Big news stories sorts are always referred to as events that can make a reporter’s career, and war is quite possibly the biggest of all news stories. Whether the causal relationship in fact exists—if you don’t know what’s become of the first Gulf War’s Scud Stud, Arthur Kent, well, that’s exactly the point—it’s nevertheless true that every reporter who can is making his or her way to the Gulf region. There haven’t just been the usual suspects there, the Christianes and Geraldos and Peter Arnetts, and there haven’t been drop-ins from only the usual parachuters—like Dan Rather, who had his sit-down with Saddam. For this war, as The New York Times reported last week, a whole range of unexpected news organizations have been sending reporters to the area, from Rolling Stone to the Engineering News-Record to People magazine. One such unlikely war reporter is MTV’s Gideon Yago, the music channel’s young news correspondent with the heavy-framed glasses. Before the war began, Yago went through a brief Boot Camp course in Quantico, Virginia, and then he went to spend some time in Kuwait, talking both with local residents in the MTV demo and with the men and women in America’s armed forces—who themselves aren’t too far from the MTV age bracket. Yago returned to New York before the fighting started, and last week he took a break from planning MTV’s continuing war coverage to talk about reporting from Kuwait, talking to the young American men and women fighting there, and why his own youth helped him report better stories.

Tell me about your trip over there.
We left on Valentine’s Day, and we came back about 13days later. Initially we were going to do a bunch of news briefs, these little self-contained three-minute packages that run 10 minutes to the hour on MTV News and MTV2. The idea was to put a face on the war, who were the people living in this region, what’s the country like, who were the young men and women serving, what are they into, what do they do, what do their lives entail, what are they thinking about. I had also been shooting a lot on my digital-video camera, just interstitial stuff on my own, because I had been trying to document what it’s like. So we had all this great DV footage and we had about 11 hours of Beta footage, and the decision came literally 24 hours before we left to come back that we’re going to turn it into a half-hour special. Then on the way back we decided to do it as a diary-style special, because it’s a popular format with the audience; it was a real way to get them dialed in and interested in the story and then interested in the subject matter. So it went from just a regular “get story xyz and see what else you get on the ground” to “OK, we’re going to do a story about getting the stories that we got.” And we also rolled out the daily news packages in tandem with it.

Did you do some military training before you went over?
The Pentagon had offered MTV two embed slots. They told me in order to take these embed slots you have to go to this reporter boot camp that they’re sending all embedded reporters to. So I went with my producer to that, a five-day training course at the officer-training school in Quantico, Virginia. It was five days of a lot more information than we needed to know. If we were embedded it would have been a lot more helpful: How to put on your gas mask, how to deal with carrying your own stuff, not being a burden on the marines, being aware of the realities of being in a conflict environment. Which we weren’t involved in because we didn’t pick up the embed slots.

Do you have any feeling, having gone through that training for the embed, that you sort of wish that you were over there now and could be taking part in the embed coverage?
I do, which partially has to do with being 25 years old and feeling like you’re bullet-proof. But the real reason I wish I was embedded was that based on our very short meetings with the young marines over there, you come to the realization—and we said this in our show—that in a couple of months we’re going to have tens of thousands of young men, ages 18 to 22, who are going to be veterans. They were all, up until last week, combat virgins, untested, it was all hypothetical for them. It would be really interesting to see how being at war, especially if this war is longer and entrenched, as it’s looking more and more to be, how it changes them and what it does to them. Yeah, we’re MTV and we’re certainly not the be-all-end-all of coverage, and we certainly don’t have the resources that conventional networks or conventional papers have. But honestly those guys opened up to us immediately. And when we were with the First Division, we watched a lot of the other media trying to talk to guys and relate to guys. It’s one thing to just interview a 21-year-old, and it’s another thing to have them really open up to you and confide in you and feel that you’re a peer and talk to you as a peer. I think to be the network we are, and to get the kind of response we did from the marines, and to watch them change over a period of time, I think that it would really be a unique and honest portrayal of what war does to young men, what war does to those who grow up underneath its realities. And I think that it’s a really important story and it’s really up to those journalists who are out there now embedded to tell that story. Because I think it’s as important a story as anything else in this conflict.

I hadn’t thought of that before talking to you, but, sure, most people think of The Washington Post doing the serious coverage and MTV doing something wacky. But the people who are in the military are the MTV generation. They’re going to be more comfortable with you than they are with a reporter from The Washington Post.
It’s the difference of dealing with somebody professionally and dealing with someone personally. From other journalists that we were talking to, the only real glaring difference was, it wasn’t the guys talking to us, it was that they didn’t want to stop talking. We would have PAO [Public Affairs Office] officers and other journalists come up to us and, looking at our tape, just say, “that’s amazing.” We were working with CBS, and we had a lot of the producers there comment to us, “Holy crap, I can’t believe you got them to say that on camera. These are the bites that we’re looking for, that’s really amazing, how did you get that footage?” And that is very gratifying, because those guys are the pros. And we felt like the little brother, running around with our little DV cams and shooting non-stop and asking all sorts of weird, roundabout kinds of questions. But sometimes it’s the most indirect question that gets the most honest and telling answer. That’s at least what we found. By the way, I hope this doesn’t sound hyper-self-congratulatory, because it’s really not. There are many talented people in the region now, who will do a far better job than we would be able to do. But if there was one advantage we had, it was simply that, it’s almost an ageism thing—for us, we were almost peer-to-peer versus a journalist-to-marine type of thing. That’s the one advantage we had coming to the game.

Obviously there’s going to be more of a peer-to-peer affinity between you and these young guys who are doing this, than with an older guy who’s been covering war for years. Are you doing continuing stuff with these marines you got to know over there?
We did those four hours of programming, right when the ground troops began, and then we did that live hour-and-a-half show. I think the idea is that as the situation warrants it, we’ll go live or do those live-style programs, depending on the gravity of the situation. Aside from that, we’re also doing regular updates, and we’re figuring out ways to bring the stories back to the audience, so it’s stuff that they can understand—we’re dialing it back to you, this affects you and affects people you know, this affects your life and you should be interested in this, in way abcdefg. And also we’re doing a lot more of the primer pieces. I’m not sure if you saw “What’s Going On?” the very successful promo from us, coming out of the news department, but it’s sort of the five basic things you need to know about key players or key things in the headlines in any given week. So it’s pretty much committing to that here on out.

Is there any effort to stay in touch with the guys you’d been talking to?
I’ve been emailing guys, but it’s been dodgy in terms of communication, as you can imagine over there.

But do you find yourself being more curious about the guys you spent time with?
Well, the story doesn’t end with this war. Like I said, I think it’s a very profound story, and I think that it would be interesting to hear from these guys when they come home. And it would be interesting to hear from these guys if they’re in Baghdad for a protracted period of time. Just because you leave doesn’t mean that you leave the story behind. And just because you do one little show doesn’t mean that the story stops. An interesting piece of data came from the latest poll the MTV statistics department did, in January; it said 67 percent of our audience has a friend or family in the military. So, obviously to keep on this stuff and who these guys are, regardless of whether they’re in or out of uniform, is important. It will be interesting to see what happens, and it seems to be important to the audience, given how many have personal relation to it.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. Photo of Gideon Yago at training in Quantico courtesy MTV.

It’s not quite five years since Michael Wolff first appeared as New York magazine’s media columnist, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine the media-about-media firmament without him. No one writes as he does, smoothly and lucidly and cleverly and engagingly, but also with such brutal candor and such original and unvarnished viewpoints. No one analyzes as he does, explicitly from personal experience, informed by insights from important (and usually anonymous) players, and culminating with such grand and confidently declared conclusions. And no one seems to lunch as he does or punctuate as he does (there are just so many commas—one New York letter-writer noted 10 in a May 2002 sentence—and parentheticals, and they’re all so perfectly deployed). Whether you love him or hate him—there are many in each camp—he’s a journalistic force to be reckoned with.

This is particularly remarkable when you consider that prior to his New York gig Wolff was neither a force nor, for the most part, a journalist. He was instead, famously, a two-time failure. The first came in his younger days, when after building a name as a magazine writer and non-fiction author he took an advance on a novel that, it turned out, he simply couldn’t write. (“It was a life and career calamity,” he once told The Washington Post.) Later, in the mid-1990s, he tried to turn his small publishing company, which produced guides to the then-new internet, into a cash-spewing new media firm. What Wolff New Media was supposed to do didn’t matter; the only point was to make money. Which it didn’t, hence failure two. But that second failure led to Burn Rate, his best-selling account of the experience. And Burn Rate led to the New York job, which put Wolff, finally, in the right place and at the right time. Last year he won a National Magazine Award for commentary, and recently he’s been churning out not only his weekly column but also a fairly regular stream of cover essays, on the city’s reaction to war, on anxiety, even on private-school culture. In the current issue, he reports from Qatar on Gen. Tommy Franks’s high-priced briefing room (where, characteristically, he berated a briefing officer for giving out useless information) and also files a cover-story rumination on New York‘s 35th anniversary. Finally back in Manhattan last weekend, he spent a few minutes on the phone with mediabistro.com, talking about his column, his background, and how not to conduct an interview.

Born: August 27, 1953
Hometown: Paterson, New Jersey
Now lives: Upper East Side, Manhattan
Reads for work: “I read very little. I read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. That’s about it.”
Reads for fun: See above.
First section of the Sunday Times: “Whatever nobody else in my family is reading.”

Tell me a little about your job history.
It was kind of hit and miss. I’m 49 years old. That’s a lot of job history.

What are some of the relevant things along the way?
I haven’t had a job since I worked at The New York Times almost 30 years ago, let me put it that way.

What did you do at the Times almost 30 years ago?
That was my first job. I was a copy boy, news assistant, news clerk, whatever.

So, there must have been something during the intervening 30 years that takes one from copy boy at The New York Times to an Ellie-winning columnist for New York magazine.
Well, I’ve written books. I’ve not written books. I’ve started businesses. I’ve gone bankrupt. And somehow I found myself as a columnist for New York magazine.

And how did that come to be? Were you old friends with [New York editor-in-chief] Caroline Miller? I mean, how did that opportunity arise?
No, I wasn’t. I had never met her before. You don’t know anything about me, do you?

It’s a Q&A. I’m trying to let you talk about this stuff.
These are terrible questions. You can’t just ask someone, give me your resume.

Fine. I’ll skip the resume questions, then. I’ll write my own introductory stuff.

Rush Limbaugh has labeled you unpatriotic, after your trip to the Gulf. How does that feel?
I guess it feels OK. It feels pretty good.

Is that something you try to do at New York, get people angry?
No. That’s sometimes the effect, although it seems to me that for every one person I make angry I seem to make a hundred pleased. But Rush Limbaugh—I mean, I don’t know. I’ve just become a useful part of his political agenda, and I guess he’ll become a useful part of my literary agenda. So we’re all just engaged in some sort of role-playing here.

What sort of writing would you classify yourself as doing—by which I mean, there is some reporting in every column but it’s not a reported piece, there’s certainly analysis but it’s not an op-ed column. How do you describe it?
These are essays. I think I am doing the job of a columnist, which is both reporting and offering opinion, and because it’s a long column, I get to do a little storytelling too.

How do you place yourself in the media-about-media cosmology, compared to a Howie Kurtz, or a Jim Romenesko, or anyone else doing this type of coverage?
The column is purposefully called “This Media Life.” In fact, when it came into being it was merely called “Media,” and I changed it because it was really about—I really write this column out of my intense involvement in this industry. It’s not me looking at the media, but it’s me writing from very much inside the media. I am as culpable as anyone else.

I never make the pretense of being a media critic, of being a media-business reporter, or of doing any of the other jobs or taking any of the other points of view that most people writing about the media take. I am, as I said, culpable. I am as engaged in this business as anyone else, and one might even say more so. I have in some way had every role, or at least as large array of the roles you can have in this business. All my friends are in this business. So, that was, from the beginning, my interest in writing about this column.

One of the things I find interesting about your column is how you can turn most anything into a media story, not just AOL Time Warner or the Times or Fox News—there was a period last summer when within two or three weeks you talked about Woody Allen as viewed as a media spectacle, Andrew Cuomo and the gubernatorial race as a media spectacle. I remember wondering after reading those column, are you intentionally shoehorning these things as media stories so that you’ll have an excuse to talk about them, or is that really how you view the world, where everything naturally to you is viewed as a media story?
To some degree it’s true, every story is a media story—or at least the stories that I write. If I write about politics, that is obviously a media phenomenon. I mean, Woody Allen, for instance, is certainly a media phenomenon. At the same time, the column is very wide-ranging and so are my interests. And one of the nice things about the magazine is that it lets me go where I want to go—so, in fact, I can go to war for this past two weeks. Now, obviously, war is a media phenomenon also, and the point of view that I usually come at this with is just writing about that. I am interested in that particular view. In other words, there are a lot of correspondents who have recently gone to war and they write about troop movements. That is obviously less interesting to me than the media process of this war—which is obviously as significant as even the troop movements.

But what I’m wondering is, is it naturally your reaction to all of these things—you look at things that are not explicitly media stories and immediately see them through a media prism—or do you become aware after the fact that an event can be turned into a media story and thus fodder for the column?
Probably both. I am certainly looking at things through a media prism, so it’s easy to get there and you don’t have to jump through hoops to get there.

What’s your workday like? From reading the column, it sort of seems like you just go and hang out in Michael’s for a couple of hours and schmooze with people, and then at the end of the week you write up something about it.
Geez. That does sound like a nice life. The column takes seven days of work. I start early and I work through the day. I go to lunch a couple of times a week.

Fair enough. Certainly the column gives off a brash manner, and judging from our conversation, that doesn’t seem to be a faked manner for the column. Is it part of the persona of the column? Or is it just Michael Wolff?
I think the column is who I am and there is not a conscious persona in the column. I mean, this is not an artifice that I am working to create here. But it certainly reflects a particular point of view.

There’s an interesting balance in your column, on one hand you’ve got the average Joe’s mix of envy, at times, or exasperation or just fascination with media mogul, but at the same time you’re often seeming to move in their world and be at their events and—as you wrote about—once found yourself having dinner with Rupert Murdoch. How do these moguls react when you wind up seeing them face-to-face?
I think that they are slightly—well, I was going to say that they’re slightly non-plussed, but the truth is, I don’t really think I register all that much. I think occasionally I am of interest to them and occasionally I have written something that someone has told them they should read, but I don’t really think that these guys are all that wrapped up in what people are saying about them.

Did you have any sort of a particularly memorable or embarrassing or funny run-in with any of moguls?
Not too long ago, I was at some sort of cocktail event where I was going one way and Barry Diller was coming the other way, holding two drinks. We were a foot apart, and we faced each other, and Barry nodded at me and he said, “Michael.” Then he said, “I would shake your hand, but fortunately I’m holding two drinks.”

What comes in the future for you? Do you hang out at New York writing a weekly column every week? I can’t imagine what you move on to from that.
I have no idea either. If you have ideas, I’m certainly open to them. The real point is, I think I have the best writer’s job in America. From the beginning, almost from the first column, this just felt right for me, and I don’t think anybody could want for more. I get an incredible audience. I get an incredible amount of space on a weekly basis. The people at the magazine—I never dreamed that a writer could be treated the way they in fact treat me. So if I could do this for the rest of my life, I would be a happy man.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

“I have run out of new places to work,” jokes Keith Olbermann about his return to MSNBC—and, as the man says, it’s funny because it’s true. Or at least rings true. Best known for anchoring ESPN’s Sports Center from 1992 to 1997, Olbermann has worked not just for that network, which is owned by ABC, but also for CNN, CBS, NBC and MSNBC once before, Fox and Fox Sports, and CNN again. There really wasn’t anyplace new for him to go—and, to make things worse, he hadn’t left all those places on the best of terms. But, to some extent, that doesn’t matter. Precocious (he was a network radio sportscaster at 20), intelligent, and very witty, he’s too good to pass up—and too good to stay confined to sports. He returns to MSNBC to anchor its main nightly newscast, the old Brian Williams slot, in a new show called Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He’ll also be the network’s main anchor for Olympics coverage in 2004. One night last week, after his East Coast broadcast but before revving up again for the West Coast feed, Olbermann spoke to mediabistro.com about his past, his present, and whether there’s a future for TV news.

Born: January 27, 1959
Hometown: New York, New York
First section of the Sunday Times he reads: Crossword (“It the only day I know I’ll have the time to finish it.”)

So what makes this show a “countdown”?
The countdown concept is in large part a McGuffin [Hitchcock’s term for a device that moves the story forward but is itself irrelevant]. It is designed to be a framework, not to animate the program. It will serve the American fascination with lists, and it will be a different way of presenting things in news. We in the media, whether you’re in print, broadcast TV, whatever, every show has a rundown, every newspaper has a story list—what’s most important, where does it go, when does it play, what is the least important, what fills out the column, what fills out the segment. We’re basically inviting the viewer in, to know exactly how we thought those things out; we’re letting them watch the process as well. And the reason that there is very little counting down is that right now obviously those structures are inappropriate. As events in Iraq begin to recede, not in importance but in total dominance of the news, you’ll begin to see more of these features introduced.

You left MSNBC somewhat contentiously in December of 1998. Did you ever imagine that you’d be returning four or five years later as their lead anchor?
It is kind of far-fetched. I have been telling people in jest that I have run out of new places to work and they have run out of new people to hire. But it’s not like that. This results entirely from Dick Ebersol hiring me to host the Olympics for NBC’s cable networks in two years. My agent put out on email to Erik Sorensen, who’s the president of this operation, in February after hearing Jerry Nachman had taken ill, and said, “Would you consider having Keith to just fill in? He’s not looking for anything, but he’s going to be back in the company anyway, and you’re short and we’re running into perilous times. Maybe you could use him in some way, or is there too much history? ” And the email came back, “I certainly would be open to it.” Forty-six days later we had a contract to do the principal nighttime program on MSNBC. It’s a testament to the people here. There weren’t deep-burning enmities between me and MSNBC, but the people who hired me were the people who fought my leaving four or five years ago and with whom there were bruised if not bad feelings. And they said, “Well, this is useless. We need a new show, we need a new news anchor, and here he is. And let’s just proceed and work that way.” And I like the fact that this occurred, because it dispels the idea that my reputation as a bad employee was based on more than a little bit of silliness on my part, plus a whole lot of unfounded gossip. If I were that bad an employee, I could not be rehired here, period.

Of course, MSNBC isn’t the only place you’ve had a history with. As you jokingly said, there wasn’t anywhere left for you to work. You had complicated departures from a number of jobs.
Actually, not as often as you would think. I’ll almost say a Hillary Clinton kind of thing, that there’s a vast conspiracy somewhere. Now, it’s not a conspiracy, and it’s not vast. But for a long time, I dealt with a local television-sports columnist who would print anything he heard about me. And most of the stories about me are either exaggerations or flat-out falsehoods that originate from him and from one of his sources, this envious guy who works for Fox Sports Net, who was hired the day before I came over from NBC, and never got over that he wasn’t the superstar. Those two people have done a great deal of story-spreading. And you mix that in with what are to me obviously childish and insecure behavior episodes on my part and you get a huge reputation as a horrible person to work with or to have work for you.

But I was asked to supply a list of people who would come work for this show with me on MSNBC, and it was about 75 people long. If you’re an ogre, they’re not going to want to work with you. The idea that things went down badly between me and ESPN when I left there is really a case of logical fallacy. When I left, they said, “If you ever want to come back, please come back.” When I left nothing was perfect, nothing was ideal, it was a wearying place to work and I made mistakes in how I expressed many of my points of view, but things were good when I left. They became bad when I talked to a guy writing a book on ESPN. That’s what I was never forgiven for. And things were contentious at MSNBC only because of a series of circumstances which really could not be repeated. There were five to six things that had to happen, each of those things a million-to-one shot, and they all happened in order. How bad could it have been if they brought me back?

Of all these gigs, which one were you at for the longest?
ESPN, for five and a half years.

Talking a little about the current job, what’s the day-to-day life? You’re putting on a show at eight, so do you still get into the office at nine in the mornings?
No, it’s the other way around. This is the late shift. I get here around 3 and write like a fiend to get an hourlong newscast together. I have some help for some of the interview segments, and I get a lot of guidance, and occasionally I’m rewriting. But basically I’m writing an hour of television between 3 and 7:30 p.m. I take a half-hour before the show to get makeup and hair spray applied. Go on and do it, and then there’s a dry down time between 9 and midnight, when we do it again. Because of the war, you can’t put on a taped newscast as we have seen so many developments and extraordinary things occur especially after 11 at night. It’s a really long day. And everybody who’s associated with the show is working similar hours or worse. There’s an energy provided by the fact that we are in one of those periods of time in which news is not something you have to look in the mirror and ask, “Am I providing anything for the public good?” This is information that people need to know. But long term, you don’t want to put people on 12- or 13-hour-a-day schedule, and I don’t want to be on one either. But right now it’s basically work, go to sleep, work, go to sleep, Saturdays and Sundays off. And that’s fine. Under the circumstances that’s not a problem. It’s fun to develop the show. I have enjoyed literally 99 percent of the minutes I have been here since I’ve been back.

If it’s all so great, are you going to break your five-and-a-half-year record at MSNBC?
I would like to. The irony that people have never perceived, and I haven’t been able to convince anybody of, is that I have always wanted to work at one place for the entirety of my career. So now, I would like to invest in a news program and go and do it for as long as I can. It’s an important time for television news. What does it mean, what does it do about the fact that very few people under 50 watch it, how do you get them, how do you get them interested, what aren’t we doing right, how do we draw them into not merely your newscast, but into the whole arena? They’re not just not watching MSNBC—although there are some encouraging numbers about that—they’re not watching any news. And what are we doing wrong, what are we missing, how are we not selling it?

And do you have answers to that?
Yeah, I have some theories. And that’s the premise of the show, for a large part. Most people under the age of thirty have never been exposed to what was state-of-the-art hard news. When I was ten years old, there was a live shot from the moon. This was unbelievable. The live video camera—the mobile camera that allowed you to go on the story as it happened—was an innovation and a presentation that had never been seen before. Interaction between newscasters, more than one newscaster on a newscast, these were all things that were invented as I was growing up and were designed to keep people’s attention in an ever more crowded entertainment universe. We haven’t done a thing like that in 20 years in television news. Everybody keeps bringing out a 1980 newscast. Collectively, we have done very few new formats and very few new ideas about how to present it. I think that there are a few new ideas out there, and we are very encouraged by the initial results of this program which, as I said, is just at its embryonic stage. We’re just letting a few of the gimmicks peek their heads up, and we’re getting all encouraging signs about the youth of the audience watching this particular hour, their willingness to stay for the whole thing.

The same sort of approach that worked at Sports Center I think will work in news. Which is—and I’ve said this many times before, and so has Dan Patrick— we did a lot of slapstick, we did a lot of silliness, we did a lot of bad puns. But those were always there because the news was either not serious enough or not strong enough to carry an audience through an hour. We didn’t throw the news over our shoulder just so we could write a great long lead-in to something that mentioned how many Hootie and the Blowfish golf tournaments we’d gone to. Yes, you’ve got to throw various hooks into people to keep them.; you’ve got to hit all the notes and say OK, we got the hard news, we have the dumb news, we have the intriguing news, we have the opinion on the news and we have a series of puns along the line of there’s been an uprising in Basra, the Shiites have hit the fan. To get an audience that’s used to rapid-fire entertainment, you’ve got to give them a good television show for 60 minutes. And you must, at the same time, and this is where I’m sort of wearing two hats, you have to be absolutely dedicated to saying, “We could keep the audience and grow it a little bit more than it even is now, but to do that we have to sell the news out, and we’re not going to do it.” And, you have to decide how much of one and the other. What can you play with? To me, you can play with the format, you can play with the always-serious tone, and as long as you can get it back to being completely serious when it needs to be, you can basically do whatever you want to make it a good TV show. And that’s what we’re going to try to do.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. He was also, full disclosure, the first guest on the first episode of The Big Show, Olbermann’s previous MSNBC program. Photo courtesy MSNBC.

For close to 30 years, David Shaw occupied a nearly unique niche in American journalism. He was—and still is—the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, and what made him unique was how the paper allowed him to define the job. He didn’t regularly comment on day-to-day coverage, like most critics, and he didn’t track the comings-and-goings of the media business, like most media-beat reporters. Instead, Shaw operated in an almost Bob Woodward fashion: He picked the media story he was interested in, he spent weeks or months reporting it, he worked directly for his paper’s top editor, and, when he was done, his mammoth, definitive stories ran as multi-day front-page series.

In 1991, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism, after one such series analyzed coverage of the McMartin preschool molestation scandal and, in so doing, took the Times itself to task for its coverage. But, remarkably, Shaw’s Pulitzer-winning work is probably not his most famous project. In 1999, under the command of a corporate CEO, Mark Willes, a former Proctor & Gamble exec known at the Times as the “cereal killer,” the Times had produced a special Sunday magazine issue devoted to L.A.’s new Staples Center. Unknown to the editorial staff, the arena itself was a business partner on that project, selling ads and sharing revenue. When word came out about the deal, it was a catastrophe. Reporters were incensed, the Times‘s revered former publisher, Otis Chandler, wrote a letter from retirement denouncing it, and, to no small degree, the fallout ended the careers of several top players at the Times and set the stage for Times Mirror, the once-proud parent company, to sell itself to the Tribune Company a year later. The fiasco also set the stage for Shaw’s most remarkable effort: A comprehensive examination of how the Staples Center deal had occurred, a piece that took apart his own paper’s culture and operations and ultimately ran to 35,000 words in a 14-page special section.

Then, two years ago, Shaw walked away from that amazing job. He didn’t walk away entirely—he’s still at the Times, and he still writes on media—but he voluntarily left that catbird seat he’d created. Now he’s more like, well, normal reporters, penning weekly columns on his two interests, the media and food and wine. He had a long talk with mb recently about his new gig, his old one, and personal dynamics of reporting on his colleagues.

Birthdate: January 4, 1943
Hometown: Dayton, Ohio. Moved to Los Angeles area at age 2. “I basically consider Compton my hometown.”
Now lives: Silverlake area, Los Angeles.
Reads for work: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Daily News, plus other papers “as circumstances warrant.” 30 or 35 magazines, regularly reading about 20 of them.
Reads for fun: “I like reading escapist fiction—I’m not necessarily talking about Danielle Steele or Robert Ludlum—but I do like mystery and private eye.”
First section of the Sunday L.A. Times: Business. News comes last. “I start with the section with which I expect to spend the least time and work my way up so that I read last the section that I’ll spend the most time with.”

Walk me through the your career path, both before the Los Angeles Times and then your whole stint at the Times.
I worked on my junior high school and high school papers. I got a job when I was just four days past my 16th birthday working at a publishing company that published a weekly motorcycle newspaper. They hired me as a janitor, and the first Monday on the job one of the reporters never showed up, so I was asked to cover a motorcycle race. They fired me as a janitor and hired me as a reporter, and five months later—I was still 16—I was the editor of the paper. In college, in the summer of ’63, I worked for a small daily, the now-defunct Huntington Park Signal, and at the end of that summer they asked me if I could stay on and work full time; they would work out whatever scheduling would fit around my classes. So I did that for my last two years of college, stayed there a year after that, and in ’66 went on to the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram. Worked there for two and a half years and left in November of ’68. Then I worked for the Times for about a year and a half, in their new Orange County edition, and I came downtown in mid ’70.

In mid ’74, Bill Thomas, then the editor of the paper, asked me if I would take on this new job he’d created, writing about the media. He wanted me to cover media in the same way we cover the other major and powerful institutions in society. I initially was disinclined to take it because I had never liked specialized beats. But I agreed to think about it overnight, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that the media covers everything, and if I wrote about the media I’d be writing about everything. So I came up with a list of fourteen conditions, although I was not that stupid and I rephrased them as questions: Can I report directly to you? Can I pick my topics and be free to reject any suggestions that anybody else makes?” “Will I get the same consideration for that lefthand column on page one that my stories have always gotten? And he agreed to all of those—although he said, “I’m the editor; you can do whatever you want but if I don’t like it I’m not going to put it in the paper.” So I did it from ’74 to 2001.

And then?
John Carroll and Dean Baquet [the editor and managing editor hired after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror] decided in 2001 that in addition to doing these kinds of long projects, they wanted me to do more on-the-news things. At the same time, I had for a few years before that been getting—I wouldn’t say tired, exactly, but I had started to find it tougher and tougher to give birth to my big projects. I realized it wasn’t that after 28 years I was bored with the media; it was that I was really kind of tired of being a reporter—tired of only gathering and reflecting other people’s thoughts, perceptions, and experiences. I’d been doing the media beat long enough that I had enough experiences, thoughts, and perceptions on my own. Also, I’ve been passionate about food and wine for 30 years, so I proposed doing two columns a week, one on food and wine, and one on the news media. And, to make very long story short, when they kicked off the new Calendar section and the new Food section last October, I was in them, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

One thing you didn’t mention when you recounted your job history was that in 1991 you won a Pulitzer Prize for your criticism, the only media critic to have done so. “For his critiques of the way in which the media, including his own paper, reported the McMartin Pre-School child molestation case,” said the citation. You’ve sort of been known for writing these things that took on the Times itself. What’s it been like to write those and then be in the office?
A year or two after McMartin, if not more, I remember coming to the front door of the paper in a driving rainstorm, and happening to arrive at the same time as Lois [Timnick, the Times‘s McMartin reporter, who Shaw criticized in his series]. She had literally not spoken to me since, and her arms were laden with books and, being a gentleman, I opened the door for her to walk in. When she saw that it was me holding the door she turned on her heels and walked a block in the rain without an umbrella—because her arms were full—rather than walk through a door that I had held open.

There’s this prevailing view that you become a complete pariah when you do the job the way I did it. I do not want to minimalize the fact that there were a number of people who didn’t like me. Some of them, because I had written stories that were critical of them or their colleagues; some of them because they felt that I got special and undeserved treatment. But when I won the Pulitzer, they had a lunch where the top editors go with you and nine or 10 of your friends on the staff to have an in-house celebration, and I had trouble limiting it to nine or 10. I’ve always had a lot of friends at the paper despite the fact that I also had a lot of detractors.

What was it like doing what you do over the last several years, with Mark Willes, and ad/edit, and Staples, and the sale of the company. What was it like to be in your role while the L.A. Times itself was so much the story?
As it happened, when Willes became publisher [and promised to eliminate the traditional “Chinese wall” between advertising and editorial], I had already started working on a series about the wall. Not just at our paper, but about the general problems in the industry; the breakdowns between advertising and editorial. So that was one of those series where I did 4 or 5 parts and one part wound up being—because it was taking place at the time—one whole piece on the L.A. Times. The paper did not become as bad as a lot of people seem to think. Willes didn’t tinker with the essential editorial quality of it. But budgets were cut and some very good people left, and there were certainly breaches of the wall that I didn’t like, and I wrote about them both in the original series and in my 35,000-word Staples Center thing.

What about the Staples controversy? How did you handle doing a big investigation of your own paper?
I remember Michael [Parks, the paper’s editor at the time] saying to me something like “I want to hire you.” And I said “I’m already hired.” And he said “I want to hire you to do this on Staples. Come by tomorrow and talk to me.” And I went in, and I said, “I’m going to be clear. You will not see this. Nobody will see this until it runs.” George [Cotlair, a retired Times managing editor who Parks had enlisted to oversee the project] edited it. We picked the copy editor, we picked the news editor, and I talked to our computer people so that no one was able to get into it. I didn’t know how long it was going to be; I said it was going to be long enough to do the job. When I was done I turned it in to George. We worked with a few layout people and copy editors who were good and I knew I could trust. We had our own office and we did it all. Our guy said to make it look good it would take 14 pages, in a special section. And we did all that. I was in the plant when they printed it, to make sure that nothing would leak, I personally carried the plates from place to place. Michael would always get an early edition of the paper from the first press run at about 9:00 at night. I found the copy messenger who was going to deliver Michael’s paper and I personally pulled my section out of his paper so that he would not see it until everyone else saw it the next morning.

Have you ever felt like you could have had more influence, more attention for your work, if you were at an East Coast publication?
Sure. I have no doubt that if I did the kind of stuff I did, and if it ran in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or maybe even The Washington Post, I wouldn’t have had to solicit book offers. People would have come to me with book offers. Just look at what [Washington Post media reporter Howard] Kurtz gets. I’m sure I would have been on a lot more TV talk shows. And had a lot more influence, clout, whatever you want to call it.

But that’s like saying, if I were a woman I would have won the Miss America contest. I’m not a woman. I would have never been allowed to do the work I did for The New York Times. None of those papers would have given me the space I had at the L.A. Times. I had the freedom at the L.A. Times to carve out the job the way I saw it. Another thing is I’m rooted in L.A. I like living in L.A. Newsweek offered me a job. Esquire. I never let it get past “thank you I’m flattered.”

You built this unique position for yourself, with the freedom to write these enormous pieces and the control over every aspect of it. Now that you’ve moved on to the columns, do you find yourself missing that?
One of the reasons I decided that I wanted to do both media and food and wine was so that I wouldn’t give that up. I know that the food editor would be thrilled if all I wanted to do was work for her. But it seemed to me that acquiring 28 years of experience and contacts and interest and knowledge in the media I shouldn’t give all that up. I have no illusions that the columns that I write have the kind of impact that some of my series do. Or are as well-read in the business. Or are as well read by the general public. Most of my pieces ran on the front page of the paper. Now I’m on page 18 of the Sunday calendar section. But I had stopped really enjoying coming to work every day. Changing jobs puts me back to looking forward to going into work again. I was a kid who always looked forward to going to school, and I was someone who for the vast majority looked forward to going to work, and that was no longer true. I wanted to look forward to work every day, I wanted to take pleasure out of what I was writing. I wanted to spread my wings a little. I wanted to do the kinds of things that were less reportorial than writerly.

I don’t miss it at all.

Jesse Oxfeld is editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

Slate magazine, the online journal backed by Microsoft and founded by Michael Kinsley, is known for its counterintuitive takes—smart, deft analyses that usually tell you what you don’t expect to hear. All that counterintuition can sometimes get formulaic—you grow to expect the opposite of what you’d expect—but one of the mag’s most successfully unpredictable features is its “Press Box” column, which debuted at the very end of 1999. Jack Shafer, then Slate‘s deputy editor and now an editor at large, has written the column since its inception, first with occasional other contributors and, for the last year, alone. A seasoned press critic, his work is counterintuitive in the very best sense: He finds interesting stories, and develops interesting viewpoints, and he’s often the one guy not caught up in the same angle on the same scandal every other media writer is busy espousing. At the beginning of the recent New York Times scandals, for example, Shafer was one of the few not to gang up on Howell Raines. “He didn’t catch Jayson Blair,” acknowledged the dek on his piece. “You didn’t either.” One tempest later, when people seemed to accept Rick Bragg’s everyone-does-it defense, Shafer was unmoved: “Reconstituting a ‘you are there’ story from somebody else’s notes and conducting a touch-and-go landing to claim the dateline violates not only Times policy, but any sober person’s elemental sense of intellectual honesty.” He was eerily prescient last week, when on Tuesday evening he posted “Dead Man Editing,” which predicted that the growing controversies at the Times would cost Raines his job. In the brief interlude between his prophesy and its fulfillment Thursday morning, Shafer spoke to mediabistro.com about his job, the Times, and why Raines was sure to go. (No photograph of Shafer was available from him, his bureau chief, or Slate‘s publicity people. So pictured above is a, um, slate.)

Birthdate: October 1951
Hometown: Kalamazoo, Michigan
Lives now: Arlington, Virginia
Reads for work: “I start off very early in the morning with Post Raisin Bran, a banana, and 2 percent milk, with 2 cups of half-caf coffee, my Washington Post and my New York Times. I cruise the L.A. Times and Romenesko before going to work. At work, I reliably pick up my copy of The Wall Street Journal and, throughout the course of the morning, paw through whatever new magazines we have received and see what’s cooking on the MSNBC and CNN websites. And I’m hitting Google News all day long, because I really enjoy how so much overseas news bubbles to the top of their list.”
Reads for fun: “I usually have a couple of books going at any given time.” Currently: Moneyball, by Michael Lewis; Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, by Adam Sisman; The Conversations, by Michael Ondaatje.
First section of the Sunday Washington Post: Sports.

You’ve been at Slate since it was founded. Walk me through your career until then.
Walking backwards, I have been at Slate for seven years now. I was the editor of San Francisco Weekly for a year before going to Slate. Before that, I was at Washington City Paper as editor for nine and a half years. And before that I spent about a year as a freelancer, and I was managing editor of a now-long-dead magazine called Inquiry between 1981 and 1984.

Have you written “Press Box” since the beginning?
When we started, I was writing a column called “Flame Posies,” and frequently my topics would be the press. When Jacob Weisberg replaced Mike as editor, I left the position as deputy editor and became a full-time writer, so that’s why the frequency of Press Box picked up about a year ago, when Jake took over. I’ve written on the press before, when I was at the City Paper, and for The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page and The New Republic and other places. I’ve been writing about the press for at least 15 years.

“Press Box,” it seems, often doesn’t cover the standard media-about-media stuff, what Howie Kurtz and everybody else is following at the moment. You often seem to be a little bit removed, or looking at things from a different angle. Is that something you’re conscious of?
Howie routinely breaks news about the press, and I think that that is one of his many strong suits. But, yeah, I’m trying to get a different vantage point than the guys who cover the press as a daily beat, and I generally strive to write some thing original.

One example of you being original—and this changed recently—but, early on, when everyone was criticizing Howell Raines, you defended him. Where did that reaction come from, and the obvious question is did your monkeyfishing experience [a largely fabricated article that ran in Slate two years ago] play a role in that?
I think not. I think that if monkeyfishing hadn’t happened, I would still have taken the same position. Go back and read my piece about Stephen Glass. The week that happened, back in 1998, editors stood up across America and said, “That could never happen at our publication,” and what I wrote in Slate then was, “Goddamned if I didn’t read those Stephen Glass pieces and think that they were astonishingly good.” Reading them now, having been told that they are fabrications and pure fraud, I am embarrassed by the fact that I, who regarded myself as a sharp-eyed cynic, didn’t see through them. So whatever sympathy I might have had for Howell Raines actually preceded the Jayson Blair episode. Even prior to the Jayson Blair blow-up, I was saying, “What are Howell Raines’ crimes? He’s become executive editor, he wants to make the paper the way he wants to make it, people who don’t want to work that way are leaving, what’s the big evil crime? An editor is not a contestant in a beauty contest.” So I thought that a lot of the criticism then and still now comes from sort of personal animus for Howell Raines and for some of the political views that he expressed in his editorial page.

But then you turned, with “Dead Man Editing.” Why?
The thing is that a general cannot command an army without the support of his troops. And I think what has happened is that Raines is very unpopular within his own newspaper and both of these crises—the Blair and Bragg episodes—have allowed the people who are most unhappy to give voice to their anger and their displeasure and put the editor of The New York Times in a defensive posture vis-à-vis his newsroom. And I think that’s a very untenable place for an editor to be. So I am not calling upon him to resign. I don’t think that Howell Raines has done anything that is fireable. But I think that an editor cannot produce a fine or great publication, as The New York Times needs to be, editing from a defensive crouch. And his latest moves—with the Siegal committee and then the one headed by Whitney and Rosenthal—you know, these are palliatives handed to the staff and distributed with his promise that he’ll increase communication and attempt to be more amenable to the staff’s views and feelings. And I don’t think that is Howell Raines. He can’t turn the Times newsroom into a 24/7 sensitivity session. That’s just not him. So what I am predicting is that sooner or later he will realize he can’t put out a great newspaper in the position that he is in, and he’ll decide to do something else with his career.

You mentioned Rick Bragg—it’s also interesting that, while you were one of the few defending Raines, you were also one of the first to come out about Bragg and say, “This is just ridiculous.”
Yeah. Bragg has put a very flattering spin on his methods and sources, which I think the press is sort of letting him get away with. Did you look at his On the Media transcript? Bragg’s still maintaining that he did nothing wrong to commit the dateline toe-touch—to claim a dateline, to basically assign the primary interviews of the piece to a non-Times employee who conducted interviews for 4 days in Apalachicola. I think that many of the ethical issues journalists visit day in and day out are hairsplitting and Talmudic and require an “on the other hand” and exceptions and explanations—but this is not one of them. After this interview, Seth Mnookin can’t put his name on this piece just by covering Jesse Oxfeld’s rent. [Note to Seth: Village rents being what they are, I’m open to offers.] Everyone would recognize that Jesse did this interview, and not Seth, and what’s going on is wrong.

Another one you’re sort of out there alone on is Judith Miller [the Times reporter whose reporting on the search for Iraqi WMD has been subjected to unusual pre-publication scrutiny by the Pentagon]. Why do you find that so important, and why do you think that nobody else, or few others, are getting on it?
I think that that will change. I think that I will have company on the Miller story sooner rather than later. As for why other people haven’t written about it, I don’t think they are as careful readers of Judith Miller as I am. Oddly, journalists I don’t think write as carefully about other journalists or read them as closely as they probably should. What’s your theory on why I’m out there alone on Miller? Am I wrong or am I just too early?

I think that the zone is flooded, as it were, with everything else going on at the Times, and that this doesn’t fit the storyline right now.
Right. Howie Kurtz did do a piece, and he added a big chunk to the story when he wrote about the internal email between Miller and [Times Baghdad bureau chief John F.] Burns, and she was bragging that [Iraqi exile leader and Pentagon favorite Ahmad] Chalabi was one of her main sources and both a source for her and a source for the weapons of mass destruction investigators on the ground. So I wouldn’t say that no one has written about it. I think a lot of the left press has written about Judith Miller, but you’re right in noting that there hasn’t been a lot of mainstream coverage.

So how much longer do you give Raines?
You know, as editor of The New York Times, he’s probably analogous to someone with a terminal disease. He could go tomorrow, he could go next week, or he can go in a year. If he goes in 18 months, I will feel vindicated because the implication, of course, is that the modern-day New York Times editor has the job until he reaches mandatory retirement at age 65. I am not going to actually put a date to it, but I think that there is going to be another crisis—I mean, there is no newspaper in the world that hasn’t has some sort of fraud committed on it by one of its staffers—and I think the next time this happens at The New York Times, once again, the issue will be that people will personalize it in the context of Howell Raines and he will feel the heat in a way that Ben Bradlee didn’t feel when the Janet Cooke episode happened.

Do you think that, as some people have speculated, Arthur Jr. might be going anywhere?
It’s hard when your family holds a controlling interest in your enterprise. It is often hard to remove family members from any business organization.

Hard, but not impossible. Wasn’t it other Chandlers [the family that owned the Los Angeles Times] who finally got Otis [the last Chandler to run the paper] out of the job?
Yeah, but Otis had aged out of it. I don’t think that he really wanted to do it by the time he left. He had had a long career there. And the family’s animus toward him had nothing to do with the performance at the newspaper; everybody just wanted to cash in. The New York Times is, as Susan Tifft and Alex Jones put it, “the trust.” The New York Times Company is not simply like the Tribune Company, committed to returning its 12 percent on investment. It is something greater than that. The New York Times wants to make money—and is unabashed about making money—but that is often very secondary to being the best newspaper in the country. And I think that that sentiment is still the sentiment of the family, and I think that Art Sulzberger Jr. is still with that program—making the paper the best. So the analogy of the Chandlers is very apt: The Chandlers wanted Otis to leave because they wanted more money. I don’t think that any of the family owners of The New York Times are angling for another two or three percent return on investment.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

New York publishing people fancy themselves the literary elite, the leftish intellectual class that watches PBS and chuckles politely at New Yorker cartoons. But if you actually pay attention to the reading habits of the Michael’s crowd, you’ll notice that its only absolute lingua franca—the one publication that everyone who even aspires to be anyone reads religiously and nearly comprehensively—is Rupert Murdoch’s very scrappy, very conservative, and not-always-entirely accurate New York Post. That’s quite intentional: In recent years the Post has carefully positioned itself as the daily paper of the media class, a white-collar second read that delivers the real dirt on our business, whether or not it’s news sufficiently fit for the first-read Gray Lady to print. The top draw for that crowd is “Media Ink” columnist Keith Kelly, who’s in the paper nearly every day and breaks more news about the media business—or, at least, breaks more fun, gossippy news about the media business—than anyone else on the beat. Kelly spoke to mediabistro.com yesterday about the Post, fishing for stories, and the ingredients of a good nickname.

Birthdate: September 10, 1954
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Lives now: Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan
First section of the Sunday Times: “I have to read their dull and pedantic business section, so I do. But the first is the front page.”

As the Post has turned itself into this media business must-read over the last few years, you’ve obviously been one of the marquee names in the paper. But how long have you been doing the beat there, and what did you do before?
Let’s see. This month it will be five years here at the Post. Most immediately before this, I was working at the Daily News, in the very short-lived Pete Hamill era. He realized that the Post was starting to rev up media coverage, and he wanted to counteract it. I knew him from Brooklyn circles and Irish circles and journalism circles, and at the time I was senior editor at Advertising Age, so he knew I had a lot of contacts and sources in the right places. So Hamill made the smart move and brought me over there and gave me the column.

And before the News you were at Ad Age, you said…
Advertising Age, yeah. Prior to that I was at Folio:, and I started Folio: First Day back in the days when faxes were amazing things. It was one of the first fax-delivered newsletters, it came out twice a week, and we broke some good stories.

So you’ve been doing this sort of media-about-media stuff all along?
I started basically in 1988. In ’87 I did some freelance for Jack O’Dwyer’s newsletter, and then I heard about this new thing called Magazine Week, which was starting up in the Boston but didn’t have anybody in New York. So I ended up hooking up with them as their New York editor—that was in ’88—and then by the time I left in ’92 I was the editorial director and we had our whole little staff going in New York. But the problem was we ran into the early-’90s recession and were running out of money. And I wasn’t the captain of the ship, so I jumped to Folio:.

I would have thought you’d been a tabloid lifer—you know, cops reporter or something—because your stuff feels so shoe-leathery.
Well, I started out working at a small chain of weekly papers out in Suffolk County, where I ended up growing up, and I was doing cop reporting and things like that out there. Then I got sidetracked for a bunch of years at McGraw-Hill, but I freelanced out of Belfast in 1980, broke a couple of good stories there about the looming IRA hunger strike. But then the media thing—partially I was intrigued by it, and it was partially luck: Magazine Week didn’t have anybody in New York, and I just started stringing for them.

I said your scoops seem to come from shoe leather, but, really, to what degree are people leaking to you and to what degree is it actually lots of phone calls?
We don’t get as many leaks as people think. I mean, most of the time when we get stuff, because of the Post‘s sort of, you know, on-the-run, tabloid style, we get a lot of pissed off people who call, but it’s not usually stuff that you can actually use. Sometimes it’s just, this guy was fired for legitimate reasons and now he’s trying to smear the competition or his former boss or whatever. So you get some people like that. Of course, sometimes just because someone’s a disgruntled former employee doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good information. But you still gotta stand it up.

More often, it’s that after doing this for quite a number of years, you’re like a good fisherman: You know where the good fishing holes are. But you can’t fish them everyday, otherwise they’d be gone. You keep calling up the same source; the fish will be depleted.

One of the things about “Media Ink”—and you must know this—is that everyone knows you’ve got to read Keith Kelly, but everyone also knows that the reality is usually going to be a little bit different from what’s in the paper. Is that just sort of the culture of tabloids, the culture of the Post? Is it a breaking-news, fog-of-war kind of thing?
Well, obviously you try to get it 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time. But I think we live in a culture where we place a great premium on the scoop. I’m not going to do the second- or third-day, here’s-how-it-fits-into-the-culture piece. I don’t do that; I just don’t have the space. I mean, we’re getting a lot of flak lately—”You said Bonnie Fuller had inked a deal back in February…”—and I’m like, “Well, yeah, we did run that story, but shouldn’t people be looking at Bonnie Fuller? I mean, the company and Bonnie both said she had a deal, so obviously somebody was lying. Who the hell was that? Was that our fault? We accurately quoted people who gave us the information.” I mean, usually when you’re doing a story you’re not going to say, “Can I take a look at that contract just to verify that you in fact have signed a new contract?” When somebody calls you up and says, “Hey we got a deal.” You say, “OK, great,” not, “Did you sign the deal, or did you just agree to the deal?”

So if you were David Carr, covering the same beat but for the august New York Times and not the scrappy Post, do you think you’d be doing things differently?
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think I would break as many stories.

Because you’d have to be more careful about things?
It’s not really the fact that I’d have to be more careful. It’s a curse and a blessing that I do two major columns a week plus breaking news as it develops in between. So that means, as they say at “Page Six,” it’s a hungry beast, and it has to be fed. So some of the stuff is just interesting inside baseball that will end up in a column because you want to have the inside-baseball readers tuning into you. The best stories are the ones—like Ben Bradlee said, the holy-shit stories, where the competition reads them the next day and goes “holy shit”—but that also translate to the average man in the street. You know, “This guy really got fucked in this job,” or, “What a crazy boss who did this to him.” You have to have something that resonates with the common man. That to me is the ideal story, the one that the industry is intrigued by, but also, hopefully, has enough human interest and drama in it. I guess if you want to boil it down to the quick and easy, we’re very much interested in just basically winners and losers. And we’re much more interested in uncovering the news than covering the news.

Two weeks ago I interviewed Howie Kurtz for this column, and he talked about filing on Jayson Blair from his wedding weekend. I heard a story someplace about you filing on Conde Nast from a vacation in rural Ireland.
Yeah, I did that. It was the Art Cooper story. There were rumors swirling about Cooper being forced to retire, blah blah blah. You don’t just want to run stray rumors that will hurt someone’s career if they’re false, so, ideally, you hear the rumor and try to confirm it. Well, we didn’t quite have that, but the drumbeats were so strong and so intense that I said, “OK, in this particular case we’re going to go with a rumor story.” Because my instincts and my signals and whatnot were telling me that it’s accurate. So I had the story pretty much set up, and then I just made a couple of calls from Ireland and, you know, called in the update. But I didn’t rewrite the story on vacation.

Gotcha. Have you had other incidents with breaking stuff when you’re theoretically off duty?
My theory in journalism is—it’s not a theory, but if you’re a journalist and you see news and it’s happening, and you’re the man, you should respond to the story. It’s kind of like a doctor: If you drive by an accident and you’re a doctor, you’re supposed to stop. Or a sea captain if he sees a boat in distress. Sometimes this gets us in trouble. I think I’ve been banned from Rao’s for life.

You’ve been banned from Rao’s?
Yeah I think so. I don’t think I could get back in.

What did you do there?
I’d better not say it. Let’s just say that there was a celebrity on my beat that was spotted at Rao’s, and although I did not mention the restaurant by name, the owners were ticked off that the incident got captured. Because they knew, and they knew that I knew, and they were worried that other people might know. But anyway, I don’t want to go into too many more details.

OK. So you reported Sunday that they’re saying Bill Keller’s got the Times job. How confident are you in that? What would you bet on it?
I wouldn’t bet my house. I mean it’s the buzz at the moment, but I didn’t get it from Sulzberger. Sulzberger knows who I am, but he hasn’t said a word to me since this whole scandal started, ironically enough.

Really?
Yeah. Ol’ Pinch. I guess we used the nickname one too many times or something.

You do seem fond of nicknames. He’s never Terry McDonell, for example, he’s always Terry “Big Sky” McDonell.
Big Sky! Nicknames are good. I’m not the first guy to use nicknames; I’m been carrying on a tradition. The guy who actually gave Maria Bartiromo the nickname “Money Honey”—she hated it. Then she realized it was a great marketing tool. Now she does her books as the Money Honey. But some people don’t like them.

Right, and Sulzberger has never liked “Pinch.”
Yeah, but we’ll use that partly because it simplifies trying to explain the difference between him and his father. It’s a good nickname because it simplifies the process. See that’s the problem. John Huey we would call “The Radioactive Man of Time Inc.” It was given to him by somebody inside the company, and we sort of played it up for a while, but it was never going to be like a good long-term nickname because he has eight letters in his real name, and its hard to get a nickname that’s shorter than that. It sort of faded.

So that’s the secret to a good nickname? It’s gotta be short and quick?
Well, it’s got to have some staying power. “Big Sky” is good. It fits him well, but he doesn’t like it. I mean, that’s the other thing. You have to dislike your nickname to some extent, or at least it has to grow on you.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.

He’s known as the nice guy on the media beat—and also as the well-dressed one. (He is British, after all.) Matthew Rose has been covering media for The Wall Street Journal for nearly four years, and he’s produced top-notch reporting on some of the biggest recent media stories. In fact, one of the rumors about why Arthur Sulzberger Jr. finally asked Howell Raines to resign at the Times was because Rose allegedly was working on some big story that would change everything at the troubled paper. Despite suffering from an illness he (mostly) jokingly suspected was monkey pox, Rose spoke to medibistro.com yesterday about writing for the Journal, getting his job, and whether he really did have the goods on Howell.

Born: September 30, 1972
Hometown: London
Lives now: Manhattan
First section of the Sunday Times: “I immediately perform Sunday-Times triage: I flip through and throw away the things that I don’t want, like ‘Databank’ and the ‘Travel’ section. I guess the first thing that I pay any reasonable attention to is the Sunday crossword.”

What brought you to the media beat at The Wall Street Journal?
I was working for the European Journal in London, covering very large, quite dull European technology companies, which one by one showed themselves to be remarkably, deliciously fraudulent—which provided a whole ream of wonderful stories. The biggest driver for me was wanting to move to New York; for some peculiar reason I had a lot of friends and acquaintances here, and to be a fully well rounded human being in the modern world you really have to live in New York at some point, whether you like it or not. So I just put up my hand to the U.S. editors at the Journal and said I’ll happily cover ball bearings for you, if you have a job available. And it just so happened that the media group was going through some significant changes at that time and there was this position that was open, and still to this day I have no idea exactly what it was that got me this fantastic job. But I lucked into it, and no one’s kicked me out yet.

How did you get to the European Journal in the first place?
My entire life is a series of random flukes. This was one of those situations in which one thing led to another led to another. I went to an American graduate school, the Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, for two years, and came back to London, stupidly chasing a forlorn love, which fell to bits. I got an internship at European Business News, which was a business TV station owned by Dow Jones. So I was running around with tape from midnight to nine in the morning, while no one was watching. And the offices of the Journal were below, and they were advertising for a news assistant—a copy maker, fax collator, chart builder—and I went downstairs and accidentally answered all of the questions right and got that job.

So you weren’t a media-about-media guy all along?
No, not at all. I knew nothing. I mean, it’s possible that I don’t know much now, but I certainly knew significantly less four years ago. I didn’t know the personalities or the people or the mechanics or any of that stuff. I just started from scratch, which actually isn’t a bad way to start on this beat in particular, which has a danger of becoming incredibly insidery. To start with zero knowledge is not quite as bad.

Why is that?
It is a beat that is very much dominated by personalities, which you have to know cover the beat properly. But there can be an overemphasis on what people do, regardless of whether what they do is interesting, because of who they are. And perhaps if you start off not really knowing or caring who these people are then you start to evaluate them more conscientiously, whether what they’re doing merits attention.

What is it like covering this beat for what’s fundamentally a financial publication?
I would immediately say that that’s an inaccurate observation. An incredibly important part of the Journal‘s coverage is finance, pure finance; the third section worries about that all the time. But, much more broadly, we just look at things through the prism of money. We do many stories that aren’t obviously financial, aren’t even obviously business stories, that look through the prism of how money is spent and where it’s going, who has it, and who’s getting it and who’s losing it. And those are universal issues. I mean, what I do and what, say, the business reporters from The New York Times do is fundamentally the same thing. And what Keith Kelly would do, or Seth Mnookin, or any of the other reporters of covering this stuff—we all pretty much think about the same things. Now it’s possible that I may end up doing a story about newspaper stocks, for example, a very technical analysis, or something about Martha Stewart’s shareholders, that other people wouldn’t, because we do have a little more of that financial bit, but it’s more similar than it is different. But that incredibly laser-eyed focus on business allows you to focus your coverage a lot more coherently. It’s another filter to make sure you’re doing things that really matter rather than things that people are talking about. Often those two are the same thing, and often you can do a story that people are talking about that has no business implications, just because it’s fun. But you shouldn’t do too many of those.

Plus, normally if the personality is interesting enough and doing things that are interesting enough, it is by definition a business story. All stories can be seen through the prism of business and are often a lot better for it. People think business stories have to be dull, which isn’t the case at all. You can have the most delicious, wonderful anecdotes in them—and, in fact, we do that all the time. It’s one reason the paper encourages the kind of narrative reporting you don’t get often at other newspapers. But somehow the stories all feel like they have more solid base to them because they’re grounded in something that’s actually happening and actually significant. Rosie O’Donnell is a great example. The collapse of Rosie’s magazine in and of itself was like a rock thrown in a pond: It would have made some ripples but after a while gone away. It didn’t really have, apart from the personalities involved, any long-lasting impact on the way in which magazines are produced and the way in which people buy them. But it was a great story because it had these incredibly large personalities; it had an incredible, sort of classic Greek tragic rise and fall, with a whole ball of hubris at the top of that, which encouraged it; and at the same time you had money, you had a business story, you had a company trying to make a splash in the U.S. doing this big magazine; and so that kind of rooted it. If one of those things wasn’t there, then the story would have been just fundamentally less compelling, but all together made it a great story. Tying all of those things together and being able to do the things that otherwise might be trivial, but doing them in a context in which they matter, is to my mind the best kind of media story.

The Journal, of course, is one of the few papers that doesn’t make all of its content free online. Yeah, sometimes sites like Romenesko’s and ours get access to your pieces, but not always. Given that people who really care about media news follow it on these sites so much, do you ever feel your visibility is decreased because you’re not able to be playing on that field all the time?
Sure, as a practical matter it’s just be easier for people to link to the stories of other newspapers on blogs or other people’s personal websites or whatever. Whether it decreases the visibility, I just don’t know. It’s hard to measure. I wonder if it decreases the chatter around your stories, but I don’t quite know if that makes them less influential. But this goes to the heart of whether this stuff should be free or not, so it’s tough for me to get into it.

Sure. But you mentioned to me your theory that coverage on this beat has to some degree become influenced by people trying to write things that will get a link from—
Nothing comes to mind immediately, but you sometimes smell stories that have been written because they’re going to get a link on Romenesko. It’s again this whole idea that no one reads your stories, they just see it on—there’s the great column Simon Dumenco did in New York on how no one actually reads stuff; they just read the links. So you get a sense sometimes. I would be amazed if people—they don’t necessarily change their stories, but they drop in quotes they wouldn’t otherwise use or sentences and phrases that they otherwise wouldn’t put in just so they can pique Jim’s interest. Here’s an example: I did a story on Maer Roshan last September or October, just about how many new magazines were being launched all in one big glut, and how crazy were all these people to do this in the world’s most crappy magazine environment. The very last paragraph was a quote from Tina Brown, saying something like, “If I had to launch Talk again I’d launch it on the web.” And it wasn’t a large portion of the story, but it was left in there, and lo and behold it’s what Romenesko picked up and made the headline of the story even though that wasn’t what it was about at all.

So you fall victim to this too sometimes.
Absolutely. It’s one those things where it wasn’t in there deliberately to get his attention, but it was obvious in writing it that it would be something that would pique his interest.

Now, speaking of your influence, one theory you keep hearing on why it was finally time for Howell Raines to go is because allegedly Matthew Rose was working on this big story that was going to change everything. True?
I also heard that I was working on a big story that was going to change everything, which actually is unfair to a colleague of mine who also was helping with the Times coverage, Laurie Cohen. She and I did the story the day he quit. I can’t really talk about the stories that we either are thinking of doing or were doing or might be doing or any permutation you could possibly want of that. We did a lot of Times coverage. And it’s really hard to give an honest assessment of how much any individual reporter’s reporting actually stirred the pot.

Do you think the Keller regime is going to be less exciting to cover?
This actually gets to the heart of your question about the Journal and the kind of stuff we cover. We only started doing stories about Howell and Howell’s rule of the paper after the Blair thing popped up and things started to get bad. For a long time reporters were clearly unhappy with the way things were going there, but we always asked ourselves, what’s the story? You know, unhappy reporters are not themselves a story, because reporters are always unhappy. So at what point does this become something broader, something significant to the way in which the paper was run, something fundamental to the company or to the newspaper? And it wasn’t until the Blair thing happened that suddenly, there you go, this is certainly important because it has a base to it, rather than just saying reporters are unhappy with the way Howell runs stuff. So in terms of covering Keller and covering the Times again as a continuous story, I wonder how much coverage we would do and at what point it becomes serious and important again. But it can’t be dull; it’s made itself into the most fascinating story.

You said that reporters are always unhappy. Reporter Mathew Rose, reasonably happy or reasonably unhappy?
Oh, I’m very happy. I have no other plans to do anything else.

So you’ll stay on the media beat for a long time?
Yeah, well not forever. I think it’s one of those beats that if you stay on it for too long it becomes kind of corrupting because you do end up becoming an insider and that becomes dangerous. As evidence, I’m giving an interview to you.

True.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com

Not on the journalism faculty at Columbia, someone who lunches at Michael’s, or a Kalb, Bob Kohn is not someone who under normal circumstances would spend his days thinking about The New York Times. He’s a California lawyer and businessman, a guy who has built a few companies and worked for a few others and is currently vice-chairman of the software company Borland. But he’s a lifelong reader of the paper, and he recently noticed that temple of objectivity with which he’d grown up was, he thought, quite a different animal. He spent some time examining the news content of the Times—not the editorial pages, which he repeatedly acknowledges can and should have whatever viewpoints they want—and located a disturbing trend of what he believes is editorializing within the paper’s allegedly objective news coverage. In Manhattan to drop off his daughter for her freshman year at NYU, Kohn spoke to mediabistro.com last week about his book, his investigation, and what he thinks has gone wrong at the Times.

Journalistic Fraud at first glance seems like the first post-Jayson Blair quickie book. But actually its genesis was long before that. Tell me how you got started on this project.
I grew up in New York, I’ve read the newspaper since back at P.S. 169 in Queens, and I’ve always loved The New York Times—there’s no other paper in the world that can match its coverage for foreign news, technology news, business news, political news. It is a great newspaper. But last summer I was on vacation with my wife, traveling through New England, and when you only read one thing each day you read it carefully, like a love letter. And I started to become very frustrated and very disappointed. I started to recognize a pattern of abandonment of objective journalism in the news pages of The New York Times. I have no complaint with the editorial pages—the newspaper has always been liberal and I’ve always been moderate or conservative, and I’ve often disagreed with the editorial pages. What bothered me is how they were disguising their opinions in the form of straight news, what I call the journalistic fraud on the news pages.

So the book is taking that sample of the Times—what you read when you were on vacation last summer—and finding bias in those news stories?
It was more than that. Yes, it was examples, hundreds of examples from The New York Times that had been delivered to my doorstep every day. I also did a lot research, including at the New York Public Library where they have copies of The New York Times dating back a century in .pdf files in their data base. So with a lot of research and with the examples that were appearing on my doorstep every day, I was able to do a comparison of not only recent news stories from the 2000 election and 2002 midterm election but dating back to the Clinton administration, where I was able to make comparisons between how The New York Times covered Clinton versus how it’s been covering George Bush.

How did you codify what you were reading? Did you have a system for determining what you would consider a biased article?
As I was reading The New York Times last summer I started to recognize a variety of techniques they were using to slant the news to reflect their editorial views. So I developed chapters with titles like, “Distorting the Headlines,” “Distorting the Lead Sentences,” “Distorting with Facts,” “Distorting with Opinion,” “Distorting Polls,” “Distorting with Loaded Language,” “Distorting with Labels,” “Distorting with Placement,” which was my way of categorizing the various techniques they use. And then I broke it down even further. In the chapter on “Distorting the Lead” I show how to write a lead sentence—the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the story—and then I go through each of those and show how they distort the who, how they distort the why, how they distort the what.

Give me some of the more egregious examples you found.
The subtle and the not-so-subtle techniques include slanting the who. During the Clinton Administration, when good things happened they gave Clinton credit by name and when bad things happened it was blamed on “U.S. officials” or “federal officials” or “military officials.” Since George Bush took office, when good things happened, like the Bush administration capturing the CEO of al-Qaeda in the Persian Gulf, the word “Bush” doesn’t appear in the article at all. Yet on the same front page, when it was bad news such as the Turkish government announcing that it was not going to allow troops to be stationed in Turkey for an eventual assault on Iraq, it was a blow to the “Bush Administration.” When Richard Nixon had seven of his cabinet officers and staffers indicted, the Times never said that it “rocked” the Nixon administration, or, “in response to widespread criticism” President Nixon did so and so. But when President Bush announced that he was creating a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, the lead read, “In response to widespread criticism, President Bush today….” In other words, they pre-spin the news before they give you the news. That’s another subtle technique that they use. And it’s an unmistakable pattern that my book demonstrates that this cannot have been by accident.

And this is something that cropped up over time, if it wasn’t like this in the Nixon administration but is now?
That’s right. There was an article recently in the Columbia Journalism Review by a former reporter and editor for The New York Times, and he said that when a reporter submitted a story that was loaded against Nixon the editors rewrote the lead sentence to eliminate the loaded language. That is a New York Times that I admired and that is a New York Times that I want to see back. But that is not The New York Times today. The New York Times today seems to be just the opposite, and this is even true after the appointment of Bill Keller as the new executive editor. There may be a kinder, gentler newsroom, but there are still many examples of loaded language on the front page, even this month.

Some of what you’re describing as “loaded language,” which you say has crept in over the years, couldn’t some of that simply be attributable to changing times? I mean, it’s a different media environment, there’s lots of choices, there’s falling circulation, people have shorter attention spans. Could it maybe just be that they’re trying to make The New York Times less boring?
If they’re making The New York Times into a tabloid like the New York Post, they’re making the mistake of a generation. Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s great-grandfather set the standard for The New York Times when he said the aim of the paper was to report the news impartially, without fear or favor. Since Arthur Jr. took control, the aim of The New York Times seems to be to influence public opinion. When you disguise your editorial views in the form of a straight news story and say that you’re fair and objective and impartial, that’s a form of dishonesty. You’re giving your opinion a level of credibility that it doesn’t deserve by infusing it inside a news story.

So as far as you’re concerned, the appearance of more muscular language in news articles—language that right now would be antagonistic toward a Republican administration because we’re under a Republican administration—is not a value-neutral effort to just make the stories more exciting. You think there’s obviously a specific slant in play there.
Yes.

You’re not a journalist, tell me about what qualifies you to make these judgments.
I’m not a journalist, I’m not a historian, and I’m not a biographer. I’m just a consumer of The New York Times. Yes, I’m an attorney, but there are lots of attorneys who have become columnists and people who have become media critics, and I don’t think being an attorney disqualifies me from writing a book that takes a forensic approach to the news pages of The New York Times. I think that puts me in a rather objective position, as a matter of fact. I’m a Republican, yes, but the only axe I have to grind is in favor of the truth. I’m concerned that The New York Times, which has always held itself up as the highest standard of journalism—and it has been recognized by the rest of journalism as the highest standard of journalism—I’m concerned that its standards have fallen. And if the standards fall at The New York Times they fall for all of journalism. That should be a concern for everybody, and it was certainly a concern for me, because I get The New York Times every day, I enjoy the newspaper—though I don’t agree with all the editorials on the editorial page—and it pains me to see The New York Times become the very tabloids it likes to deride.

In your preface, you set the book up as a letter to editor or a letter to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., saying this is what’s wrong and this is what needs change. Do you expect him to listen? Do you expect a response?
I don’t know Arthur Sulzberger Jr. or any of the people who are managing the Times and I have no insight into whether they’ll listen to what I have to say or even read the book. But if they’re reasonable people they will take a look at what I’ve argued here and come to some conclusion about it. I don’t think they can dismiss this as a mere vitriolic attack on The New York Times, because this is not a vitriolic attack. I care for this institution. People who love The New York Times have a sense of ownership over the newspaper, that we want it to succeed. If it becomes like The Washington Times, if it becomes the political party of opposition on its news pages, it’s going to lose its credibility as a reliable source of news and its credibility as a reliable source of influence. The power of the editorial page of The New York Times depends on its reputation for reporting news reliably. And it’s losing that reputation. Jayson Blair is the least of their problems. It’s the difference between a skin rash and a skin cancer: Jayson Blair was the rash, and I’m talking about the cancer.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. You can buy Journalistic Fraud at Amazon.com.

You know that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Richard Lewis is convinced he created the phrase X from hell? The joke of the bit is that of course Lewis didn’t invent the line—those things don’t really get invented, they just sort of turn up. Well, except in at least one case: Jon Hein is unquestionably the man who invented jump the shark, the term du jour for that specific moment when a television show—or anything, really—goes from good to bad. It’s when Cousin Oliver comes to join the Brady clan, when Pam Ewing wakes up and finds Bobby in the shower, when the Darrens switch. Over the last few years, Hein has turned a college joke into pop-culture phenomenon, and this week his Jump the Shark book comes out in paperback. Hein spoke to mediabistro.com yesterday about coining the term, and he went shark-hunting for us, looking at the upcoming television season, the Bush Administration, and the war in Iraq.

We all know by know what jumping the shark is, but I don’t know how you got started in the shark-watching business.
It goes back to my college days, in the mid-eighties, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A few of my buddies and I were watching TV one night and just started talking about the moment when we knew shows started to go bad. So we’d be like, “Love Boat—oh, when Vicki came on.” It was a really intelligent conversation. Happy Days came up, and my roommate for four years, Sean Connelly, this total ROTC, straight-arrow guy, thought about it and in all seriousness said, “When Fonzie jumped the shark.” And there was a pause in the room, because we all knew exactly what he was talking about—that episode where Fonzie, in his leather jacket, jumped over a shark on waterskis. And then we just proceeded to use the phrase to pinpoint any moment when anything started to go downhill. So it’d be like, “Did you see the game last night? They totally jumped the shark.” “See the girl he brought home? Oh, he jumped the shark.” So it was a college thing.

So how did it grow from that to this phenomenon? Did you even realize that the potential was there?
Absolutely not. I mean, fast-forward ten years. I have a computer training business, and I needed to learn HTML for my business. And I thought, why don’t I just make a site so I can learn the language? And “jump the shark” seemed like it would be a great experiment. So I called my old roommates, who were now all over the country, and I said, “Look, here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to put up about 150 to 200 shows. Just give me your two cents on them, and I’ll put up mine, and we’ll go from there.”

I did the project—I called it Jumptheshark.com—in December of 1997. And Christmas Day I posted the site. The sole purpose was to amuse my college roommates. That was it. And then a couple of months later, the L.A. Times wrote an article about South Park possibly jumping the shark. That’s when it kind of entered into the media’s awareness. And it built from there. People really got into it—it’s not what I have to say, but it’s what everybody has to say, and everyone has an opinion on this stuff—and the site just grew and grew and grew. And there was an op-ed in The New York Times about politicians jumping the shark. And I’ve been on the Howard Stern show a couple of times. It just bloomed and blossomed into what I have today.

It must be hugely gratifying to be the guy who created a genuine catchphrase. But to what extent has it also become a business? I mean, the book is going into paperback, so I’m sure the hardback was successful. Have there been other spinoffs?
I had this site, it kind of built up, and then I had a deal with Rolling Stone to do a Jump the Shark music site, which kind of brought it out of TV for the first time. Then when the Maureen Dowd op-ed hit, every book publisher in town started calling me, asking, “Where’s the book?” I was very fortunate that way; I wasn’t knocking on doors. I had a wonderful opportunity to do the hardcover, and every talent agent wanted to be with me, and the networks wanted to be with me, so it was definitely a wild ride.

What it’s evolved into is the hardcover that came out last September, the paperback that came out this week, and right now I’m negotiating a TV show. Last year we developed a game show for syndication, which just didn’t sell, so we reformatted it into a panel show, and right now I’m negotiating with one of the networks on doing a deal to make that happen. If that happens, that would be fantastic. I also did a 2004 calendar, a page-a-day kind of thing. I’m fascinated by where it’s gone, and now it’s reached the point where people say, “Oh, you created that website just to capitalize on that phrase.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no. I came up with the phrase. I’ve got the chicken and the egg.”

So let’s do some shark-hunting. The TV season’s about to start. What do you foresee as potentially jumping this year?
I think Joe Millionaire is definitely going to jump the shark, if it hasn’t already. CSI, one of my favorite shows on television, if they explore that Grissom-Sara romance, or the thing with him going deaf—there’s things in the air of getting more personal with the characters, which will absolutely make it jump the shark. Tuesday nights on NBC, that’s pretty much where shows go to die. Good Morning Miami, Frasier, which jumped the shark when Niles and Daphne got together, that whole line-up is absolute shark-bait. I think King of Queens is going to jump the shark this year, just because they moved it to Wednesday, to anchor their new Wednesday night. Smallville, with Clark hitting puberty—anytime anybody hits puberty, like Rudy Huxtable, that’s a moment when a show often jumps. I think The Practice already jumped the shark, but I’m dying to watch it this season.

Well, I mean, firing half the cast…
The cast thing, it’s just flailing. David E. Kelley, talk about somebody who jumped the shark. He’s got a new series on CBS, The Brotherhood of Poland, NH, which I know is going to be terrible. Look at his record lately—Girls Club—and he’s just Bochco’d. There’s a lot of stuff that I think is prime for—I think it’s going to be a busy season, let’s just put it that way.

Now, you say in the introduction to this book, that anything in pop culture can potentially jump the shark—music, sports, movies, politics. Has the Bush Administration jumped the shark?
I think it’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the Bush Administration jumped the shark. Could it have been not being able to find one weapon of mass destruction? Possibly. Could it be when—well the list is too long.

How about landing on the aircraft carrier?
Well, that was a classic. That whole scenario, and I don’t mean to make fun of it, but I can’t help it. It was so staged, so ridiculous. But I mean, the pretzel, Pretzelgate? Has everybody forgotten about that? Making up words? Politics is just so ripe.

Could the Iraq war have jumped the shark at some point? I mean, it was a big success in the beginning, and now everybody thinks it’s a disaster. Maybe the aircraft carrier’s the moment when the war jumped the shark.
You know, I think that’s a pretty good example of it. I’ll try this, and you can tell me if it works or not: When the statue toppled. Everyone knew it was done at that point. We were done in theory with what we were supposed to do. Has it been all downhill from there? You can have a show like M*A*S*H where Henry Blake dies, and Radar comes out and cries, it’s a wonderful television moment. But from that point on, that show was not as good as it once was. Maybe with the Iraqi war, it could have been something like that, where you had a highlight, or a good moment, but then from that point on, it kind of hasn’t been the same. I think, yeah, catching the sons was a pretty big deal, but other than that, it’s really been as we read everyday, a bombing here, a bombing there. What have we really done, and where are we going? Either that, or the aircraft carrier. I’m glad you reminded me of the aircraft carrier, because, oh, man, that was just so great.

What about, as a whole genre, network news, which has been constantly losing viewership for years now. Do you think that you can isolate a moment when the network evening news jumped the shark?
I think CNN is why network news jumped the shark, because you had another outlet for news. CNN, in turn, jumped the shark when Darth Vader reminded us over and over that, “This is CNN”—and of course the CNBCs and the MSNBCs and the Fox Newses cropped up. Also, I don’t think news is as personality-driven as it was 10 or 20 years ago. As strong as Brokaw and Jennings and Rather are, Cronkite was Cronkite. I don’t think that’s still there.

So maybe network news jumped the shark when Walter Cronkite retired?
Well, some people think that. Some people think it’s when someone asked Dan what the frequency was. But I think the cable, particularly CNN, was really the moment when network news jumped.

Now, the hardcover version of this book went bigger and looked at lots of different things jumping the shark. For the paperback it pulled back to your home territory of television. Could we make the argument that when the “Jump the Shark” brand tried to expand out across all things, that’s the moment when “Jump the Shark” jumped the shark?
I knew you were going to go there. The way we set up the paperback was, we wanted to do only TV for a couple of reasons: We wanted to hopefully set up a series, where if the TV edition does well, then I’ll do a music and sports, et cetera. And the feedback I got on the hardcover was, people really liked it, but a lot of the core people from the site wanted to see just TV. So hopefully this satisfies both of those audiences. “Jump the Shark” will jump the shark when you dig into your cereal box and the action figure comes out.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. You can buy the paperback of Jump the Shark at Amazon.com.

In 1935, Dr. George Gallup—previously an ad exec with Young & Rubicam in New York—founded the Gallup Organization, which would soon become the nation’s pre-eminent pollsters. Things started off well, in 1936, when Gallup correctly predicted FDR’s defeat of Kansas Gov. Alf Landon for the presidency, contrary to the then-leading polling group. From that start, Gallup expanded its polling—never on behalf of political parties or special interests—into all sorts of fields and all around the world. An internationally known name, Gallup had been pictured on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News by the time he died, in 1984.

James Clifton, the founder of a Nebraska research firm called SRI, took over the Gallup Organization in 1988, and since then the company’s business has grown rapidly. Indeed, when Gallup made The New York Times a few weeks ago, it was not for one of its polls but for news about the company itself: Rather than releasing its poll results through other media, as it has in the past, Gallup would become something of a publisher in its own right, developing new ways to get its data and analyses directly into interested consumers’ hands without being processed and reported by various middleman news organizations.

Clifton spoke mediabistro.com recently about this shift at Gallup, the company’s history, and why public-opinion polling is important in the first place.

Most of us think of the Gallup Organization as the people who do election polls. But apparently there’s a whole lot more to it than that. What’s the other stuff you do—which I understand is actually most of your business?
When Dr. Gallup was leading the company, politics was what governed democracy. He had tools and techniques to access public opinion and ways to hear the voice of the electorate that was reported leadership. Now, 70 years since he founded it, free enterprise is as or more important than politics in what rules the world. So we’ve just taken the tools that he invented and in addition to the electorate we’ve applied them to customers and then to employees. You know all of us are governed, lead, or managed by politicians or by CEOs or by our managers, so we’ve just added those two other electorates: customers and employees.

But Gallup holds this spot in the popular imagination as these mythical poll people. What you’re describing sounds on some level like it’s taking away from that mythology: You becomes just another consulting firm, maybe with a different technique.
It’s very, very different. Most management consulting firms, it’s just thinking outside the box. That’s what McKinsey and Bain do, they think outside the box, so they look at your organization and they say, you’ve got to quadruple, you have to acquire, and blah blah blah. We are still very data-based. So what we do is for, I don’t know, probably half the Fortune 100 companies, we go through, and just like Dr. Gallup did, we study the electorate, we study their customers, just thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And then we build a strategy based on the voice of that electorate, their customers. It’s very, very different.

The news now is that you’re pushing to become more of a media company than just a research company. Again, in the popular imagination, you kind of are this media company; you provide these studies for the news media. How is what you’re going to be doing different from what was being done before?
We used to just do our polls and then hand the data over to media and then they would report the polls. And the media do a terrible, terrible, terrible job with polls. Where there can be a very rich story, they just print one little headline, and so all the best work that a thousand Gallup people have done just gets totally missed. But now we’ve given up on that. Instead, we’re becoming our own source, with the polls and the analysis in one place. We’re a destination not just for journalists but for everybody—you might be a professor, you might be The New York Times, you might be the London Telegraph, you might just be someone who wants to learn more about one of our polls. And any of these people can go to our web solution—the Gallup Brain, it’s called—because they’re doing a paper or they’re a lobbyist or they’re a whatever, and all the work we’ve ever done is stuffed into this gigantic website, going back 50 years. If you wanted to see a 50-year trend on how blacks and whites are getting along, that’s all in that website. Whatever our next blockbuster is—the last really big blockbuster was we showed that after President Bush and Colin Powell said that our relationships are fine with the Muslim world, with a billion Muslims, we did a poll of 10,000 Arabs in nine countries, and we found that 20 to 40 percent of them think it’s a good idea to kill Americans—you’ll be able to get all the data and analysis there. We used to just hand that off, just be a source. Now real people can use it, and that’s been a huge breakthrough for us.

How did the Gallup Organization become so synonymous with polling?
I’ve looked into this, because I was really curious how Dr. Gallup in one lifetime became so famous—when I go to another country, it’s just embarrassing, when everybody knows Gallup and all that. What he did a long time ago was that he decided that he would never work for a special-interest group. And so he would never work for Republicans or Democrats, obviously, but also not for the NRA or even things like animal rights. So he never took a paycheck from a special-interest group. I saw a study recently where it said that red meat’s not as bad as you think and all of that, and it came out of Johns Hopkins. At the very end, the last sentence the research was funded by the National Cattlemen’s Association. That’s what we never do, and so I think we became synonymous, because not only were we honest but also because Dr. Gallup figured out a way to always have the face of independence. He would say, “Oh, we would never work for them, we would never work for them,” and that’s what we’ve always carried on. That’s why I think we became such a big name, we didn’t do it because any of the work that my leadership team has done, we inherited that from Dr. Gallup.

So do you think old George would have been pleased with this move?
I think he’d be real pleased. His said that if democracy is about the will of the people, somebody ought to go out and find out what that will is. He never said officials should necessarily vote the will, because the leaders have to vote their values and all that kind of thing. But he said that if leaders have polls—and they all do—he said that you’ve got question the integrity of democracy if people can’t have polls that are as competent as the polls the leaders have. Otherwise you have to ask yourself, what are they keeping secret? So why would we keep it a secret from the man on the street, what the rest of the country is thinking, so only the leaders would know? Dr. Gallup had a great mission and that was why he published polls, that’s why they wouldn’t work for a president like other would, because he wanted the polls for the man on the street. So now with the new application that we have, I think that he would love it, because now more than ever people can use the Gallup Poll.

And of course you’ll still be doing the presidential-election polling you’re so well known for?
More than ever. We do polls of Chinese, I just agreed about half an hour ago to do an in-depth poll of Russians, we’ve got upcoming work in Baghdad, and many Muslim polls. A lot of it is just technology— we’re bigger and have more resources than Dr. Gallup did. But we do far more polls of the six-billion world citizenship than we did before.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.