I met Will Connors this past July, the night I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A few weeks before, The New York Times had run a front page story about the Muslim rebellion brewing in the country’s eastern desert. While the story had been written by the Times‘ East Africa bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettleman, out of Nairobi, there was a second name appended to the bottom of the story, an “additional reporting by” credit given to someone operating out of Addis Ababa. That was Will. My fianc�, worried that I knew absolutely no one in the city, promptly tracked him down through (what else?) his blog and introduced us.

Will was The New York Times‘ de facto Ethiopia correspondent at the time and the paper’s only reporter on the ground there. This despite the fact that he’s 25 years old. After graduating college, he decided the action was on Horn of Africa, and set out to find it, landing in Ethiopia, learning the local language (Amharic, native only to the Christian population there), and working his way up through the local papers before getting one tiny break from the Times. It struck me that he fulfilled the dream so many journalists have of being foreign correspondents, and he had done it without suffering the tedium of rising through a paper’s ranks. Shortly after my visit, the dream turned into a nightmare when the government cracked down on “dissidents,” including journalists, forcing Connors to flee the country. (Our Q&A was conducted via email from his temporary quarters in Nairobi.) Now he’s on the road, stringing for the Times from Congo and next from either Nigeria or Indonesia. Magazine editors looking for their own foreign correspondent should get in touch.

Name: Will Connors
Position: Solo
Resume: “A work in progress”
Birthdate: January 10, 1982
Hometown: Sugar Hill, New Hampshire
Education: University of Chicago, “where the fun goes to die.”
Marital status: “Monk-, hermit-, eunuch-like”
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports — “if the Yankees lost.”
Guilty pleasure: “R. Kelly, H-Town, Ginuwine, Isley Brothers … except,
wait. I don’t really feel guilty at all.”
Last book read: A couple of Mahfouz’ [i.e. Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist]

What originally made you want to move to Africa? Why did you want to move overseas in the first place, and how did you choose Africa?

After college — I studied English and Sociology at the University of Chicago — and an anti-hunger fellowship spent in Alaska and D.C., I was extremely restless and wanted to travel abroad, specifically to Africa. I started reading as much as I could get my hands on, and pretty quickly began focusing on East Africa, then Ethiopia. The only African country never to be colonized, Ethiopia has an amazingly unique culture and history. Plus, the food and coffee are fantastic. I didn’t have a job at the time, or any prospects at all, really, so finally I just bought a one-way ticket and went. Earlier I had arranged to have lunch with someone who was moving to Ethiopia a month before me, solely to ask if I could crash on their couch when I arrived. I didn’t know anyone except them, so despite feeling bad about being a total mooch, I was desperate. And like almost all Ethiopians, they were wonderful and endlessly hospitable.

Once you were on the ground in Ethiopia, how did you set out to be a journalist? Did you hook up with the local papers or the NGOs first? How did you make ends meet in the early going? How did you make contacts? What was the media scene in Addis like?

I hadn’t planned to become a journalist, although I think the impulse had always been in the back of mind somewhere. Almost unconsciously, as soon as I touched down in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, I began looking for jobs at local English-language papers. I quickly found a gig as a copy editor at a very small regional paper, then with a lifestyle magazine.

I arrived in 2005, immediately after contentious elections and during continued post-election violence, so a bunch of local newspapers had been shut down and their editors arrested. It was not a great time for the free press in Ethiopia, but the paper I started at had a pretty good reputation for remaining independent. I got into the shit a month after my arrival. A colleague and I were detained for shooting pictures of government soldiers beating some kids, and though we were only held for about 12 hours, it was still freaky. Plus I felt like a total ass for getting my colleague, an Ethiopian, beaten up. Typical na�ve
American stuff.

I did a bunch of other writing and editing jobs for the next year, most notably for the BBC and an online paper called the Middle East Times. To pay the bills I also wrote two books for the NGO Save the Children, which I was hesitant about at first due to some of my own personal reservations about NGOs. But the gig afforded me the opportunity to travel extensively in rural Ethiopia and really get to know the country and the people better. I got to sleep on tanned cow-hide mats outside, under the stars, with the friendliest and hardiest peoples. It was an amazing, humbling experience.

How did you first make contact with The New York Times, and how did you cultivate that relationship to the point where you were writing features for the paper? What is your relationship with Jeffrey Gettleman like?

I’ll admit it. I was taking a nap when The New York Times called me for the first time. I panicked when finally I answered and ran outside in my boxers to get better cell phone reception. The neighbors were not amused. The Times correspondent in Nairobi wanted me to do some work on the ground on an American citizen who was being held in a secret prison in Ethiopia. That was my first big break, and I did a good job, so they were willing to use me again. It was a good thing they couldn’t see me napping and drooling on myself over the phone.

The downside of working the Times, of course, is the negative attention it must bring in countries unfriendly to the press. What were the chain of events that forced you to leave Ethiopia?

From then on, the news continued to come from Ethiopia, so I was working steadily for the Times. The correspondent was very generous with shared bylines and even let me do a few of my own stories. Shit got intense when we started working on a story about a rebel group in the eastern part of the country. That’s when the government began tapping my phone and following me. The Ministry of Information said I could never work as a journalist in Ethiopia. I said, “Never?” They said, “Never!” Eventually things got so intense that people high up started recommending I leave the country. I never wanted to, and hesitated until the last minute, but finally did, with regret.

Did you ever feel your life was in danger?

What I feared for most was not my own safety but that of the Ethiopians who knew me and worked with me on various stories. Any Ethiopian seen with me would be questioned, and sometimes much worse. Even my roommate, who is Ethiopian and works for the post office, was interrogated, threatened, and followed for weeks after I left. He and most others did not have the luxury to flee.

What are your plans from here? Are you hoping to work full-time for the Times? Where are you headed next?

The Times has been great to me, giving me chances to get my own pieces in the paper and continue working. I’m headed for either Nigeria or Indonesia, or both, next, to continue freelancing. Hopefully a full-time gig with a paper or magazine will happen soon.

What advice would you give to journalists hoping to become foreign correspondents (or even work overseas)?

I’m still relatively green, but if I had to give advice to aspiring journalists I guess it would be this: If you’re restless or don’t want to work for years getting coffee for editors, and want to work abroad, then just go. In a strange, new place, you’ll be forced to figure it out quickly. Oh, and if you’re in a foreign country and your local colleague tells you not to take anymore pictures of soldiers, listen to him!

Greg Lindsay is a freelancer and frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently at work on his first book.

Sarah Lacy’s new book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 tells the story of what happened after the dot com era’s implosion at the beginning of the decade. She spent a year trawling startups you might have heard of — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Yelp, Slide, Digg, Six Apart — and crawling inside the heads of their founders, many of whom had escaped the crash unscathed or even come out ahead, but were desperate to prove their success hadn’t been a fluke (or worse, a con). Lacy has spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley as a reporter, first at the Silicon Valley Business Journal and later at BusinessWeek, where she’s retired from the grind of beat reporting but continues to write her biweekly column “Valley Girl.” She’s since branched out into video as the co-host of Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker and as a blogger herself. And she continues to climb on stage as a moderator and host even after her infamous fireside chat with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at this spring’s South By Southwest conference.

Name: Sarah Lacy
Position: columnist, BusinessWeek; co-host, Yahoo’s Tech-Ticker; blogger Sarahlacy.com; author OYLTYG
Resume: Memphis Business Journal, San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal, BusinessWeek, all as staff reporters covering finance/tech. Now self employed and contracting
Birthdate: 12-29-1975
Hometown: Memphis, Tenn.
Education: Rhodes College, B.A. Literature
Marital status: Married to photographer/designer Geoffrey Ellis
First section of the Sunday Times: “Ha ha ha New York question! It sits in a bag on my front step. I’ll check out business stories online though.”
Favorite television show: “I love TV and it changes all the time. Re-discovering Gilmore Girls on the days I work from home. It makes for a nice lunch break.”
Guilty pleasure: “Books by Stephanie Meyer. Yes, even the teen ones.”
Last book read: The Road

What’s it like to attempt (and unlike some, actually finish) a book that tells the story of Silicon Valley? Is yours a sequel of sorts to the ones that came before? And what are the themes shared by your book and the Silicon Valley canon?

A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone’s books are incredible. I think his Infinite Loop is the best book that’s been written about Apple. I read it nine years ago, and it really made me want to write my own. You know, these are stories that are so iconic — American Dream stories. The people who are building these companies are, for all of their flaws, so likeable because they didn’t come from money, and they’re trying to build something greater than themselves. The complaint is always that these stories are rose-y, but that’s because ultimately these stories are so tied into our core values as a society. So you can hate them for a lot of personal reasons, but people really want to believe these guys were flukes. But if you reason how hard these guys worked, you can’t help but respect them. And that’s hard for me, because it’s easier to write about a total fluke.

Is it really accurate to portray these companies as psychological extensions of their founders? Journalists have always made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates act as stand-ins for their companies, and I would think that’s an even less effective tactic in the era of Web 2.0 and social media. It’s not like Facebook and has thrived because of a cult of personality around Mark Zuckerberg.

You know, I think it really is that easy. One thing I learned in the past nine years of covering the Valley is that they really are outgrowths of their founders. They are very, very personal projects, and they take on the personalities of their founders in the way public companies can’t. There’s a place late in the book that looks at everyone’s offices and how much they mirror their founders. You can blindfold me and put me in any one of them, and I could tell you immediately where I was because of the sounds and the smells. And it has nothing to do with what these companies actually do — it’s because of the founders. If you walk into Slide, you’ll see these engineers designing hearts and glitter and weird, frivolous things, but it’s a dead-quiet room full of people staring at Macs intensely. Everyone is in battle mode. And whenever Max [Levchin, Slide founder and PayPal co-founder] says something — he’s always surrounded by this group of his main engineers — it’s barely above a whisper. It’s very intense. So people have to be incredibly quiet just they can hear what he’s barking at them.

Whereas if you walk into Yelp — which Max is an investor in and which shares a lot of similarities with Slide — it’s completely different, as it’s very reflective of [cofounders] Russ [Simmons’] and Jeremy [Stoppelman’s] personalities. It’s very joke-y, very hip. There are a lot of women who work there, which happens to be more reflective of their site. And if you walk into Facebook, it’s a like a gross dorm room. It’s changed a little bit now that they’ve brought in other management, but up until a year ago, the main engineering floor was a dorm, and it was very much about what Mark likes.

Considering the workaholism that’s endemic to the Valley, how much time did you manage to wrangle from each of the major characters in your book, and how did you manage to even obtain so much access in the first place?

To this day, I don’t know, because these are people that won’t even do an hour interview with a reporter. And my average interview was four to six hours — it was an incredible amount of time. I think that these guys think people get them wrong a lot of the time, and that’s frustrating for them. They knew me well enough to know I live in the Valley and I’m not just a New York reporter parachuting in and spending an hour with them before trying to write a book. And I think they had a vested interest in wanting the story to be told correctly. The shocking thing for me during the time that I was writing my book was seeing how much of the coverage was wrong. I was frustrated by it, so I can only imagine how they felt. Beyond that, I think we just had a lot of fascinating conversations. It was almost like a therapy session for some of these guys. We talk about childhood, about relationships, about what drives them. They are so locked in, fighting for day-to-day survival as a startup that they don’t get a lot of time to sit down and be forced to be so reflective. I think a lot of them enjoyed it. I was always surprised at how much time I would get. I would show up thinking I would be there for an hour, and then I would be in someone’s office until they kicked me out six or eight hours later. And that was necessary — everyone can hide who they are for an hour, but beyond that, it becomes difficult.

In the past, reporters like The New York Times‘ John Markoff and Fortune‘s Brent Schlender leveraged their early access to Jobs and Gates into sterling careers as chroniclers of the Valley. Is that your goal with this book?

Yes, and no. I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I’m a business reporter — that’s what I do, and what I enjoy — and I don’t know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover. The reason I enjoy being a business reporter is that it’s basically about people playing a huge role in our day-to-day lives, ultimately, and I don’t know where else you’d find that besides Silicon Valley. I have such an issue with people covering the Valley who aren’t actually here that it would be hypocritical for me to leave and continuing to cover it. People always tell me the next stage of my career means moving to New York, but I never will. I don’t care how that affects my career, and I think it’s stupid that it would. But I would never call myself the next John Markoff because I think that convention has been broken; the media has changed too much. And I’m in a fortunate position where I don’t have to be a staff reporter or in New York to have a steady salary and have access to write stories with a wide distribution. I’m in a position now where I can write a column for BusinessWeek in which I can choose to write about Facebook or Slide or Digg. I also have my Yahoo job, where I can tell stories in video that are completely different, and then I also have my own blog, which is more narrowly techy and insidery than the Yahoo audience. So I have more freedom and I make way more money then I would anywhere else. Ultimately, this is the only way we as reporters have any leverage in the business, because revenues are shrinking and shrinking and our responsibilities at any given publication are growing and growing.

If you were starting your career over right now, would you even attempt to work at a major publication and pay your dues, or would you hook up with some blog network or similarly newfangled enterprise? What would be the fastest path to where you are now?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I think a lot of those blogs are having trouble expanding from one voice or personality, and the main problem is that it’s hard to hire away the top people from certain publications — if they’re going to go to a blog, why don’t they just start their own rather than work for you? By the same token, there’s a temptation to hire young people who are very enthusiastic, and then give them a voice and training, and that’s probably the way I would go. But that being said, you can really tell the difference between someone who’s worked at a mainstream publication and someone who hasn’t. Someone who’s worked at a major publication or daily goes through certain rigors and knows the rules of the game. You know when someone is trying to exploit you, and because there’s such a high bar of what you can publish in any given issue, you learn how rarely rumors turn out to be true.

I do worry about people who come right out of school and just start blogging, and it’s not because they aren’t good at what they do, but because I would never have learned as much as I did. So, if it were me, I would go about it the same way I actually did, working very intensely at different publication, and working my way up. But I would blog at the same time, and I would probably try to do some sort of video at the same time. But I didn’t necessarily have a glamorous career. I worked for maybe six or eight years in business journals and at the Silicon Valley Business Journal. And one of the reasons I have the career that I do is that all I covered was venture capital, day in and day out. If I was working at a bigger publication, I wouldn’t have done that because no one would have cared, and working at small publications is great because you get to learn a lot and make mistakes on a small stage. You also don’t get access granted to you. You learn how to steal it from large titles and you know how to see through a lot of things and behaviors when you do go to a large publication later. The one thing I didn’t do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn’t like that kind of journalism and I’m glad I didn’t, because that’s the business model that going totally extinct.

Your awkward interview with Mark Zuckerberg at South By Southwest this year raised the ire of an audience that was transformed into a virtual mob by the use of Twitter, thus making the event something like a scandal online. Did you find it ironic that the very phenomena you praised in your book and have spent years covering was used to tear you to shreds in front of a live audience?

It was funny. My husband had a really different reaction than mine. He wasn’t in Austin, but he was obviously horrified and upset and he never wanted to use the Internet again. I guess in covering the book, I had come across so many other examples of things like that happening to other people that I wasn’t particularly shocked by it because I was very aware there is an ugly side to empowering people so much. It was more hurtful and stunning on a personal level then it was a case of “Oh my god, how did this happen?” There was no real awakening about social media.

I think this was very exclusive to SXSW. I’ve been on stage several times since then and never been abused. I mean, SXSW is known as “Internet spring break.” There are a lot of CEOs who are very big into that crowd, and then there are stuffy business people who would never speak there for that reason. A ton of powerful Valley CEOs and others wrote me after the conference and said ‘I never want to do that conference after watching what happened to you.’ I’d be stunned if Mark Zuckerberg did it again.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

In his 25-year career, investigative reporter Richard Behar has written exposés on the Church of Scientology (igniting a decade’s worth of lawsuits), the Russian mafia, terrorist networks in Pakistan, the World Bank, the IRS, New York City’s garbage mafia, and how the FBI ignored its own agents’ early warnings of 9/11. This year, Fast Company* sent him to Africa to document China’s systematic strip-mining of the continent’s natural resources. He returned with an exhaustive account of social and environmental degradation, one in which we are all complicit. The photo above, for example, was taken outside a Zambian copper mine where a Chinese-owned explosives factory exploded in 2005, killing an unknown number of Zambians. Their unidentified remains are buried in the cemetery behind him. The copper extracted is eventually used in products exported to the U.S. While he was in the Congo, he caught an intestinal bug (not the first in his career, nor likely the last) that nearly killed him, but did provide the overarching metaphor for the piece, the longest in the magazine’s history.

Behar spent more than 20 years at Forbes, Time and Fortune before striking out on his own in 2004. That summer — four years ago today, in fact — Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov was shot dead on a Moscow street by unknown assailants. It was assumed their motivation was to silence once of Russia’s few independent and most voracious reporters. Upset by this blatant attempt to squelch Russia’s free press and the murky circumstances surrounding his death, Behar launched Project Klebnikov that summer. A worldwide confederation of journalists volunteering their time and expertise, Project K. is dedicated to bringing the killers to justice, and to demonstrating that murdering a reporter will not necessarily silence him. The model for Project K. was the “Arizona Project” organized in 1974 by legendary Newsday editor Bob Greene. After an Arizona Republic reporter was killed by a car bomb that spring, Greene assembled an all-star team of reporters and spent six months in Phoenix assembling a 23-part series on the links between state politics and organized crime. Greene, who assembled the first full-time investigative team at a national newspaper, was Behar’s first mentor. Perhaps one of the last of a literally dying breed, he passed away this spring at age 78. We spoke with Behar less than a week after he attended a memorial service for Greene on Long Island.

Name: Richard Behar
Position: Investigative journalist; director of Project Klebnikov
Resume: Forbes (1982-89); Time (1989-95); Fortune (1995-2004); freelance (2004+)
Birthdate: Age 47
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, grew up in Levittown, NY.
Education: New York University (journalism)
First section of the Sunday Times: Frank Rich (Week In Review)
Favorite TV show: Entourage
Guilty pleasure: Entourage and Lifetime (which I refer to as MSN, the “Men Suck Network”)
Last book you read: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, by Steve Weinberg

I’d like to talk about the “China in Africa” article for Fast Company first. It’s certainly no secret that China has been busy in Africa securing access to oil and other resources, but no one has questioned Chinese intentions on the continent as pointedly as you have. You didn’t just let the facts speak for themselves — you really issued a call to arms. Did you set out to write an overtly political wake-up call, or was this a natural extension of your investigative work?

I think every piece of investigative work is a wake-up call by its nature. It’s “Wake up everyone!” and “Look how this is working; look at how this system, or this agency, or this company is functioning”. A good piece does that — people raise their eyebrows and learn something.

Yeah, it was a wake-up call but it was also a pox on both your houses. It wasn’t China-bashing, it was “Look at what America has done, look at what the West has done, look at what African society is doing to itself.” It’s just a cesspool of problems: You’ve got so much corruption in the sub-Saharan, so much corruption — China at this stage of economic development is a corrupt business culture — and our track record in Africa hasn’t been great. I have always felt that if a reporter really puts in the work, the piece can and should have a point of view — if it is backed up by the facts, of course.

While you were in Congo, you contracted an organism, Entamoeba histolytica (or “Eh” for short) that could have killed you but instead provided an elegant framing device for the entire package. But from what I’ve heard, that wasn’t the first deadly disease you contracted in the line of duty…

I didn’t know if it would work, journalistically speaking. You know, you get too close to things, so you don’t know if they’ll work. That’s when you need an editor to slap you around after you try it.

Yeah, I tend to have a hard time when I go to exotic places. When I was in Indonesia in the rain forest during the Bre-X gold scam [in which the discovery of an immense gold deposit turned into a multi-billion dollar hoax], I didn’t know it was a scam yet. No one knew it. I caught something and was in bed for weeks. I couldn’t write the piece, and thank God it was delayed, because two weeks after I got back, one of my sources leaped out of the same helicopter we had flown in and committed suicide — or maybe he was pushed, it was unclear — and the whole thing unraveled as the biggest gold and mining scam ever. This was the story that my editors at Fortune sent me to cover saying “You know, Rich, don’t do anything investigative right now. Go have some fun.” My antennae were not up on that one. When I finally got into work, [then-Fortune managing editor] John Huey walked into my office, stared at me, and after a long pause that felt like forever said, “Saved by an amoeba….”

When I got back from Pakistan after 9/11, I was also in rough shape. I was there 10 weeks, and I left just a few weeks before Danny [Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter] was kidnapped. There weren’t that many of us in Karachi on the terror money trail, actually — just a few of us. Everyone else was holed up in Islamabad with the press corps. I knew people who were killed over there; I think that must have gotten to me. I was caught in riots against America and had my first experience with tear gas. I was crawling on the ground in Rawalpindi while there were flames and rocks being thrown in my direction. I’ve got a camera from CNN and I’m thinking to myself “What the hell am I doing here? I’m a business reporter. How did this happen?”

They actually aired the footage on CNN that night. I was the only American reporter — certainly the only CNN reporter — in the riot. Anyway, I came back from Pakistan and I couldn’t write for a month. I was feeling sick and miserable. So yeah, I get hit hard.

I find it interesting that the glamour beat of journalism — high stakes investigative reporting — is also one of the most miserable….

Is it sexy? I always thought of it more as public service. I grew up with the generation that looked at journalism and the First Amendment like they were religion, and still do. I tell people my god is transparency. I really believe that the more there is, the better society will be. I guess that’s what led me to those areas — that’s what led Bob Greene there.

But the foreign correspondent, war correspondent, and muckraker are also the most respected and romantic roles in the profession. That part doesn’t appeal to you?

Of course it does, especially the excitement of something suddenly coming together. There’s no more exciting feeling than that. So maybe there’s some romance in the sense of that, but more than that, I have the sense that this could and should be a better planet, as naïve as that sounds today.

How much should we read into Bob Greene’s death as a metaphor for the investigative wing of the profession? Is your kind a dying breed because of newspaper and magazine cutbacks and shrinking news holes?

I’m hoping it’s cyclical because of the technological changes and what’s happening with the journalism economy. I’m not going say that it’s always going to be dying (or dead), but at least it’s temporarily dying. There really isn’t a lot of good hard stuff going on, there just isn’t. Most of the pieces that I’ve done over 20 years would not get published today in the magazines they were originally published in.

Wow, really? In Forbes, Fortune and Time?

Most of the stuff wouldn’t. It might have run in a scaled-down form. Many of my pieces were eight to 10 pages. Look at my Scientology cover story for Time. Maybe it’s not fair for me to sit here and say this, but I just don’t see it happening today given the page counts, the [drop-off in] advertising, the move to the Internet, and so on. And most people don’t have the patience to read a 10-, 15-, 24-page story on the Internet without getting a sore back.

I don’t know where it’s going. Look, there’s always going to be a need for this reporting; I just don’t know how it’s going to play out. I used to talk to Bob Greene about this, and he was just mortified. He was mortified by what was happening at Newsday, where everything he built was stripped down and destroyed.

Have you looked into efforts like ProPublica that are attempting to find nonprofit models for long-form investigative journalism? In some ways, it sounds a lot like the Arizona Project or Project K — reporters doing great work and then giving it away to whoever wants to run it.

Yeah, I think it’s a good move. It’s a little bizarre that the old model isn’t working, so Paul Steiger has to take money from a wealthy individual to do this, but that may be where this is going. David Kaplan, who was the chief investigative correspondent for U.S. News for years, was laid off at about a year ago when they closed their investigative team. He’s now running a nonprofit unit of the Center for Public Integrity. He contacted me recently and stated, “I’ll be running a network of 100 top investigative reporters in 50 countries — and it should be great fun. Yah, nonprofits… the last refuge of aging muckrakers.”

Well, is the kind of journalism you do ever cost-effective, especially at the individual level? Even if you were assigned 7,000 words on Africa with combat pay on top of your fee, that hardly seems to justify a 45,000-word first draft and the hospital bills. What’s the temperament of an investigative journalist? Beyond the desire for truth, you must have fantastic organizational skills and discipline. I shudder to think what the outlining process for your Africa series was like.

Yeah, but like with anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I couldn’t have done this kind of work in my twenties. It just takes time. I filled up 1,128 pages of notes in Africa. That’s just what I do. It may only be the first draft of history, but damn, I’m going to try really hard to get it right. I’m just not comfortable turning in something unless I really, really feel comfortable with it. I just have a hard time with that. I also have a hard time with closings. I had a reputation at Fortune where they would try to lock me out of the copy desk at night when it was time to close one of my pieces. There’s always a better way to say something. I used to make friends with all the people in the imaging department, bringing them food, cigarettes, anything just so I could be there before they transmitted the story to the plant, just to tweak one more word.

What’s the status of Project K. at this point? What’s it been like trying to manage an ad hoc network of unpaid reporters around the world? And how much progress do you think the project has made?

Nick Stein did a big piece for Men’s Vogue on the case, and he and I have done some interviews. I talk to reporters around the world — people overseas who do digging for us — and we move an inch at a time, which is just the way its got to be. This could take an absolute lifetime, which is fine — I have a lifetime. I imagine that I’ll be doing stuff on this case for the rest of my life, and that’s alright, because what’s the alternative? Just advance the ball a little bit at a time and try not to get down on yourself, which isn’t easy to do. I look at progress that we’ve made or haven’t made over the past few years, and it’s easy to kick ourselves and wish we could do more, but it’s a brutal environment here, and it’s a brutal environment over there, even since Paul was killed. Like we talked about earlier, investigative reporting has been sliding downhill. There’s so little interest in doing this stuff and even the Western news agencies that are in Moscow aren’t doing it.

A major American news company — I won’t say who — made it very clear to us when we formed Project K. that their bureau in Moscow would not, and is not doing long, in-depth probes of Russian organized crime. Because they will not put their people at risk, and they need them there for other stuff.

That’s incredible. They actually told you that?

I thought “Wow” — not only is that all the confirmation I needed that we were right to form this project, but that is so upside-down. That’s like having a bureau in the Bronx Zoo and saying, “We’ll do everything but cover the animals.” You’ve got to do organized crime in Russia. It’s infested everything.

On the other hand, it’s only human to not want your reporters to take unnecessary risks. I have to ask, considering you followed the same trails as Paul Klebnikov and Danny Pearl, how close to death have you come in the course of reporting a story?

I don’t want to comment on that.

Has someone ever threatened to kill you?

I’m not comfortable talking about that. I don’t see where that gets me. Look, after 9/11, I was very eager to help, and I felt that I could. I had a lot of contacts in banking in Pakistan, and they were going to open doors for me, big doors, in terms of following the terror money. I told Fortune, I gotta go. [Then-managing editor Richard] Kirkland said “You don’t need to do this,” and I said “Yeah, I do.” I mean, I’ve been trained as a journalist, doing this stuff for umpteen years. It’s 9/11; I’m going.

There are things that all of us did over there that were risky in hindsight. I met with very dangerous killers privately, sitting around with our legs folded on rugs. Often I had some armed security nearby, maybe a floor below me or in the street, but in retrospect it wasn’t enough — if somebody wants you dead, you’re gone. But you know, it’s like that old saying, “If Americans didn’t take risks, we’d all be speaking German today.”

But that gets back to the temperament question. I’m a journalist, too, and I can bring my writing and analytical skills to the table, but I have no idea whether I would be so cool under pressure and have the nerve to keep putting myself in danger that way. They try to teach us in journalism school how to be investigative reporters, but you can’t teach someone how to behave in extreme situations like these.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s a temperament. It’s beyond just the desire to write, the desire to report, the desire to learn; all of that’s there, but I think you’re right — maybe it’s just a part of the personality. It’s a calling, it really is. I have found that among colleagues of mine who do similar work, they feel the same way. It really is just in their blood, and something they have to do. This is going to sound really naïve, but it’s genuinely about public service — a real belief that the press is very important to the democracy. Democracy’s not going to work without a strong, powerful, functioning press.

What stories do you think are under-reported, or would make for fertile ground for your next project.

Hmm… everything.

(Laughs.)

I’m serious.

I know. Sadly it’s the truth.

Every single important subject is barely reported. Pick an agency. Pick a giant business. There isn’t enough in-depth stuff going on — Exxon, the IRS — it’s all out there. It’s all out there waiting for a good reporter to go in. Who will publish it, though?

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

Tyler Brûlé’s name will forever be linked with Wallpaper*, the jet-setting lifestyle magazine he founded in the mid-90s while still only in his late twenties. He was hailed for capturing the era’s zeitgeist before he had even published a dozen issues, by which time he had sold the magazine to Time Inc., the company’s first overseas acquisition. He’d conceived of the magazine while lying in a hospital bed, recuperating from wounds sustained as a freelance journalist operating inside Afghanistan on behalf of the BBC. What once seemed like a deeply ironic contradiction — that he had dreamt of luxury living after his brush with geopolitics — have since merged into his latest project, Monocle. Best described as “The Economist meets Wallpaper*” Monocle is the magazine Brûlé has been dreaming of since his bitter departure from his first love in 2002. Published by Winkreative, the brand consultancy he has run full-time since then, Monocle marries the achingly tasteful and internationalist mindset for which he’s known with a news slant that relentless looks for opportunities and curios abroad rather than threats. The result is a manual-sized magazine that sells subscriptions for $150 a year and has a readership that’s also so well-curated that luxury advertisers are beating down his door. Brûlé replied to mediabistro.com’s questions from (we think) an overnight train at midnight last week as he raced to the next appointment in his jam-packed datebook.

Name: Tyler Brûlé
Position: Editor-in-chief & chairman, Monocle; chairman & creative director, Winkreative
Resume: Foreign correspondent, BBC; founded and served as editor-in-chief of Wallpaper*; created and anchored the news program “The Desk” for BBC 4; launched Monocle
Hometown: Winnipeg, Canada
Education: Attended Ryerson University in Toronto

When did you first have the idea to create Monocle, and how & when did you finally decide to launch the magazine? What made you think that a fusion of international reportage with a jet-setting luxury lifestyle component would be an editorial and commercially viable magazine?

Jet-setting luxury lifestyle component? Are you reading the same magazine that we’re editing? I don’t see any of that in what we’re doing. The magazine’s international but hardly jet-set. In many ways Monocle‘s the magazine I’ve always wanted to do. In fact, the basic concept pre-dates Wallpaper* by a good six years. We started work on rough layouts, structure and costs in the spring of 2005 and started raising finance in early 2006. I was convinced that the concept would work because I’ve spent many years watching consumers’ magazine purchasing habits at airports and it was frequently Wallpaper* and The Economist. I decided to merge elements of the two but refine the package.

Who reads Monocle? What do you think is the maximum readership of the magazine worldwide. I understand that the eventual circulation target is 150,000 readers, which is more than Wallpaper* has now (and about the same as during your tenure as editor). Is the readership of Monocle the same as the readership of Wallpaper* during your era? And considering their geographic dispersion, is it truly possible to speak to them as a coherent community?

We invited all of our London subscribers to a shopping evening at our offices earlier this week so I can tell you that our readers are predominantly male (70 percent) and work in finance, public policy, assorted academic fields, media, and assorted travel sectors. They’re over 30, are probably leaving in a different country from where they were born, and are on the hunt for opportunities. They’re also looking for smart media.

I think some day we can take this up to a circulation of over 200,000 globally. That’s a dream, not our business plan. There’s definitely a constituency of readers who left Wallpaper* who’ve picked up with us and a whole new group of readers who’ve never even heard of Wallpaper*. I think Monocle‘s readership is more interested in bigger ideas and doesn’t see a wall between politics and culture.

As for geography, I feel it creates an opportunity. While many media brands go more local we can talk to a group of readers who want to feel connected to the world’s major cities.

Considering how wired (and wireless) your readers are, why is Monocle a magazine and not an electronic publication? What opportunities does print afford you that digital publishing does not? And please discuss your business strategy in light of your extremely high cover price ($10 US is what I’m paying every month) and even higher subscription price, which I don’t think exists anywhere else in the media landscape. What does that mean for your business model in terms of the contributions of circulation revenue, ad revenue, and digital revenue? I imagine it doesn’t look like any other magazine out there.

It’s both. As of today, Monocle‘s ranked as the number three news/politics brand on iTunes. I feel that’s quite an accomplishment having only been present on the newsstand for 10 months and on iTunes for ten weeks. Print still sets the agenda but it needs a digital wing to give it a different, more varied metabolism.

Who said subscriptions should be cheaper than getting a title on newsstand? I think it’s a business model that simply doesn’t work when you’re shipping magazines to 79 countries. At the same time, when you offer up every single story archived there’s a value to that — hence the 50 percent increase on subscriptions. Today there is a consumer out there who will pay for quality journalism and recognizes that it can’t only be the advertiser that pays the bills. As for the business model, we’ve only assumed newsstand sales and ad revenues. We left the digital component and subs blank because we knew we were doing something different. 5,000-plus subscriptions at $150 has had a lovely year end effect on our plan.

How were you able to recruit a global network of contributors reporting on location from Rwanda, the former Soviet Union, Japan, etc. in an age where most magazines, television networks, and newspapers are cutting back on their international staff and coverage? I see that some of your staff, like Fiona Wilson, have been with you since the Wallpaper days, but how did you go about recruiting new correspondents in out-of-the-way places? How do you manage them? Are they essentially stringers pitching stories? Or are you assigning them?

Cut-backs elsewhere have created our network. There’s no shortage of good talent as a result of bureau closures and shrinking international news sections. While we started out by commissioning writers we’ve known for some time, we now have journalists all over the world contacting us with ideas and thrilled that there’s a new platform for international reportage. That said, 90 percent of the stories start at our hub in London.

How would you describe your editorial point-of-view with regards to news? American magazines’ tend to cover international news through the lens of the “War on Terror,” the Iraq War, and the damage to America’s self-image. This view is, of course, noticeably absent from Monocle. How would you describe the political and socio-economic stance embodied in the magazine?

Our view has a distinctly eastern side of the north Atlantic flavor. This means we sit in London but are influenced by the currents that have made this city more European and increasingly one that looks to Asia. Commercially, this viewpoint is proving to be a hit in America as readers are tired of seeing the world through the prism you mention.

How would you describe your point-of-view with regards to the design, fashion, and lifestyle coverage within Monocle? Your incarnation of Wallpaper* is justly famous for being so out-of-step with other fashion and shelter magazines and so locked-into its own vision of the world that it became an iconic, Zeitgeist magazine. Where and how did you develop this sensibility, and why — a decade after Wallpaper* burst onto the scene — are you still somewhat on the fringe?

Mmmmm, fashion. For starters, we hired a Japanese fashion editor to ensure we had pages with wearable, fresh brands and not spreads devoted to building the careers of photographers and stylists. I have a very clear view of who’s reading this magazine and as a result we want to shoot garments that are relevant and also have a story. Slowear’s a good example of a Monocle brand — it focuses on being best in class and is not consumed with being the brand of the season. I think Japanese fashion editors are more like buyers — they want clothes to sell and not linger in fashion cupboards. On a related note, our Porter bags have now sold over 1000 units (mostly to men) and we keep hearing that people like our vision because we introduce brands that are new, forgotten or rarely seen. There’s a political message here as well, you’ll note that brand provenance and legitimacy counts for a lot with us.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

Not every journalist covering the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing this month is busy broadcasting an eye-glazing 3,600 hours of coverage (2,200 of which concern Michael Phelps) or sporting a “J”-is-for-journalist visa in their passports. But finding coverage of these Games that hasn’t been pre-packaged along the jingoistic story lines of the country of your choice has so far been hard to come by. One of the few highly visible outsider attempts at coverage is the sports blog Deadspin’s “Beijing Bureau,” a trio of recent New York University graduates who have already spent more than a year in China living, working, and gearing up to cover the Games. Like any enterprising young stringer, they approached then-Deadspin editor Will Leitch about filing regular dispatches covering the broader issues surrounding the Games, written in a voice that’s neither pompous nor overly sensitive of offending the host nation with inconvenient truths.

They are just sensitive enough, however, to request anonymity. Not willing to be the ones responsible for their arrest or deportation (all three are carrying tourist visas which do not allow them to practice journalism), they are presented here as the Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief, and Correspondents #1 and #2. The interview was conducted via email, with past and present Deadspin editors Will Leitch and A.J. Daulerio confirming their identities and backgrounds.

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”
Hometown: Poconos, Pennsylvania
Education: BA, philosophy, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports
Favorite television show: Deadwood
Last book read: Collected Short Stories of Jack London ($2.50 USD at the foreign bookstore!)
Guilty pleasure: Reading the Times‘ Sports section

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”
Hometown: New York City
Education: BA, metropolitan studies, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: The City
Favorite television show: The Wire
Last book read: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Guilty pleasure: Cheese

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”
Hometown: Des Moines, Iowa
Education: BA, journalism, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: “Movies, because I’m nerdy when it comes to Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, so on.”
Favorite television show: Chapelle’s Show
Last book read: “Trying to finish Ghost Wars. It’s dense but awesome.”
Guilty pleasure: Vice magazine’s Dos and Don’ts

What was the genesis of your project? How did you meet, what are your backgrounds? What drew you all of you to China in the first place, and what’s your take on China and the Games?
“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”: The three of us got to know each other during a semester abroad in Shanghai. Neither [Correspondent #1] nor I really knew any Chinese before we arrived, though [Correspondent #2] had studied Chinese since high school. I was a philosophy & linguistics major, and when one gets [to] one’s third year or so in the program, he or she starts to think about post-graduate, professional plans. I thought learning Chinese might be a good career move. I’d always been interested in the Far East and planned to spend the summer in Beijing. But when NYU announced the opening of their Shanghai program during the spring of my junior year, I decided to jump on it. I put off my Beijing summer plans and took a job in New York for the summer (working with AJ Daulerio, incidentally).

I spent the fall of 2006 in Shanghai and it was really a life-changing experience. The three of us had a journalism class in Shanghai. Our professor had been a war correspondent in Africa and now ran a film production company in town. He had dropped out of Missouri journalism school to move to Africa when he was 23 to sort of strike out on his own as a journalist. I think his story was pretty inspiring for us, and it was definitely was proof that one could be successful going out on one’s own in a foreign country.

Once we returned to New York, almost immediately we started to brainstorm about how we could come back after graduation. [Correspondent #2] had the idea to move to China in the fall, establish ourselves there, then look for freelance work during the Olympics. The idea developed and we began to reach out to Web sites and publications we enjoyed reading to see if there were possibilities for collaboration. I had been a reader of Deadspin since about the first post, and I reached out to Will to talk about Beijing. I think AJ lied to him about my qualifications.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”: The three of us first met at a restaurant in Chinatown at an orientation dinner for our study abroad program in Shanghai. Pretty soon after arriving, we began talking about coming back to China to do creative projects and study Mandarin. We all really fell in love with the place and didn’t particularly want to enter the NYC job market, so we teamed up and moved out here to produce media content — video, photography, writing — and learn some Chinese along the way. We also wanted to explore more of the country and fortunately traveling within China is cheap and easy.

I graduated in December 2007 from NYU having studied film and urban studies, so moving to the biggest city in China and doing film was almost a no-brainer. I grew up in New York City, and I’ve found few other cities that match the energy and vibrant street life I’m accustomed to like Shanghai. Our day job — at a local film production company — takes us back and forth between Beijing and Shanghai among other Chinese cities, though we are based in Shanghai.

I’m pretty sure none of us want to be sportswriters. We all followed Deadspin for a while and loved the community of smartasses that Will created. We thought it made perfect sense for Deadspin to have some sort of China/Olympic coverage, so we pitched it to Will and he seemed to like the idea. My interest lies more in the way China is handling the attention than any sporting event or medal count. Though Chinese people seem very pleased to have an influx of foreign guests walking their streets, sometimes it seems that the government would be a lot happier if everyone stayed home and watched it on TV. The hospitality industry might not be too fond of that, but the Public Security Bureau sure would. There is a palpable nervousness in the air here and an understandable desire for everything to go absolutely perfectly. Seriously, if you’re in Beijing, try having a staring contest with a soldier (there’s one posted like every 15 feet throughout Beijing). You will win. You can’t do that in most places.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”: I studied journalism and Chinese in college. Actually, I studied Chinese in high school, too, but took a break from it and restarted in college. I didn’t realize until I went to China in 2006 that Chinese was a language I wanted to fully understand. When the three of us got to know each other in Shanghai, I think things definitely clicked. We shared a similar sense of humor, we wanted to test the creative waters after college (meaning I don’t think any of us wanted get pulled into office jobs) and we were hooked on China.

Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch described your original meeting in New York this way: “They originally contacted me about a year and a half ago, wanting to do Black Table-like coverage of the Games. We met at Art Bar in the West Village, and they had a whole PowerPoint presentation set up. It was rather impressive, actually.” What exactly did you show him? And why did you approach Deadspin in the first place?
“Bureau Chief”: What’s PowerPoint? We showed Will some video projects of ours, namely a short film about streetball in China that I had worked on during an internship in Shanghai. I discovered the Black Table from reading Deadspin… and loved it. As the meeting progressed, I think we realized that Will and the three of us were very much on the same page about how we wanted to cover the Olympics. At the time, Will was really the only one writing posts on the site, and he seemed really excited to expense some drinks. I don’t know how successful we’ve been in providing “Black Table”-like coverage of Beijing, whatever that means, but it is certainly a source that influenced us.

“Correspondent #1”: One thing we showed him was a short video of us participating in a snake dinner in South China. We chose Deadspin because it fit with our intention of guerilla style journalism (no press passes, no official accreditation, etc.). Will saw it as an opportunity to expand Deadspin. He told us not to worry about focusing on sports, to introduce China to the readers to build a context against which the Olympics could later be presented. In trying to present China to his audience, we’ve also learned a lot along the way reading other China blogs and staying abreast of offbeat, less mainstream news.

What’s your approach to covering the Games? And did you even bother applying for credentials?
“Bureau Chief”: We looked into applying for official credentials for the Games, but found out that the deadline to apply was in September of 2006 — the week we arrived in China for the first time. So that was never a real possibility. Our thinking was that the actual sports of the Olympics would be pretty well-covered by people more qualified than the three of us. We thought we could make a more relevant contribution by writing about the social aspects of the Games and the particular, novel things you learn about China by living here.

“Correspondent #2”: Access is certainly not something that Deadspin worries about, and it’s certainly not something we worry about. We would like to be able to go to every event we want to, but a journalist’s access in China comes with a lot of headaches. Also, we like the idea of being under the radar and producing stories that won’t have us getting into trouble later on. Our anonymity grants us this, to be sure, but our lack of access from the get-go does, too. We don’t have much inhibiting us from saying what we want to say and showing what we want to show. That’s an important aspect to Deadspin’s charm, no matter where its posts are coming from.

We want to provide Deadspin viewers with the Olympics from a local, street-level perspective. That means we’ll be doing stories that people who are up-to-date with the news from China won’t see anywhere else. We definitely get a lot of good stories from established news providers, but these are stories that do away with the cliché themes — like how China’s booming cities are a boiling point for Eastern and Western values or pollution, for that matter. Pollution is definitely a newsworthy thing to write about, considering China promised to have its air cleaned up for the games, but everyone knows about China’s struggle with the environment. And God knows China’s government did stress over this and put a lot of effort into fixing it. I would like for the games to go smoothly, believe it or not. This doesn’t mean that I want our stories to be soft or without the grime, though.

What do you think of the Western media’s coverage so far? Do any of them have a clue about China? Are they making an earnest effort to acclimate?
“Bureau Chief”: There are some great correspondents doing work out here — Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune comes to mind. And there are some clueless ones, too. Here’s a hint: They’re staying at hotels right now. I think most writers make an earnest attempt to get to know the place, but some recently arrived correspondents — and we aren’t exempt from this group; we’ve only been here a year — kind of botch it. A quick vignette: We were walking around last night and were approached by a Pakistani-born journalist from the Times of Oman. He had just arrived that morning and was accompanied by a frazzled and bored-looking Chinese security guard. The “Oman in Beijing” as his business card read, asked us desperately where he could buy some bread to go with the barbeque he just managed to get his security guard sidekick to purchase. What the hell is a guy like him, who just arrived that day and could barely feed himself, going to write about? And he told us (for longer than we cared to listen) that he had covered four Olympics.

A writer for The Beijinger, an expat mag here, had a great piece last week about the cliché stories to expect in the next three weeks from newly arrived journalists skimming the, admittedly fascinating, surface.

“Correspondent #2”: Western media coverage has been all over the map. We think people have realized you can only write so many articles complaining about pollution and Internet censorship. Granted Beijing has gone against its word on several promises made in order to get the Olympics, and this is certainly newsworthy, but the more interesting stories are about social change in China and especially what’s going to happen next month when the circus is over. Will the security lockdown remain? Will foreign journalists lose their freedom to travel and interview? I guess we’ll have to see.

What would you like to happen at the Games? A confrontation? A major disruption? Do you intend to cover the protests and/or any crackdowns on day-to-day life in Beijing?
“Bureau Chief”: Personally, I don’t have any expectations for the Games. That is to say, I guess, that I think anything could happen. No one wants something terrible to happen, but our instincts definitely have us excited for the possibility of a major incident to cover.

“Correspondent #1”: Nobody wants to see anything terrible happen at the Olympics. With that said, it’d be a lot easier to root for a hiccup-free two weeks if China had made good on its promises. The attitude towards foreigners has noticeably shifted in the past few months with more crackdowns and restrictions. The city feels incredibly secure right now, so if anything goes down it’ll probably be isolated and contained quickly before most press would get wind of it. As for protests, they have to be confined to special protest zones set up far from the Olympic venues. They’ll most likely be small and full of non-Chinese, as any Chinese person would most likely be monitored and potentially harassed after the fact. It just wouldn’t be worth it for them.

Are you worried at all that the government is looking for you? Or do they have better things to do? I figured there’s a reason this interview is anonymous…
“Correspondent #1”: We’re not too worried about our coverage getting us in any trouble. We’re pretty under the radar and we plan to stay that way. Even if something big breaks, acting like a tourist and speaking a bit of Mandarin goes a long way. There are always tricks to getting around Internet censors though you really never know. We think there are bigger concerns than a few sarcastic freelance sports writers.

“Bureau Chief”: The 50,000 members of the Beijing Olympic Security Team definitely have better (read: East Turkestan Islamic Movement) to worry about than we three.

What are your post-Games plans, and what do you realistically hope to accomplish, both in terms of coverage and potential career advancement?
“Bureau Chief”: We’ll go back to our normal jobs after the Olympics are over. I’d love to do creative work in China in the future. None of us came here solely for the Olympics.

It’s hard to say what we hope to accomplish at Deadspin, but I will say it has been cool to observe the reactions to our pieces as we’ve gone along the last few months. For instance, in our “Beyond Beijing” piece, I imagine it was the first time most readers ever heard of some of the cities (Tianjin, Shenyang, Qinhuangdao) we mentioned. And hell, we just graduated. We’re writing about whatever we want for a site we really like, and people actually read (some even enjoy!) the stuff we write. It’s pretty cool.

“Correspondent #1”: At a minimum, we hope that readers have gained a bit of perspective, understanding, and even appreciation of Chinese culture. We get a few comments that make us cringe on each post, but we also get encouraging emails from readers who say they’ve learned something from our coverage.

We didn’t just come to China for the Olympics. We’re actually hoping that things calm down a bit after the games are over. We really enjoy it here and we’ll probably spend another year out here before returning to the States. The experience has been great. Writing with six hands on the keyboards isn’t always the easiest thing, but we’ve had fun doing it and I’m sure we’ll look back on it fondly.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

On the first weekend of New York Fashion Week, the rather staid Wall Street Journal unveiled its glossier side in the form of new luxury magazine WSJ. It appears at a rather delicate moment in the histories of newspapers, magazines, and The Wall Street Journal itself. Newspapers are tanking, and magazines are struggling to drum up ad pages, but magazines published by newspapers — especially slick tomes devoted to the luxe life — are doing gangbusters, the best example The New York Times‘ style magazine, T. This genre-within-a-genre is by now old hat in London, where the Financial Times‘s How To Spend It and the Times of London’s Luxx have scooped up ad pages for years. That the Journal would choose to launch its own magazine in their molds at this moment is a reflection of the paper’s new direction under owner Rupert Murdoch and his deputy, managing editor Robert Thomson. And so is their choice to edit the magazine, Tina Gaudoin.

Gaudoin was editing Luxx in London when she was offered the job at WSJ. Planning for a glossy was already underway when her hiring was announced, but the Journal insider widely expected to conceive and edit it was unceremoniously taken off the project. For the last eight months, she has been prepping for her editor-in-chief debut on American shoes, tapping a handful of luxury and lifestyle editors who might otherwise have never been on the paper’s radar. Mediabistro spoke with Gaudoin on the eve of the magazine’s launch about the culture of the Journal, her tiny staff, and an autobiographical roman a clef — Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures In Magazines — she’s proposed but hasn’t sold or written about (you guessed it) her adventures in the magazine business.

Name: Tina Gaudoin
Position: Editor-in-chief, WSJ.
Resume: Began as Tatler beauty editor, worked for Liz Tilberis as beauty editor on relaunch of Harper’s Bazaar, senior writer at American Vogue, presenter Q2, deputy editor of Tatler, founding editor Frank magazine, feature writer The Times, editorial director iVillage UK, style director of Saturday Times magazine, launch editor Luxx which brings us here…
Birthday: January 4
Hometown: Norwich, Norfolk, England
Education: BA honors in English literature from Lancaster University
Marital status: Married to Ford Ennals
First section of the Sunday Times: Page one, then Vows: “I love backstories”
Favorite television shows: Grey’s Anatomy and re-runs of Black Adder
Guilty pleasure: Raisinets and Flipz
Last book read: The Size of the World by Joan Sibler

How “British” is WSJ., in the sense that it borrows from the editorial sensibility of Luxx or How To Spend It? How do those magazines compare against luxury titles in the United States, and did you set out to give your magazine that accent?

I was very aware I was coming to a huge brand, and a hugely respected brand. I’ve tried to be very careful with that, and I’ve tried to be respectful of the Journal reader, who is intelligent, opinionated, and not afraid to share their opinions. The Journal reader is very discerning not only about what they consume in terms of words, but what they consume in terms of product. I have been very careful of that, and I have been very respectful of the Journal‘s American roots, because I think it would be a mistake to make anything too anglicized. So, no, this is not an anglicized magazine. Does it have an arch sense of humor in some places? Yes it does, which might be slightly more surprising to an American reader who is used to consuming general interest magazines. But no, it is not an Anglophile’s magazine.

Were you surprised by the lack of humor in American magazines, and how Americans approach luxury?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my perspective is that if you are spending money or living a particular lifestyle you have worked very hard to achieve, you want to have some fun with it. You want to have fun spending your money and living your life, and that’s what we have tried to inject into this magazine. Do I think a sense of humor in Americans is missing? No, I do not. I think it’s a different sense of humor. It might be less arch, but it’s certainly apparent in some magazines.

What’s your favorite story in the first issue, or what story is most representative of what you’re trying to do?

What we tried to do was use people we think Journal readers would be interested in who exemplify the way they might want to live their life. So, for example, I have a piece about a trial lawyer who changed his life entirely and became a chocolate maker. I have a “Humorous Review of the Mundane,” and starting off we’re doing a review of airline safety videos. I have a bigger piece about competition, which is called “The Competition,” knowing full well a lot of Journal readers are in business and that their whole mindset is in doing better or succeeding. I have a piece about [Oracle chief executive] Larry Ellison and [aerospace engineer Ernesto] Bertarelli going head-to-head for the America’s Cup. And I have a piece about collecting, and why American folk art is the new collectible.

How did you go about assembling your staff? Your masthead is notable in the sense that you built a team from scratch from Men’s Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Tatler, and House & Garden. Was it your decision to bring in so many outsiders to create this magazine, or were you yourself part of that decision?

From the outside, it looks different than what it really is. I knew I was going to be using a lot of Journal staffers for reporting and some editing, so what I looked for was what the Journal reporters didn’t have experience in — and that was working in a magazine environment. What we tried to do was compliment the staff we already had with some “outsourced” luxury magazine people, if you like.

How does your staff here compare with your resources running Luxx, and with the famous British magazine model, with much smaller staffs. If I recall correctly, you ran Luxx with six people.

There are eight people running this magazine. The model there is much more lean, definitely, and yes, I have brought that with me from Europe. But in the same way that I ran Luxx with a stable of staff, I had the outsourcing at hand with the Times [of London] reporters I used, so the principle remains the same. I have a small staff here, but then I outsource a lot to general reporters. The resources I need are there, but I don’t need a big staff to run a magazine. (I might regret that quote later; don’t use that.)

What’s the strategic role of WSJ. within the paper and within Dow Jones? One of great ironies of both magazines and newspapers at the moment is that while neither medium seems to be doing particularly well at the moment, lifestyle magazines published by newspapers are advertising magnets. Is your job to create a vehicle for doing the same?

To bring you back to what The Wall Street Journal stands for — it has a very strong separation between church and state. I can’t speak for other luxury magazines, but I can say that there is definitely a clear line drawn between advertising and editorial — if that is what you are getting at.

Then, if you’re asking me, “Do I feel embarrassed about the fact that this is a luxury advertising vehicle?” the answer to your question is: I would be, if it were, but it’s not. And I’ll tell you why it’s not. Our readers are so discerning and so vocal that it is not something they would accept. I didn’t set out to create a catalogue of luxury goods that people could buy. I set out to create a magazine about a lifestyle that people might want to participate in.

Why did you accept this assignment, and why were you seemingly the first choice to do it? (If there were other names floated, none were ever leaked to the press.)

I had always wanted to work back in the States. I had lived and worked here before [as a junior member of Liz Tilberis’ team at Harper’s Bazaar], and I had worked very closely with Robert [Thomson, the Journal‘s now-managing editor] at the Times [of London] for five-and-a-half years, and Robert was coming here and it was that segue that led me here. It took me five minutes to make up my mind.

A practical question: how should freelancers approach WSJ.? Between your own staffers, the Journal reporters available, and your own openness to freelancers, what should they be pitching you? What percentage of the magazine will be freelance-driven?

We’re still working it out because this is our first issue, but I think ultimately we’ll probably take about 30 percent freelance. The way that works is that people will contact my senior editor Janelle Carrigan or my deputy editor Owen Phillips and talk to them about ideas for stories. What am I looking for? I’m looking for curious, intelligent reporting, and I’m looking for the story-behind-the-story, because I feel so much that you can understand a lot about the product or a person generally through general media. What readers are really looking for is more information and a different story. How do you get product? How did they get to where they were? What do we know about them that we didn’t know already? It’s just a different angle — a more questioning angle, really.

How does this experience compare with your stint at Liz Tilberis’ Harper’s Bazaar?

Look, that was just the most amazing experience. Working with Elizabeth Tilberis… she’s a genius. Fabien Baron, he’s equally a genius. It was a very intense, glossy magazine experience working with amazing photographers — those sorts of opportunities do not happen every day. That was then, this is now, as you know and I have described to you. This experience is very different. I was much more junior when I was at Harper’s Bazaar, but I did have a great time, I’ve got to tell you.

The weight of launching something like this is quite considerable given the brand, given the expectations, and given the readership. This is a tricky job, it’s an enjoyable job, but I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

Do you think that your experience at Harper’s Bazaar — the enormous budgets, the stop-at-nothing pursuit of luxury and glamour — is a thing of the past? Is the essence of editing a magazine today doing more with less?

Listen, I don’t know what people spend anymore because I’ve been in the newspaper world for quite some time now. But I think it’s a lot and you just can’t justify those budgets any more, certainly from where I’m sitting — they might have very different things to say at Conde Nast and those magazines — but from where I’m sitting there’s no space for that.

Please pardon me if I’ve mistaken you for a different Tina Gaudoin, but Amazon U.K. contains a listing for a book entitled
Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines, by one Tina Gaudoin. Is that you, and if so, what exactly is the book about? Based on the publisher’s description, it appears to be a novel about a “Tina” working in magazines.

I’ve got to tell you that, that is indeed me. I have in fact written a book, but I haven’t signed a contract, so I’m kind of curious as to where that’s coming from. It exists, but I have no idea when I’m going to publish it. You can tell I’m really surprised that it’s there, so I’ll have to go and take a look. But that’s all I can say right now about that.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

Andrea Fella can legitimately say that design runs in her blood. It’s just that she won’t unless cornered. Fella, 35, is the art director of Nylon, the messy chic fashion magazine for girls who worship Marc Jacobs and spend their rent checks at Bumble & Bumble achieving the perfect bedhead look. Fella took over the magazine’s day-to-day design duties a little more than a year ago at the behest of Patrick Mitchell, the former Fast Company designer-turned-consultant hired to conduct a redesign. At the time, Fella was considering ditching the field completely. In her brief career, she’d already bounced from startup design shops to jobs at I.D. and The New York Times Magazine. But she found she couldn’t walk away—from the Nylon job or from design. Part of that may have to do with her father, Ed Fella, a commercial artist and typographer who worked in obscurity for 30 years before he was hailed a readymade genius by the avant design crowd. Andrea Fella isn’t just an art director struggling to produce a magazine every month—in her world, she’s also stuck being celebrity offspring.

Mediabistro: So, how are you enjoying Nylon? Do you find the relative lack of overhead invigorating, or is designing a fashion magazine on a miniscule budget one long exercise in troubleshooting?

Fella: I love it. I love it because you have to work with certain obstructions in any job, and for me, financial ones always push creativity. That said, there are limitations—”This photographer just won’t do it for this price. Damn.” But what happens then, is you have the room to do it yourself, which is pretty amazing. I shoot [photography] for the magazine under both my name and a pen name. The photo director shoots stuff. [Editor/owner] Marvin [Scott Jarrett] has always shot for the magazine. I love that, because half my interests are in photography and it’s so satisfying to be that involved and not just the middle man. Instead of “I’m going to commission this, and then lay it out here” you just commission yourself and say, “How would I do this?” You get that feeling all the time as a designer, especially when you are working in a situation like The New York Times Magazine, where everything you do has to go to a big person. You have to have a certain name in terms of an illustrator or photographer. It’s just frustrating, because you know what you want, and sometimes you can do it yourself.

Mediabistro: That sounds like the complete opposite of how you felt about design when you offered this job. You had started a two-person studio with Chris Dixon, who joined New York magazine after you left for Nylon, but you weren’t really working on much.

Fella: I think I took about eight months off, and just focused on other things. And also realized at that point I had to decide whether I was going to stay in magazine design. Because it felt like I ended up there, but I thought I’d be in interactive design, or I thought I’d actually be a writer, and I just kept going with it instead and I wasn’t sure whether that was my calling.

Mediabistro: And it was at that point that Patrick Mitchell found you?

Fella: Yeah, he did.

Mediabistro: And you needed him to bring you back?

Fella: Well yeah, I kind of did, in a weird way. The time off kind of did it for me. I missed it. And I realized I really liked it. I really did like design. But I wasn’t sure about magazines, though. I really wasn’t. But Patrick helped me out. It was funny; he called me about his magazine opportunity, and I was like, “Oh, that sounds good.” Because we had spoken once or twice when I was at the Times about Fast Company, but I wasn’t moving to Boston. So, we met up and I was like, “Oh, I hope it’s anything but fashion, I don’t want to do that.” And sure enough, it’s Nylon.

I had interviewed for an idea of Nylon before it became reality. In that case, it was fashion, but also “real life.” What do real people wear? Real girls and no models. And it was under a different editor. It was Marvin’s idea, but other people were involved. And I was very excited about it. It was the first thing I was excited about while I was at The New York Times Magazine, and I had interviewed for a couple of other things, but this one sounded good. Then it all changed and it became what it became. I think it was great in the beginning, and then it just kind of got messy—I think it wasn’t sure of what it was doing, maybe. But when Patrick called me, I just thought “I don’t want to do this.” But then I had dinner with Patrick and I just realized I really wanted to work with him. And Marvin is smart, he is open-minded, he is rare. He is definitely rare in the magazine world. And I realized I would definitely redesign it, and I would agree to do three issues for Patrick and then move on.

Mediabistro: But you didn’t

Fella: But I loved it.

You know, we went through a sort of second redesign once we’d done the first. Once I sort of worked with the people there, I figured it out that we had gone in a direction that was a little too uptight, a little too perfect. And Marvin was like, “Fuck it up a little. I just needed something looser, organic.”

Mediabistro: Speaking of organic, how have you grown into your role at Nylon? You’re obviously not a typical art director if you’re shooting spreads yourself. How does the process work there?

Fella: We give each other space to create, and people overlap roles all the time. And I love that. It happens, and I don’t worry too much about how it happens—whether I’m involved in everything. I think the people are great. The photo director and the fashion director are wonderful. Sometimes they can create something, and it’ll just be done. Other times, we discuss it and I want to be more involved, and they just let me be interested in what I’m interested in. Some things you want to be involved in, but then, when you are designing them, it’s also good to step back. It’s good to be handed something where you don’t know every step involved.

That’s how The New York Times Magazine would work. You would just be handed stuff because there were so many people involved—photo editors and directors—that you barely had a say, if you had any say. And then you would have a fresh take on the material. You are not concerned. I get very concerned with all of the details and pleasing everyone, and sometimes that goes too far—”Oh, well, she really wanted this person to look this way, or this really has to be…” You’ve got all of that in your head, and it can be hard then, to just make it look the best it can, and to tell the story in the way that the audience is going to see it and not just the way it looks in your own head.

Mediabisto: Well, what is the role of personal style, then? Do you try to avoid having one? Is that how you were able to go from the Times to Nylon?

Fella: I think you just figure it out. I don’t have a strong personal philosophy, per se. There are certain personal constraints designers have, and therefore it makes them have a very personal style, whereas I know what I like. I know how I see balance, how I see form. I know how I want to respond to both the narrative of the story and the imagery of the photos that I’m up against. It kind of comes out of the material itself, and in doing so I guess you just form a personal style. It’s hard for me to see. People on the outside seem able to see it, but it’s not what I’m trying to do. I think it’s a weird combination of my entire design history. It just comes through. There is an openness, almost a naiveté, about things, and the different schools of thought I’ve experienced—whether it was the early ’90s in Los Angeles, or The New York Times Magazine—all sort of come together in what comes out.

Mediabistro: And how much of it is familial? Considering you consciously decided in college not to become a designer, yet did so anyway, then nearly left the field, but came back, how did growing up with Ed Fella shape you as a designer? And do you think that designers are perhaps born and not made, i.e. do you feel you have an innate visual sense, or learned design at a very early age by simply being near your father while he worked?

Fella: Yeah, I think that’s something you can’t avoid. Looking back, even though I didn’t know what he was doing (I was playing in the next room) he was around me for most of my growing up because he was a single father, and therefore we were just with him during work, play, whatever. It was much more intense than, say, somebody who goes off to work and then comes home.

But it’s much more about the way he sees the world. I mean, that’s the influence. How to look at things, how to be open-minded, how to see that the vernacular is beautiful. It was how to just relate to design more than anything did, or what he was doing, because I was not conscious of it at all growing up. Nor was he. He went back to college when he was 40, and I was in high school. It just sort of ended when I graduated from high school. He left to go teach at CalArts, and I had to decide whether to go to college, whether to work in a gas station, whatever.

He didn’t have any notoriety until I was at least three years into college—when the first article on him came out—and I was kind of stunned. I knew he’d been working toward this his whole life, but finally he got noticed, he was influencing things.

But I sort of turned away from that, obviously. I was like, “That’s intimidating. I’m going to think about something else, whether it be two-dimensional design, or interactive, or whatever…”

As for born versus made, I don’t know. But I can say to you that my mother was an artist and a graphic designer, and the same with my dad. So, yeah. It’s in my blood for sure, but there was absolutely no formal design training going on at all growing up. I think there are certain qualities you need as a designer, and if you don’t have those qualities it’s just really difficult. If you are not detail-oriented and you just don’t look at certain things it’s hard, but maybe it means, “Ok, well, maybe this person is creative in a way that means they can be a creative director some day, and that would suit them because they like the ideas and they like the over all big picture.” But when it comes right down to it, they just aren’t paying attention.

I am detail-oriented and always have been, and I love that. I want to be hands-on, and that’s all I think I do know. I do not want to be in meetings all day telling other people what I think they should do. That will just never suit me, or at least I don’t think it will. You never know about the future, but at this point with Nylon, I’m hands-on everything, and that’s meaningful, and I spend as much time color-correcting at pre-press as I do designing the story. And that’s really important to me.

Mediabistro: Considering how you’ve bounced around and experienced a crisis of faith, how important is it to you to hang out with other designers? For example, I know you through a friend who was the art director at a magazine I worked at, and you’re friends with Emily Crawford at Travel + Leisure, who you know through Patrick Mitchell, and so on. Do you think it’s important for designers to hang out with other designers to vet ideas and learn from each other through osmosis? I mean, all magazine editors seem to do is hang out with other magazine editors.

Fella: I highly recommend getting out of that world entirely if that’s all you have. I definitely when through a period of several years when I was much more involved in the design community, and then I dropped out. When Chris [Dixon] and I were working together in our own studio, we had all kinds of people coming through, designers and illustrators, but there was a period when I stepped out of that and it felt really good to meet people who were not at all in design, who didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

They see Nylon and they don’t judge it. But at the same time I just met up with [famed designer and typographer] Barry Deck. He’s my friend, and I asked him to give me his opinion of Nylon and critique it. And it was fascinating because, “Wow! That’s what he’s seeing when he looks at this.” And he is not the audience, so that’s good too, because you are designing for both your actual audience and your design peers.

But I think you can get too caught up in just your design peers—”What are they doing? What am I doing, and should I be doing this?” And I think that can really hinder you in feeling good about what you’re doing communicating to an audience outside of that.

At this point I feel free of that, and as I said, during that period when I decided, “Yes, I do love design, I do want to do it,” I also let go of the idea that I was going to make history like my father. I never wanted to, but I had that weight over me, as I’m sure as a lot of children of famous or successful people do. And you know, it’s my path and I have to do this. And my design is very different, it’s much more about collaboration and the people I work with and what comes out of that, rather than my mark on history, or my mark in any of that.

Greg Lindsay a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily

This is the last dispatch you’ll see from me for a while, because it’s time I bunkered down to write. It feels as if I’ve written more to date about the writing process than I have for the actual book, even though I’m almost 25,000 words in. So what if I haven’t finished two chapters yet? (And so much for writing more efficiently.)

More frustrating is that I’m still seeking a groove. Self-help books and collegial advice aside, I’m struggling with the typical self-doubt and procrastination on top of the fact that my work routine keeps veering all over the road. Just to give two examples: whereas I started out on this project with a typed outline and a daily start time of 8 a.m., I’m currently working off index cards John McPhee-style and I find myself only beginning to write around 3 p.m. (I keep going until I’m too tired to think clearly anymore). Both seem to work… for now.

I keep waiting to hit a point where the writing process will feel like an assembly line — the smooth production of polished prose — and I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will. By now I’m far enough up the mountain in terms of word count that a major fall would kill me (or at least my timetable) even though I’m seemingly no closer to the peak.

These days, I wear the same ragged pair of jeans and comfy cardigan and runs errands looking as if I just fell out of bed. Some mornings I run into a friend who looks the same way, Jeff Howe, except the look in his eyes is even more frantic, because he’s just about finished with his book, Crowdsourcing. Jeff’s been six months ahead of me the entire way, and he warned me at the outset “guard your headspace” against all distractions. I complained to him the other day that I was scared about the middle frames of the process, and he just sighed.

“The middle was the hardest time, and I’m facing the second-hardest time now, which is getting ready to go into edits,” he said. “I had busted my ass, but it sill felt as abstract as it did in the beginning, like I was filling a bottomless hole. The middle part is maybe when my internal deadlines were most useful for me. I made checklists of everything I needed to do each day, and some days I wouldn’t write anything at all, because I was reporting that day.” And it was the reporting that carried him through, because “I would find myself on roads I hadn’t planned to travel, but it often turned out that those were the most fortuitous routes. And that really saved me, because it no longer felt like I was working on a book or a chapter, but was working on sections of a narrative.”

That’s one lesson I’ve thoroughly learned. While in Bangkok this summer, I was saved from a hopelessly tangled narrative by an introduction to someone working in a field that touches directly upon the themes of the book. I can’t say what or who, only that I’ve successfully pitched Fast Company a long feature on the subject, meaning that one of the toughest and most confusing chapters will now pay for itself and have a SWAT team of editors work it over before I pass it along to my own. What I like even more is that it now feels like a discrete thing, a task that’s manageable and within my powers to master and polish to a high gloss.

On past occasions when I’d bumped into Jeff, we’d talked about what it meant to be magazine writers working on books. We each had an ear and an understanding for how a feature should sound and read — the overall sense of compression and the telegraphing of intent early on, high up in the nut graf. I still haven’t acclimated to the long narrative lines, and it took him forever, too. Finally, after some advice from his editor, he’d figured out where to plant signposts in the narrative to point the way forward without letting the line go slack. That’s something I still have to learn.

Jeff had one more piece of advice: keep the difference between “strategy” and “tactics” clear in my head. Have a strategic vision for where you’re going with the book, but the metaphorical war is, in fact, won in the trenches — the daily writing to make word count and hit self-imposed deadlines. “My days are more or less spent working for tactical victory, not strategic victory,” he said, and by that he really meant the daily grind.

So this column is going on hiatus until sometime in the spring, once I have some major news (and hopefully some major insights) to report. In in the meantime I’ll be in my office, writing.

1. Don’t be afraid to keep changing your writing tactics if what you’re doing isn’t working.
After pooh-poohing the McPhee index card method one month, I was using it the next because I need an organizational method that was more fluid than Microsoft Word, yet I didn’t want to take the time to learn project management software. And it seems to work, so I’m sticking with it. (For now, at least.)
2. Dump all distractions (like this column).
Another piece of advice Jeff Howe gave me in the early going: “Guard your headspace.” He meant I should protect myself against anyone or anything wanting a piece of my time or attention. Stephen Pressfield makes the same point in the War of Art: They may be noble, and they may be necessary, but any distraction is a form of Resistance, and need to be dealt with somehow.
3. Come to terms with the fact that you’re not writing a story.
The pace you’re used to as a magazine writer is unsustainable over a book. A runner who’s trained all of his or her whole life to run 1600m can’t make the jump to marathon distances without re-learning how to run the race. I’m still trying to build up my stamina.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

In our new AG series, freelancer Greg Lindsay discusses writing his first book. He’s filing monthly dispatches detailing the struggles and successes of writing the first draft of Aerotropolis, due this spring. In this third installment, he attempts to return to work after his wedding interrupted his flow.

I haven’t learned much since my last column, because I haven’t been writing much, either. But I did do one extremely fun thing in that span that I hope I will never do again, especially while writing a book: get married.

And not only did I get married (on November 3rd), which will stop any writing project or attempts to do work of any kind cold, but the wedding itself was followed by a week of sitting on the beach and navigating the frozen streets of Montreal, neither of which was conducive to writing. Not that it didn’t gnaw at me, however. By the end of our stay in Cananda, I was fidgety, distracted, and angry at myself for not working. It wasn’t as if I was about to sit down in our hotel room and start plugging away at the end of our pre-honeymoon (the real thing is two weeks in Tokyo next spring, near the end of the book … I hope), but I knew that was where I should be right that moment, and it was killing me that I wasn’t.

When I finally made it back to my desk the following Monday, however, the opposite had happened. I was too fidgety and distracted to settle in and get to work. Part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t prepared — I didn’t have an outline yet for the next chapter, and I was waiting for more material from my co-author — but mostly it was because I was scared. The material had gotten away from me, and I couldn’t psyche myself up enough to chase it. It didn’t help that I essentially had a second wedding bearing down on me, or at least a second reception back at home in Illinois over Thanksgiving. Even if I got back into a rhythm, the holiday trip would knock me off again.

I was still in this sad state last week when I slipped out of work early to attend a party at Fast Company‘s offices. I had just arrived when I was warmly greeted by Jeff Gordinier, an editor-at-large at Details who I knew in passing but hadn’t seen in years. Jeff has the job most magazine writers dream about — he’s the star writer at a general interest men’s magazine, filing long dispatches and think pieces about whatever catches his eye. He’d spent the past year or so expanding one of those pieces — a rallying cry for now-overlooked “Generation X” — into a book coming out next March, entitled X Saves The World.

It came out quickly in the course of small talk that I was frustrated and miserable, to which Jeff nodded sagely. “The trail goes cold,” he said. He described his own exasperations in trying to write his book, which were made worse by the demands of being a father to two young children, ages five and two. But he’d discovered a secret weapon that had sharpened his focus, removed his self-doubt, and allowed him to plunge ahead to the finish line, and he was going to share with it me. (And no, it wasn’t Adderall.)

It was a self-help book. And its name was The War of Art. Written by novelist/screenwriter Steven Pressfield (who’s most famous for The Legend of Bagger Vance), it’s a thin slip of a book, written as a series of exhortations aimed at anyone who would undertake an epic creative endeavor or personal transformation. I bought a copy the next day.

Pressfield’s organizing principle is the concept of “Resistance,” which stands in for all the forces internal and (seemingly) external that holds one back from creation. Maybe the most common form of Resistance is the endless procrastination only made easier by the Web, while other forms manifest themselves as a fear of failure, or a fear of success, or of obligations to family, friends, and other work. Throughout the book, Pressfield urges the reader to become “a pro,” to put in the work every day and focus one’s energies to the utmost during that time. When we give into Resistance, he says, that’s when writers, artists, et. al are at their most miserable and depressed, lashing out at the people around them because they’re failing to put in the work and they know it (which is exactly how I felt in Montreal).

It was invigorating as hell. “Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself cheesily and annoyingly recommending The War of Art to friends and acquaintances,” including a number of magazine writers and editor struggling with their own books, Jeff wrote the next day via email. “I feel like Joel Osteen.”

“Ironically, though, I didn’t come across The War of Art until I was already finished with the first draft of my own book. D’oh. But when I looked at it, I realized in retrospect that I had fallen prey to pretty much every single one of the bullshit procrastination tricks that Pressfield sheds a glaring light on. Sometimes I wonder how many brilliant books are not being written because of the irresistible magic of YouTube.”

“Magazine writers tend to be hopelessly ADD,” he added in another email. “They’re wired to jump from one topic to another. I mean, over just the past few months at Details I’ve written about a Vietnam War reenactment in the woods of Mississippi, a conference in Texas for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a Marine from my hometown who was killed in Iraq, the Olly Girls from Sunset Tan, and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. You get used to that pace, and that only makes it harder to stay focused on a book manuscript for months on end”

“You’ll occasionally hear magazine writers complaining about the pace of their work — ‘man, I just wish things would slow down,’ but then a book deal arrives and the pace does settle down and the writer has no idea what to do.”

After reading Pressfield’s book and talking to Jeff, at least I know what to do next, and that’s sit down, close the browser window containing my fantasy football team (my procrastination aid par excellance), and put in the work. It’s time to stare down my Resistance.

Tips on staying focused:
1. Focus on productive hours Once again, it’s not about the quantity of work or clockwatching, but stringing together uninterrupted hours for unbroken concentration. I’ve given up on hitting a word quota-for-quota’s sake, but spending eight hours at my desk and wasting three of them reading blogs isn’t the solution, either.
2. Respond to distractions What I took away from Pressfield’s book and from talking to Jeff is the realization that how I react to interruptions (like my wedding or the holidays) is ultimately more important than seeking to sequester myself for the duration of writing the book. It’s easy to make excuses and get angry (with my wife or myself) that there isn’t enough time in the day; it’s a lot hard to just sit down and do it.
3. Use your ADD effectively Jeff also mentioned in subsequent emails that a few of his more constructive procrastination aids (i.e. assignments for Details and other reporting) actually resulted in great material for the book. Magazine writers burning to scratch their ADD itch might want to pitch stories that can be repurposed later for the book. I intend to do the same thing next month in a possible assignment for Fast Company.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.

In our new AG series, freelancer Greg Lindsay discusses writing his first book. He’s filing monthly dispatches detailing the struggles and successes of writing the first draft of Aerotropolis, due this spring. In this second installment, he describes the “growing pains” he feels transitioning from magazine-speak to book-length prose.

Keep on keepin’ on

The words “Day 23” are dutifully taped to the wall above my desk, as Charles Fishman advised, but I wouldn’t have guessed those words would look so recriminatory so early in writing my book.

Just to quickly recap: I started writing Aerotropolis on October 1, starting from Chapter 2, which is set in and around the FedEx and UPS package sorting hubs in Memphis and Louisville, respectively. I budgeted two weeks and 10,000 words for the chapter, assuming I could churn out a thousand respectable words worth keeping each day.

That assumption was wrong on several counts. I am 12,000 words in, and there is still no end in sight. (I have an outline, but I’m afraid it’s an outline for a 20,000-word chapter). I’ve struggled to hit my self-imposed daily deadlines. That’s in spite of the fact that I’ve become a zealot about word count, if you define a zealot as “one who redoubles his efforts while losing sight of the goal.” Writing 1,000 words a day (a la Anthony Burgess, who could write twice as much before the pubs opened) has become a goal unto itself on some days, and that’s usually the copy I throw out the next day because I veered off the outline and stopped paying attention to the greater goal.

I’d like to think I’m experiencing the same growing pains that every magazine writer feels the first time he or she sits down to write a book. The rhythms are all different; there is no self-imposed tone by the editor or publication, and the “luxury” of so much white space is very deceiving. And so I find myself adopting different tones midway through the chapter; the John McPhee-style lead now seems self-indulgent and overwrought, and I’m refusing to cut the chapter down myself because I recognize the impulse to chop it into a 3,000-word feature with easy nut grafs up front.

I have made some good decisions. For example, I roped my research assistant into spending several days in my living room transcribing the first portion of my notebooks, which has proven to be invaluable for shaking loose quotes and nuggets of information I would have otherwise forgotten. I can’t wait until he finishes the rest.

Battling bad habits

But the bad habits outweigh the good ones for now. The worst I’ve picked up is my compulsive writing and rewriting of prose that I will probably throw out now that the overall shape of the chapter is finally coming into view. There are certain sentences and paragraphs that essentially make my brain itch, and so I scratch them, over and over, with niggling little tweaks that I’ve only just realized are a waste of time.

This past Monday (October 22nd) was my best day of writing yet, because I had used to the weekend to hole up in a Dean & Deluca with my notes and two large iced lattes, which provided the fuel for extensive paper-and-pen outlining. Armed with that on Monday morning, I just dumped words onto the page from 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m., followed by an hour of errands and emailing, and then another hour of revising for quality. That produced 1,800 words worth keeping and, more important, some propulsive momentum. Can I keep up that pace, or will my writing inevitably suffer for it?

Pacing is everything

To answer that question, I called Will Leitch. Will is the author of three books, including the forthcoming God Save The Fan, which he wrote when he wasn’t blogging at Deadspin. I have seen Will write at twice the speed of Burgess in settings in which I would find it impossible to work — while listening to music in a beach house filled with eight other people, for example. I’ve pooh-poohed his speed in the past, but now I wish I could emulate it. But I wondered whether all the time he saves writing with a fire hose is then spent on rewriting and editing.

“The rewriting is never that heavy,” Leitch says. “I know exactly what I’m going to write, and how long it should be. Once I have an idea of what I’m shooting for, I know whether I can go long on some parts, while recognizing that I’m wasting too much time on others and need to wrap those sections up. For the Fan book, because it was broken up into segments [it’s a series of original essays], I had a clear finishing point in each case. If it was going to be 3,000 words, I knew I needed to keep writing to hit that figure, and I knew I needed to stop not long after I reached it. With Catch, [his second book, a novel] I knew it would be 70,000-80,000 words total, and I have broken it up into three sections, so each one had to be 25,000 words.”

By focusing relentlessly on his word count maximums and minimums, Leitch was able to keep a much tighter grip over the shape of his narratives than I have so far. But I still couldn’t believe that he rewrites as little as he does. “Certainly, I have self-doubt about it,” he says, “but one thing about writing for the Web that has really helped me is that editors tend to like me — and online writers in general — because they are not divas, and because they are so used to putting up their writing immediately. They don’t agonize about other ways to tell the story. If it feels wrong, I’ll change it. If it doesn’t, I won’t.”

A lot of my first chapter feels wrong right now, but I’m not yet inclined to blow it up and start over. That’s what editors are for, and I’m meeting with him later this week. We’ll see how much survives.

Tips on keeping the words flowing:
1. Don’t narrow your focus to daily word counts. Hitting your self-imposed quota doesn’t matter if you’ve failed to move the story forward that day. If churning out raw copy is all that matters, then you’ll never end up cutting anything. And there’s probably a lot that needs cutting.
2. Find a healthy balance between fixing mistakes immediately and scratching an itch just to feel productive. I already wish I could have all the hours I’ve spent making tweaks back. Until you’re certain you’re keeping that prose in its current form, more or less, there is no need to tweak at the sentence level.
3. Don’t luxuriate in the space you’ve been given. At first blush, 120,000 words looks like an enormous amount of room. But here I am, a tenth of the way there, and I haven’t finished telling even a piece of the story yet. Just because it’s hard to blow your word count doesn’t mean your readers (and editor) won’t be bored while you prattle on forever.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.