When Michael Kinsley launched Slate back in 1996, its goal—fairly subversive for a web pub, really—was to be not terribly different from a traditional magazine. There’d be good writing and insightful commentary and everything you pick up a dead-trees mag for, and there wouldn’t be online bells and whistles just for their own sake—Slate would only be belled-and-whistled when the technology actually added something to the content. One example: The “Today’s Papers” column, originally conceived by Jacob Weisberg, now Slate‘s editor, and written by Scott Shuger. “TP,” as it’s affectionately known, does something that was previously impossible: It reads the five major national newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today—each night and has them summarized, with healthy doses of commentary and, often, humor, before most of us wake up. It’s one of the site’s most popular features, and it’s reportedly emailed to more than 100,000 people each morning, many of whom have grown to rely on it as their daily, indispensable news summary. For the past year or so, the column’s been written by Eric Umansky, a guy who sits by himself in a Brooklyn apartment all night, drinking coffee and reading newspapers. So it’s appropriate he met mb last week at a Brooklyn Heights coffee shop to discuss his job, his jokes, and life on the night shift.

Born: November 29, 1972
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Lives now: Brooklyn, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: “If it’s during NBA season, Sports.”

Tell me a little about your career path up to now.
Before “Today’s Papers,” I was nominally freelancing. Before that I was at Brill’s Content. Before Brill’s, I was the editor of the Mother Jones website. “Today’s Papers” founder Scott Shuger wrote a bit for Mother Jones, so I knew him through there, and I talked to him about doing a weekend fill-in for “Today’s Papers.” After Brill’s started, um, scaling back, shall we say, I started doing “Today’s Papers” a lot as a weekend person. When the war in Afghanistan started, Scott, who had been a naval intelligence officer, started writing a column about the war and therefore wanted someone to replace him. It was sort of a natural transition, I thought. Scott was doing this other thing, and it wasn’t clear how long it was going to last for, because nobody knew how long the war was going to last.

What’s your daily schedule like?
It depends which coast I’m on. I’ve been splitting time between coasts. But, on average, if I’m on the East Coast I probably work between 10:30 p.m. and 5 a.m., sometimes 4:30, sometimes 5:30. But there’s a little bit of down-time in there.

So when do you sleep?
I sleep through the mornings. I sleep from 5, 5:30 to 12:30. It’s a pretty hard schedule on the East Coast. On the West Coast, I tend to work from 7:30 to 2:30. Then I have the whole day to myself, and it’s actually very nice.

Working at such odd hours, do you have an editor to report to?
Someone edits [the column] after it’s been posted and sent out to the readers, but roughly two-thirds of the column’s readers get it directly via email, and that’s something I send out myself. Basically, I have a draft written by 2 or 3, and I read it three more times after I’ve written it. I try to catch any mistakes myself.

How do you get all the newspapers read and digested so early?
I get the front pages of some of the newspapers faxed to me, but the articles themselves, with a few exceptions, are online. I sort of match them up with what else I’m looking at. Except for the lead story, I’ll just use whatever I think is most important. Or if I think something is not important but nevertheless needs to appear, I’ll point that out as well. If something’s on page A21 and I think it’s important, I’ll note that I think it’s important, and I’ll note that it’s on page A21.

But you’re a young guy, and you’ve never worked for a newspaper. What qualifies you to criticize newspaper coverage, to decide what does and doesn’t belong on A21?
Very little. I thought that was a question you were going to ask me. I mean, I’m a news junkie, and I’ve always been a news junkie. You could ask me about my past or you could just look at my work and say, “Is he doing a good job on it or not?” The reality is that anybody could do it, anybody who follows the papers. If you’re a critical reader or you pay attention to the news, you or anybody else can do it, to varying degrees of success. That said, I’ve always been a media junkie; when I was 12 years old, my father got The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the L.A. Times, so he was the same way.

What, besides the papers, do you read?
I read magazines. I even read books occasionally. What I read is so clichéd: Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books…

Do you read many blogs?
I read a lot of them. There are so many of them that it’s sort of overwhelming to me, but there are definitely some that I read on a regular basis. It’s all news stuff, like Talking Points Memo, all the left-of-center ones you’d imagine. And I’m finding all these random ones all the time. Frankly, to some degree, there’s a circle-jerk factor to it all, but it’s definitely a good way of finding important stories that go unnoticed otherwise.

But you don’t really need blogs in order to write your column?
I don’t need to, but even this week I linked to somebody who had up a White House transcript that I pointed out something about. And the transcript wasn’t even out on the White House website. So, no, I don’t have to, but I actually think that it helps me to be in the know about things. You notice the stories that aren’t getting the play and the ones that are getting too much play. So I find them very helpful in that regard.

Because you’re up in the middle of the night, do you feel like you’re all by yourself writing? Are there other people you know who keep late hours?
At Slate, Mickey Kaus is a late-night guy, but he lives on the West Coast, and it’s not the same hours. I have some buddies at other papers who are on the late shift, but it’s pretty solitary. I’m the guy who calls the police in the middle of the night when I hear noises in my neighborhood.

How do newspaper reporters react to the column? Do they get upset about little things, or just that you criticized their work?
You know, they get pissed when I criticize them. Some people have said, “You’ve criticized me five times, and this is the only time I’m taking umbrage at it,” and that’s fair enough. Or some people have said, some editors have said, “You were actually right on with that point.” And there are times when people have e-mailed me to say, “I think you’re wrong,” and I’ve agreed with them. And I issue a corrective of some sort in the next column. You know, it just happens.

Is there a formula to how much reporting you mix with your criticism? Does the balance of the two ever fluctuate?
No, there’s no formula at all. Frankly, I think that if there’s something valid to say, I’ll say it. I try to make criticisms that are informing the reader. If you’re not going to learn anything by reading through the actual meat of the piece itself, I try not to do it, and I try not to take cheap shots. Also, to some extent, I try not to make it industry-centric. To some degree, you can go over a story and say, “The New York Times headline hacks, the Washington Post headline breathes.” And I do that, but the question in my mind remains: If I’m going to make this point, is it a substantive point or a stylistic point? I prefer to do substantive stuff, because it informs readers about the story itself. I don’t want nitpicky comparisons; I understand that people don’t really care about the differences between headlines unless they’re substantively different headlines.

Does the level of criticism fluctuate?
It does a little, based on how tired I am. I go through different goals in what I’m trying to do with it. A lot of times I’m just trying to get at a story rather than criticize, which involves criticism, too. It could say, “These newspapers are treating this issue differently, and I don’t really know what the truth is, but here’s what they say and here’s what they say. You either find yourself in the middle, or you give the readers a sense of the reality behind an idea, and maybe I don’t know what it is, but nobody knows what it is at this point.

What did you think about the infamous White House press conference in March, where the reporters were widely criticized for not challenging Bush on key issues?
It was totally horrifying. Ultimately, that’s not the only thing our media are, and people shouldn’t think that. There are tougher people out there, which is the reality. But that was a pretty sobering vision of what it can be and what it often is.

Do you think there’s any backlash now?
Yeah, a little bit. I’m not sure I totally buy it. Frankly, the whole storyline of what-President-Bush-told-us-then versus now-there’s-all-this-information-coming-out, in my mind, is pretty bogus. Six months ago, eight months ago, very few people—but some people—were saying that the nuke claims were false, that there’s no evidence of nukes, at least according to the U.N. nuke oversight agency and various CIA reports. The stuff was out there. It wasn’t like, “Holy shit, you lied about it, and now we’re finding out the facts and reporting it like we should.” That’s not what happened. It’s kind of a joke. It’s like kabuki theater, we’re just playing it out at this point.

How do you balance serious news with humor? You do lighten it up a lot. Do you go through the article and decide that certain things need to be funnier?
Again, one of the key factors is how tired I am. I try to balance it. If there’s some story where there are a lot of people who died, I can’t do it. And it’s a legitimate issue because, frankly, it comes up. A lot of stories are about human suffering. Where do you draw the line there? But it’s just a feeling. There have been a few times when, at 5 in the morning, I really I wish I hadn’t made that ill-timed joke.

Do you have a favorite punny headline from “Today’s Papers?”
One of my favorite headlines got nixed the day after. It was about the anthrax attacks, when a postal worker became sick, and I did, “Ill Postino.” But then a different postal worker died the next day, so it was decided that if the headline were to run, it would be legitimately sick under the circumstances.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and mediabistro.com’s news editor.

It’s no wonder Mark Jurkowitz covers the media beat for The Boston Globe: With the exception of the archrival Boston Herald, he’s worked for all the major print outlets in Beantown. After stints at the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix and Boston magazine, Jurkowitz joined the Globe in 1995 as the paper’s ombudsman and leveraged that gig into a position as what he believes is the paper’s first-ever exclusively media writer. Now that he’s halfway through his second decade in that gig, Jurkowitz spoke to mediabistro.com last week about Tina vs. Remnick, working for The New York Times Company, and how the New York Yankees—the Yankees!—got him started on his Bostonian career.

Born: November 24, 1953
Hometown: Scranton, Pennsylvania
First section of the Sunday Globe: “If I don’t know how the Yankees have done the night before, the first section I read is the sports section. Otherwise, the A section.”

How did you get into this media-about-media kind of writing?
Like a lot of people, I fell in love with newspapers because of baseball when I was a kid. I was a huge Yankee fan growing up, and often I’d have to go to bed before the game was over on the radio, so, as a result, I’d wake up really early just to get the paper and find out the Yankee score. From this, I learned both to love newspapers and to get up early, which I still do. But I was always a newspaper junkie; whenever my family would go on vacations I would always buy the local papers. I was really enthralled with the media.

What media are you most enthralled with these days?
I read a ton of stuff. I usually don’t read books unless I’m reviewing them, but I’m always reading magazines, Boston-based and otherwise. In terms of favorites, I can’t actually say that I have any in particular. I love reading aspects of The New York Times. The two magazines I will read for my own education each week are The New Yorker and the Times‘s Sunday magazine. For my personal interest, in international politics, I definitely like to check in with Tom Friedman and read his stuff.

But, also, without too much praising of the deceased, I will say one of the most amazing things recently was the job that Mike Kelly did at The Altantic Monthly. There’s a lot of feeling that it’s hard to change a magazine, but I’m convinced that the right people can do anything. Kelly did an amazing thing in the last few years of his stewardship at The Atlantic. Also, by way of example, Craig Unger did a remarkable job at Boston magazine, which has run hot and cold in the past. I think editors can really make a difference. Even at The New Yorker; I was a Tina Brown fan—yes there was more glitz, but, as good a job as Remnick does, I still liked her version a bit better.

So how did you move from a newspaper-reading kind to the media writer for The Boston Globe?
I’ve been here in Boston for almost 30 years. I went to BU for journalism and was a freelance writer at first. The first job I had was with the Tab newspapers, a small group of suburban weeklies in Brookline and Newton in the late ’70s—basically it was classic community journalism. I ended up at editor of the Tabs in ’84, and we expanded to Cambridge, Boston, Wellesley, and a few other places. In 1986, I spent a year in congressional campaign, as press secretary for Jim Roosevelt, who was running for the seat vacated by Tip O’Neill. It was an election that was ultimately won by Joe Kennedy, but I probably made more media contacts there than in all my years working for the Tabs. I started at The Boston Phoenix in 1987, reviving a media criticism column called “Don’t Quote Me,” which had previously been done, long before, by Dave O’Brian.

I worked at the Phoenix for seven years and also became the news editor there, but, after a while I felt that the beat was really too narrow. It was just the Globe and the Herald, and how long could I write about just those two papers? So in ’94 I went to Boston magazine very briefly, to take the executive editor job, which was the number two spot, and also continue to write media stories. At that point I’d never really envisioned a career in daily journalism. First off, I was older, I’d only worked for weeklies, and I’d been doing media criticism for the better part of a decade.

I’d also never envisioned going to the Globe. In fact, when I got the Phoenix job I’d had to swear I wasn’t ever interested in going to the Globe, because if I had been interested it would have become a conflict possibly in how I covered them. But right after I started at Boston magazine, in ’95, the Globe offered a job as the ombudsman for the paper, and I became the first one they ever had who came from outside of the newsroom. I took it, and also did some media writing for them. I was ombudsman for two-and-a-half years and then became a full-time media critic. I think they never had a person assigned to cover solely journalism before me.

Was there anyone who mentored you into being this media writer?
I’ve had good editors everywhere I’ve worked, but I don’t know if anyone in particular turned me on to media coverage. Media writing is sort of a funky part of the journalism business. I was always a fan of the “Don’t Quote Me” column by Dave O’Brian; I always used to read it and think “Man, this guy has guts.” I used to think it was amazing that he was totally unafraid to criticize people in the business. I remember once he criticized an editor friend of mine, and the editor stewed for days about how to get back at him. I remember thinking how great it would be to be able to do that. And then I met him a couple of years later and it was funny because he was just this quiet, small, unassuming guy. But he made that column famous with the way he executed his writing. He passed away a couple of years ago, and, though I wouldn’t say we were friends or anything, I was really enthralled by his writing, and I was proud that I was the one who ended up writing an obituary for him in the Phoenix.

With the big rivalry between your paper and the Herald, is it tough being expected to then unbiasedly criticize their coverage?
The toughest part of this job isn’t writing about the Herald. It’s having to do assignments and stay fair, with no hidden agenda. In some ways you end up covering you own institution. For a while I was the ombudsman as well, and if you’re doing your ombudsman job effectively, fewer and fewer people are willing to stand next to you in line at the cafeteria. As a media writer, I ended up also writing about the Globe quite a bit. I covered the departures of Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, which was a really tough time here. Also the removal of Ben Taylor, the last publisher from the family that had owned the paper, was tough. And the changing of the guard of editors here.

The Herald rivalry is actually pretty easy to cover. They do their thing, and we do ours. I try to write about them only if there’s a big story, like there is now as people are seeing the paper evolve pretty dramatically. But as far as independence, I am proud that a couple of years ago the paper let me do a profile on the publisher of the Herald. I did a bunch of interviews with Pat Purcell and eventually we ran a piece that was actually flattering. Another thing about this newspaper that I’m proud of is that there is a good reputation of airing our own linen here. I have the freedom to write about the Globe as I would about anyone else.

Did much change when The New York Times Company bought the paper a decade ago, in the transition from family to corporate ownership? I mean, what was it like covering the Jayson Blair saga as a guy who gets his paychecks ultimately from the Sulzbergers?
I always tell people if they want to know when something big is going to happen, find out when I’m on vacation. I was on vacation for the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Also for Waco and 9/11. And I ended up being vacation when a lot of the Jayson Blair stuff happened.

Certainly I am allowed to cover the Times, and I am supposed to cover it as we would any other newspaper. We profiled Joe Lelyveld at one point, and also, since Blair worked here too, we also did our own profile of him, and did our own investigation into whether he did anything here. In terms of corporate stuff, I certainly don’t get any stories from the Times—the two papers are really independent of each other. The one area where the Times Company’s broad media ambitions intersect with what I do is, now that the FCC’s cross-ownership rules might come down, there is speculation that the company might buy a television station in Boston and leverage the Globe coverage with TV news, but that’s all highly speculative. But I’m always skeptical that synergy works the way it’s supposed to.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and mediabistro.com’s news editor.

One of the largest and most overlooked publishing markets in the United States is the military. While there are government-issued military publications like Stars & Stripes, there has never been much of an effort to create leisure and entertainment titles specific to the military. Enter Drill magazine, a men’s mag that combines the puerile sensibilities of Maxim and FHM with content specifically aimed at readers in the military. Drill‘s editor-in-chief, Lance Gould, was the features editor at the New York Daily News for three years before leaving recently to join John Brown Publishing, a London-based custom publisher, for the launch of this new mag. Drill hits U.S. newsstands today, and Gould took time from launch preparations last week to speak to mediabistro.com.

Birthdate: May 10, 1965
Hometown: Warren, New Jersey
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports

What kinds of things does Drill cover?
The military content is very subtle. We don’t have a tank-of-the-month pictorial. Or tips on how to accessorize your Desert Storm fatigues with your assault rifle. It’s not that kind of magazine. Guys in the military are pretty much like other guys and are interested in the same things that other guys are interested in. So we’re catering to all those editorial categories that most guys are interested in, which is cars and girls, sports and beer, pop culture, technology, and adventure.

So how is its identity different from the other lad mags?
It comes through in a number of ways. There’s the iconography and the design. In terms of content, the names of each of the sections playfully utilize military jargon such as our travel section is called “Three Day Pass,” our fitness section is called “Drop and Give Me Twenty,” our sex column is called “Private’s Parts.” We also have a lot of international coverage—I think our editorial covers the globe, which most other men’s magazines don’t. We have stories from Swaziland and Columbia and Kazakhstan and Japan in this issue because our guys are based all over the globe and they travel all over the globe. We also have a column called “Military Intelligence” in the “AWOL” section, in which we look at the history of a given symbol, usually a patch of some sort. In the first issue, we look at the patch of the 101st airborne, which is of a screaming eagle.

We’re definitely interested in being the zeitgeist of what military guys are concerned with. We don’t mean to replace Stars & Stripes or the local base paper for information; this is an entertaining, diversionary read. But we also try to think of ourselves as a USO on paper, even though we’re trying to be a little edgier than the USO would ever be. It’s something that doesn’t always make the brass very comfortable. You know, the military brass has cautious optimism about what we are. We think that the guys in the military themselves are going to love it. And what else makes us different, is, in our fashion segment, which is called “Wardrobe,” we did our first one on retro sports jerseys. But the guys we used to model them were actually in the National Guard. So the guys from the 101st cavalry from Staten Island actually are our models for our first issue.

Do you use writers in the military?
Not yet, but we’re definitely interested in working with guys who are from the military. There’s a guy in the Navy who’s doing a piece for us for issue two. We also have a column called “Maneuvers,” which is stories from the front and the rear, in which we get their wildest tales. It’s almost like a bulletin board form for them to discuss the funniest and weirdest things they’ve seen in the military.

You’re going to be selling the magazines partly in Barnes & Noble stores near, but not on, bases. Will non-military people be interested in Drill?
I think this magazine is geared to and targeted and focused exclusively on guys in the military. But I also think it’s the kind of thing that anyone can pick up and read who is interested in humor and adventure and the things that guys are interested in.

Also, the tagline of the magazine is, “For Men Who Serve.” Other men who serve—police officers, firemen—the guerilla-style focus groups we’ve held seem to indicate that these guys are going to love it, too. It’s very humor-oriented, it’s very adventure-oriented, and it’s very geared to guys who throw themselves into dangerous work for a living,

Is there any concern with political correctness, or is it more modeled on the Maxim idea that it doesn’t really matter?
We are in no way excluding women, but we’re just not targeting them, in the same way that Cosmo doesn’t target men. We’re a magazine designed for men, but in no way do we mean to demean women and say that women in the military don’t mean anything. That’s not our message. Our message is, if you’re a guy who’s in the military, this is a magazine you’re going to like. You might like it if you’re a woman—it’s not intended for you, but that doesn’t stop women reading GQ and Details and Maxim in large numbers.

Are there delicate subjects, where you have to tread lightly? Obviously you can’t take a political position except being totally in favor of the military.
Right. We look at ourselves as apolitical. We are not supporters or opponents of the administration. And we don’t support or oppose Bush, we just support the guys in the military who do this for a living. We try to be cheeky, but we’re trying not to have too many sacred cows. Everything is fair game except for guys putting their lives on the line. We’re not going to question why we’re in Iraq. This is an entertainment read. It’s meant to boost their spirits—not necessarily in a patriotic way, but in a fun way. We’re not cheerleaders for the administration, we’re cheerleaders for the guys in the military, saying we understand what you’re going through and we’re putting this magazine out for you to relax and enjoy yourself, take a few minutes out. Whether you’re patrolling the streets of Baghdad or preparing MREs in Massachusetts, this should be a good read for you.

Is your editorial influenced by the fact that a huge number of people are in Iraq and Afghanistan? The fact that so many people are overseas affects their lives tremendously. Does this change the way that you aim the magazine at them?
I don’t think so. We’re not going to be cavalier about Afghanistan and say “Have a samosa.” We know they’re putting their lives in danger, but we’re still intending to be a humor magazine. I think the way I would best describe the magazine is, it’s either a humor-oriented adventure magazine or an adventure-oriented humor magazine. That’s our mandate, and that’s what we’re going for. We have to be sensitive to the fact that guys are putting their lives on the line and we’re not treating anything they’re doing in a cavalier way. We’re sensitive to that, but it doesn’t necessarily affect a story that we’re doing on the sport from Kazakhstan.

Also, we’re not profiteering. We didn’t come out specifically because we were at war. The idea for the magazine came out long before we knew that war was going to happen. In peacetime, this kind of scenario isn’t happening. It’s advice for the military man living his life in normal circumstances. The fact that he’s at war, I don’t think it’s teasing him to be giving him dating advice because he’s presumably carrying out a relationship online or at home where he’s missing her, or for how to conduct a relationship while you’re away.

Is it mostly aimed at single military men?
I think it is. The aesthetic is mainly for a single guy, but there are a lot of things in there that appeal to everyone. I think that we don’t have anything in there that a married guy would be too ashamed to show to his wife. In fact, I think, and this is just me, wives should be encouraged to buy subscriptions for their men as presents because it’s that kind of thing. We’re not anti-family, but it’s mainly intended for young single men.

In the military, the culture is very concerned with obeying commands and doing what your superiors tell you to do. And, is there any dissonance between this and popular music like Eminem which is saying “fuck you” to authority? Is this an issue in choosing records to review?
No. We pick records they want to hear. I don’t know how popular Steve Earle and his song about John Walker Lindh is. I probably won’t feature that. But no other retailer sells more CDs in the world than the military, of all different kinds of music. Before I took this job, I made assumptions as I’m sure other people do that the music that was most popular in the military was shitkicker country. Not the case. We did our guerilla focus groups during Fleet Week and I made visits to Fort Bragg and Fort Lee, in Richmond, Virginia, and guys in the military love Eminem and 50 Cent. Hip-hop is huge in the military. A lot of the guys, though they may be stationed in North Carolina or Texas, they might be from Brooklyn or Seattle.

How about movies, like Black Hawk Down? Would you choose not to cover that if that came out now?
I read Jarhead by Anthony Swafford, which is a fantastic book. If you read that book and take his insight into what life in the military is really like, these guys used to rent all the war movies. They would go to somebody’s barracks and get really drunk and watch Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and just get really into watching war movies. If the question is do we have to monitor what kind of controversial, anti-authority pop culture that we endorse in the magazine, the answer is yes. We do have to be somewhat careful of it. I don’t think Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are very popular figures in the military, because they take a very specific political stance against it.

But they’re not necessarily anti-military. They would be more anti-administration.
Right. I’m just saying that, from what I’ve gathered, they aren’t very popular figures in the military. But someone like Eminem or 50 Cent who are just kind of fuck-everything, fuck this, fuck that, it’s all about me, they’re kind of like anti-heroes without taking specific political stances. You have generic antihero worship from youth whether they’re in the military or not.

I had always been into the antihero thing growing up, but I assumed that the kind of people who go into the military voluntarily would probably not be anti-establishment.
It does make sense, but I think, in today’s economy, not every guy in the military is there because he wants to kick foreign ass. There are a lot of guys who joined in the peacetime scenario who wanted to get extra money to go to college or to learn a skill. There are a lot of people in the military who don’t get credit for being able to utilize and develop and become familiar with incredibly complicated technology that then becomes more popular in common civilian life. There are these guys who join the military in order to learn a skill or to get money to go to college so it wasn’t necessarily that they wanted to be Rambo. I think that’s a common misconception.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and the news editor of mediabistro.com.

Nick Gillespie, who has edited Reason magazine since 2000, took a long and unconventional route to where he is today. He first worked at a number of trade publications and regional newspapers that went under—plus two failed Felix Dennis magazines—before quitting the business in the mid-’90s. Instead he went and got an MFA in creative writing at Temple University, convinced he was the “angel of death” for publications at which he worked. Even so, as a longtime reader of Reason, he eventually applied for a job there and elbowed his way up the masthead. As the libertarian mag reaches its 35th birthday–and was recently named one of the country’s 50 best magazines by The Chicago Tribune, Gillespie talks about ghostwriting for Alyssa Milano, the uselessness of newsweeklies, and how a good magazine is like a good party.

Birthdate: 1963
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
First section of the Sunday paper: “Sunday is a day of rest for everyone except Tony Snow, who seemingly puts in a triple shift on Fox News. While i don’t believe in God, and I stopped going to church even before I graduated from St. Mary’s Grammar School in New Monmouth, New Jersey, I still try to observe a day of rest by reading nothing more edifying than the USA Today Weekend and Kroger circulars that thankfully make up the bulk of the Sunday edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer, the largest newspaper in my immediate area.”

You worked at all these trade pubs before you started editing Reason. Tell me about some of them.
Well, I helped bring a youthful sensibility to such publications as Sew Business, which was about the yarn industry and sew shops. My masterpiece there was a piece about how sewing stores could put ads on MTV to get kids back interested into sewing. And, you know, I think history has borne me out on that.

I also later worked for the pornographically named teen magazine, Teen Machine, where I interviewed the Coreys: Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, and that ilk. At Teen Machine, the most notable thing there was that I ghostwrote an advice column there for Alyssa Milano. And there’s probably any number of pregnant teenage mothers who unfortunately followed the bad advice of Alyssa Milano. Who knows actually how much venereal disease got spread as a result of that column?

And then you ended up at Reason. How’s it different from other political magazines?
It’s a libertarian magazine. So, it’s like National Review or The Nation or The New Republic, in that general genre of magazine, but with a different set of politics, which I had always been predisposed to. In fact, the magazine helped shape my views on politics. So it’s kind of interesting to end up working for them and running it. And I suppose I’m running it into the ground, if my track record means anything.

The tag line of the magazine is, “free mind and free markets.” It’s the idea that less regulation of all aspects of people’s lives is good. In terms of their thinking, in terms of their lifestyle, in terms of their economics, you name it. It’s like, let’s let it all hang out, and that’s better overall.

One of the differences about Reason from the Republican and Democrat-type magazines—which are, after all, conservative and liberal magazines—is that we really focus on politics not as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end. And the means of politics, or what politics are good for, is that they might be able to get you to a world in which people are able to live more fully on their own terms. But, fundamentally, I don’t think the magazine is interested in controlling people’s lives. What we’re interested in doing is reducing the number of controls on people’s lives, both in the cultural arena, in the political arena and in the lifestyle arena. You know, the point of life is not to be engaged in politics, the point of life is to get to a place where you can do what you want to and be with the people you want to be with, and create the life that you take pleasure in.

If you read The Nation or the National Review, you get a sense that these are people who really like politics and they like the ability to control what other people are able to do. Typically, the joke is that conservatives want to be your father and leftists want to be your mother. But both of them want to control what you’re doing to a substantial degree.

It’s your 35th anniversary. Has the magazine changed over the past 35 years?
I don’t know that it’s changed all that much. In 1968, it started as a student publication by this guy Lanny Friedlander at Boston University. There were some campus revolts, demonstrations against the Vietnam War on campus, and the cops came and beat the shit out of them. He was appalled both that the students were keeping him from going to classes as well as the cops who were beating up the students. And that in a way sums up where we are, how we’re positioned in a different place than most political magazines.

Compared to when the magazine started, we’re now engaged more in issues about globalization and whether or not increasing trade among countries of the world both in terms of goods and services and in terms of people. There’s fierce debate over this and we’re in the thick of that. Foreign policy has really come to the core in the past couple of years, since 9/11, and we’re dealing with that, we’re discussing that in the pages of the magazine in a way that is interesting and that is not dogmatic, because our readership and our writers all take different views on the legitimacy and the efficacy on the current occupation of Iraq. We remain really interested in technology, both in terms of medical technology as well as machines, things that empower people to do more stuff.

We cover a lot of that kind of stuff, how digital technology or computer technology allows people to do stuff that was unimaginable 10 years ago, much less 35 years ago. But also, biotechnology and medical technology—we’ve entered in age with increasing success and increasing ease, people can radically alter themselves. Whether it’s a man becoming a woman—one of our contributing editors is a trans-gendered economist named Deirdre McCloskey. We did an excerpt a couple of years ago from her memoir about that change. Genetic diseases or genetic problems, that is something that has been a longstanding interest of the magazine, what has changed is that the pace of that kind of ability and that kind of liberation is really pretty intriguing and amazing.

How many people do you have on staff?
Ten or 11 full-time people, and that includes the business side and the art department. We’re probably far and away the most decentralized and virtual magazine office in America. If the anthrax mailer ever comes back, it’s going to take him at least three or four bucks to knock us off. Our web editor is currently in Lebanon. We’ve got one full-time staffer in L.A., we’ve got our art director in Phoenix, we’ve got a guy in Baltimore, we’ve got a couple people in the D.C. area, I’m in Ohio, our publisher’s in Connecticut; we’re totally spread out. The reason we’ve started doing it this way is that it kind of fits in with our philosophy of experimentive living and it allows us to keep the people we need to keep as they have moved for spouse reasons, or whatever.

What other magazines do you read?
I read just about everything. I used to read all of the newsweeklies, U.S. News, stuff like that. But I’ve been taken with The Week lately, which I think is a really smart alternative and what it actually shows is that Time and Newsweek have been floundering for a while because the world in which they were created and in which they were dominant—they’re still obviously huge-circulation magazines—but we don’t need a news magazine from the 1970s or 1980s in today’s media environment. Time and Newsweek are always late on stuff because they’re weekly, but they still try to break stories and they have these interminable trend stories which are always fake or phony. It just seems like The Week gets me the information that I used to look for in Time and Newsweek.

The New York Observer remains a favorite of mine as a weekly read, that’s something that I always make time for. One of the ways that I look at magazines or news publications is that they are kind of like parties. A good magazine or a good publication is like a really good party, where you go there and you wander around and there’s a lot of different rooms you can move in and out of and have a lot of different conversations, some are serious, some are funny, some are totally offbeat and weird. You get into a couple of arguments and start shouting and screaming at each other, you also get into a clinch or two with people and then hopefully you go home before you get too sloppy drunk and make an ass out of yourself. I like publications that give me a sense of that, and The New York Observer is certainly one that pulls that off with real success.

This is one of the reasons why I’m at Reason. I find a lot of traditional political magazines and political and cultural coverage magazines to be incredibly boring, partly because they take themselves way too seriously and they take actors in the political theater too seriously. Also, that they’re not really talking about the things that change people’s lives and that really affect people’s lives

One of our guys is just finishing up a manuscript about the Burning Man Festival. If you look in the December issue, we’ve got a list of 35 heroes of freedom. And these are just people, none of whom would ever be put in the same list by anybody else, the vast majority of these people are not political, they are innovators either technologically or scientifically, or lifestyle-wise. In the end, that’s what matters.

What is your ideal for Reason in five or 10 years? What would be the best thing that could happen?
One of the things that we’ve been doing is building up our circulation as much as we can, and one of the issues—and this is an irony for a magazine that is devoted to free minds and free markets—is that we haven’t found the sugar daddies who can really give us the kind of money to grow our print circulation. But we have a target of, in five years, boosting up to 100,000 circulation from around 60,000 now. It’s not unrealistic. On our website we’re up 300 percent from where we were in 2000.

I would actually like to create more of a physical setting in Washington. At this point, it makes the most sense in terms of our professional contacts, media contacts, and things like that, and it’s a relatively easy city to enter and exit, in a way that New York is not. What we’re trying to do is have more influence and to be more a part of the national debates and discussions, and a physical setting will allow us to have events and to become more a part of the furniture of media debates, media dialogues, policy debates, and things like that and to more fully showcase the alternative vision of American that we actually discuss and articulate in the magazine.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and mediabistro.com’s news editor. You can subscribe to Reason here.

New York Daily News media columnist Paul Colford started freelancing for The New York Times when he was in college, and he’s been working for New York newspapers ever since. A New Jersey native, he wrote Garden State stories for the Times‘s Metro section back in the mid-’70s. He spent 20 years at Newsday and, later, its accomplished, if ill-fated, offshoot New York Newsday, before being lured to the Daily News by former editor Ed Kosner in 2000. The past year has been a busy one on his beat, with everything from Martha to Rosie to Jayson to Howell, and he talked to mediabistro.com last week about some of the bigger issues on the media landscape.

Birthdate: September 24, 1953
Hometown: Jersey City, New Jersey
First section of the Sunday Times: Metro section

How did you get into media writing?
I was always a big reader. I was someone who would always read Publishers Weekly very closely—it’s a very dry magazine, and it always has been, but it’s just chockablock with information about books and authors and what was coming out and who was buying what, and I just found it as interesting as someone who might follow a sports team. So I was pleased to be asked to do this on an ongoing basis. And as New York Newsday morphed into a real kick-ass daily paper all its own, very much different from the Long Island paper, this was seen as just another part of the mix.

Do you get competitive with your column?
I would say that the column is competitive. I think it’s probably less gossip-driven than Keith Kelly’s column. I think it’s pretty news-driven. Ed Kosner never spelled this out in so many words, but I think there’s a desire to make it widely accessible without overlooking some stories that are just fascinating in and of themselves to the industry.

Is that changing at the Daily News at all? I read recently that there were discussions about whether to make the paper more gossipy.
I won’t speak on behalf of [new editor] Martin Dunn, but I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done. I think that all of us are waiting to see what Dunn will do over the long term for the paper. He’s clearly a very energetic guy, and I think everybody has picked up on that, but he just got here so it’s hard to see where it’s all going.

What’s been the reaction to gossip columnist Lloyd Grove starting at the News?
I happen to sit near Lloyd, and he came in with a pretty high profile. Most people were quite impressed that his arrival merited a page one story in The New York Times. You don’t see that everyday. I was congratulating him just last night on having this juicy bit about Gwyneth Paltrow being in the family way and teasing him about the fact that the business he’s in, the side of the business he’s in, it’s really kind of a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of thing.

Isn’t most journalism that way?
Yeah. That’s exactly what it is, and it’s almost indescribable to people who are not a part of it. Some people’s best stories are important until about 10:00 in the morning of the day they appear, and then it’s off to the next one.

What was your take on The New York Times stuff earlier this year?
Certainly it was quite extraordinary. Over a six-month period I just did dozens and dozens of stories about what was going on at the Times. It took on a life of its own as a part of my beat.

I had some good sources, I think, who were genuinely concerned about what happened and—not being in a position to report it out themselves—they saw helping me as being a way of helping themselves find out how it worked. Reading it in the next day’s paper informed them about what was going on at their own paper.

I would say these were not sources for the most part who ratted out the Times—who were ringing me with gossipy leads. There was sort of a reticence about most of them. But they didn’t hang up the phone. At first, the more the story chugged along, the more struck I was by how really saddened and grieved and upset and pissed off so many people were over there. It seemed to anguish people because it was the heart and soul of the institution—the news product. And the arrogance that was perceived on the part of Howell Raines just horrified a number of people who didn’t really particularly know him or deal with him on a regular basis but who just sort of felt he had radiated something terrible at the place.

And what about the Rosie O’Donnell trial?
Well there was the whole spectacle of the Rosie thing, but that actually just leads to the real train wreck.

You mean the circulation figures?
Yes. It’s like pushing back a rock when you were a kid and noticing there were all of these really slimy worms underneath. I think most publications probably have nothing to worry about in terms of how they do their business and how fairly and professionally they represent themselves to advertisers and readers as a business. But it did raise the question—and I certainly hear competing publishers expressing some irritation about this—it has raised suspicions about other circulation question marks out there.

But is there an alternative to using this system for tracking circulation?
There’s the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the MRI, which puts out these fascinating demographic score sheets twice a year about how many people are reading. The circulation is X , the total readership is maybe twice that because of pass along, and what the household income is. That’s all interesting stuff. You will see some wide differences between magazines that have well-heeled readerships and some that have less affluent readerships. Those all go in the mix when someone’s placing an ad for Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s, but what was at issue was what was reported to the Audit Bureau. The bureau takes what you report and then they subsequently go and audit your book. You can tell them that you have a million circulation, and they may find out you only have 950,000. If they don’t find that out right away, then they don’t audit you right away. But I think the circulation side of magazine publishing will invite greater scrutiny to some degree because of the testimony at the Rosie trial.

In a magazine landscape where Maxim and Lucky have risen to the top of the heap, do you think there’s a trend towards a simplification of content?
The magazine business was so extraordinarily competitive already, and competition has intensified hundreds of times over because of the escalating glut of media. The infinite numbers of cable channels, the digital cable packages, the additional numbers of magazines—each of them hoping to get a slim piece of the pie—video games. With all of these distractions—

It just becomes who shouts the loudest.
You’ve really got to scream out of the newsstands and titillate and fascinate and hope that the person who pays $3.50 for the magazine this month may become a subscriber next month or two months down the road. And editors’ careers are made or broken on this strength of newsstand performance. It’s not the only thing that happens. Subscriptions are what pays the bills, but that sense that the newsstand is giving a Technicolor image of how popular or hot or attractive or important a magazine is—it may be more true now than it was 10 years ago.

It’s unfortunate for a lot of magazines that are quality magazines that won’t survive because their DNA would be corrupted if all of a sudden they decided to just try to make themselves a newsstand read.

But I think Maxim has converted a lot more of its newsstand readers to subscription buyers and they should be given credit for that. Many newspapers would prefer to have far more home delivery people because those people are going to get their paper whether it rains or snows. They’re not going to stay home and keep their 50 cents in their pocket. I think that the biggest challenge, for all media, network television, magazines, newspapers, radio stations, is the proliferation of a million distractions—on the Internet, DVDs, video games, digital cable, gazillions of movies opening every weekend—to hold your ground and broaden it as a publication amid all of that distraction, a lot of it cheaper than the cost of a subscription or single copy. That is the struggle of the ages. There’s just no question about it. It will only get harder and clearly only the strong will survive as time goes by.

How do you feel about the interplay of the Internet and journalism?
Some papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal rush more now than they did years ago to put up breaking stories that are written by their own staff as opposed to just slapping up a story that dribbled over the wire. The other extreme is often stunning—when you come across publications that have an anemic or half-assed web presence, where you can barely even search on their website for articles in that day’s issue. That’s almost a kind of cheap indifference to value what the website has. It just seems to be so foolhardy because of the fact that younger people in particular access a publication’s information through the website.

Do you think that this instantaneous quality makes the paper version less relevant?
I don’t think so. I think the websites are clearly seen as a lively extension of the publication. There’s no question that a thoughtful paper like the Times, and I think for the overwhelming number of people who swear by it each day, is something they want to hold in their hand, rip apart, clip stuff, and that will also be true of stories that they may have initially ran into online the evening before. I don’t see any obsolescence creeping into papers that put more and more of their stuff online. For example, I do marvel at the number of readers who are not in the New York area who read my column just because they encounter it online. I don’t even know where there are but they’re clearly out-of-state. They may have accessed the column through mediabistro or through Romenesko or any number of other places that I can’t even imagine. And they’ll say, “Out here in the Midwest, we don’t give a damn about Bonnie Fuller,” or whatever the remark happens to be. They’re not spending 50 cents for the paper but I’m sure the Daily News is delighted to have them just the same.

David S. Hirschman is the news editor of mediabistro.com and a full-time freelance writer and editor.

When Andy Pemberton came to New York in 2001 to help launch Dennis Publishing’s new music mag, Blender, he says he felt that the music mags on the market were tired and arduous. He couldn’t understand how music writers could take something that he thought was “the most fun thing” and make it tedious. And so, with Blender, which combines the beer and babes sensibility of Dennis’s best-known title, Maxim, with the glamour, glitter, and bling of popular music, he set out to create a music monthly that stretches those boundaries. Nearly half a million readers later, he spoke to mediabistro.com about his editorial style and the future of the music business.

Birthdate: March 5, 1969
Hometown: London
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page

How did you get into music writing and editing?
I’ve loved music since age 11. I was the music editor of my student paper, and at age 18 I started freelancing for the Daily Telegraph. That was my first paid assignment. I wrote a think piece about Kylie Minogue, defending her to the hilt.

Who are some of your favorite music writers?
I like a lot of English writers. There’s Adrian Devoy, a feature writer. He’s a very funny, slick writer, and his copy almost reads itself. Danny Eccleston is another quality writer. I like Lester Bangs, but he was sort of a one-off. He’s not part of the larger publication scene and that’s sort of his point. When people say, “I like Lester Bangs,” you always groan and think, “Well, OK.” Otherwise, as far as music is concerned, I really like most of the writers we publish at Blender.

What is Blender‘s editorial mission, and how does that mission separate Blender from other magazines?
Primarily, we have a massive review section, and that is a palpable difference. We review between 150 and 200 CDs per issue, which is a great deal more than our competitors. It’s about 25 or 30 in Rolling Stone, so that’s the obvious difference. Also, we like to take music seriously, but we don’t like to take the musicians particularly seriously. We have fun with them because music and writing are supposed to be fun. We expect bands to do stuff with us, like going out and spending $848, or going on a double date with us. There’s a whole list of things that we expect them to participate in with us. We’ll roll them a ball, and hope they roll it back to us. Last year we set up a double date with the Russian pop stars TatU, and they were horrible, the worst date ever, absolutely nasty behavior. But it’s punk rock, and I think that’s the idea.

Entering a market with established names like Rolling Stone and Spin, what did you feel was missing, why did you feel there was a place for Blender?
It was my personal feeling that the existing magazines didn’t reflect the emotions one experiences when listening to music, the enjoyment and thrill of pop music. I thought that they were lifeless and overly studious and they were just sort of trashing the pleasure of listening and reading. I thought it was extraordinary that you could take something that was probably the best fun in the world and make it seem so boring. That was really the massive difference; it’s not boring, it’s fun.

Have competing magazines responded to the success of Blender?
It is fair to admit that Rolling Stone has changed. They’ve got a British editor now, and a British art director. Plus the front section is more lively, and they review more albums. I’ll be the first to admit that.

Do you have the same target audience as other Dennis Publishing mags, like Maxim and Stuff?
Well, we do have women subscribers, though some women do read Maxim. Still, Blender is largely aimed at men, because men buy more records than women. Generally, we aim at men in their twenties, and, though it is the same age demographic as Maxim, our readership is fundamentally different from the Maxim readership.

How do you adequately cover all of the types of music your readers enjoy?
Our motto is, “We are the white hot center of pop,” so we cover what’s popular and exciting. In that way, it’s quite easy to determine editorial content. Also, we think that our readers are open to all types of music, so we want to cover everything.

So you cover acts like ‘N Sync and Britney Spears along with The Strokes and 50 Cent?
Definitely. Britney Spears is going to be our next cover, though we tend not to cover boy bands—that and country are the only two genres we really don’t cover. But we would do a piece on Justin Timberlake.

Our readers fit generally into two groups. The 18-to-24-year-olds like one kind of band and then the 25-plus group likes a different kind of band. There are few artists that bridge that gap. Eminem is one good example. We are not a lifestyle magazine, like Maxim. You could live in Timbuktu, but as long as you can read English, you’ll get something out of Blender. We don’t assume anything about our readers except that they have an interest in music.

There’s a new music magazine, Tracks, which is marketed to an older listening audience. Does this magazine affect you?
It is a totally different audience; however, we do cover album reissues. Before us, no other magazines did that. We like to maintain a wider presence, but I think that it would also be a good idea to do a Mojo-like magazine in America.

Do you think that the Internet is inhibiting the sale of CDs?
People don’t want this stuff for free. There are a few people in colleges and stuff who get a thrill out of downloading stuff illegally, but most people will pay 60 cents for a song they download. It’s only 60 cents, and most people are more than happy to pay for it. Before record labels endorsed music licensing, people were downloading music for free because there were no other options. It was a great piece of technology. I mean iTunes is successful, and that seems to be the way things are going, record companies are finally realizing that they can be involved in websites that charge for tunes and still be financially viable. Regardless, the CD will still exist, just in reduced circumstances. It will perhaps be similar to movies. You can experience a movie in a variety of formats—at the cinema, on DVD, or VHS.

Does this ability to get individual songs off of the Internet ruin the concept of the album?
If you make a good album, I will buy the album, and if you make a good song, I’ll buy the song. If you make a lousy album, I won’t buy it. What I mean is that many albums are not albums, but a collection of songs, and many times only one or two of those songs are decent. Fortunately, the market has found a way to give people what they really want, which is good music. So, in a way, the idea of the album was dying because it was being exploited by the record companies. Also, the consumers were also being taken advantage of because they had to buy the whole album for two tracks. On the other hand, a really great album will always sell a lot of records because it is a good item. People want a permanent item. The digital camera is a great product but people want a physical paper copy, they want this thing in their hand. You can store media on your hard drive, but it’s just not the same.

Do you anticipate that digital music will change Blender‘s content? Do album reviews mean the same thing when people are only picking and choosing which songs they’re buying?
Definitely in the future, but currently we’re taking a wait-and-see position. Again, I’m not totally convinced that the CD will vanish, certainly not in terms of personal demand. So it’s wait and see.

David S. Hirschman is the news editor of mediabistro.com and a freelance writer and editor. You can subscribe to Blender here.

Jeffrey Frank published his first novel when he was 22 years old and went on to an enviable nonfiction career on the staffs of some of the country’s most distinguished publications. He’s a senior editor at The New Yorker today, but he’s still got the fiction bug. That first book, Creep, is long out of print, but Frank recently released his latest work of fiction, Bad Publicity, a satirical send-up of the Washington establishment. Bad Publicity follows in the path of his so-called “debut” novel The Columnist, which was published two years ago to critical acclaim: Both books skewer the politicking and bald-faced careerism that pose as conversation in the parlors of Georgetown and the back offices of Capitol Hill. Frank recently took a few moments to talk with mediabistro.com about working at The New Yorker, the writing process, and why Cleveland is a more interesting metropolis than Washington D.C.

Birthdate: Declined to answer.
Hometown: Washington D.C., but born in Baltimore.
First Section of the Sunday Times: Right now, I’m caught up in the election we’re having, but otherwise I look at Week in Review or the Book Review.

So, how does one become an editor at The New Yorker?
I started out in journalism working at the old Washington Star before it went under. When the Star folded, I couldn’t bear to go to the enemy Washington Post, so I took a job at the Buffalo Courier-Express. That paper ended up folding ten months later, so I took it as a sign and finally went to work at the Post, where I stayed for almost 12 years.

I came to New York because I had a call to work as an editor at Random House, but I really had no idea what the job was all about. I didn’t understand publishing at the time. Certainly coming to New York seemed very appealing, but I think one should really never take a job one doesn’t understand. So it didn’t seem like it was going to work out. But I wanted to meet Harry Evans while I was there, and we got to talking, and after some time, the idea came up for me to work at The New Yorker, which his wife, Tina Brown, was editing. One of my oldest friends, David Remnick, was already working there, and it sort of evolved out of that.

It was a big leap of faith to come up here, since I had a sort of tenure at the Post, but it’s worked out well. Editing nonfiction is like solving puzzles, and I enjoy it—and learn from it.

And you also edit the “Letter From Washington”?
Along with other things. I have edited the Washington correspondents’ letters, and, most recently, I was Nick Lemann’s editor. But Philip Gourevich is now going to be covering Washington and I’m not going to be editing him. I work with lots of different writers on a variety of subjects: I work with Calvin Tompkins, I work with Ken Auletta, so it’s a whole range. It’s pretty collegial here. It’s not just one person doing one thing all the time.

But writing fiction has always been the thing I love most, and it’s a completely different thing and different kind of energy. At the same time, I can’t imagine not having an office job; it keeps me connected to the real world, the world that drives everyone slightly crazy. The truth of it is that most people need a job to focus you on what to write about. All the things that drive us most crazy about jobs, the paranoia, the backbiting, the worries, all of that is the fertile stuff that you end up writing about.

Are you a political junkie by nature?
Not really. I like the sport of it, though. I follow politics the way that people follow baseball, but I don’t really love it as an end in itself. Some people say that I write political novels, but really they’re not political at all. They’re about the other stuff. They’re about careerism and ambition and all of the things that surround politics.

What was your inspiration for Bad Publicity? Did you gather a lot of information for it while you were working in Washington in the ’80s?

I wasn’t even aware I was collecting it at the time, but I was constantly uncomfortable living and working in Washington. I was very happy working at the Washington Post, but the city itself was increasingly giving me the creeps, and I really wanted to find some way to get it down. How do you get down the fact that you go to a dinner with Washington people and you always leave feeling somewhat unclean? I was just trying to capture this odd place that was increasingly out of touch with the world, but increasingly doing mischief on the rest of the world and the rest of the country. It’s a kind of toxic biosphere, but it’s only since I left Washington that I really got a sense of how.

In the book you really skewer the Washington culture. How do your friends in Washington feel about that?
Most of my friends kind of like the portrayal I think, and they know I’m not writing about them. It’s just a bizarre culture. In a way, it’s hard to write about because it’s got a sort of cliché built into everything about it. In that way, Washington lends itself to the genre novel, and it’s sometimes hard to write about it in a fresh way.

How does this kind of Washington scene compare to its equivalent in New York?
The difference is that New York, to me, is more hopeful. It’s like every hopeful impulse in the world is gathered in one place. I mean, of course we have all the awful careerism and ambition as well, but I have this sense that here people want each other to do well. Washington, by contrast, is a city where you sort of root for failure. The ultimate statement was from Vince Foster before he killed himself, where he wrote “It’s a bloodsport out here.” I mean, I enjoy Washington, but the conversation is so insular and so sharply focused on politics, and there’s a lack of real culture. In some ways, a city like Cleveland is even more interesting than Washington, because there’s more of a diversity of interests.

How do you balance your work as an editor with the books you’re now writing on the side?
Basically, I write in the mornings. I tend to feel absolutely rotten in the morning, I feel like hell, but it’s also my best time of the day for writing. All my life I’ve never been good at writing for more than a couple of hours straight anyway, and so I’ll get a couple of hours down after I wake up and then go into the office.

Why did you set the book in 1987-1988? Did it have anything to do with the fact that it was the last time there was the kind of big loser candidate—Dukakis?
It was a very quiet time actually. It was more that quality than anything else. Nothing very much was happening and it was possible to look at the culture without too much in the way of distracting large events. There was no Vietnam or Lewinsky, and there was something almost comical about the time as well because for a while people actually thought Dukakis was going to win that election, so there really was a Dukakis administration starting to form that summer before the election. But it had all kinds of comic potential along with having a timelessness.

It’s weird having the books out there—seeing how people react to them, how they read them, and what, sometimes, they make of me. Fiction is forever, people say, and these things will follow me in a way that a book about, say, the Bloomberg administration wouldn’t. It’s also weird to publish a book while working at The New Yorker, where lots of people publish lots of fine books. Those of us who wander around the twentieth floor at 4 Times Square sort of never talk about it, apart from a mumbled “How’s it doing?” or “I saw that review in fill-in-the-blank.” I sometimes think that the most important thing about a favorable Times review is that it spares you from having to slink around—not that my merciful colleagues would want me to slink.

David S. Hirschman is the news editor of mediabistro.com and a freelance writer and editor. You can buy Bad Publicity at Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to The New Yorker here.

What is there left to say about Jayson Blair? After Katie Couric, after Howard Kurtz and even Editor & Publisher, after 288 pages of Burning Down My Masters’ House, after Seth Mnookin and Sridhar Pappu, after four full pages inside The New York Times, are there any new questions to be asked—is there any new information to be had—about the troubled young man who last summer scandalized journalism and brought down the top two editors of the Times? Probably not. But, when the publicist on Blair’s new book offered us an interview, it seemed silly not to try. We were told to read the book and then email our questions to Blair (a phone interview was not a possibility, apparently); though the book never arrived we sent our questions Saturday afternoon and the answers arrived late last night. Blair was discursive and seemingly straightforward; he answered all of our questions, addressing his downfall, its coverage, and what he plans to do next.

Birthdate: March 23, 1976
Hometown: Columbia, Maryland; now lives in Brooklyn, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: “I do not read the Times anymore. I still read newspapers—The Washington Post, the Daily News, and The New York Post, which I luckily no longer have to hide underneath my desk.”

How do you feel about the coverage of your fall from grace? Have you read all of it? Do you think you’ve been treated fairly by the press?
I think journalists have a hard time separating their emotions—their personal interests—from the rest of the story. I think the fairest pieces that have been written were by Howard Kurtz in the aftermath of my resignation and his more recent coverage; the Newsweek article following news of the scandal; David Folkenflik’s coverage in the Baltimore Sun; and, in retrospect, the 14,000-word package that appeared in the Times on May 11. Each of these writers have attempted to take a fair and balanced look at me and what happened. None of their pieces have been softballs, but they have tried their best to look deeply at my situation and the troubles at the Times. I feel the same way about the Dateline NBC coverage—it was tough and made me cringe at moments, but it was very fair.

How do you feel about the process of publicizing your book? Unlike Stephen Glass, who laid low for a couple of years, you put yourself right back out there. Why are you putting yourself back in the spotlight so soon? How has it been?
I needed to write this story. I did not know what else to do. I needed the therapy. And I needed to get my voice into the mix. Some argue that if I had taken more time, the book would have provided a more dramatic, comprehensive, and lucid narrative arc. The book gives you the real Jayson Blair, contradictions and all. I thought it was also very important to lay on the table the fact that I believe that it was entirely my character flaws that caused my downfall. I also thought it was important to point out that some of the troublesome practices I practiced in at the Times are more widespread than people believe.

Many would like to demonize me so they can make the case that I was an extraordinary aberration. I think there are ample examples of the fact that there will be more cases like mine, including the Jack Kelley case of fabrication at USA Today, the Uli Schmetzer case of fabrication and plagiarism at the Chicago Tribune, the Bart Ripp case of fabrication at the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Khalil Abdullah case of plagiarism at The Macon Telegraph. And that’s just in 2004. There were several other cases of plagiarism in 2003, including the cases of Charlie LeDuff at The New York Times, Bernard Weinraub at The New York Times, and Catherine Fitzpatrick at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In my book it will become clear that there are several other violators of journalistic ethics who are still out there waiting to be caught.

One of the first writers you talked to after the story broke was Newsweek‘s Seth Mnookin, who is a recovering heroin addict. Did his history influence your decision to talk to him rather than someone else?
Yes, it did. I admire Seth as a human being. He got me in a way that made me cringe at times—and, hell, still does make me want to run for the hills.

While you were engaged in your fabrications, did you know about Stephen Glass’s scandal? Did you realize that you were going down that same road? At the time, did you think that what you were doing was objectively wrong, or were you more concerned with not being caught?
I was aware of the Stephen Glass scandal, but I thought that once I felt better physically and emotionally, I would hit the road again. It crept up on me and the deceptions got bigger and bigger and more daring and daring. I knew what I was doing was wrong and was focused more on day-to-day survival. That does not excuse it, and obviously there is a character flaw in me that allowed me to carry on lying to editors, colleagues, reporters, friends, family members, and others who cared deeply about me. Lying is something I am going to have to guard against until I am in my grave. I admit I have a weak spot for it.

The title of your book, Burning Down My Masters’ House, as Katie Couric pointed out in her interview, has overt allusions to slavery and racism, but also to a certain revolutionary take-them-down kind of overthrow. Did you think that The New York Times somehow deserved to be brought down? Was it a careless fire, or was it arson?
It was not arson. I had no interest in damaging The New York Times. If I did, I think there would have been some pretty clever ways to do that (like emailing the daily budget list to The Washington Post each day) without causing myself one iota of damage. It was a careless fire. The house I burnt down was my own. I am the master of it. As you can see, the Times is still standing. I am lucky enough to have landed on my feet and been given the opportunity by my publisher to dig myself out from some of the rubble.

Given that your book’s title implies that you are reacting to some kind of racism, do you find it ironic that your actions marred the career of Gerald Boyd, who was arguably the most successful African-American journalist in the country?
I don’t think the title implies that I was reacting to some kind of racism. I have perceptions about certain things, but I was not reacting to racism. I am colorblind on this point. I feel equally bad—tremendously sorry—that my actions harmed the careers of Gerald Boyd, Howell Raines, Lynette Holloway, and Rick Bragg. None of them deserved what happened to them. There are also a countless number of Times editors whose careers were harmed—or at least sidetracked—when Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd resigned and Bill Keller took over, and I feel equally bad about the pain that they have suffered.

Did you tell anyone about what you were doing as you were going through it? Did you feel like you were getting away with something illicit, in the way that shoplifters often feel pleasure at succeeding undetected?
No. I did not tell anyone. Everyone got the same lies. There were moments where I felt a sort of high from getting away with it—but lying served a much more practical purpose in my case: to keep from having to admit to people that I could not do it as I was. I think the clinical term is, um, losing my mind.

You’ve said you want to write books now. What kinds of books can you write that people will believe? Do you plan to write novels?
I have had one offer to write a nonfiction book, but I think I am going to focus on fiction. There is a story—based on some true events about a journalist, about race, and about a descendant of a black slaves from South Carolina and a descendent Irish slaves in the Caribbean—that I want to tell. I expect to have a deal for that piece of commercial fiction in the next few months.

Do you think of this book as the beginnings of a sort of atonement? If so, then what of the money you receive from it? Do you feel bad profiting from what essentially is your own contrition?
Whether it is the beginning of some sort of atonement is something others are going to have to judge. I am sorry. There is no doubt about that. Just because I took money for the book, does not mean I am not sorry. They are not mutually exclusive propositions.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s news editor and a freelancer writer and editor. You can buy Burning Down My Masters’ House at Amazon.com.

Launching a new publication is always a risky proposition, and the odds are even tougher when you set out to create a monthly magazine on an intellectual par with The New Yorker. And—oh yeah—when it’s supposed to be a Canadian New Yorker. But that’s just what The Walrus, the smart monthly launched from Toronto last September, is trying to do. With international correspondents filing from around the globe and a stable of established journalists on the masthead, the mag has taken off with a bang, featuring lengthy, distinctly Canadian-flavored articles on all kinds of topics. Reviews for the first issue, back in the fall, were appreciative. “While The Walrus sometimes stumbles,” a critic wrote in Canada’s National Post, “its mistakes don’t begin to offset the pleasures it offers.” Other Canadians clearly feel likewise: As the next issue works its way to newsstands in mid-May—plans are to take the mag monthly, it’s been bimonthly thus far—Ken Alexander, the magazine’s publisher, reports that paid circulation has already reached 50,000, far beyond pre-launch projections. Alexander founded the magazine along with editor-in-chief David Berlin (who has since stepped down for health reasons), and he spoke to mediabistro.com recently, discussing where the magazine came from, why Canadians need it, and how it got its interesting name.

So where did the idea for The Walrus start?
A number of years ago I was doing a current-affairs TV show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and I was talking to Dalton Camp, who’s a columnist here. Our conversation turned toward investigative journalism, and I asked him why it was that, in terms of investigative journalism, print in Canada seems to be lagging behind both television and radio. And so we started rattling off names of people who can do print investigative stuff, and I started talking to different writers as a result. But I was getting a lot of, “Sure, if you can do it.” The difficulty seemed to be—from the perspective of many in the industry—”Nice idea, but not in Canada,” for various reasons. The population is strung out across a long border, the market is taken up by American periodicals. But we persevered and put together a really great team, and there we are.

You see your competition, obviously, as American magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Did that kind of magazine—smart, friendly to long journalism—not exist before in Canada?
I think we’re definitely in that family of magazines. In Canada, the mandate—and it’s not a bad mandate—is often to reflect Canada back to Canadians. That seems to be what the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation does, for instance, and it is the mandate of a lot of periodicals here—to define the country and get into questions of national identity and that sort of thing.

I think that that’s fine, but it’s a bit parochial in the world of today. We really have to be outward-looking and think of ourselves as a nation among many, to thrust ourself out into the world and to bring the world into our borders as well. You’ll notice, for instance, that not all of the contributors are Canadian. A good number of them are, but a good number of them aren’t, and that’s fine because the magazine has an international mandate. We will certainly cover Canadian content, but we will cover other content as well.

What have been some of the most difficult parts of starting the magazine?
It’s like an octopus. It really is. You’re working around the clock, all the time, just establishing credibility. We did something quite unheard of for a long time in Canadian magazine publishing by coming up with a 12,000-word piece in the inaugural issue—the piece by Marci McDonald—and just getting known and building up your subscriber base takes time and effort. But we’re way ahead of projections so I’m very pleased with that.

You don’t know anything until subscription renewals start hitting, so it’s best to be really cautious. But I’m thrilled with the amount of support that we’re getting. The magazine is a nonprofit, no-share capital corporation anyway, so, in the event that we make money, it just gets plugged back in. It’s too early to tell what’s going to happen, but I do know that we’re going to be around for a long time.

I’ll admit I was surprised in reading the first few issues at how may of your correspondents are in different parts of the globe. How did you connect with them?
We definitely have editors with good Rolodexes. We know a lot of people, but we also ask for submissions from all over the place, and part of the idea there is to cover important things, sometimes quirky, that are generally falling under the radar, or that require further amplification.

Does the magazine have a particular political slant?
No. I suppose some would say we’re pretty “progressive,” but it’s really about depth and good writing.

What did you do before starting The Walrus?
I spent a couple of years doing current-affairs TV, but really I was a book guy. I wrote a book, and I used to be a teacher. It was my belief that Canada absolutely needed a vehicle like this, and that’s why I really pursued with everything I had.

What’s with the name The Walrus?
A lot of late night drinking. No, coming up with a name was a actually a pretty vexing problem. We had a guy, a real magazine historian, Fraser Sutherland, come up with a thousand names for us and all sorts of obscure names way up north and east and elsewhere, and none of them stuck. The thing is, the walrus is a very interesting animal, different on land than he or she is under water, a bit of an unmovable beast, not easily pushed around. It has more to do with that than, “The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things,” though it has those literary overtones obviously. Also, “I am the Walrus.”

We think that it’s just a quintessentially Canadian animal, a lot more interesting than the over-industrious beaver which is really a bit of a rodent, knocking down good trees and damning up perfectly good waterways.

I think there’s probably already a magazine called The Beaver—which probably isn’t about international politics.
There is. The other thing, as a name, The Walrus really started to stick with people and resonate with people, if not on first blush then certainly on second blush. Many people came back to us and said, “The Walrus is really good; you should go with it.” Not that we did any focus groups or anything. Ian Brown, one of our better writers, said he loved it because “it could never have come from a focus group.”

Obviously your main audience is Canadian, but do you have larger ambitions, internationally?
Absolutely. We are distributing in the States in a limited way, and we have subscribers from all over the world. I think a Canadian sensibility or point of view has a lot to offer the world, so we should be out there. We shouldn’t be shrinking violets and servile. We should be out there without question.

A lot of people stateside have the impression Canada defines itself against the United States. As an explicitly Canadian magazine, how do you have to deal with that?
I think that that is much less true now than it may have been in periods of our past. It’s sometimes hard to come out from under the shadow of the United States. Sharing this long and once-undefended-but-now-more-defended border with the U.S., of course we’re tied at the hip, and I think that the antagonism is really overplayed in the press.

I think there is a separate and quite distinct Canadian way of looking at the world and understanding the world and I think you’re going to see more and more evidence of it. One of the things that we don’t do well, in my view, is support our own. We tend to believe that our talent has to get this sort of nod of approval elsewhere before we sign on, and that has a lot to do with confidence and a herd mentality and not really knowing who you are and what you believe. But I think that is dwindling away as well.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and the news editor of mediabistro.com.

There’s a certain restlessness to Anderson Cooper, CNN’s newest star anchor. That his iconically young-but-silver-haired visage gazes at you from billboards and magazine ads everywhere suggests a certain in-your-face-ness, but so, too, and more significantly, does his career path. There’s a palpable desire to be where the action is. He went overseas with only a camcorder (and, granted, a family fortune; his mother is railroad heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt) as a freelance foreign correspondent when he was just 23 years old. When the reality-TV craze was just starting out, he abandoned a coveted network-news slot to join up with The Mole. Then, just months after September 11, when the nation’s thoughts suddenly shifted back to serious matters, he signed on with CNN and returned to news world.

In September 2003, CNN launched Anderson Cooper 360°, which the network describes as a “fast-moving, surprising and provocative alternative to the typical network evening newscast.” The nightly broadcast is sort of a magazine show about the day’s news, reporting all the headlines, as Tom, Peter, or Dan’s broadcast would, but presenting them in longer, in-depth personality and analysis segments. Like Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on MSNBC, it’s part of the cable networks’ efforts to present news in a manner appealing to a non-geriatrics. (Have you ever counted all the denture-cream ads on the Big Three nightly newscasts?) So far, it appears to be working: 360° draws the youngest viewership of any CNN show.

Cooper spoke to mediabistro.com recently about his unorthodox route into the news biz, the future of news anchors, and his recent turn on the “Power Players” edition of Jeopardy! (which airs tonight).

Birthdate: June 3, 1967
Hometown: New York City
First Section of the Sunday Times: “The front section—kind of boring, but true.”

Are you a news junkie in your free time as well?
I’ve been a news junkie since I was in utero.

Tell me a little about your career path. How did you get to where you are?
I started out trying to get a job answering phones at ABC and I couldn’t get it—which I guess shows the value of a Yale education. Instead I got a fact-checker job at Channel One, Chris Whittle’s 12-minute satellite news program broadcast directly to high-school classrooms. I was a fact checker with them for six months, and then I decided that I wanted to be a reporter but figured if I told anyone they wouldn’t give me the chance

Because you didn’t have the experience?
No. It’s just that I find if you announce your intentions it’s always easier for people to say no. Instead, I came up with this plan: I quit my job and moved overseas and started shooting with my own video camera. I figured if I put myself in situations where there weren’t many Americans around and I shot little stories, then I could sell them to Channel One. I wanted to make it impossible for them to not put me on air.

Did you go by yourself?
Yeah. I had a friend of mine make a fake press pass on a Macintosh, and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government. I had met the person who was involved in the Burmese student movement in New York, and they gave me the name of a contact in a town in Western Thailand. So I found my way to this town that was like a Wild West border town, and I contacted the person and said I was a reporter. We met in an ice cream parlor, and then they agreed to take me in, and they smuggled me across the border into Burma.

Would you do the same thing in today’s environment?
It’s a lot different. I wouldn’t do it in Iraq, certainly, although—well, I don’t know, but I probably wouldn’t. I think it’s a lot different now. I wish someone would do it again in Burma; there’s still the same fighting going on. After Burma I lived in Vietnam for six months and studied Vietnamese, and then I started going to wars again. I went to Somalia in the early days of the famine and basically did the same thing. I used my press pass to hitch a ride on a relief flight.

All for Channel One?
Yeah. I ended up doing that for two years for them. Just going to wars. I became sort of fascinated with conflict.

What about it?
For one thing, it’s witnessing history, which I think is the most understandable answer. But I also found that I felt that the molecules in the air were different. In all the places where there was conflict it was sort of a highly charged atmosphere and there was something about it that appealed to me. I found I was very interested in issues of survival and why some people survive and others don’t. I wanted to see first-hand. I felt very comfortable in those places.

Has it been hard to transition into the anchor role? Now you’re on the back of every magazine and on big billboards. Is it hard to become the personality of news in that way?
It hasn’t, really. I was at ABC news for five years, and I started anchoring an overnight newscast there, called World News Now. That’s where Aaron Brown started at ABC, and it’s sort of an irreverent newscast. So I sort of snuck into anchoring; I never really planned to be an anchor.

I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don’t think the audiences really buy that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don’t buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don’t know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don’t know as long as you say you don’t know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.

Do you think your on-air persona is the same as your off-air persona?
Yes. It’s very close.

Do you think that’s unusual?
Well, I think that a lot of anchors become their on-air persona, as opposed to their on-air persona being a reflection of who they really are. I think it’s very easy to become this image of yourself, and that shouldn’t be the case. It’s not my objective. My objective is to go the other way and as much as possible be myself, as opposed to altering who I am in order to fit someone’s idea of what an anchor should be.

Part of the persona issue is also just branding. With all the competition in cable news now, there’s a lot of focus on differentiating the brand of one channel from the next. Could that branding sometimes affect the news product?
I get the whole branding thing. I think that when it starts to affect what stories you’re going to tell that’s a problem. But for the most part, it shouldn’t get in the way. I think it’s more about packaging what you’re doing than anything else, making it visually presentable. What you need to do is present the news in a way that is true to yourself and true to your sensibilities and true to what you think is providing the right amount of context. I think sometimes it’s silly and just gets in the way, but I think you have to be wise about what you do.

So I’ve got to ask: Why go do Celebrity Mole a few years ago? Do you think it has helped or hurt your career?
I didn’t do Celebrity Mole. I just did the first season, the regular Mole. I draw the line at Celebrity Mole. Frankly, I’d worked at Channel One for three years doing combat stuff and then at ABC for five years. My last year at ABC, I was working overnights anchoring this newscast then during the day at 20/20. So I was sleeping in two- or four-hour shifts, and I was really tired and wanted a change. I wanted to clear my head and get out of news a little bit, and I was interested in reality TV—and it was interesting. But two seasons was enough, and 9/11 happened, and I thought I needed to be getting back to news.

And you’re one of the news guys on the current special Jeopardy! series. How’d that go?
I’m not allowed to say who won, but I was playing against Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP and Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. It was called the “Power Players” edition, though I’m not sure why I was in it because I’m neither a “playa” nor a person of power. The experience really made me realize how much of a loser I am, because of how much I got into it. I mean, it’s kind of a no-win proposition. In what I do you’re supposed to know a certain amount of things, and there you are exposing yourself to ridicule for not knowing stuff. I didn’t consider it that much in advance, but that morning I woke up and was like “What have I got myself into?” But I feel OK about it now.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s news editor.