Five years ago, writer Will Leitch was publicly humiliated on national television. Leitch, now an editor at the culture website The Black Table, was dumped by his fiancée the night before he was set to be a contestant on Win Ben Stein’s Money, and Jimmy Kimmel announced the break-up to America as a hapless Leitch looked on in confusion. But Leitch managed to turn embarrassment into inspiration—”Consolation Prize,” the essay he wrote about that particular heartbreak, became the first in a string of Internet columns that Leitch published in various forums under the name “Life As a Loser.” The columns mostly chronicle Leitch’s itinerant early twenties, as he rode the late-nineties Internet boom from small-town Illinois to New York City, only to be laid off after five months and forced to move back home. Leitch has gathered the best of these columns in a new collection, also called Life As a Loser, released earlier this week by Arriviste Press. Taken together, the collection forms a familiar tale of “early promise squandered and hard lessons learned,” as author Tom Perrotta writes in the book’s foreword. Leitch recently spoke to mediabistro about idiots, luck, and the role of both in Internet journalism.

Let’s start with the obvious question: Do you really think you’re a loser?
I have a lot of stories where I’m the idiot, and the columns started with a couple of those. As it went along, it evolved from being less about me and more about how we’ve all been in situations like this, which is good. It’s not an online diary. That’s always been my fear, that it would be perceived as just about me, me, glorious me. Particularly in the book, I tried not to make it too one note, where it’s all like, “And at the end, Will gets kicked in the groin!” It’s supposed to be, you know, we’ve all been the guy who’s picked last in kickball, we’ve all been laid off, we’ve all been the one who doesn’t get the girl. In that way, it evolved to where it became, by the end, very easy for people to relate to.

But there is a lot of self-deprecation, this “Will gets kicked in the groin” thing. In the intro to the book, you basically say, “I’m a totally uninteresting guy,” which doesn’t seem like the best marketing ploy. But is that what you wanted your hook to be—sort of “I am the common man”?
The thing is—I mean, “Life As a Loser” is a really good title. It’s snappy, it’s catchy. But when I first started doing the column, it wasn’t, like, a gimmick. It was legitimately like—”Okay, seriously, I suck.” And it’s not that I don’t still suck, but after 10 or 15 columns, I ran out of stories where I completely humiliate myself. We kept the title, which is a hook, it is a catch, but the moral of the book is not: “Boy, look how much of a dork this guy is. I’m glad I’m not him.”

The book’s premise is this classic “small-town boy tries to make it in the big city” set-up. Do you ever play that up for fictional purposes or is it all relatively genuine?
It’s funny, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day—who’s also from small-town Illinois—about how when he got out here, he was just going to completely reinvent himself. He did not want to have anything to do with where he was from. And he said, “Will, you’re like living in the permanent Midwest embassy.” And I like that idea that I’m still a small-town kid. I’ve been out of Mattoon for 11, 12 years, but it’s so ingrained in me, and I think in a lot of people who come here. Even now, in terms of people who have only known me out here, when I’ve been here longer than they have—they know me as the midwestern guy. And I’m not walking around going, “Oh, wow! There are no sheep here—I’m confused!” But there’s a certain vibe you give off and that’s just what you are. Some people are really uncomfortable with that, like my friend, who is so determined to be taken seriously and never be labeled like that. I really think if you asked him if he’s from the Midwest, he would lie. I can’t imagine living like that. To me, the most important part of keeping that midwestern part is knowing that no matter what, you’re just a dumb idiot from nowhere, so don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s part of the idea of the book, too, being comfortable with who you are, and not trying to be something you’re not—particularly when you’ve been laid off a thousand times, and everyone’s telling you: “We don’t want you around. Go away.” The job market hasn’t been too great in the last few years, and we were all bouncing around. I’m sure a lot of mediabistro readers have been bounced around. At a certain point, you have to realize: “I’m okay. I believe in what in what I’m doing.”

Well, obviously you’re doing pretty well for yourself. Most self-described “dumb idiots” don’t parlay their Internet diaries into a book deal—
Not a diary!

Okay, your Internet musings. So tell me how the deal came about. In the book, you allude to a manuscript and a deal with a big-shot publisher. Was that this book?
Yeah, that was back in 2000, when I’d been out here for, like, five months. Someone approached me and signed me up to do something a little different from this, with more of a narrative running through the whole thing. But then we all got laid off, and I started to realize I love this little book project I’m doing, but I might want to worry about getting a job first. And the book ended up getting put on the back burner. Frankly, I just wasn’t ready yet. I was a kid! I hadn’t been here at all, I hadn’t struggled, I hadn’t gone through any of it. It’s just a chance that I blew. But I kind of had to—if I’d have written something then, it would have been so self-important. I’d been working for dot-com jobs, thinking this is the easiest place in the world—like I’d suckered these people into letting me do anything. You came to New York, you were making more money than your parents, getting off work at 3, and drinking with everyone you worked with. In that mindset, in that kind of environment—it’s no way to write a book.

So the publisher put it on the back burner—but you were glad for it?
Yeah. In retrospect, I’m happy about it. I’m actually ending the “Loser” column in March once I hit 200, and this book is a good way to cap it off. A lot that was in the original book is in this, but I’ve been able to take it and do it the way I wanted to, rather than try to force it into something it’s not. I have another deal going on with another publisher for something after this, which is good, because I’m not stupid—well, I’m still stupid—but I’m not as stupid anymore. For a time, everyone I talked to, I’d be like, “Hi, I’m Will. I have a book deal—did I mention that?” I was an asshole. And it’s just because I didn’t know. And now, I recognize that it’s just work, just like everything else is work, and I’m in a much better position now to put stuff together than I was then.

How did you find your new publisher?
They contacted me through The Black Table. Actually, a lot of stuff has happened like that. I was contacted a few months ago to write a story for The New York Times Magazine, simply because of something I’d written for The Black Table that was linked off of Gawker.

Oh, that’s great.
Yeah, it ended up getting killed. But I still have contacts over there, and I’m still working on stuff with them. That’s one of the reasons we did The Black Table in the first place—we publish a lot of stuff that’s been killed in other magazines. The notion of writing on the Internet as online diaries—that’s something we’ve tried to change with The Black Table. We try to do real journalism, just on the web. Mind you, there are more copyediting mistakes, and it’s harder to read on the subway.

You actually mention something in the intro to your book about how you’re afraid that people think the Internet lessens the import of journalism. Do you really think that’s the general perception?
Yeah. There is just a stigma. You saw it when the big gossip item came out about how Jodi Kantor was doing a terrible job as the Times‘ Arts & Leisure editor because she was hiring all these web writers. The worst insult that could be given to her was that she was out hiring web writers at the great New York Times. But the fact is, that’s where they are now. Not to get Marxist, but the workers do have the means of production now. But the term “web writer” freaks people out. They think it’s some guy in the basement, sending out screeds about Star Trek. You and I know that’s ridiculous, but most people don’t. I go back to the Midwest, I tell them I write on the Internet—and half of my family still thinks I’m doing a porn site.

I’ve been writing on the web for five years, and finally, there are people who are like, “Oh, he has a book out. I guess he’s a real writer now!” It’s strange. Even web editors have this idea: “Well, someday we’d love to get into print!” Like it’s like the holy grail. But I guarantee you that something on The Black Table, or The Morning News, or Haypenny, or Flak is far better than most of the stuff you’re going to get in newspapers and magazines—and we’re doing it for free. I think people are starting to realize that good writers are going to the web. Why wouldn’t they? You have absolute freedom to do whatever you want, and if you’re talented, that’s gonna shine through.

In the book, you say that growing up, your heroes were small ones—in one essay you devote whole paragraphs to a contestant on Press Your Luck. But did you have any sort of literary heroes in mind when you were writing these essays?
There are certain writers I really admire, but frankly, most of my heroes are not big literary names. I’ve read every single one of Andy Rooney’s books. The man’s a genius. I’m telling you, if we can get anything across to the readers of mediabistro, it’s how much of a genius Andy Rooney is. I know, he’s just the old guy on 60 Minutes, but I like his kind of no-nonsense writing. And sure, I love Jonathan Letham, I love Dave Eggers, I’m into David Foster Wallace, I’m into those sort of people—I’ve got my smart street cred. But the people I really admire aren’t trying to show off to anybody and are simply just writing stories. I wouldn’t say Andy Rooney is my biggest hero, but he’s probably my most indicative hero.

You also talk about your relationship with Roger Ebert. How did that come about?

He worked for The Daily Illini, as I did. Ebert was someone, who, as a kid, I looked up to. He doesn’t have to write full-length reviews of all this stuff, plus do the “Movie Answer Man,” plus do the “Great Movies,” plus do the TV stuff, but he does. You have to admire that. There’s a website called Professor Barnhart’s Journal, run by a man in Boston named Bob Sassone, and he sent something out to a bunch of writers called “Why I Write.” I wrote some goofy, self-involved thing, and Ebert wrote in: “This is my job.” To me, that’s the only way you can do it—he doesn’t have to do this, but he does have to do this. The fact that he has that much good perspective on who he is, and what his place in all this is, is pretty impressive.

Is that how you feel too, that you’re just compelled to do this?
Yeah. I’m still in the, “Wow, I can’t believe I can actually call this work” mindset. With the Internet stuff, I can write something and have it fact-checked and up in like six hours. I don’t have to worry about pitching it, I can just do it. And yeah, the process of pitching is very important, and obviously more magazines pay than websites pay, so that’s a factor. But to me, the idea of not writing on the web would be like not writing.

Jill Singer is deputy editor of mediabistro.com. You can buy Life as a Loser here.

Photographer Jason Fulford has contributed to Harper’s, Life, and The New York Times Magazine, but when it comes to putting out collections of his work, he’s only been published by one person: himself. Together with his partner Leanne Shapton, he runs J&L Books, a small press that publishes collections of art and photography. Like tiny publishing philanthropists, their intention is to put out quality books that wouldn’t necessarily get published by traditional venues. Their choices are somewhat idiosyncratic, highly individual affairs. There’s a buoyancy about their work—maybe it’s just their excitement about getting people to see the photographs they love. Followers of Fulford’s own work tend to put faith in J&L’s releases because they know the work has been refined and vetted by a voice they trust and count on for certain tones or styles.

Fulford’s photos—of empty motel-room doorways, street signs, and, most famously, people dancing—cast ordinary objects in an extraordinary, almost haunting light. His pictures come across like an accidental documentary, like you’re seeing something you maybe shouldn’t. J&L is releasing two new books today, and each one has an otherworldly quality all its own: Beautiful Ecstasy, a collection of photos from the ’70s by Michael Northrup, and Chart Sensation, a collection of PowerPoint charts-made-art by Michael Lewy. Fulford spoke to mediabistro.com about reading photography, editing photography, and dancing for the camera.

The name you’ve made for yourself is often the reason people buy the books you publish by other photographers. Who’s buying J&L’s books? Do you know these people?

It’s a bookish crowd, but one that is young and energetic. We did an event at Housing Works Used Book Cafe, here in New York. We didn’t have anything with text coming out, and Housing Works does mostly readings, but I wanted to do an event there. So we just decided to do a variety show and to bring in people we knew. We had a slide show, a rock band, a short film screening, keyboard players. Housing Works gets a specific crowd that works for us. People laugh at poetry there. Our audience seems to be people like that—slightly bookish, but photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, writers. It seems to be book people as opposed to artists.

The first thing one notices about your own work is that, aside from Dancing Pictures, your book of black-and-white photos that are just that, people dancing, you rarely shoot people. The hotel rooms, the landscapes—they’re all empty. Any reason for this?
My pictures aren’t really directed. When you’re shooting people, you’re directing it and creating something, and I think my pictures are more like things you’ve found. Sometimes people can energize a place or add a quality, but it’s never really about those people.

So what compelled you to do Dancing Pictures?
The dancing thing was kind of a hybrid project. Truthfully, I didn’t like that book very much. It started because Leanne and I used to dance and take pictures of each other in front of a black backdrop. We’d double expose the film so we’d both be in the shot. It was kind of narcissistic, but also fun. We thought it’d be more fun to shoot other people and have them bring music they wanted to dance to. Doing that was a fun two weeks. We danced a lot.

But there were two reasons I didn’t like the finished product. First, it felt a little too easy as an idea. I kept wanting to add another concept, and Leanne was fighting me on that. I never figured out a good enough concept to juxtapose, though. That was one reason. The other reason is that the image quality is in some strange, mediocre place. It wasn’t great production quality on the shooting and printing, and it wasn’t totally crappy, and I felt it should be one or the other. But maybe people looking at the book don’t even think of that. We made a thousand copies, and I wanted to drive across the country and put them in public bathrooms and Salvation Armys. People love that book.

We want to make a bunch of different kinds of books, but, usually, the packaging and the title tell you how seriously to take the book. Dancing Pictures, that’s what it is: It’s this paperback you put in your bathroom.

Of course, you also publish other people’s books. How do you decide what to publish?
We’ve been getting so many submissions these days. Most of the books we’ve published in the past have been people we sought out. If I can’t see anyone else publishing this great photographer, then we’ll go after them. For example, Mike Slack’s book of Polaroids, OK OK OK, he emailed to me. His wife had bought my book Sunbird, because she thought he’d like the pictures. So originally, we started emailing just about photography, and then eventually he sent me a bunch of Polaroids. He wasn’t even pitching a book. But when I saw all these Polaroids he had done, I decided to do it. It’s been a big seller. That book is a little more accessible to a broader audience. The pictures have a candy quality. They have other layers too, but you don’t have to go deep into it. You can totally appreciate it on a graphic level.

OK OK OK is a fairly accessible book; people look at it and think, “Oh, it’s Polaroids, I could do that”—whether they could or not. But not all your releases are like that. Some of the books you publish are much less accessible, even difficult, if you will.

Yeah, Jubilee, by Ted Fair, we knew was going to be different. I edited that selection from 400 or something prints, and it’s a hard one for people to read because it’s a book that needs to be read in a specific way. People often don’t read photo books like a story or a poem. And that book is a poem; each page is like a word in the poem. You have to read them all, and you get a sense or a feeling from that, from the four different motifs that go throughout, repeating themselves.

On a book like that, would you ever consider putting in an introduction or explanatory text?

No, we’re pretty minimal with that, although we did it for Gus Powell’s book, The Company of Strangers. He put a long quote in the beginning that serves as an introduction, and then he wrote an afterword. There’s a forthcoming book where we might have to do something with more text. It’s a Chinese photographer, and the work is very Chinese, but I want people here to see it. I think there might need to be some writing, just to give you supplemental information so that some of the subject matter will make more sense.

It’s easy for people to understand what editors do for books or magazines, but when you edit something like Jubilee, what are you doing? How do you edit? It’s not as if there’s a clear right and wrong, like grammar, which is editing in its most simple and basic sense.

The way I usually do it is I’ll take a box of photos and go through them. At some point, I’ll start to feel something—and this sounds real new-agey, doesn’t it—I’ll start to feel some narrative or idea that ties certain pictures together, so I’ll pull those out. Then I’ll go through the whole stack again 10 times, and at some point there’s one stack that’s out and one stack that starts to feel like something. Then I show the photographer, and we talk about it. As the process goes on, it’s totally refined.

Some photographers can’t edit their own work. All they can do is produce it, and they’ll admit it. They may be fixed in the moment of each image and they can’t see a bigger package or a bigger context for them. Or they’ll have a hard time not using pictures that they’re personally attached to. I don’t think a lot of photographers think about editing, and it’s so important. But schools don’t have classes about it and there’s no place to learn it.

When you get edited by a magazine that’s publishing your photos, do you get more involved with the whole process than most photographers, because you are an editor yourself as well as the photographer?
I work with the art director. Usually, we both work on it and then pass it back and forth. It’s different because you’re already given a story to work from. A lot of jobs end up about half from my archives and half pictures I shot after reading the article.

Do you take direction from the art departments, or do you not care and take the photos you want to take?
I try to get as much direction as I can. I try to separate the pictures I take into different categories: editorial, personal, and advertising. It helps me deal with it. There are certain jobs, like ad jobs, where I’ll just consider myself a tool. I understand that these people have something they’re trying to do, and I’m the hired help, I’m the plumber. I’ve done some ad jobs where you would never be able to tell it was me who shot it. Some of them are pretty big productions—there’ll be a van, assistants, caterers, props people, and stylists. Those are really fun. I enjoy those jobs. You’re running around making sure everyone is doing their thing. I’ve gotten kind of relaxed about it. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it all has your name on it in the end.

Chris Gage, a production editor at John Wiley & Sons, is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. Photo stolen from www.jasonfulford.com, which presumably stole it from a contributor’s column somewhere else.

As publisher and editorial director of The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, Victor Navasky has had the peculiar challenge of turning a liberal journal of political opinion into a profitable enterprise, and now he’s doing it at a time when dissent is a dirty word. Of course, this isn’t the first time Navasky has guided The Nation through an uncomfortable political era; he started as editor of the magazine in 1978. But this has been an interesting time: In September of last year, Navasky watched Christopher Hitchens, one of The Nation‘s longtime columnists, depart the magazine amid very public allegations that its stance on Iraq was morally reprehensible. Navasky, for his part, places less importance on star power and more emphasis on the power of ideas. The former New York Times editor sat down with mediabistro.com to discuss liberal bias in the media, the role of opinion journals in politics, and why he prefers not to counsel the Democratic party on the personality it should seek in a candidate.

Birthdate: July 5, 1932
Hometown: New York City
First section of Sunday Times: The front section

You started out a long time ago working in magazines and then at the Times. Would you talk a little bit about how you went from there to The Nation?
Well, I founded my own magazine when I was at the Yale Law School, called Monocle. Its motto was, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” When we graduated, we took the magazine with us, and we tried to make a go of it as a business. While we were putting it out, we all started freelancing for other places. I ended up freelancing mostly for The New York Times Book Review and the Sunday magazine. Eventually, they asked me to work there as an editor, which I didn’t do at first. I left the Times to write what became Naming Names, which is a book about the blacklist during the McCarthy years. In order to write that, I had to read through all the magazines that were being published in this country during the ’40s and ’50s. I concluded that The Nation got it in a way that no other magazine did, in the sense that it understood what was going on in this country during what we call the domestic cold war.

And then I took a vacation from journalism and my book, and for a year I was Ramsey Clark’s campaign mismanager when he ran for the Senate from New York. During that period I got to know Ham Fish. Two things happened. One was that The Nation, it was reported in the papers, was for sale. I thought it was a great thing, and I spoke to a number of people about acquiring it. Part of me thought it would be great at some point down the road, but I really was dedicated to finishing this book that I quit the Times for, and I had a long way to go. Ham came back and said, “I’m interested in helping to do this on one condition.” I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “That you would be the editor.” I agreed to do it provided Ham still had an option to go forward and be the person who bought it when the time came. That’s essentially how I got there. I also got a call from The New Republic asking whether I was interested in resuming what I used to do at the Times, but by this time I was involved in the conversations with Ham and The Nation, so I told them it probably wasn’t a good idea.

You brought up The New Republic, and I wanted to ask you about the recent L.A. Times article, in which the publisher of TNR said that The Nation is a magazine that carries a banner for a certain set of people with political beliefs. I was curious to know what your response to that is, because that’s been a criticism that people have against The Nation.
I’m not going to respond to that, because I haven’t read the article, but I will respond to the general criticism. If you said to me, “What do you say if people say The Nation carries a banner for X or Y?” I say, “Yeah, at different points in time the magazine takes positions that are generally in opposition to the prevailing political culture from a set of values which go back a long time, certainly for the last 50 or 75 years.” It changed a lot over the years, but nevertheless, it’s been pretty steady in its court of civil rights and civil liberties and in its preference for non-military solutions to political problems. We are a dissenting publication, which doesn’t mean we do it because it’s the thing to do.

Having said all of that, there is a great deal of dispute within our pages and among our people, especially our regular contributors. Hitchens quit, which I thought was too bad, but nevertheless, for the last 10 years of his affiliation with the magazine, he’d been carrying on interesting arguments with our regulars. I don’t accept this idea that there’s a party line or that it’s dogmatic. On the other hand, it certainly is true that—we had a bad joke for many years, “If it’s bad for the country, it’s good for The Nation.” And people ask me how we’re doing now, and I say, “Better than ever.” However, it would be a big mistake to attribute all of the good things that have happened to this magazine in terms of circulation exclusively to the war. The war is certainly a significant part of it, but you have to give some credit to the editors of this place and the writers of this place. If it weren’t doing its job, it could be anti-war and people wouldn’t look forward to reading the magazine. That, to me, is a critical part of it.

You mentioned the editors and writers. About the time Hitchens left, Naomi Klein was added as a columnist, Adam Shatz joined as the literary editor, and Katrina started writing on the web a lot more frequently. Do you think those additions in the past year have—
I think Adam is going to be a great force in the magazine. The Naomi thing had been in the works before we knew that Hitch wanted to move on. The web is interesting. I’m not a web person. I was sort of astonished to discover that about four years ago we got 2,500 new subscribers over the web for the hard copy magazine. That could dramatically alter the way magazines like this work. Or maybe it’s like Howard Dean, it works for some and not for other magazines; you need a passionate issue that people are going to rally around to come to it. And certainly Katrina’s contribution to that can’t be underestimated. So that’s an element. Even if there were no war, that’s an element. She is a voice of sanity from a political perspective that was so marginalized earlier in the life of political culture that they wouldn’t let it get on television.

There’s a lot of talk about how there aren’t enough outlets for liberal media. What do you think of those criticisms?
I think Eric Alterman is right in his basic thesis in his book What Liberal Media? It’s a myth that the left dominated the media all these years. It didn’t and it doesn’t. The places that Katrina and David Corn get invited on, the places that are hospitable to them, for the most part tend to be cable networks. You have these shows like Hardball, which are shouting matches. They have very low audience rating compared to the non-cable networks, compared to the Sunday morning shows. How does that translate into magazine circulation or visibility, it’s hard to say. Bill Kristol is on television virtually every week on behalf of The Weekly Standard. Circulation of the Standard, again I haven’t read this, but my impression is that it would be under 50,000, or it’s in that neighborhood—and they have Murdoch’s distribution at their disposal. So television by itself doesn’t translate into sales for a journal of opinion.

With the 2004 election approaching, is there any idea of whom The Nation might endorse for president? Do you think that candidates who are perceived as middle-of-the-road have a better shot?
First of all, I don’t have a candidate. Number two, I don’t particularly feel qualified or interested in advising the Democrats on what qualities a candidate should have. I do feel interested in talking about issues of policy and evaluating candidates by where they stand on issues of policy. Magazines like The Nation, The New Republic, National Review, it seems to me, their least important contribution is who they support for president of the United States. Their most important contribution is their ability to influence the intellectual culture and currents of the time through their analysis of issues and struggles that go on among classes and interests, and that’s different from the horse race.

One last question about the role of The Nation and its influence on culture. Is that going to be a struggle to maintain in the future?
I think that it’s a struggle to maintain. I think that E.L. Godkin, the founder of this magazine, came up with a formula that has endured since 1865, partly because it’s a very low budget formula. We don’t have slick paper; I hope we never do. We have color, which we didn’t used to have. We don’t want the magazine to ever be hostage to production costs, and yet you want to make it as accessible to as many people as possible, especially the next generation that isn’t used to publications like this. It’s going to have ups and downs, but if you take the position that the ultimate test of the success of a magazine is survival, and then you look around and see that publications like Life, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Look, with circulations in the millions have gone under, and this little thing, and The New Republic, which is half our age, and National Review which is a third our age, are still around, that’s the best answer to your question.

Rebecca Ruiz, a former mediabistro.com editorial intern and former Nation intern, is a freelance writer in New York. She currently works as an executive assistant at Demos, a think tank and advocacy group. Photo courtesy of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

The first female editor of the New York Times editorial page does not seem, at first blush, a natural author for a history of American women in the home. But Gail Collins—who earlier this year was frequently mentioned in media columns as a candidate for the job Howell Raines left vacant—has a story to tell that’s as much about other famous firsts as it is about “the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.” Collins’ first book, Scorpion Tongues, was a snappy history of gossip and politics in America. Book magazine recently called America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines “a remarkable history, which unites the efforts of female sharp-shooters and channel swimmers, novelists and abolitionists, immigrants and defense workers to create a triumphant, kaleidoscopic self-definition of American women through their actions and achievements.” mediabistro.com talked to Collins recently about late-night writing, very large women, and—of course—Jayson Blair.

I’m going to ask the most obvious question first—why this book?
You always write the book that you want to read. I’d always wanted a book about what happened to women throughout our history that could have all the big moments that you needed to have in it, but would be told from the ground up instead of from the great heroine down. I’m one of those people who always wants to know, when something great happens, where they went to the bathroom.

Were you a history major in college?
No; I’ve always been journalist. There are an enormous number of really great women historians out there, but most of the stuff they write tends to either be really narrow—you know, like midwives in the 16th century—or else it’s academic; it speaks to great theories. My theory was that if my researchers and I could read as much of that stuff as we could get our hands on, I could write the story, then give the readers the trail that I took if they wanted to go back and find out more.

Who is the reader for this that you see?
I had two people in mind, actually. One was my niece, who’s in high school, and I threw in a lot of stuff that, maybe if I’d been writing for my friends, I would have figured they already knew. But I wanted to put in everything so that someone like Becka would really be able to see the whole story. And also for my mother, who’s just a traditional housewife, and I wanted it to be a book that didn’t denigrate what they did, and that understood how much sense it made through most of our history to want to be in the house—that that was the place where you had the most power and control.

How do you find time to work on something like this—do you get up at 5?
It’s funny, because my deputy is a very well-disciplined, morning guy, and he would get up at 4 or 5, go running first, then do his book and come in. I come home at night, stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, then come crawling in half-dead—that’s my kind of thing. It took me awhile to get adjusted to not doing it—I would go home at night and stare at the computer and play Free Cell or something.

What were some of your favorite stories from the book?
I was really taken by the Gilded Age, which was morally a very bad period. It really gave me a kick that that was one period in American history where the ideal beauty type was a very large woman. There’s one letter I have from a guy out West who reports back that he was watching this woman tight-rope walker in Virginia City, and he says, “She had the most beautiful shape of anyone I ever saw—enormous thighs!”

I was also really taken with the early part of the 19th century, which was probably the most repressive period for the society’s vision of what women were supposed to be. What gave me such a charge is how many women figured out ways to work around all these rules without appearing to be breaking any of them—either by saying, “Well, I’m a woman and therefore not interested in politics, but as a mother…,” or by traveling around the country giving speeches about how a woman’s place is in the home.

Your name was floated as a possible dark horse candidate for the executive editor position…
Well, it was a lovely thought, although, given the fact that I haven’t been in anyone’s newsroom for about 20 years, the idea that I would be the right person to run the newsroom didn’t make any sense at all. But I thought it was really sweet that people mentioned me.

Do you miss the newsroom?
No, I’ve always been an opinion person for virtually my entire career, and most regular civilian people don’t understand how carefully we divide this world between the news side and the opinion side. If you’re in it, it’s not the same thing, and I’ve always been an opinion person.

I was so amazed when I realized that Jayson Blair was only in June—it seems now like much longer ago.
When I got this job two years ago, my thought was, “Well, I may be a reasonable person to have picked to be the editorial-page editor, because I’m very good at taking boring issues and making them interesting, and we’re at a really boring point in American history.” Since I’ve been editor, we’ve had the terrorist attack, we’ve had two wars, we had the entire roiling of our own shop here with the Jayson Blair thing, we had a blackout, a few weeks ago a worm got into our system and was sending letters out to the whole world saying, “Thank you for your Op-Ed contribution.” It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been doing this particular job for two years, because, gosh, it seems like we’ve had enough adventures to last a lifetime.

Has that changed the editorial page?
The things that happen downstairs didn’t really—except that we’re all part of the paper, so of course everybody was taking everything to heart. I mean, I’ve worked for many papers where a reporter went rogue and started making stuff up, but normally they just fire the reporter and move on. The degree to which everybody here went into trauma over the Jayson Blair thing does really tell you how incredibly seriously they take their jobs here. But we’re seven floors away from the news operation, and we really don’t interact that much with the people downstairs. Howell Raines had been my predecessor here, and he was just a stupendous editorial-page editor, so we all loved him—but we weren’t really in the loop.

And in terms of the major events—what changes have those wrought?
Well, gee, we talked a lot more about foreign policy than I had really planned on. When the Afghan war began, I was horrified until I realized I had two people on the board who had covered wars in Afghanistan. There’s almost always this incredible depth you can rely on when stuff happens.

Has the tenor of reader submissions changed at all?
Right after 9/11 we were just getting so much stuff—the poor letters people were getting, I think it was, 500 emails an hour.

You mention in all of your bios that you’re the first woman editor of the editorial page—is there any defensive aspect to the book, or is it more of a celebration?
It’s absolutely a celebration, I hope. When I was growing up, we looked at women’s history in particular, I think, as a great struggle, because that’s where we were. Looking at it right now, the thing that really knocks you out is how canny women were. It makes you feel like you’re sitting on the shoulders of these funky women who are always playing by the rules, but managing to wiggle around them in very smart ways.

I have talked to various female journalists—never at the Times—about hitting various glass ceilings. Do you have any stories that you’re willing to share?
I was at a panel last weekend, and a woman in the audience basically asked me a glass-ceiling question about how women still, after all this struggle, cannot get the very best jobs. Walter Isaacson was sitting next to me and I could hear him mumbling, “Hell of a person to ask why women can’t get good jobs—she’s got the best job in American journalism.”

There wasn’t much talk about this during the Jayson Blair thing, but do you feel like you’ve been the beneficiary of affirmative action for women at any point?
Sure. I think that there were undoubtedly times when I got stuff, especially when I was just starting out as a columnist. But the other thing I’ve learned is that there’s always something when anybody gets any job, so you can’t really break your heart over the fact that your combination worked for you at that particular point.

Lizzie Skurnick is a writer and editor in Baltimore and a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. You can buy America’s Women at Amazon.com. Photo credit: The New York Times.

“The Magazine Reader” is a biweekly column in The Washington Post‘s Style section, and it’s one of the few places in which the fine art of magazine writing and editing gets its due—and its comeuppance. Since 1996, the man doing that due-ing (and, less poetically, that come-upping) has been Peter Carlson, magazine lover, former magazine writer, and Style reporter, and he writes about magazines large and small with savage wit and genuine admiration.

It’s a column with a long history at the Post, invented back in 1947 by a woman named Katharine Graham, who just happened to be the publisher’s daughter. Later, as publisher in her own right, Graham led the Post to national prominence by supporting her reporters and editors through such momentous events as Watergate and the Pentagon Papers saga, and Carlson quips he took the “Magazine Reader” gig with the hope that he’d get to be publisher one day, too.

Whether or not he’ll ever occupy the executive suite, Carlson describes himself as an old-fashioned print guy. He started his journalism career at the Boston Herald American, endured “about a year and half of unemployment-slash-freelance-writing-slash-starving,” and then moved on to People magazine before joining the Post as a Sunday magazine writer in 1986. Carlson’s a mag fan who’d spend a great deal of time reading them even if he wasn’t paid for his critiques, and he spoke with mediabistro.com at the end of September.

Birthdate: September 1, 1952
Hometown: Syosset, New York
Lives now: Rockville, Maryland
First section of the Sunday New York Times: “None. When I got this ‘Magazine Reader’ gig, I had to read a lot of magazines and so some other reading had to go. I figured it was either books or the New York Times, and the Times went.”

What do you try to do with “The Magazine Reader”?
When I got it, they didn’t really tell me what to do. It was wide-open territory. And what I perceive to be what they want is to tell readers what’s in magazines, and what’s good, what isn’t—and not, for instance, that Joe Blow has been named the assistant managing editor of GQ this week. I get a lot of press releases on that, but I don’t pay much attention to it unless it’s someone who had a big impact on magazines who’s retiring, like Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner. And since the Post doesn’t give me any guidelines, I treat it as a way to write about interesting things and have some fun, and I try to write funny a good bit of the time.

You succeed.
I succeed often enough, I guess. Most of the time I’m writing feature stories, and this is something different. I get to choose exactly what I’m going to do, I get to choose how I’m going to do it, and I get to shoot off my mouth.

How do you go about it? How many magazines do you read, for example?
Well, I skim many magazines. I must get at least an average of 15 or 20 a day in the mail. Actually read? I look very closely at probably 40 or 50 magazines regularly. I’m always looking at The New Yorker and Esquire and Harper’s and The Atlantic and all the ones that would pop to mind, and then I also haunt the newsstands and look for the more obscure stuff. You could go crazy just writing about the top 40 magazines in America. So I look for weird stuff. I’m going to do a thing in October on Haunted Attraction—every industry has a magazine, and the haunted house industry does, too, so I’m going to do something around Halloween on their magazine. It has wonderful ads for severed heads that drip fake blood—I can’t resist that.

Do you just look over magazines until you find something you think is worth writing about, or do you have any kind of schedule?
It looks random, but it’s somewhat less random than it looks. I have two columns, basically, during the monthly shelf life of a magazine. So in one of the two I try to tell people, “Here’s three magazines, and two of them may have good stories in them, and the other one may look good but is actually horseshit.” That will be more of the reader-service one, and then the other one will go a little bit more afield and look for something odd.

How did you get the job?
I was working at the Post magazine as a writer there, and Bill Powers, who had been doing the column, left to go to The New Republic. There was a posting saying, “Who wants to do the magazine column?” When I lived in Boston, a guy named George Frazier used to do it in the Globe, and then he died and was replaced by George V. Higgins, the novelist. I always enjoyed reading them, and I always thought, “Boy, this is a fucking easy job—the guy gets to read magazines and write about them. That’s got to be one of the greatest jobs for somebody who loves magazines.” I’ve since found by actually doing it that it’s a little more difficult than it might look. But when they posted it I applied, and I think a couple of other people did. They gave us each a tryout and they picked me.

At the Post Magazine you wrote memorably—and scathingly—about Tom Clancy. For that piece you invented an alter ego—Carl Peterson—as a way of imitating Clancy’s writing style. How did you come up with that, and how did you get away with it?
He has his alter ego in his books, and I wrote is as a parody of his type of writing, so as “Carl Peterson” I came to interview him and saw his tank in his yard and all that. Just to show you the power of the press, I thought that was about as good a comic attack on an author and his latest book as I could possibly do. A lot of people thought it was pretty funny and scathing. It ran in the Washington Post Magazine, with a circulation of like 1.2 million in the Washington, D.C. area. And when the book it had skewered came out, it debuted at No. 1 on the Washington Post bestseller list. So there you have it.

Now that you’ve moved from magazine writing to magazine criticism, how much heat do you take from colleagues?
Not as much as you think. People I have written scathingly about are not pleased with it, but you expect that. Some of them have responded in some forum or another that ends up on Romenesko and somebody tells me about it, but it hasn’t been that bad. I certainly don’t mind; if I’m living by the sword I don’t mind if people use it against me. I’m kind of surprised there’s been as little as there has.

You’ve written a good deal on trends in the magazine industry, and you seem to have a particular affinity for writing about magazines named after celebrities.
The celebrity naming thing I’ve had a lot of fun with. In the inaugural issue of each one I usually count the number of pictures of the guy, and then all I have to do is call up my clips and compare it with all the others. I think I may be more amused by that than the readers, but it’s kind of fun. They keep on coming. We have a celebrity culture, so I guess celebrities figure their name is a brand, and they spin it off as a magazine. Do an album, do a movie, do a TV show, do a magazine—why not? So I suspect we’ll see more; they seem to be doing well. Oprah seems to be doing OK with it. I love how Essence put Oprah on the cover this month. I’m wondering whether Oprah is worried that people will run by the newsstand and grab the wrong picture of Oprah off of it and buy the wrong magazine. I guess she’s above that.

What about lists?
They keep on coming. Editors perceive—and they may be right—that the attention span of readers is shorter than it used to be, and it’s a very easy way for a writer to package information. Instead of an essay in which you describe the 19 most fascinating coming-of-age novels, you just list them and have a paragraph on each. You get your point across very fast. It’s great for lazy writers, and it’s great for lazy editors, and it’s great for lazy readers, so I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon. And some of them are great. But there’s an awful lot of them.

What are your must-read magazines?
I love The New Yorker, and the only perk I have on this job is that The New Yorker is delivered to me every Sunday morning by a man to drives it to my house. I thought I was really hot shit until early one Sunday morning he delivered the wrong copy to me, and it was addressed to Noah Adams of NPR. I mean, Noah Adams is a fine human being, but we’re not talking about Henry Kissinger here. I love the new Atlantic—Michael Kelly made it really great, and it’s continued to be great. I like Harper’s, although lately I haven’t been as turned on as before. GQ has got a new editor, and it looks interesting. And I love The Week, the newsmagazine put out by the Felix Dennis empire that gave us Maxim. It’s just very quick rewrites of news stories. They’ll usually do what conflicting columnists will say about an issue—it’s a quick read, and it’s great.

That leads me to my last question. Since you love lists so much, give me your list of the Top 5 Great Magazines We’ve Never Heard Of.
My god, you’d have to let me look through my files. Can I get back to you on this?

Yeah, let’s do it by e-mail.

[Later, by email…]

Peter Carlson’s List of Eight Great (Sort Of) Magazines Nobody’s Ever Heard Of:

Outre: The articles cover the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture from the last century or so. The ads are great, too—strange stuff like Army VD movies and driver’s-ed horror-story movies.

Punk Planet: The only punk magazine worth reading, even if you’re not a punk. A sort of new-millennium Rolling Stone.

Modern Drunkard: A funny magazine devoted to the highs and lows of getting bombed, plastered, looped, shitfaced, and three sheets to the wind. With great ’40s-style graphics.

The Door The subtitle sums it up well: “The World’s Pretty Much Only Religious Satire Magazine.” It also has some serious religious stories and it keeps track of the weird antics of our zanier televangelists.

Paranoia: A magazine for conspiracy theorists and, yes, paranoids. The magazine that dared ask the question, “Did Nostradamus Predict Osama Bin Laden?”

Placebo Journal: A humor magazine for doctors that reveals that the sound you hear upon leaving your doctor’s office is your doctor laughing at you.

Wrapped in Plastic: The world’s best magazine devoted to the cinema of David Lynch. And, I hope, the world’s only magazine devoted to the cinema of David Lynch.

Trip: The Journal of Psychedelic Culture. The fact that this is on my list might explain something about the brain that could compile this list.

Dan Dupont edits the online news service InsideDefense.com and contributes regularly to Scientific American.

Like most editors, John Capouya is not well known to the general public. There are, however, a legion of writers and reporters at publications like The New York Times and Newsweek who would attest to the high quality of his editorial handiwork. Now readers can see his talents directly: This month, Capouya, who is presently the deputy editor of Smart Money, released his first book, an exercise guide titled Real Men Do Yoga: 21 Star Athletes Reveal Their Secrets For Strength, Flexibility, and Peak Performance. He spoke to mediabistro.com recently about his book, his career, and yoga at the office.

I wanted to begin this interview by saying “namaste.” But I have no idea what it means, and whether a real man would say it.
The literal translation from Sanskrit is something like “the sacred in me salutes the sacred in you.” But in the context of my book, it could just as well mean “the real man in me salutes the real man in you.”

But why bring “realness” into this? Does yoga have an image problem among men?
It was men who invented yoga in India 5,000 years ago. But, obviously, in this country, it was mostly women who got there first, attracted by the physical benefits and, in some cases, the New Age ethos—so many men just assumed it was a women’s thing. But that’s really changing. There was just a Harris poll that estimated that there are now about 15 million Americans doing yoga and that 3.5 million of them are men. That’s about 23 percent.

How long have you yourself been doing yoga, and did the idea for the book come to you in a moment of ecstatic meditation?
I’ve been practicing about three years, and the book idea occurred to me in two moments. After I took my first few classes, I went to the bookstore to see if I could find a book which would help deepen my practice, because I wasn’t really understanding what was going on in class. What I saw in the bookstore was a sea of books with attractive women on the covers, wearing leotards and looking very serenely out into the distance. And having come from a yoga class that included plenty of men and was very rigorous, I just felt like there is nothing here for me. But I wasn’t smart enough to immediately seize on the marketing opportunity. It wasn’t until later when a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you do a book about yoga for men, you’re so into it?” I started writing the book about a year and a half ago. Since I have a day job at Smart Money, I’d work on it at night and on the weekends, and it took about eight months.

It must reflect my own stereotypical ideas about yoga that I was quite surprised to read in your book about all the famous athletes who now do it—and even more surprised by the pictures of them in action. Dan Marino does Downward Dog—who knew?
But it makes perfect sense. Who has more at stake in staying healthy than these guys, whose bodies are worth millions of dollars, whose entire careers depend on them being in the best shape possible?

This being mediabistro.com, it might be helpful to some readers to know whether yoga offers any ergonomic benefits.
Speaking as a desk jockey, I think it definitely does. It can help correct imbalances in your musculature and your spinal alignment, which are common problems for those hunched over a computer all day.

What do you do at Smart Money?
I’m in charge of the editorial that we do that isn’t about hardcore investing in stocks and bonds. We are a personal-finance magazine and we take that to mean almost anything that shows up on your personal or your family’s balance sheet, from travel to credit cards to college tuition, along with real estate and travel.

Since you’ve worked for a number of prestigious newspapers and magazines, your career path would probably be very instructive to a lot people starting out. So how did you start out?
I graduated from the Columbia j-school in 1981 and then became an editorial assistant at a Sport magazine, which doesn’t exist anymore. I was there for about 4 years and I worked my way up to a senior editor position. It was a great experience. There were a lot of talented people there, including David Granger, who is now the editor of Esquire, and David Bauer, who is the number two editor at Sports Illustrated. We had a good time and brought in a lot of good writers.

So right from the start you got on the editing track?
I did, but that was because there wasn’t a writing track; it was basically a freelance-written magazine.

Was there ever a point in your career where you detoured into writing?
After my four years at Sport, I left there with a contract to write a certain number of stories a year for them and I did that for two and a half years, mostly writing about pro basketball. I found freelancing enjoyable but a very tough go financially. The clients I was working for seemed to pay as much as any other ones but I still couldn’t make a good living. Then I had a chance to edit again. A friend of mine was starting up a regional magazine on Long Island called Long Island Monthly, which doesn’t exist anymore either, and I went to work for him, and I’ve been an editor ever since.

In your experience, what are some of the main differences between being a writer and an editor? And how would you advise someone who is just starting out and torn between which track to pursue?
I think that younger people should try both if they can because its something that you have to experience and I don’t know that you’ll know the answer until you do. I learned that I seemed to have a knack for editing. I found it very enjoyable to try to assume the voice and the mission of writers and help them along in ways that they seem to find agreeable. At its best, it’s a collaboration that benefits everyone, and there is a good deal of satisfaction to be had from the process of making things better. Earlier in my career, I found writing to be an agonizing, nerve-wracking process. I would stay up all night and rewrite endlessly and probably fruitlessly. With the editing, I got to use my intellect but it wasn’t so much of a neurotic process.

And how was it writing the book?
It came out very easily and enjoyably, so perhaps I’ve gotten over whatever it was that made writing such torture. It may be that I don’t hold the bar as high as I used to for myself. But I am happy with the situation. However many copies the book sells, I feel like it helped me get my voice back. What you do at a magazine, and what is great about it, is the teamwork. But at some point, if you have any sort of writer in you, you want to do something that is wholly your own. And that’s a challenge not only for magazine editors but also for magazine writers who must deal with editors who have their own ideas for how a story should read. So I feel like books are the refuge of the individual voice.

Among the places you’ve sacrificed your own voice for the greater good are The New York Times and Newsweek. What did you do at those places?
At the Times, I started as an editor in the Sunday Styles section and became the lead editor there. So it was assigning and editing feature stories, overseeing photo and layout, that kind of thing. At Newsweek, I was what they call the lifestyle editor. Which meant I oversaw a wide variety of beats, including television, family life, sports, and health. So one week I’d be editing a television package and then the next week I’d be on a cover story about asthma in childhood. The variety was great. The bad side of that was that so much fell under my collection of rubrics that it felt like I was always doing a cover story on something or other and it was a very demanding job. On the other hand, when you’re doing a lot of important stories at a place like Newsweek, you feel a bit like you’re helping to clarify public discussion and that is something that can be very gratifying. Plus, the writers were very good, and that really made it a pleasure.

Who were some of those writers?
There was John Leland, who is now at the Times. There was Jerry Adler, a fantastic writer who is still one of Newsweek‘s stars. I also worked with Rick Marin, who just published a book about his bachelor days called Cad.

Did you make an appearance in the book?
Yeah, I was the voice of reason who would listen to Rick’s adventures, shake my head, and sort of try to get him to see that there was another way of doing things.

And presumably you failed?
Totally.

Once you yourself decided to write a book, how hard was it for you to land an agent and then a publisher?
Finding an agent wasn’t a problem. I had a friend who introduced me to his agent, we got together, discussed some ideas, and he agreed to take me on. But my advice to others would be to try to speak to several agents before choosing one. And then go with an agent who is not only competent but also has a style of agenting that suits you. Some agents are hand-holders; others are sharks, focused less on the writer than on the deal. And you’ve got to make sure you’re comfortable with the kind you get. I’m saying this with only the experience of having written one book for one agent, but that is what I gather.

And how was it finding a publisher?
Well, I liked the idea. It seemed like such a no-brainer: Yoga was a big trend among women; now more and more men were doing it, and they were going to need a book. But no one wanted to touch it. I eventually found a very good publisher and it looks like things are working out very well, but there were a lot of rejections.

Who is your publisher?
My publisher is called Health Communications. They’re best known for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold about a zillion books, give or take.

So how long will it be until we see Yoga for the Soul?
It’s under consideration, as they say.

Between you, me, and everyone else who reads this column, do you ever do some meditation or yoga poses in your office?
I have to say I have done yoga in here a few times. Right now, in fact. There are some poses that you can do when you are sitting down in your chair. There’s one that called the Easy Cow Face pose. I can’t imagine why anyone would call it that. I didn’t include it in my book, and if I did I would have called it something else. It’s basically a stretch reaching your arms behind your back—one from above, one from below—and clasping them in the middle between your shoulder blades. Then sometimes I get up and just do some stretching in the office when I feel like I’ve been in the chair for too long.

This Cow Face thing—do you do it with the door closed?
Absolutely.

Eric Messinger has never done yoga, but he does write for such publications as The New York Times, InStyle, Real Simple, and Parents. You can buy Real Men Do Yoga at Amazon.com.

Kate Betts has been remarkably successful: She was Fairchild’s Paris bureau chief by 27, Anna Wintour’s protege at Vogue, and then editor of Harper’s Bazaar at 35—the youngest editor ever to take over a fashion magazine. But she’s also faced remarkably intense scrutiny, even for the catty world of fashion glossies. She was called a traitor when she left Vogue, and at Bazaar she had to fill the shoes of beloved editor Liz Tilberis, who’d died months earlier. Her redesign was widely criticized, newsstand sales slipped (they’d been declining even before Betts took over), and she was fired in 2001.

But if there’s anything the magazine industry likes better than a spectacular failure, it’s a spectacular comeback, and Betts is ready to make hers. After a year and a half spent freelancing for the New York Times “Style” section, she just bowed her first issue of Time magazine’s new, biannual Style & Design supplement (one previous issue was published in February). She spoke to mediabistro.com last week about starting from the bottom, surviving the spotlight, and coming out on top.

Birthdate: March 8, 1964
Hometown: New York City
First section of the Sunday Times: “I’m embarrassed to admit it’s the real-estate section.”

You’ve taken over an established magazine and now you’re essentially rolling out a startup. How are the pressures different?
The pressure of Bazaar was, obviously, that venue existed for so long, in such a high-profile way, under Liz Tilberis before I got there, and this magazine didn’t really have that high of a profile or that strong of a footing in this market. They’d only done one issue in the U.S. before I did this one. And the pressure was to create something that was going to be interesting to the Time reader and also to the fashion industry, two very different audiences.

I wanted to give the Time reader an inside look at fashion but not make it too obscure and too over-the-top or detailed in a way that wouldn’t reach them. And, to be honest, that’s always been my interest in fashion—I’ve always been interested in more of a journalistic approach, even when I was at Vogue. When I started writing for the “Style” section, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who actually read the section. So it turned me on to writing for a much larger audience than I was used to. The excitement and pressure of this job is to speak to millions and millions of readers, as opposed to people who were just looking for fashion information.

You say you want Style & Design to appeal to the Time reader and also the fashion industry. What about the readers of fashion magazines?
Well that, to me, is the fashion industry, or an extension of it. When I say “the fashion industry,” I mean the industry but also people who are looking for fashion information and who already have a lot of fashion education.

What was it like going from writing for the Times as a freelancer to starting something practically from scratch?
I had been working at Time Inc. full-time since January, so I wasn’t like, getting out of my pajamas for the first time in two years. Almost! But I had to put together a little team. I brought the art director, Terry Koppel, with me, and I brought Andrea Ferronato, who I’d worked with at Vogue, as the photo editor. So we had that capsule team, and we had some great people here at Time who were assigned to help us move the issue through the system, because the system here is really gigantic and different. The most exciting thing for me, as a writer, was being able to use some of the writers at Time who I love, like Richard Lacayo and Michele Orecklin and Joel Stein, and to draw on the global bureaus. No other magazine that I’ve worked for has that kind of resource.

Are there other ways that the culture at Time is different from those at Vogue and Bazaar?
There is a great camaraderie here that I’ve never experienced. At fashion magazines, there’s a very distinct kind of ambience. Everyone who works here is, first of all, incredibly smart, which was sort of a shock. And, second of all, they’re all really helpful, and you do get the feeling that everyone’s working together toward the same goal—it’s not like this sort of backbiting thing. It creates a really nice can-do spirit, and Time staffers have worked together on much bigger and more important projects, and pulled together as a team in ways that are incredibly impressive.

Do you have a lot of give and take with the editors of Time, or does Style & Design have its own team?
There is a lot of give and take. All the editors here have been extremely helpful. The thing about the writers here is that they’re pulled onto all different stories at any time of day, so it’s hard to get their time. But the people that did end up writing for the issue were incredibly quick and professional about it.

Style & Design comes out twice a year. Will it occupy you full time, or will you be doing other work?
I’ve also been writing for the weekly edition of Time. At first I just did little trend things in the “Personal Time” section, and this week I have a story about Sofia Coppola in the “Arts & Movies” section, and I’m working on a few other things. We’re thinking about doing more frequency for Time Style & Design—we’re meeting on that right now.

One thing I found interesting about Style & Design was its meta approach: You’re covering the fashion magazines in a way you would never see elsewhere—you’d never read in Vogue about the photographer who shoots covers for Bazaar.
Yeah, it’s an interesting place. That is something we discovered as we were going along. I’ve always worked at either Vogue or Bazaar, so I didn’t really think about being in the middle or above those two. So it suddenly dawned on us that we were in the position to cover everyone.

Had you maintained a lot of your connections at those magazines, or did you have to go back and rebuild bridges?
I’d been in touch with a lot of the people I worked with at Bazaar, and some of them contributed to this issue. Mostly I just had to get back into the business. I was out of it for a year and a half, and I hadn’t gone to that many shows. I went to the menswear shows for the first time in Milan in June, and I went to the couture shows.

You know, it doesn’t change that much, the fashion business. It’s a business predicated on change, but the people in the business don’t really change. So everybody was pretty much in the same place as when I left. And I’d kept in touch with a few people just from writing for the “Style” section. It’s weird—I’ve always felt like an outsider inside the business, and so I’ve always taken that approach to covering it.

From your bio, it seems like you never had to slave away at an entry-level job.
No, no, no, no, no—let me just disqualify that right away. First of all, when I started at Fairchild in Paris, I was a reporter. I was reporting on the lingerie business and perfume launches—what everybody at Women’s Wear Daily has to start off with. That’s where you learn about the industry; that’s the baptism by fire. You learn about fabrics, you have to cover Premiere Vision, which is the big fabric fair in Paris, and you have to figure out who the perfume nose is at Christian Dior and the difference between the fragrances. You have to learn a lot about the people and processes of each industry within the fashion industry. And that’s the best way to learn about fashion.

When I went to Vogue after three years at Women’s Wear, I couldn’t believe that the market editors didn’t know about fabrics. I mean, of course the big editors, Andre Leon Talley or Polly Mellen, they all knew about fashion, but these junior editors, they had no way of learning the way that Women’s Wear editors learn: from going to fabric fairs and actually having to know what they’re talking about. So that was a great way to learn, and it’s definitely starting at the bottom. If they decide they want to cover something at the last minute in Dusseldorf, you have to get on the plane and go to Dusseldorf. It sounds glamorous, but it’s this gigantic trade show and everyone speaks German, and there you are: Find a story. But it was really fun too.

And then when I got to Vogue, when I started off, my office was literally a closet. Nobody would talk to me, and I remember sitting in there and crying for the first three months. It was pathetic. But the people there were these giant personalities. Especially at that time, because it was 1991—Carly Cerf de Dudzelle, and Andre, and Candy Pratts Price—it was like the ’80s were still going on. And I was writing captions for fashion portfolios and “Vogue’s Point of View,” that page of writing before the well. So these were not glamorous jobs. But I was lucky because Anna was a great boss in the way that she let me do whatever I wanted. There was always room to create and write and do new things.

You’ve had amazing success and also endured a tremendous amount of criticism and setbacks. How do you bounce back?
I don’t look at it as an amazing career, funnily enough. I look at it like, I’ve always worked really, really hard. I remember one summer at Vogue, I worked every weekend the whole summer. Covering the collections is a lot of work. I mean yeah, it’s really glamorous and you meet Tom Ford and blah blah blah, but you’re running around like crazy and reporting and it’s a lot of work.

But you’ve been watched so closely, both as Anna’s protege and then taking over Bazaar after Liz Tilberis. What advice would you give others facing adversity in their careers?
Well, it’s hard. The Bazaar situation was a very particular confluence of events—following in the footsteps of Liz Tilberis, taking over a magazine that was not doing so well, having a baby three days later, having a large turnover on the staff, and dealing with all that in the spotlight is a lot at once. It was one of those things where it was a job you can’t say no to, even though I was nine months pregnant. I think the most important thing in careers, and I think this a lot in my own career now, is you have to do what you want to do. I felt for a long time a tremendous pressure to do things other people wanted me to do, and when you’re young, that is probably the case. But you really do have to go with your heart. It’s weird, all the criticism and all the tough calls at Bazaar, and getting fired ultimately, those were all hard things to experience, but with hindsight, which is always 20/20, they were great experiences. I don’t regret any of it at all. It was an amazing opportunity to learn how to edit a magazine in two years, and get it over with. There are a lot of lessons there, but the thing I always come back to is, if you’re doing something you really believe in, you never regret anything you do.

Emily Fromm is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Chuck Klosterman is an incredibly talented yarn-spinner. He knows so well how to build a story and wring out its punchline and significance that you’d think he was raised by an ancient tribe of devoted oral historians. He has sense enough to know that Saved by the Bell should be enjoyed both genuinely and also not. He knows this balance, and so his writing tows a line between mocking and praising his subjects, which is ultimately a characteristic of modern humor: irony with actual affection; not wink-wink irony, just, maybe, wink irony.

That’s the real key to his success, but he was also greatly helped by a chance phone call from a rock star and a childhood in Fargo, North Dakota. From that childhood he mined his first book, Fargo Rock City, a tale of a young man’s enthusiasm for 1980s heavy metal—particularly Guns N’ Roses—that whimsically included his phone number in the introduction. David Byrne, of the Talking Heads, read the book, liked it, and called the author. That phone call led to other opportunities, and, soon enough, Klosterman was abandoning the Midwest for the high-flying life of a New York magazine guy.

Now a senior writer at Spin (“I go to all the meetings and I suppose, in theory, I help generate story ideas,” he says of his responsibilities beyond writing) and an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he recently published his second book, a collection of essays called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. Despite his concern that he lacks any career advice, Klosterman recently spoke mediabistro.com, talking about his book, his background, and how to react when someone pukes on you.

Not too long ago you were writing for daily newspapers, first in Fargo and then Akron, Ohio. It’s a pretty odd jump—maybe even a substantial one—to Spin.
I got to Spin because I put my phone number in the front of Fargo Rock City and one of the people who called me was David Byrne. He asked me to do a reading with Dave Eggers and Lydia Davis, and at that reading an editor from The New York Times Magazine who was in the audience asked me to start writing for him.

At about the same time, Charles Aaron, who also read “Fargo Rock City” and was at the reading, called me and asked me if I wanted to start writing for Spin. A whole bunch of months passed and I didn’t hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age. Then I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can’t give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it’s still not something I am used to.

For a lot of people being a rock journalist is about meeting their idols. How do you make a good interview out of questions these people have probably heard a thousand times?
The person you’re interviewing needs to know it’s an interview. If you’re writing fiction, there needs to be artistic tension. And if you’re doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you’re not going to have a relationship with them, they’re not going to like you, they’re not going to be your friend.

One problem with magazine writing is that the people who do it often have not spent a lot of time doing hard journalism. I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren’t things you know about until you do the story. The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer’s main motivation is to become friends with the band. They’re not really journalists; they’re people who want to be involved in rock and roll. Instead of being in a band, they figure, well I’ll just become friends with them.

How do I put this? There are a lot of smart people writing about music but not a lot of people who are interested in journalism writing about music. To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn’t mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you’re trying to get information that has not been written about before. You’re trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.

So that you have time to work your way out of that hole over the rest of the interview?
No. A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

Does this sort of adversarial tactic inform your essays?
The essays are different because ultimately it’s things I’m interested in, and I’m really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism. The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I’m totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

Clearly other people seem to find you entertaining as well—though perhaps not the New York Press.
That was really weird, a very weird thing. I got an email that day that said, “This guy you’ve never heard of has written a piece for a publication you’ve never read and is attacking what you look like and claiming you’re the anti-Christ.” I still have a hard time understanding how I would warrant that. But, I don’t know. It wasn’t hurtful, it was just strange. I’ve been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you’re walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn’t be hurt by that, you’d just think it’s weird. I keep saying the word “weird” over and over again, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

Given that your writing is so infused with your personality, what kind of editorial feedback do you get—and how has it differed when you’ve written for newspapers, magazines, and books?
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me. So he only really does big picture editing. I’m edited less when I write books than anywhere else. That’s why writing books is so fun and I think everyone should do it. It’s the only place you can completely express your ideas in the way that is closest to the way you think them. An editor at a publishing house’s main job is acquiring, so if he picks something he obviously likes it already.

When you’re writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can’t swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you’re writing for the next day. If you’re reviewing a concert and it’s 11 o’clock at night, basically anything you write is going to get through.

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice. I could write the same piece about the same thing for Spin, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, and they would all be different.

But they hire you because they like your style. After Fargo Rock City, you’re a personality and you come with a voice of your own.
Maybe, but I tend to be a difficult to edit because I am very sensitive about every word and every style of punctuation and every idea because I feel that when I write I’ve considered every alternative and chose the one that works best. I’m probably edited lightly and yet I probably over-react to it. I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it’s based on is whether it’s good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

You get typecast a bit as a pop-culture writer. Are you trying to beat that rap?
After Fargo Rock City I got all these offers to write about metal, and I thought, “Oh no, this is going to get me marginalized.” Then I realized it’s better to be known for one thing than for nothing. I mean, before, I wasn’t doing anything. Five years ago, I thought I was going to write for newspapers; if I worked really, really hard I could one day work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn’t afford a home computer—I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn’t be so bad.

How did growing up in North Dakota temper how you write about pop culture?
People always say to me, “I bet when you were in college or growing up in North Dakota, you dreamed of working at Spin.” I never dreamed of that. It didn’t seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn’t know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.

I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it. I was hyper-fascinated with it, with music and film and television, but in a way I had a more normal experience—that is, closer to the average consumer—than a lot of people in more urban areas. Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn’t get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available. In Fargo Rock City I talk about Guns N’ Roses a lot, which might seem strange to someone who had a larger spectrum of music to experience, but to me GNR was by far the most interesting band that I had ever found. And because that was the best thing available, I really fixated on it. I probably thought more about GNR, Motley Crue, and KISS than anyone else in America.

It’s just that what’s important there is different there than what’s important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media. In Fargo, they say, well, that’s a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper.

Chris Gage is no longer a stalker. Photo by Lisa Corson. You can buy Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs at Amazon.com.

A bit more than a year ago, Martha Nelson took over as managing editor—the top job—at People magazine, widely considered to be the most profitable magazine in the country. More than that, though, the People people say more people read their magazine each week—nearly 36 million—than catch any other entertainment product during a week, including all the top-rated television shows and highest-grossing blockbuster films. Before coming to People, Nelson helmed another Time Inc. success story, InStyle magazine, which she co-founded in 1994, so she’s no stranger to celebrity news. But People also has a strong tradition of breaking news coverage, and Nelson’s been settling into that area while also confronting critics’ charges that the venerable magazine has been forced to move in a more tabloidy direction, driven by new competition from outlets like Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly. Nelson spoke to mediabistro.com late last month about that marketplace, her magazine, and why she’s got to keep her celebrity crushes secret.

Birthdate: August 13, 1952
Hometown: Pierre, South Dakota
First section of the Sunday Times: “I read the front section first, except on Mondays when I first look to the business section.”

Walk me through your career as it leads to InStyle and then People.
In college, I started as an editorial assistant at an academic journal. I began working at Ms. magazine after graduating, and later I became the editor-in-chief of Women’s Sports and Fitness, in San Francisco. I next was the editor of Savvy magazine in New York before working for Who Weekly, a People offshoot in Sydney, Australia. I was then an assisting managing editor at People before I left and launched InStyle—only to return a little over a year ago to People.

Why did you make that switch from InStyle back to People?
Well, I had a fantastic experience with the launch of InStyle, but the magazine was on a very strong course when the People job became available. The switch also meant that I would be returning to something I’d had a fantastic experience with before InStyle. Besides, it’s amazing to run one of the most influential magazines in the world, with one of the broadest readerships and the greatest breadth of subject matter that you will encounter. The mix of the entertainment-industry and celebrity news, combined with hard news and human interest, basically means that every topic I am interested in I can find a way to cover in People. There is no significant event that escapes us and I know what that was like, coming from InStyle. There, during 9/11, I watched the spectacular work that was done at People, and I thought about what a great job they were doing and how amazing it is to be on top of the news when something truly significant happens.

Have you found it difficult taking over such a well-established and perhaps set-in-its-ways magazine? I would imagine trying to make your own mark on it is a little like steering an oil tanker.
The thing about People is that while we are a big magazine with an enormous readership, we also are an organization that can move incredibly fast. This week we came to work on Monday and realized that what had happened in Miami with Celia Cruz was rather extraordinary, so we started up a story and did a special limited edition of the magazine with a cover of Celia Cruz just for Southern Florida—and it closed on Tuesday. So the organization can move so quickly and still thoroughly cover the news. We did a 10-page story basically overnight and arranged for a special distribution in Florida and created a cover for that special issue, all at the same time that we were also putting out the regular issue for the rest of the country. That is perhaps the benefit of our midweek deadline. A lot of things happen over the weekend so it is nice to have those extra two days in the beginning of the week. Plus, we are all about getting into consumers hands as much as possible before the weekend.

What sorts of changes would you like to see made to the magazine as your tenure continues?
Well, we’re always undergoing changes, but it’s a very slow evolution. Because our readership base is so loyal and so large, you can’t just come in and put a bomb under the magazine—because, frankly, it ain’t broke. But the magazine has evolved a lot in its history, and I think that right now with Rina Migliacchio as the creative director we are sort of stripping out some of the excesses of the previous design and streamlining it and really cleaning it up.

If you take over a magazine that is broken, it is almost imperative that you do something radically different because you have to announce to the world, “Hey, look, this really can get better, and this is different, so give us another try.” But with People, we didn’t have to face that situation. I walked into a magazine that was very strong and had a very loyal and dedicated readership. I don’t make all the design changes in a week—I make them as part of a process.

What has been the most rewarding change for you, or the thing that you have appreciated most, about switching from InStyle back to People?
In terms of personal satisfaction, I think it has probably been the work we’ve done on the issue of missing children in the last year. Both the magazine and I were recognized by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and also invited to the White House for the signing of the Amber Alert Bill. We have been credited by any number of people for the kind of attention that we brought to this issue last year and the fact that we were useful in the campaign in the California legislature to pass the Amber Alert Bill, simply by the fact that we had made the missing girls in California a cover story and we did another cover story on missing girls in Oregon. We also followed up with a number of other stories about this issue, and it is something that People magazine has consistently focused on. Usually, the kind of impact we have on such stories goes completely unnoticed, but for the people who are involved in this particular issue, the attention that we paid to them was and continues to be enormously impactful. These really are heartbreaking stories and our work does make a huge difference so, on a personal level, it is great to know that we have actually been able to be an agent for positive change.

How do you feel about the recent comparisons between People and Us Weekly?
I think this question is all about the competition in the field. It has become a more competitive field of late, but I actually enjoy the competition. I wouldn’t really know what to do if I was the lone player in this market. The competition is fun and energizing, and it helps to keep us on our game, and, really, it’s a very normal thing. Most magazines have competitors. That’s normal.

We are a very, very different animal from Us Weekly. You know, we compete on the newsstand with these other magazines, but we’re really uniquely differentiated in terms of our content, our size, and the loyalty of our readership.

Has this newer competition forced you to make any changes at People? Has Us, as some people say, forced People to move to more tabloidy coverage?
I think that one of the founding principles of our company, which People remains very true to today, is the notion that what we do is good journalism. We certainly see and hear a lot of stuff out there based on rumors, and we have a lot of reporters allowing us to hear every kind of news and non-news, but in the end, we don’t run on rumor. We run on fact. We sometimes see stories that are in other magazines or show up in other outlets that are based on reports that later are refuted, and that’s the kind of situation we will never find ourselves in. For us, it is really about the quality of the reporting and the trust with the reader, and that’s the No. 1 priority. People began as a celebrity magazine almost 30 years ago, as a chronicle of popular culture, and I think that we are basically staying very true to that mission. I don’t know if you have looked at our current issue, but it’s a good example of the kind of mix that is very natural to us. We have the Kobe Bryant story, the Jessica Lynch story, and the cover story on Angelina Jolie—a true mix of news, human interest, and celebrity. I am very comfortable in the celebrity world; I spent a lot of time covering celebrities and edited a celebrity style magazine for the last 9 years. So I don’t think there is anything unusual in our recent coverage. Celebrities are basic to People‘s makeup, and they always have been. People is about what’s happening this week, and our current issue is a good example of that.

Are there any issues from the last year that you felt would do better than they did saleswise, or that you were surprised about how they were received?
Well, last year, when we did the 9/11 anniversary issue, it didn’t sell as well as I had hoped, but I was still very proud that we had done it. I thought that it was the right thing for us to do. Every once in a while, you take a risk—we did a story called “When Baby Won’t Wait,” a human-interest story about all sorts of amazing births in unusual places, and that didn’t do as well as I would have liked either.

What have been some of the bigger newsstand winners in your editorship?
Oh, gosh, they range all over the place. Certainly Laci Peterson, Jessica Lynch, and Elizabeth Smart were all big sellers on the news front. On the celebrity front, Ben Affleck as the Sexist Man Alive was big, as were the stories on Joe Millionaire‘s Evan and Zora, our exclusive interview with Britney Spears last year, and our cover on Rosie O’Donnell as a gay parent.

Finally, who does Martha Nelson think is the Sexiest Man Alive?
That’s a good question. I don’t want to tip my hand because, you know, Sexiest Man is coming up very soon. I think that maybe you have to wait and read it in People. You can’t give these things away, you know. It’s proprietary information.

Jennifer Baker is a former editorial intern at mediabistro.com.

Wee tykes ask their mothers “Why?” and mothers invariably reply in an exasperated tone, “Because I said so.” Authors ask the same question of their copy editors, and the copy editors respond, “Because Chicago says so.” The Chicago Manual of Style is the last-word bad cop to the peaceful-relationship copy editor’s good cop. Supplemented by only a handful of guides, the big orange book is the final word regarding queries of all stripes and weights, demolishing questions with a wrecking ball’s veracity.

It was first conceived in 1906 by standards-obsessed copy editors and proofreaders in the manufacturing department of the University of Chicago Press. Originally called A Manual of Style (click here for that first version in .pdf form), only with the thirteenth edition in 1982 did the name change to The Chicago Manual of Style, in deference to how its users referred to it. It’s been 10 years since the fourteenth edition, and, for this go-round, Chicago has been rebuilt, refined, and refitted from the bottom up to withstand the tourbillion changes of the publishing landscape.

Anita Samen, managing editor of University of Chicago Press since 1993, held editorial positions at Lyceum, Macmillan, Scribner’s, St. Martin’s Press, Scholastic (“way back before the Earth’s crust cooled”), and worked as a freelance editor. Now, as the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is released, Samen spoke with mediabistro.com about her role in the manual’s rebirth, the significant alterations between editions, and of how a sexy 900-number could provide the Press a little supplemental income.

How big a project is assembling a new edition of Chicago, and how is the process of deciding what needs to be updated?
It’s a huge project to update the manual, and many people are involved. The director of our trade reference program is the acquiring editor, or fills the role of the acquiring editor, and my predecessor was the one who collected the big folder of letters and comments and sat at her desk looking at cut-and-pasted versions of the old manual, and went over every line to figure out what needed updating and what could stay as is. She also, starting in 1998, formed some informal listservs, and she would throw out questions about topics that had been raised. We also formed an internal task force at the Press that had members of literarily every department—IT, books, marketing, design, production—except perhaps for subscription and fulfillment. The trade reference director formed an advisory board, which is first time the manual has ever had an outside board of advisors.

What role did you play in this new edition?
I was part of a team of a half-dozen people that concentrated on revising the two chapters on documentation. We were particularly eager to include information on electronic citations. We did a lot of research using other people‘s guidelines and found that they didn’t really work for electronic publishing or publishing on websites.

I’m very proud of those two chapters. There is nothing anyone is likely to cite that’s not covered. We consulted with lots of people, including our colleagues in journals. Of the eight of us, four were from journals—our scientific and social-science journals—and we racked our brains to think of the kinds of things that people would want to cite. Also, our authors are incredibly comprehensive about the kinds of things they cite. So, among the eight of us and our authors, we were able to come up with a wide variety of instructions, like when you need an access dates, how to cite access dates, what do when a site has been taken down, et cetera.

How is Chicago different from other reference books like, say, Words Into Type?
Words Into Type was a wonderful book in its time, but it hasn’t been revised since 1974. Chicago is much more comprehensive even than the MLA, and we really can be used by anyone who works with words and is “publishing” his or her work in any medium—whether it’s putting it on a website, or writing corporate communications, newsletters, electronic journals, or books.

At what point does it become clear that an update is necessary?
We start thinking about the new one as soon as the previous one comes out. The fourteenth came out in 1993 and we began seriously in 1998 on this new edition, but we were collecting information all along and thinking about what we would need to change. It became abundantly clear when we looked at the way people deal with words now. In 1993, we all had computers and the Press was getting some of our manuscripts on disk, but now all our manuscripts are edited on screen.

Tell me about the most notable changes between the fourteenth and fifteenth editions.
The grammar and usage section is new. We did a lot of market research indicating that that was something that would be welcomed, so that the manual could be one-stop shopping. As luck would have it, we had a Press author who was an expert in the field and agreed to write the chapters for us. We were extremely fortunate that he was willing and able to do that.

As far as dates go, we are now preferring month, day, year to day, month year—although the latter is an acceptable alternative, because frankly the rest of the world likes month, day, year, and we don’t want to have editors trying to conform to Chicago to jump through all kinds of hoops, making all kinds of changes to things that are intelligible the way they are.

We no longer prefer small caps for a.m. and p.m and for B.C., A.D., and BCE. We’re now allowing lowercase for a.m. and p.m., and full caps for B.C., A.D., and B.C.E. Some of these changes come out of working so much on disks. When you’re working with a pencil manuscript and you want small caps you do the two lines. On screen, however, there are a few more hoops you need to jump through and it doesn’t aid comprehension.

Ordinal numbers, we’re now going with 2nd and 3rd instead of 2d and 3d, except in legal citations. Again, it never caught on among authors, and it just seems unnecessary to require people to do it that way when it doesn’t aid comprehension.

Letters as shapes—e.g., L-shaped room and U-turn—are no longer required to be set in sans-serif type. Onscreen editing has caused that change. If you like the way it looks, and I do like the way it looks, it’s not wrong to make them serif.

The thing that caused everyone to gasp was the renumbering of the chapters from chapter 4 on when we added the chapter 5 on grammar. We knew that would cause a stir.

Why is that? Because people are so accustomed to looking in specific places for certain things?
Yes, I think it is. But we felt is was absolutely necessary. Sometimes you know something is wrong and you know how to fix it but you can’t necessarily, when questioned by an author, explain exactly why one way is wrong in grammar terms. So that grammar chapter is handy because we came up with a succinct and cogent and grammatically correct way of explaining it.

Oh, also, there was a table in the old chapter 6 that dealt with hyphenation and that’s now a list.

I’ll miss that table. I used it a lot.
I have to confess that I loved that table, but the consensus was that the list was clearer and easier. It’s a good list, it just looks so different and is indeed so different.

The whole look of the book is different. There’s some color, a new type face (Scala and Scala Sans), a new index.
We wanted to make it look like a book that was published in 2003 but was still readable. And I think our designer was very successful. I love having a second color. The other change that is so nice is that after every number for the number paragraphs is a run-in subheading that tells what’s in that particular section. I can flip it open at random and know what I am looking at immediately.

Of course, people will still decorate them with Post-Its flying out of the top and dog-eared corners.
I have a twelfth edition that was in our library that the owner went so far as to tab her book with very formal index cards she meticulously placed and taped into place. There were so many differences of opinion on what we should do about adding markers. For a while I was thinking of the L.L. Bean catalog, which comes with translucent post-its you can put on pages, and we thought we could do them in manual orange. Then that turned out to be not really feasible, and we figured people have their own systems and it was best to let them devise their own.

The fourteenth edition says, “The use of the comma is mainly a matter of good judgment, with ease of reading the end in view.” Then it goes on to explain the use of the comma for 15 pages.
Authors have very fixed ideas about commas, and some people don’t really care for the serial comma at all, but we’re really not flexible about it. Our example, which is probably apocryphal, is a book dedication: “To my parents, the Pope and Mother Teresa.” It does help explain to people why you want the series comma in there.

Do you or any of the others at the Press receive fan mail from enthusiastic manual users or grammar enthusiasts?
The person who wrote the answers for the FAQ on the previous Chicago website, whose name is a deep dark secret, had someone who was a “frequent-flier” who asked interesting questions. And, through our marketing department, this author began sending fan letters and inscribed copies of his books to the FAQ writer.

Earlier, when we took phone calls, people could just phone in and the reception desk rotated it among the managing editors, and some of us gave out our direct phone numbers to people who phoned in a lot. We had to stop because we were getting so many calls we couldn’t really get our work done. People would want to fax us things, have us edit them, and then fax them back.

Are those, or did they used to be before you stopped, examples of how you knew what information needed to be updated or added?
What it does, and what it did for us, is remind us of what a broad readership we have, It’s not just scholarly publishing or nonfiction publishing. We have people out in the real world, in the business world, and at advertising agencies. The phone-in questions were incredibly esoteric. I remember a woman’s daughter was getting married, and she was doing the program and wanted to know how to style the musical pieces that would be played. I thought it was wonderful that she knew there was a right way and a wrong way, but it was incredibly time consuming. I took a call after we had stopped answering phone-ins. It had somehow gotten through to me and it was a woman in the medical field who was working on a grant proposal. I told her I am sorry we don’t take calls anymore, but I’ll answer it this time. And she said, “So you mean, my grant is just supposed to be done wrong?” I told her those weren’t the only two options.

Chris Gage is a production editor for John Wiley & Sons, and he’s probably troubled that mb.com doesn’t follow a pure Chicago style. You can buy the new Chicago Manual of Style at Amazon.com.