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.

It’s rare when a writer can irritate industry potentates with stories that aren’t even his own. But with the recent publication of Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, David Wallis, who compiled the collection, might perform just that feat. Killed is a collection of stories—penned by such writers as Ted Rall and George Orwell and axed by such titles as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair—that were deemed too provocative to publish.

Wallis is no stranger to controversy himself, having written on topics ranging from postnatal ambivalence to women who fantasize about Osama bin Laden. For this collection, he opted not to include any of his own stories, instead hand-picking Killed‘s accounts of war, sex, and culture from his online syndication service, Featurewell.com, which represents more than 1,000 journalists, and from his own research.

When a story gets killed, execution-style with a shot to the hed, the usual suspects tend to be financial interests or fear of political retribution, Wallis argues. And he also found that the FCC’s current rampage against indecency now has editors cowering in fear over potential “language malfunctions.” As a result, he says, some of today’s most incendiary and ground-breaking stories are going unpublished. Wallis recently spoke to mediabistro.com about his new book and “the culture of censorship” that gave rise to it.

Birthdate: January 18, 1967
Hometown: New York City and Sag Harbor
First section of the Sunday Times: “I ease in with Sports, then I go to the Week in Review, which I love. I throw away Automobiles—and Jobs, because I never want to have a job.”

You once said that it’s a Sopranos world out there in the media. Has Killed allowed you to seek vengeance for those who’ve been whacked by the media mafia?
It’s not really a book about vengeance. It actually should inspire hope and let aspiring writers know that even people like George Orwell and Betty Friedan and P.J. O’Rourke struggled to get their work published. My first story that was killed was in Men’s Journal—it was one of the first pieces I’d ever written. It was about frog hunting in the island of Dominica. The piece wasn’t killed for a controversial reason; the editors said it wasn’t “user friendly.” But it was, I thought, a really great piece. And I kept on submitting it, and it finally ran in the Los Angeles Times. So to aspiring writers, I would tell them not to give up. Keep on trying to get their work published, even when it’s a challenge.

What inspired you to let these stories see the light of day?
As the editor of Featurewell, I would be offered great stories, provocative stories that had been killed. Over the past couple of years I collected them, and I realized that censorship in the media was more common that I had originally thought. So my mission was to clue in readers about what they weren’t supposed to read—important information that editors withheld, whether it be about tobacco or a company that misled consumers or about missile-sized holes in airline security.

There’s a story in Killed written by Betty Friedan in 1958 that eventually led her to write The Feminine Mystique. Do you think editors today are stifling such revolutionary writers?
I would tend to say yes because I think the media has gotten more repressive and cautious. There are fewer independent publishers today. We’ve lost, since 1975, two-thirds of our independent newspapers and one-third of our independent television stations. So the mavericks who would dare to publish incendiary stories are less likely to be running magazines. Today, we see editors who are more cautious because they’re employed by multinational, publicly traded corporations and often paid in stock. You’re less likely to find that maverick out there who’ll say, “Damn the torpedoes,” and publish a controversial piece. They’re more worried about protecting corporate profits and generating growth for shareholders. They’re more worried than they should be about offending readers. There’s a lot more caution in the media today.

Are there any mavericks left? Where are they all hiding?
I would say that the folks who run The Atlantic are putting out great journalism, and I think they’re less influenced by the market. And The New Yorker, they’re somewhat insulated because of Si Newhouse’s patronage. They don’t have the same profit concerns. I think The New York Times Magazine turns out great journalism still.

What about the Times itself?
I think they’re more cautious than they need to be. The Times played down the Senate’s vote to ban news organizations from photographing military coffins, running a brief piece about this national scandal on page A17. Why would they do that? It should have been a front-page story.

The New Yorker didn’t flinch in allowing Seymour Hersh to put the administration in his crosshairs, and now the Times is faulting its own gullibility and lack of aggressive journalism before the war. Even if editors are more cautious in the name of profit, do you really think editors today are less likely to kill a story that ruffles political feathers?
Post-9/11, there’s been a host of examples where the government has cracked down on the media. One recent case that should raise concerns was the FCC’s $1.75 million fine leveled against Clear Channel because of Howard Stern’s “indecent” behavior on the radio. The Dixie Chicks were effectively banned from the radio after they rebuked George Bush at a concert. I think that creates a chill that editors, whether they are conscious of it or not, pay attention to. I call it a culture of censorship.

I was really struck by the case of a radio host named Sandra Tsing Loh. She was a radio host at KCRW in Santa Monica—a very powerful NPR station. And she inadvertently uttered the word “fuck” on the air. And the station not only fired her but they deleted her archive of work in March of this year. What has it come to that we’re so afraid of the word fuck? All I can say is fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. They fired this woman who did a series on knitting! I think that should give people a lot of pause.

Do I think that the same type of thing goes on in the print media? I do. Just the other day the writer Rory O’Connor did an opinion piece for a newspaper called AM New York. It was about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the publisher of the paper did not like the column or did not agree with the opinion Rory expressed and they killed the specific column. O’Connor then wrote about this clear case of censorship on his website, and they fired him as a columnist. It seems that even in an opinion piece, it’s dangerous to express an opinion. The level of self-censorship and censorship that’s going on today I think doesn’t quite approach the days of the McCarthy era, but it comes close.

It’s that bad?
I don’t know if it’s that bad, but it’s bad. I recently wrote about several cases where editors and reporters at college newspapers are forced to either tone down opinion columns or lose their jobs. At LaRoche College, a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, school administrators confiscated copies of their student paper before Homecoming because one opinion columnist dared to suggest that condoms might be a good idea to prevent births out of wedlock. And they didn’t want the parents to see that. Where do we learn to accept censorship? Where do we learn not to question authority? We learn it at j-schools, at our colleges.

How do writers and editors break out of this mindset?
I don’t know how you break out per se. What I would like to see, I’d like George Soros to form a nonprofit newspaper company to compete in one-paper towns that have terrible newspapers, such as New Orleans, Oklahoma City, and even a place like San Diego. I would love to see a nonprofit start-up give people unvarnished news.

Today, people often get their news—especially foreign coverage—from one source: AP. In the quest for growing profit, quality has gone way down. Newspaper publishers just feed wire copy to their readers because it’s cheap. Maybe people need to get angry. There needs to be an option for people. There needs to be an option for advertisers.

But aren’t advertisers a part of the problem? Aren’t they behind a lot of this censorship to begin with?
Advertisers are always going to try to control the media. It’s up to the editors to resist that temptation. In 2000, the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review reported that approximately one-third of journalists they surveyed avoided articles that they knew would upset advertisers. An earlier study showed that 40 percent of business publication editors “had been told by the ad director or the publisher to do something that seriously compromised editorial integrity.” Less than half of those respondents said they would rebuff such a request. So they’re admitting it—anonymously—that advertisers have a lot of power.

Beyond profit and politics, what are some other reasons behind an editor’s call to put the kibosh on a story?
Protecting friends. I thought it was incredible that the Detroit Free Press—this is a piece that’s in Killed—spiked a negative review of Mitch Albom’s book. They assigned a freelancer to review their columnist’s book. And rather than print it and let the chips fall where they may and let Albom suffer a slight bruise, they killed the piece and ultimately embarrassed their paper.

And legal reasons. In this country, people think that we have a legal system that favors journalists. Maybe so, compared to the restrictive British laws, which stanch a lot of journalistic inquiries. But in this country, it’s possible for large corporations to create havoc by launching nuisance lawsuits against publications. A lot of publications prefer not to go down that route.

Is that why Vanity Fair spiked the exposé of The Body Shop that’s now in your book?
That was written by Jon Entine. It shows Anita Roddick and The Body Shop as less ethically pure than they like to promote themselves. The piece offers a devastating indictment of their business practices. Even the name of The Body Shop was ripped off from a Body Shop in Berkeley. It was killed because Vanity Fair, which has a British edition, feared publishing the piece in England because they were threatened by The Body Shop and by a team of lawyers.

Will there be a sequel to Killed?
I’m going to do killed cartoons next. It’s being shopped right now.

What’s your favorite story in the collection?
I’m a big fan of a piece called “Travels with Bassem,” written by Mike Sager, killed by The Washington Post Magazine in 1988. Sager chronicled life in a squalid Palestinian refugee camp during the first intifada. I think he did a remarkable job. It’s just great writing. It’s sort of inexplicable why they would—actually, it’s not really inexplicable. The Washington Post was very pro-Israeli at the time and the piece humanized stone-throwing Palestinians. It was controversial, and they buckled and didn’t run it.

Could this book make you persona non grata with any editors in the industry?
I guess that’s for editors to decide.

Chantal Gordon is a freelance writer who has covered art, fashion, and beauty for Venus magazine and Women’s Wear Daily. Photo credit: Steffen Thalemann. You can buy Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print at Amazon.com.

Helen Gurley Brown just keeps going. In a recent interview, the 82-year-old self-made American icon—who famously shed her Ozark hillbilly roots, worked her way through more than a dozen offices, and ended up neatly bypassing the editorial masthead to land as Cosmopolitan‘s editor-in-chief in 1965—all but vows that the Hearst corporation will have to kick her off the scaffolding of its shiny new Eighth Avenue headquarters before she gives up affiliation with the saucy, best-selling women’s mag that was her baby for more than 30 years. This is clearly a woman who loves her job.

And why shouldn’t she? In her best-selling book, Sex and the Office—which is being reissued by Barricade as a cult classic this month—Brown offers the following assessment of the workplace: “Based on my own observations and experiences in 19 different offices, I’m convinced that offices are sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends, Hollywood swimming parties, Cary Grant’s smile, or the Playboy centerfold.”

Sex and the Office was originally published in 1964—just a year after, poet Philip Larkin famously claimed, sex was invented. At the time, it was shocking and, some accused, anti-feminist. It doled out advice on how to dress sexy at the office but still be taken seriously, how to discreetly conduct lunchtime affairs with an officemate, and how to make romantic connections when traveling on business—in a section memorably titled “Plane Talk (Only to Men, Of Course).” Is some of Brown’s advice outdated? Well, sure. Pan-Cake makeup and wigs would be considered outré these days, and there’s probably not a soul reading who is going to brown-bag it tomorrow with “Nettie’s Heavenly Shrimp and Crabmeat Casserole” and “Gladys Lindberg’s Soy-Date Muffins.” But there is a lot of be-good-at-your-job advice that holds true in any era—after all, she cautions, “few men are attracted to the office birdbrain.”

Brown recently spoke to mediabistro.com about her storied career, the state of women’s magazines, and, of course, sex and the office.

Don’t miss our first-ever mediabistro.com Magazine Editor Hot-or-Not, inspired by Helen Gurley Brown and Sex and the Office.

Birthdate: February 18, 1922
Hometown: Green Forest, Arkansas
First section of the Sunday Times: “Front page, then maybe the Book Review.”

Your ascent to the top has been pretty well documented—it’s almost a part of American mythology at this point—but I think people are less aware of what you’ve been doing since you left Cosmo in the mid-’90s.
I didn’t leave. I was only 67 years old, only been doing it for 30 years, but management decided it would be better to have a younger editor—OK, that’s reasonable. And at that time, I worked for a wonderful company, the Hearst corporation, and they knew that if I didn’t have some kind of job I’d go off a roof or into the river, so they made me editor-in-chief of the international editions of Cosmo. At that time—that was 1996—there were 17 of them; now there are 52 editions of Cosmo all over the world.

I go for the launch, when they start the new editions, and we make a big whoop-dee-doo. I just got back from Sofia, Bulgaria, where we opened the 51st, and then I went to Belgrade, Serbia, where we opened the 52nd. Somebody else does the business arrangements when it’s decided that there should be a Cosmo in that country, then I get it started. After the magazine begins, the finished copy comes to my desk every month, and I look at it and tell them where they’re going right and where they’re going wrong. So I’m kind of a nanny, but it’s a fulltime job.

Is there anything you miss about running the American Cosmo?
One misses, perhaps, having a product that you put out yourself every month. It’s creating. You decide what will go in it, what you want them to see, what you want them to hear, what you want to tell them, and there it is out on the newsstand selling up a storm. Cosmo was always the number one-selling mag at campus bookstores, and one of the top five-selling mags at the newsstand, a real success. But I’m 82 now, and I doubt I could go on being that good. And Kate White is just fabulous.

Are you still writing?
Yes, I have a book that just went into the bookstores a few weeks ago. It’s called Dear Pussycat, and it’s a collection of letters that I’ve written to people through the years. It wasn’t my idea to publish it, but St. Martin’s thought it would be a good idea so we collected a lot of the letters that I’ve written to people. It started when I was 15 years old, and I wrote to the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. I wrote him and I said, “Dear Mr. President, my sister Mary has polio just like you, and I would like it very much if you would write a letter to her. This is her address.” And he did. I have that letter framed in the hallway. So, yes, I’ll go on writing. I’d do anything to write fiction, only I have no talent.

There have been a few major regime changes at Cosmo since you left. How do you think the magazine today compares with what you created in the ’60s?
The magazine under my aegis was not as sexy as it is now. It was the sexiest woman’s magazines there was—there wasn’t any sex in women’s magazines at that time. And everybody copied us and did what we were doing, but even so, I was reasonably conservative. Whereas now, virtually every article in Cosmo has something to do with men and women, and the cover blurbs are highly provocative. There’s a lot of “Five Places to Touch Him,” or “Twelve Places You Didn’t Know You Had.” It’s a much more sexual creation than under my aegis. They don’t do very many general articles about various subjects, but listen, one can not possibly fuss at what they are doing, because they are selling frequently 1.2 million copies at the newsstand. And you just can’t fuss about that. The writing is still good, and that’s important.

How do you think Cosmo influenced other women’s magazines?
I think it influenced them a great deal. At one point, Cosmo was the only women’s magazine that had sex, and now every women’s magazine has climbed on board so now we don’t have sex exclusively any more. Honey, when I wrote Sex and the Single Girl, nobody was talking about female sexuality. It wasn’t supposed to exist. You were just supposed to go through with it, rearrange the spice rack in your head and think about what you were going to do tomorrow while you’re having sex. I didn’t do a big survey; I just wrote about my girlfriends and me, and I knew that we were having a good time. And I suggested that that’s something that everybody might think about. If you were having sex you shouldn’t feel guilty—you don’t have to tell anybody about it, just enjoy it. Therefore, to answer your question very simply, women’s magazines were not dealing with sexuality. Women might be having sex when they were married but they weren’t supposed to enjoy it. I came along and said it’s enjoyable, and a lot of women’s magazines have now decided to say the same thing. And it’s true.

Do you ever think that the sexual frankness goes too far? Some people worry that it’s somewhat shocking for girls to jump right from CosmoGIRL!, which is relatively tame, to Cosmo, which is just so much sexier.
I don’t think that it’s probably dangerous for the CosmoGIRL! reader to go on and read Cosmo per se. It alarmed me a few years ago that so many women were having sex without real knowledge of how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy. Just piling into bed and getting pregnant. Well that situation has improved considerably in the last years. There are far fewer teenage pregnancies among unmarried women than there were, so that situation is getting better.

When you wrote Sex and the Office, it was unimaginable that a woman could be a man’s boss, and now it happens all the time. And you have so much advice on flirting and charming the boss’s socks off to get ahead. Do you think the same advice holds true for a man who’s trying to get ahead with his female boss?
I never have been able to advise men. I don’t think like them, I don’t connect with what they need or what they’re doing. I’ll just say that in the first chapter of the new edition, I mention that women now are working so hard to become what they have become—heads of companies, executive vice presidents—so when you’re working that hard to become successful, do you have time to flirt with people who are working with you and for you? I think you can still fit in both situations. As I point out, you spend at least eight hours a day in the office—some of us spend more like 12 hours—and we’re doing it on the weekends as well, so it’s a shame not to use that arena. If a man is working for a woman, he can use the time to make connections at the office, make connections with the boss if he wants to. But as I said, I’m not advising them, I’m only talking about women

The workplace you describe in your book is so different, though—you talk about having long lunch breaks, hiding bottles of scotch in your drawer, taking naps in the afternoon. Do you think your advice still holds true in today’s more strict workplaces? Or are people working too hard?
I certainly can’t speak for America, but my personal opinion is that people are not working too hard at their jobs. To be successful in your work is more interesting than just to be a drone. And if you’re successful at your job, you will get more money, you will get more recognition, and you will get more respect. Therefore, I would just say categorically that I doubt that people are working too hard at their job, because you’re talking here to a woman who works—what’s 10 o’clock in the morning to 6:30 at night? That’s eight-and-a-half hours at the office every day.

I bring work home without any guilt or anguish, and I work on weekends, but still I have a beloved husband, we go out to see plays, movies, we go out to dinner. Friday night he took me to see Bobby Short at the Carlyle, we had a regular old-fashioned date. I think you can fit it all in if you are well-organized. What has to go is all that shopping and a few girlfriend lunches. But you can still fit in your girlfriends. Sometimes you can ask a girlfriend to come at your office and have a picnic lunch so it only takes an hour, or you can go to her office. You don’t really give up anything, as I said, except all that shopping, but catalogs are more efficient these days, I buy almost everything from a catalog. So I think the harder you work, the more you get rewarded, and you can still fit in a loved one, or more than one loved one. A lot of women of course have children, and they’re working hard, so they have it all.

Do you think that your books and Cosmo were pushing an idea that a woman’s priority in life should be to please the man in her life?
The reason to please the man was to be able to keep the man or possibly to get the man in the first place. So it was rather self-serving, it wasn’t just because you’re a big altruist. There was motivation there: to please the man might mean that the man could become yours. Another reason for pleasing a man is that you’ll have a happier time, you’ll have a better marriage. I do a lot of man-pleasing and I’ve been married for 45 years. My husband frequently likes to read out loud to me, but last time I was so busy I thought I was going to go off the roof. But I thought, well, that pleases him, I need him, I’m the luckiest woman in the world. At my age, there are not any men, and I’ve got a wonderful man so I’ll just shut up and let him read to me. Man-pleasing has to do with keeping your relationship desirable and happy, it also has to do with getting a man to commit to you if he hasn’t yet done so.

Can you imagine a time when you don’t want to be involved with Cosmo anymore?
Somebody else might make the decision one of these days. I’m trying to be desirable and useful, and the international editions of Cosmo are virtually their biggest moneymaker. So I’m not sure when I might not be working any longer. My husband, David, says that he and I should have retired years ago, but we didn’t, and he says that now we missed the boat—we’re too old.

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com. You can buy Sex and the Office at Amazon.com.

Danny Gregory creates art that is surprising, beautiful, and articulate—art about common objects and how we see them, or, more often than not, how we completely fail to see them. “The reason most people draw badly,” he says, “is because they draw symbols instead of what they see. A nose is a triangle. An eye is a circle with another inside. It’s very human, assigning things to categories, using symbols and signs.” In Gregory’s work, there are no symbols to articulate a thought; instead, his pieces frequently incorporate words, a technique that gives the impression of thinking aloud—sparse, exact, and humorous words, as much a part of the picture’s “pictureness” as the watercolors are.

This seamless merger of illustration and commentary is something that, no doubt, comes naturally to Gregory, who only recently left an executive job in advertising to freelance and concentrate on his own work. Since striking out on his own, his art has appeared in The New York Times, Print, and on the website The Morning News. He has published two stunning books, Everyday Matters—which recently received an honorable mention in The Comics Journal‘s 2003 Books of the Year—and Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio, and he has one book forthcoming: Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrip.

While it’s almost ridiculously futile to interview Gregory—between Everyday Matters and his website, he has explained and discussed his life and work in great detail, from the subway accident that left his wife paralyzed to his favorite type of pen—Gregory recently agreed to speak with mediabistro.com about his two careers, how drawing can be a form of journalism, and what makes him a territorial bastard.

Birthdate: September 4
Hometown: London, England
First section of the Sunday Times: Book Review

In a long piece on your site called “Why Do I Do It: My Story,” you briefly describe your transition from advertising to artistry by saying, “I let art back in the door and suddenly the walls started to crack. Within a month, I had a book contract. A few months later, I had a second, this one to publish my illustrated journals. Before long, I had an agent and was no longer a creative director.” Can you give a less perfunctory version of the story?
The first book I wrote was for Princeton Architectural Press, and it came about quite by chance. I was at a book launch party, met my future editor, Jennifer Thompson, and told her about a collection of ham radio cards I just found at the flea market the previous weekend. She said they sounded interesting, suggested I come into the office to discuss them with her, and a few days later I had a book contract. It was all serendipity. When we were working on the book, I showed her some of my illustrated journals and soon Princeton had agreed to publish them as well. Having these books under my belt made it easier to convince a great agent to represent me. And with all this momentum, I felt more comfortable about stretching beyond my career in advertising and redefining myself.

After 20 years in advertising, you were pretty negative about your experiences there. Why do you think you were you so good at something you didn’t seem to enjoy?
I’m not pessimistic about advertising. I think, to be honest, I was more unhappy with my reaction to the business. I allowed my job to take over a disproportionate amount of my time, energy, and dreams. That could have happened in another industry, too. My point in talking about my career is really to encourage other people not to feel trapped in what they’re doing. I think it’s important to diversify your life, to have a range of interests, and to find some way to truly express yourself. While advertising is a creative medium and allows one to use one’s imagination, personally I didn’t feel like my work was an adequate way to express who I am and how I see the world. My other projects give me much more of that sort of validation. Because doing advertising well is so all-consuming, I stepped down from my executive life to give myself a more varied diet.

In your current work, words seem as integral to the art as the drawing. Has this always been the case, or is that something you learned from your career in advertising?
I see myself as a writer more than I see myself as an artist. And, in my insecurity, it seems easier to be a better illustrator than most writers and a better writer than most illustrators. I also love calligraphy and see it is a pretty important part of look of the things I make. Calligraphy necessitates words of some sort, and, rather than using soppy quotes and poems, I make my own stuff up.

Your work is a quite romantic and whimsical—not something you normally see in a daily newspaper—and yet you’ve been published frequently in the Times. How did you start working with them?
Connie Rosenbloom is the editor of the City section of Times. She read my book, liked what I do, and contacted me. I showed her a couple of recent pages from my sketchbook: one about the fact that so many dogs in New York wear coats as soon as the temperature drops below 50, and another about the strange things one can buy on Canal Street. And she immediately sparked to them. She and the art director, John Cayea, have been very encouraging. Their section is less typical hard news and more an attempt to chronicle the life of New York. They tell me that I’m able to cover stories in a way that wouldn’t be as successful purely in words.

What do you think of the way art is handled in papers? It’s typically used to make a certain point or as stand-alone journalism, whereas you seem to view art as an outlet, a new way of viewing and describing the world.
Illustration has recently begun to have a more important role in newspapers, in part because of advances in color reproduction. But too often art is simply used for info graphics or spot illustration. The Op-Ed page of the Times allows illustrators to make their own statements. I admire R. Crumb’s and Bruce McCall’s and Roz Chast’s pieces in The New Yorker, Ralph Steadman’s contributions to Hunter Thompson, and most of all the late Ronald Searle.

I think of myself as a journalist in the literal sense of the word. I create my art in journals, I document what goes on around me constantly. Drop me into an unusual situation and I’ll emerge with a document chronicling that event. My approach may be different from the typical print journalist, but I’m still there to catch the story, and my advertising background has helped me to distill things, to get to their essence.

Would newspapers benefit from including more work like yours?
Absolutely. I’m pretty good at ferreting out the absurd, ennobling the mundane, and noticing those small moments of drama playing out in the shadows. My combination of words and drawing can convey the true texture of an event. I can go into a story and cover it like any journalist but my account gets an additional, emotional element through drawings. I get great response from readers who are more visually oriented, who are used to the high-intensity, graphic nature of television. I have a new story appearing in the upcoming issue of Print magazine in which I document several days that I spent at the European sex trade show in Berlin. I interviewed a broad range of people and immersed myself in the story for several days. Readers will be entertained and informed, and get a great sense of what went on there. This summer, I’m planning to cover the Republican Convention.

It seems to me that you’re doing exactly the kind of work you want to be doing. You don’t appear to be constrained by any limits. Do you ever have to compromise, particularly in the work you do that’s not for personal pleasure or your books?
Over the last few months, I’ve been hired by several publications to do illustrations. At first, that was a bit of a challenge, simply because I was fitting myself into somebody else’s conception of what I do. But I think my experience in advertising made that reasonably easy to get over. And while my blog is something I define myself, I am aware of the people who read it and put a certain amount of effort into trying to meet their needs too. Creating something for public consumption has certain rules. The things I write and draw for my blog are somewhat different from the private journal work that I do, although there’s a lot of overlap. I’ve never felt that that’s given short shrift to my own expression.

On the other hand, you seem to enjoy collaborating. Is it easy for you to work this way?
Again this may go back to my career in advertising. I’ve been used to having a partner and I worked with a range of different people in creating ads and commercials. I find it fairly easy to work with other people. That’s particularly true when I’m not doing work of a very personal nature. Then, I become more of a territorial bastard.

In a book about author Isak Dinesen, I read a line that made me think of you: “All sorrows can be borne if put into a story.” Do you think that’s the case with your work?
I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. By telling the story of my wife’s accident, I’ve given it certain parameters, made it perhaps easier to digest. At least I think it’s true for other people. What could be an unbearable, horrible story is somehow easier to take once surrounded by cute drawings. But the point of the story for me was to encourage myself and others to search for meaning and beauty in the rest of life. Drawing has given me a way to see my reality more accurately, to live in the now and not obsess about what might happen. Sometimes that’s painful, but most of the time it’s a blessing.

Chris Gage, a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com, is a production editor at John Wiley & Sons. You can buy Change Your Underwear Twice a Week, by Danny Gregory, at Amazon.com.

The Source, an independently-owned voice in hip-hop for more than 15 years, made news recently when it exposed, distributed, and reprinted the lyrics to an early Eminem recording replete with misogynistic phrases and racist slurs. A court battle ensued, pitting the magazine’s owners against Eminem and his label, Interscope. Eminem eventually issued a formal apology for the lyrics, citing youth and anger, but ripples were felt throughout the rap community: Rival magazine XXL sided with Eminem, slamming Source founder and CEO Dave Mays and his colleagues with some vitriolic words of their own; the magazine suffered a backlash from advertisers who sided with the artist as well; and last week, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons stepped into the fray, praising Mays and his publication for their discussions on race issues and hip-hop culture. While it remains to be seen whether this incident was a Dixie Chicks moment of passion or merely a publicity stunt to boost Source enterprises, Dave Mays recently sat down with mediabistro.com in his Park Avenue South office to talk about how The Source is moving on.

Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Birthdate: January 24, 1969
First section of the Sunday Times: I don’t read the Sunday Times as a habit. When I pick up the Times, I typically pick up the Business section.

The first time many people heard of The Source was a few months ago when the magazine made headlines for the battle with Eminem and his record label. How did the Eminem controversy come about?
Some kids from Detroit, white kids, drove here from Detroit and showed up at the office and said, “Hey, I got this tape of this guy from 10 years ago.” He had these songs calling black people the n-word and black women bitches and calling black people porch monkeys and spear-chuckers—blatantly racist material. Our job is to put the info out. We’re still in court with him—he’s suing us in federal court for copyright infringement. We managed to defeat him in an early round and were able to put out a CD with our February issue. And I think once people got to read the magazine and listen to the CD and engage in a dialogue about it, the public now is very much in favor of The Source. We just put out a press release talking about readers’ responses, talking about how The Source was right. I wouldn’t say it’s completely over, it’s an ongoing issue. We’ll see how it continues to play out. People have a short attention span. It made the news, it was controversial, and it got the word out about The Source. It made news worldwide.

Why does a magazine marketed in part to young, white, male hip-hop fans, decide to take on Eminem, one of the biggest artists out there?
That statement is a little misdirected. Eminem, I don’t even know the guy. I have no personal issue with the guy. I’m white. I’m not out there telling white people you shouldn’t be in hip-hop, but we need to respect the culture and the history that created this thing. Yeah, you can market with hip-hop but don’t take advantage of it, don’t exploit it, don’t take black artists out of the picture. If you asked the average American today—”Do you know that rock was invented by black people?”—they would probably say you’re crazy, Elvis created rock and roll. The whole history has been basically wiped out. The same thing happened with jazz—it went through the same process where it was co-opted and taken from the creators.

Radio station programming is operated by somebody sitting in an office somewhere in Colorado. And Eminem, while it may not be him doing this, he’s the number-one tool that the music industry is using to cut out the black artists. It’s not a natural commercial growth; in my opinion, it’s a calculated plan. We’ve been speaking out about this, but we’re speaking out about very powerful companies, like Interscope. He’s a billion-dollar asset to them. The last thing they want is for this agenda to be exposed. So they work very hard to try to put The Source down, to discredit us, to make it seem like The Source is putting down this poor white rapper Eminem, he’s just a guy who struggled from being poor. These are specious arguments.

There have been a number of articles lately about how hip-hop’s main audience now is young white guys—stories about so-called “rap-surveillance” and the mainstreaming of hip-hop. What do you think of this?
I think those statistics on white audiences are misleading, and I have a problem with those stories. Hip-hop has been dominantly purchased by white males since the mid-’80s. White kids got into hip-hop like I did in 1979, when “Rappers‘ Delight” came out by the Sugar Hill Gang. I was a 5th grade kid in D.C., hearing the song on the radio, and I was running around the playground rapping the lyrics. I can remember that. And then you had Run-DMC when they collaborated with Aerosmith for “Walk this Way” in 1985. The point is that the white audience and consumer base has driven the growth of hip-hop for 20 years now, so it’s no new finding to go out and start talking about this now. I am not sure why the media has tended to do that recently.

The majority of people today who write about hip-hop haven’t been writing about it, don’t understand it. They have to portray themselves as knowledgeable about it, as experts. That’s one of my criticisms of the mainstream media: You can’t assign people who have never dealt with hip-hop to write about it. The media has historically misreported on hip-hop and put a lot of stereotypes and misinformation out there to the masses.

How did you get from the lily-whitest part of northwest Washington, D.C., to starting a hip-hop magazine in Boston?
I went to Harvard as an undergrad coming out of public high school. My major was in government. When I got to Harvard as a freshman, I ended up deciding sort of on a whim to join the campus radio station and started a hip-hop radio show out of a dorm room in Cabot House. I was the host and also sold advertising for the show. The Source was kind of born out of that. Most of my listeners were kids in the Boston area, not Harvard students, and I started to build a mailing list of about 1,000 names and addresses. I started The Source as a one-page, Xeroxed newsletter. That was kind of the impetus. Hip-hop fans really were starving for information. This was 1988 and hip-hop had been around for about 10 years. There was literally no info for fans out there. No magazines covered it.

How did the other students react to your publication?
Well, I mean, I had a few friends at Harvard. And I got along with everybody, but once I got into the radio show and the music, it sort of drew me into the inner city of Boston. I could say I maybe didn’t fit in as well with the average student there.

And after you left Boston?
I wrote a little bit, I did the design, I sold the ads, worked on the circulation. I did pretty much everything. It grew gradually for a couple of years. I stayed up there over the summers and kept working on it. It went from one page to four to eight to 16 pages—from a newsletter to a little booklet. I started to sell it for $1.25 at record stores around town. Sometime during that early phase I received a gift—a book on the history of Rolling Stone magazine. I didn’t know who Jann Wenner was. I read the book, and I was like, “Wow. Here’s this guy, this rock fan, who started this underground newspaper and turned it into the voice of his generation, this pop-culture success.” I said that’s going to be my model.

In the first 10 years or so of building the business, you could find Dave Mays holed up in his office every day all day, just hands-on doing everything it took to get the magazine out. I’ve gotten out a lot more, and I’ve begun to build more contacts and relationships. The Source is in the process of transforming from a magazine to a multimedia and merchandising company. The future of the company surrounds a series of media platforms that allows us to engage our advertisers in a multidimensional way. We’ve begun that process with the Source Awards; we are also delivering content through cell phones, developing CDs, DVDs. We’re expanding both of those businesses. We’re launching a fashion line, a toy business, Source-branded toys—the first one is an interactive computer device that allows you to record demos of rap songs and download beats and upload your demo up onto our website.

Hip-hop artists like Sean Combs and Russell Simmons are also very good at this sort of branding—moving from music into fashion, business, now politics. Why do you think this is such a successful formula, this fusion of hip-hop and business?
Hip-hop has been evolving and growing for the last 20 or 30 years. For the majority of that time, nobody paid attention to it. Only a handful of us—Dave Mays and Sean Combs and Russell Simmons—were there from the beginning. We know it like no one else knows it; we understand that better than anyone, and we’ve been able to build our brands because there’s been no one competing for it. That’s the transformation I’ve seen from an advertising standpoint. In ’88, or ’92, I couldn’t call up a car company. Slowly, in the mid-’90s, we started to get sneakers and soft drink companies—companies targeting teens, black teens. All of the sudden, you hit around 2000 and 2001, you have this explosion and awakening of Madison Avenue and corporate America. Now everyone has done this 180-degree turn from paying no attention to being like, “Who’s the hottest rapper? I’ve got to get into the middle of this.”

The hip-hop generation is a very smart generation—these are very smart, entrepreneurial people. It’s made young people want to become entrepreneurs because they’ve watched those guys and others build businesses from nothing.

You’ve had some very in-your-face stories and covers lately, including the March cover on rappers who are in prison. That, combined with the Eminem controversy, makes me think: Is the magazine being gratuitously provocative and confrontational in order to boost sales?
I never really thought of it like that. My mantra for the editorial content of The Source has always been information and a voice for people who don’t have a voice in the media. I have always said we don’t want to be the New York Post or the National Enquirer of hip-hop. We don’t want to print rumors, innuendo, just controversial stuff to titillate and sell magazines. Now that hip-hop has become this big, mainstream, attention-getting thing, issues that The Source has dealt with since day one are becoming national issues. The issue on rappers in prison is an incredibly important cover that came out weeks before all this police profiling stuff that’s in the news. The Source has been covering this stuff for a decade. You could say that’s controversial, but we’re doing it because it’s a great story and it’s of interest to our readers.

Sarah Horne is a news associate for CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown. She’s also a New York freelance reporter for Us Weekly and has written on theatre and music for papermag.com.

Book packaging is the art of conceptualizing and producing an interesting words-and-pictures volume that a publishing house will want to manufacture, and Melcher Media is a book-packaging firm that has built its reputation on innovative, sometimes out-of-left-field concepts and productions. Why should Melcher have made a cheap paperback South Park tie-in, for example, when instead it could resurrect the Colorform? Why make just another pop-psychology book when you could instead make a pop-up book about phobias for an adult audience? While devising new, creative ways to make its clients’ products stand out in the staid medium of books, Melcher Media even invented a tear-resistant, waterproof, and infinitely recyclable book format and then put out a collection titled Aqua Erotica.

Charles Melcher started in publishing as a college student, when he created a photography magazine. “I used to fancy myself a photographer,” he recalls, “and then I learned enough to know I wasn’t.” When Melcher graduated, he decided he would investigate publishing and spent a few years doing custom publishing for schools—calendars and such—before taking jobs at Aperture and, later, Calloway Editions, where he was the publisher for Madonna’s Sex. When he launched Melcher Media more than 10 years ago, the company’s first job was to create an imprint for MTV. MTV Books, which,” Melcher says, “I affectionately describe as an oxymoron,” turned out to be very successful venture for the new company. Published by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books imprint, MTV Books produced four New York Times bestsellers in its first few years—and sold nearly two million books. Since then, Melcher has produced a range of other successful titles, including books for Harley-Davidson, Rent, and Sex and the City.

Now, as he’s preparing to turn his packaging firm into a full-fledged publishing house—which means Melcher Media will soon be fully responsible for its books’ publicity, sales, manufacturing, distribution, financing, everything—Charles Melcher recently welcomed mediabistro.com to his office, on the first floor of the brownstone he owns just off 6th Avenue, to talk about packaging, publishing, and women in bathtubs.

I’ve seen book packagers getting small credits on covers, but, other than that, they seem to operate in the shadows of the publishing world. What exactly is a book packager, and how do they operate?
“Packager” is a word that has come to describe a lot of different publishing and editorial services. Sometimes designers will bring a writer to a project and call themselves a packager; or you’ll have an editor who originates an idea and hires a designer and then calls himself a packager. There are a lot of different people who kind of use that word loosely, but traditionally a packager is somebody who creates the layout of the book, the content of the book, and then delivers it to a publisher.

Do packagers originate ideas, or are they hired by publishers who already have something in mind?
Sometimes they are originating ideas and bringing it to publishers; in other cases, publishers have ideas that require a lot of time and skill to execute, and they’ll find someone to do it for them. We’ve been something between a packager and a publisher, because we have been responsible for more of the publishing responsibilities than the normal packager. Not only are we originating ideas and doing all the editing and design, but we also have followed it through with the manufacturing, and, in many cases, we will then segment markets and sell the book to a North American publisher, a British publisher, a book club. You could almost think of what we do as publishing, but we only sell to a few key distributors, on a nonreturnable basis.

Nonreturnability is important—because traditional publishers can have their books sent back to them and they have to absorb that cost.
Yes, but that’s part of the model. We’re selling a product to the publisher: 200,000 of this book. What the publisher does with the books is up to them to decide. What’s delineated us from being a full-fledged publisher is we haven’t been responsible for the sales to the bookstores and we’ve not been the one taking the financial risk.

Why doesn’t a publisher just do all this itself? Why do they hire you?
A lot of the big houses are set up to move volume. They don’t have the time or resources to devote to making the books the way we do. We average six or seven books a year—publishing companies do thousands a year—so we can put more time and energy into the books. Our philosophy is always less is more: If we focus, choose carefully, and help to support it, we could make a high percentage of our books work and work big. That’s the opposite of the normal book-publishing philosophy, which is do as much as you can, throw it all against the wall, and hopefully something’s going to work, and that will pay for the rest of them.

So, is that model, the traditional publishing model, dead?
No, I wouldn’t say it’s dead. The downside of that model is that you put out a lot of stuff that doesn’t necessarily deserve to go out there, and you don’t do it that well because you’re too busy. What I have seen is that some houses are trying to pare back their lists, to be more focused. The dirty secret in publishing is that no one ever knows what’s going to work.

You’ve had a lot of success—your Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell is on the New York Times bestseller list—and you’ve had some impressive sales numbers with other books. How have you escaped that pitfalls of the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” model?
There are certain things that are more likely to work than others, and that’s easy when you’re talking about a South Park or a Sex in the City. But you don’t need to be a genius to know that’s going to sell. The places where you need to have confidence or belief is when you do something like Aqua Erotica or the Pop-Up Book of Phobias—they’re not guaranteed bestsellers. But they’re situations where we played with the format in a way that made sense with the content and the form. When we went out there with a $30 elaborate, humorous pop-up book for adults, there wasn’t a genre. So there are safer bets and then there are the things you just have to believe in. And with enough experience, and with the help of our publishers, we hope to turn those into successes.

Do you have other unexpected ideas coming up?
We’re doing Fortune magazine’s 75th anniversary book. They have the most incredible photo archive of any magazine. Their historic photography rivaled what’s at the Museum of Modern Art: Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, people you would not associate with a business magazine. But the beauty of it is that Fortune in its heyday was one of the most beautiful magazines ever printed. They weren’t just a magazine about business. They were a book about society; they also covered poverty, labor conflict, arts. So there’s a lot of stuff in there you wouldn’t assume would be in Fortune. I think people will be very surprised with that book. And that there were great photography you’ve never seen: color Robert Doisneau, Ansel Adams portraits of titans of industry.

South Park: A Stickyforms Adventure, which is a book of Colorforms, is a particularly good meeting of form and content. Who came up with it?
In this case I did. When I first saw South Park, I thought: Colorforms. I love it because I like to play with the media. Here’s an opportunity to create a book that’s an interactive experience; you offer your own stories, we just supply some backgrounds and 150 sheets of vinyl stickers. But it wasn’t the obvious thing. A lot of people would have done it as a cheap paperback, and we wanted to come up with the appropriate thing for the property.

One of the things that we’ve done well is to help translate things into the print media. We do work with a lot of properties—Rent, television shows, magazines, films. We’re there to figure out how that’s going to make a unique, interesting, valuable experience in book form. Sometimes that’s an obvious answer and sometimes it’s not, but when you do it right you create an object people want to have and a book that competes with other media for the attention and dollars of the consumer.

You’re particularly keen on innovating and looking at the media in a new way.
A lot of our books create an experience that you can’t replicate on the screen. I hope that that means we’re helping to create the future of books. As digital media comes in, publishing needs to learn lessons from that and adapt, and I think some publishers are scared and fighting it and not interested in adaptation. And they’re not going to be around. A while ago people were saying books are dead. Books aren’t dead. Radio, for example, isn’t dead. Books are going to have to move over to make room for their digital neighbors, but they’re going to have to play to their strengths and figure out what makes them really special and what makes them work. There’s no doubt that the physicality and the tactile quality is one of the things.

Why then do you think electronic publishing has been unsuccessful?
I think the biggest problem with electronic publishing or e-books is that there haven’t been authors who’ve grown up and learned to use the medium correctly. If you’re using e-books, the biggest advantage is not, “Oh look, I can get 12 of them on one disc.” The real advantage is that you can make it sing and dance and come alive in ways that are hard to do with a book. And no one’s really using the medium correctly yet. It’s similar to when the motion picture camera was invented and they set it up on a tripod and filmed a play. That’s basically where e-books are now. They’re setting it up and they’re filming a book.

Your most radical innovation is the DuraBooks—the waterproof, tear-resistant, unbreakable books.
It’s an idea that came years ago when I was reading an article in the Times in the Home and Garden section. It was this article about people who like to take baths, and I was struck with the similarity of the demographic of the typical bather, that it was almost the exact overlap of the typical book buyer. I thought, “What a shame that these adult women can’t take a good book into the bath with them,” and that set me on the course to try and figure out how to make a waterproof book for adults that would be durable, tear-resistant, and up-cycleable, which means that you can melt it down and make another book out of it in perpetuity, unlike paper which you can only recycle two or three times.

Is it possible that this could catch on in a bigger, mainstream way?
Right now our biggest problem is price. We don’t do that many, so the costs are substantially higher than paper. I do believe that if we could get the print run up, we could get the price down, and if you had the choice between a traditional book and this one, you would always choose the DuraBook. There’s no loss in the functionality or the printability, but you can do so much more with it.

Can you even use the same equipment? Or is that all part of what makes the larger price tag for creating these books?
You can use the same printing presses, it prints a little bit more slowly, it dries a little more slowly, but nothing that would prevent you from having everybody do their books on this. We have a marketing issue too, that if you see these books next to each other you have no idea the difference between the two. We did offer fish tanks to bookstores with a book submerged in them. A couple hundred stores took them and that worked, but you don’t get the other features. It’s about educating the consumer issue, and, for the first couple of years, we decided to do just a few things that were good uses of the medium and would help to build the awareness of it.

You do have the problem of moving it from the gimmick books to the traditional books.
These aren’t necessarily gimmicks, because the contents and the form have a reason to go together. This really is to be read in the bathtub. That’s the point. We’re looking for a place where it will fit, where it adds some value to the experience.

That’s going to be the trick, isn’t it, as you go into publishing?
Our biggest challenge is, can we be as creative in promoting and selling as we are in making them, can we innovate there. We’ll see. That’s our challenge.

Chris Gage is a production editor at John Wiley & Sons.

So what if Wonkette.com actually launched a little more than two months ago? Saturday night, a throng of Washingtonians (and those who love them) converged at a belated launch party a few blocks from Dupont Circle to celebrate the politics-and-gossip blog that’s trying to do for the nation’s capital what Gawker.com has done for New York City.

The party was hosted by CNN’s Peter Bergen and The Washington Monthly‘s Nick Confessore. It drew noted journos like Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff, Monthly editor-in-chief and former Clinton speechwriter Paul Glastris, and, all the way from Santa Monica, Slate’s Mickey Kaus. Even the whole Gawker Media family turned out: Founding moneybags Nick Denton was in town for the night, as was Gawker.com editor Choire Sicha, resplendent amid the sea of blue blazers in his brown-on-tan suit and rakishly mussed necktie.

But the star of the night was Wonkette herself, Ana Marie Cox, the 31-year-old bundle of sarcastic insight who, as she puts it, had been “fired or asked to leave from almost every legitimate publication in Washington” before Denton plucked her from the blogging wilderness to run the site. An alumna of—where to begin?—Mother Jones, Suck, Inside, and The American Prospect, to name a few, Cox now works from a cozy office in the Arlington home she shares with her husband, Chris Lehmann, an editor at The Washington Post Book World, and a rambunctious dog and two cats. From there, her sarcasm, intelligence, and talent for deconstructing the ridiculous is well deployed to mock—with equal relish—Democrats, Republicans, and, of course, Tina Brown. Or, as Cox describes herself on the site, “Wonkette provides an appropriately arch and irrepressibly giddy guide to the American political landscape and the Washington metro area social scene (such as it is).”

Cox recently took a few moments away from the arch giddiness to relax in her office with mediabistro.com and talk about her career in journalism, her wicked sense of humor, and her presidential dream team for 2004.

Birthdate: September 23, 1972
Hometown: Lincoln, Nebraska
First section of the Sunday Times: “I reflexively reach for Sunday Styles, and then I remember that Rick Marin no longer writes for them. So I put my head down on the table and sob
convulsively.”

You’re posting news roundups starting pretty early in the morning each day, which must make for a miserable schedule. How does it come together?
I get up around 7 a.m. and put on my robe and my slippers, then I come in here and start working. I also freelance, so I’ve never been this busy. I realize the secret to working at home, and liking it, is to be busy. When I was a freelancer dependent on editors getting back to me, I remember just being miserable. You end up checking your email all the time, and then you just don’t want to work. The nice thing about what I’m doing now is that it doesn’t have any of the kind of baggage of writers block. There’s no way to get “blogger’s block.” I cannot afford it; I have to write a lot. A lot. I’m required to post 12 entries a day, more or less.

Do you read all those papers each morning? How do you gather all your information?
My intern is a much earlier riser than me. He does the straight news roundup in the morning and it’s the first thing I post, and that gives me a really good idea of what happened that day. I read, or at least scan, all the stories he sends, so it’s like having my own clipping service. I would die without him. I have no idea how he does it. He’s 18 and does The Press Gaggle, too, and he’s brilliant. A woman who does Swamp City and works at the National Review also helps me out with the gossip roundup.

So how did Wonkette come about?
It was all Nick Denton. I had a website, and when he was looking for good politics blogs, he probably asked around and stumbled onto my personal blog, TheAnticMuse.com. There’s not lot of competition when it comes to finding humor about politics on the Internet—it doesn’t have to be that funny. So I think Denton asked around, and he liked the style and voice I have, and I got an email from him asking if I’d like to get paid to blog. I said yeah. Actually, a lot of this took place over instant messaging. He probably would’ve given me the job over instant messaging, but I demanded to talk over the phone. I don’t think I could accept a job without actually talking. In late November, I went to New York and signed a contract, and in December we had a name figured out: Wonkette.

Then I started actually doing Wonkette in December, but it was not live. It was behind a password, so the only people reading it were my husband, my boss, and maybe a half dozen people. That was sort of so I was able to develop a style and a feel for what things would be good to write about. And, also, it took forever to finalize our illustration. We went around and around. Ultimately, the picture looks like an 18-year-old library scientist who is probably the type of woman that our clientele thinks is hot. I get a disturbing amount of “are you as cute as that picture?” emails. I always to say, “I’ll pretend to be if that makes it funnier.” If it’s funnier, it’s good.

You wrote a funny photo caption about John Kerry and John Edwards being so close to each other that there should be a constitutional ban against them. Do you have a favorite funny line from Wonkette?
That one was a funny sentence, and I thought of it all myself. I specialize in stating the obvious. I’m afraid I will jinx myself if I say my funniest line. I have what a call my “funnydar.” This job has screwed with my funnydar. I used to have a pretty good feeling of confidence when I was being funny, but now I don’t know. Now it all has to be funny, and I just can’t tell as well as I used to. My funnydar used to be more finely calibrated. And don’t ask me who I want to be Kerry’s running mate.

Well, now I can’t resist. Who do you want to be Kerry’s running mate—at least from a blogging viewpoint?
Oh, for blog purposes, Hillary would be great. Hillary would be fantastic for humor purposes only. Leaving politics out of it, it would be great. Kerry/Clinton 2004. It’s great.

Do you get lots of tips from your readers? Who are your best sources—do tips come from people working on Capitol Hill or fellow journalists? Do you receive any hate mail?
I get lots and lots of tips. Very few people send me tips by email because if people are working on the Hill, they’re certainly not using their .gov accounts. I get tips from journalists and staffers and people who see interesting things in the world. I’ve been lucky and gotten very few emails from insane people. I must be doing something wrong because I don’t get a lot of angry emails. But the angry emails always come from the most surprising things. I’ll think something is going to piss someone off, but it doesn’t. Yet I got letters when I made an offhand remark about Princeton. I got like half a dozen emails from people who said, “Are you just jealous of Princeton?” I make fun of Harvard, and no one from Harvard writes. Whenever I’m concerned about a joke, I ask my friends. They seem to be enjoying it.

So who do you run things by?
My husband, friends; that’s about it. People with a sense of humor and an IM account, because I can’t wait for email. I don’t take the site too seriously. In that sense, it could work against me because I make jokes that people could get offended by, but I still do it.

Are your jokes ever censored? The world of political humor is rather conservative. Is there anything or anyone off limits to you?
Denton lets me write anything. The only thing he objects to is the number of sex jokes. Or, rather, not the jokes so much, as the terminology. He would like me to make fewer jokes about sex and more stories about people having sex with each other. I’m not going to say what they pay me exactly, but they don’t pay me enough to pound the pavement for that. I don’t always print everything I know. I don’t want to be a test case.

Is there anyone you wouldn’t make fun of?
I can’t think of anyone. There are things I wouldn’t make fun of, though. I hate the obvious kind of humor, like making fun of Janet Reno because she looks like a man. Making fun of Janet Reno because she seems kind of clueless, now that’s funny. I have a personal goal that I try to prohibit dumb President Bush jokes, though it’s just so hard. In general, I try not to do jokes that other people are doing that are really, really obvious. But then again, I also do really obvious jokes.

Do you have to be careful not to lean one way or the other politically with your humor?
I think what I have to be careful of is that I don’t let an opportunity to make fun of anyone go by. It’s less about making sure I have three Bush jokes for three Kerry jokes. But if anyone does something amusing, they’re going in. It just turned out that when the site first launched the Democrats were doing things that were especially silly, so I developed this intense conservative following and then when things changed the conservatives were not as happy. I started getting emails from people who had started reading me when I was making fun of the Democrats more and they wrote, “You used to be funny and now you’re not.”

So is this something you imagined you’d be doing, being a politics/humor/blogger person?
I still do some traditional journalism. I write book reviews, so I do get to indulge in that desire. But, no, I continue to be skeptical of the blog-olution. I feel very, very lucky and grateful to be part of this now. I finally have a position where all the things that got me fired and got me in trouble in previous jobs are valued. I’m a bad employee. My humor definitely got me in trouble in interpersonal interactions with coworkers. I was once told in a meeting to be careful about rolling my eyes. I think that newsrooms in Washington can be more conservative, not in the political sense, but in decorum. But there’s more to me than just having a bad attitude.

Do you see yourself as Wonkette for a while?
I’ll definitely stay through the election, and then I’ll see. It’s really, really fun, but I think it would be nice to write things that are longer than 12 characters long. I’m able do that, by the way. I worked at The American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mother Jones. I wrote whole articles with many sentences and no sex jokes. But I was ready to give up journalism right before Denton called me. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I was very disillusioned. I was thinking I would go back to school and I would do something that wasn’t journalism. My relationship to journalism is like that of an abused spouse—and it may still be, but I’m one in recovery now. I still do basically consider myself a journalist. I try to hold myself to some standard of journalism.

Melissa P. McNamara is a freelance writer living in New York.

Last year the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation received an extraordinary donation: $100 million over the next 30 years from pharmaceutical heiress and philanthropist Ruth Lilly. The gift is perhaps the largest literary endowment in history, and the fact that it was aimed at poetry, a notoriously underfunded art, left the foundation’s executives a bit flummoxed. They immediately changed their name from the Modern Poetry Association, but it was clear that more radical changes would be necessary to create a innovative home for American poetry. In order to manage all that money and still retain the artistic integrity of the company, which publishes the tiny but prestigious Poetry magazine, they needed someone well-versed in the currency of both money and meter.

John Barr, who was named president of the Poetry Foundation early last month, seems a perfect match. Over the past three decades, Barr has pursued parallel careers as an investment banker and a poet. The founder of the successful public-utilities firm SG Barr Devlin and the author of six collections of lyric, long-form poetry, Barr has won acclaim as a financial expert and a gifted wordsmith, and he has etched out a career similar to fellow businessman-poets Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. Barr, his speech occasionally laced with similes and metaphors, recently spoke to mediabistro.com about his new job, his unlikely career path, and the current state of American poetry.

Birthdate: January 28, 1943
Hometown: Born in Omaha, Nebraska; grew up in Lisle, Illinois.
First section of the Sunday Times: Book Review

So the news, of course, is that you were recently chosen to be the new president of the Poetry Foundation. How did this come about? Why do you think they chose you?
I think they were looking for somebody who had enough business experience to manage the responsibility of a very large endowment that, in effect, came out of nowhere. The 30 years or so I spent on Wall Street probably gave me the experience that they were looking for. The second part was that they wanted somebody that was passionately interested in poetry and knew something about the poetry world. And, I’ve served a lot of years on not-for-profit organizations. For five years, I was president of the Poetry Society of America. I have served and continue to serve on the board of Yaddo, which is one of the oldest artists’ colonies in the country. I’ve also been on the board of Bennington College for almost 20 years, and chairman of the board for 12 years. So that gave me a window into the arts world from a number of different points of view. Not only that, I’ve got a life as a writer, and that was important to them.

What do you see happening with the endowment?
Our objective will be to discover some of the greater unmet or undermet needs of poetry in America. We’ll develop programs either on our own or in conjunction with other organizations in the poetry world to meet those needs. One example is audience development. We want to get people who are not currently poetry readers—they might be commuters, travelers in hotel rooms who would love to see an anthology at night, airplane travelers, people outside of the traditional home for poetry, the academic world—in touch with good poetry, and grow that audience and see more poets selling more books. That’s one example. There are other ideas that we’re kicking around.

You’ve had this fascinating career: You’ve been an investment banker, you’ve been a poet, and you’ve also been a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. How did you get to this point? Walk me through your career.
I’ve been in the business world for over 30 years—on Wall Street, but not as a stockbroker. I was 18 years at Morgan Stanley, a wonderful firm, but the firm went public in the mid-1980s and a few years later I retired. I wanted to be part of something smaller and more intimate, just because I love small companies and the special kind of relationship they can have with clients. So I started my own firm, called Barr Devlin—Hugh Devlin was my partner and friend of many years on Wall Street and at Morgan Stanley—and we just kept doing what we had been doing.

I ran the public-utility group at MS for 10 years, and the business of our new shop was to provide advice to public utilities around the country. We caught the wave of all of the utility mergers that occurred in the 1990s—better lucky than smart, I guess. We had no idea that all that was going to happen when we started the shop in 1990. We were fortunate to be the investment banker of record on a lot of the largest utility mergers in the 1990s. We were acquired by Societe Generale in 1998, and we became a part of that global organization, which enabled us to take our specialties overseas. We continue as a part of their organization—we’re still based in New York, and I still carry titles there—but I have some wonderful younger partners who run the business day-to-day.

How did you pursue a business career at the same time you were writing and publishing poetry? What was your day like? Did you write in the morning? Take summers?

It tended to be concurrent—on airplanes, in hotel rooms, in the back of a taxicab. If I was very actively involved in a book, sometimes I’d wake up at three or four in the morning. I find that’s a wonderful time to write, because when you wake up, the sounds that have come through your head as conversation and noise have all abated from the night before. To me, the quality of sound or silence at 3 a.m. is like new snow with no footprints on it. The ear is more attuned and you can do the sound work of writing a poem very well early in the morning. I tend to keep journals and 3-by-5 cards, and I write lines on the edges of train schedules and whatever I can. So my method of writing is like other poets that I know. I would tend to write lines wherever I was, and then periodically transfer those in the journals. At this point, I probably have 5,000 pages of journals that are the raw material for a lot of what I write.

I think that very often, poets who have these left-brain day jobs tend to inform their art with the details of them. William Carlos Williams certainly had a lot of poems that meditated on hospitals and sickness. Do you find that happening in your poetry at all?
That’s a good question. It took a long time for my business-world experience to come into my poems in an explicit way. I think everything a poet does comes into the work implicitly. But the book that came out in 1999, called Grace, actually had a section in it that was a parody of a typical New York businessman. The protagonist speaking in the book is a black Caribbean gardener who has been tried unjustly for a crime he witnessed but did not commit. While he’s awaiting execution, he’s got a cellmate, and the cellmate is a halfwit. This fellow is explaining the world as he sees it, including New York, to his cellmate, and it’s my opportunity to take a fresh look at everything I wanted to talk about when I was approaching the age of 50.

Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has been quoted saying that he gets two conflicting questions all the time: How do you account for the poetry renaissance in America right now, and, why does no one read poetry anymore? Which do you think is the more accurate perception?
Oh, he is a master at capturing issues like that. That’s a wonderful way to put it. Here’s my take on it: A decade ago, there was a debate going on in the intellectual press and the poetry community. One point of view was that nobody that writes poetry sells any books. The other point of view is that we’ve got this growing number of poetry readings and they occasionally sell out big auditoriums. So which is it? Is poetry, in fact, enjoying a renaissance or is it the black art that it has been in the past? My own view is that that’s the wrong question.

Poetry needs to get in touch with the audiences of its time. The golden age of any art is when that art is in touch with the general audience of its time. Think of the drama in Shakespeare’s day, think of the novel in the 20th century, and think of the movie today. It’s where people go because they want to see the art, not because they’re supposed to. They’re drawn to it. The art happens at the same time as the entertainment in the art.

And I think poetry for the last 10 or 15 years has been succeeding in reaching out to the general public. You have a handful of poets—I’m thinking of Billy, I’m thinking of Mary Oliver, I’m thinking of Seamus Heaney—who, I don’t know what their book sales are, but I’ve got to believe that it’s real money, that they are at or approaching that point where a poet can actually support himself or herself through book sales, and the reason for that is they are writing in ways that the audience finds such deep sustenance that they will buy the book.

You mention those contemporary poets, and I know that Poetry magazine published the first poems of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Is there anyone who’s been published lately who has the chops to be considered in the same breath with those names?
I think that if I had been a subscriber to Poetry magazine in 1912, when it was founded, and when Harriet Monroe picked poems by the unknown poets, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others, I would not have understood them, and I wouldn’t have known that they were to become known, a century later, as the great modern poets. I am a little bit humble about recognizing the next great talent when it shows up. I do think that poetry today is doing two things very well. The first thing it’s doing is writing well in a tradition that has existed for hundreds of years that I would call the poetry of the rational or the didactic, where you can read the poem and actually parse it—poems you can read and go from A to B to C. Among those poets today I would put Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, and many others.

But that’s only one thing that I think is being done well in American poetry today. The other thing that’s going on is that other poets are pushing the envelope on what poetry can be. You cannot read a language poem and do what I just said about the first category. You cannot parse it and say, “This poem is about a man walking alone under a full moon.” It’s about something else. I think the surrealist poets, James Tate and others, often with great humor, are denying us the ability to read it as a rational line of discussion on purpose and are in fact trying to wake us up and push us in other directions. Poetry’s being used as an element of exploration as well as communication and I think that’s great. I think that both of those things have not always happened at the same time in the history of English and American poetry.

As long as we are on this literary bent, I’m going to remind you of that quote from Fitzgerald, where he talks about how difficult it is to hold two opposed ideas in your mind and still retain the ability to function. In light of your career choices, what do you think that says about you?
That my left and my right brain fused at birth? The way I think of what a businessman does as opposed to what a poet does is as follows: A businessperson, what they care about is making something happen, making something better in a world of external activities and affairs. That could be making a merger happen, selling a new product, or building a plant. A businessperson is trying to make sense of things in the external world, that’s where things get settled. The business of the poet is to make sense of things in the internal world. For a poet, nothing has happened unless they’ve made sense of that in the context of a poem. They’re different arenas, but they both have the same end. I view a businessperson and a poet as a response of the self to the chaotic universe. It’s a way to establish order in a disorderly universe. That’s where I think the two converge.

Tali and Ophira Edut—better known as The Astrotwins—have been dishing up astrological advice since long before their current gig as astrologers for Teen People and AOL’s Teen Channel. Identical twins and Sagittarians, the Detroit-born duo started their, er, meteoric rise when they created the multicultural women’s magazine Hues while still undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Taking a women’s-studies class project and turning it into a national magazine, the pair proved their editorial skills early on; they’ve since passed through roles at Sassy and Ms., and they edited the book Body Outlaws: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity.

Their latest book, AstroStyle: Star-Studded Advice for Love, Life and Looking Good, has further branded them as the astrological go-to girls, landing them TV appearances everywhere from MTV’s Total Request Live to the Fox News Channel. They’ve dished out personal readings to Jessica Simpson, Beyonce, Sting, and Paris Hilton (can you imagine what hers predicted?), among a host of other celebrities, and they’ve done it all before the age of 31. The self-branding pros have also formed their own consulting and design company, Mediarology, specializing in youth, multicultural, and women’s media. The fast-track twins spoke to mediabistro.com from their home in Manhattan, finishing each other’s sentences on branding, the teen market, and making the zodiac work for you.

Hometown: Detroit
Birthdate: December 2, 1972
First section of the Sunday Times? “The fun stuff. Sunday Styles, the magazine,” says Ophira. “We’ve fought over a crossword or two in our day,” adds Tali.

You both went to art school, so how did the interest in journalism come about?

Ophira: We were always into both writing and art. Publishing brings both design and writing together in a way that really appeals to us.

Tali: And it’s supposedly one of the best careers for our sign, Sagittarius.

How did you get into astrology?

Ophira: About 10 years ago, a co-worker gave me some chart-making software, and we started doing all of our friends’ charts. We began to notice trends and patterns, and we couldn’t believe how accurate the readings were. It was straight-up addiction from there.

Tali: We would watch TV shows and have to find out every actor’s sign. We literally know hundreds of celebrities’ signs by heart now. It’s a sickness.

How did the gig at Teen People come about? Was it something you’d ever considered before it was offered, or was it just something you did on the side for fun?

Ophira: An old coworker ended up as a Teen People editor, and she remembered my astrology obsession from our time working together at Ms. She told us Teen People was looking for new astrologers.

Tali: The editor-in-chief had about 20 framed Teen People covers in her office. At our interview, we named the sign of every celebrity on them. That pretty much convinced them that we could do the job.

You’ve really made your name in the teen market, but I’ve read pieces by you in the past that are much racier. Have you run into problems with trying to keep things tame enough for the audience that feeds you and fulfilling your desire to express your more “adult” side?

Tali: We don’t censor ourselves when we write for older audiences.

Ophira: No problems keeping it tame for the teens. Astrology is just a different package for giving the same advice we might say in blunter terms to the grown folks.

With reading Musiq’s birth chart on BET.com and reading the stars for celebs at the Billboard music awards, you two have become sort of the astrologers to the stars—pardon the pun. How do you like working with celebrities?

Tali: It’s quite the dream, we must admit. We’re pop-culture junkies, and it was a blast advising people like Beyonce, OutKast, and Jessica Simpson on what they should do in 2004.

Ophira: Being able to influence the influencers—love that! We also got to give political year-ahead predictions on Fox News this New Year‘s Eve. We speculated on the fates of Saddam and Dubya. We’ll see if our predictions come true.

Yeah, you guys have very successfully branded yourselves as astrological experts. How much of this brand was your idea, versus what Teen People planned? And how important do you think branding has been to your success?

Ophira: Branding is essential. There are so many concepts in the market today, you’ve got to anchor yours to a big vision with lots of “tentacles” and manifestations. To make money off of an idea, you can’t just have a vague concept; you have to imagine all the ways something can be turned into a tangible product or different form of media.

Tali: We’ve been able to begin branding ourselves as the Astrotwins, since the book is something we wrote on our own. Teen People has been very supportive of everything we do outside of the column.

How did the latest book idea emerge? And how do you go about figuring out who does what—writing, editing, et cetera?

Ophira: A friend—love those friends!—was working at a literary agency and suggested that we write a teen astrology book.

Tali: Fortunately, Ophi prefers writing about relationships, and I like to cover style and individual horoscopes. We divided up the book just like that.

So once you had the idea, how did you go about landing a book deal? What’s the best advice you can give aspiring authors?

Ophira: The publishing industry is almost like the stock market—everyone’s following a trend or a hot lead, but interest cools quickly. There are no guarantees that you’ll get a deal, even after spending months writing a book proposal—and we know this from several of our own experiences. Study the market, and tie your idea to as many big news stories as you can. Even if an agent or editor loves your idea, the marketing and sales departments always seem to have the last say. And it always comes down to numbers.

Tali: Also, writers get very attached to their ideas, and the way they think their book should be written. Definitely protect your artistic integrity, but be flexible and open to input, too. Writing is a business as much as it is an art, so if you want to make a living at it, you may have to let go of a little control.

In the end, unless you’re a megastar like John Grisham, you as the writer have to be the marketing force behind a book. You have to think of creative ways to get the word out there. Build a website, hold a reading series, lead a seminar—generate some buzz or hype or credentials for yourself first.

Ophira: Always make them think you’re bigger than you actually are.

Do you follow your own astrological advice? Is it a battle to not write yourself a great horoscope every time?

Ophira: Of course we’d love to have a great horoscope every day, but it doesn’t work like that.

Tali: We look at the movement of the planets every day and the energy their motions bring up. There’s always a range of both positive and negative possible outcomes. That’s what we base our advice on.

A study was published a few months ago disproving, supposedly once and for all, astrology. Does that affect you?

Tali: Hell, no. There will always be skeptics, and we welcome them. We don’t have hard-and-fast scientific evidence that astrology works. But it has for us.

Ophira: Anyway, science doesn’t account for things like intuition and spirituality. There’s a great guy named Bob Marks on Manhattan cable access, a former chemistry professor who set out to disprove astrology and ended up becoming a full-time professional astrologer.

Working as a team, how do you collaborate? Do you work on each horoscope together or split them up?

Tali: We split up the work.

Ophira: It would take too long otherwise!

Do you ever disagree? And how do you handle it when you do?

Tali: Definitely. It’s fun.

Ophira: One of us threatens to kick the other’s ass into the next galaxy, and the winner gets to determine the day’s horoscope. Just kidding.

Has your career affected your personal lives? Are friends constantly hitting you up for astrological advice?

Tali: Our career is pretty much an extension of our personal lives now. We’re constantly giving astrology advice to friends—we’ve joked about opening a 900 number hotline.

Ophira: We compulsively try to guess people’s signs within a couple minutes of meeting them. Sometimes we’re dead-on, and it freaks them out.

Kelly Nicole Lee, a true-to-form Aries, is a fashion editor, horoscope writer, and handbag designer living in Detroit. You can learn more about the Astrotwins at their website, and you can buy AstroStyle at Amazon.com.