Scott Turow’s legal thrillers have been translated into more than 25 languages and sold 25 million copies worldwide. His first novel, Presumed Innocent, was made into a film starring Harrison Ford. Still a practicing lawyer (Turow is a partner in the Chicago office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal), Turow also writes nonfiction about his own profession: His first book, One L documents his first year at Harvard Law School. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty was published in 2003. After a recent reading and signing in Dallas, Turow spoke to mediabistro.

Mediabistro: Your latest novel, Ordinary Heroes, takes readers into the territory of history. Talk about bringing history into your work.

Turow: Half of The Law of Our Fathers was set in California in the 1970s and required quite a bit of research. Of course, World War II was a period when I was not alive. I enjoyed the research more than I expected. … If there’s something that bores you to dig into, you can leave it out. And there are advantages. History sets boundaries that don’t exist in contemporary fiction. The war in Europe was going to end in May 1945. I had no decision about that.

Mediabistro: Kindle County and its recurring characters could be considered a study in establishing a setting and people readers can get into. Why did you create a fictional tri-cities area and how does that work for you as a writer?

Turow: Kindle County was created by accident. Presumed Innocent was originally set in Boston, but I spent so long writing it that Chicago, where we were living for years by then, had infiltrated the setting. So Kindle County was born.

When I decided to write next about Sandy Stern, the lawyer in Presumed Innocent, I had no choice about staying there. By now I’ve taken up permanent residence.

Mediabistro: You’re a practicing attorney and many of your characters are attorneys. Is this “writing about what you know,” truly something you’re fascinated with, or both?

Turow: I do like lawyers, God save me, but I like the law as a subject even more. The struggle of the law to impose reason on life is both morally worthy and frequently impossible. It’s a wonderful theme.

Mediabistro: How did you get started as a writer? Your memoir of law school, One L, is a cult favorite among those who have been there or are considering being there.

Turow: I got my start as a writer in college, at Amherst College, where I was given my senior year off to write fiction fulltime, under the guidance of Tillie Olsen, Leo Marx, and David Sofield. After that I was a writing fellow at Stanford, and a lecturer at the Creative Writing Center after that. Having channeled my talents a little made it possible for me to write while amid the law school hothouse. It would be a tough environment in which to start.

Mediabistro: Tell us about your writing routine—environment, research, process, whatever. How do you get from the seed of an idea to a finished manuscript?

Turow: It’s very haphazard. I think for a long time, then I start writing fragments, pieces of scenes, descriptions of characters, background, patches of dialogue. It’s kind of like the nebulae swirling to become stars. Things accrete, eventually moving toward a shape. I write principally at home, but have been known to pull out my laptop anywhere, including the commuter train, airplanes, but very, very seldom in the law office.

Mediabistro: What makes a great read? Who do you read?

Turow: A coherent imagined world makes for great fiction, a world compelling in its details. I read more “serious” fiction than anything else. Recently, I’ve liked Benjamin Kunkle’s Indecision, and was impressed by Banville’s The Sea.

Mediabistro: What advice would you give a fledgling writer?

Turow: Just do it. Writers write. As my friend Tom Zigal, a Texas novelist, puts it: “You’ve gotta log a lot of pages to learn how to do it.” Learning how to connect thought and feeling to words takes practice, just like anything else in life worth doing.

Jackie Larson is a nationally published, Texas-based writer working on her first novel. She contributes to magazines and newspapers, and is co-author of a career guide coming out in 2006.

Marc Weingarten’s The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution is a straightforward history of the last period in journalism history worth calling “new.”

The inevitable heir to long-form profiles and articles in such publications as The New Yorker, New Journalism sprang from a generation of writers (including Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Michael Herr) who found supportive editors (such as Clay Felker, Harold Hayes, and Jann Wenner) with daring publications (New York, Esquire, and Rolling Stone). The talent, the creativity, and the drive collided to change American journalism forever.

With a fan’s enthusiasm, a researcher’s depth, and a writer’s style, Weingarten tells the story behind all those marvelous stories. And then he answered a few questions for mediabistro.

Mediabistro: How did you go about your research? There’s so much material to draw from about these subjects—how were you able to parse it?

Weingarten: Research was a tough slog. It took almost two years to get everything. And yes, it’s easy to get lost in a rabbit hole with this subject. My intention was to create a readable narrative, and not get bogged down in [the] completism of listing every New Journalist, every piece, every book, etc. So I narrowed it down to a handful of writers, and three main editors—Clay Felker, Harold Hayes and Jann Wenner. Fortunately, Hayes, Wenner and Felker had a hand in so many important pieces that I could use their stories as a throughline, more or less, throughout the book. You have to parse it, otherwise it becomes an amorphous blob of information, in my view.

Mediabistro: Of the subjects you spoke to personally, with whom did you have the best interview experience? Since you were asking about the significant span of their careers, how did you budget your time (and theirs) to get to what you really wanted to know?

Weingarten: Everyone was cooperative. Tom Wolfe invited me into his apartment and then endured many phone call follow-ups, Gay Talese amply offered his time. By far the most memorable experience was the two nights I spent in Woody Creek with Hunter Thompson. I just had a wonderful time with him. I think he enjoyed reliving his salad days for a captive audience. His wife Anita was great, as well—she kept Hunter on point if he drifted too far afield. As far as budgeting my time, I didn’t! You always find that you have to grab something that you didn’t ask initially and so there’s constant follow-up. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Mediabistro: Your subjects include Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, two flamboyant writers. Stylistically, how did you determine your approach to their material? Did it make more sense to write the book as a straight history?

Weingarten: It was always my intention to celebrate these writers in the best way I knew how, which was NOT to try and emulate their styles—an impossible task, unless you want to sound like a complete dork. What’s so interesting about Wolfe and Thompson is that they are in many ways diametric opposites, politically, culturally, and otherwise. What bound them together as friends was the feeling that they were fighting the good fight for venturesome journalism.

Mediabistro: How influential were editors in bringing New Journalism to the forefront? What was it about the alchemy of these editors paired with these writers in creating a whole new form?

Weingarten: I think the editors are huge. Hayes, Felker, and Wenner gave these writers their heads to let them do their thing, but they also had a vision of how this kind of writing could enliven journalism, make it new. Conversely, writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese had tremendous respect for these editors—they wanted to do good work for them. I consider the key editors that I discuss in my book to be the Daryl Zanucks and the David Selznicks of the genre.

Mediabistro: What’s the favorite anecdote that you came across in your research? And of all the great old stories you got to read for your research, what was your favorite article by any of the authors you wrote about?

Weingarten: It’s hard to choose, on both fronts. Hunter certainly has the richest anecdotal archive, it would be hard to single out just one. As far as pieces, I have a number of favorites—Hunter’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” Talese’s “The Loser,” Wolfe’s piece on custom cars, many others.

Mediabistro: In the epilogue, you mention some of the heirs to New Journalism: Ted Conover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Jon Krakauer. In terms of publications, what today is breaking the same kind of ground that New York and Esquire did in the 1960s and 1970s?

Weingarten: I like The Believer. I think they are carrying on the New Journalism tradition, although I’m sure they would be loathe to classify it as such. I read an amazing piece in there a few months ago about the editor of a roller coaster magazine making the rounds for his job, and it reminded me of some of Hunter’s more unusual picaresques.

Mediabistro: What do you think the next breakthrough in journalism will look like? Has it happened already, because of the web? Are we stuck in a loop of imitating the talents of Didion, Wolfe, Breslin, and Thompson?

Weingarten: I think the next breakthrough will occur on the web, because there are no limits to what you can do in terms of length or integrating media—any number of things. I don’t think we’ve seen it yet, though. Hopefully, the next great New Journalists will provide us with that same shock of the new that many of us experienced when we read Wolfe, Thompson and the rest for the first time.

Aileen Gallagher as an editor at mediabistro.com

Read an excerpt of The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight. Buy the book.

Want to explore New Journalism for yourself? Sign up for mb’s The New ‘New Journalism’: Using Yourself as Subject Matter in Today’s Market class!

Editor and author Arthur Plotnik has written several books of advice for writers. Since they don’t always take it, he writes more. Encouraging writers to be bold and bright, sharp and sly, Plotnik challenges the old rules in his new book Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language and Style. Plotnik also wrote The Elements of Editing and The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts Into Words.

Mediabistro: You studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop. At what point did you become a writer who writes about writing?

Arthur Plotnik: I’d like to say, “during that stormy night in Iowa City, when Philip Roth anointed me the Watcher.” The truth is, I’d already been scrawling advice to writers—mainly as a know-nothing editor of undergraduate literary schmatas. From Roth and others at Iowa, however, I began to learn what I would later pass along, including the usual workshop commandments: show, don’t tell, less is more, particularize, focus, and so on.

Soon after, as a newspaper reporter and then a book-a-month pulp novelist, I may have tucked a little more advice into my gray pulp. But not until I’d moiled several years as a pro editor did the real alchemy of writing—that transformation from imagined to published word—become illuminated, enough so that others might benefit from my, koff, koff, coruscations.

The first flashes appeared in The Elements of Editing [1982], where, in telling editors how to edit writers, I was telling writers what they faced outside the creative womb. During the ’90s came my advisories, The Elements of Expression and Honk If You’re a Writer—the latter meaning, in British slang as it turned out, “vomit if you’re a writer,” which isn’t so far-fetched if you know the struggle.

Mediabistro: Spunk & Bite has so much to think about and incorporate. What’s your strategy on how to utilize the advice offered in your book?

Plotnik: I would say use it with delight. After all, my subject is the joy of spunky, expressive language, and how to exploit that joy so that competing writers are miserable. Take delight in that, and be inspired by the hundreds of spunky, bitey examples woven throughout. After Chapter One, which liberates writers from certain 50-year-old attitudes of Strunk and White [The Elements of Style], readers can roam at will through what might be called “prompts” toward more engaging writing; for example, toward capturing the extraordinary with “extreme metaphors,” toward acquiring “edge,” or putting pop imagery to work.

Several chapters—call them interactive if you can stand that term—offer diverting challenges: to nail the exact word, to improve an author’s modifier, to rate authors‘ figures of speech. Readers who like a structured approach can follow the book’s parts: flexibility, freshness, texture, word, force, form, clarity, and contemporaneity. But those who toe the chapters randomly will arrive at the same place.

Mediabistro: Language, like everything else, goes through trends. For example, a few years ago it seemed that everyone knew what schadenfreude meant and used it in their writing. Is trendy OK, or just a substitute for actual good writing?

Plotnik: Maybe people have dropped schadenfreude because they’ve stopped enjoying the misfortune of others. As if. But good writing is writing that engages and stimulates its audience according to the author’s intent. In that context trendy words can be beautiful—as long as they’re fresh, apt, inventive, and surprising to the readership. If you add “enduring” to those criteria that’s another story, since trendy locutions grow cringey faster than one can say, “you go, girl.”

Words have funny cycles, though. They can rise from cringey to nostalgic or retro and even wind up as fixtures in the language. In The Elements of Style, E. B. White declared that “by the time this paragraph sees print, psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky will be the words of yesteryear.” That was 46 years ago, and, dude, they all six still be funky. The trick for authors is to gauge the life of a trendy locution against its window of exposure. A daily columnist has it easy. A novelist has to ponder, will anything rock for my readers five years from now? If not, then it’s time to quarry up an enduring, if less titillating, standard term.

Mediabistro: Your book incorporates examples from newspapers and magazines as well as novels. Is good writing good writing, or do you distinguish between writing novels or newspapers or magazines or online?

Plotnik: I do distinguish, but not in terms of a hierarchy topped by literary works. The question is, how good is the stimulation? Does it refresh me from the fug—the stale air—of the ignorant or mundane? That’s the job of the writer, and it can be done in any genre. I relish the immediacy and intensity of news writing; the flair of a magazine stylist; the manic energy of online wags and wordsmiths. I read novels to be stimulated by truths of the heart and hypnotic language. The lines between these forms have blurred anyway, and one finds expressive writing in all the so-called wrong places: a hip-hop novel, a gothic television script, a trade rag. Even in the blogosphere, a cri de couer may be misting somebody’s eyeballs.

Mediabistro: You’ve spent much of your career writing about writing. What are your own biggest pratfalls and hurdles? How do you combat them?

Plotnik: Love is the problem. Like most writers, I love my darlings too much—all those words and figures of speech wrested from the depths of my being, the back alleys of the thesaurus, the uncreated consciousness of my species, not to mention the blah, blah, blah. See what I mean? Once we’ve embodied a hard-won locution in text, we just can’t kill it, can’t make a choice among our children. Instead we ask readers—or reluctant editors—to exhaust themselves sorting out the forceful from the superfluous.

In the way of combat I don my own editorial armor, emblazoned with the motto occide, verbera, ure, which says to kill, beat, and burn anything that diminishes expressive force. I have mixed success. Sometimes I find that less isn’t more; certain effects call for florid or grandiose locutions. But when a reader gets the idea and yet the words keep coming—fuhgetaboutit. A calmer approach might be through the feng shui principles I extrapolate in one chapter, helping writers identify the elements of shar ch’I or “killing breath” that subvert the flow of ch’I, the life force. Killing breath is not a good thing in a writing career.

Mediabistro: When you want to get some outside help, which books do you open?

Plotnik: First, I adore my Roget’s International Thesaurus, even if it leads me unto temptation. I don’t care what Simon Winchester says about “ill-versed” users lured into false synonyms. One has to be mad, moonstruck, unhinged, not to snorkel among these schools of words. Spunk & Bite offers tips, hints, pearls of wisdom, and fleas in the ear for doing so.

Along with such standbys as Fowler, Follett, Zinsser, Partridge, and Flesch, I keep Stephen Glazier’s Word Menu in reach. No one has yet gathered and defined related terms with the passion of this lexicographer, who died heartbreakingly young. A recent discovery for me is Garner’s American Usage, the most modern and thorough of its kind. Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale is my kind of liberating guide. For mechanical style, I find The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage more amiable than most. And to clear my head of practical messages, to hear the purity of lyric, I read the poetry of Billy Collins.

I should mention one more thing. Even though Spunk & Bite swims against Strunk & White, I still take cold splashes in The Elements of Style for its lessons in clarity and concision—and to remind myself that readers have a sense of “correct” writing, one that can be tweaked for effect, but not ignored. But in matters of style, I resent White’s patronizing advice, to which he paid little attention himself. His admonitions against wild behavior remind me of my own father, a former sparring partner who refused to teach me his good boxing moves for fear that I’d start brawling. So, resentfully, I entered the toughest fray of all: writing. And thank you for letting me get this out. I think my conflicts are resolved now.

Mediabistro: For something as creative as writing, we get attached to its rules. You praise modifiers and adjectives, which is somewhat untraditional. How did writers get to be so stodgy?

Plotnik: Convention is reliable, if not always exciting. Writing coaches are 95 percent right when they plump for strong nouns and verbs and rail against mewling adjectives, adverbs, and intensifiers. But outside convention lies the thrill of risk and reward, of modifiers that rise above their slave status on the merits of energy, novelty, dissonance, and so on. The adverb loudly doesn’t add much to the verb belch. But when, in a Martin Amis novel, a royal Brit eructs liverishly, I want to put that modifier up for knighthood.

In the arts, rules are more or less reflections of what so-called discerning people have applauded. We need rules for basic coherence in art, but also as points from which to take our creative leaps. Can one bungee jump from nothing? On the subject of rules, writing advice doesn’t change much. Some 18 centuries ago Cassius Longinus counseled that great writing needs the rein as well as the spur, just as I’ve suggested that writers want both sheriff and outlaw roaming their right brains. Even Spunk & Bite defends the decent townsfolk now and then—as against those dag-nab, danglin’ participles; but in the next episode it’s out there shooting the quotation marks off dialogue. Well, that’s how the West was won, and I reckon it works for writing, too.

Aileen Gallagher is an editor at mediabistro.com

Read an excerpt of Spunk & Bite

Number of clients: As a Former Professional Literary Agent, I currently have zero clients, though I still frequently visit Bruce Campbell’s website (despite his so called “court-order”). During my few years as a publishing professional, I represented perhaps a dozen novelists, non-fiction authors, and stars of The Evil Dead.

Notable clients: Apart from Bruce Campbell (If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor), and among others, I proudly represented the early works of Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng), Blake Eskin (A Life in Pieces), David Grand (Louse), the renowned mixologist Dale DeGroff (Craft of the Cocktail), and the estate of Matt Clark (Hook Man Speaks).

Percentage of fact vs. fiction in The Areas of My Expertise: As a compendium of complete world knowledge composed chiefly of amazing made-up facts, my goal of course was to avoid the merely accurate and instead embrace the strange and strangely plausible.

But the fact is some facts may have accidentally been included in my book. I suspect these adulterants contribute only 10 percent or so of total content. My goal is to reduce that to 8 percent by the second printing, and 2 percent by the 100th.

Percentage of extraneous information accepted by you for your book and later discarded: Just about zero percent. My goal was to include as much extraneous information within its pages as possible. However, there is always new knowledge being generated, and I hope to soon be at work on volume 2.

Most outrageous claim made in The Areas of My Expertise: “Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies (or, for that matter, as true). Proof of which maxim is the fact that I just made it up.”

Of the 55 dramatic scenarios presented in the section “Information You Will Find Useful In The Present,” one with best odds of getting published: Professional oddsmakers in Nevada traditionally favor the safe bets, staying with the old primal conflict of “man vs. man”: (“cop vs. rookie,” for example, is almost even money, for example, while “devil worshippers vs. apartment dwellers” goes for a respectable 5 to 1).

I have a fondness for risk, however, and the sucker’s bet, so my money is still on old 200 to 1: “Wilderness becomes crucible in which asthmatic leans to grow a beard.”

Tiniest font size deemed acceptable for book jacket: On that matter you would have to consult Sam Potts, the noted designer and small-font-fiend (also known as a “printer’s devil”).

What to pitch if you are a hobo looking to write a book: Please hoboes: no more books about Catholic secret societies and hidden codes in the Bible. We have gotten the message.

What to pitch to you to lure you back into the world of being a professional agent: Free lunch at Periyali at the table in the front where they used to allow smoking. Also, you have to cure cancer so I can take up smoking again. Then, only then, seated there, cancer free and happy, we can talk.

What not to pitch if you ever want to have a meaningful conversation with you in the future: Please do not pitch a great big book of fake trivia.

What to expect when Little Gray Book Lectures leaves the confines of New York City for other parts of the country: We are in fact taking the show on the road, as we used to say in show business and also road business. On Thursday, Nov. 4, we will be in my hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, along with Danzy Senna and Patrick Borelli and others.

Visitors there will see the same mix of earnest instruction, doubtful scholarship, and jingly-jangly music by Jonathan Coulton, and also a video of Dale DeGroff making a brand new cocktail: the Brookline 300.

Etiquette when interacting with hoboes: It is considered rude to stare directly at the hobo’s bindlestick, mysterious band-aids, or puffy vest.

Etiquette when reporting to the author one’s reaction to The Areas of My Expertise: Same deal.

Best way to go about having David Rees draw a cartoon featuring your book: Read My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable in the year 2000 and become so smitten with his foul-mouthed brilliance that you continue to write and badger him until he becomes your friend. Then, threaten with a knife.

Perfect ratio of self-deprecation vs. hubris when promoting one’s book of trivia: My sales pitch, which is crafted for all readers, but which I think will have a particular resonance among those in the publishing industry: “Under arrangement with the publisher, purchasing this book frees you from the obligation to read it.”

Rachel Kramer Bussel is an editor, writer, and blogger.

Veteran journalist Michael Gross’s new book, 740 Park, is an extensive biography of the life and history of the world’s richest apartment building. Gross’s impeccable research is beautifully synthesized into a comprehensive narrative about class, money and power.

Gross has written six books including Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, and My Generation, a book about the baby boom generation. He is a Contributing Editor at Travel + Leisure, a Contributing Writer for Radar, and his work has appeared in a number of other publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, George, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Interview and Details.

mediabistro’s Elizabeth Spiers spoke with Gross about 740 Park and the process of writing it:

What’s the genesis of the 740 Park book? (How, when and why did you decide you wanted to write about it?)

After writing a book about Ralph Lauren, who came from a quasi-aristocratic Jewish family (thought he didn’t know that) and for complex psychological reasons grew up compelled to dress like and act the part of a WASP aristocrat, I thought it might be interesting to write about the sort of people he modeled his look on, ie genuine American aristocrats. My first thought was to choose a great American family and trace its story from the Mayflower (or thereabouts) to the present…hopefully dealing with a Supreme Court Justice, a Buddhist, a murderer, a drug addict or two, and maybe a psycho along the way. My then-publisher didn’t think that was broad enough and though she liked the idea of telling a larger story through a microcosm, urged me to find one that let in more light, more people, more kinds of people, which struck me as sage advice.

A few days later, I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue, looking up at the old apartment buildings, when I passed one where I knew that WASPs had given way to Jews, one of whom had just sold his apartment for millions to Paul Allen of Microsoft, and I decided to write [about] a building. The next step was figuring out which building. It didn’t take long before I focused in on 740, which was distinctive not only in terms of its architecture, quality and the price of apartments, but also in terms of the people who lived there. Unlike so-called “good” buildings (ie anti-Semitic buildings), 740 had evolved with the times, which made it a perfect vehicle to tell my story about the evolution of America’s capitalist aristocracy.

How did you begin your research? Was your process different for Model and/or Genuine Authentic?

Genuine Authentic taught me a lot about genealogical research, which came in handy doing this book, although 740 Park is a slightly different world than the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, from whence L’il Ralph came. I started by looking for anything that had been written about 740 Park in the past (there was very little) and simultaneously trying to construct a list of every person who’d ever owned an apartment in the building. That, to be blunt, took forever because co-ops are not real property and there are no public records. I used newspaper accounts and reverse telephone directories, primarily. At the same time, I called the wife of the president of the 740 co-op board, who happened to be a New York Times reporter, and asked for the board’s cooperation. Alas, professional congeniality notwithstanding, that turned out to be a dead end and the possibility of “official” cooperation evaporated. Then, I heard from Andrew Alpern, who is an historian of New York apartment buildings, and Dan Okrent, who’d just publsihed Great Fortune, a great book about Rockefeller Center, that there might be some files about 740 Park at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. In fact it was a treasure trove and I spent almost two weeks there. With that, the wind was beneath my wings and the research process really took off.

How did being stonewalled by the co-op board (if that’s a fair characterization) affect how residents and former residents responded to your requests for interviews and information? How would the book, and the writing of the book, been different if they had cooperated? From what I remember about Genuine Authentic, it started out with Ralph cooperating and ended up a sort of write-around. How much does that sort of thing hamper your ability to get the real story? Or does it, really?

Yes, it was a stone wall. Ashland limestone, to be precise. Former residents cared not a whit. Co-op boards can only terrorize current and prospective tenants, not past ones, thank goodness. The widow of a board president, who still lives in the building, did try to stop at least one person from giving me an interview. That person, who must remain nameless, took me out to lunch and talked for hours, instead. Current residents broke down into three groups. Many refused to talk to me (a few of whom even made a point of expressing how angry they were that I would dare write such a book). A few gave on-the-record interviews and are quoted in the book. And many spoke to me on a not-for-attribution basis; some told me a lot, some merely confirmed and corrected information gathered elsewhere, and some were so gracious and helpful that they invited me into their apartments. One current resident even offered me a book party in the building, but I declined, explaining that I feared some of the neighbors might not appreciate that as much as I did.

Of course, the book would have been different. A writer is to a great extent a mirror that can only reflect what it is able to see. Some writers depend on access and only reflect what they are shown. Others have the skills to find things out that are not delivered on a silver platter, and it’s my experience that when dealing with the wealthy, the powerful and the celebrated, a story based on that sort of enterprise is usually far more interesting and revealing than one based on access. But even enterprise reporting benefits from some level of access. I don’t turn my nose up at cooperation! The current residents who took my calls were able to clarify and amplify and affect the way I portrayed them. Any good writer should feel a responsibility to reflect the point of view of their subjects, even if you ultimately feel that’s only one side of the story. So I guess, that’s all a long way of saying, yes, had some of those who declined to speak to me done interview, their versions of their lives would have been included alongside the ones I was able to piece together on my own.

In the case of Ralph Lauren, I feel I was lucky that he didn’t cooperate, but only because he’s made self-delusion his own personal art form–and he’s a genius at it. Had I been dependent on his version of his own life, the book would have been narrow and frankly, a commercial fantasy like the ones he depicts in his ads. The day he bailed on me, my editor said, “It’s probably going to be a better, more honest book now.” And indeed, I think that’s what happened.

What have you learned in the process of writing the first three that has made it easier to write this one?

What have I learned? That it takes a long time. That’s it’s hard and it doesn’t get any easier. That you just have to do it. And as a great writer and friend once said to me, “When in doubt, just lay brick.” In other words, you have to work even when you don’t feel inspired. So just sit down and write, even if you think that what’s coming out is terrible. Foundation work isn’t sexy, but it’s what the rest of the edifice rests on.

Upcoming readings in New York:

Tuesday, 10/25 Strand Books @ 6:30pm 828 Broadway @ 12th Street
Talk/Q&A/Booksiging.

Wednesday, 10/26 Barnes & Noble @ 7pm 1972 Broadway @ 64th Street

Talk/Q&A/Booksiging.

Vanity Fair Contributing Editor David Margolick’s newest book, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink chronicles the 1936 and 1938 matches between boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and the political and sociological complexities that contributed to making the fights important historical events. Margolick is the former legal affairs editor at The New York Times and has also written Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, At the Bar: The Passions and Peccadilloes of American Lawyers, and Undue Influence: The Epic Battle Over the Johnson & Johnson Fortune.

We spoke with Margolick about the making of Beyond Glory, the importance of the story and media coverage of the events when they happened:

When did you start the book and how long did it take you to write it?

After a while I lost count. But I signed the contract six years ago, and had started it about a year before that.

What made you latch on to the Louis/Schmeling fight, especially given that it had already been so extensively covered and analyzed? What convinced you that it was important and that you wanted to devote so much time and energy to it?

First of all, I dispute the notion that it had already been covered extensively. It had already been covered repeatedly and superficially, but people kept writing the same things, and repeating the same canards, about it. There had never been a book about it, let alone a good one, which amazes me to this day. I’ve known ever since I was a boy that it was one of the great sporting events of the 20th century, a sense that was corroborated before Y2K, when everyone was compiling their millennium lists and the second fight was on every one. The story tied together so many themes that interest me—American racism and the civil rights movement; Nazi culture and politics; Jewish identity and power; the history of New York; radical and reactionary politics in the 1930s—that I had no trouble either convincing myself it was worthwhile or finding the time, energy, and inspiration to do it. Frankly, I feel lucky to have done it.

What did you do to prepare to write the book? What was your research process like? And how much groundwork did you do before you actually began putting together the manuscript?

The research was actually quite simple. First, I tried to locate the few people around who either remembered the fights or had studied them. But by now there weren’t very many of them, nor were there lots of documents, official records, diaries, etc. I realized quickly that most of my material would come from newspapers, and reading them was how I spent most of my time. I kept digging deeper and going more widely afield: after I read the daily papers in New York, I looked at Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Newark, Washington and other American cities. In Germany, I started with the major papers, from Berlin, Munich, etc., and then went to smaller cities, too. When I’d finished with those, I looked at papers from London, Paris, Rome, Johannesburg, Warsaw. And after I’d read the most important black weeklies—the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro-American, I looked at more obscure ones. I spent three or four years reading before I began to organize the book. Then it took me a couple of years of writing, polishing, and cutting.

What did you think of Joyce Carol Oates’ critique in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review that your own analysis regarding the moral implications of the fight (or amoral implications, as it were) was conspicuously missing? (And if perchance you happen to agree with her, is your alleged unwillingness to editorialize a product of your experience in newspaper journalism?)

I was delighted with the play and the space the review got. And while I disagree with much of what she wrote, I understand her criticism about my authorial voice. I did not write the kind of book she’d have written, nor did I want to. This was, above all, a wonderful story; it did not need a lot of pontification or editorializing from me. My imprint is on every page, with the hundreds of editorial decisions it represents; that’s conspicuous enough for me. And yes, I’m sure you’re right: that my reticence is probably a function of my newspaper experience. Though it can be done, it’s hard to cultivate a distinctive voice at a place like the New York Times, where I worked for many years, and it’s harder still to expand upon it when you leave. I’m still learning how.

How was this book a different experience from your previous books? What did you learn that you’ll take with you into the next one?

What was different about this book was that the canvas was so much larger, and the issues were more important. I think I learned that one should not take refuge in the microfilm, as rich a resource as it is, and must find and talk to as many witnesses—i.e. people—as possible. I also think that this is, in a way, an old-fashioned book, a book of the sort I grew up reading and always wanted to write. I hope there’s still a market for a rich slice of American history, for a lovingly detailed narrative like this—that readers under 40, say, still have an appetite for it, but I’m honestly not sure. In any case, I think such books are harder sells than before, and though this book is short by my standards, I don’t think my next book will be as long or as ambitious.

As news consumers adjust to ultra-short-form journalism in the form of TV snippets, blog posts, etc., where does long-form journalism (especially long-term long form projects that may take years to complete) fit? Why is it important?

As the news becomes increasingly snappy and superficial, the need for long-form journalism becomes more acute. There will always be a demand for it; people will always want to get behind stories, to dig in more deeply, to have more perspective on things. So for that reason, I think the future for magazines like mine is bright. But as I’ve said already, the longest form journalism is clearly getting shorter. I don’t think the public has a limitless appetite anymore for 500 page books.

About the topic matter: the book really seems to be, in large part, about race and class, and an another level about the political power of metaphor both of which seem highly relevant right now. Where do you see elements of the Louis/Schmeling story repeating itself in current events? How important or unimportant is it to contextualize a book like this against the backdrop of what’s happening now?

The issue of race is never very far below the surface in American history, and in order to understand where we are now, it’s important regularly to remind ourselves of where we’ve been. Writing about Joe Louis’s era is refreshing, in a sense, because nobody’s guard was up; there was no such thing as political correctness. The stereotypes, the ugliness, the bigotry were all out in the open. And while we’ve made great progress, these things just don’t disappear; they only take different forms. On the other hand, people who see this story as one purely about American racism make me angry, because they imply, first, that everyone was a racist back then, and second, that we’re all so much more enlightened today. Neither assumption is true.

If I were judging your book by its cover, I’d assume it was a sports book, but I think it’s almost more of a political history. (I think the lines would be more clear cut between the two if it were, say, a book about the 1972 Olympics.) Do you think of it that way? If you have to categorize it—and Barnes & Noble does, even if you don’t and the reader doesn’t—how do you describe it?

It upsets me to hear that, because we labored very hard to create just the opposite impression. First, look at the title. We wanted Beyond Glory to connote that there was something far more at stake here than mere sports. Then look at the end of the subtitle: “A World on the Brink.” That, too, was meant to suggest that more fundamental forces were at work, that the world was on the brink of both catastrophic war and a revolution in race relations. And the picture of the Nazi rally at the bottom of the cover was specifically meant to underline that this was not just a sports book. If it gets relegated to that department in books stores—usually toward the back—I’ll be very unhappy. It’s really social history. Having said that, though, the sports story in the book is also wonderful. That’s the beauty of the Louis vs. Schmeling story: it’s gripping on all levels.

In the book you chronicle, in great detail, the manner in which the press covered both fighters—good and bad. When you were researching and looking at old press accounts, was there anything that surprised you about the way the events were covered? If those journalists were your contemporaries now, what would you think of them?

First, there were a lot more of them. Many of them were hacks, who didn’t work very hard or write very well, and who had all kinds of ethical conflicts. One quickly learned to discount their work. But others were terrific, and they weren’t all on the most ‘respectable’ papers. Indeed, some of the best writers were on the black papers, and are almost entirely, and undeservedly, forgotten. I was delighted by the high quality of much of the writing. These were people who worked under what would now be considered primitive conditions, using manual typewriters and paper on crushing deadlines, and yet the best of them often turned out luminous prose. Just writing the volume of copy they did, and managing to describe and reconstruct lightning-fast action in the ring, is awesome to me.

The columnists of the day were great, too, and incredibly productive by contemporary standards, putting out as many as five or six columns a week. I’ve often thought that had I been around then, I’d have gotten nothing done; there’d have been too many newspapers, and newspaper columnists, to read. There’s no doubt that readers and reporters had a much closer bond then than they do now; when a game’s on television, after all, there’s no need to read about it the next day, nor for writers to describe it in a particularly vivid way. The whole conversation between readers and writers today is much more muted. That said, I think many reporters in that era naively thought that politics played no role in sports, and under-covered the political dimension of the fights I described. That made those who did acknowledge the connection, like Dan Parker of the New York Mirror and Nat Fleischer of Ring magazine, that much more admirable. I know I’d have liked them.

Elizabeth Spiers is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com

New York Times Moscow Bureau correspondent Christopher John (C.J.) Chivers joined the daily newspaper journalism ranks following a stint in the U.S. Marines—something that happened far more frequently in decades past. It didn’t take Chivers long to move from a mid sized newspaper to the country’s most prestigious newspaper. Hard work and quality work, Chivers says in the email interview below, are the best ways to move up the ladder.

Chivers talks to Baton Rouge Advocate reporter Steven Ward about his stint in the Marines, working for the Times and why journalistic fundamentals are important:

When you attended college at Cornell, did you have plans or designs on a career in daily newspaper journalism?

No. I hadn’t even thought about it. I did want to write. But I knew I had nothing to say, not at that age. And I wanted to live a bit before I found my way to a desk. Newspapers were things I read, not things I wanted to help make. My interest in working for them came about 10 years later, while I was in the Marines.

Why did you join the ROTC at college and enter the U.S. Marines? Do you think your time in the Marines helped you as a journalist?

I didn’t [think of] myself as joining ROTC. I saw myself as joining the Marines, and ROTC was a route to get there.

My thinking went something like this: I started college with no military affiliation and was a freshman when a truck bomb leveled the barracks in Beirut. I remember flipping through a copy of Newsweek, looking at the pictures of guys my age in flak jackets pulling at the rubble, and it was deeply affecting. It was 1983. It seemed like half the people around me were talking about getting a money job on Wall Street, or applying to law school or med school, and a lot of the rest were driving around in Saab Turbos their parents had bought for them and trying to score a few grams of cocaine. I found it disorienting, socially and academically. I was lucky to be there, but had no idea how to use that good fortune. I was 18, with a clear sense of what I didn’t want, but less sense of what I did. So I was looking at those pictures of the Marines having just had their building flattened and their buddies killed, and I wouldn’t say it was an attraction—who would be attracted?—but it stirred something.

I kept quiet about it for a while, but the thought of joining kept pressing in. It seemed like this war was picking up speed—and not the Cold War—and no one noticed it except these guys in pictures with the helmets on their heads. In high school I had been fascinated by the Marine Corps—by its culture and its reputation in combat, by its unapologetic sense of brotherhood—and now I wondered what was going on inside.
After a few months I picked up the brochures at a recruiting office and started to think seriously about signing up. I was finding the classroom tedious, and the Marine Corps was this young, globe-roaming society you could escape inside, where the stakes were high and work was rugged and people watched each other’s backs. It also struck me as a place largely populated by people who understood that there are things in this world that should be fought, or at least stood up to at moments when the fight was not on. The notion of risk and service were not foreign to our household; my father had served in Vietnam, one of my cousins was training to be a Marine helicopter pilot at the time, and we can trace family members in American uniforms back to World War I. So I started talking with the Marines. I wanted an outdoors job, in the weather and on the ground—a good antidote to sitting in class. The Marines said they could help with that.

As I was thinking through all of this my stubbornness became a factor, because once I started talking about it with my friends and family, so many people told me not to join they made it more alluring. So I drifted through another year of school, getting bored and thinking about dropping out—reading all the time, but away from the list—and one day I decided to take the physical and sign the line. I went to an indoctrination camp run by the drill instructors, and returned to college and kept a straight face through two years of ROTC bullshit—and it was mostly bullshit that had little to do with what the Marine Corps is all about—and after I graduated I went down to Quantico and got a slot in the infantry.

It was the right way for me to pass my 20s. The drill instructors knocked me into focus, and once I left college and showed up at the Marine Corps proper, I was put in a good unit, sent to Ranger school, and in time traveled around the U.S. and to a long list of other countries, and served in the first Gulf War and the peacekeeping operations in the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Except for the months on those dismal, pent-up ships, I enjoyed and benefited from most of it—the patrols in the Philippines, the travel within the United States and abroad, the years inside a brotherhood where race and class drop away more than I’ve ever seen on the outside, the adrenaline of the helicopters pushing into a landing zone at night, the difficulties of the infantry life and the relentless expectation of excellence, the chance to see elements of American foreign policy (and in Los Angeles, domestic crisis management) right up close, with all of its bold intentions and screw-ups and warts. For right or for wrong, when the United States grinds up against another country, or even engages it slowly over time, the Marines are there at the friction points; to be one of them is to have an insightful seat. I was lucky to have mine.

To me those initials—USMC—are still resonant. The corps is not storied by accident. It is a special outfit with a special frame of mind and a history that almost every Marine wants to live up to and preserve. That’s not bullshit. It’s true, and a rare truth at that. This is not to say it doesn’t have its problems, or its misplaced priorities, or its share of nitwits. It does. Plenty of them. And they should be fixed. But on balance its sins have less weight than its merits, and I’d sign back up now if I were 18 or 19 again.

I ultimately resigned when I was a captain, at 29, in part because I didn’t like having rank and the bureaucracy that accompanies it. As I moved up, I was seeing I had less freedom than I had down below, and could see I would be spending less time in the field. I preferred the field to garrison. So I walked.

Later, after I put away my uniforms and sold most of my guns, I found out that it doesn’t hurt, personally or professionally, to have been a Marine Corps infantry officer. And, yes, now and then it enriches my journalism. Sometimes it helps in ways that are obvious; there have been times around guns when I have had a much stronger feel for what was happening, or what might have been about to happen, or what could have happened, than I would ever have had if I had not served in the Marines or graduated from Ranger School. There have been days and places where I have been very grateful for that. But more often the help comes socially. I meet former Marines and Rangers all the time, almost everywhere, and we often find a sense among us of common understanding, a set of common memories, a group of ideals and exasperations we share. It has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Germany, Russia, you name it. It happened at Ground Zero. It used to happen up in Providence. You can’t put a linear value on that, journalistically, but there have been stories when it has helped me immensely.

Do you think an education at Columbia is important if you want to work at a newspaper? I understand that you had a choice of two big newspaper jobs following your time at Columbia—the Providence Journal in Rhode Island and a newspaper in Philadelphia. Why did you choose the Providence Journal?

Forget the debate about whether journalism schools are useful or useless. Columbia is useful. And forget the ivy. The place is a trade school, and I mean that as a compliment. Let me say I am speaking of the past—I understand Columbia has changed parts of its program, and I know little about these changes, so am not qualified to talk about the present day. But when I went there I wanted very much to learn a craft, and the Columbia j-school knew how to teach a craft. The Marines had shown me—and I still believe this—that excellence is about fundamentals. Journalism is like that, but by the time I decided to try journalism I was 29, and had little insight into the skills I would need. What records are we entitled to? How do you get them? What lines of questioning can elevate an interview, and yield the details and facts and impressions that can elevate a story? How does the First Amendment work in practice? Even little things, like where can we sit in a courtroom? When we’re starting out we don’t know these things. And by that time I had been a Marine Corps company commander, and I didn’t like not knowing where the switches were. Columbia provided a set of answers to these questions, and many others.

Whether the j-school experience is important if you want to work at a newspaper is another question. It depends. If you’ve worked hard at a solid local newspaper, or are some kind of genius, then you don’t need j-school. You probably already know at least half of what they teach, and you may have been smart enough to have been paid to learn it. But if you don’t have journalism experience, signing up for a structured curriculum is a good play. What did it get me, short-term? When I left I had interest from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Providence Journal. These weren’t big jobs. They were internships with a small possibility of a full-time slot. I chose Providence because it was clear from the interviewing process that the editors in Rhode Island were more personally interested in their young reporters. And the fishing was better. That mattered.

What kind of reporting and journalism did you produce at the Providence Journal? Did you start out covering school and zoning boards i.e. the bottom of the ladder?

I started in North Providence, which is a suburb of Providence with a population of 30,000 or so. The editors’ instructions were simple: if it happens in North Providence, it’s yours. I did cops and crime and fires and zoning, went to the school board meetings, read the union contracts and bond issues, chased after the mayor and the police and fire chiefs. I interviewed high school athletes, took obits, wrote about road accidents, turned out modest investigations into job-rigging and benefit fraud—the standard fare of local newspapering in America. That was my brief, just like most everybody else’s. On weekend coverage I roamed the region, doing parades and festivals and school graduations. I liked it. (I still do, and I still read The Providence Journal on the web, watching the paper tell the story to the state. Who doesn’t enjoy smelling all that muck getting raked?)

After two years the editors moved me into the capital to cover the police at night and Buddy Cianci’s city hall. Buddy’s in jail now, but when he was banging around the corner office, swilling his scotch and cursing into his speakerphone, hemmed in by crooks and sycophants and cops in knee-high leather boots, he made my job interesting. Covering him was like covering a middle-weight corruption coach; the play that surrounded him was very instructive. People have since joked with me that trying to figure out Buddy was a useful prep for covering Russia and the former Soviet Union. There is some truth there. But there is also another half of the story: The Providence Journal itself has a special energy and I was lucky to work there and get a feel for that level of journalism early in my start. They sent you out to work, and they backed you when you made contact. It was a great break, and I didn’t realize it when I signed on, but I see it clearly now.

The only thing out of the ordinary during my time there was that I had an international fellowship—basically a check—from Columbia, and the Journal’s editors let me use it to underwrite research and expenses for a trip through the fishing ports in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. It led to a series of stories about the destruction of the cod and the looming evaporation of a traditional way of North American life. There is a persistent school of thought that zoning boards and the like are the bottom of the journalism ladder, but writing about the North Atlantic cod collapse was a bit like covering a zoning story, because part of the work required reading up on years of fishery management issues and the details of regulations. I was buried in obscure reports of meetings, reading lawsuits, falling asleep at night with a stack of Canadian and American biological reports on the status of the fish stocks, studying a century’s worth of technological change in commercial fishing, trying to grasp the issues. Sure I hung around the docks, went commercial fishing, toured fish plants, ate some seal meat and drank some rum. But most of what went wrong in Newfoundland’s fishery happened as a result of bad decisions in government meetings and official cowardice. In many ways covering it was like running down a zoning story. A lot of stories are like that.

How did you get your job at the New York Times after the Journal?

The cod stories won a prize, and at the award luncheon I met Howell Raines, who was then the editorial page editor of The Times. He told me to look him up if I ever came to Manhattan. I went to Manhattan a few times but didn’t look him up. I mean, who was I? Howell was putting out the NYT editorial page, and I was a former Marine hanging around this Irish pub called Patrick’s or the Providence Fraternal Order of Police bar, hearing cop and politics gossip, farming sources for tips that might grow into stories. When I wasn’t doing that I was in the surf down in South County, chasing bluefish and striped bass. Have you ever hooked a 35-or-40-inch striped bass in the breakers? Then lugged the thing home and eaten strips of it raw? These are forms of joy.

I was happy in Rhode Island, and I was planning on getting married and having kids, and teaching them to fish and surf right there, up against the Atlantic. Why would I want to live in some nook in New York? But The Times is a rare place, and I one day figured they don’t call twice. About a year later I said what the hell, and wrote Howell and told him when I’d next be in town. Howell was pretty direct. He booked me an appointment, and after a few minutes in his office he asked if I would ever be willing to cover war at The Times. When I said yes, he told me to me apply. So I did.

You started out as a police reporter at The Times. Did you like that beat and what were the plusses and minuses on working that beat there.

I asked to cover cops. I had covered crime and corruption in Providence, and my view was—is—that covering the NYPD is one of the better beats at the paper, providing insight into a fascinating subculture and an essential organization, as well as a fast way to get to know the city. The NYPD also happened to be one of the principal instruments by which Rudy Giuliani ran New York, so the beat was instructive in ways beyond writing up last night’s dead. And I got to work with Willie Rashbaum and Kevin Flynn, a real pleasure of the job.

We worked in a grubby office on the second floor of the police headquarters, trying to beat the tabs. It was city newspapering in an old sense. It’s fashionable lately to say old-time newspapering is dead. It’s not dead. It’s alive and doing not half bad, and you can see it in cop and crime coverage in newspapers all around the world. Look at it in The Times, or The New York Daily News, or The Moscow Times. It’s right there, in wonderfully high quality.

As for the journalist’s journey, in my view, police beats are among the best, as long as you have a heavy stomach and don’t mind some of its hassles, like the occasional mean-spirited or condescending cop, and as long as you can be gentle in those moments when you have to, like when you’re doing house calls to accused or the bereaved. Exposure to crime can harden you in unhealthy ways, but it can also enlighten you, and equip you with a sense of your own good fortune. It can be very, very valuable to see violence and its effects, those first hours and days after a terrible loss, to realize how lucky you are that your own friends and family are alive each day, and healthy. Like almost everybody in this business, like you, I’ve rung a lot of doorbells where there is something awful on the other side, but I tell myself—and I mean it—that often when we go into a house where the grief is descending, that newspapers offer a chance at capturing someone’s memory. I believe that because I know how intensely crime stories are read by the people involved. So maybe those trips are a minus in cop and crime coverage. Maybe. But they are more than offset by the benefits of the job—the glimpses into human nature, its best and worst sides, and by a look at an enduring puzzle, which will never fully be solved: how does a society police itself? It is also translatable to most other beats.

A lot of what we do here, month in and month out, is a direct extension of covering cops and crime, whether it’s the big Chechen raid last June in Ingushetia, the bombing of the two passenger jets that took off out of here last August, the slaughter in Beslan, the crackdown in Andijon. You know what these are, at least part of the time? They are crime stories. Yes, they fall under political coverage. Yes, they tell us something about war and terrorism and counter-terrorism. Yes, they have much to do with nationalism and Islamic revivalism, and how these deeply emotional forces take shape and are resisted, successfully or no, by those who want to block their growth. But these events, in a basic sense, all had their moments as elements of the cop beat. The cop beat accounts for a large fraction of what we do. There are no minuses.

Talk a little bit about your reporting work from Ground Zero? Did you think your Ground Zero reporting led to a spot as a war correspondent and do you think your years as a Marine helped you as a war correspondent?

I worked inside Ground Zero because I was a cop reporter and Ground Zero was my beat. Where else was a cop reporter supposed to be? By chance I happened to be nearby when the first plane hit, and was running toward the south tower it when the second one came in. It was chaos and destruction on scale I never want to see again. But big events are self-organizing. Their own logic takes over. When the buildings came down, the task at hand seemed clear enough: fill the notebooks, and get the notes to the desk. For the first 24 hours I was a straightforward reporter, in a suit, working the scene and ducking and running like everyone else and calling in my notes uptown when I could. There was no tension then between the police and the cop reporters, and the fences, such as they were, got built behind me, meaning I didn’t have to show any ID or talk my way past any guards. I was simply there, and the comfort level—or maybe confusion level—was high enough that together we all sort of became a messed-up mass of spectators, unable to have an influence over this mountain of ruins and fire, and trying to take it in, and there was almost no one I bumped into who was trying to do anything as stupid as chase after the reporters, given that there were real problems to deal with. As long as you weren’t intimidated by being around a few thousand uniforms, there was absolutely no restriction on the first day, none. So I just stayed put.

Sometime before sunrise on 9/12 I slept 45 minutes or so among a bunch of firefighters who had smashed their way into a furniture store to collapse to sleep on these posh floor-model beds. The next day, I stumbled out of there and checked in at the newsroom, wrote up the last of my notes, and after sleeping a few hours and changing into work clothes, I got back into the zone because I knew the department, had both a NYPD press ID and one of my old USMC t-shirts and I managed to slip through the barricades, as did a lot of other veterans from all over the tri-state area. Some of these cops knew who I was, and they didn’t throw me out. So I morphed into a laborer. There were a lot of veterans wandering around down there, and for several days, as long as we worked as hard as everyone else, we were welcome. I worked for a while on the rubble, and then at the food stands, and after a while I mostly hauled garbage, partly because no one else wanted to, which made it a secure job when they started throwing people out. In many ways it was easier to do this physical work than to be a reporter, because you could escape into the rhythm of heavy tasks and not to have to try to make sense of all the murder and fear. If you had a good back and a good attitude for manual labor, you could stay. As long as you remained in motion the place was glad to have your contribution, whether you were a reporter or an insurance agent or a banker or an actor, all of whom I met down there. That was the code: Just keep working, which we did until we were hallucinating with exhaustion.

In the end, the journalism itself was not as difficult as it might seem. I could see, I could hear and, with my garbage bin on wheels, I could roam. The garbage man could go almost anywhere; every cop had a pile of stink he wanted disappeared, in the command posts, in the tents, at the rows of parked fire engines that were sucking water out of the Hudson to douse the pile. And getting word out was not hard. Everyone—cops, firefighters, volunteers—had cell phones, and whenever we took these little sweat breaks I would stand in the crowd of people talking and call uptown and feed the reporters at work, describing what I was seeing. It was both amazing and ordinary, because we were in front of this smoldering, awful mess, but everyone on the phone was usually saying the same sorts of things, describing it. The only difference was I was describing it to a newspaper, and the guy next to me was talking to his girlfriend, or his brother or his wife. And I might have a layer of detail they weren’t interested in, like the names of construction companies down there, so someone might follow up.

After about five or six days it finally did get dicey, because rules started to be made, and order began to get imposed, and to be down there you were supposed to have some sort of special red ID badge, which came from God-knew-where. So rather than get hassled or arrested for doing a good deed, which seemed be the position the city administration was advancing toward, I left for a night, cleaned up, and through a source in Albany I was able to return the next morning as an accredited reporter, embedded with the New York National Guard. I was irked at the apparent position of the city government—the administration welcomed volunteers from every trade except ours, and, whatever the underlying thinking was, one of the messages was that somehow we weren’t citizens of our own land. I’m still grouchy about that, and doubly so for having served, and for having spent more years in uniform than most of the suits over there in City Hall. I later heard that they said they were trying to protect us, but that was bunk, because when Mayor Giuliani went down there each day he made sure there were reporters in tow to put him on TV. Still, it didn’t much matter, because there is always another way, and the Guard provided an excellent opportunity to work. I wandered alongside them for another six days or so, living in one of their tents, and morphed out of volunteer back into reporter. But even that couldn’t last. After I got under the trade center ruins, into the subterranean space that survived the collapses, and wrote a story showing that some of the rescue workers were looting the mall down there, my source in Albany called me to say that the administration went ballistic and was pressuring people at the Guard to have me tossed out. So I left. That was that. I went to the newsroom, did some writing, and was sent overseas. As to whether the Ground Zero coverage get me sent out to the war, you’d have to ask whoever made the decision, and I’m not sure whose decision that was. But I doubt it.

I think the war assignments of the last few years flow more from my experiences as a Marine infantry officer. It always seemed inevitable to me that when enough war broke out for The Times to be rushing people overseas, I’d go. It was part of the unwritten contract. No American news agency these days has many people—and many have no people—who have tactical military experience, which unfortunately has become a valuable background of late. And there’s no question that it has been more useful to know weapons and tactics and to be comfortable with hardship than to have been one of the accidental souls who was there when the planes came in. But I don’t really know what the bosses thought. I wasn’t consulted.

When you started out in daily journalism, did you ever think or dream about working as a war correspondent or foreign correspondent overseas for the New York Times or did all this happen by accident?

I thought about covering war, not because I was enamored with it, but because I had spent years in a martial culture and had a certain understanding about how war is waged. And like most people at newspapers I thought about working for The Times or the Washington Post. Who wouldn’t, knowing the traditions at these papers, their level of editing, and the commitment they bring to running after stories? The top papers in the country, and not just these two, are special in many of the ways that the Marine Corps is special. They have rich histories. They stake their names in almost every fight. They matter. In spite of their rare failures they’ve contributed mightily to the country, and generations of reporters and editors and photographers have established institutional reputations for them that the rest of us are trying to live up to, hoping to preserve. But I had no concrete plan to work for them.

Do you think you are young to be a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the New York Times?

I’m 40. That’s a pretty normal age on the foreign staff, and it’s older than many of us in Moscow, at The Times and elsewhere. If someone thinks I’m young, I’ll take it.

What advice would you give to daily newspaper reporters who want to work for a newspaper with the size and influence of a New York Times?

I’m not much on advice, but I’ll say this. There is no secret to it. What we do is rooted in fundamentals. Take my job covering Russia. It’s not a lot different from covering a town, a city hall, a state legislature or a murder. By that I mean that, yes, okay, the lifestyle is different, and the languages are not English, and the cultures are different, but no matter these external differences, the bones of the job are the same. Every day, whether the subject you are after is familiar or unfamiliar, you go around or call around or email around and ask people to tell you what they know, what they saw, what they heard, what they think. You ask them why any of it is important or interesting. You ask them to tell you how they know what they’re telling you. And you ask them to tell you what they don’t know, what they didn’t see, what they didn’t hear, so you can establish the limits of their knowledge. You ask them if there is anyone else you should be talking to and how to be in touch with them. You ask them if there is corroborating material to what they say. Documents? Video? Tape? Transcript? Other witnesses or participants or victims or victors? You ask them what’s the best resource out there for understanding the thing you think you’re writing about. (It might be an old lawsuit, or a union contract, a book of regulations, a copy of a budget or a medical record; it might be a poem or a local historian or archivist. It could be a family photo album. It could be anything. It could be many things. But there is usually something.)

If you don’t know them already, you say: How do you spell your name? What’s your date of birth? Where are you from? What’s your job? What’s your phone number and email address so I can check up on this on deadline if I’m going to use it? There are variations on this, of course, ways to keep pressure on people who need the pressure, to show you can see fishhooks in the bait and that you have no tolerance for error; there is no time today to list them all, and you get the idea.

Then, no matter how the interview went, you thank them.

Then, when you have done enough of this that you feel solid about what you’ve got, you go back to your laptop, think it through, back check it, talk it over with your editors, write it up, trim 10 or 15 or 25 percent so it’s tighter, fact-check it and email it to the desk.

Then you get edited, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few weeks, but eventually it’s done to your desk’s satisfaction, and it drops. Then you begin the next chase. That’s what we do.

When we’re not doing that we’re reading everything we can get our hands on, studying, or calling around the sources trying to get traction, looking for the next story or a referral to the next source. It’s not like doing brain surgery. It’s just plain work. There is no advice except the obvious: work harder than you want to. Then get lucky. And enjoy it, although sometimes we get exhausted enough that we forget that.

Other than that I’d tell anyone who was still young enough to join the Marines. Or the Peace Corps. Or an NGO. Or be a banker or a nurse. Take out a loan and open a shop. Work on a haul seiner. Wrench cars. Paint houses. Paint nails. Teach school. Chase your hobbies, and go wherever you can get and read anything good you can find. Do something, anything, different from the usual route to a notebook and a press pass. Get away from the university and the newsroom while you can. Journalism will still be here when you get done.

You have a few pieces published in Esquire magazine. Was that a goal of yours and do you want to do more of that kind of journalism in the future?

Of course I want to file more stories to Esquire; it’s a marker in American male culture, and it’s one of the few places left that will do longer pieces of non-fiction. My entrance to its circle was nothing but luck. Mark Warren is the executive editor there, and we met through our wives, who had babies at roughly the same time and became friends at the city playgrounds, in the mom scene. Our sons became fast friends, too, and spent their first few years playing together, and eventually Mark and I crossed paths through the boys. After 9/11 we spent some time together at Ground Zero, and he said something like, “when you get back from Afghanistan, you’ve got to write about the zone.” That was where it began.

Now Mark is a friend, and I’ll file to him forever. As for my longer-term goals, and how I’ll balance the mediums and the work going forward, it’s hard to say with any clarity. When I contemplate coming home from Russia, I worry about the lifestyle that might await me. When I was working in New York I jonesed for something more physically active, and was really missing Rhode Island and being able drive to the beach and boulders after work and cast for stripers for a few hours, or to fish an hour or two before work. It was chewing on me. I thought: my life is slipping away while I ride up and down on the 1 and the 9.

When 9/11 happened I had one little son and my wife was pregnant with another. We had been caught up for months in this conversation about what Annie Dillard wrote, something like, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I looked at my days: I was riding the subway to and from work, living in this 400-square-foot apartment with two other people and more on the way, scraping by on dollars and worrying that if I raised my sons in New York City, they’d turn out like a couple of Woody Allens. Where were the trees? The birds? The fish? The smell of dirt? The waves? The farms? Fresh air? I thought: I can’t do this city for life. No way. Not with kids to raise outdoors. Then the towers came down and we haven’t stopped running since.

What kind of work I’ll be doing later is anyone’s guess. I’ll have to sort through the conflicting pulls. Right now I’m working nights and weekends and vacations on a book about the social history of the Kalashnikov, the most abundant firearm ever made. When I finish my time in Russia and get the draft together for the publisher I’ll look up and see what’s next.

Hopefully, The Times will be there, and Esquire, too, and in a place where my work life can be balanced with our goals for our children. We’ve got three now, Irish triplets. We’re jammed. We spend our spare time washing dishes, mopping floors and reading Dr. Seuss. We’ll get around to talking about long-term plans when it’s time to talk about that. Right now, it’s this. I’m enjoying it too much, and am too busy, to have more planned than I have planned already.

What’s the best general career advice you can give a daily newspaper reporter?

I already said that I don’t do advice that well, and I’ve already offered more than I should have. So I’ll pass on two of the best tips I’ve ever heard, both from other journalists. You should attribute the tips to them.

First, Tom Heslin, at The Providence Journal, told a group of us on our first day of work in Rhode Island something I try to remember every shift. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “there’s this thing that you need to do between reporting and writing. It’s called ‘thinking.'”

The second tip comes from Jeffrey Fleishman, of the L.A. Times, who had advice on where to find the best stories in a crowded beat. He said, “always zag.” A lot of us wish we lived up to that one better. I know I do.

Steven Ward is a staff writer at The (Baton Rouge, La.) Advocate where he covers general assignment news in the paper’s river parishes bureau. An Operation Desert Storm veteran of the U.S. Navy, Ward also freelances for magazines and webzines.

Rebels on the Backlot, Sharon Waxman’s exhaustive, behind-the-scenes account of six independent film directors who bucked the studio system and rose to prominence in the 1990s, isn’t as dishy as you might expect considering that, in the weeks prior to the book’s release, Waxman herself became something of a Page Six plaything, her public feud with David O. Russell, one of the book’s subjects, filling column inches usually reserved for Lohans, Zuckermans, and Trumps.

The book does offer some titillating nuggets: George Clooney and David O. Russell’s famously rocky relationship on the set of Three Kings disintegrates in spectacular fashion over 20 pages, aided by reprints of Clooney’s testy handwritten notes to the director. And in a particularly amusing interaction with John Malkovich, Spike Jonze is revealed to be what Waxman dubs “aliterate,” blissfully unaware of almost all culture that preceded his generation. (For those keeping track, Waxman quashes once again the long-running rumor that Jonze is heir to the Spiegel fortune).

But Rebels never quite rises to the level of schadenfreude we’ve come to expect from our Hollywood tell-alls. The majority of items that pass for gossip are oft-told tales of the aspiring artist’s slash-and-burn approach to relationships, instances of the grand ignorance of the studio system (at one point, then head of Paramount production John Goldwyn remarks “Election is the best movie we’ve made in our studio in the past 10 years. And it’s a movie we have no interest in repeating”), or the stuff of supreme film-geek trivia (it’s revealed that the title Reservoir Dogs evolved from Quentin Tarantino’s garbled pronunciation of Au Revoir les Enfants.)

Rebels doesn’t sling nearly as much mud as predecessors like Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again or Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures. Perhaps that’s because Waxman is still firmly entrenched in the world on which she’s reporting. As a Hollywood beat reporter for The New York Times, her job relies on continued access to Hollywood’s power elite.

But maybe Waxman didn’t set out to write that kind of tale. She has publicly expressed contempt for the Hollywood tell-all, most notably in her review last year of Biskind’s account, where she referred to books about Hollywood as “unrepentantly lame, a few racy anecdotes strung together about strategically mentioned movie stars, along with an explanation of how-I-ended-up-here-from-my-humble-beginnings.”

“It’s not a gossip book,” Waxman confirms over pots of tea at a hotel bar overlooking Central Park. In fact, Waxman, with her master’s degree in Middle East studies from Oxford and fluency in four languages, says inspiration for the book came from a completely different kind of source: “The models I had in mind were really the great foreign correspondents’ books that I had read and loved over my whole career, whether it’s David Halberstam’s fantastic books about the ’60s and Vietnam or Tom Friedman’s book about the Middle East. Those were the books that I loved as a young journalist coming up, so I tried my best to do that kind of a book in the entertainment world.”

It’s not hard to imagine Waxman writing one of those more serious-minded books had her career followed a different path. Unlike most people who find their way to Hollywood, Waxman landed there by chance, after spending the early years of her career abroad, covering the Palestinian intifada as a stringer for the wires and freelancing from Paris. She tried to turn her foreign relations expertise into a fulltime correspondent position or even a staff job back in the States, but her timing was off. It was the Clinton administration, and newspaper coverage was focused on domestic issues. “I got rejected for every single job I applied for,” she says. “I really started to have a moment where I thought, you know, maybe I can’t do this journalism thing.”

Waxman talks about her stymied foreign correspondent career like a thwarted dream, but when she was offered a spot covering Hollywood for the Style section of The Washington Post, she found the experience to be somewhat analogous. As a native Midwesterner, Hollywood was like a foreign country to her, except that “they spoke English and had drugstores.” At the Post, which Waxman acknowledges is not particularly well read in Los Angeles, she was able to use this handicap to her advantage, writing for an audience that, in some segments, was as unacquainted with the inside workings of Hollywood as she was.

Writing for the Times, she says, is a completely different game. “You’re writing for two audiences when you’re writing for The New York Times, which you’re not so much when you’re writing for the Post. You’re writing for Hollywood insiders and you’re writing for the broad national and international audience. So it has to be smart—you have to keep that balance.”

Waxman seems to have been occasionally thrown by the attention that has come with the high-profile Times beat. In an era of self-appointed media watchdogs where the Gray Lady is a popular target, she finds that “every single word you say, everything gets scrutinized in a much more rigorous and picayune, even, way, than before.” In some ways, she appreciates the feedback—at least “you know people care about what you’re writing. When you’re a foreign correspondent, your life doesn’t matter. It’s like, ‘is anybody actually reading this?'”

But some of the attention has been unwelcome. “I think part of why I became a reporter [is] because I feel comfortable as an outsider,” she says. And for someone who embraces her outsider status, Waxman just can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight. Beyond the David O. Russell imbroglio (questions about which Waxman dismisses sharply) Waxman’s feet have been held to the fire for sins of various sorts (her headline revelation of Million Dollar Baby‘s surprise ending annoyed legions of Times readers and bloggers accused Waxman of relying too heavily on Jack Shafer’s pet “anonymice” for a Michael Jackson piece).

“Thank God I don’t read the blogs,” she says, but adds dryly: “I can guarantee you that if there are questions and criticisms of my stories or my reporting, they are fully discussed at every level of the new and improved New York Times.”

Waxman seems thick-skinned enough to deal with the criticisms, and for now at least, she’s been offered a shield to help deflect some of the attention that comes her way: The Times, in its effort to diversify and expand its culture coverage, recently charged reporter David Halbfinger with sharing the beat with Waxman until, as with predecessor Bernie Weinraub, she’s cycled out at some point in the distant future. It’s inevitable, she says: “I’ll stay on the beat as long as they want me to stay on the beat, but I certainly do intend to cover other beats or other subjects down the road.”

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.

Michael Grossman has designed, edited or consulted for more than 40 magazines. He gave Entertainment Weekly its look; consulted on the launch of O, the Oprah Magazine, helped turn around Real Simple after its troublesome birth, and next week his latest collaborative creation—the ultraluxe city title Absolute—will be born into the world. His work has won more than 250 awards, but here’s the thing: he hates it when you call him a “designer.” The “Design Spotlight” series ends (for now) with Grossman tearing the word “Design” off the marquee and calling for editors who think like art directors and art directors who solve deeper problems than layouts.

Mediabistro: You finally agreed to this interview only after multiple assurances that we wouldn’t label you as a designer, and that you would have the chance to end this interview series by critiquing part of its premise—that designers have fundamentally different jobs than editors. If you have a prepared statement, please read it now.

Michael Grossman: I love designers and some of my best friends are designers. But I do think that “design,” as practiced in the magazine world, is inherently flawed, because you can’t really design from the position of the designer. The sequential nature of magazines, which grew out of books really, is: create the product and then design the surface of it, which isn’t just unsatisfying, but it’s also not a good way to do right by your product, whatever it is.

I just realized over time that to do the most good for a client or a product or an employer, my aspiration is to be more than a designer for them. Another way of looking at it is that design is the act of conception in other disciplines and in the creation of other products. In architecture or fashion, it’s not like you make a building and then call in an architect to design the surface or it. Or you create the clothing first and then the fashion designer comes in and sprinkles a little color on top of that. You design from the beginning. Design is invention. And there may be a client, there may be given, but it’s never: “Here, we fully conceived it, now make it pretty.” I think it’s changing, and it’s certainly different in start-ups, but it’s not a great place to be starting from. I just try to do right by the product I’m working to work on, and I’m always pushing against that.

Mediabistro: Well, what was your role in the creation of Absolute? That’s a startup situation where there was a narrowly defined target reader, a business plan, and an editorial director and editor already in place. How did you work within that team, and was it closer to the way you want to work?

Grossman: In any project, if I’m working with people that I haven’t worked with before, there’s sort of this… surprise at first if I want to be involved and make contributions in areas that don’t really have anything to do with design. I have to establish myself in that way in working with them. But we do all end up thinking editorially, thinking from a marketing point of view, thinking from a production point of view, thinking about the bottom line—just trying to think holistically about what it is that we are doing.

On Absolute, [editorial director] Caroline [Miller] and I started on it before we hired [editor] Andrew [Essex] and subsequently the design director, Deanna Lowe, and the photo editor, Catherine Talese. It was all very collaborative and very good that way. When conceiving a magazine, my ruling metaphor is the geometric proof: every project is driven by givens, and figuring out what they are is, if not half the job, then a crucial part of it. And sometimes they’re not what they appear to be and you have to push against the few givens and create new ones.

Mediabistro: What kind of things are you thinking of when you say “givens?”

Grossman: “This doesn’t actually have to do with design, but I know your research indicates that this aspect of the magazine is the most popular with readers, but does it lure the younger newsstand audience that is your best shot of circulation expansion?” Or: “I know you think this is your trim size, but with the money we’ve saved on paper, could we upgrade something else?” Or: “I know this is the name that you’ve had for fifty years, but is this name going to serve you best over the next fifty years?” Maybe changing the name of the magazine is the right thing to do. So it that a given that it stays? All of these things would appear to be givens, but it’s really an energizing thing for everybody working with it to stop and think: “Well, we haven’t thought of that as something that we could change, but maybe it’s the right thing to do.”

Mediabistro: Well, who should be thinking this way, and who should have the power and the final say to start, lead, and end these types of conversations? Is that the role of the design director or some new, super-designer/consultant brought in above or beside the person producing pages every day?

Grossman: My feeling would be that everyone should think this way. Obviously, you can’t think about it every second, but having the big picture in mind with everything you do is how you make a product better. All the time (or maybe not as often as they should be) people are thinking about “what is the world of the magazine?” and the world where a lot of the information we used to provide is available with immediacy on the Web. People’s relationships with television have changed over the years, and the same is true for newspapers. I mean, what are the givens now?

I don’t know if there should necessarily be an additional position, but I do think that the best editor and the best designers are people who think holistically, and that the distinction between them is vanishing. A little example I use a lot is that once upon a time, a designer had rubber cement, T-squares and type books, and there were also typewriters and style manuals around, and each of those tools was at a different end of the office. Now we’ve all got a monitor and a keyboard and mouse, and the same software. Sure, I can use a tool set to design a spread, but I can also write a headline, and I do. Even when I was more constrained in the designer role, I could be the one to stop say “should we bring this part to the top?” or “should we pull this out and make this a sidebar?” or “here’s a good quote.” But I couldn’t do that with my Exacto knife and my T-square. And editors, god help us, can re-crop a picture. (Laughs)

No tool is going make somebody who doesn‘t have skills do something skilled. But just as I’ve managed to develop skills that are outside my normal, assumed, skill set, it would be great if everyone in magazines would aspire—just the way everybody in film aspires to be a director—to be the visual person, the conceiver, the creator of something. I admire, for instance, the fact that Susan Casey at Time Inc. has gone from being an art director to being an editor. I’d like to see it happen in the other direction. But more than crossing an aisle, it should be that you’re morphing into one person who does all of these things. I hate people who use the word “both.” It’s just strange, but magazines have grown up this way. When you look around at other products, you don’t separate the creation of them that way.

Mediabistro: You’ve built a reputation as “Michael Grossman, the renowned art director.” At what point did you finally grow so frustrated with the limitations of that role that you no longer want to be labeled as designer? How did you start rectifying that, and what led to this realization?

Grossman: It’s funny. I was an editor at my school magazine, and I took a summer job at a magazine and ended up taking a little time off from school and staying there, and then ended up being the art director of this little magazine in California called the Berkeley Monthly. I was a head art director at, like, 19, and I never had a design mentor—which was a good thing and a bad thing, because I never really learned what my place was. I had to learn a lot of stuff by trial and error, and I didn’t work under anyone who showed me how I was supposed to work. I ended up learning what I know from editors and publishers and marketing directors. And I sort of stumbled upward from one number one job to another number one job at bigger magazines. So all along, I was trying to get at the essence of what it took to make a magazine the best it could be. It was like the system resisted that, and I was really aware of it. Certainly the people I was working with—and I’m really grateful for this—tended to be for the most part welcoming of that participation.

I drew a little bit more of a line with you when you approached me than I had felt compelled to draw on a day-to-day basis, but it’s been something that’s been going on for a long time. There have been a couple of forks in the road for me where I actually had a chance to be an executive editor, or had an editorial job where I could have been at some place long enough to sort of establish my editorial credentials. I could have made that move to ‘the other side of the aisle’ and didn’t. But in thorough meetings with the client, I’m trying to make it clear that they’re getting to the essence of the business.

Mediabistro: Is the natural inclination of your clients to think of you as the person who makes things pretty? Are you having to fight that perception and make is clear at the outset that you want the latitude and the charter to work more broadly than that?

Grossman: Well, I think they naturally think of the designer as somebody who is going to make things pretty. Sometimes the problem is not what the client defines as the problem, and sometimes someone brings me in, and would bring anyone in, and they think, “well, change all the typefaces and make it more modern.”

While working on Real Simple—which was kind of my first charge when I went to Time Inc.—the thought was that there needed to be a redesign. But really, the typefaces and the things that one would normally think of as what would be redesigned weren’t the problem, and those weren’t the things we changed. It was more that the architecture and labeling of the components of this magazine needed to be clearer. It was a magazine about organization and simplicity, and it was beautiful, but it wasn’t clearly organized and it wasn’t that simple. Those changes were, in a way, more about the editorial than the design. So a lot of times you are looking at a problem, looking at what someone thinks is the problem and seeing something slightly different. I’ve been in many situations where I talked somebody out of redesigning something they thought needed redesigning. It’s not the best thing for me sometimes.

Mediabistro: Will you remain being a one-person consultancy? Would you like to start a larger firm that will put these principles into practice? And how much of a personal role do you want to play in changing this state of affairs?

Grossman: I’ve made a conscious decision to not be Roger Black. I admire Roger Black, he is great at doing what he does, but I’m trying to strike a balance where I do enough work to keep me comfortable, and at the same time I let clients know that when they hire me, they get me. I might hire somebody to help me with the execution of something, but I never want to stop being at meetings. I just think that being face-to-face, talking people out of their assumptions, is really the meat of what I do.

There are clients that I have, and have had, where my primary function has been a brainstorming one, and I really love those jobs. They are never going to win awards, or put my name in the paper, but hearing someone say, “I’ve never looked at it that way,” or “That’s something I thought we couldn’t do,” is more gratifying to me than winning an award. And that lowers my profile; my name doesn’t go on anything for doing that. So, as far as my aspiration, it’s to do as much good, and to have as much impact on the product and the people I’m working with as I can, whether or not that involves making the surface flashier.

Mediabistro: How can designers and art directors empower themselves to get out from under the perception of just being the design guy or the design girl?

Grossman: For both editors and designers: talk about it, and try to educate yourself. There are obviously protecting your turf issues here. But I think it’s true at Martha Stewart’s publications, for example, where you have “projects.” I don’t know exactly what they call them, but the senior editor/project manager/art director person for a particular discipline is fully conceiving stories and producing them. The idea of producers and directors of projects within magazines, rather than who might be an ‘art person’ or ‘editorial person’ is a better way to be thinking from scratch. “How do we present this kind of information? Maybe this entire story should be a timeline?” You know, there are different ways to do things, and if you are not starting from the notion that, well, this is the sequence of things: the writer is going to write, and then the photographer is going to photograph, and the editor is going to tell some stuff to the art director, and the art director is going to put it on the page and make it pretty. If you can break of that in whatever way, you are going to make better magazines.

Mediabistro: And how many people in the business right now are able to do that? Or have the inclination to do that, rather than just succumb to institutional inertia? Do you have to start teaching this to people at the outset of their careers, or can you retrain people to work this way?

Grossman: Yeah, I think it’s true that there are people who are going to specialize, and that’s fine. In movies, there are cinematographers who don’t want to direct. And I think there will always be a place for somebody who is really good at something. Just like there are editors who are very good at one kind of editing—they’re really good with story editing, but they’re not going to be the editor of the magazine, they don’t have that kind of overview—there is a place for that. I just think that looking at places to reach past the conventional constraints is really helpful.

[Nylon art director] Andrea Fella and [Nylon editor] Marvin [Scott Jarrett] are shooting [photographs for their magazine], and that’s great. I just think that whatever random thing outside the traditional purview of your job title you can do is healthy.

I was talking to somebody about the idea of “church and state,” which I think is a hugely important issue in magazines. For all the line-blurring I’m a proponent of, I think that with what’s happening on television and in movies and on the Web—the inability of the consumer to tell the difference between content and advertising—one of the strengths of magazines is really having a voice, a critical voice. I’m always pushing: “can you say it with more judgment? Let’s not be relentlessly upbeat, let’s say something critical right here to let you know that we are judging.”

But in editorial, the line there is more like the line between political parties. We’ve made it so that there are the art people and the editorial people, red and blue. We’d make better legislation if there weren’t political parties—if everyone was collaborating and blurring those lines completely. You’d just inherently be able to do better stuff.

I met Sarah Bailey at a party in London a couple of summers ago. It was Sunday afternoon at The Waterway, a fashionable pub by a canal and we were celebrating the birthday of fellow journalist Kate Spicer. Everyone seemed to be drinking properly.

Ms. Bailey and her boyfriend saw me twitching in the corner and made a point of being welcoming. We began chatting about the wonders of press trips and about how tricky and joyless American women can be to date. “Why don’t you write a story for me?” she asked, rather kindly. “I work at Elle.” Later, someone mentioned that she was the rather lauded editor-in-chief of British Elle. “Oh,” I said.

Last February, Ms. Bailey joined Glenda Bailey—who, it turns out, is not her aunty—at Harper’s Bazaar as the deputy editor. February 23rd will be her one-year anniversary. On her first day at the job, the story goes, she showed up and there was a champagne toast. Ms. Bailey, the deputy, downed her glass immediately, while the staff all politely put their glasses down and proceeded with the day’s tasks.

Sarah Bailey isn’t just British—half of Manhattan media are—she’s from the North, hailing from Manchester. What’s the difference between the North of England and London? What’s the difference between Oasis and Hugh Grant, or between Glenda Bailey and Anna Wintour? Northerners tend to be more pragmatic, down to earth, and generally less precious than their counterparts in the south.

She went on to Cambridge University, where she also famously worked for the Socialist Workers Party, handing out copies of their newspaper, while wearing vintage ’50s dresses. Just eight years ago she was a freelancer in London, and has the rare distinction among fashion editors of being able to write, as a Google of any number of her breathy, unironic profiles will attest. She also has an individual, quirky fashion sense—she has never submitted to a stylist’s dictated notion of what she ought to be, unlike any number of mutated editors in London and New York.

So, when she arrived last year, I sent her a welcoming note with dreams of casual assignments worth tens of thousands of dollars. Then, I sent a note requesting an interview worth no dollars, and heard back that if I could send my questions to a public relations colleague at Hearst, then I could have a half hour on the phone with her. This, then, is a half hour on the phone with Sarah Bailey, deputy editor of Harper’s Bazaar.

MB: Given the process of just getting you on the phone, would you say the magazine world in New York is rather more formal than in London?

SB: That’s absolutely true. I mustn’t sound too preposterous a know-it-all after my grand experience working in New York for all of eleven-and-a-half months, but yes, it is more formal in New York than in London.

MB: I take it that you are speaking from an office the size of my apartment.

SB: I do have a grand corner office with a view of the Hudson and I can’t stop emailing my friends about how amazing it is.

WG: But your door is always open?

SB: Unless it needs to be shut. But yes, a British magazine, however grand, is open-plan. American magazines all seem to have a seating plan based on a hierarchy. In London, we’re all joking over each others’ terminals and there’s that buzzy atmosphere that is so key to an editorial voice. Right now I’m looking out my windows at the construction site of the glossy new Hearst tower, and when we move there we will have a looser seating plan.

MB: Can the little people still talk to you?

SB: I aim to be a very easily approachable senior editor. I like to be accessible. But there is more formality in the way things are done here. There are strengths and weaknesses with both the U.S. and British style. The accuracy here—the precision with details and facts and grammar is impressive. In London, we have a looser approach.

MB: Given the relative formality in New York, is your work now less hands-on and more bureaucratic? Is it still fun?

SB: I am hugely hands-on and that’s the way I like it. Even when I was the editor in chief at Elle I was in there rolling up my sleeves. I absolutely love that side of the business. I top edit every piece of writing in the magazine and I’m involved in recruitment, and I’m meeting talent all the time, which is a great way to get to know New York. And I’m overseeing all the fashion.

MB: Are you like so many editors in New York who come in to work at the crack of dawn?

SB: No, I still keep European hours. I get in at 9:30 and I work late. I start the day by meeting with Glenda and go from there.

MB: And at the end of the day you go to Soho House and air-kiss everyone?

SB: There was a week in November when I found myself there every evening for a week. But, no I am not a member.

MB: You mean you didn’t move to New York to stay in London?

SB: Well, it is important to branch out a bit and make new friends with Americans, otherwise what’s the point?

MB: So that story about your first day on the job, downing your glass of champagne and everyone else putting their full glasses down—true?

SB: That might have been exaggerated slightly by people back in London. But it is always appropriate, when celebrating, to have a glass of alcohol.

MB: So then you and the Harper’s Bazaar team go drinking every night after work?

SB: At Elle we all had a bonding process after work. We would all go to the Covent Garden Hotel and drink. I’m not saying it isn’t fun here, but at the end of the day everyone does go their own way. It’s different.

MB: Have you and Glenda and Anna and any of those Sykes triplets gotten together to form a master plan to subvert fashion in the U.S. to some British sensibility?

SB: Neither Glenda nor myself are importing some brutal fashion sense. We’re both hugely influenced by New York. The caliber of Americans is hugely inspiring, don’t you think?

MB: Um. You haven’t been here very long have you? So now it’s time for the question that you are asked every day: Why are so many female British editors running New York magazines? Doesn’t America have some fashionable, eloquent editors?

SB: Well, fashion is international by its nature. It is a characteristic of British editors to be creative and if that is true, then you know why—there is a lot less money and much smaller staffs to put out magazines in London and those negatives mean you have to be more creative to put a magazine together. And with that you can also be rakish and have a devil-may-care quality.

MB: Because magazines in London are put together off-the-cuff and not with such excruciating caution like they are here.

SB: I understand why Americans respond to British editors, but there is also something sexy about American editors. They have those blood-thirsty negotiation skills and that ballsy attitude—I mean, all of my fantasies about New York have really come true.

MB: I take it you haven’t met the editors at Esquire yet?

SB: No. But when the gleaming tower is completed I’m sure I’ll be seeing a lot of them.

MB: Until then, what would be something in Harper’s Bazaar that you’re excited about, something that you’ve brought over with your British attitude?

SB: My most recent personal triumph would be the Teri Hatcher cover, that was something I really drove and I’m really happy with. Her show, Desperate Housewives, is so zeitgeist-y, but TV is mid-market and we are high-market so it had to be done very well. I think it’s a little cheeky and a very British decision, but that informed the sense of mischief and it’s important to bring some of that to such an elegant, beautiful magazine. And the March issue has some real coups in it, things that will make you smile.

MB: Can’t you pretend to be a little unpleasant? I thought fashion was meant to be cruel.

SB: I have to say when I was at Elle, it was important to me that the office was a happy place. You have trials and tribulations, but fashion is something that you have to play with. My philosophy at Elle was non-dictatorial. It was: ‘This is fashion, now make it your own.’ Really, this is a non-bitchy atmosphere and that’s what I like. It’s easy to live and work in the fashion community and not involve yourself in lethal behavior. There is that camp mythology, and it exists, but we’re too busy to bitch, darling.

William Georgiades is at WGeorgiades.com.