, incidentally).

I spent the fall of 2006 in Shanghai and it was really a life-changing experience. The three of us had a journalism class in Shanghai. Our professor had been a war correspondent in Africa and now ran a film production company in town. He had dropped out of Missouri journalism school to move to Africa when he was 23 to sort of strike out on his own as a journalist. I think his story was pretty inspiring for us, and it was definitely was proof that one could be successful going out on one’s own in a foreign country.

Once we returned to New York, almost immediately we started to brainstorm about how we could come back after graduation. [Correspondent #2] had the idea to move to China in the fall, establish ourselves there, then look for freelance work during the Olympics. The idea developed and we began to reach out to Web sites and publications we enjoyed reading to see if there were possibilities for collaboration. I had been a reader of Deadspin since about the first post, and I reached out to Will to talk about Beijing. I think AJ lied to him about my qualifications.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”: The three of us first met at a restaurant in Chinatown at an orientation dinner for our study abroad program in Shanghai. Pretty soon after arriving, we began talking about coming back to China to do creative projects and study Mandarin. We all really fell in love with the place and didn’t particularly want to enter the NYC job market, so we teamed up and moved out here to produce media content — video, photography, writing — and learn some Chinese along the way. We also wanted to explore more of the country and fortunately traveling within China is cheap and easy.

I graduated in December 2007 from NYU having studied film and urban studies, so moving to the biggest city in China and doing film was almost a no-brainer. I grew up in New York City, and I’ve found few other cities that match the energy and vibrant street life I’m accustomed to like Shanghai. Our day job — at a local film production company — takes us back and forth between Beijing and Shanghai among other Chinese cities, though we are based in Shanghai.

I’m pretty sure none of us want to be sportswriters. We all followed Deadspin for a while and loved the community of smartasses that Will created. We thought it made perfect sense for Deadspin to have some sort of China/Olympic coverage, so we pitched it to Will and he seemed to like the idea. My interest lies more in the way China is handling the attention than any sporting event or medal count. Though Chinese people seem very pleased to have an influx of foreign guests walking their streets, sometimes it seems that the government would be a lot happier if everyone stayed home and watched it on TV. The hospitality industry might not be too fond of that, but the Public Security Bureau sure would. There is a palpable nervousness in the air here and an understandable desire for everything to go absolutely perfectly. Seriously, if you’re in Beijing, try having a staring contest with a soldier (there’s one posted like every 15 feet throughout Beijing). You will win. You can’t do that in most places.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”: I studied journalism and Chinese in college. Actually, I studied Chinese in high school, too, but took a break from it and restarted in college. I didn’t realize until I went to China in 2006 that Chinese was a language I wanted to fully understand. When the three of us got to know each other in Shanghai, I think things definitely clicked. We shared a similar sense of humor, we wanted to test the creative waters after college (meaning I don’t think any of us wanted get pulled into office jobs) and we were hooked on China.

Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch described your original meeting in New York this way: “They originally contacted me about a year and a half ago, wanting to do Black Table-like coverage of the Games. We met at Art Bar in the West Village, and they had a whole PowerPoint presentation set up. It was rather impressive, actually.” What exactly did you show him? And why did you approach Deadspin in the first place?
“Bureau Chief”: What’s PowerPoint? We showed Will some video projects of ours, namely a short film about streetball in China that I had worked on during an internship in Shanghai. I discovered the Black Table from reading Deadspin… and loved it. As the meeting progressed, I think we realized that Will and the three of us were very much on the same page about how we wanted to cover the Olympics. At the time, Will was really the only one writing posts on the site, and he seemed really excited to expense some drinks. I don’t know how successful we’ve been in providing “Black Table”-like coverage of Beijing, whatever that means, but it is certainly a source that influenced us.

“Correspondent #1”: One thing we showed him was a short video of us participating in a snake dinner in South China. We chose Deadspin because it fit with our intention of guerilla style journalism (no press passes, no official accreditation, etc.). Will saw it as an opportunity to expand Deadspin. He told us not to worry about focusing on sports, to introduce China to the readers to build a context against which the Olympics could later be presented. In trying to present China to his audience, we’ve also learned a lot along the way reading other China blogs and staying abreast of offbeat, less mainstream news.

What’s your approach to covering the Games? And did you even bother applying for credentials?
“Bureau Chief”: We looked into applying for official credentials for the Games, but found out that the deadline to apply was in September of 2006 — the week we arrived in China for the first time. So that was never a real possibility. Our thinking was that the actual sports of the Olympics would be pretty well-covered by people more qualified than the three of us. We thought we could make a more relevant contribution by writing about the social aspects of the Games and the particular, novel things you learn about China by living here.

“Correspondent #2”: Access is certainly not something that Deadspin worries about, and it’s certainly not something we worry about. We would like to be able to go to every event we want to, but a journalist’s access in China comes with a lot of headaches. Also, we like the idea of being under the radar and producing stories that won’t have us getting into trouble later on. Our anonymity grants us this, to be sure, but our lack of access from the get-go does, too. We don’t have much inhibiting us from saying what we want to say and showing what we want to show. That’s an important aspect to Deadspin’s charm, no matter where its posts are coming from.

We want to provide Deadspin viewers with the Olympics from a local, street-level perspective. That means we’ll be doing stories that people who are up-to-date with the news from China won’t see anywhere else. We definitely get a lot of good stories from established news providers, but these are stories that do away with the cliché themes — like how China’s booming cities are a boiling point for Eastern and Western values or pollution, for that matter. Pollution is definitely a newsworthy thing to write about, considering China promised to have its air cleaned up for the games, but everyone knows about China’s struggle with the environment. And God knows China’s government did stress over this and put a lot of effort into fixing it. I would like for the games to go smoothly, believe it or not. This doesn’t mean that I want our stories to be soft or without the grime, though.

What do you think of the Western media’s coverage so far? Do any of them have a clue about China? Are they making an earnest effort to acclimate?
“Bureau Chief”: There are some great correspondents doing work out here — Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune comes to mind. And there are some clueless ones, too. Here’s a hint: They’re staying at hotels right now. I think most writers make an earnest attempt to get to know the place, but some recently arrived correspondents — and we aren’t exempt from this group; we’ve only been here a year — kind of botch it. A quick vignette: We were walking around last night and were approached by a Pakistani-born journalist from the Times of Oman. He had just arrived that morning and was accompanied by a frazzled and bored-looking Chinese security guard. The “Oman in Beijing” as his business card read, asked us desperately where he could buy some bread to go with the barbeque he just managed to get his security guard sidekick to purchase. What the hell is a guy like him, who just arrived that day and could barely feed himself, going to write about? And he told us (for longer than we cared to listen) that he had covered four Olympics.

A writer for The Beijinger, an expat mag here, had a great piece last week about the cliché stories to expect in the next three weeks from newly arrived journalists skimming the, admittedly fascinating, surface.

“Correspondent #2”: Western media coverage has been all over the map. We think people have realized you can only write so many articles complaining about pollution and Internet censorship. Granted Beijing has gone against its word on several promises made in order to get the Olympics, and this is certainly newsworthy, but the more interesting stories are about social change in China and especially what’s going to happen next month when the circus is over. Will the security lockdown remain? Will foreign journalists lose their freedom to travel and interview? I guess we’ll have to see.

What would you like to happen at the Games? A confrontation? A major disruption? Do you intend to cover the protests and/or any crackdowns on day-to-day life in Beijing?
“Bureau Chief”: Personally, I don’t have any expectations for the Games. That is to say, I guess, that I think anything could happen. No one wants something terrible to happen, but our instincts definitely have us excited for the possibility of a major incident to cover.

“Correspondent #1”: Nobody wants to see anything terrible happen at the Olympics. With that said, it’d be a lot easier to root for a hiccup-free two weeks if China had made good on its promises. The attitude towards foreigners has noticeably shifted in the past few months with more crackdowns and restrictions. The city feels incredibly secure right now, so if anything goes down it’ll probably be isolated and contained quickly before most press would get wind of it. As for protests, they have to be confined to special protest zones set up far from the Olympic venues. They’ll most likely be small and full of non-Chinese, as any Chinese person would most likely be monitored and potentially harassed after the fact. It just wouldn’t be worth it for them.

Are you worried at all that the government is looking for you? Or do they have better things to do? I figured there’s a reason this interview is anonymous…
“Correspondent #1”: We’re not too worried about our coverage getting us in any trouble. We’re pretty under the radar and we plan to stay that way. Even if something big breaks, acting like a tourist and speaking a bit of Mandarin goes a long way. There are always tricks to getting around Internet censors though you really never know. We think there are bigger concerns than a few sarcastic freelance sports writers.

“Bureau Chief”: The 50,000 members of the Beijing Olympic Security Team definitely have better (read: East Turkestan Islamic Movement) to worry about than we three.

What are your post-Games plans, and what do you realistically hope to accomplish, both in terms of coverage and potential career advancement?
“Bureau Chief”: We’ll go back to our normal jobs after the Olympics are over. I’d love to do creative work in China in the future. None of us came here solely for the Olympics.

It’s hard to say what we hope to accomplish at Deadspin, but I will say it has been cool to observe the reactions to our pieces as we’ve gone along the last few months. For instance, in our “Beyond Beijing” piece, I imagine it was the first time most readers ever heard of some of the cities (Tianjin, Shenyang, Qinhuangdao) we mentioned. And hell, we just graduated. We’re writing about whatever we want for a site we really like, and people actually read (some even enjoy!) the stuff we write. It’s pretty cool.

“Correspondent #1”: At a minimum, we hope that readers have gained a bit of perspective, understanding, and even appreciation of Chinese culture. We get a few comments that make us cringe on each post, but we also get encouraging emails from readers who say they’ve learned something from our coverage.

We didn’t just come to China for the Olympics. We’re actually hoping that things calm down a bit after the games are over. We really enjoy it here and we’ll probably spend another year out here before returning to the States. The experience has been great. Writing with six hands on the keyboards isn’t always the easiest thing, but we’ve had fun doing it and I’m sure we’ll look back on it fondly.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

On the first weekend of New York Fashion Week, the rather staid Wall Street Journal unveiled its glossier side in the form of new luxury magazine WSJ. It appears at a rather delicate moment in the histories of newspapers, magazines, and The Wall Street Journal itself. Newspapers are tanking, and magazines are struggling to drum up ad pages, but magazines published by newspapers — especially slick tomes devoted to the luxe life — are doing gangbusters, the best example The New York Times‘ style magazine, T. This genre-within-a-genre is by now old hat in London, where the Financial Times‘s How To Spend It and the Times of London’s Luxx have scooped up ad pages for years. That the Journal would choose to launch its own magazine in their molds at this moment is a reflection of the paper’s new direction under owner Rupert Murdoch and his deputy, managing editor Robert Thomson. And so is their choice to edit the magazine, Tina Gaudoin.

Gaudoin was editing Luxx in London when she was offered the job at WSJ. Planning for a glossy was already underway when her hiring was announced, but the Journal insider widely expected to conceive and edit it was unceremoniously taken off the project. For the last eight months, she has been prepping for her editor-in-chief debut on American shoes, tapping a handful of luxury and lifestyle editors who might otherwise have never been on the paper’s radar. Mediabistro spoke with Gaudoin on the eve of the magazine’s launch about the culture of the Journal, her tiny staff, and an autobiographical roman a clef — Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures In Magazines — she’s proposed but hasn’t sold or written about (you guessed it) her adventures in the magazine business.

Name: Tina Gaudoin
Position: Editor-in-chief, WSJ.
Resume: Began as Tatler beauty editor, worked for Liz Tilberis as beauty editor on relaunch of Harper’s Bazaar, senior writer at American Vogue, presenter Q2, deputy editor of Tatler, founding editor Frank magazine, feature writer The Times, editorial director iVillage UK, style director of Saturday Times magazine, launch editor Luxx which brings us here…
Birthday: January 4
Hometown: Norwich, Norfolk, England
Education: BA honors in English literature from Lancaster University
Marital status: Married to Ford Ennals
First section of the Sunday Times: Page one, then Vows: “I love backstories”
Favorite television shows: Grey’s Anatomy and re-runs of Black Adder
Guilty pleasure: Raisinets and Flipz
Last book read: The Size of the World by Joan Sibler

How “British” is WSJ., in the sense that it borrows from the editorial sensibility of Luxx or How To Spend It? How do those magazines compare against luxury titles in the United States, and did you set out to give your magazine that accent?

I was very aware I was coming to a huge brand, and a hugely respected brand. I’ve tried to be very careful with that, and I’ve tried to be respectful of the Journal reader, who is intelligent, opinionated, and not afraid to share their opinions. The Journal reader is very discerning not only about what they consume in terms of words, but what they consume in terms of product. I have been very careful of that, and I have been very respectful of the Journal‘s American roots, because I think it would be a mistake to make anything too anglicized. So, no, this is not an anglicized magazine. Does it have an arch sense of humor in some places? Yes it does, which might be slightly more surprising to an American reader who is used to consuming general interest magazines. But no, it is not an Anglophile’s magazine.

Were you surprised by the lack of humor in American magazines, and how Americans approach luxury?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my perspective is that if you are spending money or living a particular lifestyle you have worked very hard to achieve, you want to have some fun with it. You want to have fun spending your money and living your life, and that’s what we have tried to inject into this magazine. Do I think a sense of humor in Americans is missing? No, I do not. I think it’s a different sense of humor. It might be less arch, but it’s certainly apparent in some magazines.

What’s your favorite story in the first issue, or what story is most representative of what you’re trying to do?

What we tried to do was use people we think Journal readers would be interested in who exemplify the way they might want to live their life. So, for example, I have a piece about a trial lawyer who changed his life entirely and became a chocolate maker. I have a “Humorous Review of the Mundane,” and starting off we’re doing a review of airline safety videos. I have a bigger piece about competition, which is called “The Competition,” knowing full well a lot of Journal readers are in business and that their whole mindset is in doing better or succeeding. I have a piece about [Oracle chief executive] Larry Ellison and [aerospace engineer Ernesto] Bertarelli going head-to-head for the America’s Cup. And I have a piece about collecting, and why American folk art is the new collectible.

How did you go about assembling your staff? Your masthead is notable in the sense that you built a team from scratch from Men’s Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Tatler, and House & Garden. Was it your decision to bring in so many outsiders to create this magazine, or were you yourself part of that decision?

From the outside, it looks different than what it really is. I knew I was going to be using a lot of Journal staffers for reporting and some editing, so what I looked for was what the Journal reporters didn’t have experience in — and that was working in a magazine environment. What we tried to do was compliment the staff we already had with some “outsourced” luxury magazine people, if you like.

How does your staff here compare with your resources running Luxx, and with the famous British magazine model, with much smaller staffs. If I recall correctly, you ran Luxx with six people.

There are eight people running this magazine. The model there is much more lean, definitely, and yes, I have brought that with me from Europe. But in the same way that I ran Luxx with a stable of staff, I had the outsourcing at hand with the Times [of London] reporters I used, so the principle remains the same. I have a small staff here, but then I outsource a lot to general reporters. The resources I need are there, but I don’t need a big staff to run a magazine. (I might regret that quote later; don’t use that.)

What’s the strategic role of WSJ. within the paper and within Dow Jones? One of great ironies of both magazines and newspapers at the moment is that while neither medium seems to be doing particularly well at the moment, lifestyle magazines published by newspapers are advertising magnets. Is your job to create a vehicle for doing the same?

To bring you back to what The Wall Street Journal stands for — it has a very strong separation between church and state. I can’t speak for other luxury magazines, but I can say that there is definitely a clear line drawn between advertising and editorial — if that is what you are getting at.

Then, if you’re asking me, “Do I feel embarrassed about the fact that this is a luxury advertising vehicle?” the answer to your question is: I would be, if it were, but it’s not. And I’ll tell you why it’s not. Our readers are so discerning and so vocal that it is not something they would accept. I didn’t set out to create a catalogue of luxury goods that people could buy. I set out to create a magazine about a lifestyle that people might want to participate in.

Why did you accept this assignment, and why were you seemingly the first choice to do it? (If there were other names floated, none were ever leaked to the press.)

I had always wanted to work back in the States. I had lived and worked here before [as a junior member of Liz Tilberis’ team at Harper’s Bazaar], and I had worked very closely with Robert [Thomson, the Journal‘s now-managing editor] at the Times [of London] for five-and-a-half years, and Robert was coming here and it was that segue that led me here. It took me five minutes to make up my mind.

A practical question: how should freelancers approach WSJ.? Between your own staffers, the Journal reporters available, and your own openness to freelancers, what should they be pitching you? What percentage of the magazine will be freelance-driven?

We’re still working it out because this is our first issue, but I think ultimately we’ll probably take about 30 percent freelance. The way that works is that people will contact my senior editor Janelle Carrigan or my deputy editor Owen Phillips and talk to them about ideas for stories. What am I looking for? I’m looking for curious, intelligent reporting, and I’m looking for the story-behind-the-story, because I feel so much that you can understand a lot about the product or a person generally through general media. What readers are really looking for is more information and a different story. How do you get product? How did they get to where they were? What do we know about them that we didn’t know already? It’s just a different angle — a more questioning angle, really.

How does this experience compare with your stint at Liz Tilberis’ Harper’s Bazaar?

Look, that was just the most amazing experience. Working with Elizabeth Tilberis… she’s a genius. Fabien Baron, he’s equally a genius. It was a very intense, glossy magazine experience working with amazing photographers — those sorts of opportunities do not happen every day. That was then, this is now, as you know and I have described to you. This experience is very different. I was much more junior when I was at Harper’s Bazaar, but I did have a great time, I’ve got to tell you.

The weight of launching something like this is quite considerable given the brand, given the expectations, and given the readership. This is a tricky job, it’s an enjoyable job, but I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

Do you think that your experience at Harper’s Bazaar — the enormous budgets, the stop-at-nothing pursuit of luxury and glamour — is a thing of the past? Is the essence of editing a magazine today doing more with less?

Listen, I don’t know what people spend anymore because I’ve been in the newspaper world for quite some time now. But I think it’s a lot and you just can’t justify those budgets any more, certainly from where I’m sitting — they might have very different things to say at Conde Nast and those magazines — but from where I’m sitting there’s no space for that.

Please pardon me if I’ve mistaken you for a different Tina Gaudoin, but Amazon U.K. contains a listing for a book entitled
Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines, by one Tina Gaudoin. Is that you, and if so, what exactly is the book about? Based on the publisher’s description, it appears to be a novel about a “Tina” working in magazines.

I’ve got to tell you that, that is indeed me. I have in fact written a book, but I haven’t signed a contract, so I’m kind of curious as to where that’s coming from. It exists, but I have no idea when I’m going to publish it. You can tell I’m really surprised that it’s there, so I’ll have to go and take a look. But that’s all I can say right now about that.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

Andrea Fella can legitimately say that design runs in her blood. It’s just that she won’t unless cornered. Fella, 35, is the art director of Nylon, the messy chic fashion magazine for girls who worship Marc Jacobs and spend their rent checks at Bumble & Bumble achieving the perfect bedhead look. Fella took over the magazine’s day-to-day design duties a little more than a year ago at the behest of Patrick Mitchell, the former Fast Company designer-turned-consultant hired to conduct a redesign. At the time, Fella was considering ditching the field completely. In her brief career, she’d already bounced from startup design shops to jobs at I.D. and The New York Times Magazine. But she found she couldn’t walk away—from the Nylon job or from design. Part of that may have to do with her father, Ed Fella, a commercial artist and typographer who worked in obscurity for 30 years before he was hailed a readymade genius by the avant design crowd. Andrea Fella isn’t just an art director struggling to produce a magazine every month—in her world, she’s also stuck being celebrity offspring.

Mediabistro: So, how are you enjoying Nylon? Do you find the relative lack of overhead invigorating, or is designing a fashion magazine on a miniscule budget one long exercise in troubleshooting?

Fella: I love it. I love it because you have to work with certain obstructions in any job, and for me, financial ones always push creativity. That said, there are limitations—”This photographer just won’t do it for this price. Damn.” But what happens then, is you have the room to do it yourself, which is pretty amazing. I shoot [photography] for the magazine under both my name and a pen name. The photo director shoots stuff. [Editor/owner] Marvin [Scott Jarrett] has always shot for the magazine. I love that, because half my interests are in photography and it’s so satisfying to be that involved and not just the middle man. Instead of “I’m going to commission this, and then lay it out here” you just commission yourself and say, “How would I do this?” You get that feeling all the time as a designer, especially when you are working in a situation like The New York Times Magazine, where everything you do has to go to a big person. You have to have a certain name in terms of an illustrator or photographer. It’s just frustrating, because you know what you want, and sometimes you can do it yourself.

Mediabistro: That sounds like the complete opposite of how you felt about design when you offered this job. You had started a two-person studio with Chris Dixon, who joined New York magazine after you left for Nylon, but you weren’t really working on much.

Fella: I think I took about eight months off, and just focused on other things. And also realized at that point I had to decide whether I was going to stay in magazine design. Because it felt like I ended up there, but I thought I’d be in interactive design, or I thought I’d actually be a writer, and I just kept going with it instead and I wasn’t sure whether that was my calling.

Mediabistro: And it was at that point that Patrick Mitchell found you?

Fella: Yeah, he did.

Mediabistro: And you needed him to bring you back?

Fella: Well yeah, I kind of did, in a weird way. The time off kind of did it for me. I missed it. And I realized I really liked it. I really did like design. But I wasn’t sure about magazines, though. I really wasn’t. But Patrick helped me out. It was funny; he called me about his magazine opportunity, and I was like, “Oh, that sounds good.” Because we had spoken once or twice when I was at the Times about Fast Company, but I wasn’t moving to Boston. So, we met up and I was like, “Oh, I hope it’s anything but fashion, I don’t want to do that.” And sure enough, it’s Nylon.

I had interviewed for an idea of Nylon before it became reality. In that case, it was fashion, but also “real life.” What do real people wear? Real girls and no models. And it was under a different editor. It was Marvin’s idea, but other people were involved. And I was very excited about it. It was the first thing I was excited about while I was at The New York Times Magazine, and I had interviewed for a couple of other things, but this one sounded good. Then it all changed and it became what it became. I think it was great in the beginning, and then it just kind of got messy—I think it wasn’t sure of what it was doing, maybe. But when Patrick called me, I just thought “I don’t want to do this.” But then I had dinner with Patrick and I just realized I really wanted to work with him. And Marvin is smart, he is open-minded, he is rare. He is definitely rare in the magazine world. And I realized I would definitely redesign it, and I would agree to do three issues for Patrick and then move on.

Mediabistro: But you didn’t

Fella: But I loved it.

You know, we went through a sort of second redesign once we’d done the first. Once I sort of worked with the people there, I figured it out that we had gone in a direction that was a little too uptight, a little too perfect. And Marvin was like, “Fuck it up a little. I just needed something looser, organic.”

Mediabistro: Speaking of organic, how have you grown into your role at Nylon? You’re obviously not a typical art director if you’re shooting spreads yourself. How does the process work there?

Fella: We give each other space to create, and people overlap roles all the time. And I love that. It happens, and I don’t worry too much about how it happens—whether I’m involved in everything. I think the people are great. The photo director and the fashion director are wonderful. Sometimes they can create something, and it’ll just be done. Other times, we discuss it and I want to be more involved, and they just let me be interested in what I’m interested in. Some things you want to be involved in, but then, when you are designing them, it’s also good to step back. It’s good to be handed something where you don’t know every step involved.

That’s how The New York Times Magazine would work. You would just be handed stuff because there were so many people involved—photo editors and directors—that you barely had a say, if you had any say. And then you would have a fresh take on the material. You are not concerned. I get very concerned with all of the details and pleasing everyone, and sometimes that goes too far—”Oh, well, she really wanted this person to look this way, or this really has to be…” You’ve got all of that in your head, and it can be hard then, to just make it look the best it can, and to tell the story in the way that the audience is going to see it and not just the way it looks in your own head.

Mediabisto: Well, what is the role of personal style, then? Do you try to avoid having one? Is that how you were able to go from the Times to Nylon?

Fella: I think you just figure it out. I don’t have a strong personal philosophy, per se. There are certain personal constraints designers have, and therefore it makes them have a very personal style, whereas I know what I like. I know how I see balance, how I see form. I know how I want to respond to both the narrative of the story and the imagery of the photos that I’m up against. It kind of comes out of the material itself, and in doing so I guess you just form a personal style. It’s hard for me to see. People on the outside seem able to see it, but it’s not what I’m trying to do. I think it’s a weird combination of my entire design history. It just comes through. There is an openness, almost a naiveté, about things, and the different schools of thought I’ve experienced—whether it was the early ’90s in Los Angeles, or The New York Times Magazine—all sort of come together in what comes out.

Mediabistro: And how much of it is familial? Considering you consciously decided in college not to become a designer, yet did so anyway, then nearly left the field, but came back, how did growing up with Ed Fella shape you as a designer? And do you think that designers are perhaps born and not made, i.e. do you feel you have an innate visual sense, or learned design at a very early age by simply being near your father while he worked?

Fella: Yeah, I think that’s something you can’t avoid. Looking back, even though I didn’t know what he was doing (I was playing in the next room) he was around me for most of my growing up because he was a single father, and therefore we were just with him during work, play, whatever. It was much more intense than, say, somebody who goes off to work and then comes home.

But it’s much more about the way he sees the world. I mean, that’s the influence. How to look at things, how to be open-minded, how to see that the vernacular is beautiful. It was how to just relate to design more than anything did, or what he was doing, because I was not conscious of it at all growing up. Nor was he. He went back to college when he was 40, and I was in high school. It just sort of ended when I graduated from high school. He left to go teach at CalArts, and I had to decide whether to go to college, whether to work in a gas station, whatever.

He didn’t have any notoriety until I was at least three years into college—when the first article on him came out—and I was kind of stunned. I knew he’d been working toward this his whole life, but finally he got noticed, he was influencing things.

But I sort of turned away from that, obviously. I was like, “That’s intimidating. I’m going to think about something else, whether it be two-dimensional design, or interactive, or whatever…”

As for born versus made, I don’t know. But I can say to you that my mother was an artist and a graphic designer, and the same with my dad. So, yeah. It’s in my blood for sure, but there was absolutely no formal design training going on at all growing up. I think there are certain qualities you need as a designer, and if you don’t have those qualities it’s just really difficult. If you are not detail-oriented and you just don’t look at certain things it’s hard, but maybe it means, “Ok, well, maybe this person is creative in a way that means they can be a creative director some day, and that would suit them because they like the ideas and they like the over all big picture.” But when it comes right down to it, they just aren’t paying attention.

I am detail-oriented and always have been, and I love that. I want to be hands-on, and that’s all I think I do know. I do not want to be in meetings all day telling other people what I think they should do. That will just never suit me, or at least I don’t think it will. You never know about the future, but at this point with Nylon, I’m hands-on everything, and that’s meaningful, and I spend as much time color-correcting at pre-press as I do designing the story. And that’s really important to me.

Mediabistro: Considering how you’ve bounced around and experienced a crisis of faith, how important is it to you to hang out with other designers? For example, I know you through a friend who was the art director at a magazine I worked at, and you’re friends with Emily Crawford at Travel + Leisure, who you know through Patrick Mitchell, and so on. Do you think it’s important for designers to hang out with other designers to vet ideas and learn from each other through osmosis? I mean, all magazine editors seem to do is hang out with other magazine editors.

Fella: I highly recommend getting out of that world entirely if that’s all you have. I definitely when through a period of several years when I was much more involved in the design community, and then I dropped out. When Chris [Dixon] and I were working together in our own studio, we had all kinds of people coming through, designers and illustrators, but there was a period when I stepped out of that and it felt really good to meet people who were not at all in design, who didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

They see Nylon and they don’t judge it. But at the same time I just met up with [famed designer and typographer] Barry Deck. He’s my friend, and I asked him to give me his opinion of Nylon and critique it. And it was fascinating because, “Wow! That’s what he’s seeing when he looks at this.” And he is not the audience, so that’s good too, because you are designing for both your actual audience and your design peers.

But I think you can get too caught up in just your design peers—”What are they doing? What am I doing, and should I be doing this?” And I think that can really hinder you in feeling good about what you’re doing communicating to an audience outside of that.

At this point I feel free of that, and as I said, during that period when I decided, “Yes, I do love design, I do want to do it,” I also let go of the idea that I was going to make history like my father. I never wanted to, but I had that weight over me, as I’m sure as a lot of children of famous or successful people do. And you know, it’s my path and I have to do this. And my design is very different, it’s much more about collaboration and the people I work with and what comes out of that, rather than my mark on history, or my mark in any of that.

Greg Lindsay a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily