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.

Julian Rubinstein’s literary debut, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, tells the incredible but true story of Attila Ambrus, a professional Hungarian ice hockey player turned bank robber whose alcohol-soaked exploits earned him the respect and adulation of his adopted country but who remained a relative unknown in America—until now. By Rubinstein’s account, Ambrus is the most charming criminal this side of John Dillinger: He is a romantic and a crook; a dashing “gentleman bandit” who was known to proffer roses to his female victims; a bank robber who pulled off nearly 30 heists (though that loose appellation does a certain disservice to the travel agencies and post offices Ambrus held up); a disenfranchised orphan of the Eastern bloc trying to make good on the promises of capitalism; and by turns a church painter, a grave digger, a door-to-door pen salesman, a janitor, a Zamboni driver, a lunatic third-string goalie affectionately referred to as Chicky Panther by his teammates, a pelt smuggler, a drunk, a womanizer, a gambler, and, many times over, a fugitive. It’s an exuberant narrative, but as zany and twisted as the story itself is, the story behind the story—that of actually putting the caper to paper—demands almost as much parsing.

Rubinstein, a former sports writer at the Washington Post and Sports Illustrated, had only been freelancing fulltime for a year and a half when he first encountered Attila Ambrus, who was, by all accounts, the perfect protagonist for an author in search of a subject—and the best part was, Ambrus was real. In a recent interview with mediabistro.com, Rubinstein recounted his own narrative—that of navigating the fickle world of publishing. It’s a familiar tale of magazines folding, interview subjects caving, and dealing with the terrifying possibility that lightning may strike only once.

Birthdate: December 27, 1968
Hometown: Born in the Bronx, grew up in Denver
First section of the Sunday Times: “It depends on what’s going on in the world. Either the front section, the magazine, or the Book Review.

You frequently mark time in the book by referring to what was going on in America simultaneously—much of the story unfolds during the Clinton era. Most Americans didn’t know what was going on in Hungary at the time, much less had they heard of Attila Ambrus. How did you ever come across this story in the first place?
In the summer of 1999, I read a short item in the Scorecard section of Sports Illustrated, where I had previously worked, that said there was a professional hockey goalie [in Budapest] who had just escaped from the city jail on a bedsheet after having spent the last seven years living a double life as a wildly popular bank robber—and he was now the center of this international manhunt and being lionized as this folk hero and supported by most of the country. I was totally stunned and taken by the story and immediately wanted to do a magazine piece on it. It was a hell of a long path to actually get the story assigned—the piece didn’t appear until the spring of 2001 in Details. It had first been assigned at Talk and then Talk folded and I never even got to go to Hungary to report on it, because three separate editors who were working on it all left the magazine. So I finally finagled it back and was able to repitch it to Details.

Between 1999 and 2001, what sort of research did you do? What made it into the Details piece, and then at what point did you say, “Actually, this has got to be a book”?
I spent a lot of that time trying to line up the access to Attila himself, and that involved a lot of leg work—which I understand and I’m used to doing—but in this case it was even harder. At first, he was on the loose and no one even knew where he was. Then he was finally recaptured, and his lawyer, in exchange for an interview with his celebrity client, demanded from me a Hollywood movie deal. And it was great. A lot of the things [the lawyer] did I first found so outlandish but realized that he was doing it because from their perspective, that’s the way things worked in America. But he finally relented and I convinced him that just giving me access would give his client a better chance of getting a movie deal and more exposure in America.

I spent maybe three weeks over in Hungary reporting on the story. But it wasn’t until I actually did touch down that I realized this was a book. I knew it was a great magazine story, but what it took was when I got there and I saw that the characters—this lawyer, these small-time crooks, the Keystone Cop-like police guys, the hockey players—were better than fiction characters, across the board. Attila was from Transylvania, he was making a living smuggling animal pelts, his first job with the hockey team was driving the Zamboni—all these crazy details that you could never make up. I was like “Wow, this is way bigger than a magazine story.”

Did you know the language going into this? How did you manage once you got to Hungary?
Well, it was tough. Had I never done foreign reporting before, I would have been completely screwed, but I knew I had to rely on a really good fixer and interpreter. I’m always really careful to choose that person because it makes such a big difference. They’re really your representatives—if your subjects don’t like that person, you’re in trouble. So I did that, I got an apartment, I was over there in three main two-month stints. And I knew that everything was going to take three, four, five times as long as it would if I were working on a story anywhere in the U.S.

How did they feel about cooperating with you? Attila, in some ways, seems a bit like a media whore—was he happy to talk?
Not at first. He was interested to talk to me because it was intriguing to him that someone from the U.S. wanted to talk to him, but one thing that’s reflected throughout the book when you get to know him as a character—he actually is an incredibly humble and smart guy. But by the end, when this whole thing became a total circus, he said he didn’t want any publicity, he was tired of being a showman. More than anything, he had some shame about whether or not he should be considered a hero for what he’d done. Also, by the time he was re-arrested, he was so isolated that he wasn’t really sure how the outside world was seeing him; he only had heard misinformation that was put out there by the officials and the police to make him out to be some really awful criminal, and a violent one at that, which he was not.

He was great to deal with because he was certainly a captive audience. When we spoke, one of the best things was that he would have all day. On probably 13 different occasions, I spent the entire day with him.

Over that time, did you befriend him? It’s a very sympathetic portrait.
Yeah, over time I did really grow to like him. But the one thing I’ll say about my writing, in this book, and in my magazine work, is that you can see that I have a sympathetic eye and take on most characters that I write about. The key, I think, in writing literary nonfiction is to get yourself in the actual shoes of the people you’re writing about. In most cases when you do that you’re going to have some sympathy for the people. For example, the archnemesis in this story is this Colonel Lajos Varju, the robbery chief, who haplessly chases this guy like Inspector Javert for seven years. In Hungary, he was considered a buffoon, but he also had like no training, no resources, little staff, no support. I find in journalism today there is far too little sympathy. I dislike when pieces are sort of snarky about the way they’re treating their subjects. It’s not my style.

You mention Javert, and Attila has been compared to everyone from Butch Cassidy to Robin Hood. Did you have other books or stories in mind? It seems like there are shades of everything from Newsies to Steven Soderbergh movies.
Well, one of the first things that came to mind was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We’re talking about a crime story that takes place in an unfamiliar place to most readers, but rich with history and full of colorful and unique and odd characters. And you mentioned movies—you know, those of us writing today are inevitably heavily influenced by film. And sometimes, earlier on, I would fight the idea of seeing things visually, but actually I think it’s really useful. And it might sound strange, but one movie that struck me about this story was Life is Beautiful. The reason I say it is that one of the things I loved most about the story was that on the surface it was a comedy; it was this hilarious caper. But beneath the surface it was this heartbreaking story, the classic, archetypal, underdog struggle to survive and be somebody. And I saw an opportunity. No one had really looked at this story as a comedy before. It was obviously written about and covered heavily in Hungary, but it was just a crime story. No one in Hungary had reported that he was a Zamboni driver; no one had talked about his pelt smuggling.

The other person I thought of is Elmore Leonard. I had the instinct that this was not a story to be dealt with straightforwardly, I wanted to look at it just slightly askance. What happened was too crazy to be played totally straight.

The book really does read like a novel because of the level of detail, like how Attila and his accomplices are always growing out their mustaches and shaving them with saliva and disposable Gillettes as they are running away from the crime scenes. Besides conducting all those interviews, how did you manage to recreate everything so closely?
I wanted it to read like a novel, I wanted to do it in the real tradition of literary journalism that I always aspired to back at graduate school at Columbia, these nonfiction literary journalists, and the new journalism of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and Mark Singer, who is still doing it at The New Yorker today. What you have to do is over report and know everything—and that’s my attitude in every piece I do, because if you want to be able to write great detail and great description and great scenes, you have to know everything. Court files and police files are always key if they’re available, or public records.

And what I did here, of course, was that much harder, because you’re talking about documents in another language. I spent five weeks in the Hungarian Supreme Court building with an interpreter on either side, two laptops open, typing in details that they would pick out. I was swiveling back and forth. There was great detail from witnesses from various crime scenes. I also went to the immigration office and was able to get Attila’s immigration documents. He made this unbelievably dramatic escape into Hungary underneath a train before the fall of communism, and there were details in those documents supporting the stories that he’d been telling for years. And the other thing is interview everyone you can interview, and go everywhere you can go. I visited almost every site of every robbery he made, I visited the hockey rinks. I went to Transylvania and went all over the place where he grew up and interviewed everyone I could find who was related to him.

And this is another very key thing: The difference between interviewing someone once or twice, and interviewing them four, five, six, seven times. It’s so different. You start to get such a fuller picture and sense of things if you interview people over and over. That’s what I did. It served me nicely in a certain sense. I was going there for two-month stints, and I’d at least make my rounds of everyone twice, then leave and come back and do another two interviews with everyone. You start to put together scenes in your head—what you know and what you can picture—so you know what details are missing and what questions you have to ask.

Once you had all this information floating around, how did you coalesce that into your narrative?
To me, this was the greatest story I’d ever heard in my life and I was in position to do a book on it, so I went all out. When I came home, I got a studio apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where for a year I went into this meditative process. I storyboarded the whole book. I knew that there was this narrative, but I didn’t realize right away that I could get into this back and forth with the police. But once I was putting everything together, I realized, well, that’s a great way to have it so the reader knows what Attila is thinking and doing, and what the police are thinking and doing, but neither of them know—there’s this built-in tension. You know they’re going to cross at some point but you don’t know when, and in this case there were so many near misses and you had the Hungarian news media playing this funny role in the middle, so it really worked. I literally had a dry-erase board, and I storyboarded and I had note cards where I did scenes. And I think that was absolutely crucial for making the story work like this. Because in some ways it’s a thriller, and I wanted it to have a real driving, narrative force.

You really stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime story—for your next book, do you plan or do you wait for lighting to strike again?
I do have a couple of things I’m thinking about. The good and bad with finding a story like this is that it makes you worry if you’ll ever find another story this good and almost makes you gun-shy about what you’re going to do next. Everything seems to pale in comparison. But I’m actually very much looking for the next book. I mean once you do it, it’s an amazing process and, in general, more satisfying than magazine work. You have so much room to tell a story. Even if you’re writing features, you need to develop the story and develop the characters, and it’s really tough to do that even in five, six thousand words sometimes. So I’m definitely on the hunt.

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com. Photo credit: Michael Parmelee. You can learn more about the book on Rubinstein’s website, and you can buy Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts at Amazon.com.

In 1972, America confidently re-elected a President who lied and manipulated his way to a second term in front of a news media that proved unable—if not outright unwilling—to convey the true balance of the elements at play in the campaign. It would take a kid, fresh out of school and foreign to the insular world of the media, to capture some of the more brazen truths of Campaign ’72. It was the year Timothy Crouse would release The Boys on the Bus, a seminal campaign-trail reporting book that marked a turning point in American journalism. Finally, someone was reporting on the reporters. Nobody had thought to do that before.

Crouse was a newbie, out on assignment for Rolling Stone, but he had an almost preternatural grasp of how exactly things worked. As he criss-crossed the country, keeping close watch on Nixon, McGovern, the high-strung hopefuls, and the low-slung correspondents—the grizzled wire veteran, the ambitious college graduates, the ego, the hack, the rising television star—Crouse would use that, in tandem with the tweaked soothsaying of his colleague and friend Hunter Thompson, to convey both the detail and the grand narrative of life on the bus.

Much of Crouse’s account seems familiar today, but instead of a centralized, tightly-knit group, the sources have multiplied exponentially. And to a certain extent, the bus doesn’t exist anymore—or maybe, to extend the metaphor, we’re all on it. Certainly there are reporters following the campaign trail, but only a fraction of today’s media content consists of actual coverage of speeches, campaign stops, and press conferences. The majority of news today is a kind of chattering about chatter—stories that fall somewhere between the trivia of daily pools and the truly analytic coverage that was sorely lacking in the 1972 campaign. Are we any better off for it? It’s hard to tell.

We recently checked in with Crouse—who, after releasing Boys on the Bus, disengaged from the journalism pack almost entirely—to talk about campaigns old and new.

Every campaign season must seem at once the same and totally different. What seems familiar to you in this campaign season? What is new and strange?
My method in The Boys on the Bus was to assess the coverage I was seeing against what I was witnessing and discovering myself. Since I’m not out on the road, and haven’t been for some time, I have no way of doing that now. So far this year, I’m not getting a very clear idea of the generalship behind the two campaigns, and how the ongoing strategies are being formed. Nor have I seen a completely convincing analysis as to how such a huge cultural rift came about in this country. But that may well be because I have so little time these days to follow the coverage—and because I don’t have a hooked-up TV and the only publications that I see with any regularity are The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Also National Public Radio.

These have all run their share of substantial reporting on the campaign and the background issues. But it seems that there are only so many reporters who do original work, and a lot more who indulge in a kind of groupthink. (Joan Didion, in The New York Review of Books, is good on this year’s reportorial clichés.) What’s more, there are only so many thoughtful consumers of news. Louis Menand spoke the unspeakable in his New Yorker piece, “The Unpolitical Animal”: According to those who have studied the matter, not a whole lot of voters make their choice according to anything resembling rational analysis.

One similarity I see between this year and 1972 is the ongoing inability of the campaign press to deal with a bully. The bullying tactics haven’t changed: lie, intimidate, cover stuff up, and—when the press tries to nail you—cry “bias.” Always effective. In 1972, there was a hopeless imbalance between the relative transparency of McGovern’s campaign and the toxic opacity of Nixon’s, yet the press never managed to make it clear that one side was consistently playing foul. (Just how foul would only sink in after Election Day—although Woodward and Bernstein had begun to blow the whistle well before, to the studied indifference of most of their colleagues.) In my book, I tried to show how this failure came to be committed by reporters who were, as individuals, for the most part neither cowardly nor lazy, but who, as a group, tended to act like lemmings. Then, as now, the press fell back on a supposed even-handedness which amounted to watching one side rabbit-punch the other and pretending it was a fair fight.

This year, one side is again impressively out-lying the other (and with a whole network devoted to spreading the disinformation, something Nixon never had). And again, the press has been awfully slow to point the imbalance out, much less try to redress it. I was heartened to see the alarm sounded the other day by Paul Krugman in the Times: “Mr. Bush’s statements… are fundamentally dishonest… Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry’s choice of words are betraying their readers.” Mark Halperin’s reported ABC memo struck me as another sign of intelligent life—especially on the need “not to reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.” But what, I wonder, has come of these calls, other than predictable grief from the right?

Let’s take a step back. How did you first get the idea to do the book? What did it take to get started on the project? You allude to some resistance to your presence in the book, but just barely. How were you received “on the bus”?
As a young Rolling Stone reporter, I’d been doing a lot of music stories, but I wanted to try my hand at political reporting. There was a convocation of the whole Rolling Stone masthead in Big Sur at the start of 1972, and since the only other writer interested in covering the election was Hunter Thompson, I latched onto him. When I showed up in New Hampshire, it was clear that Hunter would be doing the main coverage, so I began looking for a juicy, unexplored subject. It only took a few days of riding the bus for me to see that the reporters themselves would make a great story. With Hunter’s enthusiastic sponsorship, I got a green light at the magazine, and was on my way.

A few of the reporters were openly hostile at first, and one or two took me aside to explain what damage I could do to venerable reputations; but a number of them, especially the younger ones, were welcoming, which gave me a wedge. After it became clear that I wasn’t going away, nearly all of them opened up to some degree. I guess they assumed they’d be better off if they made their case to me than if they didn’t, and since I was more than willing to listen, things worked out. Acquiring historical context took a while, but there were old-timers living around Washington whom I sought out, and I did library research.

Reading the book, it’s remarkable how many of the reporters you mention are still familiar to readers today. There’s R.W. Apple Jr. of the Times on one page, and David Broder of The Washington Post on the next. Do you keep in touch with any of them?
I wish I saw more of them. Jack Germond and I were going to get together a few weeks ago, but he got stuck behind a highway pile-up and never made it to lunch. For a good, growly assessment of how campaign reporting has changed over the years, by the way, see Jack’s book, Fat Man Fed Up.

In a way, your book marks the opening of the media’s inward-looking eye, yet it is very unlike most of the navel-gazing that seems to have followed. What do you think about the media’s self-obsession—is it essential to gain perspective on a given moment, or is it more often its own form of distraction?
The media, self-absorbed or not, remains a major factor in the political mix, and I’m glad that there are people like Ken Auletta at The New Yorker writing intelligent stuff about it.

But you’re no longer a factor. In fact, you seem to be doing anything but journalism—writing short stories, translating a century-old French novel. Why, after writing such a penetrating and groundbreaking book, would you leave journalism, more or less altogether?
I hope to get back to journalism at some point. I’m in contact with various magazine editors off and on, and one of these days I’m sure we’ll hit on just the right subject. What happened is that I got pulled away by other pursuits. There are a number of projects (fiction, theatre, translation) that I’m committed to, not only because they interest me deeply but also because the subjects are far enough off the beaten track that I know they’ll never get written if I don’t write them.

Hunter Thompson once said that he’d watched me getting hooked on politics and was sure I would never miss a national convention for the rest of my life. In fact, I gradually realized that, although politics intrigued me, literature and the theatre had a stronger pull. With hindsight I began to see what hadn’t been evident to me at the time—that my attraction to campaign reporters had its roots in certain personal circumstances. My father, Russel Crouse, had been through a whole career as a newspaperman before I was born, by which time he had become a successful playwright. The stories he told me of his newspaper days—especially traveling around the country with prankish sports teams—had a fatal tinge of romance about them. The inception of The Boys on the Bus can probably be traced to the moment in my fifteenth year when, as I stood with my father in the lobby of a Chicago hotel, the doors of an elevator parted, and out stepped the dean of the White House correspondents, Merriman Smith. My father knew him, and as he introduced me, the expression on my father’s face—deep respect, combined with what looked like an upsurge of nostalgia for his former vocation—made a lasting mark. My father died when I was nineteen, and I missed him. I think the spark for Boys on the Bus came from a desire to connect with him, and particularly with the exciting realm he had occupied before I came into his life.

Is there any pattern to this flurry of widely varying projects you mentioned?
If there’s a pattern, I think it’s that I care a lot about literature, and want to come at it from every angle that my skills and talents permit. One project reinforces another, so there’s a kind of constant cross-pollination going on in my work. I also like writing for the theatre. I co-authored a new libretto for the musical “Anything Goes” with John Weidman. It was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 2002, was a hit, moved to the Drury Lane in the West End, and just closed recently.

You talk about the pull of literature. Tell me about the collection of short stories you have coming out. How long have you been writing fiction? Was this a natural extension of your earlier journalism?
I’ve been writing fiction for several years now. I’m still working on the short-story book, so I’d like to hold off on characterizing it until it’s done. But “Sphinxes,” the story that ran in Zoetrope, gives a pretty good idea of what I’m doing.

Journalism provided me with a good foundation in writing prose and strengthened my habit of observing. I’ll always remain something of a journalist in that I don’t like to invent for the sake of inventing. Reality is just too rich and fascinating. My stories are based on things that happened: the challenge, for me, is to fathom the meaning of these events.

Greg Bloom, a former mediabistro.com intern, is currently engaging in extreme participatory democracy. Tomorrow, he will be unemployed once again. You can buy Boys on the Bus at Amazon.com.

Up until late 2002, Kendall Hamilton was your quintessential New York media guy—a kind of Kevin Bacon-esque utility player who could be easily connected to nearly every magazine bigwig you can imagine. Born and bred in Manhattan, Hamilton rose, Mark Whitaker-style, through the ranks of Newsweek, from a lowly apologist in the “Letters to the Editor” section to a cushy TV-writer post. After 11 years at Newsweek, he moved over to the currently much-publicized Mark Golin-era Details—right before that mag went briefly belly up. After dabbling in the start-up life at MBA Jungle with his friend Bill Shapiro (now managing editor of the Life relaunch), Hamilton went looking for something different and ended up as editor-in-chief of Ski magazine out in Boulder, Colorado. He’s traded in, as he puts it, a media pool for a media puddle—publishing pickings are slim in Boulder unless you count Soldier of Fortune—but as Hamilton tells it, maybe things aren’t that different when they run on Mountain Standard Time.

Birthdate: June 30, 1967
Hometown: New York, New York
First section of Sunday Times: The front section

You’ve really been all over the map here: A newsweekly, a lifestyle mag with an identity crisis, a start-up, and now a niche enthusiast mag out in Boulder of all places. How did you get into this business originally?
I got into this business in the way of most stumbling English majors who are looking for jobs after college: I wanted a job, and if I got a paycheck, that sounded just fine to me. Somebody told me that the letters department at Newsweek was a kind of traditional entry-level, sweep-the-floors, get-in-the-door job. So I went in there and contacted the right people and ended up getting that job. Our job was actually to write responses to readers who wrote in grieved about one thing or another that Newsweek might have said in the magazine. It was a staff of about six of us who did nothing but write, “Dear Mr. So-and-so, I’m terribly sorry you felt that we were unfair to poodles in this story, but in fact we love poodles and you misinterpreted what we said.”

I spent a couple of years just writing letters and being around the magazine culture. We were kind of sequestered off in our own little area, and it wasn’t as if we had daily interaction with the important people at the magazine. But over time, you got to know people, friends of yours got promoted, and you worked the system a little bit until the right combination of people went on vacation at the same time one summer, which is really how everything works in this business. You want to be the one guy standing there so they turn to you and say, “Oh, hey you! You’ve got a pulse, you want to try this?” So that’s what happened with me with the “Newsmakers” page.

Your jump to Details was a bit ill-timed, wasn’t it?
It was, unfortunately, yes. I’d gotten to a point at Newsweek where I really liked it and could very easily have stayed there a long time. Newsweek is one of these places where you look around and there are people—young people—who have been there 20-plus years. It’s a place where it’s very easy to settle in for the long haul. But I thought, if I stay here, I can see who I’m going to be, I’m going to be that guy down the hall. And that’s nice, but I’d like to inject a little more excitement into my career path here, which I certainly did—though not quite in the way that I anticipated.

I thought it would be a nice change to get out of the grind of writing on a weekly deadline, which was one of the features of Newsweek that really can wear you down after a while, and switch over to just being a pure editor. I had a really nice time there—I think I was there about four months before the ax fell.

So how did you go from this little New York media network, where you’re constantly swapping places with other power players, to editing a niche mag out in Colorado?
After the bubble burst, as they say, the culture went from, “We have the massage guy coming in every Tuesday!” to, you know, you’ve got to buy your own garbage bags, which is pretty much the arc that [MBA Jungle] progressed along. You get to a point where you say, you know, if this really were going to be all the success that we hoped, it would have been by now. So I started poking around and reached out to some people whose paths I’d crossed earlier in my career. In fact, the recruiter at Time Inc. that I called had been the recruiter at Conde Nast at the time I went to Details. I called her, and, you know, discussions led to discussions. As it turned out, they were looking to make some changes. What was starting then, and has continued since, was an across-the-board revitalization of the Time4 Media titles. And so it came around: “Hey, are you a skier?” Yes, absolutely, I’ve been skiing since I was a little kid, I love skiing. “Well, that’s interesting because we have these ski magazines out in Boulder, would you think of moving to Boulder. Is that even on the table?” And I said, sure why not. Basically you just want to keep talking. If I’d said no, we would have stopped talking right there so, “Yeah, sure!” and I figured I’d deal with that decision when and if the time came.

Eventually, they offered me the job. My wife and I sat down and thought long and hard about it. She’d been a corporate lawyer and she loved it, but I think that the opportunity to spend more time with our son was appealing to her. You sit there and you say, OK, how is this going to work, we’ve got the nanny, we’ve got private school. And you start looking at the realities of raising a family in Manhattan, and you start to think well, is there another way here? And Boulder seemed to be another way.

How is it different editing a specialty mag as opposed to a general interest one? How do you keep it fresh when it’s focused on a single subject?
I mean, it helps to be new, because you can selectively ignore much of what’s been done before you arrived. If you said, “Well we can’t do a story about mogul skiing because we did one four years ago”—you just can’t afford to do that. What it becomes about is what’s a new and different way into the same old familiar topic. It’s not as if new mountains are popping up every day, and snow has remained relatively unchanged for the last millennium. So you’re right, it is constantly a challenge to address a relatively limited universe in a fresh way, but you know, I think that we have managed to do that. In five years? I don’t know.

How is it different from other ski mags—like, say, Skiing?
Well, right here in Boulder there is Ski magazine and Skiing, which is our sister publication, also a Time4 Media magazine, and a very fine magazine, I think. And essentially these are the two biggest magazines devoted to the sport of skiing right under one roof. So how do you differentiate? For many, many years, particularly under the previous ownership, there really wasn’t a lot of differentiation. In college, I subscribed to one of the two and I couldn’t even tell you which one it was.

One of my prime directives was to enhance the editorial separation between Ski and Skiing, and that certainly is their mission over there, too. Skiing has moved to be younger, noisier, more irreverent, a little bit more back-country oriented. Ski—you’re not going to find the Ski reader sleeping in his van at the base of a mountain in Alaska. We have a very upscale readership, we are very resort-focused, family oriented. We are not necessarily “rad.” Skiing over the past decade has become an increasingly amenitized sport—it’s moved into the realm of luxury travel. You look at a place like Vail or Beaver Creek—these are really upscale destinations. There’s a huge market for that segment of skiing, and we devote ourselves to serving that first and foremost.

Maybe in some ways, then, Ski is not that different from your old magazines. Details? MBA Jungle? Those certainly target an affluent audience.
Yeah, that’s an astute point. We are, in many senses, a lifestyle magazine for skiers. We are about a lot more than what actually happens on the mountain. We are about what happens on the mountain, and we’re authoritative in our instruction and gear coverage, but at the same time, we’re about everything else that surrounds and augments the actual on-hill experience: great restaurants, great hotels, just everything that goes into what it means to be a skier.

So then what sort of writers do you attract? Do you get the same people who are also taking their stuff to Travel and Leisure?
Actually yes, in many cases we do. One of the things I’ve worked hard to do since I got here two years ago is to broaden the pool of contributors. There certainly are a vast number of “card-carrying ski writers.” And these folks, many of them are quite good, but they’re really specialists, and I thought that the magazine could benefit from casting a wider net for contributors. So we have folks who write for just about any comparable magazine you could name.

How is your life different now that you live in Colorado?
Well I’m looking out my window at a mountain right now, that’s a pretty prime improvement, as opposed to a dingy wall downtown. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place and there’s just so much to do in terms of outdoor recreation. In terms of my work life: here in Boulder, you’re not going to find too many people to have a big boozy conversation about the last issue of The Atlantic. In New York, you can really get steeped in the magazine culture, and out here that’s not so much the case.

But, I mean, a magazine is a magazine, wherever you’re putting it out. The actual mechanics of my job aren’t different. The closes are a little bit less late at night—although we certainly do get frenzied. We have a lot of big issues to put out on a tight schedule with a pretty small staff, particularly early in the season. One of the oddball things about Ski is that the seasonality takes on a huge role. It’s not like you can plan everything on a rolling basis as you might be able to do with a regular monthly, where you’re working three or four issues ahead. We have to work the whole season ahead because we have essentially four months where there’s snow on the ground and skiing to be had. So things get planned over a couple of weeks in November and we basically dispatch an army of writers and photographers out onto the snow, racing to get where they need to go and accomplish the things they need to accomplish before the snow melts. And in the spring it all comes flooding in all at once, and you sort if out from there. But there’s very little room for error. You can’t decide in May, “Oh, we should do a piece about skiing in Jackson Hole.” It’s too late; there’s no snow anymore. So planning is of absolute paramount importance here.

Does that affect the magazine in terms of coverage in the summer versus coverage in the winter? Does the Southern hemisphere get a lot of play during the summer?
We do have a summer issue that comes out in June, and we cast a pretty wide net for that. We’ll do a story about recreation in the mountain. We might do a golf piece or a dude ranch piece, but we almost always will do a summer skiing piece. And there is terrific skiing to be had in South America, Australia, New Zealand, even Europe on some glaciers.

But I can assume you’re not going to have a big spread on Alpine sleds.
Let’s just say that’s not our reader.

If you’re thinking that this might, in five years, become a situation where you say, “OK, I’ve done this,” what would you think is next for you?
That is an excellent question and one I am not really prepared to address at the moment. I’m having a terrific time with this. There aren’t a lot of other magazine jobs in Boulder; it’s not too tough to figure that out. Editing a magazine in a place other that New York, you kind of get out on a bit of peninsula, and there aren’t a lot of other places to go. So who knows, I may come back to New York. Anything’s possible.

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com.

Bob Edwards and his famously silky, sonorous voice took to the airwaves again yesterday morning, but unless you’ve got a $9.99/month subscription to XM Satellite radio, chances are he didn’t accompany you on your Monday morning drive time (though for a limited time, you can strap on your headphones at work and listen to the first week of broadcasts gratis, streamed via XM’s website.)

But the fact that XM’s subscriber base numbers only 2.5 million—as opposed to the 13 million listeners Edwards reached as host of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition before he was unceremoniously stripped of anchor duties this past spring—doesn’t seem to bother him. In fact, Edwards seems to have emerged from the whole NPR imbroglio relatively unscathed. He’s a little bruised, sure—there’s a frown in his voice when he recalls the circumstances of his dismissal—but as people who recently lost their job of 25 years go, Edwards is having an excellent year. In April, he released a biography of his lifelong hero, Edward R. Murrow, and August brought his selection as an inductee to the 2004 Radio Hall of Fame.

Now, XM is pinning its 20-million-subscribers-by-2010 dreams on the launch of The Bob Edwards Show (as well as a slate of other radio notables), and Edwards is back behind the microphone, doing what he knows best—having conversations with the newsmakers, artists, and journalists he loves. We recently turned the tables and asked Edwards the questions about his old gig, his new one, the birth of broadcast journalism by way of Edward R. Murrow, and the future of the medium by way of, well—Bob Edwards, of course.

Birthdate: May 16, 1947
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
First section of the Sunday Times: The Book Review

Tell me about the format of the new show. How is it different from Morning Edition?
We don’t have the army of several hundred that produces news programs with NPR. We’re a staff of, at the moment, six, soon to be seven, possibly topping out at eight. So we can only do what we can do. Primarily it will be interviews. There will be contributors and people with essays—maybe even independent producers who have done stories. But primarily it will be my interviews.

Who would you like to talk to?
Just people that I’m curious about. It’ll be musicians, it’ll be authors, it’ll be thinkers. People who can sustain long-form conversation, interesting people that appeal to me. People who won’t bore the listeners.

Do you have a dream subject you’d like to interview?

Well, there are people I’ve always wanted that I can’t get. I’d dearly love to talk to them, but they don’t give interviews. Anne Tyler, for one, the novelist; Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird; J.D. Salinger, who of course is notorious for being a recluse. I would love to interview all those people. I’d love to get the presidential candidates, and I’ve got no positive response from any of them yet. So I’ll bring in David Broder of The Washington Post to talk about the presidential candidates. With the program [launching] just a month before the election, I think it’s important to acknowledge there is an election under way and that’s the most compelling thing at this time.

One sort of obvious but notable difference is that this show is actually called The Bob Edwards Show. Does that mean this show is going to have a more personal stamp?
Oh, absolutely. Sure. The phrase that Hugh Panero used—he is the president of XM—he said, “Let Bob be Bob.” So for better or worse, that’s what you’ll get.

Talk to me about leaving NPR. How did you feel when it was announced that you would no longer be with Morning Edition?
Well, what’s the right word? Disappointed seems a little lame. I was hurt. But that’s the way it goes. I was not in charge, they are. They can have whoever they want doing their programs for them.

NPR said their goal was to reach a younger demographic. If you aren’t reaching that group, who is the sort of person you picture listening to you on the radio?
I know the type of person listening. I know the NPR listener is a very intelligent person and has certain expectations of subject matter, approach, scope—and very often will know more about what I’m talking about than I do. It’s a very challenging audience. And I’m hoping to have that same audience here because it’s still public radio. So I’m making the same assumptions about the audience I’ll have here as I had there. And I like working for that kind of audience. I wouldn’t want to do a program that is intended to factor in the lowest common denominator. I want the most listeners I can get, but I’m not going to compromise the content of the program to get that. I’m going to continue to have the same standards I had at NPR.

After NPR announced your dismissal, there was a huge outpouring of support from your listeners. Does it frustrate you that you won’t be able to reach as many people on XM?
No, I mean, I understand that it’s something new. I was at NPR in NPR’s third year, and they had fewer listeners then than XM has now. Now I’m joining XM in its third year, and I understand that you start small and build. I fully anticipate that we’ll have as many listeners, that this audience is going to grow rapidly—more rapidly than it did at NPR. God knows, I was there for 30 years—I’m not sure I’ll be here for 30 years, I’ll be well into my 80s—but I know it’s going to grow and that’s part of the excitement. That was the excitement with NPR and, within that, Morning Edition, and it’s the same here.

After listening to you for 25 years, people probably feel as if they know you, but I’m not sure they do. Tell me about what drew you to broadcasting in the first place.
Oh, it’s all I ever wanted to do. I’m talking a little-bitty kid, too, not just high school. I mean way back, I was attracted to broadcasting. Radio was my friend, my pal, my playmate. I listened to all the stations, to all the formats up and down the dial—who was coming on shift at one o’clock in the afternoon, what kind of music they’d be playing. And then at night—it was all AM, there was very little FM—at night, listening to broadcasts in other cities. And that was exciting because I’d never been anywhere, never been to those cities. It was intriguing to hear somebody far away in a different city talking to you. I was just in love with radio. Still am.

Were there people after whom you wanted to model your career?
Well, [Edward R.] Murrow of course. Absolutely. It became more focused later, of course, when I was not a little kid anymore and realized just who he was and what he had done and how important he was to broadcast journalism. I guess it was the high school years when it hit me how important he was. He’s been my hero all my life.

There are certain parallels between you and Murrow. You were both pioneers in a way, and in your biography, you even wrote, “Murrow lost favor with his bosses but never with his public”—which is probably how most people would describe you these days. Do you see the similarities?
Only in a few areas. We’re both from working-class backgrounds, for example, champions of the underdog and all that. But the talent, the brains that man had—I could never, ever approach that. The courage—he was just fearless. I’ve got none of that. I’ve never been in a war zone. He went out and walked the streets of London with bombs falling all around him. He wouldn’t go into bomb shelters because he was afraid that he’d get used to them. I’d be in the shelters. I don’t know that I would have had the chutzpah to take on McCarthy at the time that Murrow did. I hope I never have to test myself that way, that we have some sort of demagogue like that again. Those are things I’ll never know about myself, but I know them about Murrow. There’s no match there.

And the courage to take on his bosses and to insist on principle over practical, corporate reality? No one fights that fight anymore because he did and lost. It was almost reckless. I admire the fight for principle, but it meant that he couldn’t function at CBS anymore. I don’t know that I would do that; I don’t know that I could if it meant I wouldn’t be hired by anyone.

In the book, you lament the state of broadcasting today, but barring the total annihilation of Clear Channel and Infinity as we know them, how can radio improve?
I think what’s going to happen is, given the continued success of public radio and the potential success there is for satellite radio and Internet radio, I think there’s going to be enormous pressure on standard commercial radio—what they call here terrestrial radio. They’re going to feel the pressure to shape up and change their ways and get back to being innovative and creative and less greedy. They’re doing these 20-minute commercial blocks now—it’s just astonishing they have a listener left. My God, you forget the program you’re listening to because it’s wall-to-wall commercials. That’s just greed. Commercial radio is being run as a big cash register. There is not any kind of energy, and there is no room for creative people. You follow the tight little playlist that the program director has given you based on some focus group in Columbus, Ohio. The voice tracking is done for 25 cities by a guy who is pretending to be at each of those 25 cities—that’s bogus. They’ve lost their localism, the thing that should be a radio station’s advantage—where they should have it all over us at XM. Instead they’re doing programs for multiple cities and just pretending to be local. People know better. So I think they’re going to feel pressure ultimately. Clear Channel has already cut back on some of their commercials. And I think that’s in response to non-commercial radio, both public and satellite.

You’ve also said that Murrow wouldn’t be able to find a home in radio today, but with things like XM or Air America—these so-called alternative outlets—springing up, do you feel like that’s changing?
I think that if he were in charge, he’d be OK, but if he were not in charge there would be the pressure to be this, to do that, to appeal to this group—all those things he would completely reject—and he’d end up getting fired again. Well, he wasn’t fired, but he was marginalized to the point where he quit. So I just don’t see him functioning in this atmosphere.

Would you ever want to be in charge or do you always want to be behind the microphone? I’m not sure that broadcasters necessarily have those aspirations.
No, I would never want to be in charge. I guess I have the ideal situation here: I’m the boss of no one, and yet I’ve been told that I have the freedom to do what I want. We’ll see. I hope that’s true. But I’m feeling very comfortable here, and everyone has been so encouraging and so warm and friendly. God, how long can that last?

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com.

In the race to capture the dollars of the coveted 18 to 34 demographic, has the book world faltered? Magazine publishers have swooned over lad mags and shopping rags, television networks have ramped up reality-TV programming, and movie studios have Lindsay Lohan scheduled out through 2006. In publishing, there have been sporadic efforts to cater to this crowd—the proliferation of genres like chick lit or the grouping of titles under umbrellas like Random House‘s Teens@Random. But there has never been anything so concerted as an imprint devoted to finding out exactly what’s on the minds of these elusive consumers.

All that changed earlier this month, when Simon & Schuster launched a new imprint, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, to focus exclusively on courting this demographic. The imprint is an extension of Simon Spotlight, a successful S&S imprint within the Children’s Publishing division that mainly does kiddie lit media tie-ins, and it’s being headed up by associate publisher Jen Bergstrom, a former Simon Spotlight exec. So far, the imprint seems to have hit a nerve: The lead title, He’s Just Not That Into You, by two ex-Sex and the City consultants, is already a bestseller and the book’s writers are currently making the talk-show rounds. Bergstrom recently took some time out to speak with mediabistro.com about how the imprint intends to get a new generation reading again.

Birthdate: December 21, 1968
Hometown: New York, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: “The Style section. It’s the women’s sports pages.”

This is an interesting chance to get a behind the scenes look at the rationale and thinking that goes into the development of an imprint. Tell me a little bit about the start-up process. Why was the decision made to branch out into this market?
I have to tell you, it was when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hit TV. It was the first reality TV show, I think, that everyone in my office really responded to. We started talking about the books we could do or would want to do to tie into that show. And we realized that there was a niche audience out there that really wasn’t being published for. It was this 18- to 34-year-old group—actually, I have to start raising the age as I grow older. I’m going to be 36, so I said in an interview this morning “It’s 18 to 35” and the interviewer said, “But Jen, it says 18 to 34 in the press release,” and I said, “I know, but I’m 35 now. Just change the age.” I’ve got to grow with my demo.

But we loved Queer Eye. It started a really cool conversation at one of our editorial meetings and we decided to go to the powers that be here at Simon & Schuster and see if we could get the OK to launch an imprint that would be completely dedicated to taking brands and TV shows and celebrities and issues that are hot or in the media and leveraging them into a new format that would encourage reading in what we’re calling a pain-free and gotta-have-it kind of way. And no one here was really doing that. Specifically saying you want to publish books that people within a certain age are going to buy was a new concept to S&S. And the fact that we’re also part of Viacom and the MTV family—the reception was incredible. Our CEO challenged us to do it, he fully supported it, and we ran with it. That was almost a year ago, and our first two titles are just shipping as we speak.

So the original brains behind this were people at Simon Spotlight who wanted to branch out even more?
Exactly—wanted to publish books that they themselves wanted to read. It’s the old “you have to be one to know one.” And this list really started directly out of us talking in meetings and by the watercoolers about what shows we were watching, what we were interested in. It’s very media-centric. Everything’s got a pop-culture framework to it.

Who do you see as your typical reader?

Our typical reader obviously falls within the age group. They are hooked on at least one reality TV show, they own an iPod, they can’t live without TiVo. They can be married or single, but they are thirsting for a new voice or a new attitude. We just signed up Lewis Black, for example, the comedian, to do a book filled with his rants on our spring list. You don’t get more irreverent than Lewis Black. He is like the poster child for this imprint.

Our runaway bestseller right now—and it’s officially a bestseller—is a book He’s Just Not That Into You, written by two consultants and writers from Sex and the City. Oprah featured it on her show; it’s already number one at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. What we love about it is it’s this no-excuses guide to understanding guys. It’s sort of like the new Rules for dating. It’s very irreverent, it’s fresh, it’s smart, it’s savvy, and it’s written by two people in the media. And most of our authors on our list fit that profile—they’ve either written magazine pieces, they’ve written for television, or they’re celebrities who are breaking out.

What was your role in creating this? What’s your background like?
I’ve been at Simon & Schuster for eight years, and I’ve been the publisher of their children’s media line of books. So I’ve been publishing anything that’s on TV for kids, but my target audience has been three to five year olds—a little different. But it’s always been media-based, and in this business, those contacts—because a lot of it comes down to buying rights and negotiating deals—are the same people. For instance, when we’re talking to Comedy Central about a book that we’re doing with them on The Man Show, it’s the same person at Comedy Central that I talk to about doing something on one of their Nickelodeon properties. So the people were the same, we hired four editors at various levels, promoted an intern—we’ve got simply the hippest, coolest editorial staff. I mean, I consider myself pretty cutting-edge, and these guys will come into meetings and tell me about celebrities that I haven’t even heard of that they think are going to break out. And so far, they’re batting 1.000. We’ve done some unauthorized bios, we’ve done a book on Ashlee Simpson. They know who’s hot, much like, I think, editors on magazines do. If Entertainment Weekly were to do a line of books, it would be this line of books.

What differentiates this imprint from previous houses’ efforts to plug into what “the kids” want to read?
I don’t know what differentiates it aside from the age group, 18- to 34-year-olds. I think maybe the question behind that question is what are we doing differently than some of those other imprints, and I would say the answer to that is marketing. Given what I said about this media-savvy reader that we’re trying to attract, we’re finding that we’re doing a lot more guerrilla marketing than we ever have before. Our marketing people are doing everything from advertising on Match.com for one of our dating books, to partnering with a magazine and Smirnoff for our poker book. There’s a lot more grassroots marketing than I think you would find with a serious fiction line of books. We’re also finding that we understand our readers aren’t necessarily going to be shopping at Barnes & Noble. They might be in Barnes & Noble buying a magazine or a cappuccino, but we’ve got just as good a shot with them buying a book at Urban Outfitters or Restoration Hardware or online.

I think what really got corporate here at S&S excited about this idea was that statistics and studies have shown recently that readership for this age group has been dwindling. And we truly believe that it’s because there’s nothing out there that they want to read. There’s this big gap between young adult or Harry Potter and the classics. There’s this middle section of readers that we think we’re going to capture, and they want stuff that’s edgy and irreverent and funny and smart. This is a generation that didn’t grow up with Tom Brokaw—they grew up with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Tell me about some of the other books in the fall catalog. How did you assemble the list? Did agents just submit titles because they knew this was happening?
Well, He’s Just Not That Into You was submitted to us from an agent. Poker: The Real Deal was 100 percent our idea in-house. I had been on a trip to L.A. and all of my friends—mostly my guy friends—were obsessed with poker. We decided we wanted to do a book with it, and we got, luckily, Phil Gordon, who is the co-host of Celebrity Poker on Bravo. We approached him about writing an introduction for the book, and he blew us away by saying. “No, I want to write the whole book.” So we teamed him up with Jonathan [Grotenstein], the co-writer on the project, and it’s another runaway bestseller for us, it’s been phenomenal. And Hardly Working, which I think has gotten the most buzz when people pick it up because it’s so funny, came to us after we put out a call to our favorite packagers and agents in the business. We said, “OK guys, here’s what we want to do.” And I think what surprised us the most is that all of those people had six things on their desks that they weren’t getting sold anywhere else. And we said that’s exactly what we’re looking for. So we’re getting ideas from three places: from agents, from ideas that we’re coming up with on staff, and we’re chasing a lot of celebrities.

And media tie-ins?
And media tie-ins. They’re really sort of the backbone of our business—series publishing, like Everwood and Charmed and Buffy. Buffy and Charmed we’ve been publishing for years, but we’ve had them on our teen list. In creating this imprint, we decided that from a brand perspective, it was probably smart to just keep everything that was TV-driven or entertainment-based on one list. And we’re always looking. There are a lot of shows that are on right now that we’re watching very closely, like Arrested Development. We also like Joan of Arcadia, which is CBS’s big hit, just because it’s a different, middle-America audience. What we want to try to do is not become too regional.

A lot of the books seem really design-y—smaller sizes, a lot of very stylized covers. Was that purposeful?
It absolutely was. We wanted it to be different. Even our trim sizes are different. Again, this is an audience where packaging is king. We knew that with our buying habits—you know, as the same age as our readers—I buy a lot of books for friends. We wanted it to be gifty. Most of our books have rounded corners—just something that gets them to stand out a little bit more. And surprisingly, these aren’t necessarily features that make a book that much more expensive. That’s the other thing. We wanted the books to be as affordable as possible. We wanted these to be impulse buys. We wanted it to be a no–brainer. I love to say about He’s Just Not That Into You—it’s less than a manicure and pedicure, and it makes you feel so much better in the long run.

Your marquee author Lewis Black said something recently: “This whole century is about style over content.” Do you worry about creating that perception?
Well, listen. He was at our launch party last week, and he did some stand-up for us. We have a finished cover, we’ve got quotes for the back of the book, and he said, “Now all I have to do is write it.” And he turned to us and he said, “Or do I?”

I agree with Lewis, I think that’s funny, but the reality is this is an incredibly discriminating audience. Phil Gordon’s poker book is super smart. He’s got to be writing it for a person who’s obsessed with poker as a sport, so it’s got to deliver. And Lewis’ book is the same, and he will. We’ve seen bits and pieces of it, and we’re just so excited.

When you Google “imprint,” “teen,” and “demographic,” the only thing that seems to pop up are references to the “Extreme for Jesus” line of books. How do you feel about your competition?
Oh, we can so easily take him. I love that. But you know, we come up with these ideas in our editorial meetings, and we think, God, that’s such a great idea. Someone must have done it already. And then someone does exactly what you did. We go onto bn.com or Bookscan, and lo and behold, there’s nothing there on the subject. It’s perfect. We’re having a blast. I don’t think any of us have ever had this much fun before.

Larry Grobel doesn’t so much drop famous names; he simply mentions them—big names, like Capote, Pacino, and Streisand—with encyclopedic efficiency and no pretense. For thirty years, the freelance journalist, author, and biographer has probed the minds and lives of some of the most famous names in show business, music, and the media for publications including Playboy (where he’s a master of the famed Playboy Interview), Esquire, and GQ, and he’s a go-to guy for E!’s True Hollywood Story series. Grobel has island-hopped with Brando, sparred with Bobby Knight, and jumped through publicists’ nefarious hoops to get face time with the likes of Halle Berry, Jodie Foster, and Drew Barrymore. His new book, The Art of the Interview, is both a primer on the subject, which he teaches at UCLA, and a humorous in-depth look inside the exasperating and exciting world of celebrity journalism. mediabistro.com recently turned the tables on Larry Grobel and asked him all about his adventures in interviewing.

Despite your enviable career, you indicate in The Art of the Interview a fair share of rejection and disappointments in the beginning. What’s your advice for writers starting out and struggling to keep the faith?
I mention in my book about crying after receiving rejections from both Esquire and Playboy on the same day. I used to save all my rejections, always thinking, “I’ll show them.” I always talk about how hard it is, but I also think it’s glorious. If you have talent, persevere. Some give in. Writers are writers because they can’t help but be writers; they have to get it out there. I feel more whole and reassured when I’ve written something. I try to discourage my students from a writing career most of the time. The ones who get beyond it are really meant to do it.

Your portfolio includes the A-lists of Hollywood, literature, and art. How do you handle the intimidation factor—those pre-interview jitters, if you still get them?
Being nervous is healthy because it means you’re into it. Sometimes I’ll just sit in the car before I go in and take a few deep breaths. You just remember they’re no better than you. When I first started out I used to really sweat, going up against people like Lucille Ball and Jane Fonda. You’re going in there to meet these iconic, legendary people, and you’re about to ask them personal stuff. I would feel the heat on my brow, but when I saw they were willing to talk to me, I would relax a bit more. It never really changes. You don’t know who they’re going to be that day, and you’re dealing with their anxiety and concerns as well. When you see people on edge when you come in, it actually calms you down. The scariest time is when you’re not prepared. You can’t wing it. No matter who you talk to, never go in unprepared.

Who were your favorite people to profile?
Well, it’s hard to beat people like Capote, Huston, Henry Moore—he was a real thrill. Brando was one of the most challenging. Michener was such a mensch. He was willing to talk about a lot of things, and he had a lot of interests. Nicole Kidman is a good interview. So were Pavarotti, Miles Davis. I’m sorry I never did a book with Miles. So much anger and genius in him. There’s something revealing there.

You mention in the book several friendships that have resulted from interviews. How does this affect your work as a journalist?
First of all, you have to separate acquaintances from friendships. I have lots of acquaintances that result from interviews. As far as friendships, Elliott Gould is a close friend, as is Al Pacino. First, I let the editors know, in case they’re after an ambush piece. I do separate friendship from work, and I let the subject understand that I am going to have to mention certain things. But I know how to couch it, preface it. Premiere is going to run my interview with Pacino in February. I told them, “I have access to Al, I’ve seen Merchant of Venice, and I can give you a different kind of insight.” I had to overcome their skepticism by having him say things he never said before.

The Playboy Interview—for which you’ve talked to everyone from Barbra Streisand to Jesse Ventura—has become the kind of interview that signifies someone has “arrived” in the popular culture. How did it earn that kind of editorial cache?
Barbra Streisand said of the Playboy Interview; “That’s the Bible.” It really happened from the start, with Alex Haley’s interview with Miles Davis [in the September 1962 issue]. At that time there were no other Q&As, at least in that form, in general-interest magazines. Playboy let the format flourish and gave it the space it needed so you could change the subject a few times in an interview. They typically ran about 25 to 30,000 words. Now it’s down to 6,000. The magazine is thinner, and there’s less editorial space, which is tied into the belief that nobody wants to read that much anymore.

In your book, you mention some notable interviewers such as Orianna Fallaci, Connie Martinson, and Brian Lamb. Who else should we be watching/reading for a demonstration in good interview skills?
On television: Larry King, Bob Costas, Charlie Rose, Katie Couric. Letterman is the best of late night. You really have to pay attention to what’s out there. I watch 60 Minutes, Dateline, John Stossel on 20/20. You have to ask, am I coming away from the interview feeling manipulated, satisfied, or, like after a Chinese dinner, wanting a little more? You want to see them take the next step, go a little deeper. Montel Williams doesn’t have a script but is focused. Merv Griffin would listen to you. Are they listening or looking at their note cards to get through it? If they’re having a conversation, that’s better. The more unexpected the direction the better the interview. You want to come away understanding who that person is. As far as print, I remember great pieces like John Updike on Ted Williams, Gay Talese on Frank Sinatra, or Gore Vidal’s profiles. You can still find some good stuff in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.

Where are your favorite places to do an interview? Least favorite?
It depends on the assignment. When I interviewed Brando I ended up at his island retreat, which was fascinating. Their house or my house usually works well. There are fewer distractions. A public place like a restaurant can be difficult, with people interrupting the interview for the star’s autograph. There’s also a lot of noise, that clanging of silverware, which I hate.

What kinds of interview exercises do you give your UCLA students?
For their first assignment, I have the students interview each other. Think about it. How many times have you taken a class and not gotten to know anyone? I have them pair up and meet for 1-3 hours. The person being interviewed gets to pick the place. The interviewer is allowed to ask anything, and the interviewee cannot get angry at the questions. Then they switch. It’s a great assignment because it introduces them to what it’s like to interview right away. Then I read the transcripts and get to know 16 students like I would never know them otherwise. At that point I can help them with what they want to do in life better than I could before.

One of the most difficult things about interviewing is actually getting people to talk. How do you do it? And for the people who talk too much, how do you find the relevant material and keep the interview on track?
I talk a lot about this in my book. Usually you’ll get advance notice from the publicist as to what somebody will or won’t talk about. But I’m prepared with questions that are conversation starters, or questions about people’s individual interests. Sometimes it’s hard, like with the Nicholson interview I talk about in my book. I recently interviewed James Franco, and he was talking in a stream of consciousness fashion yet he didn’t have much to say. As for more effusive interview subjects, time does dictate, too. And you just have to go over and find the gems in the interview, the things that are most revealing about the person.

What are conversation starters?
It depends. I keep a list of prepared questions handy, one list for actors and one list for writers, in case I get an assignment I can’t prepare for. There are about 215 questions, but I’ve never used them because I’ve always been able to research the person beforehand. Some of those boilerplate questions for writers are, “Do you ever get treated like a star?” or “Talk about your early writings,” or “Do you have any secret rivals?” For actors, I have quotes from Olivier or Brando that I would ask them to respond to, or I would ask about the first time they fell in love. But, again, I’ve yet to use these questions.

What are some signs of an amateur or novice interviewer?
General or nonspecific questions like “What was your childhood like?” This tells me you didn’t do much research. A more specific question tells your subject you’ve prepared and they respect that and will respond to you in a more intimate way.

As an interviewee, who would you like to go up against? Who would you avoid?
I’m not comfortable around people with an agenda, like Bill O’Reilly or Howard Stern. I’d rather talk to someone like Charlie Rose just because I know we’d have a conversation that is about something.

What names are still on your to-do list?
A while back I turned down Clint Eastwood and Stephen King for Playboy. I’d like to interview them now. I would have liked to interview Bill Clinton. I’d like to interview George Bush. Also: Bernard Henri-Levy, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Tom Wolfe. Writers interest me because they’re smart and observant. Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il. I tried to do Idi Amin, but Playboy wouldn’t let me. It was too dangerous in Uganda at the time. I’ll talk to anybody who’ll talk to me.

Angelina Sciolla last wrote for mediabistro.com about the end of Sex and the City. You can buy The Art of the Interview at Amazon.com.

When John A. Byrne was named editor-in-chief of Fast Company in April 2003, his first task was to tell his new staff that the magazine was moving from Boston to New York. Which meant most of them would lose their jobs. And things only got tougher from there: The magazine’s corporate parent, Gruner + Jahr USA, revealed in its ugly lawsuit with Rosie O’Donnell that it had inflated circulation figures for magazines including Fast Company, and CEO Dan Brewster, who’d long championed the title, was fired.

To some observers, Fast Company—a business book focused on an economy impacted by technology and globalization—was seen as the poster child for G+J’s follies under Brewster, who oversaw the purchase of the magazine in 2000, reportedly for more than $300 million, just before the dotcom crash caused its ad pages to plummet. But while Brewster has since left the building, Byrne is still at the helm of the magazine, apparently with G+J’s full support: The company recently combined the magazine’s business side with sister publication Inc.‘s, in an effort to make both more competitive.

Byrne’s ability to weather the storm is even more impressive considering he had almost no experience as an editor before joining Fast Company. A senior writer at BusinessWeek since 1985, he co-wrote GE CEO Jack Welch’s best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut, and he wrote or co-authored seven other business books. He recently spoke to mediabistro.com about learning to be a leader after a career spent writing about them.

Birthdate: January 17, 1953
Hometown: Paterson, New Jersey
First section of the Sunday Times: “The first section that everyone reads; the first section that Jack Welch reads: the Style section.”

Did you always want to write about business?
I actually started out as a rock critic. My hair was down to my shoulders, and I was a rock critic for my college newspaper. I wrote all these reviews; I went to three rock concerts a week. It was a lot of fun, but you really don’t influence people, you don’t change their behavior. When I started writing other stories that upset people—I did a profile on a student who was raped; I wrote editorials about inadequate security and lighting on campus—I realized the power that journalists really could have.

What attracted you to business journalism?
I felt, back in the ’70s, when I was getting into this, that the people in our society who are the most influential, who have the most say over how we live and work, are actually businesspeople. And there is great drama there: In many of the stories that I like the most, there are characters you can relate to—either you love them or you hate them—and they inspire something in you that touches your emotions.

That’s been especially true recently: Look at how people have reacted to the Martha Stewart verdict. Do you think these big stories have made the layperson more interested in business?
There is, in general, more interest in business—all you have to do is look at the success of a show like The Apprentice. Unfortunately, the worst possible role model anyone could have would be Donald Trump. He represents everything that’s wrong about business. It’s an old style of leadership. It’s all about, “I’m your boss and you’re my underling,” and, “You’re fired.” That’s what business was about in the 1950s, not today. Nonetheless, the popularity of that show, I think, is indicative that the layperson is far more interested and connected to business than he or she has ever been before. Part of that is not only the democratization of the stock market, but frankly, people are understanding that their personal fate is intertwined with the business world. We’re all part of this huge global economy, and it’s both exciting and scary. So whether you’re paying $3 for a gallon of gas or worrying about getting laid off because someone in India may be taking your job or thinking, “I have an idea for a company—should I get venture capital for it?” there’s a lot more focus on business today.

It must be strange to go from being a journalist chasing a killer story to being an editor-in-chief thinking about nurturing a brand.
I think in the early days I thought much more like a journalist. I thought, I’m gonna put my kick-ass provocative story—the story that’s going to create conversation and get attention—on the cover. I think ultimately that that’s not what magazines are about. That doesn’t mean you don’t run those stories—you still run them, but you run them inside. It’s why Vanity Fair or Esquire will have George Clooney and his pecs on the cover, but another coverline will have Seymour Hersh writing about public policy. Those really good pieces of journalism have a home, but the cover is your most precious real estate, and you need to continually remind people what your position in the marketplace is.

Tell me about the “autopsy” process you instituted for each issue.
I’ll invite someone in—it could be a colleague from another magazine or newspaper, a journalism professor, an advertiser, a CEO who was once covered in the magazine, even a longtime reader—and they’ll critique the magazine page by page in front of my entire staff. There are two reasons for that. One is I want to create a place where everyone is learning, no matter where they are on the masthead. The other thing I want is for everyone to see how open I am to criticism, because that’s how you improve. I take the blame for everyone, and I should. Because otherwise these sessions wouldn’t work. I don’t want outsiders coming in and beating up on my people.

Do you get the feeling that your staff dreads the autopsies?
No, they look forward to them. Everyone is hungry for feedback. When you’re in this closed world where you’re putting out a magazine, and most of the people in here don’t have a lot of contact with our readers, you want to see what some people who you respect have to say. In our next session, we’re having the economics correspondent for The New York Times, David Leonhardt, come in to critique us, which will be fascinating.

Fast Company has been pointed out as an example of G+J’s missteps.
G+J paid a large sum for the magazine. Obviously that was a very different time. Fast Company was a five-time finalist in the ASME awards and a two-time winner. It went from a circulation of nothing to a circulation of 725,000 in seven years, which is pretty unusual. Then, of course, when the bust occurred, a lot of people who both advertised and read the magazine went away. I think because of the amount of money paid for the magazine, there was a lot more attention paid to it than most.

And Fast Company was also caught up in the newsstand inflation scandal.
What happened is, you know the difference between the pink sheets and the white sheets? One of those sets of numbers is unaudited, and they’re estimates of what newsstand might be, because you don’t know. You don’t get any good hard numbers for probably six months after your magazine goes off-sale. The reason is simple: It takes a long time for the returns to come back, and for all that to filter through the system. So the estimates of what you expected in newsstand sales can vary wildly with the audited results six months later. That’s what happened with Fast Company. Frankly, the reason the estimates were so far off was because the distribution was significantly reduced. They’re putting out fewer magazines and therefore selling a lot less, thinking, what would it matter as long as we meet our rate base? They weren’t thinking about anyone looking at the difference between the pink sheets and the white sheets.

Fast Company is so symbolic of things that had happened under Dan Brewster. Is there a sense of, “As goes Fast Company, so goes G+J”?
No. Because the real moneymakers at G+J are Parents and Family Circle. Inc. and Fast Company have terrific potential, and I think that they’re both uniquely positioned in the business-magazine category. But they’re also like all the other business magazines: highly cyclical. When things are good, these magazines make huge sums of money for everyone. When things are bad, they don’t make a lot of money. Whereas Parents, Child, Family Circle, Fitness, and YM are not as dependent on the economy going up and down. I don’t think the way Fast Company goes is the way G+J is going to go. It was one of the big bets that Dan Brewster made, along with the decision to convert McCall’s to Rosie. And because it was such a big bet, it really sticks out.

So, no pressure?
I don’t feel there’s pressure. I think I have one of the greatest jobs in the world. I love this job. I absolutely love it. I haven’t had this much fun since I was the editor of my college paper. Even the frustrations and challenges are wonderful, because through each of them I’m learning something new. The beauty of being the editor of a magazine is that you always have another shot. Your product is never static. It’s always changing, it’s always evolving, and if there’s something that you regret you can fix it in the next issue.

Fast Company cofounder Alan Webber has said he invited you to join the magazine when it started, and that it took 10 years to get you on board. What took so long?
When [Webber and co-founder William Taylor] first came to me, I thought they were exceptionally smart, passionate—and I thought the idea was terrific. BusinessWeek was just really hard for me to leave. It was my professional home for nearly 18 years. I loved the people there, I loved the product. I could basically go out and write about almost anything in long form. I did 57 covers. I was having too much fun and learning too much to leave. It’s different when you’re offered the top job to run a magazine, and then I thought, “That is truly the offer I can’t refuse.” I’d never done it, and they were willing to take a risk on me. So of course I jumped at the chance, and it’s one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

Emily Fromm, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, is a contributing writer to mediabistro.com.

“Great art stands on its own even if it’s removed from the specific context of when and how it was made,” declares Jim DeRogatis, the brash and influential resident rock critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, in the essay that kicks off Kill Your Idols, a new collection of rock criticism he edited with his wife, Carmel Carrillo, an assistant editor at the Chicago Tribune. For this book, the husband-and-wife team brought together a group of Generation X and Y rock critics and placed them in attack mode, instructing them to merrily defile the albums we’ve all been taught for years to cherish: everything from The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, to The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The problem with these albums, the critics argue, is that when they are removed from their context, be it the Summer of Love, the birth of punk, or the aftermath of September 11, they’re revealed to be, well, not so great—maybe great artifice, some seem to say, but certainly not great art.

Like all criticism, of course, it’s all a matter of opinion and no doubt one contributor’s album albatross would make it onto five other’s top ten lists. But that, says DeRogatis, is all in the spirit of the game: He sees rock criticism as a dialogue between writer and reader—not a dictum handed down by a cadre of elitist glossies. “Call it a spirited assault on a pantheon that has been foisted upon us, or a defiant rejection of the hegemonic view of rock history espoused by the critics who preceded us,” he announces in the introduction to the book. DeRogatis recently spoke to mediabistro.com about the magazines he hates, the critics he loves, and the state of music criticism today.

Birthdate: September 2, 1964
Hometown: “I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, but I always say I moved up in the world to Hoboken as soon as possible.”
First section of the Sunday Times: Arts & Leisure

Tell me a little bit about the evolution of Kill Your Idols. Where did the idea come from?
I’ve had this idea for some time. I’d always been a fan of Stranded, which is the book that Greil Marcus put together in the early ’80s with some of my heroes of the first generation of rock critics—people like Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis. It’s kind of a hoary idea—they all wrote about the one album they’d take to a desert island. At the time, ’96 or ’97, I was working at Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone is obsessed with this idea of the rock-and-roll canon. It’s a particular baby boomer thing. And as a snot-nosed Gen X-type person, I deeply resent this notion of there being one rock-and-roll canon.

Because while I definitely am a fan of rock history—and my first book was a history of psychedelic rock—I resent this notion that there’s one history carved in stone. I love psychedelic rock, but I don’t believe its heyday was 1967. I believe you can draw lines between Ken Kesey’s acid test to raves today, from what The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were doing to psychedelic hip hop. I hear connections between the Beatles’ Revolver and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I don’t believe that rock history is set in any one point in time. I thought it was time to do the evil, flipside, carbon copy of that Stranded book, a collection that would say, “Here are these albums that we’re forever told are masterpieces that we just don’t buy into.”

It took a long time to sell. I sent the proposal out for a while, and I got, invariably, “Nobody wants to read a book all of negative reviews.” And I felt that was kind of a crock. Roger Ebert has always been one of my heroes, and one of my favorite books of his is I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It’s all of his worst pans, and it’s very funny. And there’s been collections of Dorothy Parker’s worst pans.

Finally, Barricade said this is a great idea, which I always thought it was. I’d pitched this idea to my fellow writers for a long time, and invariably they were all like, “Fuck yeah! I’ve always wanted to write about fill-in-the-blank.” And my idea of a great editor is you just choose a writer whom you respect a lot and you give him or her the room to run wild. I didn’t pick any of the albums, I just picked the people, with Carmel, who is a really brilliant editor. We chose the essays that made the cut together and chose the people together, and just let the people run free. My wife is not a rock critic and that’s why I was glad to have her eyes on it. She cast sort of a critical and scoffing and disdainful eye on the species known as rock critic. And that was really healthy, because I was really trying not to let in the rock critic cliché. I’m very proud—I don’t believe the word “seminal” is used once in this book.

It’s turning out to be great timing for the release. It’s like “scathing review month,” with the Times tearing into Bill Clinton, and the new Dale Peck anthology coming out. There almost seems to be a renewed psychotic glee in tearing people apart. Why do you think that is?

I think criticism has been subservient or nonexistent for about 10 or 15 years now. We’ve been living in a world of two thumbs up, smiley happy blurbs of 100 to 150 words. I’m sorry, but in 150 words you can’t say anything but, “Buy this product.” And that has become the norm. Entertainment Weekly, the Maxim-ization of every magazine on the newsstand, even freaking Rolling Stone. Literally, when I was an editor at Rolling Stone, there was a sign in the copy department that said, “Three stars means never having to say you’re sorry.” It was one thing when, in the late ’70s, criticism shifted to become this quote unquote consumer guide. But it’s not even that any more. It’s really just a cataloging of new product.

There’s been a real dearth of ideas, much less opinion in criticism for a long time now. I’m not a fan of the pointless, gleeful, jumping-up-and-down destruction of something, but I do like to see ideas. I think it would be wrong to classify this book as a bile-filled collection of 34 hateful screeds. There’s a lot of humor. There’s something masochistic in this endeavor. These 35 writers had to spend an enormous amount of time listening to albums they don’t really like in order to say a lot of things that were really smart about them. They have to spend time living with these albums, much more than they would listening to music that they love. They were trying to get to the bottom of why they’d been sold this con for so long, why they’ve grown up being told that these works are really important.

With the Clinton book, you see a certain amount of settling of scores, there’s a lot of bile spewing. My book is something a lot better—it’s jilted lovers. Every one of my essayists should have loved these albums, and their position of dislike comes from the fact that they were really let down. I think good critics approach every piece of art wanting to really love that piece of art; when they don’t, there’s a certain betrayal and disappointment. You’re trying to figure out why. What went wrong. It’s like any romance: After the fact, you’re trying to figure out what didn’t work. Part of it is you. You’re trying to figure out what did I learn about myself through this. There’s a lot of self-realization in it.

Your selection of writers is interesting. To me, if you talk about Generation X and Y critics, that says Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone, or Kelefa Sanneh at the Times. Did you specifically avoid critics who work at these places?
Yes, I have a real problem with critics who are in the club. There is definitely a lunchroom clique of hip critics. Now, mind you, we are talking about a world of geeks to begin with. There is no such thing as a cool critic. But within the geek existence of critics, there is the cheerleader jock crowd. They are the snotty elitists, they are the hipsters. And I ain’t one of them. I’ve never been one of them, and I wanted to unite the folks who are not one of them. None of us are the cool kids, but they are some of the best writers of my generation. Lorraine Ali works at Newsweek, and she’s a brilliant, brilliant writer. Keith Moerer worked at Rolling Stone, and he’s starting a new magazine which is going to be really exciting. Rob O’Conner is the record reviews editor at Harp, and he’s simply one of the best writers I’ve ever worked with.

These are writers I think are great, except they’re not considered hip. They’re not the $2 or $3 a word folks, necessarily, and they’re not the cool folks. They’re scattered. The story today is that there’s not one or two great rock publications in America that you can plug into. Much like music today, you have search far and wide; there’s a website here, or one or two trusted columns there, or you can read the record review section in this magazine, or the front of the book in this mag is OK, or one out of three issues of this mag is all right, or this magazine sucks but, I don’t know, I’ve still got to subscribe just to see what they’re covering. There’s no one great rock magazine anymore. You have to really work to find the writers here or there.

In the writers’ bios, it seems that a lot of them write regularly for newspapers as opposed to magazines.
There’s a really important reason for that. There is much more freedom today in America to voice your true opinion in the big, square daily newspaper than there is in the rock magazine. This is a pathetic state of affairs. In the daily newspaper, you have to have two-sentence paragraphs, and you cannot say “fuck.” And you must have the parenthetical aside that explains that breakbeat is a form of electronic music. But, you know, Rolling Stone needs to make the agreement with Eminem to have him on the cover. He is going to choose the writer who interviews him, he’s going to choose the photographer, he’s going to dictate the coverage. He is not going to get a negative review, no matter what piece of shit he puts out. And that’s the case at many publications.

If I ran my ideal magazine, you might have three writers reviewing the record. I’m not saying you have to publish only bad reviews, but let’s see a diversity of opinion. There was a great fanzine from Chicago at the height of the indie ’80s. They would have one lead reviewer on an album, but then they would have two or three others review a great record. So Steve Albini might review the new Husker Du record, and then Gerard Cosloy and myself and Liz Phillip, who ran the magazine, would all weigh in with three or four more sentences. And the picture you got of that album by the time you had all those voices—it was extraordinary. And you don’t have anything like that today. What you’ve got, like I said earlier, is these 150-word blurbs. What do you get out of that?

At least in the daily newspaper, they have no stake. At the Chicago Sun-Times, I have to cover—whether it’s Britney Spears or the new Califone record—I have to cover everything. But they don’t care what I say about that Britney Spears record. You know, The Streets are not going to get a bad review in Spin, and R. Kelly—despite the fact that he was under indictment on 27 counts of child pornography—is not going to get bad press in Vibe. It’s horrifying. American music mainstream magazines have abdicated not only their role in rock journalism but in rock criticism, and that’s a sad state of affairs. There are exceptions. Spin, in particular, will do some good journalism, and I know that Sia Michel is a great editor and wishes she could do more. And magazines like Harp and Magnet I think try to do a lot more. I wish these magazines were selling half a million instead of the number they’re at. Maybe Keith Moerer will do something—he wants to do something like The New Yorker of rock writing. But, I mean Tracks? Tracks is a piece of shit. They had two or three years and how many million dollars, and they’ve come up with a print version of VH1. It’s an embarrassment.

Do you see yourself being a lifer at the Sun-Times—the Ebert of music criticism? Or if something like The New Yorker of music criticism came up, would you consider a move?
Oh, I’m never leaving the Sun-Times. I love being at a daily newspaper, I love having that kind of contact with the readership. Greg Kot and I go to a show, and there’s 898 paying people and then the two of us. Eight-hundred and ninety-six of those people are going to stop us on the way in and tell us what they thought of that day’s column. And that’s great. We are part of the community in a way that that clique of elitist New York magazine types never are. That’s the problem of that clique in New York. They don’t have a clue who they’re writing for. Neil Strauss, a couple of years ago, did a pie-chart piece in the Times of the guest-list breakdown at some New York shows. And it was like 80 percent of the house was industry and press. There were no real people at any of these shows. So how do you have any idea who’s reading you? They don’t. They’re writing for each other. They’re writing for other rock critics.

Doing the radio show with Greg Kot here, we invite people to call us up. We’re forever talking to the people we’re writing to—all of whom are convinced they can do my job better than me. And that’s really good. I see rock criticism as an ongoing dialogue with people. And that’s really healthy and it’s really fun. This book is obviously an argument-starter. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s fun to fight about rock and roll. If we don’t care about this stuff enough to fight about it, why the hell have we devoted our lives to it?

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com. You can buy Kill Your Idols at Amazon.com.