In his new book, Taking On The Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, longtime investigative journalist Steve Weinberg profiles Tarbell, one of the OGs of the genre, and examines her famous takedown of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The University of Missouri J-school professor, who writes for Columbia Journalism Review and is the author of eight books, says he’s been “typecast as an investigative journalist for almost [his] entire career.” We caught up with him to talk about how the Internet’s changed the investigative journalism world, the best and the brightest of today’s reporters, and who’s going to pull a Tarbell on Microsoft, Starbucks and the rest of America’s giant corporations.

How did the idea for the book come about?
I’ve been typecast as an investigative journalist almost my entire career, even when I was in journalism school. As a result of that, my path has led to running this group called “Investigative Reporters and Editors.” It has about 5,000 members and it’s all over the world. It’s physically based at the University of Missouri [where Weinberg works as a professor].

Because of that job I was helping investigative journalists every day and I was a spokesperson for investigative journalism, and I started thinking more about the craft. I finally got around to reading Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company, which had come out in 1904 and which I’d heard about in my American history courses but I had never bothered to read. It had been long out of print, in the days when being out of print actually meant out of print.

I read it, all 800 pages and I thought, “Wow, this is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I’ve ever read.” It was 100 years old at the time I read it, but it could have been written yesterday about Microsoft or McDonalds or Starbucks. It was about a dominant corporation taking over the world, and she also brought down John. D. Rockefeller. I just felt like I needed to know more about the person who did this, so I proposed a biography about her.

How do you keep the subject fresh?
Part of it was looking into her techniques and getting into what she did in terms of investigative reporting. But also, her life, in a way, is outdated, but it’s also fresh for the contemporary reader because she was, obviously, a she, and struggled against huge odds to get anywhere other than being a stay-at-home mom, which she definitely knew she didn’t want to do, or a schoolteacher. Those were pretty much the options. She managed to go to college and get a degree, which wasn’t unheard of, but she was the first woman to graduate from Alleghany College. Through a series of unplanned events, she broke into journalism in a serious way. Up until her, there wasn’t a woman who was taken seriously as a journalist.

Most important of all, I would say, is coming up against a gigantic, dominant institution run by someone who is every bit as powerful as Bill Gates and a hell of a lot more colorful. I felt like it had a lot of resonance for today.

Where’s the next Ida Tarbell going to come from?
There are a lot of them now. You hear a lot about the death or illness of investigative reporting, and of course, at some newspapers and at some magazines and some broadcast stations and some Web sites, that’s true, it’s sicker than it use to be. But I would say in general, investigative reporting is extremely healthy at this country and in other countries, and a lot of the people doing the great work are female. It’s not so much being a pioneer anymore.

I don’t think the key issue is where is the next one going to come from. I think the bigger issue is, how many journalists are going to do a great job explaining the big institutions that are dominant in our time. There are a few journalists who do that on a regular basis but not a lot. The investigative reporting — I’m generalizing of course — tends to ignore the corporate sector and look more at government.

There’s Jim Steele and Don Barlett, who now write for Vanity Fair but really made their name at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Diana Henriques at The New York Times is mighty good at corporate gigantism and its behavior. There are a few others, but I don’t think anyone has done Microsoft or Starbucks or McDonalds or you can fill in the blank as well as Tarbell did standard oil, although there were some pretty good books on Microsoft in the past few years.

What are your thoughts on ProPublica?
I don’t know a lot — obviously, I know what you’re talking about and I’m certainly aware of [Paul] Steiger from The Wall Street Journal — but there’s already a model for ProPublica out there and that’s called the Center for Public Integrity. I’ve actually done a couple of big investigations for them.

The Center for Public Integrity, which was started by a guy name Charles Lewis who had been a producer at 60 Minutes. Lewis put together a great team of editors and writers and database people and got corporate money — foundation money, like ProPublica — and started doing these amazingly broad and deep investigations of power. Also, when CNN started getting serious, Ted Turner put together a giant investigative team of 40 people back in the late 80s.

So in a way, ProPublica is not that revolutionary. I’m excited for it and I hope it’s as good as CNN was for a while and the Center for Public Integrity still is.

Do you think that’s a good model going forward where investigative journalists aren’t tied to a specific publication but rather to an organization that gets its funding from other sources?
I think it’s an important part of the mix. These groups have shown that different models can work and I hope ProPublica is the same way.

You’ve been an investigative reporter for more than three decades. How has the Internet changed the discipline?
It’s certainly made certain parts of investigative reporting quicker. I love to be able to go online, even at my fairly middling level of knowledge, and dig out stuff, sometimes in a minute, more often in an hour that I might never have found before. A few years ago, one of the big environmental magazine called OnEarth, asked me to do an in-depth story about John D. Graham, a guy real high up in the Bush White House who was completely gutting environmentalism.

This was an assignment so I didn’t know that much about Graham. One of the first things I did was look at different Web sites at Harvard [where Graham went] and some of the organizations that he belonged to. One of the things I learned was that at Wake Forest, when he was still an undergrad, he got into debating in a big way and won all these awards.

This turned out to be real key to the story in several ways. First of all, it provided some of the narrative thread of the story because his debating background came all through the rest of his career. It also helped open the door because he was naturally suspicious that this lifetime investigative reporter writing for an environmental magazine would do a fair job. He really stonewalled me for a while. Then, in one of my approaches to him, I mentioned that I had been doing some background on his debating life and found on the Wake Forest Web site that he had met his wife on the debating team. That seemed to work wonders with him. He was impressed that I even cared who he was married to and all of a sudden he was somewhat cooperative. I eventually got the face-to-face interview in the old executive office building.

Even more revolutionary is this small corner of investigative reporting they now call computer-assisted reporting, where you can take gigantic government databases and turn them into understandable information. That’s what’s really amazing. I’ve seen some of that from the beginning and I’ve seen how that’s changed investigative journalism. The possibilities are almost endless now.

You mean because of the opportunities for number crunching?
The number crunching but what that number crunching reveals, the patterns that it shows you about the distribution of affordable housing or the number of sex discrimination cases across the country or whatever so you can start your reporting with an incredible knowledge base. You can look for patterns that the data suggests. It would have taken you years before that just to get to that stage.

What’s your hope for the book?
I guess I hope for what every author hopes for, short of best-sellerdom: that it gets read by people who care about any number of matters in this society, about corporate gigantism, about journalism and its role, about gender equality and feminism.

It’s also a damn good story. I give my editors at Norton a lot of credit. I proposed this as a cradle to grave biography of Ida Tarbell. Obviously, I knew John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil would play a big role, but only after I wrote the book and [my editor] started looking at it, did he say, “This is fine. We could publish this, but what about making Rockefeller more of an equal character. What about making it a narrative about the collision course.” So I did.

Three tips for becoming an investigative reporter
1. Relentless curiosity: “You need to be one of those people who’s always asking, why and how and how come,” Weinberg says.
2. Systematic thinking: “Your training needs to include not only the basics of reporting, but you need to learn to think through your material,” Weinberg says. “Always build a chronology of the person or thing you are investigating.”
3. Continuing your education: Keep up with the latest developments in technology that can help make your job easier.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor and co-editor of FishbowlNY.

In late November, Rolling Stone published an exhaustively detailed, 15,000-word treatise titled “How America Lost the War on Drugs,” detailing the government’s $500 billion failure. Jack Shafer wrote that he wanted to “force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read” the piece penned by RS National Affairs writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells. We spoke with Wallace-Wells about the genesis of the article, writing and reporting the feature, and the positive response it’s garnered.

How did you land this assignment? Did you pitch it to your editors at Rolling Stone or did they come to you?
Rolling Stone‘s editors came to me. I was told it was an idea that resonated with Jann [Wenner]. Obviously the drug wars are something that been have a topic of particular interest to Rolling Stone for many years but that had fallen out of urgency and current issues. I think they wanted a piece that would be comprehensive about what happened in drug policy since the crack epidemic. What exactly has been going on? We have this feeling that the drug war has acquired its own inertia and we have massive programs that are ongoing to try to combat coca growing and coca delivery in Colombia. There are programs in South East Asia. There are federal programs to assist police. We’re still putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail. But the feeling within the magazine was that we weren’t really sure what we were getting for all that input. The assignment as it was given to me was to figure out a way of synthesizing and structuring all that we were getting. And that’s more or less what I tried to do.

Was the original article intended to be this long and ambitious?
I’m not really sure. It was left open. The initial idea was to go out and see where it took me. There was the sense that I would be spending a number of months on it and that it would be a serious undertaking. It ended up taking me about three and a half months to report.

How did you manage to structure the story to keep readers interested?

There were two challenges at the outset. With a piece like this that covers action that’s taken place in so many different venues, it’s hard to write an honest accounting of it. You have to account for the dynamics of street gang competition in San Francisco and the political tension that was felt around law and order by the Clinton administration. You need to keep a sense of narrative propulsion going throughout. How do you get people from 1992 to 1996 and have them give a shit about what’s going on?

The other challenge was intimacy. In a piece that’s functionally an assessment of policy, how do you get some feeling of familiarity with characters and a sense of what this world feels like? How do you keep them familiar and credible?

Around the time I was beginning this in May or June, I was reading some histories by Taylor Branch of the Civil Rights movement, which are phenomenal, but also grapple with this narrative problem. The Civil Rights movement is something that feels incomplete unless you are grappling with it at a number of different levels, both geographically and structurally. The way he solved that was to tolerate an episodic character. You were telling a history, not making an argument. You would do an episode in this place and an episode in that place, and permit the through line to be chronology. That solved both of the problems that I was trying to grapple with because if you’re telling a history rather than writing an expository, there’s a very natural propulsion to it. The propulsion is, “What happened next?” Because we were able to jump in and out of these worlds, I was able, within the confines of these scene-conscious episodes, to do at least a little bit to develop characters and understand the feeling that came through for people who were involved at all different levels in the fight.

That was the first big decision we had to make, and that was the reason we ended up doing it the way we did. It was a structure that would permit the depth that we thought we needed for this kind of story and also the kind of intimacy that without it a magazine article would flounder.

It sounds like it was a pretty collaborative process. Were you working with your editors pretty closely throughout the whole thing?
Yeah, my editor and I would go back and forth with some frequency. I definitely wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Another instruction they gave me at the beginning that was enormously helpful was they wanted to make sure it was credible, that it relied not on advocates who had a leftist point of view, but was very reported and bureaucratic and insider-y — which sounds a little bit demeaning — but which would comprehend the War on Drugs as people were actually fighting it. That direction was critical because it gave the piece credibility.

One of the things that has been heartening is to hear people who were former D.A.s and policymakers say, “That’s how I remember it.” That’s what we were striving for, not to condemn the War on Drugs or detail a kind of argument.

How many people did you speak with? Did you speak with them once or do multiple interviews?
It was both. My guess is about 75 or 100 people. There were a few who were really critical sources, many of whom appear in the story frequently, who I went back to again and again. John Carnevale [the budget director of the drug control office] had a terrific aggregate view of what was happening, both in the macropolicy world and in the policy world. So did Carol Bergman, who was the legislator for a few drug czars. Many of the people I just spoke to once. I don’t know how many people we quote in the story. 35? 30? Maybe not that many. We were going back and forth a couple of times with most of the people I ended up quoting.

The thing that jumped out reporting this was it’s like the old men who sit around at the V.A. telling stories about the one battle they were sort of near in World War II. For the people who’ve gone through this, who’ve been D.A.s and police officers, this is something they care enormously about and they want to tell you their war stories. Many people have asked me since this came out whether there was a reluctance to talk to me and Rolling Stone. I tell them, “No, it was really the opposite.” People who have spent their lives trying to figure out how best to fight the drug war were extremely eager to tell their stories and show their perspective. As you talk to these people, very quickly the war stories begin to come out. For the most part, it wasn’t a pulling teeth or contentious set of interviews. It was a very pleasant and interesting narrative process. People are very constructed in their heads of these stories as stories because they told them to their friends and their grandkids. It was ripe for picking.

How’d you go about finding your sources?
The first thing I did was compile a timeline of significant characters and events in Washington legislatively. As you go about tracking down the staffers who were involved in those efforts, they give you more names of people they worked with: D.A. agents, social service providers in California. The decision of what policy choices [the government made] at certain times responding to what phenomena was out there not only gave the story a structure but also gave me a reporting framework because it gave me a basic line to spool out from. I was basically filling out this single narrative. I got some people through the DEA. I got some people, specifically care providers, by looking up interesting local stories, seeing who was quoted, and tracking them down. I got a bunch of people through looking up the research and seeing who the academics were who were doing interesting things in the world. The biggest thing was just talking to people who were dealing with this stuff legislatively and figuring what inputs they had and working backwards from there. The amazing thing about beginning as a political reporter — which is what I began as — is that so much moves through Washington and if you have a basic handle on how Washington operates, it can give you a way to write all kinds of great things like this.

How many pages of notes and hours of tape did you have and how did you group it all together when you sat down to write? Did you use an outline?
I don’t know how many pages of notes. When I was like a third of the way through the reporting, I started to notice things that people kept talking about as a critical moment, such as the conversations within the Clinton administration over whether to commit to Plan Colombia, which was a huge, several billion dollar program that’s now lasted seven years. This was regarded by everybody as a catalytic moment in the spooling out of the drug war from one century to another. Everybody talked about the conversations between Jim Burke, who’s the head of the Partnership for a Drug Free America, and Barry McCaffrey, who was Clinton’s second drug czar, in which Burke convinced McCaffrey to commit to this focus on youth prevention.

As I was going through the reporting, I sat down and said, “What are the 15 episodes that link up all the raw material that I’m getting.” Then I went back to my editor and he said, “That one sounds sensible, that one sounds terrible.” Once I had that, I could basically concentrate my reporting more, not to exclusively focus on those specific things, but to understand how each of these moments fit into the narrative. The weird and exciting thing about the story was the way in which it linked up activity at all different levels and all different places.

When did you start writing? Did you do all the reporting first and then begin writing?
I basically did all of [the reporting first]. I finished the draft in August and we didn’t do much with it for a month or so. Then there was some editing in October and we edited it on and off in November, but there wasn’t a huge time crunch. The assignment I had was write it when I was done [reporting], which was a nice luxury. I was going at a pace of about 1,000 words a day, which for me is a considerable clip, but with a 15,000-word piece, that’s still a considerable amount of time. It took me the better part of a working month — from the middle of July to the middle of August — to write.

And when did you start the reporting?
May.

Do you think the article successful? What do you think of the final product?
Yeah, I think it was really good. I think the reaction has been terrific. It’s a complicated thing and part of the struggle with the topic is that what is most critical to understand is masked. Right now, if we are thinking about meth amphetamine policy, we want to know where the raw chemicals come from, how they are transported into the U.S., and whether we are doing the right thing to combat them, but because there’s this fog of illegality, you never know exactly how that’s working. You have to rely on some triangulation of law enforcement people who are trying to fight it and policy people who are trying to figure out how it works and registered parties and cobble it together. I don’t pretend that throughout the tale it’s absolutely right. There are places where it falls far short of achieving truth, but I think it’s a pretty solid account of how the policy evolved and it’s an honest attempt to wrestle with how the traffic has evolved. There are certainly things that I know I could do better. I feel like there are some characters that we could have developed a little further, who were more compelling than we made them in the draft. There were things like that.

One of the things that has been nice is watching how people have responded. They responded to all different parts of it. I’ll see an article [discussing my article] that focuses on the overall structure of policy, then I’ll get interviewed by a radio station about the meth epidemic, and then I’ll see a blog post that is detailing the innovative new ideas about policing and how drug crime works. A nice thing about this piece is that its been large enough to contain a lot of different ideas about how the world of drug traffic and drug consumption work. It’s always a little bit hard to access your own work but this is one of the few pieces that I haven’t been completely embarrassed to read.

What’s up next for you?
I’m doing two pieces. One for Rolling Stone, which is an attempt to detail the political closet, focusing on the ways in which gay politicians are being closeted and how that closet is being broken or has been broken in the last couple of years. It’s been a nice mix of being political significant because of how the country’s politics have evolved, but also being a documentary of a microculture, which is where I think journalism can do it better than other fields.

The second, for another magazine, is a piece about the culture of Republican operatives, but it’s through a discussion of the efforts of the National Republican Campaign Committee, which is the institutional arm of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. It focuses on how they come up with sufficiently compelling candidates to take back the House and the Senate, and in what ways and how have the politics of the country shifted since 2004.

Tips on writing a long article
1. Be conscious of why a reader would read it
“A 15,000-word piece takes 50 minutes to read. It’s an enormous commitment, so at every point you have to be conscious of what is going to get the reader from word 5,100 to word 5,300. The best you can do is try to ensure you’re investing the piece with enough of the natural drama that the real world has, so the reader will continue reading after 1993 when you’ve had your nut graf,” Wallace-Wells says.
2. Be really into the subject
“I just started writing really long pieces a couple of years ago and there’s a natural impulse to game out what’s compelling to an editor and try to get into the magazine by guessing their interests. But if I hadn’t enjoyed paging through old Nexis clips of old crack epidemic stories, I would have been bored out of my skull.”
3. Listen
“I came into this story with the idea that drug policy had been badly botched and that bottom-line impression hasn’t changed, but the reasons for it have changed enormously,” says Wallace-Wells. “I’m much more sympathetic to drug warriors, the law and order perspective, and the difficulty of doing something about a very real problem than I had been at the outset. That sensibility helped make the story more credible.”

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. You can reach him at NOAH at MEDIABISTRO dot COM.

When BusinessWeek decided to freshen up its look, the magazine’s editors decided to go in an unusual direction. Instead of hiring a traditional design firm, they recruited Modernista!, a Boston-based advertising agency that had previously worked on the redesign on IN magazine. A team from the company worked in concert with BW‘s editorial staff, including editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and art director Andrew Horton, to remake the book for the Internet age. Bruce Crocker, design director at the firm, discussed the process his team went through, the end result, and the difficult task of “brand soul searching.”

Modernista is known primarily as an advertising agency. How did you end up working on the BusinessWeek redesign?

Modernista was approached by BusinessWeek for the magazine redesign as a result of the relationship we had developed with them during our design work on IN magazine, a quarterly supplement that focuses on business innovation which we helped name. We were awarded that project because of the depth of Modernista’s design and strategic capabilities. While Modernista may be known primarily as an advertising agency, we have always had a comprehensive design component in our work. In fact, our creative teams are built with triads of writers, art directors, and designers who work very closely with our strategic planners.

Who was on the redesign team from both Modernista! and BusinessWeek? How closely did the two groups work together? What was the process?

For the BusinessWeek redesign, the core design team at Modernista consisted of executive creative director, Gary Koepke; myself as design director; senior designer, Katie Andresen, who incidentally did much of the heavy lifting; and designer, Michael Seitz. Additionally, head of planning, Gareth Kay and account director, Kirsten Hano rounded out the team. On the BusinessWeek side, editor-in-chief, Steven Adler, and the magazine’s art director, Andrew Horton, were our contacts and collaborators.

Regarding the process, we approached the assignment the same proprietary way we approach all work at Modernista, which generally consists of brand soul searching, numerous research and audit exercises, strategic definition and positioning, and extensive creative/design explorations and testing. The working relationship between Modernista and BusinessWeek was relatively transparent. The fact that we were in Boston and BusinessWeek was in New York needed to be marginalized by regular on-site, face-to-face meetings at both locations. We were very sensitive to the distance factor and may have even over-compensated by having so many meetings. However, in practice, this approach not only became the best way to keep our communications tight, but also helped us stay on top of the rigorous schedule the assignment demanded. We also did a lot of electronic file sharing.

What were the challenges of redesigning a magazine to function in the digital world? How did you overcome them? What advice would you offer to others hoping to overhaul other magazines?

The balance and dynamics between print and digital are constantly shifting and being debated. We needed to keep our eye on a few key factors. Specifically, we needed to thoroughly understand how the magazine’s readers interact and absorb information through different media. Although this was a print assignment, it was critical that the reader experience be considered in conjunction with its digital counterpart. Simply put, print and digital are interrelated but engaged differently, so in a way, we needed to have a vision and strategy for both. The diverse resources that fall under the single Modernista roof gave us the ability to think three-dimensionally about the problem and ultimately provide a strategy that was logical and actionable.

The redesign includes a section that summarizes related articles from other publications. In the age of Internet aggregators such as Drudge and Google News, do you think more publications will follow this trend in their print editions? What other magazines or magazine genres lend themselves to this sort of cross-pollination?

Editorial aggregation is nothing new. In fact, in the early nineties, Modernista founder Gary Koepke, along with editor Michael Schultze, created a Dunn and Bradstreet print publication called World Tour in which all of its content was second source. It will be interesting to see how different media types will converge and how this type of information will be restructured and tailored to each particular reader experience. This is partly what we faced during the BusinessWeek redesign. In terms of specific genres of aggregated content that lend themselves to cross-pollination, for me it’s completely open-ended.

What’s your ultimate dream for the new BusinessWeek?
BusinessWeek has a very large and loyal subscription base, so part of our redesign objective was to create a publication that was even more relevant and useful as a tool to that base. Strengthening reader loyalty and increasing subscriptions is something that was very important. Another one of our key objectives was to provide a design that would help secure additional revenue from advertisers. If ad revenues increase over time, we’ll know that we’ve provided good value. But that’s not enough. The content flow, which we were a part of mapping out, needs to stand the test of time, as does the overall look and feel of what we’ve created. Additionally, we’d like to see other BusinessWeek products and services benefit from our contributions. If over the next six months to a year things are still intact, still relevant, and still functioning smoothly, we’ll feel good.

What’s next for you? Are you doing any more magazine redesigns in the future?

Modernista is constantly engaged in pursuing a number of diverse opportunities in areas that go beyond what is typically framed within an advertising agency. The recent U2 video that Gary Koepke directed is a great example how our curiosity has been realized. That’s exciting for us. So it could be just about anything that asks for a new point of view.

Four tips for successfully redesigning a magazine
1) Do your research.
Modernista and BusinessWeek spent “Many months asking several thousands of people, readers and nonreaders questions about what they want and expect” from the magazine, Crocker says.
2) Set goals.
“Strengthening reader loyalty and increasing subscriptions is something very important,” Crocker says and the redesign focused on helping achieve these goals.
3) Don’t be afraid to aggregate content from other sources.
“BusinessWeek shares ideas that they have found insightful even if they weren’t invented within the publication,” says Crocker.
4) Shake up the norm.
New sections will include The Business Week, News, In Depth, What’s Next, Personal Business, and Opinion. Columnists and a weekly feature will reside in a new back-of-book section.

Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor. He can be reached at Noah AT mediabistro DOT com.

From his editorial discretion to his chiseled abs, David Zinczenko embodies Rodale’s brand of healthy living magazines. In 2000, at the tender age of 30, he took over as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health, and has since added editorial director of Best Life and Women’s Health to his job description. Ad Week‘s Editor of the Year in 2008 was the architect behind last year’s “Magabrand” theme of the MPA conference, which he chaired. Through frequent appearances on The Today Show, a line of best selling books, and two popular blogs, he’s living proof of the potential success of Magabrands, as all three magazines he oversees bucked the trend and posted positive circulation gains in the first six months of 2008. mediabistro.com caught up with Zinczenko fresh off his recent trip to Beijing for the Olympics to discuss the publication of his new book, Eat This Not That! For Kids!, his brand’s 1.5 billion media impressions a year, and whether fit is still the new rich.

Name: David Zinczenko
Position: Editor-in-chief, Men’s Health; editorial director of Women’s Health and Best Life
Education: Moravian College
Hometown: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Resume: Was previously editorial director, Men’s Health International. Started as assistant editor of Men’s Journal at the 1991 launch.
Birthdate: December 13, 1969
Marital status: Single
Favorite TV show: The Colbert Report. “Stephen Colbert openly fakes it, unlike so many who covertly fake it.”
Last book read: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
First section of the Sunday Times: “I love the Week in Review, but not only because of the editorial content. It’s fun to look at the jobs pages and contemplate other professions. Some of that ad copy is rather enticing.”
Guilty pleasure: “I like to eat well even if it’s the mac and cheese with truffles at the Waverly Inn. One of the reasons I care a lot about nutrition and exercise is because I have to eat and exercise in really smart ways to offset all of the cravings.”

Eat This Not That! For Kids!, teaches children to eat healthily. It’s a bit of a stretch from the Abs Diet books you started your book writing career with. Why the change of pace?
Eat This, Not That For Kids! is the follow-up to Eat This, Not That!, and I’m someone who dealt with weight issues growing up in small town Pennsylvania and made bad choices in regards to food. Nutrition and exercise is really important to me and especially with all this talk of nutrition and childhood obesity. It just felt like the marketers were constantly bombarding us with messages about really unhealthy food. We’re spending half of our food dollars eating out, and this was an opportunity to get the information back in the hands of children so they could make smart choices wherever they are eating.

Do writing books and editing a magazine such as Men’s Health complement each other?

Oh totally. This job, and particularly this time in publishing, makes you pretty format agnostic. You have to learn how to edit a magazine, how to write a book, how to pitch the Today show, how to blog. Not only is it very complementary, [it’s] helpful to what I do with the magazine.

You were named editorial director of Women’s Health earlier this year, in addition to your duties as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health and editorial director of Best Life. How do you juggle all three magazines?

I’m not one of those jugglers who tries to throw a chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a live chicken, but it’s more like juggling gold nuggets. They are heavy but uniform size and incredibly valuable to the readers and the company. The magazines all share the same mission: to serve the physical and emotional lives of the readers. In fact, the three magazines are hugely complementary because they are taking on the subject of mental, physical, and emotional health. What we learn about men in relationships will also be good for women in relationships if the advice is any good at all. Ditto the nutrition and exercise info. It just needs to be interpreted for different audiences that have different needs and different ways of taking in information. The appeal of healthy, vigorous living is universal across the titles, so we’re applying what we know to solve universal wants and needs. Furthermore, each magazine has really smart editors who listen closely to the readers and understand what they are looking for, so it’s a collaboration, and I’m just lucky to be a part of it.

How does your role as editor-in-chief of Men’s Health differ from your role as editorial director of Women’s Health? What are you doing for Men’s that you don’t do for Women’s and vice versa?

Right now, I’m almost in my ninth year of editing Men’s Health, and I’m very involved in the day to day of the magazine. The same is true right now with Women’s Health because it’s the early stages. But as an editorial director, what often happens is you can be a little bit more involved in the strategic things and not fly as close to the earth.

Best Life tends to be more strategic, long-term oversight and planning. Again, Women’s Health is a little more of everything right now as I get my feet wet and get to know the magazine and all its various channels — from online to international additions to books to DVDs to what will surely be Women’s Health‘s own spinoffs.

I would imagine there are no “normal” weeks in your life, but what percentage of the time would you say you spend on each magazine?

It’s pretty evenly split right now on Men’s Health and Women’s Health. Best Life is less time. I’m usually in pretty early, at 7 or 7:30 [a.m.], and through to 7 [p.m.] with usually a dinner or something after.

You just returned from China. What were you doing over there?

Because of Men’s Health and Women’s Health I was at the Opening Ceremony in the presence of the healthiest people to have ever walked the planet. How could it not be exciting? As for the ceremony itself, I think it’s a powerful demonstration of what a massive population with a central government can accomplish, but I still prefer the individualistic accomplishments that you see on the sports fields, the volleyball courts, and the running tracks. Still, the Opening Ceremony was a highlight for me. I was handling a few segments for the Today show, mostly gear and technology things looking at Olympic innovations.

Because of all your media outreach, you’re one of the most visible editor-in-chiefs. When media industry people think of Men’s Health, they inevitably think of you. In the short term, that’s good for both you and the magazine, but at some point, isn’t having you tied so closely to the face of the brand a bad thing? What happens when you leave?

[Laughs] This is a very strong company and these are very strong brands with very capable editors and writers. I think they’ll be fine. It’s not Dave Zinczenko’s Living. It’s Men’s Health. It’s Women’s Health. It’s Best Life. It’s a very commercially minded crew that knows how to do incredible sophisticated lifestyle magazines.

Is there ever any conversation that “maybe we shouldn’t send Dave on the Today Show. Maybe we should send someone else?” Is there ever any push to get other editors in the spotlight?

Well, there are. [Senior editor] Matt Bean, [Deputy editor] Matt Marion, and [editor] Peter Moore do dozens and dozens of radio interviews a week, and they are on Good Morning America, the Today show, and Fox News all the time. For Men’s Health, there are over a billion and a half media impressions a year, and while I’m certainly a chunk of that, there are probably six to 10 editors on the Men’s Health side who are representing in the media.

Men’s Health Living is publishing its second issue in December. Are there any plans to increase the frequency?

Not at this time. I look at the future of that magazine like any homeowner does his home. An upgrade here, an upgrade there — maybe we can convert those assets to pay for a move into a whole new neighborhood. I think guys are into their homes just like they are into their health, it’s just that they are not currently being served as guys by any of the existing magazines out there. I think the magazine industry abhors a vacuum, and we aim to fill this one. Right now though, it’s just a very complementary newsstand special to the main book, but we’re all very happy with the kind of success it’s been having.

This has been written about before, but [it has] an over 50 percent sell-through with 400,000 copies out there and a $5 price point. That’s really cool and it certainly indicates the kind of need there is for this information. A lot of guys turn to Ikea catalogs when they look for new information and we aim to change that — but after this next issue coming out in December, we’re not making any promises.

The great thing about it is the brilliant service that drives Men’s Health, Best Life, and Women’s Health can drive Men’s Health Living too because it’s all about living your life to the fullest. There are very specific ways that you can set about doing that. That’s where the special will excel. No, the housing downturn doesn’t worry me particularly because a shelter book is all about maximizing what you have and Men’s Health Living helps guys to [do] that.

The other reason I think [Men’s Health Living] is resonating is that your home is the eye of your life’s hurricane. It’s where your emotional, financial, physical health and your relationships come together. It makes sense that once you’ve read Men’s Health and learned how to improve your body and mind, you want to then turn to a magazine that will help you to put that ethos on display. It’s the same way a lot of fashion companies have gone into the home. Ralph has suits, and he has sheets. Porsche has cars, and they have knives. Other designers have home collections now.

One of the big selling points of Men’s Health Living from the industry perspective was that the first issue made a profit. How much of the success of a spin-off is determined by the bottom line vs. its ability to extend the brand?

I think paying attention the bottom line is so important, especially now, because there are constantly new forces and changing whims in the media world, particularly the publishing world. But for us, when we think about these moves, we are incredibly strategic about it, specifically, “How it will end up serving the brand?” Exactly how complementary is it? How is it going to extend the lifestyle messaging of the brand? Who it’s going to be competing against? We look at all of these things, and we also say if we want to get into the space, should we first come in with a book or a newsstand special or an online venture? We’re always thinking about these things at Rodale and at Men’s Health.

It’s an interesting, some might say bad, time to get into a shelter publication. Just yesterday, Home folded and Blueprint and House and Garden have closed recently. What makes Men’s Health Living different? Is it that you feel it has a unique space in the marketplace?

Yeah, we’ve rather modestly put on the spine of the magazines, “The world’s first home magazine for men.” Certainly, there’s nothing like this, and our internal research showed that this was something the guys wanted. They weren’t getting this information anywhere else, which is why some of them were turning to Ikea catalogs, and they would trust us to give them the information because of the authority that we have in all of these areas of their lives that matter. That’s all we needed to share and think that we needed to go into something like this. Look at the positive circulation numbers, not just for Men’s Health Living, but for Men’s Health, which is up three percent in the first half, with a price increase. With the January issue of Men’s Health, we took the price from $4.50 to $4.99, so you’re increasing the price 10 percent and your first half newsstand is still growing. We’re seeing that growth at Best Life, which was over 20 percent, and on Women’s Health.

When the economic going gets tough, what do you do? You set aggressive priorities for what’s really important in your life and you reduce the rest as needed. I’ve always felt that for the people we really care about, health, fitness, and good living will be the last things to get cut from the budget and it makes sense. What’s more important long term then your health and happiness? That’s the business we’re in and from the looks of the magazine industry right now, it’s a good choice. I’ve always felt that for all the options that people have for entertainment, magazines that offer solid, useful, and life-alerting advice service that are exhaustively researched and well-written are the ones that will thrive.

In February 2006, you told FishbowlNY your five year plan was: “Continued international growth to the tune of five new editions per year, turning Best Life into a category killer, and I want to someday sell 800,000 copies at newsstand — we just broke the 735,000 mark with our January issue.” Halfway through the five year period, are you succeeding? Would you change these goals?
They are going great. We’re the largest men’s magazine brand in the world, Men’s Health, with over 40 international additions, so we’re on pace to launch the four to five magazines a year.

I think [turning Best Life into a category killer] is absolutely happening. With the circulation at 500,000 with our premium prices — that’s also a $5 price point at the newsstand — and all the growth led by Michael Wolfe and his team, who have done a fantastic job bringing in advertisers like Louis Vuitton and others. It has high subscription prices, high renewal rates, and is a magazine that fills a hole in the market you could have driven a truck through. If you look at some of the traditional men’s magazines, it’s as though you don’t have kids, you don’t have a career, you don’t care about your health or your marriage. Here was Steve Perrine, the editor-in-chief, coming in and showing that this was a magazine that could fill a real need. So I think we’re well on our way there.

I’m going to have to call our senior VP, Rich Alleger, and ask him [about the circulation]. Jan/Feb was our biggest seller ever and I think it was somewhere between 780,000 and 805,000, but I’m not sure it hit 800,000.

Well you have two more years to get there so if you’re that close now, we’ll give it to you. Men’s Health is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. How?

We’re not big believers in self-indulgent anniversary celebrations because this isn’t about how important we are as a magazine, but rather we’ve always placed our readers first. What do they need and what are they trying to do with their next 20 years? We’ll play it low-key and add an extra dollop of cool service as a little fist bump, if you will, to the readers on the way to their next 20 years. No big plans as of yet. We don’t need a flashing billboard on the newsstand to advertise how cool we are. In fact, if we start to think we’re cool that’s when we’re in trouble. We’re not ahead of you. Our motto is we’re right here with you, and we totally understand.

I think Esquire‘s trying to monopolize that flashing sign anyway for their 75th anniversary issue.

[Laughs] You said it, not me.

If you’re not working at Men’s Health for the 25th anniversary, any thoughts on where you’ll be?

You know, I don’t know. This is what really gets me jazzed, Noah. Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Best Life are successful as magazines, but they are also each primed to make a splash in books. If you look at the success of The Abs Diet and Eat This Not That! and the tremendous anticipation over our first Best Life book, The Defining Moment: A Guide to Achieving Maximum Success, that Steve is going to write, you can see how the magazines translate into longer form, smartly conceived products: online, online video, TV, wireless content, and any other medium that’s embedded in the next decade. What’s great about what’s happening here is that it’s intensely personal and relevant, which I love. It’s adaptable to intensely personal delivery systems. That’s what a magazine is. So is a newsletter. So is a diet plan. And so is an exercise program delivered directly to your Blackberry. I think we’re woven into millions of people’s lives and that takes a lot of thread. It’s the whole Magabrand concept, which is just a conference name, coming to fruition. The medium isn’t the message any longer. The message is what matters. How we deliver it can totally change depending on the readers’ needs.

So you think there’s room at Rodale for you to continue moving up and creating a niche?

Yes, because Rodale has gotten incredibly smart about how to launch brands, starting from anywhere. When you have a magazine platform and you have a books platform and you have an online platform and you have an international platform and then you have a database of 24 million names and on and on and on, you can grow personally and professionally and create great things forever.

Okay, last question. Is fit still the new rich?

[Laughs]. I think I’m gonna leave that one buried.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

Gary Smith is a rare sports writer who’s transcended the label and become something much greater. In 2003, Slate’s Ben Yagoda called him “the best magazine writer in America,” praise Jon Friedman echoed earlier this year. For the past 25 years, his 8,000-word articles have graced the pages of Sports Illustrated, earning Smith countless honors, most notably four National Magazine Awards.

Those four stories, plus 16 others, appear in his newest book, Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories. It’s a compilation of the writer’s best work — chosen by the author himself — that showcases the intensely human tales Smith details. He describes his writing method as getting “swallowed inside one person‘s life,” and after speaking with him, one understands how he does this so effectively time and time again. Even when he’s the subject of a phone interview, Smith conveys an easy manner and a genuine interest in the details of the world around him. mediabistro.com spoke with the writer on the eve of Going Deep‘s publication about his storytelling process, his relationship with Rick Reilly, and whether he’d ever want to be on TV.

Name: Gary Smith
Position: Senior writer, Sports Illustrated
Education: B.A., English, La Salle
Hometown: Lewes, Delaware
Resume: Worked for the Wilmington News-Journal (4 years), Philadelphia Daily News (7 years), New York Daily News (6 months), Inside Sports (3 years) and Sports Illustrated (25 years).
Birthdate: October 27, 1953
Marital Status: Married, three children.
Favorite TV show: “I don’t watch TV, except for sports.”
Last book read: On Deep History and the Brain
First section of the Sunday Times: Front news section is first, usually followed by The Week in Review.

You write about four stories a year for Sports Illustrated. Tell me about the process. Are you writing more than one at once?
Every once in a while, they overlap, but pretty much it’s one at a time because they are wall-to-wall, full-court, you’re-in-up-to-your-ears kind of thing. It’s much better if you can be swallowed inside one person’s life instead of two or three.

You must feel pretty lucky to have that luxury. You’re one of the few people who has that type of contract.

I spend about two and a half months on each story, so it ends up being a full year’s work. I came in on that basis with SI and I’ve kept it that way. I wanted to feel like I really got to know the subjects. To do the kind of writing that I like to do, I feel like really understanding the character and being immersed in them is what it takes, so I’ve been very fortunate that Sports Illustrated has given me that time and space to really delve in that way.

Do you have an editor you always work with or do you have a different one for each story?
Usually, my front line editor is a guy named [senior editor] Chris Hunt and SI always has a backup editor, someone else who edits as well. That’s recently been a guy named Mike Bevins, but most of my years it was Rob Fleder. He was my secondary editor. Chris Hunt has been the first editor on all my stories for a long, long time, and I’ve been very fortunate to have that kind of relationship.

Where do the story ideas come from? Does Chris bring them to you, do you go to him, or is it a little of both?
The stories can come from any direction. I’d say it’s about 50-50, where half of them are mine and half are theirs. I can veto their idea, they can veto my idea, but as soon as we have one that’s mutually agreeable, it’s a go.

The story ideas can come from anybody at SI. There are researchers and fact-checkers who sometimes come up with good ideas, as well as the editors themselves. I’m wide open to any direction. Sometimes I’ll read a sentence or two in a newspaper that suggests to me there might be a lot more there to the story. It can unfold in many different ways.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a story where I spent four days up in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. Until this past week, they had the best record in baseball. And I’m also working on a story about a NASCAR driver who’s also a Hollywood stuntman.

When are those going to be coming out?
I think the third or fourth week for the bleachers story [It will be in SI‘s September 22 issue] and I’m guessing, but I really don’t know, sometime in October for the stuntman/NASCAR one.

One of your recent pieces was the obituary for NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw. His death was rather sudden and the story was only a couple pages long, much shorter than your usual work. Was your writing the obit pre-planned or did the editors come to you and ask you to write it after he passed away?
They came to me because I’d done a long story about Gene about nine months ago [it came out in January, 2008]. Naturally, when he died, the editors turned to me and asked me to do it because I’d had a lot of background and a lot of contact with people who were close to him.

You have a book, Going Deep , coming out on September 16. What was the genesis for the book?
It was a lot of mutual conversations. I’d been talking to Rob Fleder, who recently left Sports Illustrated, over the past year or so, but we’d had the idea going back three years. We all got together and Terry McDonell, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated now, really got behind it and made it happen now.

How much work is putting a book like this together? All the articles are already written, but what do you have to do to get them ready for inclusion?
I went back and edited them all. It takes a lot more time then you would think on first glance — it took a lot more time then I thought it was going to take. Figuring out which stories you want to put in there, how to pace them or how to order them, and then editing them all. To me, they’re always a work in progress in a way. Every time I look at a story again, I see things I want to do a little bit differently. It’s a decent amount of work, but mostly worthwhile.

Did you have final say on all the stories that went in?
Yeah, pretty much, they did give me final say. If [SI deputy managing editor] David Bauer, who was the editor on this book because Rob was leaving, felt really strongly one way or the other, he’d urge me or make a recommendation, but in the end, he would leave it up to me.

In the acknowledgements of the book, you write: “in an industry in which the long narrative is gasping.” In 10 years, do you think there will still be a place for the type of contract that you have and the type of writing you do?
I hope so. God, the way the industry is changing, I couldn’t tell you with total confidence, but I really hope so. The response you get from people on these types of stories seems to justify their existence. They just seem to hit people in a different way and in a different place that the quicker, little blurb-ier stories don’t seem to be able to. Everything has its place, and that type of journalism has its audience and significance in a different way, but [these stories hit] more human aspects and get into who they really are. I hope to heck it’s still there, but God only knows.

Are there any younger sports writers who you’re really excited about seeing where they go?
Scott Price at Sports Illustrated is younger than me and does a great job with it. He has a lot of talent. There’s a guy at the St. Petersburg Times and I’ve been reading some of his stuff — Tom Lake. He seems to have a lot of potential to me. Jeff MacGregor is another fine long-form writer. Those are a few names [of sports writers] that pop into my head that have more than enough talent to write 8,000 words.

[Former SI and current ESPN writer] Rick Reilly wrote the introduction for Going Deep. What’s your relationship with him like?
We’re friendly. There are some years where we’ll see each other a couple times a year, and some years we might not see each other at all. Whenever we seem to intersect, we really have a lot of fun together. Great guy. A lot of life and a lot of laughs.

Has that relationship changed at all since he went to ESPN?
No. That’s secondary. It was a big change for SI that he’s not with us, but that doesn’t affect how I feel about Rick.

It seems like one of the things that drew him to ESPN was the opportunity to go into television work. Do you have any desire to do that?
No, I am really not pulled to TV. That’s one aspect of media that really [doesn’t interest me]. I’ve gone on and done things before, but it’s not a driving urge or a need to be on TV.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

After trying the life of a Wall Street peon immediately after college, David Willey left the financial world and ran to the publishing one. A decade and a half later, he finds himself at the helm of Rodale’s Runner’s World, a position he’s held since 2003 when he jumped from Men’s Journal. During his tenure at the top of the masthead, Willey — who’s based in the company’s Emmaus, Pennsylvania offices — has overseen a redesign, helped ad pages increase despite the struggles of the industry, and been installed as editorial director of Running Times.

Willey is also the president of American Society of Magazine Editors, where he’s helping bring the organization into the Internet age. He played a key role in introducing panels about sustainability to the upcoming American Magazine Conference in San Francisco, and is relishing the opportunity to bring the next generation of editors into the ASME fold. In town for the board meeting, Willey took time to speak with mediabistro.com in Rodale’s New York offices about the upcoming conference, allure of working in Pennsylvania, and updates to the magazine’s Web site that will be like a “performance-enhancing drug” for page views.

Name: David Willey
Position: Editor-in-chief of Runner’s World and editorial director of Running Times
Resume: “After grad school, I spent a year struggling as a freelancer in New York, followed by a year on staff at a trade mag publisher, then (finally, mercifully) was hired at Men’s Journal, where I stayed for eight and a half years, starting as an assistant editor and moving up to executive editor. I started as EIC of Runner’s World in 2003. For the record: No, the editor of Runner’s World need not be some kind of near-Olympic-caliber runner. I’ve done four marathons and am still chasing the Holy Grail of a Boston qualifier with the normal mix of dread and hopefulness.”
Birthday: October 17, 1967
Hometown: Grand Rapids, Michigan
Education: BA Williams College, MSJ Medill School of Journalism
Marital status: Married, with two kids and a third on the way
First section of the Sunday Times: “Also for the record — that still means the actual ink-on-your-fingers newspaper to me — the Sunday morning ritual just isn’t the same on a laptop. First section? Depends. I scan the front page and if there’s something I want to read right away, I’ll follow the jump. If not, I go to the Sports section and, in Groundhog Day-like fashion, wish the “newspaper of record” had more actual news and results from the day before — which my middling, downsized local paper has no problem getting into the morning edition. (Okay, then I boot up the laptop.) I save the [NYT] magazine for later, when there aren’t kids and a dog clamoring for breakfast and I can actually, you know, read it.”
Favorite television shows: “Are all on DVD. West Wing, Sports Night (I’m an Aaron Sorkin junkie), The Wire, Arrested Development. But I will watch 30 Rock, Entourage, Mad Men and any broadcast of the Boston Red Sox.”
Guilty pleasure: Pinot noir, “Oberon ale, chocolate milkshakes, the corned-beef reuben kit from Zingerman’s Deli (although I don’t feel the least bit guilty about any of them — one of the virtues of being a runner).”
Last book read: “I’m a promiscuous reader, keeping several books going at one time and picking them up as my mood dictates. Nonfiction: The Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, because clearly we need to make some changes. Fiction: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — which I started before Oprah blessed it, I swear.”

Obviously it’s not the greatest time in the magazine industry, yet a lot of the Rodale publications are sort of bucking the trend — Men’s Health is doing well. Women’s Health is also staying strong. How’s Runner’s World doing?
Runner’s World is also doing really well. We’re continuing to grow. Our newsstand, like Men’s Health and Women’s Health, is up this year over last year for the fifth year in a row. Total readership is growing. Our online traffic is like a hockey stick. Coming off of the Olympics, we just had our best traffic month ever. We had 20 million page views.

The magazine is still really thriving. We’ve got an incredibly passionate readership, and I think running is one of those things in tough economic times — it doesn’t necessarily get cut from people’s lives. In fact, it may be the opposite. People are so passionate about it and it’s a part of their lives, and it helps them sort of stay in control. It helps them feel healthy, it empowers them — all those things that when life gets hard and economic times get hard, those things become even more important. So, I think what you mentioned taking hold at Rodale is happening at Runner’s World also.

The editor of Runner’s World has traditionally been based in Rodale’s offices in Pennsylvania, not New York. Talk a little bit about how that changes your job.
It’s a great question and it’s really interesting. I lived in New York for 13, years and I worked in magazines. I worked at Men’s Journal for eight and a half years. That’s where I was before I took this job at Rodale. After living out in Pennsylvania for five and a half years now, part of me still feels like [New York] is home, and I’m here a fair amount. Whenever I come back, I still feel very energized and comfortable. But there’s a lot to be said for having sort of a dual existence and being out [in Pennsylvania]. Some of it’s the obvious things that you would expect. The pace isn’t quite as insane. New York is a very work-centric place anyway, and it’s a little bit harder to have a balanced life. And I say this all speaking totally from experience. I’m married. We have two little kids with a third on the way now, and we have a dog.

I’m one of those New Yorkers who never thought I would last more than a year. It was kind of like, “okay, one more year.” And then I paused and realized I’d been here for 10 years and I loved the place. But I’ve always been very outdoors-oriented and active and athletic. Even when I lived in the city, I couldn’t live any farther than five blocks from Central Park because I was in the park literally almost every day. It was like my lifeline. I would go downtown for other reasons, but I had to live uptown. For all of those reasons, being out of the city is great, on a personal level.

There are also some magazine reasons why it’s great to be out there. We really are able to totally focus on the magazine. We do 12 issues a year with a pretty small staff, and we have a really small online staff of seven people. We really are able to focus on what we are doing while also kind of living the life. Basically, everyone who works on Runner’s World, the Web site or the magazine, is a runner. It’s part of our lives. We’re in the same building as Bicycling, so there are lunchtime rides going out every day. It’s like the Rodale lifestyle, which has kind of become, in the past several years, a little bit trendy. It even extends into organics, the balanced life thing. Rodale has been doing this for decades. It’s real out there. It’s not a marketing line or a pitch. It really is the way we live our lives out there, and I think there are some real advantages to that work-wise. It helps us really be in tune with the running community, the readers and the users of our Web site. We totally relate to them and interact with them all the time out there. We run with them. People are energized in a way that I think is different. I don’t think there’s any place on earth that’s more energized than New York City, but I think it’s a different kind of focus and energy there [in Pennsylvania] that comes with just being able to focus on what we’re doing. Some of the noise gets filtered out. You come into a New York high-rise, especially in the media industry, and there is lots of noise. There’s lots of other stuff going on and lots of it is important, but you can get distracted and knocked off track sometimes. There’s a lot less of that out there.

Have you ever been close to hiring someone only to have him or her say, “I really can’t live out in Pennsylvania?”
Yeah.

Is that a problem or do you think it’s more of people saying, “I need to check out Pennsylvania before applying for the job?” Is it a self-selecting population?
It’s a challenge when you’re recruiting people. When I took this job, it was with the mandate to grow the magazine, redesign the magazine, and that included bringing in some new talent. Editors, designers, writers, everything — and I recruited a lot of people from New York City. A lot of those hires are still there and they’re totally key people, but there have been some people who came from New York and realized that they didn’t like living out there or there were other things that just weren’t right for them.

You use the word self-selecting, and I think that’s definitely part of it. People like Tish Hamilton and Kory Kennedy, our current art director, came from the city. Robert Festino was the art director who did our very first redesign and he came from Entertainment Weekly. Those people tend to be older, they tend to be married. They tend to maybe even have kids. So, they’re at a point where I was when I took this job which was: been in the city, worked really hard in magazines and loved magazines, still care really deeply about doing great work but maybe was thinking a little about where else can I do this? If you have that mindset, it’s pretty logical to think about Rodale, and typically it’s not the single 25-year-olds who end up picking up stakes and moving out to Pennsylvania. Honestly, I can’t say if I were single and 25 that I would want to pick up stakes and go out there myself. It’s a challenge — I think it needs a little bit more time and effort on the recruiting end, but when it works, it works for the long haul.

Rodale bought Running Times in 2007 and you’re the editorial director of the publication. It seems to me that it’s more for the hardcore runner. Can you talk about the differences between your job with RT and Runner’s World and how the editorial focus of each magazine differs?
As Runner’s World redesigned in 2004 and really broadened, there was really big-time growth there. We brought in lots of new subscribers and newsstand started going through the roof, and that really kind of captured the growth that was happening in running overall. In particular, lots of young women are coming into the sport. We think of them as the post-Title IX generation.

When Runner’s World redesigned, it really did broaden it, welcoming all kinds of runners, not just the 10-time marathoners and people who are running 100 miles a week. The success that Runner’s World had, at that point, made life kind of difficult for Running Times. And you’re exactly right, Running Times is and was founded to focus on the more dedicated and the more hardcore runner. As Runner’s World grew and continued to succeed, that made life harder for Running Times. Running Times, out of necessity, started to broaden a little bit, too, because they saw the same growth patterns that were happening in the sport that we saw. Running Times got away a little bit from that niche, you know — the front of the pack as opposed from the front all the way to the back. There are lots of people who just assumed that we were going to buy [Running Times] and shut it down. It really is the only competition that’s running-specific that there is, and it’s one-sixth of our size. We never intended to shut it down; in fact what we thought was sort of the secret sauce of it was that we were the only buyer that really could let Running Times really go back to being Running Times because we’re Runner’s World. We’re already talking to all runners so we could empower Running Times to go back to its focus and talk to just the really dedicated people. That was the idea and it made sense editorially for Rodale to serve the whole running community; it made sense from an advertising standpoint; it just made sense all around.

I am the editorial director, but I don’t edit the magazine. Jonathan Beverly is the editor-in-chief of Running Times, and he edits the magazine. He and I talk all the time, but I don’t approve headlines or line-ups. I don’t line edit. There are things that I do for Runner’s World but not for Running Times. There’s a really small and hardcore group of editors and runners who do that, and that’s really working, too…

You ran the Chicago Marathon in 2007. It seems to me that a growing trend is for editors to embody their magazines in a way they didn’t 10 or 15 years ago. Would you agree?
I do. The obvious and easy answer to that is to start talking about the brand, which is fine. It’s a very real phenomenon, obviously, and I think it’s important. To be honest, I try not to use that word “brand” too much because I think it sometimes can be taken the wrong way and we run the risk of commoditizing what we do a little bit, if we just boil everything down to the brand.

I think what we still do as editors and writers and designers and photographers is be creative. It’s the things that we make and it’s that great alchemy of a great story well-told with an amazing layout and incredible photography. That to me is the magic to what we do, and that is kind of what is referred to as the brand now. It gets extended across all of the different platforms, and I’m not demeaning that at all. I still [think] that the magic is what creative people do and then the business ability to make that sustainable. Being a face of your magazine or your brand is also a huge part of what the industry is about now. I do think it’s important especially for brands like Runner’s World, where the real power is in the community. And I just don’t mean community in the online sense like “we have a chat board so we’re into community,” I’m talking like there is a real community of runners around this country and it’s deep, and it runs the gamut from this skinny 75-year-old who runs 20 marathons a year to the Sarah Palin soccer mom. Every town, every city, every state in this country has its own running community in it and it’s very, very real. I think it’s important for those people to feel like the magazine that they get every month and feel so strongly about, is not only for them but is by them, in a way. It’s by people who are runners like they are and it doesn’t get into politics, gender or race. It’s about being a part of the running community and understanding that psychology. I do make a real effort — it’s not just me, other editors as well — to run races around the country. I ran Chicago last year in that brutally hot marathon. I also ran the Austin Marathon in February. There’s a half-marathon out in Allentown that we run every year. A bunch of us are going to Philly to run the half-marathon in a couple of weeks.

The big events like New York, Boston and Chicago, those three big marathons, we have a pretty big presence at. It’s pretty cool, I have to say, meeting readers, because they’re so excited to meet the editor of Runner’s World. It’s not just because half of them can’t be put on the cover or have stories to pitch — well, there’s that too — they’re just excited to meet you because you’re the person who makes this magazine that they care about so much. I think it’s important especially for special interest [running] magazines when that is sort of the engine of everything. The more you can be in the mix with your readers and users, the better it is.

You talk a lot about the community of runners and it seems, in a lot of ways, it’s something that transfers really well to the Web. But I know there are a lot of runner’s discussion broads and groups online that might not need RunnersWorld.com to connect. Have you had trouble bringing runners to your site?
No, we haven’t. We’re, at this very moment, expanding the community aspects of our site in a really big way. The forum-ites have been there all along. They formed in and of themselves when the Web site was launched. Our Web site has been around for seven or eight years, and there are thousands of people who are on our boards talking about anything and everything. They’ve always been there and in a lot of ways, that’s one of the biggest assets of our site.

We just formed a partnership with a community vendor where we’re really going to extend that out. Everything on the site will eventually become part of the community. It’s things like being able to comment and share every single story, every bit of content on the Web site. It will also, we think, turn Runner’s World into sort of a social networking site. It will be sort of a Facebook-ish destination but really focused just on runners. What’s happening is sites like that are getting sliced more and more thinly , and it’s a great opportunity for brands like Runner’s World to make our own Web sites the place where that stuff happens. The users very soon not only will be able to go on and chat about stuff, but they’ll have personal profiles. They’ll be able to put out race photos from their most recent race and video, and Google map links to their local training runs. They’ll be able to find each other in local areas: You can just throw together, “Hey, I’m training for the Philly half-marathon. Is there anybody else who lives in Allentown who wants to do long runs on Sunday?” These people are going to be able to find each other immediately, and I think that’s going to be like a real performance-enhancing drug for our Web site and our page views.

I guess the billion-dollar question is, how do you make any money off that? Ads are a part of it but they’re not growing as fast as everyone needs them to grow. My thought with a place like Runner’s World is you make it easy for a user to buy a shoe that you guys recommend. At the end of a review where you’re saying, “Here’s this great shoe, our editors love it, we think you’ll like it too,” you add a click here link that takes you to New Balance or Asics or something like that. Is that a viable option? Do you think that blurs the editorial line too much?

Yes and yes. We do that now. We’ve got a shoe finder where all the shoes that we review in the magazine — we do four big shoe reviews a year, and we have set up our own shoe lab — is on the Web site: you can search by type of shoe, brand name, however you want. We have an arrangement with a company that’s called RunTex, which is a retailer in Austin, Texas, where there’s a button that says “Buy now” and you can click and go buy it. It does get a little tricky because we review shoes in the magazine, and we have absolute separation between you know, edit and advertising. Shoe companies are our biggest advertising category in the magazine. A shoemaker is our biggest single advertiser, that’s Nike, no big surprise. So we just have to make sure we’re very, very careful about that. We have a disclaimer on our Web site that sort of lays that out. None of this is a violation of ASME guidelines.

I’d hope you would know…
[Laughs] I thought about it very carefully, trust me. We have a disclaimer that tells people: Here’s the deal. We review shoes; we’ve got this arrangement as a convenience for you. No shoes that we recommend are given any kind of preferential treatment on the retail side. And we take a small percentage of the sale. Now that gets to the other part: The real answer to your question is, you just can’t make that much money at that. We act as the reviewer and the facilitator — even if we have a link and a “Buy now” button — you’re still not going to make enough money on that sale to have that be a big business.

Let’s talk about the American Magazine Conference in San Francisco. What’s your involvement with it? Are you all developing the panels or have you championed any of them yourself, specifically?
As the president of the ASME board, I’m more involved than I would have been otherwise, even as an ASME board member. So I’ve been aware of all the panel ideas and how they’re coming together, and I’ve had input on the editorial portion. I feel pretty strongly that the industry needs to get our heads around sustainability. There are pretty compelling issues to figure out with paper, distribution, recycling.

I don’t think magazines are dying, I really don’t. I know some magazines are closing and I think that’s part of the evolution of the media industry, but I really don’t think that there’s a better medium for bringing together that alchemy that I mentioned before. Great writing, great photography, great layout, you can hold it in your hand; it’s portable, it’s relatively cheap. It’s kind of the killer app. That said, there are some challenges that have to do with sustainability and paper, in particular. The MPA already has been working on things like that, but if there was an issue that I really sort of spoke up about, to really have some editorial breakout sessions about, that was it.

I feel like every week, there’s some slight tectonic shift that has taken place. You pick up the paper or go online on a Monday morning, and you read about some buyout or another magazine that’s closed or some other evolution. It’s all just happening so fast, and it’s changed the very job of being an editor. Editors everywhere, whether they’re editors of two million circulation, very high-profile magazines or maybe small city magazines, are kind of all grappling with some of the same challenges. I think and hope that a lot of that stuff will get talked about and at least kicked off at AMC and then followed up on with ASME — ASME really needs to grow with the magazine world.

We administer the ASME guidelines in print and online and that’s very important. But there are a lot of other things that ASME does and can [do], and I think the average ASME member probably just focuses on those two things: the awards and the guidelines, and violations. Both of those are more important than they’ve ever been, but there’s all this other stuff we need to do and be useful to all editors through all stages of their career. We just launched about a month ago, [a group] which is for assistant- and associate-level editors, and there are 65 or 70 members who have already signed up for that. [We] really need to get into the confluence of digital and print; how that impacts the awards, how it impacts editors’ daily lives. I think magazine editors are also a community. There are things that lots of us are doing with our magazines and our Web sites to serve our readers, and we just need to come together as ASME and think about that in the same way, and make sure that we’re serving the membership the way that each of us go back to our offices and serve our readers.

Are you talking about that in ASME board meetings? I picture all you guys sitting around in this dark room like the fall of Rome, but there’s a lot of smart people on that board, so I’m sure that this discussion is happening.
We talk about that all the time. The board meetings are full of very smart, successful, opinionated people, which means that there’s lots of great ideas flying around in debate. We do need to at almost every meeting talk about the guidelines, talk about the awards. We have been having sort of these larger philosophical issues, partly because we’re all thinking about it at our desks anyway. What does it mean to be a magazine editor today? So, what’s ASME’s role now, today? How much should we embrace digital versus print? You’re going to notice some changes in the way ASME looks and works and feels and serves its membership pretty soon.

On a more personal level, any idea where you’ll be in five years? Still want to be at Runner’s World?
I’ve never, ever been good at answering that question, honestly. This is where you say, “I love my job, this is the best job that I can imagine.” And I really do love my job. Rodale is a great place to work; it’s very entrepreneurial. My job has changed more times than I can count in the five and a half years that I’ve had it. When I took my job, the job was: make the magazine. Which, not too long ago was all of our jobs. And then, the editors here were given control over the Web sites, so now we’re overseeing the Web site. Very quickly when you start at Rodale, you understand the importance of international, so there’s that connection. We have — is it 10 or 11 international editions now? [Editor’s note: 12]. Rodale is very, very smart about its place in the media industry with — and Dave Zinczenko talked about it in your interview — all the different platforms. It really does mean that as editor-in-chief on these titles, you have all this opportunity to get involved in these things. You have a mandate to get involved in some of these things, but you can sort of pick and choose, from time to time, what you really want to focus on.

I have no idea what I’m going to be doing. I sure want to stay in media somehow. I still love magazines. I got into this because I was a magazine junkie 15 years ago. My first job out of college was on Wall Street. I was among the worst Wall Street hires ever made. It was only when I sort of stopped working — wasn’t crunching numbers and was doing research and presentations and doing writing, research — where it was the only time that I ever felt like I was sort of shining in that job. So I walked away from the Wall Street thing and went back to grad school in journalism. It’s the journalism, the writing, the storytelling, the magazine-making that I’m most passionate about. So whatever I do, I want to stay as close to that as I possibly can. There are a million different kinds of editors these days. You can shoot off into other mediums, television, and that’s all cool, and I’ve done that too. So that’s a very long way of saying I have no idea. If you’re an editor-in-chief right now in this moment, and you think you have a clear idea of what your next job is — what’s that old saying? If you want to amuse the gods, make plans. I think that’s kind of like the moment that we’re in magazines right now. Even if I did envision some kind of next job, a month from now it’s probably going to change anyway.

All right, last question. You got a lot of oohs and ahhs from the female section at ASME last year. Who’s better looking, you or Dave?
[Laughs] I can put you in touch with my wife and my two kids, but I think you know what my answer is.

Noah Davis is co-editor of FishbowlNY, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

Christopher Keyes began his magazine career as an intern at Outside and rose through the ranks to associate editor. After leaving the magazine in 2002, first for Skiing and then for Texas Monthly, where he was eventually editorial director, Keyes returned to the Santa Fe-based independent publication as its editor in 2006. (“I had to leave for long enough for people to forget I was an intern,” he jokes.) In the past, the magazine he helms has helped launch careers of writers including Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, and Keyes relishes the opportunity to continue producing quality long-form journalism. In addition to giving us the grand tour, captured on video, of Outside’s office in August, Keyes spoke with mediabistro.com about his magazine’s rich literary tradition, building a brand, and the advantages of working in an office where his staff hits the slopes before work.

Name: Chris Keyes
Position: Editor, Outside
Resume: Started as an intern at Outside. Rose to associate editor before leaving for Skiing. Joined Texas Monthly as its articles editor before being promoted to editorial director. Returned to Outside in 2006.
Birthday: March 13, 1974
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Education: BA, environmental science and policy, from Duke University
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: Week in Review: “I go straight to Frank Rich.”
Favorite television show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Bill Simmons’ The Sports Guy podcasts: “Zero nutritional value, but highly addictive.”
Last book read: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Tell me a little bit about how you see Outside — where it is now and where it’s going.
We just had our 30th anniversary last year, so we’re 31 years in, and we did a redesign last year. As part of the redesign, I really looked back at this mission statement that we’ve had and it was great to see that we’re doing exactly what we set out to do 30 years ago: inspire people to live an active lifestyle. That’s the thread that you’ll see throughout our pages. In terms of that mission, nothing’s really changed, but if you look at the magazine, it’s changed quite a bit. At the core of it is still this dedication to long-form literary journalism that holds the magazine together. It’s why people love the magazine. That’s surrounded by lots of service which lends itself to inspiring that active lifestyle.

Outside has always had an impressive focus on the long-form literary journalism: Jon Krakauer started here, Sebastian Junger started here. As magazines get smaller and articles get shorter, is there always going to be room in Outside for those 3,000-, 5,000-word stories?
Definitely. And if that part of it goes away, in my mind, Outside goes away. It’s still part of our uniqueness in the marketplace. If people are going to read long-form literary journals, they want to read it in a magazine right now. So we’re just completely committed to keeping that and trying, actually, as hard as we can to find that in the next generation of voices. It’s a different business model now. I think if you were here in the 1990s there were a lot of contract writers; now it’s almost exclusively freelance. It’s harder to find guys that we can really brand as Outside writers, but one of the things we’ve done is make a smaller pool of writers that we’re drawing from and keeping them very busy. They might be appearing in other magazines, but hopefully we’re keeping them so busy that they’re going to be here exclusively.

Are there any of those writers that you’re really excited about?
Yeah, there’s a few. There’s Eric Hansen, who writes our “Out of Bounds” column. He’s kind of continuing in the Tim Cahill and Randy Wayne White heritage of misadventure as opposed to just adventure. Nick Heil, who’s a former senior editor here, just came out with a book on Everest, and he’s written some great stories for us. He also writes our “Lab Rat” column. And another guy, Kevin Fedarko, who we just sent to Pakistan with Greg Mortenson, the guy who wrote Three Cups of Tea, sets up the schools there. He’s written some incredible stories for us. We’ve got some young voices that we’re really excited about.

Magazine circulation is down across the whole industry for the past six months. How’s Outside doing and what are you doing to kind of stem that circulation decline?
[Outside is doing] well, surprisingly. When you look at the industry as a whole we’re doing really well. I think newsstand is up between four and five percent for this year. Our circulation is up about four percent, or I think about 695,000 rate base, and that’s higher than it’s ever been. We feel pretty good about where we are right now, but obviously it’s really challenging out there.

We never got sucked into the public place distribution game and the agent-selling game. We certainly have it like all magazines did, but when ABC really cracked down on [junk circulation], all of ours has really been strong. So we didn’t have a lot of junk circulation, and I think that’s helped us hold strong in this year. We’ve also really focused on our covers. Four percent isn’t like a dramatic increase. but when you look at where the industry is as a whole, we don’t have as many bombs as we used to. So it’s good to have some consistency there — not to say that they all fly off the newsstand.

Outside sort of exists in a weird space. It’s out in Santa Fe, it’s an independent magazine. Do you think that helps you avoid some of the pitfalls that other magazines are going through?
Yeah, I do. There are certainly disadvantages to being out here, because people do almost forget that we’re out here, but first and foremost, the great thing about being in Santa Fe is here we are, this magazine whose mission is, like I said, inspiring the active lifestyle. Everybody in this office is living that lifestyle, so it’s a real authentic publication in that sense. If you come here in the winter, we’re meeting in the parking lot at 6:30 in the morning going out skiing a couple runs and then coming into work. You can’t do that in New York, and I think that comes through in our pages because we really know what we’re writing about and talking about. It does give us a unique perspective to be out here.

It’s hard to find talent because you can’t go across the street like you can in New York, but the people who do come out here really want to work for Outside and know that it’s a commitment. They have to love Santa Fe. So we get people who aren’t just looking for that next step necessarily in the magazine, but want to really spend some time here. I think that gives us an advantage because we have a real consistency of voice, of institutional memory of where the magazine’s been and where it’s going.

How does that work for you? Are you constantly going to New York for various things? Do you spend most of your time in Santa Fe?
I spend most of my time in Santa Fe. We have an editor, Mike Roberts, who first started in San Francisco in our line division and came out here when we brought our line to Santa Fe. He became an editor on the magazine, and then we moved him out to New York City. He’s on Good Morning America and Bill O’Reilly — he’s kind of the face of the magazine in New York. But I do travel probably two or three times a year to New York and then go out to L.A. a few times.

And what’s [Outside owner] Larry Burke’s involvement with the magazine?
Well, the good thing is he’s had the same idea for the magazine for 30 years. He’s not involved in a day-to-day level, at least editorially, but he is in a business sense. But I know exactly what he wants the magazine to be. About once a month in our production cycle, I will show him the issue. We’ll kind of quickly go through — sometimes I’ll make a change that he wants and sometimes we’ll disagree and it won’t be changed, but for the most part we see eye-to-eye and it’s a pretty good working relationship.

With the addition of Outside‘s Go, you seem to be building a brand. Are there any discussions of selling the titles?
People ask about Larry’s involvement in the magazine and I always say, if he’s really involved that’s a good sign. I tell my staff that because I think that he is so passionate about this brand that I can’t see him doing anything else, and so I don’t think he’s ready to let go of it yet. But he also sees it as something that he wants to grow. Magazines aren’t necessarily growing right now, but you add another title, which I think will help make us more robust.

Our online division is doing really well, like all magazines are starting to grow their own divisions pretty successfully. We’ve got our first TV production coming out on the travel channel in November, which we’re excited about; [we’re] looking to develop a lot more television programming. So we see a lot of ways where this brand can go. And it’s fun to work at Outside because unlike a lot of the bigger magazines, because we’re independent, you can’t just come here and be an editor. You have to be a multimedia editor; you have to wear a lot of different hats. You have to know a little bit about marketing, you have to know a little bit about TV, because you never know what you’re going to be called to participate in. We can’t just hire a TV division. You are the TV division if that’s what wants to happen.

Can you talk about that TV program?

We did a package of stories two times, two years in a row called “Unsolved Mysteries,” which was just exploring mysterious things that had happened in the wild. The pilot is actually hosted by a former intern here who wrote the package, Tim Sohn; he and a producer flew to New Guinea to investigate the disappearance in 1961 of Michael Rockefeller — the son of Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York — [who] disappeared swimming from his boat, which capsized at the island. One of the first things Tim had to do was try to recreate the swim, which involved swimming across shark-infested water, so it was pretty hilarious. He says that the scariest thing for him was getting in front of a camera for the first time.

Not the sharks?
Not the sharks.

What are you guys doing online?
Well, we have a partnership that’s gone back to 2001, when we partnered with Away.com. They’re two distinctive sites: they share some travel content but we have an online editor here. Most of our producers, and hardware and everything is in D.C. at Away.com. But we have total control of the editorial vision of the site. We don’t have, as I discussed, the luxury of just pouring a ton of money into our site, so fortunately all these other magazines are. We see this trickle-down technology, see what’s working, and pick and choose where our strengths are. We know that almost three-quarters of our traffic is coming for gear coverage. So we’ve really ramped up our coverage there. We have videos of all the gear that we’re reviewing in both our magazine and our buyer’s guide. We launched these first ones which were hilariously poor production value, and it was the most popular thing immediately that we’d done on our site. So we’ve started producing those almost once a week. And really, I think we went from about 10,000 views when we had very little video content to almost 200,000 a month, in just six months. There’s a lot more in the pipeline video-wise. We started with a really big umbrella blog, which didn’t have a focus. Now we’ve got a separate gear blog, which is generating its own traffic really well.

We’re looking at what we’re good at. We know we can’t do everything online right now, but I think we have a unique opportunity because Outside, rather than being so general interest, does have a focus. We’re going to be able to build a community a lot better than some magazines that do really cover the entire gamut of men’s interests.

It seems to me that you have a lot of different niches that you can sort of build out.
Yeah, the fitness side, and we have the travel side, and we have these little components that I think we can grow individually that are some of this bigger whole. But again, not so broad that we’re doing the best bars, drinks, and food and all of this stuff. That’s all sometimes tied into the magazine, but not where we’re going to pour [all] our energy online.

Photography is a huge part of Outside. How has digital imagery changed the game? Do you worry about fake photography or doctored photography?
We worry a lot about it. In fact, it’s interesting you brought it up. We just had an “Exposure” shot that we ran — it was a sailing shot in San Francisco Bay. We asked the photographer, “Did you do any doctoring?” ‘No.’ Asked him again: ‘No.’ [We] printed the image, [and] got several hardcore sailing fans who looked at the image and saw that something wasn’t right about it. We went back and discovered that it was doctored. That really concerns us from a digital standpoint because it was more than just highlighting a portion of the photograph, it was doctoring reality. We really changed our standards there, especially with that front “Exposure” section, which is supposed to represent a real, beautiful reality-based photograph in the front of the magazine. It does concern us and we’ve started to really look at our policies there to ensure that there is no doctoring. And the question is trying to define where that line is. Even Ansel Adams was doctoring his photographs. That’s a part of our conversations now.

Where is that line?
I don’t know. Where we came down to, at least with the “Exposure” section is if it changes the reality of the photograph — if it creates a reality that isn’t possible, that’s not okay. But if it’s changing the quality of the sunlight, that may be all right. It’s really a case-by-case basis.

Five years down the road, where do you see Outside?
I see Outside still being a print publication. Larry and I joke that if tomorrow morning we could switch our entire subscription base to Zinio or some other digital platform, we would do it in a second obviously — from an environmental standpoint, from a cost standpoint. But I don’t see it going away. We’ve always been dedicated to this long-form journalism, to rich, beautiful photography; really still the only place that those two things thrive are in a magazine format. So I see that as being still here five years from now. I have to imagine there will be some shakeout among the magazines that are in this space or sharing some of this space, but I think because Outside has been here for 30 years and defined this space, we will be the one that really sticks around. That said, I see a huge upside for our Web site and our audience growing there. Some readers are going to want to get the Outside content that we create in the magazine, and a lot more are going to want to get it online.

Noah Davis is a New York-based freelance writer and co-editor of FishbowlNY.com, mediabistro.com’s New York media blog.

When reached by phone for this interview, Lisa Belkin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the paper’s former Life’s Work columnist, provided the perfect lede: “Can I call you back in a minute? I’m trying to get my son’s AP scores sent to college.” Soon after, Belkin — who recently started penning the Times‘ Motherlode blog and will moderate mediabistro.com’s Women’s Magazine Dinner on November 12 — called back (after successfully submitting her son’s scores) and provided her insights on joining the parenting beat, journalism in the new media world, and finding the elusive work/life balance.

Name: Lisa Belkin
Position: Motherlode blog writer, New York Times Magazine contributing writer, host of “Life’s Work with Lisa Belkin” on Sirius XM Radio
Resume: Started at the Times as a clerk, answering phones in the Washington bureau, then worked her way around the Times ever since then, writing books along the way. Wrote the Life’s Work column about the intersection of life and work for the past nine years. Article that got the most attention: The Opt-Out Revolution, about high-powered, highly-paid women who leave the workforce.
Birthday: April 10
Hometown: Westchester, NY
Education: Princeton University
Marital status: Married to Bruce Gelb
First section of Sunday Times: “Magazine, except I almost always read it before Sunday, online.”
Favorite television show: Lost
Last book read: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Guilty pleasure: Mallomars

You’re a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and recently started penning NYTimes.com’s Motherlode blog. Talk a little bit about what each of these jobs entail. How do you structure your days and weeks?
[Structure] would be a good thing to have, wouldn’t it? I don’t know that I have as much of it as I should. The blog is a daily exercise in terms of what is out there and being talked about in the parenting circles. There’s always a magazine piece in the background. Depending on whether I’m reporting or writing, that’s another part of the day. There’s periodically a column that we are just starting [in the NYT Magazine] so I don’t even know how that’s going to work, but it will be blog ideas that become longer and larger, and rise to the level of a column. Every day is different, and structure really is one of the things I’m working at right now.

How do you decide what goes on the blog and what becomes a column? Do you write a blog post and then if the response from the readers is strong, it turns into a column?
It’s the other way around. There are some things that are longer and a little bit more than a daily blog post and those tend to become columns, either a Life’s Work column for the Styles section or a front-of-book column for the magazine.

How does the blog work? Do you have editors who you work with to figure out topics?
Yes, there are two people who I work with daily. Megan Liberman is the content editor, so I’ll bounce ideas off of her. We’ll decide what has legs on any given day. Then I write and send it to her. She looks it over and sends it to Jeff Delviscio, who is the tech person. This is all brand new to me. There is an immediacy to it that is exhilarating and terrifying. I can write something at 8 a.m. and it can be up by 8:30 a.m. if things go well. It’s lightning speed. And then there’s feedback, which isn’t brand new, but it’s constant. So I’m learning.

How does that immediacy of the feedback alter how you’re writing?
That’s a good question. I’ve been [writing the blog] for exactly three weeks, so I don’t know the answer to a lot of the questions yet. But there is a subtle difference between what will get people reading and what will get people talking. I can’t quite articulate the difference, but I’m beginning to know it when I see it. A blog is more about what will get people talking and print is more what will get them reading.

It’s fascinating what types of columns get the most comments.

Right, but it’s not only about comments because I don’t think comments are a complete reflection of who’s reading. The things that are most commented on are not necessarily the things that are most trafficked, but the comments are fun. The comments are something that we never used to have. You used to write and then wonder. I would be really happy when I would see someone on the treadmill or the subway reading something I’d written because that would mean they actually did.

Now, they tell me they did. I put it out there and a few minutes later, they write back. The comments are the point in a way, because the comments are the conversation. It’s not just what you write. It’s also what they then add to it that makes a blog richer, I think, than just sending it out there.

I find there’s something about having commenters that makes me take one more look at what I’m writing and think, “Is this actually what I want to say?” because I know if I get something wrong, I’m going to hear about it immediately.
Yes, if it’s not exactly what you want to say, you will know. You will hear about it in five minutes. The beauty is though you can say, “Oh yes, you’re right,” and you can add or write back. It’s truly interactive. When I first started hearing [the word interactive] a decade or so ago, I didn’t really get it, but [writing on the Web is] completely interactive.

How did you end up on the parenting and work/family beat?
It evolved. The Life people came to me. I got a call one day, and interestingly it happened to be a particularly bad, disorganized, frantic day, and they called and said, “We want to do a column about life and work, and we’d like you to write it.” So for nine years, I did. You can’t write about life/work issues without having an eye on parenting. Not everyone who struggles for life/work balance is a parent, but parents have particular struggles.

The panelists at the Women’s Magazine Dinner consists of women who’ve taken their careers online. How has the Internet changed the opportunities for journalists, and specifically female journalists?
The buzzword for the decade I’ve been covering life and work has been “flexibility.” If you can work on your time in your space then you have more control over both your life and your work. Women in particular are looking for this because they are the ones who — at least up until now — feel the most pressure. For them, it’s been a game changer. It means that you are more likely to be able to fit the puzzle pieces in to form a whole that works for you if you are able to take the work piece of it in a tablet-sized box with you wherever you go. That’s how I do it. I got myself a wireless card, and I can work absolutely anywhere. It was almost true before the wireless card. It is now absolutely true with the wireless card, except maybe on an airplane.

If you’re a writer and you have this thing you can take anywhere and write anywhere, suddenly all sorts of possibilities are open that weren’t open when you needed to sit at a desk and talk face to face with an editor. It means this profession is entirely mobile, and for women who are looking for mobility and flexibility, it’s changed everything.

Are there specific aspects of Web sites aimed at women or parents that you think work well?
I’m drawn to two kinds of Web sites when I’m looking for fodder. One is really good news people who have a hand in what’s new out there: new studies, new conversations, new trends. The other [kind] are really talented essayists, people who have a lot to say about something that’s universal, but phrase it particularly well. The thing about parenting is that so many people are doing it — it’s a universal experience — and what I find powerful is when somebody manages to capture that in a way that hasn’t been captured before.

Where are you finding those people? Is it more on the sites of mainstream publications or on personal blogs?
Both. I actually spend a lot of time on blogs that maybe nobody else has heard of. There are women out there exploring their lives, often anonymously, which is one of the fascinating parts of this. It allows moms who have something to say — they are mostly moms, although there’s a growing daddy lit, if you will, that is much more recent — [to say it]. Women who were going through this life-altering experience of parenting were doing it in this relatively isolated way and some of the most interesting blogs are their stories without their names, so they can be completely honest. There are a lot of pseudonyms out there.

When you find one of these writers, what do you do? Does it spawn ideas? Do you contact the blogger?
I haven’t done anything. What I hope to do is reach out to a lot of these women and bring them onto my blog and make it more of a community there. Again, I’ve been at this for three weeks, so that’s one of the things I haven’t quite gotten to do yet.

What skills does a journalist need now to succeed? You have an XM show. Do writers need to know about satellite radio? What about Podcasting? Video shooting/editing? Blogging?
I’m surprised about how much of my journalistic life is spent talking. It started out completely writing. I’m stunned that probably the most important training I got early, early on was my speech and debate class in high school. I talk all the time now. The speeches, the radio show, so much of it is verbal. Writing is still the core. It’s still the root of it, but it’s so much more about the oral part than I ever would have expected a few years ago. I have actually contacted my high school speech and debate coach to thank her.

What was her response?
She was very pleased. Then she saw me a few weeks later on the Today show, and she sent me an email telling me I was talking too fast.

I would imagine that being the parenting columnist has a certain time limit, both in terms of available material and your interest in continuing to write the column. I know you just started the blog three weeks ago, but any idea what’s next?
I have no idea how long it’s going to last. I have a feeling I will know when it’s time to leave. My first question when they asked me to do this was, “Aren’t my kids too old?” which is sort of a way of saying, “Aren’t I too old?” The answer was, anyone we pick is going to be at some point on the parenting spectrum, so in a way it makes more sense to have someone who’s been through more of it because you have more touchstones. You have more experience under you’re belt. I’m finding that even though that was my concern that’s actually right.

First of all, there are many fewer people out there blogging who have teens than those who have young children. It’s unusual. And secondly, I guess I’ve actually accumulated some wisdom along the way. I do have the perspective of “This too shall pass,” which you don’t have as much, or I certainly didn’t, when you were smack in the middle of it. I’m grateful for that perspective now, and I wish I hadn’t made some things as huge as I did along the way. I hope to pass that on, but I’m also grateful for it journalistically because I’m not drowning in the middle of many of the things I’m writing about. I do understand that the good things end and the bad things end, and you appreciate the good things and you get through the hard ones. I don’t know where end will be.

What’s the key to the work/life balance?

If you find out let me know and I’ll write it, okay? I have not figured it out. I thought the column was going to be about answers. That’s what I wrote about in my last column: There never were any answers. There were a lot of interesting questions, and there was great conversation, but if you figure out the answer, let me know.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2003, Steve Proctor traveled across the country, moving from his position at The Baltimore Sun to take a deputy managing editor spot at the San Francisco Chronicle under managing editor Robert J. Rosenthal (another East Coast transplant). In the years since, he’s seen Rosenthal’s departure and significant cuts in the newsroom while the remaining staff has increasingly focused on transitioning to Web, a job Proctor has helped oversee. It’s a difficult time for newspapers nationwide, and the Hearst-owned Chronicle is no exception, but the deputy believes the paper has cut costs while continuing to produce great journalism. (The BALCO steroid investigation springs to mind.) During an August visit to San Francisco for the Magazine Publishers of America conference, we took some time to talk with Proctor about changes at the Chronicle, how the Web influences the print product, and how the obsession San Franciscans have with “extremely tall buildings” has changed the paper.

Name: Steve Proctor
Position: Deputy managing editor for news, San Francisco Chronicle
Resume: United Press International, reporter (1979-80); The Baltimore Sun, reporter and various editing positions leading to deputy managing editor for sports and features (1980-2003); the San Francisco Chronicle (2003-present)
Birthday: June 25, 1957
Hometown: Riverdale, Maryland
Education: BA in journalism/history from American University in Washington, D.C. (1979), and John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University (1998-99)
Marital status: Married, two children
First section of the Sunday Times: A-section
Favorite TV show: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food
Network
Guilty pleasure: “Golf Channel, as I am addicted to the Scottish torture.”
Last book read: Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American
Revolution, by Gerald M. Carbone

You oversee the Metro, National, Foreign, Business, and Sports sections. What are your daily tasks?
Typically I’ll get into the newspaper sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 in the morning, and I’ll spend the first hour and a half touching base with my key editors — the editor of metro, national, foreign, business, and sports — and lining up what we’re doing in response to anything that’s breaking that day. Obviously we have enterprise stories that we’ve been working on for a period of time that are always in progress, and we will talk about those at times, but primarily we focus on what’s happening that day and how we want to deal with it. We have a meeting at 10:30 every morning with the editors of the various sections of the paper and the editor-in-chief, Ward Bushee. We will spend a little bit of that time talking about what is really hot on the Web site right now — like every newspaper in America we’re a Web-first operation, so part of my morning discussion will be when we can get these things up on the Web.

Hot in terms of what people are looking at?
What people are reading. So, that guides my choices somewhat in the paper. Sometimes you’ll see a story that maybe wasn’t on your radar screen just getting massive traffic on the Web, and you realize there’s a huge amount of interest in this story, and then you take a second look at it because of that. We reflect a little bit on what was in today’s paper, things we might have done differently, things we loved. And then we just go around the table and talk about what stories people are offering for A1 pretty much exclusively. There’ll often be a very lively discussion about how to cover certain stories, and we’ll get great ideas sometimes from editors who are not in the business department about how to cover the unfolding business story or whatever.
That [meeting] usually goes from about 10:30 to 11:00. Between 11:00 and 2:00 or so I have a chance to kind of catch up on other things, like enterprise stories that are in the works. I’ll start working on Sunday packages. Any kind of corporate things I have to do, like evaluations, I try to squeeze them in between 11:00 and 2:00.

At 3:00 we look at all the photographs we’ve taken for that day, graphics we’ve developed and so forth, and then sort of semi-pick out the design for the next day’s front page. From there on, I’ll continue doing advance work or reading the day’s stories as they’re coming in and helping to shape them with editors who are developing them. I usually stay here till 6:30 or 7:00 at night, later if necessary. On the night of a [presidential] debate, when the debate ends I’ll spend another half an hour talking to the people about how we want to frame the stories and then let them carry it forward.

You’ve been at the paper since 2003. How has it changed?

When I came here in 2003, in addition to the editor-in-chief, there was a managing editor and a deputy editor, and there were a lot more people in upper management. As we’ve downsized, they’ve really flattened out the management structure, so there’s an editor and three deputy managing editors, [of] which I’m one. That had meant a great deal more responsibility for me in terms of the managing of the newsroom day to day, and dealing with A1 on any given day, which I’ve enjoyed. It’s given me more freedom to operate in the newsroom in the way that I think is best, so that’s been good.

There’s been an increasing emphasis all through the years — and it was really something that started before I came here in 2003 — on integrating the Web and newsroom operations. Like in a lot of papers, our Web operation grew up somewhat separately from the newsroom operation, and that creates barriers that make it difficult to excel in the way you need to both on the Web and in print. We’ve been going through the process of trying to integrate those systems much more so than we have in the past. We started the continuous news desk, for instance, that keeps constant breaking news updates on the day. We’ve expanded the number of blogs, photo galleries, videos, all the sorts of things that attract more readers to the Web, and have taken over responsibility for updating a lot of the sub-navigation pages on the Web [although] not the homepage itself. I developed a desk — in coordination with other people here — that constantly updates the Bay Area news page, the national news page, so that if a reader is coming back throughout the day they’re finding a new look and different stories. And a day like today with the stock market crashing, for instance, we need to have that business page updated every six, seven, eight minutes, because people will keep coming back.

Who’s doing that? Is there a separate Web staff?
The Web staff manages the homepage itself, because there’s a sense — and I think wisely — that the sensibility of the newsroom editor and the sensibility of a Web reader are different things. But they don’t have a large enough editorial staff to really keep all their pages updated in a certain way. So some of our more minor pages — like the environment one — will be updated automatically. They’ll just scrape whatever we have in the editorial system and update it.
On the active pages — like local news, national, foreign — what I essentially do is take the wire editing desk and make that a combined wire editing/page updating desk, because the nature of wire editing is such that you don’t have reporters that you’re dealing with. You’re just looking at wires and copying and merging things together. Every hour we try to take 10 minutes to update pages, so that on a minimum they’re updated hourly — more if news is breaking. It gives me resources to keep those sub-navigated pages fresh. One of our goals is to get people beyond the homepage and get them to spend more time within the Web site itself. And that’s a way of getting that accomplished.

You mentioned that the Web traffic sometimes influences content in the print publication. How so?
It’s more a case of play for the story. Most of the stories that are driving traffic on the Web we’re already writing at one dimension, in one way or another. I’ll give you an example: every single time we’ve posted a story on the Internet about an extremely tall building in San Francisco, thousands of comments come on the story right away and the Web traffic goes crazy. I knew that there was a passionate interest in tall buildings in San Francisco, but I had no idea the depth of it until we enabled comments on our stories. And so as a consequence of that I’ve tended to give every story about another tall building issue front page display, whereas I might have kept some of those in the local section in the past. And I mean I shouldn’t say anything is all the time, but I’m much more inclined to put a story about a tall building on A1, because I know from seeing how the debate becomes so passionate on the comments area how strongly people are interested in those stories.

One of the big advantages of newspaper Web sites is that you can very accurately track what people are reading in a way that you never could before.
That is an enormous help as an editor, because you have your own instinct about what’s good, but you can never know what everybody thinks, and this really gives you an opportunity to know — in a very specific sort of way, in real time — what people think about the unfolding news of the day, what’s really attracting them. And you have to be a little bit cautious about it on one level in the sense of certain kinds of things that you might not put a lot of attention on in the newspaper are real huge Web traffic drawers. What I would call cheap crime tends to be huge Web traffic drawers. I still don’t play a lot of cheap crime on A1 in the Chronicle.

Before you came out to the West Coast you were out on the East Coast at The Sun — so was former managing editor Robert J. Rosenthal. Is there any difference between East Coast and West Coast papers?
When I first came out here I was just surprised. I don’t think I’ve been at a meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area, either at the Chronicle or anywhere else, that actually started on time. And I think of that as kind of a cultural indicator of a more laid-back approach. People on the East Coast are just a little bit more intense — and in some ways that’s good in the newspaper, because people can be more driven. But I haven’t really noticed anything substantive in terms of the coverage itself. One of the first things I realized when I got here was what a terrific staff we had. I think in some cases in the past maybe they didn’t feel the leadership was what they wanted, and my sense from them has been that they just want a more clear, focused idea of what it is that we want to accomplish as a paper, and as we zeroed in on that, the work has been terrific from them. So I’m really happy and proud about all of that.

You get to work this morning and the stock market’s already down 550 points. How does the time change affect things?
Even still the world is mostly run from the East Coast. So if you’re covering the presidential debate, most of the presidential debates will be conducted someplace on East Coast time. That gives you more time to deal with the debate and offer an analytical take on it. Wall Street closes out here at around 1:00 or so, so you have much more time to reflect, contact people about where they think the story’s going and so forth and so on. We’ll often know before our final deadline what the Asian markets have done because of the time difference, and we’ll be able to include in a story about Wall Street how the Asian markets reacted this morning to the news. There are a number of advantages to being out here from a time perspective. And in every way, covering sporting events, covering the World Series or whatever, we’ll have a lot more time to write the story after the game ends than someone else will most of the time. It’s a big advantage from the standpoint of deadlines.

How does that work on the Web? Did you have someone here this morning at 5:00 in the morning when the markets opened in New York?
Yes, I have the Web staff working pretty much from 7:00 a.m. till about 11:00 p.m. I could have someone here at 5:00 obviously and there would be news to put up there, but you don’t have a lot of people looking at the Web then, so you have to just sort of make some value judgments. Our main traffic will be sometime between 8:00 and 10:00, sometime between noon and 2:00 and right around 3:00. There are three spikes a day, so we’re conscious of making sure that we have fresh things for those spikes — by 8:00 a.m. if you’ve signed onto the Chronicle you would have a complete update of what’s going on in the markets and so forth and so on, particularly on a day like today.

Are you happy with where the Chronicle is and where it’s going right now in terms of coverage?
In terms of the news coverage I’m very happy. I think we’re putting out a very strong paper every day. I think our paper — if you compared it to regional papers of our size — would really stand out in that class for the type of journalism that it produces consistently day in and day out, and especially for the high spikes. I think some of the work we’ve done in the past four or five years, the BALCO steroid investigation being one of them, and a number of other narrative stories that have gotten some recognition. We did win a Pulitzer Prize for photography for a pretty powerful narrative story about an Iraqi boy who was blown up there and flown back here to Oakland to be cared for and pieced back together. A number of our stories have gotten a lot of national recognition, but I think our paper day to day is a very, very solid paper, and I’m very happy with the work that we’re doing.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

When Sewell Chan came to The New York Times from The Washington Post in 2004, he immediately made an impression on the Gray Lady’s famed Metro reporting staff with his prodigious work rate and nearly daily bylines. It didn’t take long for the New York media world to notice the efforts of the Harvard graduate, as well. In a 2006 New York Observer story, Gabriel Sherman wrote, “At a paper populated by reporters with sharp elbows and brazen ambition, Mr. Chan’s singular, nearly inhuman work ethic stands out.” Three years later, he’s the bureau chief of the Times‘ local news blog, City Room, one of the paper’s most-trafficked portals. With his blog nearing its two-year anniversary, Chan spoke with mediabistro.com on the 14th floor of the NYT‘s headquarters about working with the boss’ son (Times scion Arthur Gregg Sulzberger), his paper’s efforts on the Web, and why Times reporters go on “autopilot” when news breaks.

Name: Sewell Chan
Position: Metropolitan reporter; City Room bureau chief
Resume: The Washington Post, reporter (2000-2004, intern in 1997 and 1999); The Wall Street Journal (intern in 1996); the Philadelphia Inquirer (intern in 1995)
Hometown: New York, N.Y.
Education: Harvard University, B.A. in Social Studies, 1998; Oxford University, MPhil in Politics, 2000
Marital status: “Single (Is this really relevant?)”
First section of the Sunday paper: “Hard to answer. I alternate among Week in Review, the Magazine, and the Book Review.”
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Dim sum
Last book read: Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad

In general, high blog traffic is often event-based. Heath Ledger’s death was huge traffic-driver for City Room, and also the Obama election comes to mind. Do you have any thoughts about that?
It gets to a bigger question of what is a blog. The whole blogger versus journalist debate that might have existed around 2004 is dead. Over. Stale. Uninteresting. I couldn’t care less — it’s a meaningless debate to have. What’s more interesting to me is what a blog means now. There’s the traditional, which is one voice of one person, like Firedoglake or Andrew Sullivan, that’s coming from a single point of view. Then there’s the very, very popular group blog model, the Huff Post model, that I think in some ways is one of the most successful, because it’s got a bunch of people with something that ties them in common. You know where the whole site is coming from, but you definitely get a multiplicity of voices.

The blog that I work on is called a blog, but it’s not what most people would think of when they use the word “blog.” For one thing, it’s group-written, but it’s not group-written with people who share any predilection or point of view. What they share is that they cover metropolitan news for The New York Times. They definitely bring their individual perspectives or interests to the table. David Dunlap, for example, writes about architecture and public space and photography and the quirky changes in the streetscape of New York City. Jenny Lee will often write about food and cultural trends. She has an eye for the wacky and weird, and definitely a lot of strong interest in ethnicity and immigration. Corey Kilgannon, who is one of our most amazing roving bloggers/multimedia journalists, wanders around with a camera and a video recorder and shoots video and does audio and takes photos, and he’s mostly trolling around boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn looking for these outsize or hidden personalities who are wonderful New York stories. They are bloggers in a sense, but they’re also just doing what traditional great journalists have always done — but with their own strengths.

The days with Heath Ledger or the plane crashing into the Hudson or the crane collapse, those are the rare days. Those are days when we can be positioned very, very prominently on the homepage because the news is major — major subway shutdowns, odd weather, major news, including political news. But that’s less than a third of our days. Most of our days, we keep up traffic by supplying a steady stream of varied features. And that’s the key to keeping the blog alive: You can’t just rely only on the breaking news. You have to also have blog posts that are going to engage people in discussion and get people talking and chatting, and I think that’s what we spend a lot of our time focused on.

I’m not saying the breaking news is easy, but we kind of run on autopilot when news breaks. This is a pretty well-honed organization. All our instincts kick in. We’ve dealt with 9/11 — there’s not much that can faze us. I’m not saying reporting on a plane taking off from LaGuardia and dropping engine parts over Queens and then making an emergency landing in JFK is child’s play, but it’s pretty clear how to do it.

Well, you have a model for that.
There’s a model for that; it’s easy to do. City Room was a new model in a sense, because we were never doing it this quickly. When the steam pipe exploded near Grand Central, our first blog post initially was, “There’s been an explosion near Grand Central. We don’t know what it was. Stay tuned.” We would never have done that even two or three years ago. We would have waited probably half an hour to an hour until there was some sense of what happened. It’s not that way now, and the blog really gets readers more involved. We had readers immediately writing in from the scene, and the eyewitness points of view; amazing photos from this reader who loves The New York Times and was shooting photos from the Empire State Building. It’s just a much quicker report, and that higher metabolism has been new when it comes to breaking news.

You made your name as a metro reporter. How do you feel about it not existing as a standalone section anymore?
I don’t feel particularly strongly about it; I wasn’t thrilled, and I think most of my colleagues weren’t thrilled either, but the space allotted to metropolitan news has essentially stayed the same. We get too hung up on the print edition and how it’s sort of organized. It’s important still. The printed product is beautiful, and I think it’s here to last. It’s an important part of my day. But there are very valuable arguments to be made that actually having a lot of serious metropolitan news in the A section, which is the place people turn to for serious news outside of the business section, makes sense in a lot of ways.

I think the main area where I was most unhappy is that it imposed some restrictions in terms of displaying photographs and having it look visually and graphically as nice as it did before. But, you know, it’s a hard time right now.

The New York Times recently launched The Local, four citizen journalism sites. Do you have any involvement with that?
I helped consult with them, and I know and work with and have worked with Tina Kelley and Andy Newman, the reporters, as well as Mary Anne Giordano, who’s the editor overseeing The Local. I think it’s a really exciting new venture. It is very different from what City Room has been about and what it can accomplish.

City Room launched in June 2007, and we didn’t really know how granular we could get. We got on a lot of community board mailing lists and a lot of business improvement district email lists, and obviously every local politician knows how to find us, and they do. But it’s not meant to be a blog that covers every planning dispute, liquor license renewal application, zoning permit questions — the really nitty-gritty, like what’s happening to my local subway station. That’s beyond our capacity, but also beyond the focus. It goes back to the famous question, how do you cover a city of 8.2 million people? On one level, it’s impossible. What our blog does is try to pick out some of the most salient or interesting issues of the moment. That means by definition that we’re going to leave a lot of things uncovered.

I think The Local is a wonderful complement to that. The question that everyone has quite frankly is how much we can scale that. Does every neighborhood need a version of The Local? I think we picked a few initial communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey to work with that are interesting just to see it as a model for what might come.

Any early feedback on how it’s working?
It’s been received really positively by neighborhood residents, and it definitely involves so-called citizen journalism a lot more than anything we’ve done. City Room wasn’t a revolutionary concept. The challenge wasn’t conceiving of it. It wasn’t some brilliant idea necessarily. To the extent we’ve succeeded, it’s been by just making it a high-quality product. I think The Local will do that. The question is how big it can get, or what the demand for it will be and how many neighborhoods it should expand to.

What’s it like working with the boss’s kid?
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger joined the Times staff as a reporter, and he’s been working continuous news. He’s already been working with metro, and he’ll continue to work with metro. He has been absolutely impressive, gracious, smart as a whip, hardworking, full of energy, full of ideas, and has a great sense of language. His writing sparkles, and he’s a charm and a pleasure to work with.

Obviously money is one of the biggest issues facing newspapers today. How does that affect your day-to-day job?
The answer you probably expect me to give is, well, we’re completely insulated and that’s a good thing — and that is the answer. I’ve never been asked, and would never expect to be asked, to cover something because it would be either especially popular with readers or, God forbid, advertisers. It would never come up.

Look, do we know that if we write a post about dog owners in Chelsea versus poverty in the Bronx that one topic might get more readers than the other? Sure. That never factors in. Again, it’s always about a mix of stories, and we try to mix the morally significant with the somewhat frivolous but enjoyable, because that’s what people want to read on a blog. They want a steady news diet, a varied news diet.

That said, I think the Times has gotten a little bit more bold about asking journalists, especially the younger journalists, in this building about their ideas for making money — not in any way that would interfere with our editorial mission, but just sensing how we feel about things, all the ideas that have been discussed, from micropayments and voluntary contributions from readers to so-called crowd sourcing and more reliance on citizen journalists.

I’ve definitely been part of meetings where myself and other younger journalists here have been solicited for ideas. And that’s been a really, really good thing and hasn’t been in any way to the detriment of what we actually do editorially.

Have you noticed any tightening of the purse strings at the Times?
No, the main thing I’ve noticed is that we have been using freelance journalists a little bit less. And we’ve had a general hiring freeze. There’s been very little movement on the staff. The first two or three years I was here, it felt like a new reporter was hired at least every few months, if not more frequent[ly]. And now it’s been quite a while since we’ve had anyone brought in from the outside. So it’s like there’s internal movement within the paper, but very, very little hiring from outside right now.

You’re on Twitter [@sewell_chan]. How do you use it?
Twitter is a major sort of point of weakness for me. I don’t think I’ve nearly begun using it frankly well enough, and I think I do understand it. In some ways, I was an early adopter in that it was in May of 2007 when I set up my account, not too long after the South by Southwest event at which it became big among tech people. But then for awhile I didn’t Twitter at all, and I’ve really failed so far to exploit it for its potential. And I’m trying — I want to use it more.

I’ve had to think about it a lot, to be honest. This is almost a little bit of a confessional, but I think it has a different purpose for me than a Facebook status update would. I’ve made a conscious decision that I’m going to use my Facebook status updates more for personal things that would be of interest to my friends who know me and my tastes, and to really limit Twitter to my public role and my public face as a New York Times journalist. I do think there’s a lot of potential of getting tips from readers, but also sharing with them and helping to pull back the curtain a little bit. City Room in general helps to pull back the curtain on the news, because you often see an early version of what runs in the print edition the next day. You get news very quickly. We’ve been much more open about our uncertainty if we don’t know something on a breaking news story. But I think Twitter allows you to pull back the curtain even more and perhaps discuss — to an extent that doesn’t tip off your competitors — what you’re working on. Or to have some musing about things that you’ve seen in the city that you’re interested in writing about, or to pose questions to readers about what they’d like to see more of. And in a way, that’s much more dynamic than what you can get through the comments section or emails from readers, which are valuable means of feedback, but not nearly as direct as Twitter.

Where do you see City Room in two years?

Well, I think it’s got off to a great start. We’re going to celebrate our two-year mark in just a few months, and I’d like to see it grow a little bit. I think there’s still some capacity for more posts. We feel we have a natural limit of around 18 to 20 a day. There are some blogs like Gothamist that do more — and I love and respect Gothamist — but I think that their model’s a little bit different from ours. A lot of their posts are shorter and simply link out. Our limit of 16 to 18 to 20 posts a day feels about right given that we just don’t blog all day and night, which I think also makes sense. I mean, we could blog all day and night, but there are really meaningful questions about whether that’s wise.

And where are you in two years? Are you happy if you’re still the bureau chief of City Room in two years?
It’s a fabulous job. I think I’d be happy to do it as long as they want me to. There are definitely a lot of other things I’d be excited about doing here, as well, so I guess time will tell.

Any specifics?

Just time will tell.

Noah Davis is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.