Matt Welch has spent nearly two decades avoiding newsrooms of the so-called main stream media, only to position himself right in the middle of it, as Assistant Opinion Editor at the Los Angeles Times. He started his career by spending eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the region’s first post-communist English-language newspaper, worked as UPI’s Slovakia correspondent, and managed a business journal in Budapest. Back in the U.S., he’s freelanced for the Columbia Journalism Review, L.A. Daily News, Orange County Register, L.A. Weekly, ESPN.com, Salon, Wired News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Hardball Times, AlterNet, The Walrus, The Daily Star of Beirut, and dozens of other publications, on topics ranging from media to international affairs to all things California to baseball. From July 2002 to October 2004, he wrote a regular “Letter from California” column for the Review section of Canada’s National Post newspaper.

Welch joined Reason, the culture/politics magazine (and website) for “Free Minds, Free Markets.” He was Associate Editor (October 2004-January 2006), regular media columnist (April 2004-April 2006, according to the magic of magazine lead times); pinch-hitting writer/editor when other staffers were on book sabbaticals (stints in 2003 and 2004); freelance contributor since late 2001, and longtime contributor to the award-winning Hit & Run weblog.

At Reason, Welch was encouraged to freelance for other publications, and after writing a half-dozen columns for the LA Times, he met Andres Martinez. Martinez offered him a three-month “visiting fellowship” to sit on the editorial board. “Not long after, they described a new position that didn’t yet exist, where I’d sit on the board & write editorials, but also edit the things, and also write the occasional op-ed, and also solicit & edit op-eds,” Welch says.

Welch also maintains his personal blog, and was one of the first to write about blogging back in 1999 for the Online Journalism Review, entitled “What Do You Tell Your Boss?” Since his tenure at the LA Times, the paper has launched a number of blogs with more on the way.

Welch has avoided the labels of conservative, liberal, libertarian, commie-pinko, thus far in his career. As an editor in the Opinion section of one the country’s largest newspapers, he’ s well positioned to piss off all sides, equally. He emailed with FishbowlLA editor Kate Coe.

Name: Matt Welch
Position: Assitant Editor, Editorial Pages
Publication: The Los Angeles Times
Company: Tribune Co.
Education: Lack thereof hasn’t hurt me none.
Hometown: Born in Bellflower, raised in Long Beach, reside in Silver Lake (going on eight years).

How did you get into journalism?
By screwing up the courage to walk inside the offices of the country’s best college newspaper. (In the same year, incidentally, that the paper dug up enough dirt on Mickey Kaus’ uncle to eventually help get him convicted for embezzlement.)

What is your average media day like?
Wake up and kiss the hottest French journalist in California. It’s all downhill from there….

The clock radio is set to KCRW, so I have r-e-a-l-l-y boring news dreams, usually involving Daniel Schorr searching for a glass of water. Unseal my eyes with the hometown paper. Watch my wife giggle while devouring the New York Post. I don’t giggle.

Then I’ll check our section’s web landing pageand blog to make sure everything’s cool, and read the new comments. Followed by a three-minute tour of the local-news blogs —
L.A. Observed
Mayor Sam
Rough & Tumble

Martini Republic…
one or two among
LAist
Blogging.la
LAVoice
barky gal
etc.

If I wake up early (unlikely) I might also catch a glimpse of
Wonkette
Reason’s Hit & Run
Halos Heaven
6-4-2
Drudge.

Then it’s off to the bus, reading either Hoy or The New Yorker or Reason on the way. Grab the Daily News and whatever print weekly on the way to my desk.

At the office, the Internet is mostly a search tool, though when I have time I might zip through the permalinks listed on our blog. I usually turn the teevee on around noon, watch CNN or C-SPAN with the volume off until the sun goes down, then it’s baseball or basketball. Back home, I’m lucky if I arrive in time for The Colbert Report. The only other news program that occasionally interests me is the Hal Fishman Drama Hour.

Contrast and compare magazine vs. daily newspaper?
In my experience anyway, the biggest difference is between 940 editorial employees and 10 (even though my department, which is pretty well sealed, only has around 20). That is just a huge discrepancy, and affects everything. There’s also the (related) difference between working in an office and having 10 meetings a week, and working at home and maybe having 10 meetings a year. By phone.

You definitely get your calls back quicker here, and are roughly 800% more likely to be visited in your office by Mikhail Gorbachev, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the head of the Coast Guard, or a leetle robot controlled by Eric Garcetti. But you’re also much more likely to begin interactions with readers by them screaming insults at you.

Work-wise, at Reason I blogged more (though that’s beginning to change here), and always wrote under my own name. Here I write most often in the Institutional Voice, which is a pretty big difference (and kind of theoretically weird, given my personal history, though I rarely think about it that way). But even though we had plenty of daily content at Reason, there is just no deadline as emotionally satisfying as that of a print daily newspaper. I love the things; cringe when we stumble, dance a jig when we stick a landing.

How does the media attention on the LA Times/Tribune story affect you?
Very little, truthfully. For a while I was following (and gently ribbing) the whole Manhappenin’ Beach Project over on our Opinion L.A. blog, but at the end of the day, I’m happy they’re trying to reimagine the paper; otherwise obsessing about future ownership is kind of pointless, ya know? It’s sort of like arguing passionately in December about which baseball team is going to win the division … amusing sometimes, sure, but there ain’t nothing you can do about it. Meanwhile there’s a paper to put out, and fun to be had. I figure our lives will not change much unless and until Eli Geffen-Burkle walks through that door and tells us we have to, I dunno, wear Dodgers jerseys or something.

Proudest moment in your career?

Probably the January 1994 issue of Prognosis, the paper I co-founded in Prague, coinciding with the visit of Bill Clinton and the ceremony that essentially kick-started what would eventually become the expansion of NATO. It was called “The Unbearable Largeness of Bill,” and that headline was by far the worst thing about it; the rest was just bloody terrific and fun — investigative pieces on the Czech family Clinton stayed with when bumming around the country as a college kid, a compare/contrast of Clinton/Havel’s philandering, pot-smoking and views on death; a handy playing card-style guide to the five biggest thugs in post-commie Europe; incredibly detailed & sober analyses of post-Cold War security issues, a handful of dynamite and diverse opinion columns, a “Hack’s Guide to Prague” for the visiting journalists, and on and on.

Our paper was on its last legs (even though it would somehow limp along for another 15 months); we were all pulling 23-hour days, lubricating the paste-up process with absinthe, coming up with genius off-the-cuff ideas at the last minute. And I had just emerged from a weeklong stay in the hospital with a ruined back, and was in the process of recording an album. We were totally exhausted, but the issue just soared, and was praised (among other places) on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

Who’s the biggest influence on your work?
A three-way tie — Bill James, Hunter Thompson, and Vaclav Havel.

What’s the coolest thing/person/ story you’ve worked on/with?

The technically accurate answer to your question is Mejla Hlavsa of the legendary Plastic People of the Universe, though I only saw him play with the terrific Pulnoc and the you-had-to-have-been-there Velvet Revival Band.

If you weren’t a journalist/writer, what would you do?
Try (and fail) to become a successful recording artist; then end up as some sad middle-aged busker playing covers in various foreign bars.

Work’s over, kitchen’s clean, no deadlines looming–how do you kick back? Music, book, DVD–what’s your relaxation preference? (And please don’t tell me you go for a nice 5 mile run.)

What is this science fiction you speak of?…. I enjoy a glass or three of wine, seeing a movie with ma belle femme, having a Malo dinner with pals, or immersing myself in the warm minutiae of obscure baseball statistics.

When last we interviewed Ken Auletta, he had just released Backstory, a collection of writings from his decade at The New Yorker.

He won’t tell us what he’s working on now (“Because I have such long lead times, you’ll have to torture me!”) but we can guess that whatever it is will be long, detailed and full of exclusive tidbits that could be a headline many other places. His recent profile of Lou Dobbs, for example, pegged the outspoken anchor’s yearly compensation at $6 million — a figure that has been the subject of guesswork for years — and Auletta says he triple-sourced it through means he won’t disclose.

Whether for books or magazine articles, Auletta writes with a grace, authority and detail born of hard work, scads of cross-referenced notes, multiple repeat interviews, and as much research as possible. Which is why, we guess, his wife calls him what she does (see below).

Auletta spoke, then emailed with mediabistro.com’s editorial director, Dorian Benkoil.

Name: Ken Auletta
Position: Author and Annals of Communications Media Writer
Publication: The New Yorker
Education: B.S., State University of New York at Oswego; M.A. in Political Science, the Maxwell School at Syracuse University
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
First job: Working Summers at Pat’s Sporting Goods store in Coney Island at age nine for my dad, Pat Auletta.
Previous three jobs: I have written for The New Yorker since 1977, and also written a weekly political column for the New York Daily News from 1977 to 1993, and have authored ten books. Before 1977 is a blur of stuff.
Birthdate: April 23, 1942
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show Do I have to choose? I’m addicted to The Sopranos, 24, and Studio 60.
Last book read Two simultaneously: Richard Ford’s, The Lay of the Land, and Lawrence Wright’s, The Looming Tower.
Most interesting media story right now Pass.
First section of your Sunday paper: Sports.
Guilty pleasure Pasta.

You’ve covered the media for years, many of those years for The New Yorker. Do you ever get bored of it? (What makes it continue to hold your interest?)
I don’t get bored because the media is not one small planet but a galaxy of planets with an ever changing cast of characters. Once, media was pigeonholed as journalism. Now its software and cable and the Web and books and networks and satellite television and PDAs and cell phones and video games, among others. Myspace and YouTube are, in part, new distribution systems.

Change is a given, and it’s hard to get bored with something that is always new. One can argue that the invention of electricity in the 19th Century had a more profound impact on society than the Internet (which is powered by electricity). But what is different today is the velocity of change. Think how long it took the telegraph, or the telephone, or radio and television, to become mass mediums. And then think of the less than five years it took the i-Pod.

Does it ever feel a little incestuous, being both in the media as something of a celebrity and also writing about it?
If a journalist remembers that the audience is the reader, not the subject of the article, and aims to get as close to the truth as possible, not make a friend, then the trap is avoided. I’m not personal friends with the people I cover. But I like people and have reasonably good manners and know that people open up more freely if the interviewer’s style is not that of a dentist drilling teeth.

Do you have an assistant or researcher or do you do all the work yourself?
It’s a ma and pa operation without the ma.

How long does it take you to prepare for an interview you conduct? For a profile you do?
There’s no single answer to this question. Generally, I try and spend weeks reading about the subject. And if I am profiling someone, I seek more than one interview. In this case, the first interview is usually autobiographical. Then I try to interview associates, friends, competitors, analysts, etc., collecting information and questions that better prepare me for the second round.

What’s the trick to digging up all the details you use throughout your pieces? (For example, you peg Lou Dobbs’ compensation at $6 million per year, with no hedging. How do you get that so precisely.)
I’d be a schmuck to tell you how I got something that did not have a named source. I had three sources for the $6 million, and my editor and the factchecker who called the sources or listened to my digital recording were satisfied.

How do you take notes, stay organized? What’s your system for getting such detail in your pieces and keeping them all organized?
With some merit, my wife calls me anal. I create three digital files: a) what I call an index of all the materials I collect; b) a file of people I wish to interview or things I need to read; c) a file of questions to be asked of each person to be interviewed. Of these files, the most vital for me is the index. For a long piece, the index can run to fifty single-spaced pages, and consists of a cross-reference system of each interview or document.

I number each notebook and document, and make a headline in the index of what someone said that I might want to use, followed by, say (A, p.30), which to me means notebook A and page 30 of the pages I have numbered; documents get numbers (10, p.64); and books get Roman numerals (IV, p290). I break it into subjects — possible Leads, Chronology, Bio, Observations, Themes, etc. — and place each entry in these categories.

I try to index as I am reporting because it is so tedious, yet is so important that I don’t want to have it back up and then possibly race over this process out of boredom. As I’m indexing I see that people are mentioned I should interview, that anecdotes or facts are relayed that I should confirm with others. I skip to the questions to be asked document and type in questions, and to the people to see document and add names.

At the end of the reporting, I take several days to study the index, which I hope helps me climb above the trees. Then I move it around on my screen like a deck of cards and slowly organize a narrative. I write off the index and place a checkmark next to each headline, allowing me to see, when the first draft is finished, what left out and included.

What’s your favorite medium and outlet to produce? Magazine articles? Newspaper articles? Books? A mix? Do you like going on TV?
Having written a column and done TV, I have a strong bias for long form journalism. The New Yorker and books give me the most satisfaction, the space to convey complexity, the grey as well as black and white.

Many writers are, to put it bluntly, disheveled. You seem to take great care with your appearance and look very polished. Why is that important to you, and the image you wish to project?
I like nice clothes, and I’m fairly neat. I do, however, bite my nails.

Your story (well, in magazine terms, a tome) on Howell Raines became a bit of an irony when he resigned. In hindsight, would you change anything if you could? How about a follow up to it? Considering that?
Actually, I thought the Raines piece gave readers a sense of his hubris and arrogance, as well as his talent. When he was forced out a year later as Executive Editor of the Times, I felt that those who read my piece had a context to understand why.

How much influence do you think your stories have? Does the influence surprise you?
It’s really dangerous for a journalist to think about “influence.” Our job is to ask questions, and if we’re puffed up with our own self-importance we will want to answer questions, not ask them.

How many stories do you write a year? What’s your deal? Contract? Full employee? Are you well-compensated?
I’m supposed to write at least a certain number of words per year for The New Yorker.

You work from home. How’d you get to do that? Why do you?
I like to be close to my refrigerator.

How did you get where you are, at what could be considered the pinnacle of magazine writing? What was the path (for those who may wish to emulate it).
Life rarely follows a straight line. I was a jock in high school with a 64 average and an attitude. I got into the State University at Oswego because the baseball coach thought I had a promising fastball. I almost flunked out, then found a new me, which including editing the underground newspaper at college; then thought I’d like the Foreign Service; then government and politics; then I got bored in a Ph.D political science program and left to be a gofer and write speeches in politics; then on to serve in government; then to work for Bobby Kennedy before he was sadly killed; then to serve as campaign manager for a wonderful man running for Governor of New York who, with my help, lost; then a daily reporter for the New York Post, followed by writer for the Village Voice and New York magazine, where I wrote mostly about politics and government. Then books on disparate subjects like New York’s economy, poverty, Wall Street, the Microsoft anti-trust trial.

Go figure.

If you weren’t writing about media, what would you be doing?
Visiting some other planet as a journalist.

How do you choose your subjects?
I consult a Medium.

What kind of story do you find most satisfying?
Profiles of complex people through whom you can tell a larger story.

What story would you say you’re proudest of? How’d you get it?
One would be a story I reported in 1992 for the New Yorker about Barry Diller’s quest to figure out the future by taking six months to visit everyone from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to the MIT lab and old media folks, all the while he was learning to use his new Apple Powerbook laptop to try and figure out the new world of digital connectivity. It was an early piece on the emerging digital future back when I thought @ was spelled “at” and .com was dot-com. I’ve never gotten a bigger response to any piece.

The idea came from one of the most valuable things I did when I started writing about the media for The New Yorker in 1992. Tina Brown was the new editor and she asked if I would write under the Annals of Entertainment rubric. Having just published a book about how the “old media” industry of the networks was challenged by new technologies — Three Blind Mice — I said Annals of Entertainment was too narrow to capture the convulsive change in the media. I suggested it should be written under a wider framework, Annals of Communication, and that I would want to write nothing for five months and instead go out and do what I later learned Barry Diller was doing. Tina quickly blessed the idea.

With the calling card of a respected magazine, having interviewed a fair number of the folks who were challenging the old media television networks for my Three Blind Mice book, and with assurances that I would treat this as a seminar and use information but not quote them, I wound up visiting about 60 individuals and institutions. We talked about things they wouldn’t talk about on-the-record, like: Where they felt their business was vulnerable? What kept them awake nights? I probably generated a dozen story ideas from these visits, and one grew out of my visit with Diller.

As coverage of media has increased tremendously, do you find it harder to stay ahead, find original angles, really new takes on things?
Sure.

What do you think of the Internet? Use it? Changes your life at all? Technology in general? We don’t see a blog you have. Any MySpace page? Why or why not?
The Internet allows journalists to do a fair amount of research — newspaper or magazine clips, SEC filings, campaign contributions, annual reports, correct spelling — without getting up from our desks; it also allows quick and efficient e-mail communication to set up interviews or clarify things. Among other innovations, digital technology allows me to shuck tapes and record interviews on a digital recorder, plug the recorder’s memory stick in a slot, make a back-up disc, split my screen and using a track ball to review the interview, and type in the quote I want.

I have a website, kenauletta.com, which contains all my pieces, links to my books, and other stuff. I prefer to read rather than compose blogs. And I don’t have a MySpace page (“transparency” has its limitations).

How does The New Yorker have to change in order to compete with today’s changing media landscape? How does it NOT have to change?
The New Yorker — like The New York Times, The Economist, or NPR — is in the enviable position of being rewarded for quality journalism. Each has, to borrow a phrase that is uttered more often than it is understood, a “brand” that stands for something. The New Yorker adds really good fiction, art, and writing to the mix.

All-time favorite New Yorker cover? Cartoon?
That’s like asking, What’s my favorite pasta?

Karen Grigsby Bates is the Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR’s news magazine Day to Day. Bates contributed commentaries to All Things Considered for about 10 years before she joined NPR as the first correspondent and alternate host for The Tavis Smiley Show. In addition to general reporting and substitute hosting, she increased the show’s coverage of international issues and its cultural coverage, especially in the field of literature and the arts.

In early 2002, Bates joined

Day to Day, and is one of the show’s original staff members. She has reported on politics, media, and breaking news. Before coming to NPR, Bates was a news reporter for People magazine and a contributing columnist to the Op Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times for ten years. She also writes mystery novels.

Hometown: New Haven, CT
Favorite TV show: “Used to be Gilmore Girls, but they’ve gone crazy since Amy Sherman-Palladino stopped driving that bus. Bo-ring. Now it’s a split between Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy.”
Last Book Read: The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, by Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff. “Highly recommended.”
Guilty pleasures: Chocolate. Good wine. Reading the tabloids while standing in line at the grocery store

How did you get into radio?
I sent NPR a commentary for consideration, they liked it, asked me into the studio to record it, and I ended up doing that for about 10 years. I didn’t know that route was highly unusual.

What is your average media day like?
I get to the office somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00 am (yeah, I know!) and we’re involved with preproduction on the day’s show–maybe I’m being edited, then tracking (voicing) a piece, which would be put together for broadcast that day. If I’m not doing that, I’m looking for stories that might work for me or for someone else on the show.

Contrast and compare radio and print. [Grigsby-Bates used to write for People magazine.]
Print is more free, in some ways. It’s mostly just you and your editor working on your story. How you tell it and how you relay what’s happened, what you’re writing about, is of paramount importance. In radio, sound is the most important component–people are often doing other things when they’re listening to you (as opposed to sitting still to read a paper or magazine) so you have to create an intimate enough bond with them that they WANT to listen to what you’re telling them. It isn’t always the most scintillating story (I recently did one about how raccoons and Angelenos are coming into closer and closer contact–and not always happily) but the sound you use can make it or break it. (In the case of the raccoons, I had a gurgling fountain, part of a television newscast about coon attacks and some actual raccoon chatter. Those livened up the piece considerably.)

How do you carve out time to write?
I don’t always manage to do that. A couple weeks could go by before I’m able to sit down and write for myself–as opposed to NPR. Those are two different kinds of writing. But when I DO manage to sit down, I might not get up for hours. I used to try to keep a little notebook with me to jot down ideas–but I’m so disorganized, I’d lose the notebook, so I don’t do that anymore. I just figure if it’s meant to stay in my head, it will.

You write mysteries, huh? Is Alex Powell [the main character of a mystery series Grigsby Bates pens] your alter-ego?
NO! We do share some commonr characteristics–we’re both pretty opinionated and we have authority issues. but we’re very different people. For instance, I found Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle side-splittingly funny. Alex would have stalked out after the first 10 minutes.

No chick-lit in your future?
Some people would say that what I write IS chick-lit, but I don’t think all womens’ books are, and I don’t think the Alex Powell series is–although my publisher sometimes markets it that way. Which is something over which I have no control.

While radio journalists are invisible to their audience, somehow (and not just because I know who you are)–you’re African-American–I don’t know how but you communicate that, without an accent or vernacular, but you do. Design, chance or just who you are?
Hmmmm…that’s ironic. About a year into my first radio job I was told I wasn’t appropriate for that particular show because I “didn’t sound black enough.” Clearly somebody had an aural image of what black was supposed to sound like, but in my humble opinion, that image was pretty provincial.

Me, I have a more elastic, universal philosophy about what black voices are: I have one. Colin Powell has one. Leontyne Price, Oprah Winfrey, Julian Bond, Willie Brown, Desmond Tutu and Condoleeza Rice all have authentically black voices. You’ll notice that not one of them speaks in the vernacular (in public, anyway; I don’t know them in their private lives). If my audience perceives me as black (and not all of them do), it’s perhaps because I’m indicating my interest in people and issues to which the mainstream public has not been adequately exposed. I’d like to think that my passion of making these people, places, issues visible might be what makes them know I’m black.

How hard is it to stay who you are, working in national media? You might not be Barbara Walters, but you’re nationally known, have a reputation, success, etc.–how to stay grounded?
(Laughter) I’m not so successful that I get stopped on the street and asked to sign things, so I have no problem staying grounded whatsoever! The nice thing about radio is most people don’t know who you are–they could listen to you every day and have no idea at all what you look like. Which is a good way to separate your public and private lives. Although I did have an incident recently: I was walking down the aisle of a plane, chatting with some colleagues, and this guy looks up from his seat and points at me: “NPR, right?” “Uh, yes…” “You’re Karen Grigsby Bates, aren’t you?” “I am–how’d you know?” He gave me this “duh” look and said “I hear you on the radio all the time, so, like, your voice?….” I didn’t think it was that distinctive, but apparently he thought so.

Do you gravitate towards stories in and of the African-American community?
I gravitate towards stories that interest me. Some of them are about or in black communities around the country, but they’re not the only thing in which I have interest.

Is having a certain beat important or can it be a trap?
I don’t have a specific beat, so I can’t speak to that. I CAN say I think it’s bad–for the reporter and for the news outlet–to have the black reporter do all the black stories, or the female reporter report only on women.

If you weren’t a journalist/writer, what would you do?
At one point I thought I wanted to go to medical school, but I realized I’d be about a zillion years after I finished grad school, residencies and all the other apprentices one has to do, so I stopped being interested in that. I could see me as a litigator (maybe medical or criminal), but I’d get fined a lot of contempt of court (authority issues, remember?), so the law is out. Really, I can’t imagine not writing or reporting in some form or fashion. It’s who and what I am.

Okay, come clean–why don’t you have an NPR voice? Media training or church choir?
Most people think I DO have an NPR voice. I’ve sung in choirs off and on, and NPR has given me some help with projection, but really, for better or worse, this is what I sound like.

Work’s over, kitchen’s clean, kid is occupied–how do you kick back? Music, book, DVD–what’s your relaxation preference? (And please don’t tell me you go for a nice 5 mile run.)
I read. I spend a couple hours in the kitchen improvising (might be coq au vin, might be an ultimate brownie recipe). I like to open a good bottle of wine and chat with a friend. Unfortunately, with the hours my show demands, I don’t stay out or up very late, so (Harold and Kumar notwithstanding) I am SO behind on movies it’s pathetic.

Kate Coe is an editor at mediabistro.com’s FishbowlLA blog, which covers media in Los Angeles.

Most people know Jodi Applegate as co-host Good Day New York, or perhaps the “that’s not cool” newscaster who was the target of a YouTube-driven practical joke earlier this year. But she’s had a starry career — rising from Phoenix, Arizona morning personality to NBC’s Later Today and Weekend Today. Applegate also holds the distinction of being at the anchor desk for MSNBC’s debut broadcast in 1996. She recently spoke with mediabistro.com about her career.

mediabistro.com: Are you really 42?

Jodi Applegate: Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t have admitted [my age] in interviews a long time ago, but it’s too late now. On morning TV, with the Internet, that [info] can be grandfathered in [to your next job] very easily.

What’s your media day like?

Hmm, let’s see. I haven’t seen the sun in years. I wake up at 3 a.m. I leave my clothes out the night before. I’ll have some leftover pasta and I’m out the door at 3:50, snarf down some coffee. A car picks me up at my door, and I get to the studio for our 4:00 a.m. story meeting. That’s with our executive producer and line producer and Ron Corning, my co-host. That usually goes until 5:15. Then I’m in makeup for 15 and hair for 20. Then we’re on the air for 3 hours. After that I’ll shoot promos and have a planning meeting with the producers. We might have a shoot, we’ll say ‘Is this a good topic for an interview?’ Then I usually go home. It’s pathetic, but I’ll watch the air-check of that day’s show— I’m never done critiquing.

A nap?

Then I’ll take a nap for a couple hours. I’ll get up in the early afternoon and take my dog for a walk around the reservoir in Central Park. A golden retriever, 5 and a half. Then I’ll come home, log on, check out what stories we’re doing. I have a call with the producers from 4-5PM. Then I’ll watch a little local news, and I’m in bed by 7-7:30, baby.

You were the first anchor of MSNBC for its debut. How was that?

I was working in Phoenix, Arizona for a local morning show. It was like Good Day New York. They ripped off the format. We started getting popular. Then NBC was in town for the 1996 Super Bowl and they saw me and asked if I would be interested in coming to New York. So I was hired.

I went on the air on July 15, 1996. It was like “Applegate, you’re up.” I was nervous, it was the network debut. I had (former GE chairman) Jack Welch standing right in the room there watching. I was probably too young and naïve to be really nervous.

How do you feel about competing with 3 national morning shows in NY?

Well, not to sound too trite, but they can’t do what we can do. They can’t give the local viewers in the metro area what we can— that is, specific local reporting. They have to be general enough to please someone in Ohio or Nebraska. We can cover both, and our ratings in New York prove that. So I don’t think we’re at a disadvantage.

Fox is starting a national morning show next year. You’re obviously not hosting. Did you feel passed over? How will it affect you?

It’s a national show. I did that. I’ve never been happier in my career, being at a local network. I just think it’s a better lifestyle. You’re part of a company. And being in New York, it’s a cliché, but you’re at the center of the universe. So I’ve never felt like that. We’re going to work with them, lead into them. From what I understand it’s going to have a lighter feel to it. A nice way to bridge the morning gap.

Do you have designs on becoming a national show host? Would you like to host the Today Show or GMA?

I never say never, but not at this point, no. I’m having too much fun.

Who do you look up to in terms of inspiration? Anyone you model yourself after?

Well, when I was growing up, it was wall-to-wall Johnny Carson. He was dorky, but in a great way. Everyone of my generation was influenced by him. He had such a deft touch. Then Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley, of course. They knew when to take a pause.

What about current anchors?

Shep Smith. He’s just effortless.

Last song you listened to on your iPod?

Applegate: It’s whatever my husband has on there. Jackson Browne and the Eagles?

The YouTube bike lock thing. Reactions were mixed as to how you handled it. What’s the fallout been like? Has anything changed? Have you banned YouTube guests on the show?

The “That’s not cool” incident. There hasn’t been much in the way of fallout, believe it or not. I think people had the impression that these guys were trying to hoax us. They had fake blood and stuff. We’re ultimately a news program, and these guys were staging the accidental fake cutting of a guy’s jugular.

What’s your favorite thing about NY? Least favorite?

This is kind of a cliché answer: the expense. There’s not much of a middle class. You open the Times and there’s a $10,000 pair of shoes. Who buys those?

Network anchors, maybe?

No. It just feels like a different planet. I guess it is, in some ways.

Favorite part?

Again, a cliché: the people. It’s like traveling around a parade of humanity. You know those cruise retirees, who never have to live anywhere, they just float around between islands? Living in New York is like that.

Who would be your dream interview at the moment?

Oh, gosh. I don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld? I would like to talk to him.

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

For Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, what should have been a professional high — the publication of her first book Random Family — coincided with personal tragedy. Her father, who had been paralyzed during an operation, was diagnosed with lung cancer. LeBlanc first grappled with the emotions of being both a journalist and a loving daughter.

She and radio producer Sarah Kramer then collaborated for two years to distill 40 hours of audio footage and 70 pages of text into “The Ground We Lived On,” a 12-minute tribute to LeBlanc‘s profound connection with her father.

Did you find yourself trying to insert any distance into how you were experiencing your time with your dad, to cope?
It felt like some weird violation at the time, to tape-record it. For the last section of the audio, when he’s actually leaving, I thought that that conversation was a conversation that I had created in my head, to soothe me. I literally thought I had made up this story that somehow, was a profound comfort to me. And when Sarah played that section of the tape, I literally felt like I could have fallen out of the chair. I’d had no recollection a) that I was taping that or b) that he had actually said that. His literal language, when he says, “You are gentle”– all those things I thought were phrases that were writing phrases, that were coming out for a project I would write. That it was true stunned me. I had no recollection of having the tape on those last days. It amazes me, still, that I could have, but that’s what I’m saying about how I am a journalist — who am I kidding? Somebody put the tape on.

Working on this project over a long period of time — did it feel like it was extending the grieving process in a way that made it more difficult, than if you weren’t working on this?
I think if I wasn’t working on this, yes. In some ways, it’s allowed me to mine the grieving process as opposed to just experiencing it, which is always my preference — to both have the experience and nose around in it, and try to understand it. It’s an intellectual interest, but it’s probably also a survival strategy, for when things feel overwhelming to me, painful to me, or enraging to me.

But it absolutely extends it — think of if somebody sat you down , and every three days had you listen to [a loved one] in their last hour, because you had to figure out how many minutes of tape you could use. It was like structured triggers, scheduled triggers. I was getting really screwed up, saying, “I’m back to where I was after he died.” I felt like everything I felt then had just gotten re-stirred up again.

Sarah Kramer [LeBlanc’s StoryCorps editor] is someone I have to recognize in this. This was a piece that totally stresses the necessity of good editors. [‘Ground’] would not exist without her and it really put her through hell, as well. Because, as much as I had to live with it, Sarah was listening to these tapes for two years. Plus, she had to push me and pull me, and respect me and protect me, and still get me to do what she needed. She cared about every word when I couldn’t care, or carry it anymore.

“If someone asked, ‘Was this cathartic for you?’ I’d say, ‘I probably won’t know that for a decade.'”

She got to know my father. When I was saying to her, “I have to end this, Sarah, I have to get out of this,” she was saying, “I do,too, Adrian. I’ve been living with your family in my head for two years.” Which of course, is like when I was doing [Random Family]. And, she had her professional responsibilities — to her boss, to her co-workers who were picking up the slack for her at work while she was dealing with me, and it was so protracted. It absolutely extended it. It made it happen again, except from a distance and yet, because of the distance, it was also part of the grieving process. If someone said, “Was this cathartic for you?” I’d say, I probably won’t know that for a decade. Part of this was, I had to make something of this experience.

How many hours of tape were there?
40, probably a little bit more than that.

And you edited it down to…
12 minutes. With Sarah, it was absolutely a collaboration — she did all these cuts, and I was just writing. She’d say, “Write about what you remember. ” At one point, we had at least 70 pages of text — she was refining down chunks of text, and then we had certain scenes we could work with. The structuring of a radio piece is very interesting. It was really hard because literally, we took pages and pages and we had one sentence like, ‘Language is the ground we walked on, and we were speaking even as he was leaving me.’ There were all these haphazard thoughts, and it took forever to get down to that sentence.

It’s like poetry.
I think it has a process akin to that, because for me, I had never been refined to that point– down to a few sentences, that’s all that radio can take. It can’t have any extraneous reference so, for example, there’s a sentence: “The house my father built with his own hands.” I first had the sentence as: “The house my father and my uncles built with their own hands,” but [Sarah] was like, “You can’t really bring them in.” We’d have these conversations because I felt I needed to include my uncles, but then the narrative gets distracting, because you’re listening and you’re asking, “Who are the uncles?” My siblings are invisible in this, and that was a huge ongoing issue because, if you mention their names, then you have to characterize them, and then you’re waiting for them to come back in.

How do they feel about this project?
I worry about it. It’s their dad, too, but then again it’s like how I say: I have to reckon with the fact that I am a journalist, because I am telling the story of my story. If they want to tell their stories, they can. It’s a hard thing, though, when your story is also — it is their father. And he is dying on tape, and that’s a pretty heavy thing to ask somebody to have out there in the world, if they don’t want to have it out there.

How long could the program have been?
They can only be six, 12 or 22 minutes.

Why didn’t you go with 22? [‘Ground’ is a 12-minute segment]
I would’ve loved to have, but I think it was too heart-wrenching, I think there wasn’t enough levity, over time, to hold it. We had earlier tape, as he was becomng bed-ridden, but we had sound quality problems so we couldn’t carry it past a point, and there was this big leap, so it was a mix of those things.

So you had to make these editorial decisions to shape the piece.
Yes, they were very editorial, in terms of what [material] you have, what you don’t have, what you missed, and who will talk to you. We couldn’t go back to do anything. With a lot of radio, you can go back and re-record it, but with this it was either there or it wasn’t.

Would you embark on a project like this again?
Definitely. I would really like to write about the elderly. I really enjoyed the time that I spent in the hospital with other older people. My dad I never thought of as elderly, but I would love to do more writing about elderly people. It’s interesting narratively, and interesting because it’s always considered a little bit of a surprise — [covering the elderly] is usually cast as “elderly people doing water aerobics,” or “elderly people dating and having sex.” How about just writing about elderly people like you write about teenagers?

You were recently awarded a Macarthur “genius” grant — congratulations. How does that affect your work? Does it grease the wheels for other projects you want to embark on, does it change things financially? How does it affect your life?
I think there are people, in general, who would persist in doing whatever they’re doing, but who are doing it against many obstacles — that’s a pretty similar trait with [the Macarthur recipients]. They’re going to do their music the way they do it, whatever. So in that way, I don’t feel that it’s changed the course of my work, but it has made me determined to protect the freedom of this time, which is what I was saying with the calendar [LeBlanc had showed us a datebook filled with current engagements that gave way to blank pages — upcoming time off from professional obligations.] All these anonymous people said, “What you’re doing matters to us.” For whatever reason, the external acknowledgement makes me say, “Respect what they’re respecting in you.”

I don’t have to worry about finding the best outlet for minidiscs anymore. It’s just the little things, like taking a taxi versus the subway. The other night, I was out all day reporting. It was raining, I was feeling sick, I’m coming back from a comedy club, it’s 11 at night. I got on the train and took the train. Then I thought, “Oh, I could take a cab tonight.” It was just the feeling like, “Wow, I could’ve.”

What’s your advice or recommendation to journalists interested in taking on subjects like this — personal, family-related, or ones to do with death and loss?
I hate to give this answer, but it really depends on the person and the story. For example, my friend Ann Patchett who’s a novelist, wrote a book about this friend of ours who died, Lucy Grealy, in the white heat of her grief. I think it was immediately, or very quickly after — it just had to come out of her. For me, [‘Ground’] could never have happened without two years, at least, of separating. I can never process it quickly. It takes me a long time.

In terms of the subject matter, I think it’s just a matter of very practical things. If you have an inkling that you want to [write about someone who’s dying] and you can’t right then, timewise, you need to just get information: from your uncle’s address to the name of the nurse. And ask if you can have phone numbers, because people move around a lot. Also, copies of medical records, and descriptions of rooms, the pajamas people wear — things like that can sort of be soothing. There are all the practical things you need.

In a case like this, because perspective is everything in the piece, I really think the editor is crucial — especially the closer you get to your own experience. I think any really good reporting brings you very close to your own experience in one way or another, and a good editor is able to keep combing through that, and help you not compromise your authority, get yourself out of the way, be more vulnerable than you want to be.

How did you and Sarah work together?
I think she got assigned to the piece because Dave sensed that we would be a good team, and I bet he had very clear reasons for that. So, we got assigned and I think she, sadly, has a long email history of these attempts, where she’d say “Are you ready to do this,” and I’d say ‘Yes, yes,” but then I was constantly postponing — really thinking I was ready to do it and now, in retrospect, I see I was nowhere near it. She was in a very sticky situation.

We moved along, she dealt with my resistance, and was incredibly graceful about the frustrations it had to have been causing her, that I can only see now. Because, I was so self-absorbed and narcissistic: This was my father, my family. Then we had this moment, where I was at the precipice of having to really accept what I was doing, and I wasn’t ready to and there was some kind of rupture, for a mix of reasons. From that moment on, it made the whole process completely toxic for me. Very destructive, very negative, very painful, and I realized that the bridge of that trust with her was everything, because I’m not telling the story to some anonymous public. I was telling Sarah the story and I was entrusting her to help me tell it.

That’s when I realized as a journalist, it actually really does matter when you’re covering these kinds of subjects, you really have to be involved in a way that’s decent, because you are the link to someone being able to do this. You literally are. When they have anxiety, and when they have fear and anger, that communication has to be open because if you retreat into some purely professional distance, it doesn’t always work in these circumstances. Sarah was really remarkable in her willingness to stay in there with me. I think you have to see it through.

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

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

For Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, what should have been a professional high in early 2003 coincided with personal tragedy. Her first book, Random Family — now considered a triumph of “immersion journalism” that helped her win a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2006 — was being released. At the same time, LeBlanc was grappling with her 85-year-old father Adrian Leon LeBlanc’s deterioration from late-stage lung cancer. Shuttling between her Manhattan residence and her childhood home in Leominister, Massachusetts, LeBlanc strove to spend as much time as possible with her dying father. With the intention of writing about him someday, she began tape-recording their talks, so she’d be sure to remember him exactly as he sounded and in his own words.

Those conversations have been distilled into “The Ground We Lived On,” an arresting radio documentary that peers into the intimate relationship between LeBlanc and her father. Even as they prepare one another for the inevitable, their conversations — “the ground they lived on,” as LeBlanc describes them in the piece — continue with humor and insight up until his death. In the first installment of a two-part interview, LeBlanc lays bare her ambivalence about documenting her dad’s last days. In Part II, she describes how she and StoryCorps producer Sarah Kramer (interviewed here) distilled 40 hours of audio footage and 70 pages of text into a 12-minute tribute to LeBlanc and her father’s profound connection.

What was it like for you when your father was diagnosed with lung cancer?
He had a sequence of events happen: He had an aortic aneurysm that was longstanding, for years. It finally got to the point where it had to be operated on. During that surgery, he was paralyzed in the torso, and during the neurological testing for that — which now brings us easily six months into this odyssey — that’s when he finds out he has lung cancer. So, we were dealing with his paralysis, which was a stunning kind of devastation, and the lung cancer was just sort of in the background.

It’s not to say we didn’t recognize [the lung cancer] was devastating, but he was trying to deal with becoming paralyzed. So then, this doctor said to us, “Look, you don’t have time on this.” So, the lung cancer diagnosis really collapsed into just a pure crisis feeling in my life. I was incredibly close with him — I went into high alarm. I was very stricken, and anxious, and terrified.

How did it occur to you to do this project?
Dave Isay, who’s the head of Sound Portraits and StoryCorps, was an acquaintance of mine, not a close friend, and we met for lunch, I think — we’d sort of crossed paths in journalism, prior to this. I was in the throes of this grieving and [Random Family] was coming out. I was just really devastated, and a friend of his had just lost a parent to lung cancer, so Dave said “Tape your dad. Just tape him, Adrian.” I said, “No, why?” He said, “Just tape him. Get down the info about his life. You think you’ll remember all these details but you really won’t.” Which I know from journalism — you think you will [remember every detail], but you never do. So he gave me a tape recorder and said, “Just do it.”

I brought it home and did one interview with my dad. It was very stiff, like” “Where were you born? Blah, blah blah.” The taping got screwed up, so I got some consultation from StoryCorps, and then that’s how it happened. It was never with a plan to do anything with [the material] except have it. It was this idea that I would get [my dad’s] bio down, because I knew I would forget the name of his high school, that stuff. And I know I will write about my dad someday, but [I was] definitely not thinking it was for a project.

In “The Ground We Lived On,” you say of your father: “His keen joy in observing people and the world is the reason I became a journalist.” Can you elaborate on that?
We thought a lot about the use of the word ‘keen,’ because it wasn’t just this sort of vague thing — he really was a bird watcher, he’d always called himself a bird watcher, and he was the kind of person that would watch people very carefully. He was a very loveable guy, a gentle nice guy — he wasn’t a person you’d feel uncomfortable with, but he was absorbing people and would often have a very astute take on them. Not a critical one, but, kind of like these characterizations. He would think about it, and he would enjoy it. I guess it was observing, then characterizing.

And, he also was a person who was incredibly curious about people and the world. He would always ask questions like, “What’s your day like?” It’s the question he always asked people: “What do you do during the day?” I think partly because of his union stuff [LeBlanc’s father had been a labor activist], he was always trying to place that — things that were good, or things that were working and things that weren’t. And in [‘Ground’] it says he would call us to the window. He was always pointing things out — my mom did it, too. It was a way of looking at the world.

What was your dad’s take on being taped during all this? Did you have to convince him?
No, no, no. I think he always secretly wanted me to devote myself to writing about him at some point. We always thought we’d get around to it — it was never spoken, but we both sort of knew it. He was totally game. I think he would’ve done anything for me, in general — he was supportive. When we started, he never even said, “Why?” I think he understood that I needed to do it, I wanted to do it — he sort of wanted to do it. I think he liked to think about his life in our conversations. When I used to go home and visit, we would always get up really early and go out to breakfast. I would always ask questions, and he would talk.

My mother didn’t want it to happen — she was like, “Adrian Nicole, if you have to do this, [do it], but I don’t want to be in it.” Of course, the great irony is, she’s the only one [besides LeBlanc and her father] really in it, because of both the way the documentary went and the quality of the recording — only certain recordings have useable quality. So, my father was trying to say, “Respect that your mom doesn’t want to be in it.” So, sometimes, I’d shut it off when she’d come in the room. And sometimes I wouldn’t, because I just forgot that it was running.

How does your mom feel about it now?
Well, she just listened — I was just calling her [LeBlanc was finishing a cell phone call when we arrived for the interview]. She seemed to think it was very beautiful. She was nervous about listening, but I think she sees it as something very separate from her. I think she just hopes it will help me process this a little bit better than I’ve been able to. But, it is pretty intimate in terms of them, and I feel respectful of the fact that I still made the decision to do it despite what she wanted, and despite that, in fact, it was a very private moment between them. Which is sort of sobering, but I still have to face that I did do it. I don’t think that she has a problem with it, but she had no way of knowing what was on it. I didn’t share it earlier because I wasn’t going to let anybody change it, and I didn’t really want to know if she hated it, because then I never would have had the guts to do it.

In what way did your father’s illness impact your relationship? You say you’d always been close, but did you feel that was ratcheted up while he was sick?
[While he was sick], we were still talking, and then he was talking less, then he was not talking at all. So, it didn’t change our relationship at all — [‘Ground’] is really representative of our relationship. I just spent every minute I could with him. I mean, the sad thing was that [Random Family] was coming out, and he was like, “Get out there, honey — you jumped in the water, now you’re gonna swim. You don’t just let this thing die.” So, I was doing readings and it was horrible. I was so dissociated from that. I have no recollection of most of those events; I could’ve cared less, really — not because I didn’t respect what I had done and the fact that people cared. I just wanted to be [with him] all the time, and I was scared I would get a cell phone call… I hated being away from him. Any available minute, I gave to him.

He was being cared for at home — that must’ve been a huge thing for you, your mom…
And my siblings. He was in a hospital a lot, prior to that because he’d had major surgery, so getting him home was great. Then, hospice was amazing. Hospice allowed us to take care of him the way we needed to, and we were lucky that we had the comfort level, financially, to not have to worry about sustaining that. I’m in a career that, even though money was never the thing it generated, I could just be home that much. It’s one of the things that makes us most happy and proud.

“I don’t think you should ever shelve your introspection about your own motivation. I think it’s really crucial.”

As a journalist, the impulse to chronicle or document what’s going on — even if you’re not thinking of it as anything official — how did you negotiate that?
I have to credit Dave Isay with that. Even had I had the impulse, I would’ve repressed it because I would’ve been very uncomfortable about it — reckoning with that impulse we have as journalists. I think it’s good to reckon with it, because I don’t think you should ever shelve your introspection about your own motivation. I think it’s really crucial.

It helped me feel much more at peace and confident about what I do. It’s not about preserving my dad. It’s not even about the death: There’s just 12 minutes [of the program] where people, friends — maybe strangers — just get to know my dad. I do really believe that about writing about people: You get to know them and you get to see things, and it’s really valuable. I think it sort of matters that you get to know the way someone else is living. Dave Isay really does believe that regular people need to be known and I think it’s true.

“Immersion journalism” is a term that’s been used to describe your work. Does this project fit into that category?
I understand what people mean by that. I guess part of it is the luxury of time, because [journalism] is really a hard business to make any kind of time in. I think of it as time, where the immersion comes in, the willingness to let your [work] dominate, or be a very, very large part of what you’re doing. [‘Ground’] was implicitly immersed, because obviously it is my family life.

My other projects are my life, but this made me aware of the journalism. When I was doing Random Family, my reporting was my life. Whereas [with ‘Ground’], I was aware that there was a footbridge between my life and the reporting. I thought, “Oh, I am reporting.” Not to say that I don’t intellectually know that I’m reporting…

But you were more conscious of it?
Yes, of my own agency and intention. Because, no matter what, even if I didn’t know this was going to be a documentary — I mean, come on! I set up a tape recorder on the hospital bed.

You say in ‘Ground’ that there are moments when caring for your dad feels “spiritual,” and you describe the reverence you feel toward his flesh, even as he’s physically deteriorating. Those sentiments may sound familiar to those who’ve experienced loss like this, but in the media you don’t tend to find them outside the purview of self-help books, or articles specifically about grief. So, how would you place this project in the larger journalistic landscape?
I never thought of that part of it. I wonder, how would one cover that stuff journalistically, as opposed to more personally — like self-help. It’s a really good question: I don’t know how you would cover it journalistically. I don’t know how people would report about this. It’s clear that since I don’t know, and you’re clearly wondering, we need to cover it. Personal essays get the closest, I think.

In the piece, you say: “Serious loss brings you into one of the world’s silent fraternities.” And sooner or later, if one lives long enough, we’ll all go through an experience like this. So, why is that fraternity silent?
A total inability to deal with mortality, a refusal to deal with aging: I think that’s thoroughly American. I was in Eastern Europe this summer, and it’s really different there. We don’t know how to deal with it and we willfully don’t deal with it. Just the very fact that when some loved one gets sick or is dying, it’s like everyone else’s life is continuing — if you bring it up, people don’t really want to hear about it.

In the second half of this interview, Editing Through Loss — Part II, LeBlanc describes the grueling editing process that had her reliving her father’s final moments to create “The Ground We Lived On.”

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

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

As the CEO of Playboy Enterprises, one of Forbes‘ 100 Most Powerful Women In The World — and, oh yeah, daughter of Hugh — Christie Hefner’s perspective on the media industry — and life, really — is unlike yours, ours or anyone else’s. Mediabistro.com managing editor, media news Dylan Stableford chatted with Christie during the 2006 American Magazine Conference in Phoenix, Arizona (she was the chair of that, too) about magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, the venerable Playboy brand and what it’s like to hang out at the Mansion with Dad and all of his robes.

mediabistro.com: What is your average media day like?

Christie Hefner: I read four newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. I read Financial Times online. I don’t read blogs regularly, unless someone directs me to them. But I do blog for the Huffington Post.

A big part of this conference is based on the theme of magazines “going beyond the page” and Playboy has clearly been adept at this, with all of its brand extensions. But is it realistic to think other publishers, particularly smaller magazines, can emulate what you do?

Online — absolutely. It’s not realistic to think they can emulate what we do in other areas, at least in scale. We have a $700 million retail business — that’s not the template for most publishers. But I think connecting your magazine brand to other mediums — that’s extremely important.

What is Playboy‘s next brand extension?

We’re looking at London and Macao to do the same thing we’ve done in Las Vegas. We’ve already launched a Sirius channel. And we have a casino club. It’s the basic idea of bringing the brand experience, and lifestyle experience, to new territories.

Under its new ownership, Penthouse appears to be transforming itself into more of a competitor to Playboy than they’ve been in the recent past. They hired away Diane Silberstein from Playboy, they just threw a “Meet the Media” party in New York. Do you feel any pressure?

No. If you look at history, five years, 10 years decade to decade, there’s no comparison. The breadth of what Playboy does just isn’t comparable. I’ve been at this business far too long to feel that pressure. We just move ahead.

How often do you get to the Mansion?

Hmm. Well, I’d say every few months. Maybe something like eight times a year. We were at the Mansion for Halloween last year, and I must say, it is the party. There’s nothing else that compares to it. You should try to go if you can.

How much has been expressed to you about the chain of succession if your father retires?
The company’s his. We went through that process. Our roles are well defined. Creatively, he’s training [all of] us to understand what the brand is, how it should be represented.

Will he ever retire?

He’s said, basically, he loves what he does, and he’s going to do it as long as he’s able to. So, no, I don’t think so.

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

Following a summer of rumors, an ownership change and a
subsequent housecleaning that included the exodus of popular editor Mimi Valdes
that has kept the fire of speculation fueled, Valdes’ replacement, Danyel Smith,
who was Vibe‘s editor in the late 1990s — inherited a lot of blingy
baggage. We spoke with Smith recently about managing morale, the relative soul
of American Idol and why “you want me backstage at Diddy.”

You’ve a history with Vibe. How did you wind up back
here?

It seems like I’ve always been with Vibe. It feels like I never
left. In 1993 I moved to New York from Oakland to be the R&B editor at
Bilboard — just as I was offered the job of West Coast editor of
Vibe. I was a stringer for Spin, the New York Times,
and then was appointed editor in 1997. I became Vibe‘s editor-in-chief
for 21 issues. Then I got a job as Time Inc.’s editor-at-large — it was a sexy
offer. I dropped out of the magazine game for awhile to write and get my MFA,
but then [the new ownership] got me back, so here I am.

How do you manage morale after a housecleaning?

It’s been a whirlwind. Anytime you have to let anyone go, it’s like a family.
I didn’t hide the fact that it is a tense time. It’s not easy. I’ve been through
that experience. A few years ago I would’ve run crying, but we’re deep here, we
have forward-thinking editors. It makes us stronger. You lead by example, but I
don’t pretend to act other than the way I feel.

What was the first thing you said to your staff?

‘It’s a very tumultuous time, but we’re going to get through it.’ That, and
‘I’m back, folks.’

How would you describe your sensibility as an editor?

I’m tough. I have really high expectations. I love Vibe. I breathe it. I had
some great teachers like Joe Levy and Robert Christgau along the way — they were
very principled, tough, editor — just because [the subject matter] is music and
culture doesn’t mean it’s any less important to be that way.

Is Vibe as influential as it was, say, three years
ago?

I hate to sound corny, but it’s been the same, best music
magazine in the entire world. We have relentless, thorough, excellent writing. I
think there are some music stories that have been criminally undocumented — some
really beautiful music, and it’s of service to our audience to find it. I view
that as my job.

How do you balance covering hip-hop culture while being a
part of it? Is there a downside?

We’re all a part of what we write about, not just hip-hop. If you cover
business for the New York Times, you’re part of it in some way. We live the
culture. In some ways it makes us biased, in some ways it doesn’t. I love pop
culture. I live it. If you’re a reader, you want me backstage at Mariah. You
want me backstage at Diddy, so I can tell you what’s really happening. I’m the
girl for the gig.

What is your typical media day like?

I’m in the office at 9:00-9:30. I’m everywhere. I’m reading everything all
the time — the Times, the Washington Post arts section, all
the alt weeklies, the San Francisco Bay Guardian — all of them online
except for Billboard. Then we have an internal blog that interns post
to. When I came in here, we were still making interns get us clips, and they
were spread out with scissors — I was like, no, ‘This is Little House On The
Prairie.’

Is Vibe changing direction?

If anything we’re expanding what we do to have a broader spectrum. We’re
doing 300-400 words on TV on the Radio. We just did a big piece on American
Idol winner Taylor Hicks. People might be like, “What’s this guy doing in
Vibe?” But he’s really soulful. He’s into the blues.

What’s encouraging in terms of magazines you compete against? What’s
discouraging?

I think we compete against everybody — Rolling Stone, Spin,
the Times. It’s hard to speak for them, but what’s discouraging [in
general] is the idea of what’s “urban” and “mainstream” and that line in
between. When we put people of color on our covers, we’re always dealing with
that issue. Once you think it’s over, we’re past it — it seems to be coming back
to mattering again. People want to use it against you. ‘If a there’s a star
who’s white on our cover, does it mean less or is it worth less?’ That’s why you
get forward-thinking editors to guide you through all of that.

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

Charles Glasser started as a reporter in his teens and ended up reporting in Nicaragua, El Salvador, England and Spain. Today, he travels the world training reporters and editors of Bloomberg News how to responsibly exercise freedom of speech.

In his new book, the International Libel and Privacy Handbook, Glasser attempts to demystify the world’s libel laws in an era when all media is global. Fresh from a trip to Japan, Glasser took time to speak to Aileen Gallagher of mediabistro.com. Excerpts:

Mediabistro: What do you do?

Charles Glasser: One of my responsibilities here is media law training around the world. With 125 bureaus and almost 2,000 reporters, that’s a lot of stuff. Bloomberg journalists are required to take media law training every two years. It’s kind of a rolling thing. Primarily, giving classes in Japan and India. While I’m there, other things — meeting with outside council, reviewing changes in general law, perhaps supervising some litigation matter. I wear a number of different hats here.

Mediabistro: (As a young lawyer, Glasser argued a case in the First Circuit Court of Appeals.) What happened in that case?

Charles Glasser: The case is called Levinsky’s Inc. v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., where I won a reversal of a jury verdict on defamatory meaning. Does the word “trashy” defame you? If I said your store was trashy, have I defamed you? The trial court said yeah, trashy. I wouldn’t go to a store that was trashy. The holding was that when a word is capable of so many different meanings, and most of them are just opinion or not defamatory, then the word can’t be defamatory. Trashy is one of those words. The word is capable of so many different meanings.

I did a lot of access work and really got into the public interest work. I got to do a great case Doe vs. Department of Mental Health. It’s a tragic story but a great example of how the press can be everything it’s supposed to be. Pardon my proselytizing, but it is a religion. A mildly retarded young lady was in a state home and she was murdered by another patient, both in the state care. The facts seemed to indicate that her murder was largely due to incompetence and negligence of the caretaking staff.

“If you teach people to get it right, if you teach people to be fair, be responsible, most of all, be clear.… More often than not, libel cases occur because something wasn’t well thought out and it wasn’t well supported.”

Mediabistro: But she’s a column and that’s protected, right?

Charles Glasser: Remember, it’s not marked as an opinion column. She was just a reporter. She’s a columnist. That’s part of how I won the case. Their argument was “Wait a minute, this is in a news page, not on the op-ed page.” I convinced the court — I know I’m bragging, but it’s a good case — that there are things in a newspaper that are the indicia of opinion. One of them is the fact that she’s got a standing sig with her picture and that indicates to the reasonable reader, column. Readers are smart enough to know that a column has that flavor of opinion. Opinions are not wholesale protected. Opinions can be defamatory. I like to think it was my experience as a journalist that I was able to flesh out what the facts were that you could then present to a judge.

Mediabistro: How does media law training work at Bloomberg?

Charles Glasser: If you teach people to get it right, if you teach people to be fair, be responsible, most of all, be clear. Most libel cases come from a well-founded, well-intended mistake. There are not all that many cases where a reporter acted with knowing falsity and reckless disregard for the truth. More often than not, libel cases occur because something wasn’t well thought out and it wasn’t well supported. The research wasn’t as clean and clear as it should have been.

The amount of pre-publication review varies wildly across news organizations. I can tell you at Bloomberg our general approach. I could never read everything. We move 5,000 stories a day and it’s just not going to happen. My driving principle is not to put on the brakes. My driving principle is break the news, beat the competition. That’s my first job. How can I facilitate breaking the news?

What we have here is sort of a red-flag system. We train editors and train reporters how to get it right, how to be fair, how to be clear, how to be cognizant of certain issues. If one of those libel-y things comes up, take a good look at it and then call me. We train them to reach out to me. Long, investigative pieces I always read. Bloomberg publishes a magazine, Bloomberg Markets, and because it’s a monthly, it only makes sense for me to read it ahead of time.

“The defenses to libel are similar the world over if you reach for the highest standards.”

Judges, at least thoughtful judges, are cognizant of the drive to publish quickly. Indeed, if a judge really believes, wait a minute, maybe Gallagher got it wrong but my gosh, she was writing about toxic water in the baby food and if she didn’t write about it right now, who knows what could have happened? There you have a public interests that demands what Justice Brennan called the “exigencies of the deadline.” On the other hand, what if Gallagher was working on a story that was much more enterprising… Six years ago, a famous politician was charged with drunk driving. Does the public need to know that right now, and so much at the expense of fact-checking a little more?

One thing that, in the Bloomberg way, we emphasize here a lot, is we must remember, that driving force is the public interest. Not, NOT competitive disadvantage with other news organizations. The London Telegraph was accused of rushing a story to print and, at trial, when pressed about why the rush, the editor had to admit that, “Well, we were afraid the other newspapers were going to get the story.” What are we here for? What are reporters here for? We’re not here to simply beat the competition, we’re here to serve the public interest. I honestly believe that, naive as it sounds. Unfortunately, we lose sight of that. And when we do, we get into trouble.

Mediabistro: In the book, you’re examining the libel laws of several different countries. Who has the toughest?

Charles Glasser: There’s the toughest law and the toughest atmosphere. China is tough because the legal system is the most impenetrable. India is one of the few countries, and the only one in Asia, that will read American law. The former attorney general there told me in a conversation that we’ll look at law anywhere and if we think it comports to our constitution, we’ll cite it. India has cited Times v. Sullivan. China’s legal system is the scariest and most impenetrable, and they have criminal penalties so that raises the stakes. In terms of the most difficult, right now England is still the worst because the burden of proof — the burden of truth — as in most of the world, the story is assumed false until you prove it true.

What we teach here is, knowing that as a reporter you’ve got this responsibility of proving the truth, doesn’t it makes sense that when you’re preparing a story, you dot every I and cross every T, save every document and really do a great job? You can look anyone in the eye and say “No, here it is, boom, boom, boom.”

The defenses to libel are similar the world over if you reach for the highest standards. You grew up believing that truth is a defense. In Germany, truth is not an absolute defense. If a story makes a defamatory — we’ll say unflattering — statement about somebody, the fact that it’s true is not enough to justify its publication. It must serve the public interest. The famous illustration is one of the German papers published a story referring to Gerhard Schroeder’s dyed hair. You’ve seen a picture of the guy. It’s total shoe polish. He sued and won. It may have been true, said the judge, but where’s the public interest in that? How does that serve the public? A judge is going to say, “You’ve clearly damaged somebody’s reputation. The question is, can you justify it?” True isn’t enough, you have justify it by dint of service to the public. That’s just an interesting difference that people don’t think about.

“It’s not just so much where the article is available, but where the impact of the article can be felt.”

The most difficult problem with England is that the judges, unfortunately, are insanely generous to people that we would consider scoundrels. I’m not kidding. It’s shameless. We’ve been threatened by people who are notorious — Russian mobsters, Arab oil sheiks with ties to terrorist funding — who can still bring claims in England. If you have enough money in England, just go to down to Savile Row and get the right suit and the right lawyer and it’s just remarkable.

Mediabistro: What does the global nature of the web mean for libel?

Charles Glasser: Because of the Internet, your article can arrive in France and Germany with a few mouse clicks. In England, judges have said, “Enough with the libel tourism.” The fact that the article was available in England isn’t enough. If the plaintiff (they call them a claimant) has a reputation in England and has interests in England and the article and be said to have impacted those things, then they’re going to take jurisdiction. So it’s not just so much where the article is available, but where the impact of the article can be felt.

Mediabistro: What’s stopping online writers, like bloggers, from getting sued?

Charles Glasser: If Mrs. Smith has her web page and she’s living in Florida, she’s got no assets in Italy. She doesn’t have an office in France. She doesn’t have a bank account in Germany. Let’s say she writes about a German guy and the German guy sues her in Germany. Even if the court in Germany takes jurisdiction and even if the German court rules against her by default or otherwise, American jurisprudence will not enforce foreign judgments that do not comport with the First Amendment. I cannot sue you in France under French libel law and then take my judgment to a U.S. court and then say give me all your money. That doesn’t stop other shenanigans from happening. If Mrs. Smith was in the EU, she’s got problems. The treaties require full faith and credit across countries. A judgment in France will be enforceable in Germany.

The other problem with this isn’t so much Mrs. Smith and her weblog, but let’s say that a corporation publishes a website where they do comparative advertising where they say our widgets are better than Brand X’s widgets and Brand X is in Germany. If the publisher of the statement that’s sued upon has assets in Germany, has an office, has employees, has a bank account — like Bloomberg does, like AP does, like NBC does — then you can’t just thumb your nose at it. CNN can be sued anywhere and CNN can have assets seized everywhere. And much more importantly, from a human standpoint, remember that most of these countries have a criminal libel law. That puts at risk not just the money and the stuff, but people — the most important asset that any company’s got. Many countries, for instance, France, can actually imprison the director of publications even though that person had nothing to do with the publication. They’re responsible. Companies and news organizations need to be aware of their global impact.

Mediabistro: How does Bloomberg deal with that?

Charles Glasser: We do not change our stories for their venue. A story that is good enough for Bloomberg is good enough for Bloomberg globally. Some organizations do. Some organizations will publish a scathing editorial about Singapore and that same story will not appear in their Asian edition. We have a more practical and more ethical approach: If we meet the highest standards of good journalism, we will take our shot in court anywhere. Good journalists really get that. If I can show you that my story is accurate, clearly written, fair, not motivated by an agenda, it is transparent with regard to my sources, it is transparent with regard to how I obtained material, if my article most of all serves the public interest, is clearly written so there is not ambiguity about who did what bad thing, then I will stand up in any court and defend that. You have to. Any less, then why bother? Does that mean we will win every case? Probably not.

Mediabistro: How does your journalism training work?

Charles Glasser: Good journalism is the best legal defense there is. As a journalist I know the techniques. As I lawyer I know where the weak points are. Then we’ll highlight the little quirks in local law. Defamatory meaning in Japan is very different from here. If I say someone here files for bankruptcy, there’s nothing bad about that. In Japan it’s very shameful. Also in Japan, the dead can be libeled. If libel law is culturally reflective, then look at Confucian and Buddhist influences in society. The family can bring the claim. We emphasize the techniques of good journalism.

Mediabistro: How often are these international libel suits filed?

Charles Glasser: Global publishers are forced to defend collectively at least a hundred international lawsuits a year. They are very expensive and they are very, very damaging. Being sued for libel is one of the most unpleasant, emotionally exhausting, emotionally expensive experiences that I wouldn’t wish on a dog. Nobody likes getting accused of getting it wrong. Reporters may best be served by thinking of what they do as a craft rather than a profession. And to have one’s craftsmanship challenged is a necessarily unpleasant and disturbing thing. Any reporter who tells you no big deal, let ’em sue me for libel, that’s the kind of guy I worry about.

There are two kinds of reporters in this world: There’s the woman who lies awake at night and goes, “Gosh did I get it right, did I miss something.” I’ll take that person every day of the week. The guy who says, “Aw, I couldn’t be wrong. Prove it,” that sort of hubris. Those are the kinds who keep me awake at night.

Come see Sebastian Junger and others talk about their transition from writing articles to books in mediabistro’s June 28 panel discussion, “From Journo to Big Book.”

mediabistro: What were your criteria for choosing which of your stories went into Crime Beat?

Michael Connelly: I was looking for stories that had what I was calling an echo—a connection that would go from that story to something I’ve written in my fiction, and whether it’s the plot in some of these stories, some have obvious plot connections. But, there are also some more subtle things, like a character theme. But, I was looking for stories that connected to the [novels] because I thought the audience, largely, would be people who are familiar with my fiction work.

mb: Considering you started on the crime beat while in Fort Lauderdale, during the height of South Florida’s “cocaine wars,” how much of your experience reporting on that shows up in your fiction?

Connelly: Well, I think my days on the crime beat obviously influenced me. [Otherwise], we wouldn’t be having this conversation, I’m sure. I wouldn’t have been able to write the book I did, if I hadn’t been on the crime beat. But the kinds of crime, how they affected this, I’m not really sure how to place that.

I was drawn, as any police reporter would be, to the more intriguing cases. I mean, with the Fort Lauderdale stuff, there are a couple stories in Crime Beat where I’m with the homicide squad. That story was very influential—I spent a week with them back in, I believe, ’87 or ’86 (I don’t have the date in front of me). That one week has influenced all 16 novels I’ve written. You know, with a full immersion into that world, it was very influential.

mb: Are any of the articles you wrote during that time in Crime Beat? If so, why did choose those stories, in particular?

Connelly: Yes, the first one, called “The Call.” I wanted that to be first because
I think, if someone has read my [novels], they’ll immediately see the
connection between the character I write about most often, Harry
Bosch, and a couple of the detectives in that story.

Also, the stories on Christopher Wilder (in Crime Beat chapter “Killer on the Run”) were back
then. The serial killer started in South Florida,
then went out to L.A., then went back to the northeast.

mb: Which incident from the book that you reported on took you most by surprise, and why?

Connelly: Probably one from the story called “The Stalker.” It took me by surprise because I was asked to cover the trial of this man named Jonathon Lundh, who was charged with murder. What’s surprising about it is that he started calling me pretty regularly from the jail. He had convinced the judge of his skills and he was allowed to defend himself. In his charge of murder, he was his own lawyer, and even though he was not a lawyer he was allowed to defend himself. And as such, he got greater access to things in jail, including the phone, so he was pretty free to call.

So he called me quite a bit, and there was kind of an obvious manipulation going on. Then, he ended up subpoenaing me to be a witness. It was a kind of surprising twist in covering that case, because I was never really sure what he hoped to get out of putting me on the stand—nothing more than probably embarrassing me or something. I knew nothing about the case other than what I had reported on. And he was trying to use me to get to the police, to get me to tell what the police had told me about him that never got into the newspaper story. So, it involved the whole legal morass of the Los Angeles Times attorneys saying I didn’t have to testify, and so on and so forth. And that was something I didn’t see coming.

mb: So did you actually end up testifying?

Connelly: No, ultimately I didn’t have to testify. Actually, you know, I did testify, but I didn’t say anything. Basically, the Los Angeles Times gave me a rehearsal-answer thing, I can’t remember exactly what it was. It was something along the lines of, “I choose not to have to answer that,” under whatever reporting protective laws there were at the time.

mb: How did you navigate the emotions called up by the cases you cover—for example, in the Kanan murder? How did you keep the feelings elicited by the crimes from coloring your reporting of those incidents? Did writing crime fiction help provide an outlet for that?

Connelly: Well, the more you [covered crime], the thicker the shield was around you. Like cops, the crime beat reporter can seek outlets that help maintain mental health or numb the difficult feelings. In my case, I had my fiction. I would come home from a day of telling it like it is to spend a couple hours in an alternate universe, where I got to make it up and tie up all the loose ends. It was very therapeutic. But, as I said, I still could become cynical.

You asked specifically about the Kanan case. Well, I can’t remember any particularly difficult feeling overtaking me from that case. To me, it was a big story and I was all about advancing it ahead of the competition. I remember when I got ahold of a search warrant that named a suspect, I was elated because I knew the competition didn’t have it. I didn’t really slow down to think about who that suspect was and how sordid the story was turning out to be.

mb: You say that one of the cases you recall most from your life as a reporter involves a “woman who killed her kids, the family dog, and then turned the gun on herself.” You also say your biggest regret is not going back to that house to find out why she did it—what stopped you?

Connelly: Probably because at the time I didn’t care. I didn’t care enough to go back. I was caught up in the routine of the job, the momentum of moving on to the next story, and the next day. I was sort of a crime reporter du jour. If you do that long enough, you kind of wrap yourself in a cold cynicism. You become inured to the content of what you are writing about, you lose sight of the human element.

Frankly, back then I didn’t care why she had killed her family and herself. All I knew was that it wasn’t going to be a big story, so I moved on. My regrets are formed in hindsight. It’s not something I regretted in the moment. I probably didn’t think too much about it.

mb: Do you still rely on the contacts you made while covering crime for newspapers when writing novels?

Connelly: I do use a lot of contacts within the LAPD and other law-enforcement agencies, but I’m pretty sure there’s not a single person who I work with now that I used as a source when I was a reporter. One story that’s kind of funny is that an LAPD detective, who helps me quite a bit now, never returned my calls when I was a reporter. This sort of underlines the difference between journalism and writing fiction.

When I was calling on him as the reporter, he perceived me as a possible threat because I might question how he was handling the case, or I might report facts he wanted to keep out of public knowledge. But, when I call on him now as a novelist, he’s happy to help me because I write fiction, and there is no threat to him.

“When I was working the beat, I often had to lobby and fight for space for my stories. I really wonder if that would be the case now.”

mb: While crimes don’t seem to change much over time, technology certainly does. Describe your reporting methods behind the stories in Crime Beat, prior to cell phones and the Internet.

Connelly: I had an editor who used to call out to me as I left the newsroom, “Got quarters?” Well, I doubt there is a reporter in the country now who relies on pay phones for calling in to rewrite. They carry cell phones, not quarters for pay phones. So advances in technology have changed reporting as well as policing. I think more shoe leather was involved back then, more face-to-face relationships.

mb: How did cutting your teeth as a journalist using those methods affect your writing? Also, how does current technology play into your work now?

Connelly: I think because of my years as a reporter, I am blessed with the ability to write almost anywhere: planes, trains, cars, airports, hotels, etc. So to do that, I always have a computer with me. I have Internet access, I have my BlackBerry, I have any piece of technology that makes [writing] easier to do.

Conversely, in the writing itself, I use technology as window dressing. It usually is not an important part of the story. Most of the time, I write about a detective who doesn’t trust the advances of technology, who’s not sure [technology is] improving the world, and has a difficult time when put into a position where he must confront or use technology.

mb: What are some trends you’ve noticed in crime reporting and writing over the past 25 years? Do you think newspapers’ treatment of crime stories varies from how they were handled when you were reporting? How?

Connelly: I think media access to law enforcement has increased tremendously through things like Court TV and the proliferation of live trials and car chases, and the Internet, too. I think this has educated the public, but also whetted the appetite for the reading and viewing public. This, in turn, has pushed the crime beat to the forefront in a lot of media venues. When I was working the beat, I often had to lobby and fight for space for my stories. I really wonder if that would be the case now. I kind of doubt it.

mb: “If you want to know the facts, read a newspaper, but if you want to know the truth, read a novel.” You’ve said you agree with this sentiment: How do your novels get to truth behind the facts in a different way than your newspaper crime stories?

Connelly: With fiction you can tell “true” stories by creating characters and situations that explore an issue or an incident or whatever you want to its full extent. It’s a perfect setup for this exploration, because there are no boundaries. You can move the pieces anywhere on the board to truly make your case.

In a piece of journalism, there are always boundaries. You are bound by the known facts and what people are willing to tell you. Just because someone told you how something happened, it doesn’t mean that is how it truly happened. It is only their version. You can’t go inside that person’s head to get the truth. In a novel you can.

mb: Your police detective friend describes what you do as “faction,” or “the blending or bending of fact into fiction.” How does that play into your own work, both in reported crime stories and crime novels?

Connelly: When it comes to journalism it plays no part—you don’t blend fact and fiction. When it comes to my novels, I try to cast the stuff I make up against a backdrop of reality. I want as many truthful details as possible, because it makes the fiction more realistic. I want the line between what is real and what is made up to be unnoticeable.

mb: Having been a journalist covering the crime beat gives you an advantage as a fiction crime writer. Got any advice for writers who don’t share your background, but want to tackle crime fiction?

Connelly: You mean when they go to write crime novels? I think these books live
and die with the characters you create. And they have to be real,
credible characters… [Maybe] you don’t have the kind of [experience] I had, where
I actually dealt with dozens and dozens of detectives almost on a
daily basis. Then, you’ve got to get that somewhere else. I don’t think
you can watch TV or read other books, or watch movies and write about
detectives and the crime beat as you will, credibly.

You’ve got to do
your research. If you don’t spend years as a newspaper reporter,
that’s not required, that’s fine. But I think you should go and visit
the police station, and try to spend time with some of the people who
are doing the work that you want to write about.

**

Want to hear from other journalists who’ve made the move to writing books? Come to mediabistro’s June 28 panel discussion, From Journo to Big Book: How Five Journalists Became Authors, featuring The Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger, Vanity Fair‘s David Margolick, and more.

Nicole Haddad is an aspiring freelancer with a Master’s degree in publishing. This is her first piece for mediabistro.