Josh Quittner was for many years the new-media guru of quintessentially old-media Time magazine. He ran Time‘s website, he wrote a column about technology in the magazine, and he ran the ill-fated tech offshoot Time Digital, later known as On. Then, nearly two years ago, Time Inc. packed him up from its Sixth Avenue headquarters and sent him out to San Francisco, where he’s now running Business 2.0, the (at least onetime) New Economy business book the company had acquired a year earlier and combined with its own eCompany Now. The magazine has been flourishing under Quittner, and last week, as its annual “101 Dumbest Moments in Business” issue was headed to newsstands—and as a book based on that franchise was coming to bookstores—Quittner spoke to mediabistro.com about his career and his magazine.

Birthdate: February 12, 1957
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania.
First section of the Sunday Times: It used to be the magazine, but now it’s the Book Review.

Business 2.0 is of course interested in how tech affects business, but it is still basically a business book not a tech book. But you, before this job, were a tech guy, not a business guy. So how did you end up here?
I came out here really to reposition us post-bubble, during the tech meltdown. We very deliberately set out to broaden our franchise and get away from being entirely dependent upon technology. My sense of our readers is that they all get tech, they all understand technology, and there’s no way in the world that I could hope to compete with the vertical technology publications. So as long as we have a certain sophisticated approach to technology, I think our readers are happy. And what we really try and do is write about the technology underlying all kinds of businesses where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find technology.

But why you to do that broadening? You were the technology editor of Time, not the business editor.
But I’ve done enough different things in my life. I started out for 12 years as a newspaper reporter. I was a crime reporter, I was a general assignment writer, and then I started to write about technology from the consumer side. My interest in technology wasn’t technology for technology’s sake. I mean, I’m innumerate. I never cared for science or math when I was growing up. I was interested in how it was changing the world we were living in. And I think great business magazines also document that, but they look at it through the world of making money.

So what was your career from being a crime reporter early on to running Business 2.0?
My first journalism job was the weekend night police reporter at the Albuquerque Journal. Eventually I decided to play a Chutes and Ladders game, and I went to Columbia and got my masters degree in journalism. I was hired out of Columbia at Newsday on Long Island, where I went back to being a crime reporter, covering the court for a few years, and then general assignment. And then, around 1990, they had a very forward-thinking assistant managing editor—who’s now the editor, his name is Howie Schneider—and Howie saw the whole Internet thing happening. So he created a beat on the national desk called information technology, and I was the first reporter to get that job—I think I was one of only two people who applied for it. And it was this wonderful, utterly open new world. The great, great thing about Newsday is it really believed in letting a beat reporter finding his or her way. So for a year you were able to educate yourself on the job. Go to every conference, read every book—which they would buy you—and experiment. So that’s what I did.

I started to write about the Internet in 1992; I wrote a Newsday column called “Life in Cyberspace.” And at the same time, my wife and I started to write a book about a group of New York City hackers who got into an online war with hackers in Texas, called The Masters of Deception. And it was like being the first guy in on a Ponzi scheme. All sorts of wonderful things started to happen. I met Kevin Kelley, who was then starting a magazine called Wired, and I would take my outtakes and turn them into big, adult oriented, feature-length magazine stories for Wired. And every time I’d write a Wired cover, I’d get job offers. And one day, literally the day my cover story hit the newsstand, about Penn Gillette, of Penn and Teller, being the most wired man in the world, my phone rings. It’s a guy who says, “You don’t know me. My name is Walter Isaacson.”

Walter was then the editor of new media for Time Inc. He said, “I just read your piece and I’d like to meet you. I don’t have any agenda, I’m not offering you a job, I’d just like to meet you.” And one of the great things about Walter is he was a real collector of people. So I went in and met him, and I put my ponytail back in a knot, and I bought my first suit since I was married, and we hit it off really well. And he said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” He was actually looking for an editor of Time.com. And I said, “Boy, if I could do anything it would be write for Time magazine.” Long story short, two weeks later, I was working at Time magazine.

I went to work as a writer at Time in 1994, and, soon, I was so excited by the Internet, I got myself whipped up into such a frenzy, that writing magazine stories wasn’t doing it enough for me. I really wanted to launch my own website. So I was secretly ovulating a plan with some friends at Wired to start a tech-news site. I was also perfectly miserable in my personal life. Walter got wind of the fact that I was anxious to do this, so he waved his magic wand and the next thing I knew, I was able to start my own website at Pathfinder called The Netly News. So we started to do this website, which was a daily take, a supposedly edgy, irreverent take on some kind of tech story every day. Mostly we just covered culture, and it was amazing fun.

And so I basically bounced around, doing The Netly News and writing for Time. Walter then went on to be editor at Time, and he gave me a column that appeared every couple of weeks called The Netly News, and the idea was to point Time magazine readers to the web, and they made me the editor of Time.com. So I ran that website, taking the things that I learned from Netly and applying them. That was fun. And then they asked me if I wanted to be the editor of Time Digital, which was a surprise, and something I had never considered before. And, ultimately, I said yeah, because it was a great learning experience. And we tried to take that magazine and turn it into a subscription magazine—it had been controlled circ—but that ultimately didn’t work. It was one of the ugly many casualties post-9/11.

Jon Friedman recently called Business 2.0 “the best magazine you’ve never read,” which is a bit of a backhanded compliment. If it’s so good, why aren’t people reading it?
That has something to do with the whole business-magazine environment now. A year ago, the business story was an awful ugly depressing story. Business magazines do well when business is good, and that’s a historical fact. And business was lousy. At the height of the game, when all of these new titles were started, I would argue that the people who bought business magazines weren’t real business magazine readers. They brought business magazines with reckless abandon because they saw them as being like the Daily Racing Form. They were looking for places to find bets. Who’s going to be the new IPO, where should I be putting my investment money?

So you had all of these mom-and-pop day traders, thousands and thousands of them, buying every conceivable business magazine. Not only did you have tons and tons of readers going out and buying these magazines that they really didn’t care about, at the same time, you had tons of fly-by-night companies that were looking to spend lots of marketing funds to prove that they were real. So you had inflated advertising and inflated readership. It’s not like people suddenly loved reading business magazines. When the bottom fell out of the market, you were left with the traditional business reader, who is a conservative sort, who, in times of depression, is really looking for service stories. They’re completely resistant to stories that hype celebrity businesspeople. There are only three or four CEOs who you can put on the cover of a magazine right now that will get people excited. Mostly they believe everyone else is corrupt and clueless. So our formula has been to stick with service, to talk about what’s working. Technology is often a key to that. Certainly demystifying technology is important and helpful to a businessperson.

You’ve been quoted as saying that you want to be the dominant business magazine for the 21st century. Doesn’t that conflict with a certain fairly dominating business magazine back at the Time & Life Building?
I think the quote was “the dominant business monthly.”

A-ha. That’s the trick there?
Yeah, and it is a trick because there’s a really big difference between what a monthly does and what a fortnightly does and what a weekly does. I worked at a weekly for eight years, and I can tell you with great confidence that weeklies want to have the last word on stories, not the first word. Time is a brand that is beloved and respected and well-known because it weighs in and turns news into history in some sense. Fortnightlies, like Fortune, tend to be a bit of a hybrid. They do a certain amount of that, because some people like their contextual stories every two weeks. It turns out, for some reason, to be a really interesting frequency for a magazine. And it does a certain amount of forward looking. Forbes and Fortune are fighting it out to be the dominant magazine in that space, and you know who I would pick in that fight. I don’t think it’s even close.

But both of those magazines are aimed at a very New York-centric worldview of business. It’s the view from Wall Street, it’s the view from the CEO’s desk, and both of those magazines, when you read them, make you feel like your hanging with the big dogs. For a monthly magazine, especially one that’s situated in San Francisco, we’re trying to provide a very different view of the business world. I’m happy that we’re out here because it puts us close to where some of the great, new innovative ideas come from. I think that we’re kind of at the headwaters of new and interesting business ideas, so to the extent that we can bring that back to our readers, make our readers feel smarter, we establish ourselves as this dominant must-read business monthly. But I cannot compete on news. I sit out on newsstands for four weeks, so even if I could get in on Amazon announcing its first fully profitable year, in two weeks that story looks ridiculously out of step. So I have to predict things, I have to look at broad patterns and trends and be believable.

Speaking of the difference between New York and San Francisco, what’s it like moving to the other coast, especially in terms of the media culture?
On the personal front, it was a major upgrade. Living out here is unbelievably wonderful. I used to spend four hours a day on the Long Island Railroad; now I spend half an hour riding over the insanely gorgeous Golden Gate Bridge into the most beautiful city in the world. So on a personal front, there is absolutely no comparison.

On the media front, it’s funny because I lived in a world where everything was media. All my friends were media people. Here, none of my friends are journalists. My wife writes a column for The New York Times, and that doesn’t raise an eyebrow with our friends in Mill Valley. They could care less. Where in New York, that’s good for cocktail party bonus points, here, it’s not nearly that big a deal. I find it refreshing, because it reminds you that you are writing for people who are very different from your friends than when you’re in New York. In New York, you tend to think more about how it’s going to play with your buddies. And here, the people I socialize with actually read my magazine. It’s fun, it makes me feel like I’m more in touch with our readers.

You’re coming into a big week next week with the 101 Dumb Moments annual issue, and you also have the book coming out. Do you have a favorite all-time dumb moment?
No. I think of all those dumb moments as my little darlings. I hate to pick one. I don’t like to show favorites when it comes to dumb things.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. You can subscribe to Business 2.0 here. You can buy Business 2.0‘s new book, The Dumbest Moments in Business History, at Amazon.com.

As we’ve read time and time again, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has been trouncing its competition in the Nielsen ratings for nearly two years, and its competitors at CNN and MSNBC can’t quite figure out what to do to fight back. At FoxNews.com, the channel’s companion web site, Murdoch’s crew hasn’t been quite so lucky: Last month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site drew about one-fifth the traffic of top-rated CNN.com and one-third that of MSNBC.com. But, for their part, the Fox News folks do know what to do to improve their site: They’ve added new, web-only features, including a range of streaming video from the network, and recently introduced a special campaign section, You Decide 2004, featuring comprehensive coverage of political races nationwide. Things seem to be working: Traffic to the site has more than tripled since late 2000. New York Post vet Stephen Bromberg, most recently an editor for Gannett’s chain of suburban New York dailies, has overseen FoxNews.com since the summer, and he spoke to mediabistro.com last week about the site, his job, and a dot-com newsroom as compared to a newspaper’s.

Birthdate: October 14, 1950
Hometown: Upper Nyack, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: The front section

So what does it mean to be the executive editor of FoxNews.com?
I’m responsible for editorial content on the FoxNews.com website, the meat of the page. It’s all the editorial, for all the various sections: Top Stories, Politics, Business, and so forth.

And how much original content is being produced for those sections each day?
A good deal. One of the things we have done is recently is added an only-on-Fox section to our front page, which is very, very specifically stories that are only on Fox. These are a combination of staff-written feature stories as well as video packages that have aired on Fox News Channel and news columns that are exclusive to FoxNews.com. We specifically have put this into a separate section, on the front page, so that people can find things that are just ours alone, separated from the headlines, which are obviously news stories that everybody has.

What’s the operation like there? How much of this original content is produced by a dedicated FoxNews.com staff that’s writing material for the site, versus coming from some of the TV reporters and producers out in the field?
I would say it’s about even. We have several stories each day that are written specifically for our Politics section and our features section, FoxLife. These are staff originals that we have on the site often, and frequently, though not as often, we have stories that are written for our Top Stories and Business sections. These are done by our reporters, and occasionally they’re also done by people who work for the channel but are writing specifically for us. For our own staff, we have in the neighborhood of about 35 people here full-time, and in addition we have about five to seven freelancers who work with us.

You’ve had a career in daily newspapers. I’m wondering what it’s like being in that FoxNews.com newsroom as compared to life in a newspaper newsroom.
It’s great here. My feeling about the news on our website is that this is news radio for the eyes. What is key here is that, unlike at a newspaper, which has a finite deadline, and you’re building toward that all day, what I love here is that at any given second everything can turn around. You are never satisfied with what you have; you’re always looking for the next story. And that makes it a very exciting business to be in, a 24/7 operation. No matter how good you current story is, there’s always something coming along that may top it. At any given point, no matter how good your story is, it’s gonna get old. You don’t just put the paper to bed and say, “That’s it, that you either did a great job or a lousy job, and we’ll come back tomorrow and start from scratch.” It’s an ongoing situation, and that’s exciting.

That does sound exciting. It’s interesting that you use the talk-radio analogy. I wanted to ask: The Fox News television channel has had tremendous success with a talk-radio model, with personality-driven news programming. Does that transfer to the web, or are people looking for news on the web seeking something more headline-driven and less about good showmanship?
Well, I didn’t use a talk radio analogy; I used a news radio analogy. There’s a big difference. First and foremost, this is a news operation. Our job here is to present the news, to present it accurately, present it fast, and present it well—and to present it in a fashion that will be exciting. Personality-driven, that’s not our function here. Our function is to deliver the news.

How integrated is your operation, then, into the personality-driven news operation of the on-air Fox News Channel. I mean, does Roger Ailes take a direct interest in what’s going on the site?
Well, I don’t speak to him every day. Does he take a direct interest? Roger Ailes, I would imagine, takes an interest in everything that has to do with Fox News, as well he should. I know what my job is, I know what our job here is, and we don’t speak by any means on a daily basis. We do our job, I like to think that we do it well, and nobody is telling us what we should be doing. What we are doing is what we are supposed do, which is to present the news in a fair and balanced fashion.

Tell me about the You Decide 2004 section that the site launched along with the start of the campaign season? What is some of the content that one will find in there?
The You Decide section is a section very, very professionally devoted to the campaigns: presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial campaigns throughout the country for November. The page was designed to be separate from our Politics section, which is an ongoing section that always appears on FoxNews.com. We have put up there an interactive map that allows you to click and see the election dates, and primary dates, for your state; voter and registration information; candidates and incumbents in every state’s entire congressional delegation; an ongoing repository of polls; audio reports from Carl Cameron, our correspondent; a series of election basics, on the candidates, on previous selections; a full election calendar; as well as some ongoing features on some of the ads that the various candidates running; and, of course, the daily news stories.

Is this one of those good examples of synergy, where you’re able to post reports from the various off-airs with the candidates, whose reporting there often just isn’t time for on the air?
Yes, the TV reporters are on-air, and they are also filing their reports to our system. We have an in-house messaging system, where we get information from our correspondents in field, and we will use that information in the stories that are written.

At this point in the campaign, when it’s only a Democratic race, and certainly Fox News viewers tend to be more from the conservative side, is it tough getting interest from the typical Fox News viewership for this stage of the campaign?
Well, first of all, I don’t see it as we are appealing to any specific, conservative or liberal audience. I think that our viewers and our readers clearly have an interest in fair and balanced news, and they are very issues-oriented, they are very social-issues oriented. So I think when we are looking at candidates, we are looking at the candidates and we are looking at their positions on very, very important social issues. I don’t think that we have any trouble getting anybody interested in the Democratic campaign, by any means. Each of the Democratic campaigns has a position on the vital issues of today, and that’s going to be critical to making a decision and November.

And your site is where people can go to get their fair and balanced look at what those positions are, I guess?
Oh yeah. Absolutely.

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

Danny Wallace, a 27-year-old Brit, is an award-winning TV-comedy producer, a precocious freelance writer (he’d written for 12 different national magazines and newspapers by the age of 16), and—oh yeah—a cult leader. It happened by accident, he insists, after, for no particularly good reason, he placed an advertisement in a London newspaper that contained only the words “Join Me” and an address. He was curious to see what would happen, and soon enough, he had 6,000 Joinees across Europe. Join Me is a good cult, though, one that’s only mission is to do nice things for people. Certainly it’s been a nice thing for Wallace: He became a European sensation, his Joinees call him The Leader, and his book Join Me, which chronicles the founding and growth of this movement—and the tolls the movement took on The Leader’s personal life—is being published in the United States next week. In advance of a planned two-week U.S. tour, designed both to sell books and pick up some new Joinees, Wallace spoke to mediabistro.com about his cult, his background, and his day job at the BBC.

So you’re a cult leader?
Yes, I am. I’m a leader of men and women. In the earlier days, I was a little uneasy with the term “cult leader,” because cults tend to get a bad press, but my cult is a nice cult. There’s very little space travel involved, and no chanting to be heard of, really. And suicide is frowned upon.

That’s always a plus. So what exactly is Join Me?
Join Me is something that started a couple of years ago. I had no real idea of what I was really doing, and it’s grown into quite a nice little collection of thousands of people from all over the world who just want to be nice. Like, for example, here in Britain, the unsolicited pint is often a good one: You’ll see an old guy in the pub running low on his drink, so you’ll just buy him a new one and pop it down and walk off. One Joinee got up very early in the morning and washed all his neighbors cars.

And they’re nice because you tell them to be?
Well, I think they’re nice because, essentially, I think people are nice, and they want to be nice. But sometimes they need an excuse to be nice, and if joining a cult helps you, then it’s a good thing. I think that the people who join Join Me do so for a variety of reasons. In the early days, I just put an advert in the paper saying “Join Me,” and I didn’t really know what I was doing and obviously neither did the people who were replying to the advert. They didn’t know who they were joining or what they were joining or why they were joining. But they just were joining. In the early days, I think people joined up out of a sense of adventure or a sense of fun or maybe they saw the joke in joining something when they didn’t know what it was. But then there was the Good Friday agreement, and people going off and doing good deeds. I think this attracts a certain type of person, and that’s people who want to be nice.

The book, then, is am account of how Join Me developed, and what the group has done?
It’s essentially the true story of how I started the cult by accident. And the early days. And the effect it had on my life and my then-girlfriend. What I found is that girls don’t tend to like cult leaders.

Really? David Koresh had had all—
Yeah, I’ve really missed the trick with this whole cult-leader thing. I think that Koresh was in the golden era of cult leaders, and I’ve come in at the tail end, when there’s very few girls and just a lot of admin.

I get it that your original “Join Me” ad was just sort of a joke. But did you also have the idea that you’d write about the experience?
Not really. I’ve got a bit of a history of doing things not knowing if they’re going to go anywhere. It’s only when you’re down at the pub with your friends, telling stories about what you’ve been up to, that you start to realize it could be something. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t aware that something could happen. But if I’d gone to a publisher in the early days and said, “I’m going to put an advert in the paper, and then 6,000 people are going to call me their leader,” I don’t think that anyone would have believed me.

I asked that because you’ve had a long history as a freelancer, especially for a young guy. Tell me a bit about how you started and what you were doing up until you decided to become a cult leader.
At 13, I was really into video games. Just massively so, and so were all of my friends. And then one day at school they told us that we had to go and get work experience. Most of my friends were going off and digging ditches or cleaning gravestones or whatever. But I found out that there was a magazine in my hometown that was dedicated to video games, and I just kind of begged them to let me in for a few days, and they did. I did all the world’s worst jobs, things the guys there didn’t want to do. Then one of the reviewers got ill, and they let me review a game, and they liked it, so I started writing about games. Then gradually I fell out of love with writing about video games. But I liked writing, so I just continued. When I first took out that “Join Me” advert, I’d just stopped working at the BBC, where I was a comedy producer in the writing dept. And I stopped for a while because I wanted to take stock and find out where I was going, and I was doing a bit of freelance work at home, writing, and then I started a cult instead.

And now, since last year, you’ve got a job in development at back at the BBC.
They call it the head of development in the new comedy department, which sounds very impressive and grand but—trust me—really isn’t. It’s like being made head of stationary just because I’ve got my own pencil. There’s no one beneath me.

Well, what does one do as head of comedy development?
I try to do as little as possible. I walk around with paper looking busy. Actually, I go and see comedy and work on scripts and find new talent and try and spot new people and work things up and put them with the right people and make it funnier.

Did having your cult of Joiners behind you help get the gig?
I don’t think it did. It’s something that my bosses I don’t think were aware of, and I’m quite pleased about that. Because if you’re in any sort of job interview and they ask you you’re interests, when you say you run a cult—

It is an unusual resume line item. So what do the Joinees think about you having this big corporate job now?
I’m not sure that many of them know. They know that I’m the same shambling idiot who’s been their so-called Leader, so I don’t think that they mind at all really. They’ve all got jobs as well. Just being a cult leader doesn’t really pay the rent anymore.

What’s the actual job description? What are your responsibilities as cult leader?
At the moment it involves responding to a lot of peoples emails, a lot of sitting at a desk opening letters and putting passport pictures into a file. A lot of Joinees meet up around the world—on any weekend they’re meeting at Oxford or in Edinburgh or in Brussels—so sometimes I’ll set up that, and we’ll all get drunk and do some kindness. Which sounds dirty.

As a television producer, it must make it easier to build an audience when you have a whole cult of people at your disposal.
That would be good. But development is one of those places where nothing ever actually gets made. But if anything does get made, yeah, I’ll have an audience there.

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

Heeb magazine—the self-dubbed “New Jew Review”—has been getting mounds of press since well before its launch two years ago. After all, when a magazine aiming to capture a younger, hipper, Jewish audience announces its plan to appropriate a long-standing anti-Semitic slur as its new, look-how-cool-we-are name, there are bound to be some ruffled feathers. Predictably, organizations like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith were upset. Fortunately, major Jewish donors like Steven Spielberg and Charles Bronfman were not; a Jewish social-entrepreneurship venture fund they both support happily gave Heeb $60,000 to get started. Two years later, this quarterly mag put out its fifth issue—OK, not so much quarterly, but who’s counting—and its first under a new editor, the onetime wannabe philosophy professor Josh Neuman. Neuman spoke to mediabistro.com last week from his apartment-slash-office in lower Manhattan, talking about his magazine, its business, and the tough job of helping young Jews break into the media business.

Birthdate: March 1972
Hometown: Paramus, New Jersey
First section of the Sunday Times: “I’m sort of strange and obsessive compulsive, and I go through and throw out the sections I don’t read before looking at the ones that I do, so: Automobiles. The first one I actually read is the magazine.”

Let’s start, as they say, in the beginning. Give me the quick version of Heeb‘s creation.
Heeb was started with a grant from the Joshua Venture Fellowship, which Jennifer Bleyer, the original editor, received as a young Jewish entrepreneur. She put that towards starting a magazine. We launched in January 2002 to great fanfare and a big media explosion; since then we have put out five issues, with a sixth on the way in June. It’s our first theme issue. We have a readership now of approximately 100,000, with 5,000 subscribers and a distribution of 20,000. We’re distributed nationally.

Why did Bleyer decide to do this, that there was a need for this magazine?
We were looking around the newsstand, and there was a magazine addressing every imaginable ethnic demographic but nothing for young Jews. There were some Jewish publications, but none of them had the snarky, urban voice of the magazines that we were interested in, so we decided to make one ourselves.

That urban-snarky part: I wonder sometimes if Heeb isn’t all that different from all the other downtown, hipstery mags.
Exactly. I think we differ from the Fader or Vice or Tokion in that, yeah, you might find something from Princess Superstar, or you might find Sarah Silverman writing a similar piece in Vice to the one she did for us, or you might see someone deconstructing the legacy of Neil Diamond, like we did, in another one of these publications. But I think where we differ is our borscht-belt schtickiness. It’s a different kind of irreverence—it’s an irreverence that has a bite as well. And I think we have a more discernable focus on politics than the magazines that I’ve mentioned. I like to call it Groucho Marxism. That sums up our editorial mission.

Of the things write about, is the sole criterion that it involve Jews?
Our mission statement says that we’re interested in the inadvertently Jewish, the tangentially Jewish, the Jewish by side glance. It’s easy to point out what’s Jewish about klezmer, or pastrami sandwiches, or the 2nd Avenue Deli, but it’s not so easy to point out what’s Jewish about famine in Africa or Dolly Parton or something completely unconnected.

What we’re looking for is something like High Times, where not every article is explicitly addressing weed, or like Thrasher, where not every article is about skateboards. I’m a little put off when someone pulls something out of our magazine and says, “I don’t understand. What’s Jewish about that?” Sometimes there’s an overt connection, sometimes there isn’t, but the common denominator is what we feel our readership—which is disproportionately Jews in their 20s, 30s, urban, left-leaning, non-affiliated with an organized Jewish movement—is interested in.

How much of the audience is not Jewish?
Very small, but it’s growing

Is that a goal, to be more ecumenical in the audience?
No, it’s not a huge goal. It’s never going to be our core readership, it’s never going to be a core demographic. Right now we just have our first readership stats. It’s a very small percentage, it’s right around 10 percent. I was in L.A. last week working with the guy who’s working on some ancillary Heeb film and TV projects—

Because we all know Jews are underrepresented in film and TV.
Yeah, it’s like breaking the color barrier in baseball. But we were driving down Sunset and I saw this Rastafarian guy wearing an “Honorary Heeb” t-shirt. It sort of happens dialectically. The more focused you are on your core readership, the more that your editorial captures the essence of a demographic, then the more people outside that demographic want to somehow be a part of it. So the content of the magazine will stay focused on our left-leaning, disproportionately queer, I would say, non-affiliated demographic. When you really manage to tap into that fanatic Heeb reader outside the demographic, like grandparents who are writing to us, or Irish people who are writing to us and saying that they have always dated Jews, or people in Kansas, or a kid that found Heeb in a mall in Houston—it’s really overwhelming.

So talk about the business part of it. You launched two years ago as a quarterly, and since then you’ve only had five issues, which doesn’t make one think business is booming. But now you’re talking about reader surveys and brand expansion, which makes it sound much more professional and developed. What’s going on?
We’re incredibly encouraged by what’s been happening on the business side. I’ve been the publisher of the magazine since February 2003. I just took over as editor in August and since then, it’s been my goal to make the Heeb brand more visible given all of our limitations, the challenge of advertising and distribution and lack of frequency that we had at that point. And ads are still a challenge. But I’d say since October of ’03 our sales have been up every month. I thought we could make the brand more visible with these ancillary projects. We started a storytelling series that is traveling around the country. We made the website more of a destination than a calling card, we’ve got content on it and games and a blog, and we’ve started working on a book deal with St. Martin’s Press. These ancillary projects do have solid business plans and help to support and spread the gospel. I also started looking at advertising in different ways, like co-sponsoring film festivals or book tours or other release parties. We don’t have money to advertise, so these cross-promotional opportunities mean a great deal to us. They’re a great way for us to extend our readership. We’re confident that if we can get the magazine into the hands of the demographic that they’ll like it and they’ll subscribe.

I’ve noticed credits in the last few issues that you are getting grants from UJA-Federation. How significant is that money, and how do you keep attracting these old-school conservative donors who theoretically wouldn’t be into the young irreverent message?
Historically they have liked the results. We’ve reached an audience that they can’t reach on their own. And now the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies are supporting our storytelling series, which is going to be in New York City in May and in San Francisco in June. Then we’re going to L.A. and Seattle and Atlanta. Part of my goal is to turn this into a business, to wean us off of this support, and we’ve been doing it. Still, 50 percent of our revenue is coming from grants, but the idea is to create a business.

Why did Jennifer Bleyer hand the editorial reins over to you?
It’s tiring to do this, and she needed to get away for a while. It’s really hard to run an independent magazine. I’ve worked 120 hours a week since August, I haven’t had a day off, my trip to L.A., which was semi-business last month, was the first time I’ve been out of New York since August. It’s a grueling, grueling process. It’s an all-volunteer staff

Including yourself?
Not including myself. But it presents big challenges. My apartment doubles as the magazine’s office. I have interns sitting across from me entering subscriptions as I speak. Until recently we’ve been silk screening t-shirts on the floor of my apartment. We’re schlepping the magazines to the post office. Jen’s doing a grad program in journalism, working on her own journalistic pursuits right now. I can’t do this forever, either, but right now I have megalomaniacal dreams about Heeb. Heeb TV, Heeb: The Movie, and the Heeb skyscraper in Times Square. But right now it’s very difficult.

Which is sort of funny, coming from you: Your background is not as a business guy. You have a master’s from the Harvard Divinity School.
I think it’s impacted my experience. I think there is a line to be drawn. I’m aware this is commerce. I’ve always loved magazines, but I never mistook my magazine for Hegel or Kierkegaard or Marcus Aurelius. What interests me about magazines is the intersection of ideas and commerce, the way our magazine performs something subversive in the marketplace. Watching people experience Heeb at the newsstand, it’s this triangular experience. They look at the image, then they look at the word Heeb, and then there’s just this private moment. And that private moment is precious because it’s not an, “Oooh, that’s cool,” and it’s not an, “Ugh, that’s awful.” It’s something like, “What the hell is that? Could this really be here, could this be happening?” So that’s really of interest to me.

It’s not my background. I thought I was going to be a philosophy professor, and I taught for five years at NYU. But marketing is very philosophical to me. The idea of how to trigger and convey what this very complicated, very nuanced publication—that we’re constantly trying to create in text and imagery, trying to redefine Jewish experience and Jewish iconography—how that gets conveyed in a focused and meaningful way to someone who is strolling around Barnes & Noble or someone whose friend sends them a link to heebmagazine.com.

“Trying to redefine the Jewish experience”: So the role the old Forward played for Jewish immigrants 100 years ago—for my great-grandparents—is the role Heeb is playing for Jewish 20-somethings—for me—today?
I hope. I would be really happy if that’s what we were doing now. Sometimes the content in the English Forward and our pages overlap. I think what really distinguishes us is our voice, but the Forward has been great to us. When the Anti-Defamation League was picking on us, the Forward stood up for us.

Well, first, that’s what the ADL does, and, second, you must have been counting on the ADL’s objections on some level. You named the thing “Heeb,” the ADL complained, and then suddenly everyone was writing articles on this little, not-yet-launched magazine.
I think if Jen had made a schlocky magazine that would have gotten old very quickly. I almost wish the name wasn’t Heeb, but it does express something wrought with tension and thoroughly out and postmodern and reflective of our generation. But it does get tedious when people keep asking us questions about the name of the magazine when frankly, there’s more to get riled up about.

Weren’t you counting on more response from the ADL—which you got—with the Passion photo spread, pegged to the Mel Gibson movie, you did in the last issue?
I didn’t think the ADL necessarily.

Yeah, where’s the Catholic League when you need it?
I have a feeling that the two were in cahoots on this one. And this is a scoop: The Catholic League asked for a copy before release, so I know they were aware of this. I have a feeling that Abe Foxman at the ADL was displacing his anxiety about another offensive magazine—ahem, Cargo [which is edited by Ariel Foxman, the ADL chief’s son]. The things that they pointed out were strange. I expected people to be up in arms and to demand retractions. But I thought we did a good job contextualizing that this was a reaction to Mel Gibson and not to Christianity. It truly was. It was grounded in a history that Gibson’s movie lacked. I wanted to see how many people would be riled to see Jesus wearing the Talis, and that was the main objection by Susan Blond, our publicist who quit in protest.

When’s the next issue?
June.

Is there more controversy we can look forward to in that one?
It’s our first theme issue. The theme is guilt.

Great. Just what we need more of.

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

The competition between New York City‘s two tabloid newspapers is an intense one, and it’s perhaps most intensely fought in the paper’s dueling gossip sections. The New York Post lineup is a sort of murderers’ row, featuring the stalwart Liz Smith and Cindy Adams and the incredibly powerful “Page Six.” Across town at the Daily News—a tabloid, yes, but with some serious journalist ambitions—the tabloid team is the husband-and-wife-penned “Rush & Molloy” column and, since last fall, Lloyd Grove’s “Lowdown.” Grove made his gossip name as the well-respected, very snarky writer behind The Washington Post‘s “Reliable Source” gossip column. Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, trying to spice up his paper’s profile, lured Grove away from the Beltway last year with a salary that would be impossible for The Washington Post to match: It was reportedly larger than even Post-man Len Downie’s. He arrived in New York to much anticipation and many sharpened knives. Eight months later, he’s successfully keeping on, and he spoke to mediabistro.com about his career, competing with the Post, and the glamorous life of the gossip columnist.

Birthdate: February 6, 1955
Hometown: Los Angeles
First section of the Sunday Times: “I read it online, and I need to buy an apartment here. So lately it’s been the classifieds, for open houses.”

Before you were a gossip columnist, you had a long career as—for lack of a better term—a real reporter. Tell me about it.
Well, I had been at newspapers for 25-odd years before I accepted the role as the gossip columnist at The Washington Post. I’d done a number of things at the Post, starting out on the Weekend section, which is their Friday entertainment tabloid: I reviewed every play that opened in Washington for about two years, including those put on in church basements. So I really got burnt out on Washington theater, let me tell you. Then I jumped over to the Style section, where I was a general-assignment reporter. But I’ve always been interested in politics, so I started edging my way into writing political profiles, these long pieces, and then I got to the point where I was asked to come on the national staff for the 1988 presidential campaign.

I did that and had a great time covering the media and the political campaign, which had to do with advertising and earned-media campaigns and media strategies. Plus, still writing profiles. That’s how I first met, for example, Roger Ailes, who of course was a character even then. Then I resumed, after a hiatus for a book leave for a book I never wrote, at the Style section, where I continued writing about politics and political profiles and campaign coverage. I never wanted to be a gossip columnist, and I was resistant when they asked me to do it. Eventually I allowed myself to be persuaded.

What persuaded you?
In the end I was persuaded by—it’s not good to keep doing the same thing, to always be comfortable at what you’re doing at work. Anything that keeps you awake is in the end good. I found that it was a new challenge, and something that would be interesting to try—and the fact there was more money in it was also a factor. I guess I just buried the lede there, didn’t I? In any event, it took me in a whole new unexpected direction in my life and career. I did that for four years; I think I was the longest-tenured “Reliable Source” writer they ever had at the Post.

So clearly you took to it.
Yeah, it turns out I had a knack for writing superficial items with scurrilous intent.

What was it like to do it for the Post, which generally is a pretty serious newspaper?
I think there was a bit of hand-wringing and angst over some of the things that I ended up writing, because the Post is not at bottom a paper that deals in gossip. In point and fact I was a gossip columnist in name only, as I am really right now, because I don’t write anything except what is reported and confirmed, and I make lots of phone calls to make sure that things are right and that things that are potentially attracting libel suits—and even if they’re not—we have in-house lawyers here that go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. We’re very careful.

Are you suggesting that there’s another paper in town that is perhaps less fact-based in its gossip reporting?
Well, I’ve always been an admirer of The New York Times, so I don’t want to…. The truth it, I don’t do blind items in my column; Richard Johnson at Page Six has acknowledged without any defensiveness whatsoever that the reason he does blind items is because they’re not nailed down. Certainly I’ve had my own experience being written about by his esteemed colleagues—not only was it inaccurate but they didn’t even bother to call me to see whether there was any point of view other than what they were wanting to write or trying to write. So it’s a great brand, “Page Six,” and the New York Post is a terrifically fun newspaper to read, but, as someone who comes from Washington, it continues to mystify me that the New York Post is considered this hot, successful brand and newspaper, when in fact they’re losing money hand over fist.

Isn’t Mort Zuckerman, too?
On the Daily News he’s making money. Mort Zuckerman is not a businessman who is happy to have businesses lose money. The Daily News stands on its own two feet. It has increased circulation while maintaining its 50-cent newspaper price. Look at the advertising, and just compare the ad pages between the Post and the Daily News. And I’m not speaking for the paper, mind you, I’m just making an observation as a reader. The fact is that the New York Post is losing, at least by Lachlan Murdoch’s own acknowledgment, $40 million a year, and if someone’s willing to acknowledge that, as he did to Ken Auletta, then you can just double it and probably be pretty accurate, as a rule of thumb. So it pleases Rupert Murdoch to have this newspaper in New York and to be able to wield this influence; the money involved is probably a rounding error in the whole News Corp. empire. But I have to tell you that, looking at which newspaper more successful, which has the higher circulation, which is actually financially more reasonable proposition, it’s the Daily News, my friend.

But never mind the business; on the gossip front, what’s it like to compete with the juggernaut that is “Page Six”?
Well, what’s the juggernaut that is “Page Six”? It’s a terrifically entertaining and fun column to read, and I’m an admirer of it. But if you on a day-to- day basis looked at “Rush & Molloy” and looked at my column and assessed the gossip packages that both newspapers are offering, I think that we are offering a better gossip package day in and day out than the Post is, with the caveat that they have these fantastically entertaining and unique voices—Liz Smith and Cindy Adams—which I think are assets to the paper. But just in terms of, if readers want to find out stuff they don’t already know, if you looked at my column and “Rush & Molloy” and compare that with “Page Six”—which is probably a bit unfair because we’re two columns and the “Page Six” team is doing one column—I think we can match them.

Do you think the public thinks that?
More people are reading the Daily News every day than are reading the New York Post.

But there’s certainly the perception—rightfully or, you’re arguing, wrongfully—that “Page Six” is the hot gossip column. Does that make it harder for you to get leaks or information?.
Everybody, including myself, is a creature of habit. And people are in the habit of taking certain kinds of things to “Page Six,” but, frankly, I haven’t felt terribly disadvantaged. I’ll leave it for others to judge, but I think I’ve made a good account of myself in terms of having the gossip-column types of scoops and interesting reportage, and it is my hope every time I write a column—which is five times a week—to have stuff in there that people don’t know, and to have original reporting every day, and to have stuff that people tend to talk about both among the people who plunk down their 50 cents for the paper, and also among people such as yourself, who are expert readers of these sorts of products, and understand what is good, bad, or indifferent, from a professional point of view.

So what’s the actual day-to-day life of the gossip columnist? A J.J. Hunsecker, glamorous thing?
Yeah, generally I like to sit at the Stork Club and smoke thin cigars and terrorize senator’s sons. Well, no. But it’s not for the faint of heart, let me tell you that. Among the people in this business, there is a very deep bond, because there are only a few of us who know what we all go through every day. So Richard and I, for one, although occasionally he’s written things or his column has written things that I haven’t particularly enjoyed—and certainly I about him—I think we have an abiding sort of, we like each other and we respect each other.

I get in at 10:30, already having gone on the Internet and looked for stuff, seen what’s out there, and read the competition. Sometimes I’ll compulsively read stuff the evening before, if I’m still up. And then it’s a mad scramble to figure out how am I going to fill a tabloid page tomorrow with interesting and well-reported material. There’s a lot of emailing and talking on the phone all day and just trying to sort of go after stuff. So we get the column in—”we” meaning myself and my new associate, Hudson Morgan—then we go out and gather more material at night, hopefully. There’s no shortage of events and screenings and parties and fashion shows and whatever at which to try and gather material. Then it starts all over again.

You mentioned your new associate—your prior associate went to the other side, to the Post. How does the defection feel?
She got a very attractive offer from them. She got her own column, and that’s very hard to resist. That’s life in the big city. And I’ve been enjoying her column.

So “Lowdown” started about eight months ago. This far in, are you pleased with how it’s turning out? Is there something you’d like to be different?
I think I’m pleased. I think it’s being read increasingly; it’s a voice that’s being listened to from time to time. These things are incremental; you can’t expect to go from zero to 100 miles an hour immediately, especially for me in a city where I’m on a steep learning curve—still. But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of bringing things that would otherwise go unreported that particular day. I’m just hoping that we do better and better as we go along.

Do you have any regrets about leaving the “Reliable Source”? You were the really big fish of the gossip world there, whereas here you’re just one of the larger fish swimming around.
I’ll take that, for now. You know, this is the greatest city on earth. It’s just so interesting to be here, and I have the opportunity to do something that not everybody in this business gets, and I’m very lucky to have it and I want to make the most of it.

Being a big shot New York gossip columnist, does this make you more fodder for other gossip sources to report about you than you’d been previously?
I guess so.

How’s Elisabeth Rohm from Law and Order doing?
That was a Gawker item? That was so silly. I’m happy to be thought of as dating beautiful actresses, so I wouldn’t comment other than to note that in my own column I’ve noted that she’s dating Dan Abrams from MSNBC and NBC. But if you want to think that I’m dating her, I would never deny that.

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

When television news is truly indispensable—when it’s not just providing a prurient fix of Laci, Kobe, or Michael but rather serving as a national glue when important events happen—it is also transparent. Tom or Peter or Dan is just there, ready in our living rooms when we need to be told about hijacked jets or world leaders’ deaths or hanging chads. But of course TV news doesn’t just happen on its own; there are countless people—and not just the team-coverage correspondents—whose hard work makes sure the right information, and the right pictures, get into our homes.

Chief among those less-blow-dried TV-news powerhouses—at least at ABC—is Roger Goodman. He is the go-to guy for the technical end of all the major live productions at the network; not only did he invent the visual vernacular of modern TV news and sports and also design the sets from which ABC anchors broadcast, he also directs all major ABC News coverage, commanding a control room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that oversees all those cameras and technicians and correspondents around the country and the world. This week, he’s directing ABC’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, just as he has directed all convention coverage—and election coverage, and inauguration coverage—for the network over the last quarter-century. Goodman spoke to mediabistro.com recently about his career, his inventions, and the changed fact of television news.

Birthdate: April 28, 1945
Hometown: Chicago
First section of the Sunday Times: Business

You’re vice president of special projects for the ABC Television Network. In practical terms, what does that mean?
I produce and direct television programs for ABC News. I do programs for the ABC entertainment division, such as this year’s preshow for the Emmy awards. I might be asked by ABC Sports to direct at the Super Bowl—the halftime or pre-game or post-game. I was the executive producer of several shows over the last couple years; the biggest was the millennium. That took about two or three years of planning, and we were on the air for 24 hours. I performed as executive producers and director of the broadcast. There were 175 million people viewing—unprecedented—and we sat there for 24 hours and directed 200 cameras from around the world. What else do I do? I was asked to find a new home for Good Morning America about five years ago, and found the current building, and I turned it around, designed and created the current GMA studios. I design sets, create music—I’ve been doing this for a long time.

And you’re also the director for all sorts of big events.
I’ve directed every election and convention, every event for ABC News, since around 1978. I have been involved in 10 Olympics, I’ve probably directed or co-directed 20 Indianapolis 500s and Kentucky Derbies. I directed coverage of the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa; I did Ted Koppel and Nightline‘s unprecedented show of Palestinians and Israelis, back in 1998 or 1999. I was there for the beginning of Nightline.

Which were the most exciting?
The three I’ll remember forever are, first, 9/11—I don’t want to consider that directing, I just want to consider being involved in that moment of time. The L.A. Olympics were to me one of the greatest things I ever had an opportunity to work on, up until I did ABC 2000, which rounds out the top three for me.

On the very concrete level, what’s the director’s work in something like that? When a major news event happens, what do you do?
Let’s take the current conventions. I remember, back in 1980 or even 1992, we might have had 20 or 25 cameras. Things have changed. We’re now using four or five cameras. Back in the late ’80s, you’d go to a convention city and build two control rooms—actually build them from the ground up. Eventually I said, why don’t we do them from a mobile unit—because of my experience with doing sports. Don’t build two control rooms, I said. I’ll do it from the trucks. Then, with the invention of fiber optics, I wondered, why go in the field and do it at all? Just bring all the cameras back via fiber optics to New York. So here we are doing the Democratic Convention from Boston, or the Republican Convention, and all the cameras come back to a normal control room. I come in in the morning, do the shows, and go home at night.

So you actually directed the coverage in Boston while sitting on 66th Street?
Yes, sir. The first time I did that was in 1992, and we’ve done it ever since. For Princess Diana’s funeral—I also did her wedding—everything came back to New York via fiber and satellites, and I directed from here. Ronald Reagan’s funeral, everything came back to New York. ABC was responsible for the pool coverage in the National Cathedral, so that was done in Washington, but that feed came to New York and all the other cameras, anywhere in the United States, all came back to New York via fiber or satellite, and everything was directed from here. And for all of these things, sitting here in New York, I actually direct all the individual cameras from around the world. It could be the blackout, it could be the Gulf War, it could be Reagan’s funeral. I do the inaugurations, all the cameras for the inaugurations, 30 or 40 cameras, and I do it all from New York.

Now that there are only three hours of network coverage from each convention, and now that you’re running it all from your regular office, has convention coverage become much easier for you?
Actually, it’s as difficult, if not more difficult. At the Democratic Convention, we were supplying our new digital channel, ABC News Now, so we would do a show for them from 12 to 2, come back on from 3:30 to 4:30, we’d take a break to do World News Tonight, then we would come on and do a show from 7 o’clock, take a one-minute break, come back on the network from 10 to 11, and then sit around and service Nightline. When you have fewer cameras, it’s a lot more work, because you’ve got to have those cameras in more places to shoot more things.

How much is running a convention broadcast in 2004 like it was doing it in 1978?
It’s a totally different animal. When I started in 1978, they actually did the roll call. In those days we had to go ahead and rehearse the roll call, understand it. The convention itself was different, and the press was, too. Now we have a much bigger pool. The pool is 10 or 12 or 15 cameras, when the pool then might have been two or three cameras. So we rely on the pool a lot more.

There’s all this discussion of how the conventions now are just PR events for the parties. Do you work on trying to find a way to get around that, to not just provide the hourlong commercial the campaigns try to create?
It’s not my area. I direct the script that’s put in front of me, that’s what I direct. I have no role in that decision-making process—what we cover what we don’t cover, the length of hours, et cetera. That’s way out of my realm.

Together with Roone Arledge, you to a large measure really invented the look of modern TV news and TV sports. My favorite detail is that you guys actually invented the box over the anchor’s shoulder with the graphic. It’s sort of amazing to think that didn’t exist before you.
The Quantel. That was mine, back in 1978. I happened to see this device at the NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters convention. Some engineer said, “Roger, I want you to take a look of something”—I was the creative director of ABC News at that time. This was a box that was black and white that could be seen in the upper left, upper right—any one of the four corners—that was used for X-rays in airports. And I thought this thing could be spectacular. So I made a phone call to Roone, and I believe I got $150,000 to get it exclusively for a year. Then, on July 10, 1978, we premiered World News Tonight. We had three newsrooms then—Peter Jennings in London, Frank Reynolds in Washington, and Max Robinson in Chicago—and we decided to put a structure in the newsroom, a wall maybe five feet high and three feet wide, and we superimposed the image on it. And at one of the rehearsals, about two days before the launch, the wall accidentally fell over. And we all went, oh my god—and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

I always think that’s amazing—something that’s so natural now but was actually once invented.
Everybody in the world uses it. And that’s one of my inventions.

So how did you get into this? It’s such an interesting combination of tech stuff and creative stuff and news stuff.
I was always a techno freak. And when I started in 1964, I started in Chicago, and then there was an opening as a P.A. at a new program called Wide World of Sports, in New York. I arrived here on a Friday, and my first assignment was a U.S.-Russian track meet the following Wednesday, in Kiev, Russia. I never stopped since then.

In ’68, I started directing. I’d never directed before, but in those days you really got a chance to do it. There weren’t a lot of books in 1964 on television, and I studied a lot. I’d sit in control rooms and watch other directors. I ran the graphics department at ABC for a long time—when I started at ABC in 1965, when you did graphics you would have a TV camera shoot white letters on black board, like a restaurant menu board. But I had a lot of ideas, and Roone came to me in late 1977 and said, I want you to go ahead and create newsrooms around the world for ABC News. Next thing you know, they gave me another one: World News Tonight‘s music. Bam bam bam bam. It was about three weeks before the premiere. And I said, “Roone, what do we want for music”—this was the original premiere—and he said, “I don’t want anything but some ticker sounds.” So I said OK, and then I went over to a company called Score Productions, a guy named Bob Israel, and “I said write some music.” And what he wrote was bam bam bam bam. We did what Roone wanted and did some little ticker sounds, but we also gave him what I call the quote—bam bam bam bam—and obviously it’s been playing ever since. When I played it for him he said, “Thanks a lot for just doing the tickers.” He was kidding, with a smile on his face, and that’s become synonymous with ABC News ever since.

The Olympics just ended. You’ve done ten of them. Did you miss being in Athens?
Desperately. I watched the Opening Ceremonies, and I just go back and remember Sarajevo, Grenoble, Mexico City, Innsbruck, Calgary, all of them.

So how many more years does NBC have it locked up for?
I don’t remember. But I will tell you that it’s great. The opening ceremonies, I received phone calls from all of my buddies who used to do it with me, and it’s great. We just all sit there and say, “Boy, we wish we were there.” It’s a great experience, and I’m very homesick for it. I was in Munich in ’72, L.A., Sarajevo, Lake Placid—the “do you believe in miracles?” in 1980. You say the name, and I’ve been there.

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com. He was also a desk assistant at ABC News for about six weeks in 1998, during which time he played the role of “Peter Jennings” in Goodman’s camera rehearsals for that year’s election-night coverage.