When Swink launched last March, editor Leelila Strogov said her new literary magazine was looking for work that was “new in concept, form, or execution, and that reflects a diversity of thought and perspective.” In other words, this was not to be, as so many new literary mags are, yet another poor man’s New Yorker. Strogov was looking to create a publication that would showcase new blood, rather than the usual smart-guy writers. The biannual, bicoastal magazine debuted with a few notable names—including some of those usual suspects, like Charles D’Ambrosio, Jonathan Ames, Neal Pollack—but it also lived up to its calling by including work from several lesser-known yet stellar writers. Particularly notable was a piece by a guy named David Ulin, about the legacy and draw of famously unbalanced writer Frederick Exley. Strogov, who cobbled together the funding for her nonprofit mag from a variety of sources, is happy with the debut; a onetime Internet executive, she’s finally getting to release the inner editor she always knew she had. She recently talked to mediabistro.com about the magazine, its future, and why she seeks obscure writers.

Birthdate:No comment.
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: Arts & Leisure.

First things first: Where did the name Swink come from?
It’s an archaic word for “labor” or “toil.” I thought that that would be appropriate because writers know that writing is really hard work. I thought that that was an appropriate name to give to a journal that was devoted to writing and writers.

Is the magazine mostly creative writing?
Yes, it is. It’s fiction—and creative nonfiction as well. I’m actually looking to publish more nonfiction in the future. But it’s fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and anything that falls in between. Interviews as well.

Not unlike The Believer, it would seem.
It’s more along the lines of maybe The Paris Review or Granta but of course with our own spin. I think what I’m trying to do is break away from those types of magazines in that I’m trying to find something really good that doesn’t feature all the usual suspects. I think that that’s surprisingly hard to do.

By usual suspects, you mean established fiction writers?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. I think that I am first and foremost trying to find greatness in unexpected places. I’m trying to find the new great writer, and it’s kind of hard to do because you never know where they are. You have to go through your slush pile very carefully, which I think not many magazines do.

What do you think of the kind of fiction that is currently being published? How will Swink differentiate itself from what is out there?
One of my goals is definitely to try to broaden the scope of this type of reading, to the “regular readers.” Because I think so many of the readers now of literary magazines are just writers themselves. So it turns into this writers’ community. I’d like to branch out from that and have it be just readers—more accessible, combine the inventive with the smart but also the fun. I really try to emphasize that this is fun. Reading something really great doesn’t have to be drudgery. Unfortunately, a lot of these literary magazines have this academic feel to them that keeps people at bay, and that’s definitely not what I’m trying to do.

Are your issues themed?
No, although I do have some ideas for potential theme issues in the future. But generally speaking, no, they’re not done in themes. We will be having online-only theme issues. There’s one literally around the corner from being posted, which is the “Lying, Cheating, Stealing” issue.

How do you find writers?
A lot of the process involves going out to the creative-writing programs and speaking to some of the administrators there, and having them send us their stellar students. So that was the first line of attack. But obviously I’d like to go beyond that and really try to find that person who’s just really great but not even aware necessarily of these programs. Or not established enough in a literary community to even think that a program like that might be right for them.

Like a Frederick Exley, some guy in the middle of nowhere.
That’s exactly what I’m looking for. And it’s really hard to find. I am looking for writers who are doing something just slightly off-kilter. I really appreciate the strange, the surreal, and the embarrassing—but still good. I think I also have this vulnerability for vulnerability. Someone who can put that brokenness on the page in such a way that doesn’t make you feel sorry for them—it really probably makes you feel sorry for yourself more than them.

I noticed that in the first issue you had a lot of the usual unusual suspects, Neal Pollack and Jonathan Ames and so on.
Sure, and I think that—for a first issue particularly—you’re almost forced to go with a lot of known names in order to establish yourself. And so the idea is to get yourself established first so that others will hear about you and will submit.

How many people are on staff?
We’re up to 8 or 9 people working on the magazine, all on a part-time volunteer basis. We’re not paying anyone on staff per se, although we of course have many expenses. But the editorial staff is all volunteer.

A year or two from now, where do you see the magazine being? Would you want to be positioned to be a successful business, or is it more about finding unknown writers?
I’d like it to be a viable nonprofit. It will ultimately, hopefully, pay for itself, without us having to do an enormous amount of begging from the public. So that would be nice. And to continue to have better and better writing and writers, and to continue to have great new writers. That would be a huge thing for me—discovering a great new writer. I feel like there’s so many writers out there who encounter so much resistance along the way that they eventually stop, and then you get someone who might not be nearly as talented, who for some reason in their persistence ends up making it. I think it’s so key to find that really talented writer, and not have them stop. Just encourage them to go on, even if they’re not hitting every note just yet.

Do you write? Is that where the idea for Swink came from?
I do. Yes. That is partially where it came from, although, for me, just being a writer is not something I’m cut out for. It’s too solitary an existence. I just have this natural tendency to try to juggle multiple things and multiple tasks, and I tend to do things better when I am juggling multiple things. But I think I missed the creative side of things when I was in the business world, so the idea was to use those skills to do something I actually cared about.

I think that writing does use totally different skills, even a different part of the brain. But I think running a literary magazine doesn’t necessarily. I think a lot of it comes down to being plainly business-savvy. Trying to work out numbers and try to make the thing work in such a way that it’s sustainable. I think that many writers don’t have that, and it’s very hard to make a literary magazine work for that reason. It’s hard to get it into the right hands and it’s hard to get it to sell. It’s hard to make it look appealing. There’s a lot that goes into it that’s traditional marketing and just crunching numbers and seeing what you need to be able to do to survive.

Do you think that your business experience has sort of helped you with that?
Absolutely, I think it’s definitely helped. Not that this is ever going to make us any money, that’s not my goal. My goal is really just to keep it from going under. My goal is to have it do well enough to sustain itself and maybe eventually pay a few employees. That’s at this point the most you can hope for from any truly worthwhile endeavor.

David S. Hirschman is the news editor of mediabistro.com and a reporter for Metro New York.

In the wake of the Sago, W.Va., mine collapse in January of 2006 (where 13 miners were trapped underground for two days, and only one survived), GQ writer Jeanne Marie Laskas saw the opportunity to do a story she’d been thinking about for a long time — an immersion journalism project where she would actually go down into the coal mines in her home state of Pennsylvania and get an inside view of an industry we all depend on, but which most of us know little, if anything about. While pretty much every mining company she called rejected the idea of letting her go down with their workers (many wouldn’t even return her calls), one mine, about two hours from where she lived, agreed to let her come by, day after day, and go deep inside the mines with its workers.

The resulting story, “Underworld,” appeared in the May, 2007, issue of the magazine, and recently was nominated for an Ellie for excellence in feature writing. mediabistro.com caught up with Laskas recently to go back over the process of researching and writing the story, and to find out what she learned from the process.

This story took you deep into the lives of the people you were writing about. Tell me a little about similar immersion journalism projects you’ve done in the past.
I’ve done quite a few. One similar to this was with deer hunters — which was a world I so feared and couldn’t deal with — and I went off and killed and slaughtered deer and got to know that culture. Another one was this bull-rider I just loved — this young guy who wanted to be the best bull-rider in the world. and he was not very good and that made it more interesting. I probably wouldn’t be interested in the champion bull-rider story; I’m more interested in the guy who is so passionate about this thing even though he can’t even keep his seven-second ride.

The three topics you’ve mentioned are all heavy into issues of masculinity. Coming at it as a woman, is it easier or more difficult to build trust for these types of stories?
Apparently, I’m really drawn to men; I really rarely write stories about women, and it seems to just be men who do very classically masculine activities. I think that in some ways it helps to be a woman doing it because I go in as a mother or a little sister or whatever. It’s non-threatening, and it throws it into a sort of psychological place almost automatically, so that people tell me their problems. I think guys can talk easier to women — these kinds of guys anyway. It’s certainly a dynamic that I’ve noticed.

Looking at some of your stories, it seems like you tend to go to places that test your own fear levels. Is that part of how you come up with ideas?
That fear thing is a recent thing — I’ve got a little thrill thing going. I’m not drawn so much by that usually, as much as thinking about, “Where can I find some interesting characters?” The fear thing tends to intensify the experience, but it’s not what I go after. And I don’t tend to write that much in the first person.

You did in the coal miner story. And a lot of what you were able to expose had to involve explicitly showing that you were down there and what it was like.
That was the first first-person story I’d done in quite a long while, and I just sort of surrendered to it, because the reader has never been in a coal mine — almost nobody has � so you’ve got to attach to somebody going in there for the first time, and to feel that weirdness. You can’t attach to any of these other characters going in there for the first time, because they’re already so used to it. You want to really feel that visceral thing of what it’s like to be down there. That’s the first question everyone has about a coal mine: “How the hell can you stand it?”

If you go in with that premise — “Why would anybody choose to do go down into this scary place every day and do this as a job?” — doesn’t that already put a spin on the questions you ask?
That’s really all I asked at first. It was even more explicit than that. I kept saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Absolutely. And I think that’s why you stay so long. If I just had that over and over again, it would just be a one-beat story — that would just be shock value. But if you stay in there long enough — and, really, four months is not even long enough — the point of the experiment is to see if it can become normal.

When you were down in the mine, you weren’t doing any mining work, so were you just kind of hanging out most of the time? It must be just hours and hours straight of just sitting in a coal mine, no?
Yup. And something I always tell my journalism students is that you have to have a really high capacity to be bored, because there is a lot of just absolutely nothing happening — or the same thing that happened yesterday happens again and again and again and again. Seeing something 15 times like that teaches you something that you couldn’t learn from just seeing it once, so it’s a kind of a deepening. Or maybe it’s a deepening of the character as you see this kind of rhythm and surrender to it. You can’t get that just once; rhythm happens over time. It’s all about time.

What was the most difficult aspect of it? And at what point did you get over your fear of going down into the mine?
I actually got over that remarkably quickly. It was true what they told me — you find out the first time you go down whether you can stand it or not. I was really afraid. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. Thinking about it was much harder than just doing it. When you’re in there, it’s just so damn interesting that you forget. You get completely disoriented and you’re not thinking that it’s scary; only about how foreign it is down there. The bizarreness factor takes over.

I’m not a particularly brave person, but it just distracted me somehow to be interested. And you get hooked in wanting to talk to the people.

You described a bit at the end of the piece about how you continued to go down into the mine even though you already had what you needed for the story. Have you had any more revelations about why you felt so drawn to the place and the people?
There is definitely something about it. I still talk to the guys from down there — we talk on the phone all the time, and I always want to know what’s going on, and I always want to know dumb stuff about the airflow or whatever. I just got really in. You become part of this little world, and you know all of the specifics of it and the everydayness of it. It’s like a school you once went to… I’m actually very glad that I had that experience of not wanting to leave, because I think that’s part of what it is for these guys.

As you were doing the reporting — going down in the mine every day — are you also writing in the evenings? Or do you wait until afterwards and then just dump it all?
I never even think about writing when I’m researching. I can’t even go there. I’m so not a writer at that moment, and it’s just not about words or even images at that point. I’m usually calling my editor and telling him everything that just happened, and having conversations because I want to hear what I’m saying and what I’m noticing — and what is surprising to him. So we have a lot of conversations like that, and that’s good data. I record those conversations with Andy [Ward, GQ‘s executive editor], because sometimes you can forget what was interesting to you. But I don’t start writing until way after the fact. I take pages and pages of notes, but the writing is later.

At what point do you know what the structure is going to be like? Does it develop as you go along?
For me, it grows out of the story, so I never know ahead of time. I know what are going to be scenes, so that’s sort of where it starts. I just sketch scenes and I start to look at it and think to myself, “What is this adding up to?” And then it starts getting fun.

When you’re looking at your stack of research and listening to the endless tapes — and you have this intimate experience with the subject — do you ever wonder how you’re going to be able to properly convey the scene?
That is the hell of it. It’s horrible. That’s just when I take naps constantly. Because it just seems so impossible. That’s the whole beginning stage of wrestling down the story. I don’t ever believe that I can communicate it. And this may be really bad news, but this kind of feeling does not get easier — at least for me it hasn’t. But while it doesn’t get easier — every one is a terrible fight — I just trust the process now. In the old days, the fact that it was so hard was depressing, and I wanted to give up, and I didn’t believe that it would ever come together.

Laskas’ tips for getting the story
1. Character, character, character
It’s all about character. I should have teased with more character threads earlier on — I wish I had. And in my next stories I want to be more mindful of that.

2. Information is boring, so condense, condense, condense.
Find any way you can to condense it. You’ve got to convey it — it’s got to happen to give the story a foundation — but get past it as quickly as possible, and get back to character.

David S. Hirschman is the editor of mediabistro.com’s Morning Newsfeed.

Anil Dash, one of the main speakers at the Mediabistro Circus next week, has been on the blogging scene more or less since the medium began taking hold in 1999. Now the “chief evangelist” at Six Apart (which created Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox, and owns LiveJournal), Dash spends his time managing communities, blogging, and marketing and developing products for the company. “I basically try to help all our customers interface with the company, and help our staff do their jobs better. By using blogs!” he says, describing his role. He delves into how the blogosphere (and the perception of bloggers) has changed in recent years and what he thinks blogs will be like in the future.

Name: Anil Dash
Position: Chief evangelist, Six Apart
Resume: I started out as a geek, one of those folks who grew up having a little computer at home that I programmed on. That evolved into a consulting company, and then later I ended up working in media, first in the music business and then finally in the journalism and publishing world when I was working at the Village Voice. But almost the entire time, I’d loved the web and the idea of using it as a space for personal expression, and so I started blogging in 1999. By the time my friends were co-founding Six Apart in 2002, it seemed almost inevitable that I’d want to combine my love of the technology industry with my love of media, and building a blogging company was the perfect way to do that.
Birthdate: September 5, 1975
Hometown: Outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Education: “I’m a high school graduate, though I’ve dabbled in higher education over the years. As the son of immigrants in a family where everybody’s got a master’s degree or a PhD, I’m not sure they’re thrilled I’m the first to not go to college.”
Marital status: Happily married to Alaina Browne. (She is, among other things, the general manager of SeriousEats.com)
First Section of the Sunday Times: “Magazine. Big pictures and shiny pages are perfect for my short attention span.”
Favorite TV show: “Can I still say The Wire? I know it’s over, but they haven’t made anything better yet.”
Last book read: Probably Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, though Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest is the answer that popped to mind.
Guilty pleasure: “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I think people who apologize for liking popular music or entertaining films are wasting energy inflicting misery on themselves.”

You’ve been a blogger since the beginning of the format. How do you think blogging has changed over the past six of seven years (both in content and format)?
I think blogging has really broadened out into a lot of different niches in the past decade. It used to be common for popular blogs to be about a wide range of topics that would shift over time or from day to day. Today, almost all of the biggest blogs are about a particular topic, and are run by teams of professionals who publish on a set schedule. Similarly, it used to be common to augment or interweave long-form essays with shorter, link-based annotation of other content, but popular sites usually choose one format or the other.

There have been some more fundamental changes, like the introduction of podcasting and rich media like video, or more aggregation and sharing-based services like Tumblr and Vox, but those are still in their nascent stages. Twitter is interesting, but I think a lot of people who think it’s really new probably weren’t around to see LiveJournal or Blogger back in 1999, when they were similarly simple.

How has your idea of blogging changed over this time — and what is different in the types of things you blog about.
For me the biggest change has been the role it plays in my career. Now that it’s part of my job, I don’t share as many aspects of my personal life, at least on my public blog. I am more aware of a readership outside of my own circle of friends, family and coworkers, and that can put some constraints on what I say or do. Conversely, I am also aware of the power of being able to reach outside that circle, and have spent a lot of time thinking about what responsibilities we inherit when we gain that power.

I also actually really love the blogs we publish inside our company to keep tabs on people and projects. We’ve got offices in San Francisco, New York, Paris and Tokyo, so it’d be impossible to all be on the same page without using this kind of technology, but it also lets us connect at a real human level with our coworkers. I can see the links people post, or the music people are listening to, and then even if it’s been a few months since I’ve visited our office in San Francisco, it’s like no time has passed at all when I see people that I’ve been reading on our internal blogs.

Bloggers — particularly political bloggers — were portrayed early on as amateurs musing on minutiae, with the mainstream media often referring to them typing in bathrobes. Today, a large number of mainstream media outlets have their own blogs and have co-opted the form for their own. How has the perception of what bloggers do changed?
It depends on which audience you talk to.

That reality of these being professional-level journalists, whether independent or affiliated with an established media brand, isn’t yet reflected broadly in public perception. People see scare stories on To Catch A Predator about creepy guys finding out your daughter’s home address, and they think “that’s blogging!” or they see someone forward a funny cat picture and they think “oh, so that’s what a blog is”. They might get sent a link to Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo or something, but most regular web users don’t even register that those might be blogs, let alone if they’re on the Time magazine site. It’s just “news.”

Who have been some of the people blogging who have helped change this perception?
I think you can’t ignore the incredible influence that political blogs have had on the broader political discourse. If it’s Talking Points Memo getting a Polk award for Josh Marshall’s work on the U.S. Attorney scandal, or Barack Obama on Huffington Post being quoted for his statements about small towns, the milestone moments in the most Internet-focused political campaign ever are all happening on blogs.

There are also the other cultural drivers, from geeky sites like BoingBoing and legal geeks like Larry Lessig helping drive the conversation about intellectual property, or the various gadget blogs taking what was an arcane culture of product reviews into this new era where a Steve Jobs product launch is a religious event. Even the huge number of mom blogs and dad blogs have changed the parenting industry, where the norm has shifted from “how to be a perfect parent” to “here’s what it’s really like.”

What are some of the main growth areas in blogging these days? Who is blogging more, and where are your new clients coming from? Is it more businesses or individuals? Are there different types of blogs that are becoming more prevalent?
Every area of blogging is growing rapidly, but some of the early investments we made are really paying off now. What we call “enterprise blogging,” or using blogs as business collaboration tools within a company, is just an enormous growth area.

Blogs are a fundamental part of online marketing now, too. It’s astounding how quickly that change has happened, but anybody who’s concerned about search engine optimization or easy content publishing or maintaining a relationship with a community of customers online knows that the first thing you need to do is get a blog.

And of course, personal blogging is still growing by leaps and bounds. More and more people are realizing they want to have a record of the moments of their lives, especially as the tools get easier and it’s simpler to have some privacy controls to choose who you share that blog with.

Our home base, of course, is media companies. From our CEO on down, many of us have worked in the media business and we all love the publishing world. So, with a flagship product called “Movable Type,” that’s always going to be a business we focus on.

Six Apart recently created a “services” division, as well as Six Apart Media — tell me a little bit about these, and what market niche you’re hoping to fill with them. What are some of the services?
Our Services team does everything from design, development and deployment of sites to helping with strategy, implementation and integration. The primary focus has been the media industry in particular, and from services to software we’re helping power everybody from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, to Time to Radar to Gothamist and more.

The Media team is the counterpart to our services effort, assisting in helping build the business efforts of our publishers, with everything from an advertising platform to services around increasing traffic, improving SEO, and building an audience. The combination of these efforts is basically an evolution of our company to reflect the fact that blogging is about a lot more than just the core technology, and we want to provide every resource we can to publishers who want to succeed in blogging.

Looking ahead with Six Apart, what kinds of new technologies do you think can be added to blogs? How are Web 2.0 concepts being applied to blogs?
Well, we’ve had great success in inventing many of the technologies that have made Web 2.0 possible, so we think the many different social networks out there are going to thrive and succeed, but we’ll all use our own blogs as the place that connects them together. For example, our open source infrastructure was designed to help the privacy features around blogging grow to internet scale, but it’s been adopted by companies like Facebook and Craigslist and Wikipedia to help power their rich community features. That’s an extremely satisfying way to see our work benefit the whole Web. So you’ll start to see blogs develop two-way connections with the social networks out there, whether it’s the big names or little niche sites that cater to your particular interests.

What technology over the past few years have you been most excited about?
Mobile devices, certainly, are endlessly fascinating with how quickly they’re maturing. We’ve worked with Nokia for years � you can buy one of their N95 phones and it has our Vox blogging platform built in. We were the first blogging platform on the iPhone, and have announced with Apple that we’re doing an upcoming application to connect our TypePad service to the iPhone. In the larger tech industry in general, a lot of us are fans of things like the Nintendo Wii � innovative technology combined with a great experience and something that’s just plain fun. There is also some really smart work being done around location and mapping and geodata these days.

In an ideal for blogs, what would you hope will be their effect on society and communications generally? At some point in the future, do you think everyone have a blog of their own?
I hope blogs continue to do what they’ve always done: Give people a voice and a reach based on their passion and persistence, instead of merely giving the loudest voices to those with the most resources. It’s just as important to me that people use blogs to talk to their friends and family and stay connected with causes or issues they care about as it is that blogs tackle the “big” issues and speak to millions of people. Now, we’re far from perfect. We’ve been so idealistic in these early days of blogging that we haven’t spent enough time trying to design against destructive behaviors that people can have online when they’re anonymous or gathering into mobs. But I am optimistic that we can do better with that in the future.

I do think everyone who has the resources to be online will, in the future, have a blog. That’s much more likely as we’ll be able to record our actions online, or the content we create in the course of living our lives, and that collected content (which is much easier to make than actually taking the time to sit down and write an essay) will form the bulk of what we share with the world.

What are some of the blogs you read as part of your daily routine — who do you tune in to every day?
I love the work that the team at Serious Eats does — my wife’s the general manager there, but even if she weren’t, getting to read about delicious food is a really satisfying escape. I always say that my friend Jason Kottke’s site kottke.org, though extremely popular, is still underrated due to how much time he spends editing and refining his skills as a blogger. I’ve sort of fallen back in love with dollarshort.org, too. It’s the site that Mena Trott started long before she co-created Movable Type or co-founded Six Apart (or became my boss). Dollarshort has always had an incredibly unique voice and beautiful design, and that’s pretty inspiring. Jay Smooth’s work on Ill Doctrine is hands-down the best video blog on the web, from where I sit. And for fun, I love Overheard in New York and 90s R&B Junkie are always entertaining.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Newsfeed.

When longtime New York Times reporter James Bennet became editor of the venerable Atlantic just over two years ago, Slate‘s media critic Jack Shafer wrote that, because of the magazine’s stable of great writers, “even a dunce” could pilot it to journalistic greatness. But at a time when the magazine industry is rapidly adapting to the Web, there is more to an editor’s job than simply creating solid longform features. In fact, Bennet says that he has been surprised to find that more than half of his time is spent on The Atlantic‘s Web site — keeping on top of online content, navigating the “relationship between a very turbulent Web site of ideas and a monthly magazine of ideas,” and planning for the site’s future incarnations.

mediabistro.com caught up with Bennet recently to discuss how The Atlantic‘s signature long features are produced, this month’s Britney Spears cover story, with which writer David Samuels takes joking credit for “destroying The Atlantic“), and what is shaping up to be the “most amazing campaign that a lot of us have ever experienced.”

Name: James Bennet
Position: Editor, The Atlantic
Resume: Started as an intern for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.; interned at The New Republic; editor at Washington Monthly; reporter for The New York Times for 15 years, covering metro news, business, politics, and media — was also the White House correspondent, Jerusalem correspondent, and a writer for the Times magazine; joined The Atlantic in 2006.
Birthday: March 28, 1966
Hometown: Born in Boston, raised in D.C.
Education: B.A. from Yale
Marital status: Married
First section of Sunday Times: “Depends which one my wife gets to first, but … I usually start with The Week in Review, back to front.”
Favorite TV show: South Park
Last books read: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
Guilty pleasure: Going to the gym. “It’s time stolen from the magazine and from my family.”

Politics is obviously a main component of The Atlantic‘s content, and this is shaping up as the mother of all election seasons. Is it hard to produce large monthly features about stuff that’s changing so rapidly?
In the primary season, it’s obviously difficult in the magazine to look three months ahead and say exactly where we’ll be. So it’s tricky. But we have a pretty great group of writers now, and we’ve been lucky, I think, in this campaign season. I think our coverage holds up pretty well.

On the whole, The Atlantic tends not to show its hand politically. How difficult is it to remain balanced?
The Atlantic has always been a platform for strong-minded writers who disagree with each other — and sometimes disagree with themselves, if you watch their work over a number of years. This is a great strength and also a weakness for the magazine. I can understand the appeal of a magazine that takes a very consistent and predictable editorial line. Readers return to it to have their own views confirmed, or because they’re comfortable with that view of the world. The Atlantic in that sense is a much more unpredictable and surprising magazine. We’re not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but we go where the reporting takes us, and where the argumentation takes the writer.

Is the immediacy of the campaign coverage why you’re putting more of an emphasis online, with the new Current feature on the site?
Politics is important to The Atlantic, but it doesn’t define The Atlantic. It’s one of several preoccupations of the magazine. In this political year, we’re paying more attention to it because this is the most amazing campaign a lot of us have ever experienced. But you’ll see us shift our focus back after the campaign. Our main areas of interest are things thinking people care about — it’s politics, it’s business, it’s culture, and it’s science.

In Current, the pieces are pretty short. How do you translate the voice and the longer, deeper features of the magazine into such an abbreviated format?
You don’t. The magazine and the Web site do different things. I think there’s a very nice relationship between a very turbulent Web site of ideas and a monthly magazine of ideas. We’re mixing provocative arguments in both mediums, but we’re doing it in different ways.

The wonderful thing about the Web, for us, is that for our writers and editors, it can be a long time between “drinks” in the magazine. They’ll work on stories for a month, and people can disappear from our pages for a month or two. So the Web just gives our guys another outlet to show what they can do, but they’re not doing the same kind of thing on the Web as they are for the magazine. All of a sudden we have a highly active and interesting Web site that is growing really fast. In the last year, we’ve gone from just over 500,000 unique visitors to almost 2.3 million monthly, and a lot of that has been the addition of the bloggers, and taking our pay wall down.

With so much time between the release of magazine issues, do you see the Web site as a place where you would break news now, as well?
We wrestle with that question: when you have negative news or a big news story and the magazine’s not coming out for a month, whether you try to rush it up onto the Web instead. We’ve had a couple of experiences where news has broken related to a big story that we’re about to bring out, where we have rushed it up on the Web for that reason. One example of this was when Zarqawi was killed last year, we happened to have a huge profile of him coming up in the magazine, so we put it up on the Web. And we’ve had frustrations the other way where we’ve had a big piece coming, and some item in it that was highly newsworthy got broken somewhere else between the time we closed the issue and the time it appeared.

Are you planning on doing more video on the Web?
Yes. We’ve already started, and we’ve had a great group internally that have shown a lot of initiative in starting the first Atlantic experiments in video. We’ve been doing this roundtable with our bloggers called “The Table” that is attracting a fair amount of traffic and attention, and we’ve also been doing some video alongside our big magazine pieces and some of our columnists. You’re going to be seeing a lot more of that. We’ll also be launching more blogs, and more non-blog content and online dispatches soon. I’m eager to add more and more dimensions to the Web site.

In the past two issues, you’ve had a couple of stories that attracted major attention: Lori Gottlieb’s piece about women settling, and this month’s cover story about the paparazzi and Britney Spears. Do these pieces represent a change at all in where you’re taking the magazine?
I think it’s totally in keeping with the history of the magazine, and I think our readers expect from us to be provoked on all sorts of subjects. We’re getting a lot of mail in the “settling” piece, and it’s really kind of amazing how much pickup it’s gotten in the media world — everyone from Dr. Phil and NPR to the Nightly News and Colbert. The expression “putting Britney on the cover” is kind of shorthand in the industry for trying to become People or Us Weekly, which, of course, would never make sense for The Atlantic. That’s not what we’re doing. There are other elements of this story than just the latest glimpse of the starlet in distress … that make this a kind of classic Atlantic piece. It’s a cultural story, it’s a business story, it’s a media story, and it’s a funny, rollicking yarn. I would want to turn the question around, though, and say “Why wouldn’t we put Britney on the cover?”

It’ll be interesting to see whether you get a spike at the newsstand because of it.
I don’t know. I certainly don’t think anybody who would be apt to pick up Us Weekly or People will pick up this issue of The Atlantic. That’s not what we’re aiming for or anticipate.

You’re in the process of redesigning the magazine. How is that going, and what sorts of elements are you planning on changing?
We’re in the very early stages of it. We’ve contracted with Michael Beirut from Pentagram to do it. We’re redesigning the magazine and the Web site at the same time. Certain design elements will carry over, but the goal is to take better advantage of what each of the separate mediums is capable of — which means essentially enhancing the magazininess of the magazine and enhancing the user experience on the Web.

What have been some of the more challenging aspects of the job over the past two years? Has it been hard to switch over from the pace of a daily paper.
Well, going from being the interviewer to being the interview subject is one. Another is simply management, which is an experience a lot of people have in going from being a writer to being an editor. And, sure, there are aspects of the daily newspaper life that I miss, but we have a lot of activity now at The Atlantic too. And the core mission of The Atlantic — the creation of the well pieces we do — is a deeply satisfying enterprise to be part of. I feel incredibly lucky to be involved in that.

What is the genesis of one of these long pieces, and how do you decide how long is too long?
We have the freedom here to go up to [10,000 words] or beyond that, but we set a really high standard that every incremental word has to be earned.

So you’re saying the longest pieces are the tightest?
[Laughs] Every piece is tight. In some ways, as we all know, it can be harder to write short than to write long. But we spend a lot of time thinking months ahead what our cover should be six, eight, 12 months out and setting some of those pieces in motion. Some of the ideas come internally, some come from our stable of writers, and some come from writers we’ve never worked with before. And then we place a handful of very big bets.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Newsfeed.

Bucking the trend of the major newsweeklies, The Economist has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade. Newsstand sales have gone up 107 percent since 2000, and the magazine (the publication actually quaintly calls itself a “newspaper”) now boasts a total audience of 1.8 million. John Micklethwait became the magazine’s editor-in-chief last year, following a 13-year run by his predecessor Bill Emmott. Here, he talks to mediabistro.com about his recent writing project, how The Economist is staying relevant in the digital age, and why the magazine has no plans to buck tradition and give is journalists bylines.

Name: John Micklethwait
Position: Editor-in-chief, The Economist
Resume: At the publication, he’s been finance department reporter, chief of the L.A. and New York bureaus, led business coverage and coverage of America, and EIC since 2006
Date of birth: August 11th, 1962
Hometown: Leicester, U.K.
First Job: Worked at Victoria Wine as a sales room assistant
First section of the Sunday Times: Week in Review
Marital Status: Married
Favorite Television Show: Watching The Simpsons with my children
Guilty Pleasure: Listening to Leicester city football matches on the Internet
Last Book Read: God and Gold by Walter Russell Mead

Tell me a little about the special report on religion you have been working on lately.
The big idea behind it is the idea that if you look at the century going forward, I think religion is going to play a much larger role in politics than it did in the past century. I think there was an attempt — in some ways a rather benign attempt — to push religion out of politics in the 20th Century. In some cases it was disastrous: in the case of communism and fascism. But what seems to be happening now is that you have religion growing in a large number of places, and largely it is religion by choice, rather that “religion from above.”� And this is changing quite a lot in politics, because if you choose to be a certain religion, then it’s more likely that you are going to have a public interest in views connected to that religion being put forward. [EDITOR’S NOTE: On Nov. 10, Micklethwait will moderate a debate on the topic.]

This kind of project doesn’t seem like the kind of thing the editor of a major news magazine usually does. Is this part of the job description as editor of The Economist?
The advantage of going off to do a long story is that it allows you to sort of recharge your intellectual batteries a bit, and ideally the subject is something about which you know a bit but not a huge amount. It’s a way of pulling more into your world. [My predecessor, Bill Emmott] went off and did one on the 21st Century … he did stuff on capitalism, as well. It’s the kind of thing that Economist editors have always done. It’s a nice indulgence that you get five weeks to go and do it. It’s not built into the job description, and [laughs] about three-quarters of the way through it you wonder exactly why you are doing it, because vast amounts of your day job still come back and hit you. But, in general I think it’s a good idea; you learn a lot.

Who is your target reader these days, and if you had to sum up the mission of the magazine under you, what would it be?
I think the mission of The Economist under me is not very different from what it’s been under my predecessors. It’s been a mixture of, on the one hand, trying to grow the circulation and expand; we think there is an ever-growing number of people around the world who are not interested in not just good coverage of where they are, and also of the world around them, because your world can get dramatically changed by things happening miles and miles away. That said, if we just sat there and though, “We want to just write global stories,” that wouldn’t work. I think the key is to write about every region of the world, and to do it in such a way as to compete with the local press where you are. I think if you can tell a good story then it travels.

While business pervades most of the sections of The Economist, the magazine has also spread out quite a bit over the past few years, and there is much more arts, science, and culture. Will these be expanded even further? And how do you see the relationship of the magazine toward business, generally?
Business is absolutely core. We have someone around here who calls our business coverage “the engine room” of The Economist. He jokes of that, but it’s absolutely key. Not only do we have a lot of business people who read us, but we think you can make business interesting and provocative as well to people who aren’t necessarily in business themselves. We’re not all about business, but economics is a useful discipline in that it forces you to pare things down to what really matters. But that doesn’t stop us from having a lot of fun. We have a lot of people remark on the obituaries, for instance when we have obituaries of parrots and that sort of thing.

Who do you see as your main competitors? Is it business magazines? Time and Newsweek? The Week?
All of the above. The “cute” answer I give that our main competitor is “time”; not the magazine, but people’s time. People have very busy lives, particularly the sort of people who tend to buy The Economist. You are trying to squeeze into their life, and you have to make that worthwhile, because often I think the choice is not between us and BusinessWeek, or The New Republic, or the LA Times; it’s more, “Are you going to spend 10 minutes grazing on the Internet or are you going to watch a soccer match on the internet, or are you going to watch a film?” It’s that sort of thing. You have to come up with something as challenging, interesting, and provocative enough to demand someone’s time. You don’t really think too much about the competition, because in the end it’s just about producing something interesting and relevant to people.

Newsweeklies particularly have had a lot of trouble staying relevant in recent years, as they adapt to the instantaneous nature of news on the Internet. How is The Economist dealing with the Web and what sorts of things are you planning on doing online in the future?
One thing we’re doing is just increasing the amount of daily content [online], so that people can come back every day and find something worthwhile. And we’ve done a lot to make sure the content online is at the same level as the content in the magazine, even while we’re introducing blogs and a rather good weekly correspondent’s diary from some distant part of the world.

One place on the Internet that we’ve done really well is in audio. We’ve discovered that audio seems to do particularly well for us; we’ve had a big success in starting a weekly podcast. And on top of that — and I think we’re alone in the world in doing this — we now offer a full audio version of The Economist online. You can listen to the whole thing read by BBC newsreaders. It’s a way of getting people used to experiencing The Economist in different ways; people who are jogging; people who are in cars; people who are cooking; people who are at the gym.

We remain provocatively paranoid about the Internet; you have to be thinking of ways in which you can deal with it. When I first came on I thought of the Internet as this sort of hurricane coming right towards us, that had already hit newspapers and now would come to magazines, which were further ashore. But now it seems to be sort of glancing magazines, rather than hitting directly. It’s not true for all magazines — there are some that have been hit quite badly — but the sort of thing that we’re doing at the moment seems to be helping us rather than hurting us, because it’s putting so much more information out there.

While it was a more common practice in the past, there are almost no other publications left aside from The Economist where the articles don’t include bylines. Why have you stuck with this? Is there any talk of changing?
We’re really the last people clinging to that tradition of not having named correspondents and [laughs] we look with great envy upon those publications that have big pictures of 50-year-old journalists staring out from their columns. But no. Really one of the reasons that we do it is just history; we’ve stayed the same while everyone else has changed. Another reason is the brand; I think it would be unfair of me to deny that it’s part of the ethos of The Economist, part of what we all like about it. But the fundamental point is that it has to do with the way we all work; we are a collaborative effort, so that if someone files a piece from Nigeria, and then someone here wants to change it, the fact that it’s anonymous means that you can change it, even to the point of disagreeing with the original piece — which would have made it much more difficult for the original person if their name were still on it. It doesn’t happen that much, but it does have to do with that collaborative sense. I would suspect that none of the journalists here agree 100 percent with all of the things we say, but that’s part of the deal when you come here. And it’s good because you can bring a lot of people’s brainpower to the same topic.

The magazine has a reputation for shading conservative, having supported the war in the Iraq and the presidency of George Bush — at least until recently. How do you see The Economist‘s politics, generally?
I regard us as classical liberals. And we did back Bush against Gore, but we backed Kerry against Bush. Foreign policy is really the hardest thing to apply a liberal perspective to. You could certainly add a sort of liberal spin to the war in Iraq. Now it seems almost ridiculous to do that. We tend to approach each election with an open mind; I would hope that both Democrats and the Republicans would have reason to believe we’d endorse them in the next election, because our history shows that.

In the past decade the magazine has made a lot of strides in the U.S. market, to the point where The Economist is read by four times as many people here as in the U.K. Does that change how you position the magazine?
No, because I don’t think you should pander to your readers. If The Economist started catering to an American view of things, we would lose our readers elsewhere. Often what happens is that in America we get depicted as pro-European, and in Europe we get depicted as pro-American. But once you start thinking too much about who’s reading you where — particularly when you have so many readers in as many places as we do — you could get yourself into a horrific muddle. We always respect our readers from everywhere, but you cannot design your package around them.

It says in your surprisingly short Wikipedia entry that you invented the term “Cosmocrat.” How do you feel about that as �
As my epitaph? [laughs] To be fair, it was actually me and Adrian Woolridge who I wrote the book with. We actually thought when we invented [the word] that it would be a wonderful hit, but now it seems to drift away. But it seems to be coming back again. The idea behind it was really that there was a sort of global class of people emerging, many of whom had more in common with each other than with people closer to them. The example being that someone in Canary Wharf [in London] and someone in lower Manhattan and a person in Los Angeles would have more in common than they would with someone a mile to the East of them. The only thing that seems to have happened to [the term] — and one thing you can’t do when you come up with these sorts of glib phrases is that you can’t complain when they’re changed by other people — is that it seems to be more focused in on hedge funds and private equity than we had intended. Anyway, it’s very flattering when people use it.

David Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s Newsfeed editor.

Taking the helm of one of the largest, most respected newspapers in America is usually the apex of a traditional journalist’s career trajectory — the top rung on a ladder that, until recently, seemed relatively straightforward. But when you assume the position in the midst of an unparalleled industry-wide meltdown, as the fourth editor-in-chief in three years in a newsroom ravaged by cuts and turmoil and recently bought by a zany billionaire, the prize position comes with more angst than it used to.

But if Russ Stanton isn’t optimistic about the future, he’s not letting on. A 10-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times, and the 14th editor in the paper’s history, Stanton talked to mediabistro.com about the challenges the Times is facing, what the paper hopes to do online, and what life is like under Sam Zell.

Name: Russ Stanton
Position: Editor-in-chief, Los Angeles Times
Resume: 27 years in the newspaper industry, 10 at the Times. He began as a business reporter at Southern California papers like the Orange County Register, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the San Bernardino County Sun. At the Times, he worked his way through slots as technology editor and business editor before he was named last year to the newly created post of innovation editor, where he was charged with integrating the paper’s print and online operations. He was named editor of the Times in February.
Education: California State University, Sacramento undergrad. 1984 fellow of the Herbert J. Davenport Economics Program at the University of Missouri
Hometown: Tulare, California
Birthdate: Dec. 24, 1958
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday New York Times (and Sunday LA Times): Book Review
Favorite TV show: The Unit
Last book read: Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty by Dennis McDougal
Guilty pleasure: Celebrity Q&A in Parade magazine on Sundays

You took over as editor in the midst of a very tumultuous period in the paper’s history. Are things quieting down? How’s morale?
I think they’re starting to [quiet down] and I think our morale is beginning to come back to where people are focused solely on doing great work and good stories and terrific journalism. I try to remind people every day that we still put out a big, huge hell of a newspaper and a really terrific Web site every day, and that’s what we need to be focused on and nothing else.

Your predecessors left due to disagreements with management about the editorial budget, policy, and newsroom cuts. Have these been resolved to some extent?
No. And I don’t think they’ll ever be resolved. Our industry is changing, seemingly month-to-month, across a whole number of spectrums, including the financial ones. Things haven’t gotten any better than they were for some of my predecessors, and in some cases the situation has gotten worse. But as I said during what I would jokingly call my “inauguration day,” I’m tired of not having a plan.

We’re in this mode where we are reacting to everything — and our reaction is always to make cuts and reduce. I get that we may have to be a smaller news organization here at some point in the near future, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be a great paper and a great Web site. One of the great things about this paper is that the ambition is still really high, and we still have the swagger and attitude of a paper that, when I got here, had 1,300 newsroom employees. We’re now down in the low 800s, and so we just have to pick our spots a bit better.

You were previously in charge of integrating the Web and print newsrooms at the paper. How integrated are they now, and how does your last job inform your strategy for the future?
We got to a pretty good start last year, but even in my previous job I felt we weren’t moving fast enough and we didn’t go deep enough in the integration, so that’s going to be a huge part of what I want to accomplish in the first year on this job. We have some physical limitations [in terms of the building structure]… and we’ve got to do a fairly substantial remodel to pull that off. But the plan is, when we finish that off, to have a fully integrated newsroom on one floor.

As you look for ways to improve the Web site, what are some of the Web 2.0 concepts that seem most interesting? How about citizen journalism or social networking?
I am pretty intrigued by citizen journalism. I think that there might be a way for us to do it that doesn’t give away the hallowed territory of “who does the journalism.” I think there are ways we can address that. One of the things the site is going to be rolling out over the next couple of months are neighborhood pages that are zip code-centric, and that have crime, real estate, and school test-score data that you can sort and play around with for your local area. And as part of those sites we’ll have news from that smaller community, and we’ll let users help us fill out that part of the thing. Also, we currently have a print entertainment guide that comes out on Thursday that’s all about what to do in Southern California — and online we involved users a great deal.

On the social networking thing, we have a new feature called ICU. I think social networking is something that we’ve got to figure out how to host so that we can be the gathering place for Southern California.

Any changes to the print edition that you have coming up in the near future?
Yes. One of the things that we spent a fair amount of time on since I started this job is gathering together the senior editorial leadership, and we’ve had a series of daylong meetings over the past couple of months to try and re-imagine the paper, knowing that our advertising revenue is not going up at this stage. We need to refigure how we do things, and we’re on track to deliver a plan to the publisher in late June on how we do some of that stuff. I don’t think it’s going to be a radically different L.A. Times when all is said and done. I think there are some more things we can do in terms of different kinds of storytelling besides what is a 35-inch story, and we’ve been dabbling in that over the past couple of years, particularly in the sports and business sections.

How many years will it be until there is no print edition of the L.A. Times?
One hundred twenty-six [laughs]. But, you know, somebody, somewhere soon is going to throw in the towel on print. For us, I think that for now, our core base of readers are the baby boomers, and I think that we’ve got at least another 35-year run in print. On the other hand, someone, somewhere is going to grow the revenue from online enough that it can support a newsroom of our size and talent. And when that happens, that’s when you can start, if you so choose, to pull the plug on the paper. If you have the revenue to pay for the journalism, you can eliminate the print. I mean, the people are only half of the cost — the stuff that costs so much are the paper and the presses you need to print the darn thing. But I don’t see that happening around here in my lifetime.

The paper’s editorial page recently came out against proposition 98, which was kind of a bold move considering that one of Zell’s companies donated money in support of it. Was this a difficult issue to manage at all? Did you inform Zell of the editorial beforehand? And how is dealing with him as a boss, generally?
I haven’t talked to the guy since two days before I got this job. I met him before I was named, and he told me then that he wasn’t going to screw around with the editorial stance of the paper. I actually don’t control the editorial pages here — that’s done by a guy named Jim Newton — but we didn’t tell him beforehand and he probably read about it like everyone else. And I think if anyone was worried about our editorial independence, I think we answered that question right there.

Newsday was sold recently, and that was one of the Tribune properties that Zell had said he was hoping to hold on to. Have you heard anything from him that would indicate a change in his plans for you all?
From the conversation I had with him, and the internal communications I see — as well as talk with the publisher every week — I think he’s made pretty clear that he’s not happy. He felt like the conditions of our industry, and some of our papers in particular, have declined a lot in a relatively short amount of time — and I think he’s surprised about it, he’s not happy about it, and I don’t think it was ever in his plan to sell any of the media properties. That said, selling Newsday and the Cubs buys us a tremendous amount of breathing room over the next couple of years, in particular, and will allow us to reinvent what we do and get ourselves back on terra firma, and back in a position where we can grow. I’ve not gotten any indication at all that they’re intending to get rid of us.

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Newsfeed.

Despite the fact that his family was solidly working-class, John Byrne says that there were always copies of BusinessWeek in the house while he was growing up, sparking a deep interest in business journalism — and in exposing the mechanisms of corporate power. Having worked for much of his career at BusinessWeek, he also has served as editor-in-chief of Fast Company, where he helped right its ship and engineer the magazine’s sale to Mansueto Ventures. He also has written or co-written eight business books, including the autobiography of former GE CEO Jack Welch. Today he helms BusinessWeek‘s Web site, which launched the BusinessWeek Arcade in the spring, and is set to transform yet again. Here we catch up with him about his career path and BusinessWeek.com’s bold new networking/aggregation product, the Business Exchange, set to debut September 3.

Name: John Byrne
Position: Editor-in-chief, BusinessWeek.com
Resume: Started out as a paper boy, and worked at newspapers all through college and grad school, including the Columbia Missourian. Worked as part of a journalism fellowship program as a Washington reporter for the Yakima Herald-Republican (Wash.) and the Corpus Christi Times (Texas). Took a job with Fairchild trade publications’ internal news service in Washington, covering retail legislation, regulatory agencies, and the DOJ (among other things), and then was eventually promoted to London bureau chief. Returned a couple of years later to New York to work at Forbes as a general assignment staff writer for the next four. Moved to BusinessWeek and stayed for a 17-year stint, largely as a writer, logging 57 cover stories in that period. Left to become EIC of Fast Company for about three years and then returned to BusinessWeek in 2005 and served as executive editor before taking over the Web site last year.
Birthdate: January 17, 1953
Hometown: Paterson, New Jersey
Education: William Paterson College of New Jersey for undergrad, University of Missouri for grad school
First section of the Sunday Times: Sunday Styles
Favorite TV show: Doesn’t watch TV, though the Sopranos used to be his favorite.
Guilty pleasures: Key passions include the Yankees, Frank Sinatra (and music in general) and canoeing
Last book read: The Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

What got you on the business journalism track originally?
[Starting in college] I kind of knew I wanted to get into business journalism for competitive and ambitious reasons, and for reasons that most journalists get into this field — because they think they can reform or get things done for the better. Everyone wanted to write about politics, and because I knew that’s where the crowd was, I didn’t want to go where the crowd was. The second reason was that when I sat back and looked at what was really going on, I really felt that the people who have the most influence in the way we live and what we do are people in business — not people in politics. These are the people who determine whether we have meaningful employment and how productive we are as human beings, and how well we live. I felt while I was growing up that it was a less examined part of our society.

Having been a print guy during most of your career, what was it like to take over BusinessWeek‘s site at such a key moment in the history of publishing?
I had been involved early on [in the development of the BusinessWeek site], and at Fast Company we had a group blog where I was among the biggest bloggers there, but still [when I was offered the job] I considered myself a print guy. But everyone I talked to about it said “This is an inflection point. This is an incredible opportunity for you. You can’t turn this down.” And I have been utterly transformed.

What do you see as some of the major challenges for online news brands today?
It’s not, as some people say it is, “online vs. print,” because the contrasts are actually more insidious and dangerous than that. The more threatening contrast is between aggregation and original content — because aggregation is something that’s cheap. You don’t have to pay writers and editors to do it; you can do it automatically, and basically Yahoo, AOL and MSN [as well as Google News] have already won on aggregation. If you look at the reader research, you’ll find that readers prefer getting their news and analysis from multiple sources instead of one. The average reader of BusinessWeek content gets news from 20 other brands (includes radio and TV, online and print) on a regular basis. Aggregation just plays to their needs and their wants.

The other level is search vs. community. Search is essentially a transaction: it allows someone to go directly to content which is brand-agnostic. You go and get what you want, period — you don’t care where it exists, as long as you get it. What we do is that we try to create a relationship, not a transaction, with a reader that is all built around community. So the way search has undermined our business on some level is that it’s antithetical to what we are, breaking up this relationship.

How is behavioral targeting affecting brands like BusinessWeek that produce original content?
When I look ahead, I see behavioral targeting becoming much more effective and much more in use. What that essentially does is devalue your brand. Every brand in journalism is based on a simple value proposition: we create terrific content and terrific journalism that your demographic wants to read. So, as an advertiser, you come here next to our quality, premium, well-lit environment and you’ll benefit. And in a world where people weren’t cookie-ed to death, that worked very nicely. But now advertisers know so much information about people, so what you can do is get the same demographic at a lower CPM at a different site, because that demographic moves all over the place on the Internet — so, rather than paying a $60 CPM on your site, let’s go to Facebook and pay 50 cents for that same CPM. That erodes the value proposition that was at the heart of the economic model of journalism.

I think the only way you can fight that is to create relationships with readers that induce the kind of loyalty that matters to both the reader and the advertiser. Because if I can prove to you as an advertiser that my readers are unusually engaged in my site, you can probably then guess that they are going to be engaged in your advertising in a way that they won’t be elsewhere.

Your recent column in Mediaweek seemed to tout a model that’s not dissimilar to citizen journalism, with people commenting on articles and also adding their own content. This concept has been tried a bit in local and national news, but very little in business journalism so far (which requires more in terms of getting access). How do you think this can work?
I’m not a total believer in citizen journalism. But I am a believer that journalism is no longer a product — in fact it’s a process. [It’s about ] involving your readers in the process, in the beginning and the middle and the end. Generally, as journalists we haven’t paid very much attention to our readers over time. It’s as if we write out tablets and hand them down. And sometimes we even turn away — we get letters from people we don’t answer; we don’t return phone calls. Part of the excuse is that we’re too busy, but that’s our audience and that’s who we’re writing for. So what I think online enables you to do is tell your audience, ‘Tell us what stories you want us to do.’ They should feel involved and they should know why an idea is good or why it’s bad. And that shouldn’t be just a suggestion box — it should be a conversation. It’s embracing the readership and making them part of the process of journalism, as opposed to us producing the product and turning our heads away — and through that involvement enriching the story and making it a real, live, growing thing.

You’ve talked a bit about how aggregation is hurting traditional journalism, but you’re also about to launch a new networking/aggregation product. It seems strange to resent the aggregators but want to get on the boat at the same time. What’s it all about and how will it work?
We have to have that weapon in our arsenal in order to compete and gain scale. But it’s not just doing what [the aggregators] do; it’s taking the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and putting them together in a unique way to change the game.

What this product does is that it allows us to have tens of thousands of unique Web sites, ultimately, all under the BusinessWeek banner, on very narrow, important topics to business people.

We allow the users to create topics such as “Boeing 787,” or “stock options,” or “unfair dismissals,” or “iPhone,” or “Steve Jobs” — the narrower, the better. And then they essentially write a Wikipedia entry and push a button, and within seconds that topic is created, meaning a Web site is created where there is a newsfeed that immediately populates with stories on the topic from everywhere. It’s completely agnostic, meaning there’s no preference given to BusinessWeek stories at all. It will be from newspapers in India, China, Europe, Latin America, and magazines from all over the world too.

So say you create a page — all the stories in the world from several thousand publications will be populated. Then there’s another place where all of the blog posts on that topic will be populated. Then there’s another tab where reference materials like white papers, academic papers, position statements, and Wall Street reports will be populated. What happens is that the interaction between that content and the community determines and creates a front page. By the nature of the community’s interaction with the content, we are creating a hierarchy of the most useful stories.

The five most active contributors in any given topic have their pictures seen along with their name, and title and their contributions. Network-wide the 10 most active contributors are acknowledged. You have the option of seeing what everyone else in the system is doing — what they’re adding and what they’re sharing. And you have a profile — one click and your LinkedIn profile is imported into our product automatically. So the social media part of this is the community interaction with the content that allows a hierarchy to be created so that it’s more useful than any typical search — and then the ability to see who is in the network and read about them…

A key piece… is the role of our edit staff and external bloggers in curating topics. We’ve signed up people like John Battelle and Henry Blodget… and the BusinessWeek edit team will curate more than 200 initial topics alone…

There will be a lot of other bells and whistles to the project, obviously, but that’s essentially it. It’s called the Business Exchange. It’s big and it’s different, and we think this can get us to scale in a way that we can grow.

Is part of the point of these micro-sites to drive traffic back to the main BusinessWeek site?
It’ll be completely integrated in the core site, but most people are going to find it through search. [We won’t favor our own content, though] because we want people to know it’s all about them. We will curate a few hundred of them — meaning every editor and writer on our staff will essentially adopt a couple or more online topics, and refresh them, dialogue with readers and interact with them, based on their experience. We think that a lot of our users will take over the rest of the topics.

If you’re in mobile marketing and you work for Nokia, and you want to get to know your colleagues in Siemens and Motorola and Cisco, and you want to keep completely on top of your field, you can imagine that you’d come once a day or a couple of times a week to see what the community deems to be the most important news on that topic. The audience — which is most keenly interested in that one topic, and is probably working in that field too — will help guide you.

So it’s kind of like a social network where each topic is kind of a profile?
I think it’s sort of a stealth social network, emphasizing the contact of the people inside of it. Flickr is a stealth social network [like this], where people think they are coming to post their photos and share their photos when in fact a lot of social activity is going on around the photos. So if you go to these topic sites, you’ll find all the other people interested in them — the competitors, the suppliers, the employers, the investors and the analysts — and we think there’s value in that. But basically you go there for the content.

We actually also think it’s a great reporting tool, because if you’re covering a beat there’s far too much content chasing far too few brains and eyeballs. This is a way to really stay on top.

David Hirschman is editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Media Newsfeed.

When Wired editor Jeff Howe was covering the Vans Warped Tour a few years ago for an article he was writing about MySpace, he was struck by a strange phenomenon among the young people there: powered with the latest creative technological gadgets, they were creating a ton of their own content. “They were promiscuously creative,” he notes. “They painted and did poetry and wrote music and played music and did Web design — but looking at how they worked, it seemed like they had a much deeper dynamic.” What he found was that they were part of a new type of online interaction, with communities forming to become engines that create collaborative content. After chewing over his findings, Howe eventually decided this was an example of how Internet communities can be harnessed for their collective talents, collaborating on projects that weren’t possible in the past. In a sense, this new paradigm is all about outsourcing to the crowd, an idea that became the term he coined for his new book: “crowd-sourcing.” Here he talks to mediabistro.com about these ideas, and their implications for creative professionals and freelancers.

Name: Jeff Howe
Position: Contributing editor at Wired, author of Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
Date of birth: August 19, 1970
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
Resume: Attended Ohio University. Moved to NY in 1994 to be an art critic. Worked for a couple of years at Art Forum and Art in America. Edited a national college magazine called Link. Became a contributor at the Village Voice and worked at the magazine for Inside.com. Brought into the Wired fold in March, 2001, and went on contract several months afterwards.
First section of the Sunday Times: Week in Review.
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Last book read: Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg.
Guilty pleasure: Nicorette by the dozens.

Why do you think there is this explosion of people doing stuff for free in “crowd-sourced” communities?
People do it because it’s a lot of fun. People have always done it, but there has really been a renaissance of amateur activity. In the past, it was kind of an economic dark matter that took place in garages and at the local bars and in people’s kitchens and at church socials where people were producing information that possibly had some latent economic value — but there was no way to make it kinetic or leverage it. But then the Internet comes along and you can sell ads against it, and you can start pushing and prodding people to use this information production as a means of solving problems, taking photographs, and getting them rallied behind some idea of investigative reporting . [You can] have them pore over engineering blueprints instead of having a reporter do it, because some of the people in this community are engineers and know a lot more about this than an investigative reporter. It’s not that this stuff started with the Internet — it’s that the Internet made it economically valuable. And now there’s a positive feedback loop where you have companies that have exploited this for gain and are learning ways to foster even more people coming on and doing more of this.

The most successful examples have been ground-up; communities that form of their own sake and it’s almost happenstance that they are creating something of immense economic value. And then the corporations swoop down and buy it up. It’s fun — it’s passion, and passion is the currency of the 21st century.

But someone is making money off of it. How do you think this will affect the ability of people who do this kind of stuff for a living to get paid?
At this point there are a lot of thorny questions about “should these people be demanding more money?” I mean, are Flickr users “slave labor?” Flickr’s offering a valuable service, but Yahoo is making money off of it. Or a better question might be whether the people of iStockPhoto are bringing down the standards of photography and the general aesthetic quality of photography. Are they hurting the ability of a creative professional to make a living? These are very important questions — and the answer to some of these questions is “yes.” But should they stop? There’s obviously a value proposition there that is appealing, and that’s the market, for better or worse.

How do you see this market evolving?
Well, Ken Auletta is not going out of business anytime soon, and neither is Malcolm Gladwell or Sebastien Junger, and neither is David LaChappelle. High-end photograhpy will enjoy as robust a market as it ever has. I think top talent will always enjoy a market, and nothing that has happened as of now to telegraph that they’re in trouble.

If iStockPhoto and blogs is hurting the general level of content, it’s not by much. The fact is that the aesthetic quality of what’s being produced by professionals; that mid-range mid-market kind of stuff wasn’t very good anyway. I mean it was okay, it was passable. But the crowd is going to hurt the ability for your average sitcom writer to produce a really shitty product? Read some regional daily newspaper reporting — a lot of it is really bad. I mean, there are regional bloggers out there that are much better. The fact that they’re not accredited to do it, or that they don’t make a living doing it, doesn’t mean that they’re not doing a better job.

One of the things that crowdsourcing is doing is removing the patina of authority around the “accredited professional.” We’ve been chipping away at that patina for a long time, but this is really a positive thing. There’s a lot of professionals out there who have failed upward; I feel their pain, but at the same time a lot of them are bad and the amateurs are better. The fact that someone went to J-school or studied photography or got a PhD in organic chemistry is not a guarantee that they are doing good work. What crowdsourcing creates is a meritocracy where people who aren’t accredited, didn’t go to the right schools, and don’t necessarily need or want to make their living at it can compete with the professionals because sometimes they are as good.

But don’t the quality products and the people who create them soon become professional?
That’s really one of the big debates around all this user-generated content — is this really just a talent-finding mechanism? Or are we seeing the emergence of a new ecosystem, where basically people all have their heads in “the long tail”? I lean towards the former, but I still think that crowdsourcing is transformative because if you are creating a meritocracy in all of these fields, that’s still transformational. I don’t necessarily think the professional will end. I just think we have found this amazing new way to discover people who should be professionals.

What is the takeaway from your book for freelancers in media industries, as well as newspaper people who are being downsized and forced to reevaluate their careers?
I’d like the book to be well-read generally, but on a very emotional level hope that it is well-read in the media industry. I spent a lot of time looking at media, and it’s the one part where I didn’t just spend time looking at crowdsourcing, but also in practicing it. I think that newspapers, magazines, and editors ignore crowdsourcing at their own peril. From the perspective of a journalist, the crowd is a threat. And we can try and wish that away, but we’re not going to. From the perspective of publishers and editors the crowd is also a threat, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity.

A good example of this (that’s not in the book) is what Budget Travel did a few months ago, creating an entirely user-generated issue. What they learned in some ways was that it was a more vibrant issue than those produced by professionals — but it was also very labor-intensive. The lesson for publishers is that a deeper reader engagement is its own reward, but you’re expending a lot more energy editing.

So the idea that the crowd wants our jobs per se — that they want to cover city council meetings or write long-winded features about desalination — is the product of a crack high. No one wants to do that. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to produce the media; they want to give tips, they want to get involved, they want to feel like they have a relationship with the people producing their media, and they want to shoot photos and send them in. The audience has a lot of offer in terms of media, and I’m bullish on their ability to contribute meaningfully to investigative journalism.

The future of investigative journalism really is all about impassioned readers working close together with professionals unearthing information that would have formerly required teams of investigative reporters. You have smart journalists and editors who really have their ear to the rail when it comes to the subject, who are helping guide the crowd and ferreting out what’s good and what’s bad in what they come up with. But you have the crowd doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the aggregate. As individuals, people maybe aren’t doing that much; say everyone reads 10 internal memos, and suddenly you have 300,000 internal memos to read because you have 30,000 people who are happy to do it. Every newspaper in the country should be studying what Talking Points Memo does, because you could import that model and hammer away at government malfeasance on every level.

Does this work better for uncovering stuff in government than in business? On the one hand, the crowd is able to investigate, but they don’t really have the contacts or backing of a publication to get in touch with a CEO, say. I mean, it’s one thing if you call up and say “Hi, I’m Jeff Howe and I’m calling from Wired…” but it ‘s totally different if you’re just some guy who’s interested.
That’s why the first idea of crowdsourcing — that the crowd is simply going to rise up and produce a wholesale journalistic product — was terribly misguided. It just doesn’t work that way. You need someone with a source network making those calls. But the crowd is very good at these select tasks; at poring over documents, and gathering unique information in bulk. If you’ve got 30,000 people working on something, one of them is an engineer, one of them knows Spanish, one of them used to work at said corrupt utility. So that’s what you’re getting. But they’re not going to be completing those specialized functions that only a journalist can do. That’s why you need them working together, and you need this fact-checked as well. I mean, the crowd will give you lots of crap, so it needs to be filtered and sorted.

David Hirschman is editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Media Newsfeed.

Roy Johnson’s mother wanted him to be a lawyer, but it wasn’t in the cards: From the start, he was passionate about journalism, and he has worked his way through the ranks of a variety of magazines and newspapers over the past 30 years, mostly covering sports and business. Now at the helm of American Media Inc.’s Men’s Fitness, Johnson is preaching a gospel of diet and exercise to an increasingly obese nation. Here he talks to mediabistro.com about his magazine’s readers, his recent letter to President Obama, and what he thinks of Hearst’s plan for a Kindle-like device for magazines.

Name: Roy Johnson
Position: Editor-in-chief, Men’s Fitness
Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma
Birth date: March 19, 1956
Education: B.A. from Stanford University
Resume: Started as a reporter for Sports Illustrated in 1978. Moved on to The New York Times as a sports reporter covering the New Jersey Nets, and then became a sports columnist at the Atlanta Constitution. Returned to SI as a senior editor, overseeing college basketball, tennis and golf at various times. Briefly worked at Money before moving over to Fortune as an editor-at-large. Left Fortune to join Vanguard Media as the founding editor of Savoy. Returned to SI as an assistant managing editor in 2003, but then was laid off at the end of 2005. Joined Men’s Fitness as a consultant to CEO David Pecker, and then was given the title of editor-in-chief in May 2007.
Marital Status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: Front section
Favorite TV show: ER
Guilty pleasure: Golf

Tell me a little about how you got started in media.

I started out as editor of my junior high paper, and while I was encouraged to pursue something other than journalism (and majored in political science at Stanford because I was going to be an attorney), I actually ended up in the profession that was most at my core.

When I left college, I was torn between law school and starting to work. Torn, in part, because my mom wanted me to go to law school. And so I applied to some schools, but I said, “Let me get a job, I can always go back to school.” I ended up with two job offers out of college. One was to become a local reporter at the Tulsa Daily World, where I would have been the first black reporter at the paper. The other offer was to become a reporter at Sports Illustrated. That decision literally took seconds to make, and I ended up coming to New York to work for SI. My mother was disappointed, but she got over it.

While you have worked at a couple of business magazines, for most of your career you’ve been writing about sports. Men’s Fitness is focused much more on service pieces about health and conditioning. How was that transition for you?
It’s actually been an easy transition, but it’s a natural transition. Having been around people who essentially earn a living with their bodies has proven to be a great resource for keeping our readers ahead of the curve when it comes to fitness and nutrition trends… My background has really helped because I not only had relationships in the sports industry and sports world, but really had an insight into what is required for these guys to perform the way they do.

Do you see the magazine as a venue to help people who are obese, or is it more for guys who are already in shape and seeking to up their game?
Ideally, if a guy wants to get in shape, he can pick us up and find something that helps him get his foot in the door to take that first step toward living a healthy lifestyle. Most of our readers have already embraced it to some degree, and are looking to elevate their game, to get in better shape, to get stronger, to build more stamina, to learn what they should do to enhance their workouts. So with most of the guys who are picking us up, it’s not the first time they’re going in to the gym. But we have a broad spectrum of readers.

In February, you addressed your editor’s letter directly to President Obama. What was behind that?
I thought this was an opportunity, with a new president coming in under the banner of change, to put something that I feel is very important in front of him as he tackles the various challenges that the nation is facing — certainly there could be no greater challenge than getting America back in shape. I didn’t write it lightly because I feel that fitness has an impact on our society, and certainly there are costs related to healthcare when we are not in good condition, and there are costs related to work efficiency, and costs relative toward our own feeling about ourselves… So I encouraged him to look at this and develop an agenda that would get America back on track, including a revival of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness with a mandate to begin educating people in the ways they can get in better condition and start eating better; to look at what we are giving our kids in our schools and try and pull some of the trans fats out of cafeterias; and to look at reviving sports programs in our schools.

So you see yourself in an advocacy role as the editor of a fitness magazine?
No question about it. I feel like I and my staff are ambassadors of living a fit and healthy lifestyle, and imparting the benefits of investing in yourself to the reader. I think there’s a clear mandate and opportunity to say, ‘We’re giving you something to help you live a better life.’

Is that a requirement of staffers? Do people on your team have to get in shape?
It certainly helps to be living the life that you speak of. Not everyone here looks like our fitness models, but I think we have a pretty good group of people who not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk — in their own way.

How does online play into the magazine’s plans, and are you doing anything with other platforms?
I tell our staff that we’re not a magazine staff, we’re a brand staff. And our aim is to create content and distribute it to readers however they want it — either through the Web site, or through their iPhones, or whatever medium they happen to be using. Ideally, we’d like to be able to have people take us to the gym, either on their iPod as audio or video workouts, or any of those things.

Hearst recently announced that they are planning to come out with a Kindle-like E-reader for magazines. What do you think of the idea, and do you think that the model of Kindle can work for magazines?
I’m intrigued by Kindle. I think for magazines it depends on the content. Just as how the experience of reading Men’s Fitness is different from getting the same information on the Web, we distribute it both ways because each individual might want the information in a different way at a different time. I think there will always be users who love that experience of reading a magazine and touching a physical magazine — and there will be people who immediately migrate to another medium. For those, the content is what drives them, and so the ability to get the content easily is more important than touching the paper. I want to get all of them.

American Media Inc., your parent company, barely avoided bankruptcy a few months ago after restructuring its debt. Has that affected Men’s Fitness at all, and do you anticipate problems in the future from it?
I don’t think there’s a media company in existence that hasn’t been affected by the turmoil of the economy — whether there have been layoffs and restructurings or not. Most companies have had some sort of action like that. It’s unfortunate and the industry is certainly undergoing seismic change. Some of it may have been necessary, and it’s unfortunate when you see your colleagues leave, and see how it sometimes affects the people who remain behind. But we’re a resilient industry and we’re a resilient company. Morale is getting back to itself again. People still believe in what we do and believe in the products we’re creating. And as long as we’re doing that and feel like the market is responding, we’ll be fine.

David Hirschman is editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Media Newsfeed.

Larry Kramer didn’t intend to be a media entrepreneur: Growing up, all he wanted to be was an investigative reporter and editor, breaking Watergate-like stories from the side of business. But after following this path through Harvard Business School, and into stints as a reporter, editor, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of some of the most highly respected newspapers in the country, he saw an opportunity and he took it. The result was Marketwatch, an online news service that he helmed for 14 years before it was sold to Dow Jones for more than $500 million in 2005. Kramer will be moderating a panel entitled “New Business Models for Media” on Wednesday, June 3, at Mediabistro Circus. Here he talks to mediabistro.com about which models for monetization look the most promising, and how a young journalist might break into the industry in this age of media upheaval.

Name: Larry Kramer
Position: Senior adviser, Polaris Venture Partners
Birthdate: April 24, 1950
Hometown: Hackensack, N.J.
Education: Syracuse University (journalism) undergrad, Harvard Business School
Resume: Reporter and editor in various positions at the San Francisco Examiner and The Washington Post; Editor-in-chief of the Trenton Times; managing editor, Metro, of The Washington Post; editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Examiner; founder of Marketwatch; advisor to CBS Digital and others. Currently writes for The Daily Beast and serves on the boards of seven different companies and institutions, including Discovery Media and The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show: House
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports or business, depending on the season.
Last book read: Boom! by Tom Brokaw
Guilty pleasure: Playing golf.

You’ve been involved in thinking about models of online content monetization for a while. What do you think are the most promising ideas out there, and how do you think publications are going to make money in the future?

I think that what the Web allows — and what we should therefore offer — is alternatives. Look at entertainment TV: you can watch shows on TV and you can look at the ads, or you can go to iTunes and pay for it and watch it with no ads, or you can get it some other way. And so I think we should have every option open to people. I think whether or not people will pay for content (or how many will) depends on a lot of things, including the economy. But the Web is wonderful in that it allows for multiple business models. It has to be about multiple revenue streams — you’ve got to have that to avoid tragedy, and to avoid what’s happening now to companies that are entirely ad-based.

So you think advertising is done as a business model for the time being?
Absolutely not. We’re in a downturn, but advertising will come back. People have to sell things, and companies need to market their products — and they will. There’s no question that there are new ways to do that — and for some advertisers, something like [Google’s] AdSense might be the most efficient way to do that no matter what happens. But there still are multiple kinds of advertising that will need homes, and they generally reside around where people are spending all of their time. If you’re trying to sell people something they don’t know they want, then you have to go wherever they are. And people are on the Web… We have a huge open area as to what people are going to watch and how they are going to get that content. So advertising will find a way to be involved in that — it has to. It’s in its infancy now; they don’t know how to measure it.

One of the great things about the Web is that it’s an enormously accountable medium. If we sold a million newspapers, you can’t know how many people saw your ad on page B22 — yet the medium can charge you for the million they were printing. On the Web, you don’t get ad money paid to you unless people go to the page it’s on.

Magazine editors love controlling the look and feel of what you see. That’s a big part of what a magazine is; the way things look and the quality and the size. They all make a difference to you as a consumer. In the Internet world, the consumer controls that — how big a screen he has, what he’s looking at, what he chooses to look at. You have to adapt to that — both as someone who is giving them information, or something for purposes of entertainment, or selling something.

And so the storytelling process is being reinvented; it’s just totally at a new moment. We don’t yet have that generation of digital storytellers who are integrating all forms of media on one platform… The real future is total integration. When someone is telling a story they use video when they should, use text when they should, use pictures when they should, and use interactive graphics when they should. And it’s a single, seamless process. And we don’t even have that down as a medium yet, so how can the advertisers have it down?

The theme of the Mediabistro Circus this year is “Doing More With Less.” Which companies do you think are doing the best at this point in economizing?
For media companies, doing “more with less” means that, in all likelihood, a good number of the revenue streams which supported you are gone. Newspapers and newsgathering were supported by, among other things, classified ads, and that was purely because of the medium. Because the only way to get those ads into every house was to have them delivered there in a newspaper — because a newspaper went to every house. It had nothing to do with the news, but the news operation was supported by it. Now there’s a more efficient way to do it, so there’s the end of that revenue stream.

As a media company, you assume you have less revenue and it has to be made up to some extent. But it also means that you need to figure out how to more efficiently deliver the message that you have to deliver. And on top of that, because the public can now go to any news source, one of your key roles is no longer going to be filtering everything the way it used to be. But the fact is, you still have to filter it, but you are filtering more of a finished product.

In the old days, press releases went to the press, and you didn’t get coverage unless they gave it to you. Today, people issue press releases and they show up in a hundred places, whether any news chooses to pick it up or not. But if you’re the consumer of that press release, you might not know how important that news is — you’re not getting anyone’s advice. So the journalist’s role as the curator of the “long tail” is the new part of what they have to do. It means that instead of ignoring the fact that everything is now available to the public, they’ve got to take advantage of that and help the public figure out which of the 20 blogs out of the 10 million on a subject they care about matter — or are giving you an intelligent offering. Part of the journalist’s role will be to help link you, the reader, to the best and the brightest information. And there you don’t need armies of reporters to necessarily cover everything yourself. The public has said very clearly in some places, “We care about the wisdom of the mob.” We care about what 1,000 people think is the best hotel in Belgrade — not necessarily a paid journalist who’s out there reviewing it, or the marketing efforts of a company that owns it.

As journalists you have to use that information and use everything that’s out there publicly, and organize that for your readers. And, in a lot of ways, that’s different from investigative reporting — which you still have to do by the way. It’s less important for you to write a piece saying, “Here are the best hotels in Belgrade,” and it’s more important — instead of paying $100,000 a year to a great travel editor — to pay some people less who are basically moderators or curators, to take what’s available and use the wisdom of your position to select as opposed to do it again.

If you’re The Boston Globe‘s foreign editor, your value may not be anymore in hiring a reporter in every city in the world, but in telling your readers who’s got the best coverage that matters to them and delivering it to them.

But as there are fewer and fewer newspapers producing this kind of content, isn’t there less and less content for news organizations to aggregate?
Yes, there are right now. But here’s how the model changes in my book: Ten years from now, we don’t have TV newsrooms, newspaper newsrooms, radio newsrooms — we just have newsrooms. And the newsrooms are built around what they’re covering, not how they’re delivering it. So you get a Washington newsroom that is covering D.C., and it’s covering the federal government. And instead of it being a newspaper or a TV station or a network or whatever, its job is just to cover Washington, and it has journalists everywhere there. And its job is to distribute content on every platform from there. It could be sports, it could be finance… These could be geographical or whatever. It’s just subject matter coverage… It doesn’t mean that every reporter has to have a camera and do video. It just means that you have to understand what part of that story is best told in video and be able to tell it.

There will ultimately not be one news organization covering each place of topic — there will probably be a couple or more. To make an analogy, it was once this way for wire services. There was AP, UPI, Reuters, Agence France Press — all these alternatives that would give you some coverage of London or Moscow or Washington. This is not to say that The Boston Globe shouldn’t have a reporter in Washington — there is a Massachusetts delegation, and there are issues that are related to Boston there that they should be covering. But why do they have to have a reporter covering the White House? Why not have the equivalent of one or two wire services covering the White House — only instead of wire services, they’re news services and they cover it for everybody.

Because these platforms are merging… why not just do them once? The smartest way to do this is to divide it up not by medium, but by what it is that they’re covering.

As a guy who started out wanting to be a newspaper man during the Watergate period, how do you feel about the fact that the old-style culture of journalism has been lost in these changes?
I think it was lost way before all this happened. Everybody I knew who was a reporter back then wanted to change the world. But the industry got much more “professional” over the last couple decades. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re training good journalists, we’re doing all the right things. But I think that what they’ve lost is a lot of the passion that drove us. There are great journalists now — don’t get me wrong, and it’s fun to find them and see them do their thing, but it was more prevalent then. There were fewer people who really cared that much about how much they made, and that led to a situation where media people really aren’t paid that much — unless they’re really big. There’s a really big chasm between the average reporter and a superstar. The danger of that had already happened. But one of the nice things about the Web is that it’s bringing back a lot of the people who have passion, because they don’t have to get a job at The Washington Post to go and be an investigative reporter.

What would be your advice for someone who is starting out now — say a 23-year-old college grad who is thinking about J-school?
The difference now is that [young journalists] don’t have to go to Grand Forks [North Dakota] for three years to become anchor. They’re going to where they want to live because, like everyone in the world these days, they’re more used to getting things the way they want it.

I don’t think people have to go to strange places or small towns [to get started as journalists]. There’s nothing wrong with it — small towns need coverage too. But the fact of the matter is, if you’re a good statistician, you should go to Washington and work with one of the investigative groups that are using stats to break stories… Or if you love business reporting, work for any of a number of Web sites that cover business. One of the traditional ways in, too, was always through trade publications, and there are more and more of those with the Web. Niche publications are great.

We still don’t have yet a whole generation of storytellers on these new platforms. Platforms are changing so much that nobody’s got a head start on you if you’re a kid. If you have the heart and soul and you’re interested in covering something, you can go to any one of these new media places and in three weeks be as knowledgeable and up to date as everybody there — including what tools are available and how to tell stories — because they changed last week anyway. I think it’s a wonderful time, and it’s a great time to reinvent what we do. But at the core of it — are ethical standards, are issues of fairness.

Do you think that ultimately the big media companies are on the way out?
I think the big media companies right now are in bunker mentality. They’re getting so slammed on revenues, that it’s not about where they are now or where they’ll be in 10 years, it’s about the transition. And taking the transition, particularly if you’re a public company, is brutal right now — because you have to recondition your company (including all of the shareholders) that this is going to be a very different company. It’s not going to be nearly as big.

Everybody has to reset what defines success [for a large media company]. And that’s almost impossible to do.

David Hirschman is editor of mediabistro.com’s Daily Media Newsfeed.