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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WG: But your door is always open?

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

MB: Can the little people still talk to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Georgiades is at WGeorgiades.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Singer is the deputy editor of mediabistro.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who do you see as your typical reader?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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