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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you get into astrology?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tali: We split up the work.

Ophira: It would take too long otherwise!

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

Tali: Definitely. It’s fun.

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

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

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

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

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

These days, when bolder, brasher headlines spill across magazine covers in a split-second strugglbe to capture our Schadenfreude-tinted fancy, it’s rare that a picture catches the public’s eye the way the low-angled “crotch shot” of Bill Clinton did back in December 2000, when it appeared on the cover of Esquire. The photographer behind that notorious shot—the British-born and mono-monikered Platon—was granted only a few minutes with the then-president, in which he covered his assignment bases and then boldly asked: “Mr. President, can you show me the love?” The photograph was immediately dissected and discussed by Larry King, Bob Woodward, and a host of other media pundits and scribes. The reaction the photo received, Platon says, “said more about the media than it did about me and Clinton. It was a contemporary portrait of a contemporary president. I wasn’t going to photograph him as a stuffy old guy who doesn’t relate to the young people.”

That playful attitude towards politics was primarily shaped by John F. Kennedy Jr.—who originally lured Platon to the United States to work on the now-defunct George—and it is stamped all over his forthcoming photography collection, Platon’s Republic, due out in April from Phaidon Press. [CORRECTION: The book is now expected in June.] Part personal scrapbook, part cultural documentary, the book features the best of Platon’s work, including, of course, the infamous Clinton portrait. Platon recently met with mb at his studio in lower Manhattan to discuss the culture of celebrity, the architecture of people, and the loneliness of the portrait photographer.

Birthdate: 1968
Hometown: London, England

Here in the studio, your book is spread out, taped up, on the wall. You have Al Pacino here and Manchester United there and George W. over there. Tell me about the arrangement you’ve created.
I call it channel surfing through contemporary culture. In America, there are so many channels and they’re so terrible. One minute you have Pamela Anderson gossip, the next something on September 11th, the next you have the president, but it’s all leveled out and one thing doesn’t get more attention than the other. So this book is, as an Englishman in America, my experience of that, my regurgitation of that. I wanted to recreate that same feeling, that one isn’t more important than the other. It’s all mixed up because that’s what it’s like.

In a sense, are you asking readers to read the book as a story rather than looking at it as individual photos?
It’s the way I saw the world, but I didn’t want it to be shoved in your face as a statement. I wanted it to have a random quality, but once in a while I have built a little sequence of stories that, if someone’s interested, they can read through. At the end of the book, there’s this huge section of my memories of each shoot, what the people are like, and sometimes the sequence is explained. For instance, you have two mayors, Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg, contrasting against each other and then the next page is Billy’s Topless, a bar that Giuliani’s administration shut down. So it’s both extremes of Manhattan.

I wanted to show what it’s like to meet these people, what happens behind the scene. Like when you meet the President, what does it feel like? What’s it like to come into contact with the sense of power, what do they talk about with their aides? What are the fashion people like, the neo-Nazi skinheads I spent a week with in North Carolina? I’ve photographed Giuliani about four times, so I’ve gotten to know him now. But when I was just beginning, I had no experience with someone very powerful. I remember he came out the first time with this huge grin on his face—his media grin—and I made the mistake of saying, “Mr. Mayor, are you sure you want to keep this grin? I think you’d look a lot more dignified if you looked a bit more serious.” And he snapped back at me really quickly and said, “Listen, sonny, this is the way I am, this is me.” So I shot him and then I realized that this is him, and it’s wrong of me to push him into something he doesn’t want to be. And the photo turned out to be very Giuliani.

The shot of Mayor Bloomberg, on the other hand, is of him yawning. He was uninterested in the shot and he was yawning all the way through it. I caught him yawning by accident, but that’s what he was like on that day. He’s not really interested in the media; he’s interested in getting his job done. He’s a businessman, he’s not a showbiz personality. By putting him opposite Giuliani, it says a lot about the times we’re in and it shows the differences in their personalities.

In an interview with Texas Monthly, you said, “As soon as you put people in a clinical environment, in a studio with one light and a white background, they tend to become very conservative.”
They do. It’s like going to the dentist. You sit there and there’s this camera pointed in your face. People are at their best when they can be natural. And that’s the hardest thing as a photographer. It’s nothing really special, it’s not important in terms of world events, but it is a big challenge to get the magic of someone. Normally there’s this wall, so it’s my job to break it down. I try to push that, but only where the person’s prepared to play back.
Some people are very playful, like Paul Smith. That shot was inspired by Yves Klein, who used to get his subjects to press their bodies up against the canvas, to get the subjects to make direct contact with the art. I wanted to break down the barrier between me and the sitter, so I got Paul Smith to hold onto the edge of the camera lens, so we’re connecting physically.

In more difficult photos, like the ones of neo-Nazis, why would you put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation like that?
I owe a huge debt to John F. Kennedy Jr. for that. When I graduated from college, I was working for gritty magazines with no budget and we were reacting against the gloss of the American photographers, where everything was very glamorous and everything was perfectly retouched. Growing up in London, it was always raining, we were very poor, we never saw any celebrities. So I started shooting that way, and I became punchier with portraits. And Kennedy had this vision to show politics and media in a different way. He wanted to make it accessible, entertaining, less stuffy, less elitist—much more gritty and in your face.

Do you think George was a successful magazine in its day?
I don’t think it was always successful. The magazine was criticized a lot and it wasn’t always a creatively successful magazine, but it was an unusual one. It had a message that it’s not just politics as usual. There are not many magazines that are playful with politics, there’s a void there.

As a photographer, it was an amazing magazine. It gave me commissions that you very rarely get now. The first job I did was one where they sent me on a whirlwind tour around America documenting the 20 most fascinating men in America. I photographed Larry King, Mayor Giuliani, Marilyn Manson, and, because I was working for John, I got instant access. It was like a passport to the heart of American culture. As a young English guy, I was ignorant to a lot of it, so it was a great education.

Do you see any change in recent years in how the public views photography as the world becomes, arguably, more visual?
Well, they’re confronted with more. There are so many magazines now it’s overkill. It almost doesn’t matter what magazine you read. They all put out the same information. The same celebrity is blitzed on five different covers every month. So you essentially buy one magazine and there’s no reason to read the other four. I think we’re all getting a bit punch drunk. The more you’re bombarded with something, the less it means. There’s so much pressure on art directors to put so much information down that a sense of good design has changed. It’s more about practical design—how much information can you fit on the cover. It’s not so much about whether the cover is a work of art. It’s about have you gotten as many cover lines as possible. Now, in magazines, I have to compete with so many headlines. And that’s fine, I’m very aware that it’s not going on a gallery wall, it’s serving a practical purpose. In the book, I had a chance to go back to that and to let the photography breathe.

Some of your photographs seem more like iconic symbols of the subject than like portraits, particularly the ones of George H.W. Bush and Clinton.
It’s very intimidating to be photographed, but if I kneel down and chat with you, so you’re looking down at me, it makes you feel less threatened. My father is an architect, so I often think like a designer or an architect. I remember when I was admiring buildings, I would look up at them and see this perspective and this awesome power of the monument in front of me. I guess it’s natural to see these icons in the same way, the architecture of people.

Do art directors try to influence you, to make the portrait fit with their aesthetic or to make this or that person look like a celebrity?
I’ve reached a point where they know my work, so they know they’re going to get a Platon photo. I understand the magazine wants some guarantee that it ‘s going to look a little bit like this or that. But to be honest, it’s very difficult to go in with a preconceived idea. My best pictures are the ones where I had no idea it would look like this—just some magical moment where we were reacting against each other or with each other and we reached some middle ground. It’s very difficult to control it without it looking very staged.

Isn’t the fashion photography designed to look staged?
No. I’ve become very political with my fashion stuff, in the sense that I’m very aware of the damage the fashion industry has done to society, this idea of creating a dream that doesn’t really exist. So I’ve started creating this new set of cultural heroes. My fashion pictures are a cross-section of everyday people—deliverymen, girl skateboarders. My idea is that when you look at a fashion story, you’re presented with society’s ideal. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could look at a fashion story and say, “I know someone who looks just like that” or “I look just like that”? I can’t do very much with photography, but where I can make a difference, I really try. It’s wonderful to see some of my friends or people I’ve gotten to know in a giant 16-page story in Esquire. I’m trying to put a mirror up to society instead of holding up a picture that depresses us all.

You’re a bit of a celebrity yourself, aren’t you? Is it hard for you to reconcile that with this idea of the everyman?
I always wanted to be the underdog. For me, as a portrait photographer, it’s the kiss of death to become well known. I did my best work when no one knew who I was. People weren’t threatened by me because they didn’t think I was a big deal. This book has started to change things. But you always want to leave your ego at the door.

Is that possible?
Sure. From the first shoot I did to the shoot I did a week ago with Jude Law, there’s always this moment where it’s all down to me. The bullshit goes out the window, the glamour goes out the window, and I’ve got to deliver. I’ve got to push myself to confront this person and confront them in a very truthful way. I go to this lonely place where I pace up and down, getting my head straight, checking that I’m focused on all my technical stuff, and opening my mind to be ready for anything this person’s going to throw at me. After it’s over, then the bullshit comes back and you can brag about it. But at the time, there’s no room for that and [my subjects] would pick up on that. Why would they give me something, if I’m not giving anything to them? It’s quite a painful thing to face each time.

You’ve photographed so many famous, accomplished people. What kind of advice have you gotten from them?
When I was shooting Karl Rove, I said to him, “Mr. Rove, I’m just a guy from England trying to make it in America. Can you give me any advice?” and he said to me, “Sonny, if you’re shooting me, you’ve already made it.”

Chris Gage, a production editor at John Wiley & Sons, is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

When Michael Bloomberg was elected New York City’s 108th mayor two years ago, one of his very first appointments—and one he was so sure of he didn’t even use a search committee to select—was his press secretary, a 28-year-old kid named Edward Skyler. Skyler is a New York City native, and he’d worked for Parks Commissioner Henry Stern and then as a press aide in Rudy Giuliani’s administration before going to work in the communications department of Bloomberg L.P. He then worked as press secretary on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign, in 2001, before becoming the youngest press secretary in New York City’s history. He took time out recently from his usual routine of staunchly and vociferously defending the mayor from the press’s inquiries and spoke to mediabistro.com about getting his job, balancing the media’s constant quest for information with the Mayor’s desire for privacy, and his recent mash note from the New York Post.

Birthdate: April 11, 1973
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: Metro, then Week in Review

How did you get your start in politics? Was it always your dream to be working in City Hall?
I had interned for a city council member in high school, and when I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, I was majoring in history and wanted to enter government. It’s hard at the entry level to find politically interesting jobs. You can get basic civil-service jobs, but I was trying to find a way to get into City Hall. The only city agency I found open was the Parks Department, this was about seven years ago, and $22,000 was my starting salary, but it was a great opportunity to see government up close. They matched me with the commissioner, and I had wanted to go to law school, but I changed my application to Fordham from day to night. The commissioner offered me the position of deputy chief of staff.

Henry Stern was famous for his nicknames. Did you get one?
Skylark was my nickname. Then I went to the press office for two years. In my last year of going to law school at night, I joined the press office for Giuliani. So after four years, I got a job in City Hall. It was rewarding to work my way into that goal. When Giuliani decided not to run for Senate, I was looking for another opportunity, and was interested in Bloomberg Media, not knowing he was going to run.

You didn’t have any idea Bloomberg would end up running for mayor?
I knew little of him at the time. Most New Yorkers not in finance didn’t know a lot about the company back then. I had some friends who heard he was going to run, but I had no idea he would run. Turns out, I got to know him and, when I heard he was going to run, joined the campaign in mid-2000.

Is it more challenging being so young in this job?
Age is a challenge, in that the press is always going to find fault with you in some way. Although the press secretary’s job is to serve as a liaison with the press and be the intermediary with the mayor, they view you more as an obstacle than as a help. I think they resent, in a sense, having to call the press secretary to get information. We try to be useful and I think we truly are and provide a lot of information to make their lives and jobs easier, but there’s always resentment from some of them, especially from some of them being around for a while, there’s a certain tension.

You say you’re a liaison, which suggests striking a balance. But New York is an aggressive media town and the mayor is extremely private; do you feel like it’s hard to balance reporters’ desire for openness with your role as protecting Bloomberg’s privacy?
Some politicians want the press to share their holiday meals with them. Mayor Bloomberg isn’t like that; when he asks for private time, he doesn’t want to share it with the media. The press demands to know where he is on a Saturday in late December with no events scheduled. It’s one thing to miss the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but a weekend day is different.

What is a typical day like for you?
I start off most days with checking my email, seeing what news has broken over night. I get into work at about 7:30 a.m., and there’s usually a senior staff meeting around 8 or 9 a.m. My job in the first couple of hours is oriented toward the press conference for the day, making sure the right remarks are there, making sure the location for the event is good. We also find out what the mayor will be asked about and make sure he’s prepared. The next stage of the day is preparing for what is happening the next day and week. The last few weeks were especially focused on the state of the city, but we also want to respond with statements from the Mayor on X, Y, and Z. It’s a juggling act.

One article I read described you as Mayor Bloomberg’s “pit bull press secretary.” Is that a fair description?
When I have to be, I am. You need to defend your boss aggressively. Press work can be quite aggressive. You have to draw the line, and when you first come into office, you have to be clear at the get-go where that line is. That may make me a target for criticism, but I’m just protecting my boss, it’s what I’m paid to do. I’m not paid to be loved by the press. I am paid to be respected. I’m not paid to be their friend.

Now that you’ve been there for two years, has it gotten any easier for you?
You get better at managing the level of stress. It’s not necessarily easier, but you get better at dealing with it. The first year is tough, there are crises and challenges. Now that we’re halfway through, we’re taking stock of our accomplishments and helping to prove that the mayor deserves the people’s vote again.

What’s next? Will you continue to work as the mayor’s press secretary through the next election?
I will stay and help him get re-elected.

Last thing: How does it feel to be one of the New York Post‘s most eligible bachelors?
I don’t have a lot of time to take advantage of that.

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

Remember when Geraldo Rivera was thrown out of Iraq for revealing information about troop locations and movements? Journalism scolds everywhere condemned his actions, but they all did so with a repetitive sameness. One reporter whose criticism stood out was The Daily Show‘s Stephen Colbert.

The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, of course, and it’s not a real newscast but rather an Onion-like parody of one. Colbert—one of the show’s earliest correspondents—comes from the world of comedy, not journalism. But his segment on Geraldo, “Cry Me a Rivera,” was somehow more spot-on than any other coverage of the Fox News reporter‘s snafu. Colbert didn’t just make fun of the easy-to-make-fun of Rivera; he lampooned the weirdly patriotic but simultaneously self-interested motivations of all the embedding reporters. Which is what The Daily Show does regularly: It makes jokes about the news, but it also makes pointed—if subtle—social commentaries about the news and those who cover it. The New York Times recently described the show as “taking the facts of a news story more seriously than real TV journalists sometimes do,” and, since the 2000 president election, the show’s been garnering more and more praise for its coverage and commentary—including an Emmy and a Peabody Award. Colbert spoke to mediabistro.com last week about his own transition from Second City comedian to faux-news correspondent and the show’s evolution since its creation.

Born: May 13, 1964
Hometown: Charleston, South Carolina
First section of the Sunday Times: The food column in the magazine

You started out with Second City, but I recently read that you’d briefly been on Good Morning America before you came to The Daily Show. How did that happen?
I desperately needed a job. I had been working for ABC Entertainment at The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. That show got canceled, my wife wasn’t working, and we had a baby. Someone from entertainment division recommended to the news division that if they were looking for somebody who was funny but looked really straight, for a correspondent for Good Morning America, that they should consider me. So I had a meeting with the head of ABC News—whoever it was at the time, in 1996, I wasn’t that cognizant of the news. They asked me if I could do it, I said yes, and they hired me. I did exactly two reports.

Only two?
Only one of which ever made it to air.

How did you then end up at The Daily Show?
After those two reports, I pitched 20 stories in a row that got shot down. At the same time, my agent, who also represented the executive producer of The Daily Show, Madeline Smithberg, said, “You should meet with Madeline. She’s doing this other show and I bet that they would do those stories.” And I went and met Madeline and the people at the show at the time, and they liked my ideas. They had me on for a trial basis, and for the next nine months I worked here occasionally. But it was totally a day job. I never expected to stay here because I did sketch comedy and I wrote, and I really didn’t think that this show was going to go anyplace.

That was when Craig Kilborn was the host?
He was still there. It was right before the first anniversary; Craig was gone a year and a half later. And so I worked with Craig as the host for about a year and a half, and didn’t do that many pieces because I was also working in California at the time. Anyway, I just didn’t think the show was going to be sticking around, until I started working there for a while. And then I found out that it was full of these incredibly nice, talented people, and I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. It was a complete happy accident that I ended up being here.

There’s been so much news coverage recently about The Daily Show, having won the awards and the CNN Global Edition. You’ve been around to see the changes in the show, so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.
Well, in the old days—and it’s funny to say that sentence, in the old days—it was much more like a local newscast. Craig was reading some national headlines, and then the field pieces that we did were all human interest-y—you know, squirrel-on-waterskis kind of stuff. Freak shows, Big Foot stories, alien abductions, stuff like that. But we treated it like hard news. We took a ridiculous thing and we elevated it. But now, thanks to sort of the editorial vision of Jon and Ben Karlin and now D.J. Javerbaum, our new head writer, the show has a far more political bent, which obviously started during the political campaign. As soon as the campaign started off in 2000, you could see the show begin to shift.

Right, “Indecision 2000.”
At the end of that campaign, I put a hundred dollars down on the table and I said to the field producers, “if you can get us a Big Foot story, I’ll give you the hundred-dollar bill.” Because I knew that none of that shit was going to get past Jon anymore. Everything has to be grounded in reality, in something that’s happening in the world, so we can use our field pieces as an addition to the satirical take that’s happening at the desk. It’s great. I mean, I did enjoy occasionally flying to Portland to talk to a Big Foot expert. But I’ll take stories that have more of a satirical bite to them, any day.

Have any non-parody news shows approached you with positions? Have you even thought about doing serious news?
We’ve all been invited to comment on the cable channels like CNN or Fox or MSNBC, to be part of a panel talking about some social issue or political issue. But, an actual job? No. I’ve never been offered an actual job.

Would you consider doing an actual news show?
Hell, yeah. Absolutely. I would love it—if anybody at the networks is calling.

Part of the reason I ask is because for so many people The Daily Show is a primary source of news. How you feel about that?
I don’t buy it, necessarily. For two reasons. I think you have to have some handle on what’s happening in the world to get our jokes. Because we only do the most cursory explanation of what the issue is in order to set up our punch lines. We don’t talk in depth about any stories. I suppose you could watch our show and sort of get a sense of what’s going on in the world, but you’d also be missing half of our joke. Half of our joke is the way news is reported, not just what the news is.

I think, nonetheless…
That what you said is true? I weep for our nation.

But one of the good things, and an article in The New York Times talked about this a little bit, is that The Daily Show gets away with critiquing the government and the news in ways entertainers can’t.
I think the reason for that is simple. We’re making jokes, and the entertainers who were attacked were not making jokes. They were not doing what they’re good at, which is entertaining. They’re not good at having policy positions. They’re not good at playing political games. They are good at entertaining. I admire all of them for trying. I think they might have been more effective—I don’t know if anything would have stopped the juggernaut of that war, but certainly not using the thing that you’re best at doesn’t help your cause.

Is there a piece from The Daily Show that you are most proud of?
Um, no. I mean there are things that I have fond memories of. I have a piece that I think captures the kernel of what I try to do as a correspondent. It’s a piece called “Death and Taxes.” And in Saratoga Springs, New York, on the annual tax forms for the county employees, the printer put the X in the wrong box on all of the tax forms and the 1040s said that everyone was deceased. They checked deceased for everyone, three hundred people—dead—in one fell swoop. So we went up there and we covered it as if there had been a disaster, three hundred people had died. We were there to cover the grief and the rage about it. And what I liked about it was that it highlights the reporter as single-minded idiot. The reporter desperately needs the story to be what he thinks it is. The story is written before you leave; you’re just going there to verify what you already want it to be. In this case, the reporter gets there and it is not what he thought it was but he won’t let it go. He cannot let go the idea of this tragedy and that the people there are filled with rage, and I actually eventually got people to say that they were sad and that they were filled with rage. And it was a great triumph for me as a fake reporter to get them to buy into my idiocy. I like that piece because no one in town looks like a fool. I look like a fool. You know, we’re not shooting fish in a barrel like with alien enthusiasts or Big Foot hunters; this is really spoofing the self-important, hyperbolic, vulture-like quality of tragedy news.

Compared to the other comedy writing you’ve done, what’s it like writing for The Daily Show?
Well, there’s sketch, there’s narrative, and then there’s The Daily Show. Writing for The Daily Show is wonderful because as a correspondent you have to come up with a particular take on a specific issue. There is an actual event in reality that you’re spoofing or an actual event in reality that you’re talking about, you come up with a wrong headed view of it, and you explore that wrong-headed view through the lens of your newsman, and it’s easier to turn out a lot of material that way. Which is good because we’ve got to do it every night. And I think one of the reasons that it is a little easier to turn out material in that way is that you can’t feel precious about it. Because you know there’s another one tomorrow and we’ve got to get this damn thing on by five o’clock It has got to be written by three, and the story just broke this morning. So, you can’t be like egotistical about it and be precious about your words. Which is probably one of the reasons why it’s most liberating. Because you’re like, you know if I fuck up, then I fuck up, there’s another Kleenex in the box. That’s sort of how I feel about it. It’s Kleenex comedy, just pull another one out tomorrow. It doesn’t mean that we don’t try our hardest, or that it can’t be really hard to do this work, but of the three things I’ve done this is the most immediately enjoyable.

Jacqueline Schneider is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com

MTV has done a lot of things since its inception two decades ago, and one of the biggest is to regularly fly in the face of tradition. Which is why it’s so fitting that, ever since the network’s TRL studio opened its windows onto Times Square, MTV has staged its own New Year‘s Eve special to counter that most stalwart of shows down the block, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Tomorrow night, MTV looks back on the year that was—the Punks, the platypus, the pop icons’ liplock—and recruits pop darling Hilary Duff and a slew of other performers to help ring in 2004 at the nighttime bash. We recently spoke to executive producer Mike Powers, the man behind the scenes of all this rock ‘n’ roll revelry, about his role in staging the last MTV party of the year.

Let’s start by talking a bit about the show. How many years has it been running now? What’s on deck for this year?
We’ve been doing New Year’s since we moved into our studio, which was ’97 or something like that. This is my first year doing the show. Simple Plan is going to do a medley of their own songs, and then they have a special surprise performance at midnight. Hilary Duff is doing two songs, she’s also co-hosting. Clay Aiken is doing two songs. And Ludacris is doing two songs at the ABC building. At ABC’s studios across the street, about six flights up, there’s a roof space, and Ludacris is going to be up there performing out to the masses in Times Square, which is going to look really cool.

A couple of years ago, you guys premiered the ‘N Sync “Girlfriend” video just after midnight. Do you have anything like that planned?
We don’t have any video premieres, but one really cool thing we’re doing is an MC Battle of the Champions—two guys going head to head, rhyming, and we pick a big winner. We did two MC battles this year, one in the spring, one in the fall, and we have two great champs so far, Reign Man and Wrekonize. So now we’re going to pit the two champs together and have them battle it out for MC supremacy.

So this being your first year, it’s basically a trial by fire for you. What’s your role in all this?
My role is to oversee the production and the logistics of the show. And, you know, it’s equally challenging on both the creative level and the logistics level. This is one of our hairiest shows when it comes to dealing with not just the city and the police, but dealing with the Times Square Business Improvement Department. The BID basically puts on this giant party out in Times Square, and we try to coordinate with them, figure out ways for us to keep that crowd entertained. They in turn put some of our programming on all the screens in Times Square, and they pump our audio out to those people, so it really feels like we’re at the center of everything for the night, which is great.

But you share the spotlight with an American icon. What’s it like going up against the Dick Clark special?
We feel like our show is definitely the most exciting and fresh and live. I’m not sure if Dick Clark is live the entire night—maybe some stuff is pre-taped, I don’t even know, I can’t speak to that—but we’re live the whole night, and all of our acts are performing in Times Square. So we feel like we own the evening, in a way, and give people the best programming from the center of it all.

Do you feel it’s ironic that the Dick Clark special is called New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and then you guys have this huge, and very rockin’, show going on?
Well, certainly Dick Clark’s not going to do an MC battle.

What’s it like putting this on in Times Square? Obviously it’s more exciting, but is it also a lot harder? Do you hire big thugs to keep the crowd controlled?
No, the cops are in charge of all the crowd control. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it, but they do the most amazing job. They have everyone divided into pens, so if there’s trouble in the crowd, it’s isolated to that one particular pen, and it’s a more manageable group of people. So the cops are really great. They have it down to a science. We work with them, and they help us out as far as getting all of our talent into the building. All the streets are closed around Times Square, but it’s actually not that difficult to get around once the crowd is in their pens. It’s really well-organized. And it’s exciting. I mean, it’s so great to have a view of the ball and to be in the middle of this party, but to be inside where it’s warm and toasty. It’s such a wonderful experience.

How do kids get into the studio, for people who are attending these performances?

Well, we pre-select all of our crowd. We don’t pick people out of the crowd that night and bring them in.

So it’s not like TRL?
No, logistically that would be a nightmare. We do casting, and we have people out there looking for kids who are really excited to come to the show, and they arrive separately from the rest of the Times Square crowd. They go to a specific point with their special passes and they get to come inside, and they love it. It’s so fun to be in Times Square, but not freezing to death really helps. And we have such a great view of everything. When midnight strikes, it’s just ridiculous looking, it’s so cool.

How many people besides you are involved in this? When does the planning start for such a big event?
The planning starts around September. There’s probably a staff of about 30 people, give or take, for a while, some not necessarily full-time. But then once we get into November, then everyone’s pretty much full-time on it. We have one group of people working on the creative and the format: How are we going to position our performances? What else are we doing that evening? So we come up with things like OK, we’re going to team up with People magazine, and we’re going to look at the best and worst celebrity makeovers for the year, and the best and worst celebrity styles, that type of thing. We come up with fun segment ideas, like the MC Battle. We know we’re going to have performances, we’re going to interview various celebrities who come by for the party. There’s a lot of things we know, but then we just try to add as much content as possible for the rest of the evening.

I know that because the studios are right in the middle of everything, celebrities tend to just stop by these MTV events. Do you allow that kind of ad lib thing to happen on New Year’s Eve? Is there that element of surprise or is everything planned out?
Well, we pretty much have to know they’re coming or they’ll never get in. People start trickling in late October and through November, and then even this month we keep getting people confirmed. Erika Christensen is going to come by, and the cast of One Tree Hill, and there’s still a couple offers pending.

You have a ton of newly minted MTV stars this year. Do they have any part in this?
Nick and Jessica are doing something for the open of our show. And then, really, our VJs—folks that are getting more and more recognition for what they do every day on TRL—they’re going to be huge stars for us this night, too. We’re doing kind of an ensemble hosting crew, so it’s Damien and La La, Vanessa Manilo, and Hilarie Burton, and Quddus, and then Hilary Duff.

Obviously this is a big event for the people who come down to Times Square. But everyone is reporting that people are itching to go out this year. How do you get people to stay at home and watch the show? Who is the show aimed at?
It’s aimed at a fairly broad audience, like a lot of our programming. We have such a great mix of performers—with Ludacris and Hilary Duff and Clay and Simple Plan—that I think is appealing to a broad range of folks. Hell, if people who live in the New York area or wherever want to come be a part of it live down at Times Square, more power to ’em. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. But for folks who don’t want to stand all day and freeze their butts off, we’ll pretty much give them the entire vibe at home—everything they need to see and feel and experience on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. But it’s really just so exciting to be here—for the people working it, too—it’s definitely a once in a lifetime experience.

Jill Singer is deputy editor of mediabistro.com. Image courtesy of MTV.