Cathie Black is referred to, un-ironically, as “the First Lady of American
Magazines,” a title that not only describes her power within the industry, but
also her shattering of its glass ceiling. It’s largely due to Black that Hearst
has been the steadiest of America’s great magazine companies, conserving its
strength and growing slowly, steadily, while others chased grand expansion plans
and digital dreams.

But now, Black has decided that the time is right for Hearst to join the Web
2.0 wave in earnest, beginning with a generation of magazine sites rolling out
over the next few months. mediabistro.com recently interviewed Black about her
company’s plans, the shape of the industry, and the endgame for the magazine
business, which she dutifully presented in nearly 25 words or less: “There will
continue to be stars made and opportunities presented — I don’t know if there
are going to be fortunes made — I think we are going to be around as we know it
as long as we all are comfortable constantly with reassessing, with taking risks
and not being afraid of change, of just getting unstuck. But I think,
personally, that most people have gotten over that.”

Name: Cathleen P. (“Cathie”) Black
Position: President,
Hearst Magazines
Publication: 19 consumer magazines in the U.S.,
nearly 200 worldwide, including such brands as Cosmopolitan, Good
Housekeeping, Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, and
Seventeen
Education: Trinity College (She also holds eight
other honorary degrees)
Hometown: Chicago
First job: Ad
sales at Holiday magazine
Last 3 jobs: President, then
publisher of USA Today; executive vice president/marketing of Gannett;
resident and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.
Birthdate:
4/26/44
Marital status: Married
What’s your
favorite TV show: Grey’s Anatomy
Last book
read: Two books in progress — Bad Blood by
Linda Fairstein, and I’m about to start Why Some Ideas Succeed and Others
Die by Chris and Dan Heath, that Kate White, editor-in-chief of
Cosmo, highly recommended. And there is always a cookbook by the side of
the bed for browsing.
Most interesting media story right now: Frankly,
it changes every day, sometimes every hour. But right now, Viacom asking YouTube
to remove 100,000 clips from its site and the Cartoon Network guerrilla
marketing stunt mistaken for a bomb threat are the two most interesting stories.
[Ed: Answer was sent Feb. 5]
Guilty pleasure: Massage
First
section you read in your Sunday paper: Page One and then Real Estate! (I
just bought a house.)

It’s my understanding that Hearst is about to begin re-launching each of
its magazine sites over the next few months, beginning with Esquire.com. I’m curious as to
what the readers should expect of these sites now that Hearst is finally heading
back onto the Web in a big way.
First of all, the sites are going to
look different from each other. The primary phrase we have at the front of our
brain, hopefully every single day, is “the user experience.” Our editors have
moved from thinking that a magazine’s Web site was just the magazine on the Web,
to really thinking that the magazine is a brand on the Web. We know for sure
that it has to be, and is, a different medium. In other words, we want to keep
that user going forward so they are finding the experience on our Web site
interesting, interactive, entertaining, fun, you name it.

Each one of them has been carefully thought out. [Esquire editor]
David Granger and I just had lunch today, and he was talking about Eric
[Gillin], his Web site editor, who he thinks is fantastic and who has a million
ideas and kind of, sort of scoped it out in his own mind. The teen sites have
been a petri dish for us. We’ve had a very goodWeb site for CosmoGIRL!,
and a younger staff is creating that, so we’ve used that as something to look at
to try to figure out what elements of that make sense for some of our other
sites. Everyone is just hot to trot. I mean all the editors here and the Web
editors want their site to be the best, and they wanted it up yesterday.

Unlike Time Inc. or Condé Nast, Hearst has been happy to farm out its Web
operations at times to Women.com and to iVillage. But now you’ve recentralized again with Hearst
Digital and the editors’ newfound zealotry for the Web. How and why did Hearst
get its Internet religion, lose it, and then get it back again?
Well I
don’t think Hearst ever lost religion, but the Web has changed so dramatically.
Early on, there was Home Arts, which merged with Women.com. So right from the
beginning, we were working through partners. I don’t know if that was such a bad
thing because, let’s face it, there weren’t that many users back then, and
certainly there were no ad dollars. In any event, Women.com handled our sites,
so we kind of talked the talk, but we were not creating them. It was the same
thing with iVillage. Yes, there was a Web editor for each magazine here, but the
real ownership was at iVillage. I mean that figuratively and literally. And we
all felt very strongly that for us to really be a part of a very
transformational moment in our media world, we had to be the patrons of our own
sites. So there’s great excitement here that this is the right moment. Our sites
are magazine brands; we don’t want them disconnected from the brands here.


What’s Hearst’s philosophy online in terms of revenue and growth? Ann
Moore is making headlines, seemingly every week over at Time Inc., as she seeks
to dump every spare penny into the magazine sites. She’s convinced that online
is where all of Time Inc.’s future growth lies.
The day that the digital
revenue for Cosmo will come close to profit that Cosmo makes for
this company will be a beautiful thing. Cosmo is a huge
profit-maker and a huge revenue-generator, so it would surprise me if at
any time in the next couple of years we would see anything approaching it. Maybe
it’s 10 percent of our ad revenue that comes into the company today, but the
idea of it becoming 50 percent or even higher of the revenue from our magazine
division is just improbable to imagine. I could be wrong, but I don’t see the
migration of many of our magazines to a digital-only platform.

That said, do we need a new way to measure the vitality of magazines? Is
it worth it to still track advertising pages sold? And is it worth a permanent 5
percent decline in ad pages in exchange for what amounts to a 10 percent gain
from digital revenue? Are we talking about the wrong things when we talk about
the health of the business as a whole?
No, I don’t think we are talking
about the wrong thing, but what I do believe that we have to look at digital
efforts as its own business, because it’s expensive. What I don’t want is to
encourage advertiser A or advertiser B to say ‘Well, I spent a $100 with you
last year. In 2007, I’m going to spend $90 at that magazine and $10 online.’ And
I don’t want them saying ‘you should feel good about that’ because I want them
to spend $110. It shouldn’t be an either-or.

In your remarks at a recent Magazine Publishers of America breakfast, you
touched upon the increasing difficulty of launches. Other publishers have
experienced this too, with Time Inc., Hachette, etc. all closing magazines to
refocus on core properties like People, Sports Illustrated, and
Elle. Even Meredith is pouring the majority of its efforts into
franchising brands like Better Homes & Garden in new media, rather
than inventing new brands. Given those developments as a backdrop, how do you
see the Hearst portfolio evolving? Is it inevitable that the largest publishers
will only have a handful of their most successful brands pumping at their
hearts?
It’s a simple answer to say you have to do some of all of it.
We’re all looking for the next big idea for what could be a really important
magazine. Oprah has been an extraordinary successful magazine. And there
are new magazines started in the last decade: Real Simple, and now
[Everyday With} Rachael Ray seems to have gotten a lot of traction on the
newsstand. But it’s a much more difficult environment.

You know, years ago here at Hearst, we launched Country Living, which
has been a great moneymaker for more than 20 years now. We put one magazine on
the stands with no ad staff and it sold very well, which told us that this
reader really had a connection to the magazine. In today’s world, pick any
number you want; I have no idea what Condé Nast will have spent — both for
almost the last two years and into the next two years — on Portfolio.
They’ve announced it’s a $100 million investment. We’re just not going to
do that. It may not be a hockey stick [Black is referring to the shape of
financial projections on a graph], but at some point, after your big early
investment period of two or three years, what’s it really looking like there? Is
it going to get the ad traction? Maybe it will, I’m not really positive.

But you know, we’re a different company, everybody’s a different company. We
measure our metrics very carefully. We review our new products constantly, and
ask ‘is it going to hit break-even?’ But not only is it going to break even,
what is it going to do in the 24 months after that? It is going to really make
sense for us to put in the time, the effort, the creativity, the financial
investment, etc.? It would be great to be able to launch something for $10
million, but when you’re in New York and the ad community demands a big hoopla
over the launch of a magazine, it adds overhead that’s just unbelievable and
hard to live up to.

What happens to staffing levels and employees as the industry contracts
and cut costs to maintain its overall health? You’re on record as being a fan of
the British magazine method, with its smaller, more nimble staffs, and Hearst’s
magazine have quietly reduced headcount on your watch. What does the staff of
the future look like at Hearst, and will employees have the same opportunities
to advance upward?
That’s a very good question. I remember when Felix
Dennis spoke at the MPA Conference six years ago, and he knew that when he came
to the United States to launch Maxim, he would have a 25 pecent larger
staff than he did in the U.K. just because that’s how New York is. And that’s
the sort of thing we wrestle with all the time.

For example, Quick and Simple is, at this point, sold by the Good
Housekeeping sales staff. There’s a lot of synergies between the two, so the
former’s advertising staff is — honestly! — one person and an assistant. But
they have the resources of Good Housekeeping, which has a lot of feet on
the street, if you will. America has not come around to the way most advertising
is sold in the rest of the world, which is much more on a group concept. You
might have a publishing director — there’s no publisher — and the next title
is probably “advertising director,” and they might sell two magazines or it
might be a group.

We were charting workflow not long ago — I like the operations side of the
business — and if you look at the U.K., an editor might touch a piece of copy
once or twice because it’s a small staff. It’s that they don’t have the time,
not because they don’t have the interest. They don’t have the time. It
moves through the system very quickly. If you chart most magazines in the United
States, including our own, you’ll see that people are touching, and retouching,
and editing, and re-editing something six or seven times. If you want to figure
out why that happens, look at the UK. I would suggest that they have very few
middle managers. It’s probably 15 people or 18 people or even seven people, so
they multitask. They don’t work all night long. Honestly, they aren’t in the
production departments at eight or nine at night.

How is the new Hearst Tower helping with recruiting? It’s been suggested
that the new building and new cafeteria has gone a long way in addressing
Hearst’s corporate inferiority complex vis-á-vis Condé Nast.
The power
of an environment to change people’s thinking,, and their attitude and their
sense of everything is unbelievable. Our retention rates have already gone up…
it’s only a few percentage points, so it’s not going to make or break it one way
or the other but — quite honestly — if I were 25 and if I were interviewing at
this company or a similar company, and saw that we have a fitness center and saw
this incredible café, and all the open work environment that creates
communication and camaraderie and all the rest of it, I’d think it’s a slam
dunk.

Well, assuming you were 25 again, and were starting your career over
again, where would you start? Seeing that you began your career at Ms.,
and seeing that Ms. doesn’t really exist anymore, I was picturing you
starting out at some sort of blog network aimed at young women…
I have
always loved the print business. I’m as excited about the digital world as
anybody else, but I love the feeling of being around creative people, of looking
at beautiful things, of reading a great story, so I’d probably come to magazines
again.

You broke gender barriers during your upward ascent, including becoming
the first female publisher of a weekly magazine at New York. How has the
magazine landscape changed since then in terms of opportunities for women? From
my generation’s view, publishing would seem to be dominated by women, or at
least editorial is.
It’s a very welcoming environment, and if you want
to look at an industry and ask ‘Where have women succeeded? Where are they
sitting in the larger offices? Where do they have the titles?’ I think you would
say, for whatever reason, ‘Gee, this seems to be a place that I can excel.’
Women tend to get stuck in the staffing positions, not the line-operating
positions, and they haven’t been trapped in those in publishing.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.

Rafat Ali is the founder, publisher, and editor of ContentNext, the parent company of his first and most widely known blog, PaidContent.org. Only 31 years old, Ali started PaidContent in 2002, after reporting stints at Inside.com and Jason Calacanis’ Venture Reporter. Long before the phrase “blogging for dollars” entered the Web’s lexicon, Ali was the sole proprietor of the newsblog of record for media executives desperately trying to crack the code of making content pay online. Since then, he’s added editors (including former Inside colleague Staci Kramer), investors (including Alan Patricof), new sites (MocoNews.net) and even veteran management (new COO Jordan Posell). I remember Ali when we were both cub reporters sitting back-to-back in the cubicle farm of Brill’s Content in its final days, after Brill had bought Inside and everyone was scrambling for the exits. Ali was an afterthought then; today he’s arguably its most successful alumnus not named Andersen or Hirschorn. “Last year was a very eventful one; it was when we really became a company. To call us one before then was really a stretch,” he says.

Name: Rafat Ali
Position: Editor & Publisher, PaidContent.org
Company: ContentNext Media
Education: Master in Journalism, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2000; B.Tech in Computer Engineering, Aligarh, India, 1996
Hometown: London, England; Presently settled in: Santa Monica, CA
First job: A PR executive in India… glorified press release distributor
Last three jobs: Intern, Inside.com and then Reporter, Inside.com; Managing Editor, Silicon Alley Reporter; and now this
Birthdate: April 26, 1975
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show: Friday Night Lights
Last book read: The Gang That Couldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten
Most interesting media story right now: The attempts by big media companies to develop a YouTube rival. More the mentality behind it than the story itself.
Guilty pleasure: Carpenters

Not many journalists ever make the leap from reporter or editor to CEO or senior manager. Did your training as a journalist adequately prepare you for that? And if not, what would you liked to have known before diving in head first?
I wish I had understood the financial aspects. If you want to run a company one day, and you’re a journalist and you don’t know stuff like “former earnings versus this versus that,” then you’re making a huge mistake, not just as a journalist, but as an entrepreneur as well. If you don’t, no one else will sort it out for you.

That set us back considerably [at ContentNext] because we couldn’t get our act together organizationally. Part of that was my fault because I didn’t know how to get health insurance — I didn’t know how to do the operational day-to-day stuff. That’s what I would tell someone getting into this game. Even with Om [Malik, a former Business 2.0 editor-turned blogger], I told him, “Make sure you get a financial person, even if you have to pay for him through the nose.” Make sure all the business stuff is in order because that will save you so much heartbreak and worry. That was what I had no clue about when I started in 2002. These days, bloggers start with the idea of being a business, but I started [my blog] just to raise my own profile.

Obviously you’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur…
No, I did not. In 2000 and 2001, I came out of school, and like everybody, I wanted to be a magazine feature writer. But the world doesn’t work that way.

You come to realize that being a magazine feature writer, like writing for The New Yorker or Esquire, just doesn’t happen. When you go to a journalism school, they don’t try to teach you that you will, but that’s the image you get: feature writing is glamorous. That’s what I had in mind. I never thought I would go out and break news. I never thought of myself as a reporter. But it turned out that way.

At Inside.com, I was a feature writer because I wasn’t doing daily stuff, I was writing one or two stories a week. Mine were trend pieces. But when I went to Silicon Alley Reporter, Jason [Calacanis] had that same question: “Do you have the chops to do reporting?” I said “Well, I haven’t really done much, but I can try.” I asked him to give me two months to prove myself, and after that, he could fire me. I emailed him that much and he said, “When can you join?” That’s where I learned reporting — or not learned, but where I was just thrown into it. We had a daily newsletter, and it had to have X many stories. I was given stories where I had half an hour to figure out the background and then start calling sources.

One of the things I tell people is that at Inside.com, how I learned to report was actually from watching you [Lindsay] and David Carr conduct interviews on the phone. In school, they never teach you how to do phone interviews — they never teach you about interviews in the first place. One of the things I learned from David Carr — I overheard him because he was generally loud, especially at the old Inside.com building where I sat across from him — was how to ask the hard questions.

And what did you possibly learn from listening to me?
You were always the guy they gave a story to when they couldn’t figure out anything else to do, and then you would call 50 people. I learned to call as many people as you can and that somebody will get back to you; somebody will tell you the story. People ask, “How do you get a story?” I say that there are as many sources within the company as there are employees in the company. Somebody will talk. I’ll email everybody, I’ll call everybody I have to, and somebody will talk. That’s what I learned at Inside as a general principle: Do whatever it takes to get the story. That’s what they don’t teach you at school.

As one of the first blogger-entrepreneurs, you’re also the closest to the end game at this point. What’s your exit strategy? And what will be the likely fates of your contemporaries?
We don’t have an exit strategy. I’ll tell you that right up front. If two years down the line someone says, “We want to buy your company,” we’ll be in a position to have that discussion. Our company should be in good enough shape that we’re ready to flip the switch if we need to.

I know this sounds vague, but even before Alan [Patricof] invested, we went through a round of talks with various media companies. Three or four companies you can probably think of wanted to buy us, and we had first-round talks with each of them. I realized that we were nowhere even close to being in a shape to sell the company. I decided we’re not going to sell the company; we’re going to make an investment: Let’s build the company into a real one. That was when I realized that we needed to build enough systems organization. I might sound like a guy on Dilbert, but the fact of the matter is that the business fundamentals are now in place. It’s difficult to scale beyond a certain point.

That’s a thing I worry about — we have built the company with me, Staci [Kramer] and two other people. How do we scale it? That’s another strategic thing we think about a lot. We have a CFO now, whose job is to ensure that everything is GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Principles] compliant. We’re very close to being GAAP compliant, which is a huge deal to us. All that stuff we have to worry about.

But back to your question about the endgame. I’ve been at this for five years. I have a wife now. I’ve been with her for two years, I haven’t really spent any time with her, and I want to. When someone comes along with the right amount, we’ll look at all the options. It’s an honest answer. I guess there’s no science to it: If somebody makes an offer that makes sense, I’ll definitely look at it.

Do you think what you are doing now is fundamentally any different than classic newsletter publishing or trade publishing?
Not really… Well, yes, in the sense that the economics have gotten much leaner. And yes, because you can come to market much faster, you can run on a leaner budget, and you can break stories as they happen because of the tools. But, at the end of the day, it’s all about sales. You have an audience; so how do you sell that audience to an advertiser?

For us, because of the industry we are in, because we have so many endemic advertisers in the space, the sale space has been shortened by a huge factor. And this is the trade media mentality — because of the endemic advertisers we have in the field, our sales factors are short, compared to a big general news site, which is focused on everything, and then they have to go to the agencies, and the agencies have a yearly budget. We don’t work by those budgets. We work with “I’m gonna email a CEO at some company and ask ‘Do you want to advertise?’ and they say ‘Yes.'” Then, a week later, they start advertising.

The next step is to go to the bigger companies, who go through a buying agency. We’ve started working with them — we now have three ad sales people. They’ve begun making the rounds of the agencies, speaking to clients, taking them out to dinner, all that stuff. If it were me, I would have said “Screw all that,” but you have to do it. It’s how a media company has been run for ages and ages. At the end of the day, it’s about ad sales.

One again, what will be the fates of your contemporaries? Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and he’s long gone. Denton continues to hold out, and remains enigmatic about his ultimate plans. John Battelle has gained some traction with Federated Media, but once the blogs in his network reach a certain size, they hire their own sales staffs and leave.
All these sites, these small blogs that are influential in a certain area or community, will never be on the radar of the media planning agencies because the latter don’t have the bandwidth to go that small and to look for the gems in a specific industries. John Battelle and his company, that’s their role, to be the broker for medium-to-large-ish sites. He’ll tell you that his aim was never represent the biggest of big sites because they can survive on their own, they can hire other people. His aim is to really represent the middle part. To that extent, I think he’s been successful over the last six to eight months or a year. It’s still too early to tell if he’ll be successful in the long run. He takes a huge chunk of money — 40 percent, which is ridiculous — but generally, I think he’s doing okay.

If the big media companies come and subsume us… I don’t know, that’s what happens with everything. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. Look at YouTube. Look at MySpace. I’m not sure if any of those two sites have lost anything yet. It’s too early to tell with YouTube, but has MySpace gone completely uncool because News Corp. bought it? I’m not sure that has happened. If it’s lost cool, it’s not because News Corp. bought it — it’s become too big and too mainstream to remain cool.

If big media comes in, will a lot of the stuff lose its indie cachet? If they do, then I’m sure new ones will be started. That’s the thing about this: It’s so easy to start something, that even if the bigger ones get bought by bigger media companies, there will always be enough people to start new ones.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview contains excerpts, and has been edited for clarity.]

To celebrate mediabistro.com’s 10th anniversary, we spoke with our Golden Boa honorees about their achievements in media. Check back throughout the week for Hey How’d You Do That features showcasing these media pros.

Betting on the globalization of the advertising business is how Scott Goodson built his career. He didn’t set out to start another conglomerate or sprawling one-stop-shop with offices in third-tier cities, but rather the opposite. Back in 1999, after nearly a decade co-owning an agency in Sweden and working for JWT in his native Canada, he moved back to Europe to open StrawberryFrog, a boutique unencumbered by bureaucracy and eager to serve clients regardless of their geography. A few years later, Goodson packed a backpack and landed in New York to open a second office from scratch. His splinter group would go on to land clients as diverse as Asics, MTV, Heineken, and Sam’s Club, and also lead the onslaught of accented boutiques like Mother and Taxi. He sees the agency of the future as an ultra-lean team solely concerned with generating the best ideas for clients; the actual execution will be outsourced.

A little more than a decade ago, you were still in Sweden, where you were the co-owner of your own agency by the time you were 25. How did a Canadian born in Montreal end up in Sweden, not to mention end up in advertising in the first place?

I grew up in a family that was working in the business, and I started working in advertising for my dad’s publishing and printing company. After graduation, I wanted to find a way to work that was unconventional. And I met my Swedish wife, who lived with me in Canada for a while, but then we ended up in Stockholm. We moved there for what was supposed to be a year, but it ended up being 10 years. You get caught up in a life decision that you have nothing to do with, and it changes your life forever. The decision to move to Stockholm was one of those decisions that many of my friends and parents said, “What are you crazy?” but I went there just as Sweden was going through a media renaissance.

Sweden had been a country in which advertising was basically prohibited. There was no television advertising, no radio, and there was basically print and outdoor. So I learned a very different way of thinking abut strategy, because the Swedes were very strategic, and very logical in the use of imagery, particularly in using still imagery to tell the whole brand idea in one photograph. That was very much a Swedish art form.

Then, all the laws were repealed and there was just this explosion of creativity. There was no history of how advertising was suppose to be done, unlike in North America, where you have clients that have 60 years of how their advertising is supposed to be done. So we had clients whose idea of a TV spot was a Fellini movie. It was really easy to create good advertising, and also innovative marketing, because so many of the clients were in IT, like cell phone makers. They obviously wanted to break boundaries, change behaviors, and find new ways of connecting customers. There was a global market opening up for Swedish multinationals.

I did that for 10 years, and I learned a few things. First of all, a very small, very focused, and very talented group of people could guide and guard a global brand. You don’t have to be huge corporation.

Canadian journalists have attributed at least some of your success to your upbringing in Montreal. As a Canadian, they argued, you were raised to see the broader world and not just in terms of your native country, as Americans are prone to do. Were you unafraid to live and work abroad because of that, and did that lead you to start StrawberryFrog in Amsterdam?

I have no idea. There’s a certain amount of fearlessness you are raised with when your father owns a company. You have to stay focused on your goals, and sustainability is the key issue for an independent organization. I’ve never really been panic-stricken by running companies with a lot of employees and clients. The Swedish example was great because it proved you could do international global brand work for major corporations on international basis with clients that were not prepared to ram advertising down people’s throats, but needed an approach that would bring people together and inspire them to work together based on universal insight.

And, there are a lot of Americans in Amsterdam and a lot of Americans in Sweden. It’s becoming increasingly popular amongst young people to live in a world without borders. I do think that growing up in a social democratic country like Canada, you tend to compare yourself to other people, because you always want to feel that you’re growing up in a society that is better than other nations. You have a natural openness and curiosity about what happens outside of your own country. A lot of my friends went to work in New York or Toronto after school, and it just felt natural to go a totally different way. I think to some extent that’s why we’ve managed, through the company, to establish ourselves. I think that you need to be a little bit on the outside lane to see opportunities and possibilities to network with people that are just a little bit off-center, because otherwise you just trample the same beaten path that everyone else does.

You founded StrawberryFrog in 1999 near the peak of the Internet bubble and on the cusp of the Euro integration. What was it like to start a pan-European and would-be-global agency at that moment in time?

We were the only agency that set itself up, from the beginning, to be a global ad agency. There were no Dutch people in the Amsterdam office. After two years we had 325 nationalities in Amsterdam and clients all around the world. So I don’t think there was ever an agency that could be a brand that worked across all borders. Back in those days, most national agencies believed their ideas would go to the border, and you would never consider going for a French account or — God forbid! — a European account. That was just never done because that’s how Europeans thought of the market. If you were French you worked with French companies; if you were German, you worked with German clients. We were the first agency to say that’s all poppycock, and the first of its kind to be a non-nationally based agency.

While we chose Amsterdam for a number of reasons, it wasn’t because of the fact we were Dutch. It was the center of Europe, it was because Weiden & Kennedy had an office there and we could easily attract talent if we wanted to bring people into the agency and, from a cost perspective, it was much cheaper than London, Paris, or Berlin.

How has the advertising business changed since StrawberryFrog launched? A number of firms, like Mother, reached many of the same conclusions you did and have had similar success. And if you were able to serve clients globally from Amsterdam, why open a New York office?

We started out to be about “total engagement.” What we meant by that was we’d find an idea that was on the rise in culture and then we would take that idea and create a connection between the brand and that idea in such a way that we would create communities and build, basically, a popular grassroots movement. After five or six years, we did several campaigns that became quite well-known not only in Europe but also internationally. We won the 42-country Mitsubishi Motors account after starting the agency with the Smart Car, which was created by Swatch and DaimlerChrysler. Our relationship with Daimler evolved to the point where we were asked to pitch the Mitsubishi Motors European account. We won that, and it was an example of how sophisticated StrawberryFrog could be for what was probably one of the most demanding kinds of clients, which was not only a car account but also a retail car account with multiple markets and multiple languages.

At that point, we started to meet clients in the United States who were taking an interest in what StrawberryFrog was doing in Europe. After many discussions, people would fly in from the United States to talk about campaigns, and we would do work for people in the United States, but out of Amsterdam. After a while, I thought it was time to try something totally new, so I left the Amsterdam office and moved to New York with a backpack and the same idea. We won our first piece of business from Pfizer, whom we worked with for two years, and from there we started to win accounts. We’ll be three years old in February.

In March, you delivered a keynote address at the Global Future Marketing Summit in which you basically called for an end to the agency model as we know it. In the future, there would be boutique ideas shops earning big money for supplying ideas to the clients, while everyone else would essentially work for Kinko’s. Is that where the industry is headed over the next decade?

I think there are a couple of things. First of all, the advertising industry is not unique to business today. Every business is going through a revolution. I think the advertising industry does a better job hiding the fact that it’s going through a revolution, but the reality is there’s a massive shift right now. I think the bigger organizations won’t disappear, but they are going to have competition in areas that they never thought of in the past. The thought I had, back then when I wrote that essay, was the idea that a company stating today that is the FedEx of execution — when it absolutely, positively, has to be done overnight — is not a crazy thought. Clients could buy the best ideas and have companies that simply, and purely, are in the business of execution. I think that day is coming quickly. Pure ideas are where the industry is going to have to go. If the execution side of the business is a commodity and people are being squeezed for money, the only way that value can be created in this business and attract the type of quality thinkers that it needs is to come up with great ideas.

Small organizations like StrawberryFrog are trying to find ways of generating income in that respect. No one has really solved that yet, but I think clients are starting to look and be open-minded to trying new things. I think that the reality of business is that if someone is doing something successful, everyone stops and says, “Wow, if they can do that we can do that too.” Everyone starts to run a bit faster, people are inspired, and there are new brands and small companies that join the race and ideas get better and clients have more choices and there are more alternatives. In that respect, I think it’s better all-around for the industry, because you have more competition that’s not just relying on the established institutions that have been around forever.

Lessons From Scott Goodson’s Ad Career Arc

Like any good ad man, Goodson’s advice is pared down to the bare essentials: “Have fun; keep a sharp sense of humor; (for the most part) we’re not saving lives here, and never buy your own hype.” But there are a few additional lessons to be learned from his experiences as an entrepreneur abroad, including:
1) Don’t just talk about globalization; embrace it.
The opening of new markets overseas is creating opportunities for creative individuals of every stripe that never existed before. The pivotal moment of Goodson’s career may have been being in Sweden at just the right moment, while StrawberryFrog was founded on the idea that a tiny agency could, in fact, go anywhere it needed to for clients.
2) Follow the talent.

Goodson chose Amsterdam as the base for StrawberryFrog because it was already a magnet for European creative talent (poaching from rival agency Weiden & Kennedy was apparently part of the game plan). Set up your own tent in one of these camps — there’s a world out there beyond New York.
3) Find an organizational structural and management style that suits your temperament and stay put within it.

Between leaving Sweden and launching StrawberryFrog, Goodson spent two years as creative director of J. Walter Thompson in Canada. That unhappy experience helped shape his ideas of how his next agency would essentially be the opposite.

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

To celebrate mediabistro.com’s 10th anniversary, we spoke with our Golden Boa honorees about their achievements in media. Check back throughout the week for Hey How’d You Do That features showcasing these media pros.

Luke Hayman was once dubbed the “best designer you haven’t heard of,” by a magazine covering the design trade, bestowing upon him a dubious honor along the lines of “best athlete to never win a championship.” Ten years ago, Hayman was the design director of I.D., a prestigious-but-tiny title known to few outside the design industry. He didn’t help his visibility by jumping to Brill’s Content and Media Central — a grab bag of meta-media trade titles that Hayman invested with more visual acuity than they probably deserved. He escaped to become creative director of Travel + Leisure, and finally shed his dubious distinction once and for all when New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss tapped him to refresh and reinvent the magazine with the help of a dream team of editors. The same magazine that once considered him a secret later offhandedly described as one of the two most influential magazine designers working today (the other being living-legend Fred Woodward at GQ). But Hayman topped himself when he joined the bluest-of-blue chip design firms, Pentagram, as partner a year ago and was immediately set to work retooling Time. We spoke to Hayman about his transformaton from magazine design’s most obscure superstar to saving a print icon at the precise moment the magazine seems doomed.

What were you doing 10 years ago this month, and where did you see yourself in terms of your career arc?

I was probably just getting to I.D. for the second time. I had been there once before as an associate art director for two years. There were two reasons I went back. One, I was having a child, and so I needed more income, but more importantly, it really was the chance to be the ultimate decision-maker, and to see if I could do it.

But before long, you had jumped from running a magazine to becoming a sort of consultant for Ogilvy, and then you jumped back into the industry to Brill’s, and would leave magazines again for Pentagram. Why do you seem to alternate between working for magazines and trying to escape them?

When I talk to students I make a silly joke: “I’ve spent my whole career trying to get out of magazines, and I just keep getting sucked back in.” I came to New York for a couple of reasons, and one was wanting to work on corporate identities, which I never done on a serious scale. My fantasy was designing an airline — I wanted to see my logo on an airplane tail, which is a common fantasy for a graphic designer just out of college. So I came here and freelanced for one of the bigger branding agencies for nine months, and it’s very frustrating for someone used to churning out stuff every few weeks to spend months and months covering a wall with logos. Then the senior people would narrow it down to five, and you’d refine them, present them to the client, and they’d choose one and you’d go on from there. And this would take a year!

But the trouble with magazines from a designer’s point of view is that while I love the first year — because you’re really figuring it out — and the second year is kind of good because you’ve figured it out and can do it to the best of your ability, by the time you get to the third year it’s really starting to get repetitive. There are some art directors I’ve seen who have been at the same magazine for 12 years, and I can see it keep getting better and better and better, but in small increments. I get much more satisfaction out of the big before-and-after, to have this sort of “Look how crappy it looked before, and look how brilliant it looks now!” That is so much more fun for my ADD personality.

So you returned to corporate branding at Ogilvy, where you were asked to redesign Brill’s Content. What made you want to leave the agency and join Brill’s full-time?

The job to redesign came up, and I was the only person there with magazine experience. So I did it and I was successful, and Brill is a very smart guy. He wanted continued creative direction for the magazine and he also wanted creative direction for Contentville, his e-commerce venture, and he also wanted creative direction for Media Central, his deal with Primedia to take over all their media-related titles and conferences.

You brought a level of sophistication to those trade titles — such as Folio and Cableworld — that is so rare. Why do most trade magazines look so terrible when there is so much talent working for them?

Good design doesn’t cost much money. It just needs someone in charge who understands what good design is, and very often the people who are in charge don’t care, or aren’t aware, or are not educated enough to see that. If you look carefully, you can find some trade magazines that are as beautiful as any consumer title, and it’s because they have someone who cares and is allowed to do that.

That sounds like someone describing Adam Moss. How did you land your job at New York? I’m sure everyone in town was messengering him their portfolios the moment he was on the job.

He’d heard of me. He apparently asked around, “Who should I meet?” But he hadn’t called me and I was thinking, “I’ve heard of this guy Adam Moss, and everyone says he’s the man — this is probably my only legitimate chance to meet him.” I’m not someone with the balls to call up an editor and say, “Hey, let’s have lunch.” I would never do that. But, I can call him up and say, “Hey I heard you are looking for an art director or design director. I’d like to put my name forward.” So I thought I could meet this guy, and while I sincerely thought I wouldn’t get the job, I wanted to meet him so he knew who I was next time. I called a mutual friend, an editor I’d worked with, and asked, “Would you mind suggesting my name?” and he said, “Of course,” and so he sent an email to Adam and Adam sent an email right back saying, “He’s already on the list.”

What did you learn from working with Moss? You pretty much had a dream situation in the form of a strong editor, a great team, and an owner with bottomless pockets.

Adam is very knowledgeable about design. He also had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do, conceptually, and I think he may have had a clear idea of how he wanted it to look. The best magazines are the ones where there is one person at the top who has a very clear idea of what they want (and who makes an awful lot of sense) that I can tap into and riff off.

At that point, did you feel you had already reached the top of your field?

This is going to sound obnoxious, but it really doesn’t get better than that. But when the call came to do Time, I was thinking, “Wait a minute this is the whole damn country. It’s not just New York and little bit of L.A. and a little bit of the smart people around the country. You’re talking about 4 million people here.” So that satisfied my massive ego in another way, but with that came another set of problems.

How long had you been talking with Pentagram, and how does one start talking to Pentagram in the first place?

Joining Pentagram is a lengthy process. I’m in touch with a guy in London who has been talking to them for 11 years. For me, it was more like a year. You have to fly to each office and meet everyone, and have dinner with them. They’ve seen the work, they like the work, and they want to see how you present yourself, the work, and your philosophy, and basically see if they like having dinner with you.

It sounds like you were joining a secret society.

[Laughs] It really does, especially with the name ‘Pentagram.’ It’s the Wicca Society.

How did you simultaneously land the Pentagram job and the Time job; was your hiring contingent on it?

The final vote for my acceptance at Pentagram was due at a meeting in November [2006], but at the end of September, [Pentagram partner] Paula Scher got the call from Time. They were having a bake-off — they called four different groups, and you had a month to come up with a prototype for what you thought Time should evolve to become. Paula said, “Confidentially, we are talking to Luke Hayman; we think he is very likely to be join us, and I will do this project if I can do it with Luke.” They said yes, so while I was at New York putting out a weekly magazine, worked weekends and between the hours of 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. with Paula and one of her senior designers to put together the prototype. They liked ours a lot, and I was asked to join Pentagram. The very next day, I moved into an office at Time.

Now that you’ve reached what is arguably the pinnacle of your profession, is there any advice you would have given yourself 10 years ago to speed up the process or correct any mistakes?

I feel really really lucky. I don’t think I made a false move, although a lot of people think I did by going to Brill’s. I saw a big role there doing a lot of design, and I did so much work there that I was really proud of, actually, although I never show it. Having said that, I’ve shown it twice in the last month, and it has gotten me jobs. Consumer Reports asked me to submit a proposal [for a redesign], which I did, and I spent a lot of time on it because I really thought it’d be a great job for me and my team. They called me back and said, “We love your proposal and love your work, but we don’t think you are for us.” And I thought, “What? You won’t even meet me?” I started talking to Kim Kleman, the editor, and she said, “I really do love your work, but I think you are too cool for us.” She had a really great analogy: “We think that New York is like a cool cousin, who will talk to you, but is only talking to you because you’re hanging around. We want Consumer Reports to be your older brother, who knows you, cares about you, and is a really, really smart guy who you know does his research before he buys a TV.” I said, “I can do that too. I can show you other work.” We tend to show our more flashy stuff, our award-winning stuff. So she said, “All right, prove me wrong.” We met, and we had the best meeting for an hour and a half, and I showed her all the stuff I had done for Steve [Brill]. She loved it. It just goes to show you.

Five Pieces of Advice From Luke Hayman…

…but first, a piece of advice from someone else. “A mentor of mine,” Hayman says, “had three golden rules of editorial design: 1) Read the copy; 2) Read the copy; 3) Read the copy.” Hayman’s own advice is:
1) Find a mentor.
Find someone good and then all of your work will be good. I have taken drops in salary more than once to work for great people.
2) Look beyond magazine design.
And look back as far as you can — it has all been done before.
3) In my book, you get extra points for originality.
It’s not that difficult to copy Fred Woodward/John Korpics/Robert Priest. And yes, they do notice.
4) Work harder than everyone else.
This should be self-explanatory.
5) Put yourself in the position of the editor, publisher and reader.
Play well with all of them.

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

Matt Bai enjoys an unusual distinction among The New York Times‘ political reporters. Perhaps alone among those on the campaign trail, he has the luxury of spending months on his next story, as his typical dispatches run north of 5,000 words. He covers national politics for The New York Times Magazine, not the paper, which affords him the precious time to see the shape of the campaign as it unfolds, rather than rush to an incorrect judgment (as his colleagues ultimately did on Primary Day in New Hampshire).

Bai is following the Democratic primaries this year with particular interest after having written The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, an inside account of the struggles within the Democrats to choose direction for the party. Since December, he has also been writing a blog on the Times‘ Web site, “The Primary Argument.” As you’d expect from someone used to filing every month or two, he’s still struggling to adapt. The first words out of his mouth during our interview (on the day of the Iowa caucuses) was, “Blogging is killing me…”

Name: Matt Bai
Position: political writer
Resume: Reporter, the Boston Globe (1995-96); national correspondent, Newsweek (1997-2002); contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine (2002-present); author, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (2007)
Birthday: September 9, 1968
Hometown: Trumbull, CT
Education: BA, Tufts (1990); MA, Columbia Journalism (1994)
Marital status: married, one child (and one on the way)
First section of Sunday Times: the crossword puzzle
Favorite TV Show: The Wire or 30 Rock
Last book you read: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Guilty pleasure: watching Yankee games in the afternoon when I should be working

As someone used to working in (very) long form, how are you adapting to the pace and rhythm of blogging?

I really approach it like an interactive column, which is the part I really love because I hear a lot from readers every day. But any columnist would probably tell you that’s not a sustainable pace [laughs].

As a magazine we can’t keep up with the events of the caucuses and primaries, so this is really a way to be relevant and hopefully interesting during a period when our lead-time doesn’t allow us to do much else. An 8,000-word piece is an amalgamation of months of questions and observations; all I’m really doing here is putting those observations together and addressing them piecemeal. The hardest thing for me to get used to is being wrong. A few times I reached back into my mind for a historical geographic or fact, and my mind has betrayed me. Someone wrote on the blog saying, “Hey Matt, don’t worry about it, this is what blogging is, and we don’t care if you forgot where the Missouri River is.” But it keeps me up at night. I’m just not built that way.

So who’s idea was it to start one, then? If it wasn’t your idea, who strong-armed you into doing it?

It was [NYTM editor] Gerry Marzorati, and saying he twisted my arm wouldn’t be accurate. I just trust Gerry a lot, and when he has an idea it’s always worth trying. People have come to me over the past few years, with at least two or three serious offers to blog, for pay, and I have always said no with strikingly little regret. But when Gerry came to me it was different. I just trust his judgment so much, and it was only a six- or eight-week trial run, so there was no reason not to.

What’s your working relationship like with the paper’s political reporters? Is the primary season an all-hands-on-deck situation?

We are totally separate. I have very little interaction with paper; I maybe go into the office twice a year to see folks. I work from home, and when I go to New York, I go directly to the magazine floor. But I think the emergence of the Web has helped a lot culturally because all of the departments of The New York Times are really working more cooperatively now. My existence is really quite separate, and can be really quite confusing because there are a lot of people at the paper I don’t know, and editors I don’t know. And there are times when people will expect me to represent The New York Times or have some influence, and they’ll mention to me an editor or reporter they’ve had some interaction with, and I don’t even know who they are talking about because my relationship with them is so tangential. It does get awkward at times, but in general, particularly in the last few years, the paper has been very supportive. Chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney and I get along great, and the people in the Washington bureau have been very helpful.

In The Argument, you approach sites like Daily Kos as the heirs of think tanks or the ideological standard-bearers of the Democratic party rather than journalists. I always considered them to be closer to highly (and openly) biased journalists, writing for a niche audience.

Everybody has a different take on this, and my own is that there isn’t much of an intersection between journalism and blogging, and therefore not much of a competitive problem. I see what they’re doing more as community building than informing; they’re pretty separate. What we at The New York Times call a blog is very different than what Daily Kos calls a blog. There’s always this discussion among journalists and bloggers about whether bloggers are journalists and whether journalists are dinosaurs. I’ve never found that to be a very enlightening discussion, because my experience tells me that those two things are very different. I get frustrated with journalists who completely dismiss bloggers as a bunch of know-nothing amateurs when they are doing something quite extraordinary in American politics, and some of them are frighteningly smart people. And I get equally frustrated with bloggers who think that they are doing what journalists do, when in fact, what they are doing bears no resemblance to the actual gathering and analyzing of information. I think that the roles are pretty separate and can coexist quite nicely.

[A short time later:] That’s probably too broad of a generalization. I don’t like it when [bloggers] make that kind of generalization about us. There are some blogs, like Talking Points Memo, that are gathering information, and certainly analyzing it well. All I really meant to say was that the vast majority of blogs are engaged in community building and debating within community rather than the actual gathering of information.

In your book The Argument, you assert that the Democratic Party is still searching for its soul, essentially. Have you seen any signs thus far in this campaign that they’ve found it, or are at least on the path to finding it?

I think they’re evolving, but there isn’t going to be a magic answer overnight. I wrote a post about the argument between the top-tier Democrats coming out of Iowa, which is actually quite substantive and important. It’s about: “What does leadership look like in this era after Bush?” There are real distinctions between the top three candidates about how you achieve change. There isn’t much discussion about what kind of change the country needs beyond the same things that Democrats have been talking about for a long time, some of which are more relevant to the moment than others.

I think these things evolve slowly. I think it’s a lot to ask for people to have the answers to really profound change, and I think it’s a lot to ask for leaders to come up with those answers on their own. It’s the job of a leader to tell difficult truths, which they haven’t really done, and I think it’s the job of movements and people to demand better answers, and I’m not sure they’ve done that, either.

In your essay about Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes, you wrote, “Like a lot of young journalism school graduates then and now, I had come to see political journalism as a lesser form of the craft, populated mostly by the effete and the unindustrious, while the real reporters were out there braving crack corners and foreign wars.” I was under the assumption that the campaign trail was the glamour beat, and was the only story that mattered to newspaper reporters in presidential election years. What made you become a political reporter?

I sort of grew up thinking that too, but by the time I got to graduate school, it was no longer true. I think especially in the era of cable TV and punditry, a lot of people think of it as a lesser form of the craft. I was very much influenced by Richard Ben Cramer’s book, and I was interested in reading Joe Klein, back when he was at New York magazine and then at Newsweek, and reading Hunter Thompson‘s work and other great book writers, but there was no one thing for me.

I think my way of taking on political journalism has been more influenced by novelists than political journalists. I grew up just outside Bridgeport, Connecticut, and spent most of my life in the Northeast, and I am very much shaped by the decline of the industrial economy and what that means for American cities and that disconnect of the newer, more affluent parts of America and the parts they’ve left behind. The people who told that story, and told it best, are not political writers. They are people like Richard Russo and Philip Roth, with American Pastoral. I think they understood that moment of profound anxiety and change better than political writers did. Most of the themes of my work are more informed by that, than by the tropes of political journalism.

Especially since the dominant meta-narrative of ambitious political reportage has focused on the “process” and the inherent artificiality of the campaigns.

I’ve always been interested in telling stories about people. I love politics as a game and as a craft, and I find it fascinating. If politics was a pursuit of winning elections, and the end in and of itself was just about who was victorious on Election Day, I wouldn’t have much interest in covering politics. I do think that a lot of my colleagues do find that to be the most interesting part. I think for a lot of political reporters of my generation, the game is the story. It’s not entirely our fault. Politics has become much more about the game than the actual business of governing, and that’s happened for a lot of reasons that don’t have to do with the media. It has to do with economic and social reasons, and the intractable problems of this country that are hard to solve. I don’t judge anyone who feels that way. I have some tremendously talented colleagues that have mastered the art of polling and documenting what is happening in each congressional district, and I think that’s a really cool skill. But for me personally, politics is about something much larger. It’s very much connected to the governing and the vision of where you want to take the country. My own hell would be to write about the elections, and never about the results.

In the same essay, you also mourn the fact that no one has been able to advance the campaign narrative since Cramer, who covered the 1988 election. Why are there so few great campaign narratives since then?

Politics changes as a result of being written about. I think Ben Cramer’s book changed campaigns in some way, and it also just reflected a time when campaigns were really changing, so I think that was a book you could only write once. I tried to write a political book that was very different than what had come before, because it was a narrative, and it wasn’t about candidates or campaigns. It was about people you’ve never heard of, or knew of only vaguely, but who were quite influential in changing the Democratic Party.

I think in anything you do, you have to always be thinking about how it will change the genre in some way, because I don’t want to do what has been done. None of us can totally avoid it, but I’m always trying to think of different ways to do things. We are here to engage readers. If I’m not engaging readers who might not normally read about politics, than I’m not doing something that I find satisfying. I never write for insiders — I always write for people who are casual followers of politics. I think in the magazine, we’ve been successful in doing a kind of hybrid story that’s part-narrative and part-essay, and often part-profile too. So I was certainly trying to write a book that was different than the ones I had read. Frankly, I don’t feel like reading the vast majority of political books that are being written right now, and if I don’t feel like reading them, then no ordinary voter will feel like reading them.

Your career path is a somewhat conventional one — newspaper reporter, newsweekly reporter, and now long-form reporter — but that path is less likely for a young reporter with each passing day. If you were starting over again right now, would you still pursue the same path, or would you become a political blogger? And did journalism school really help?

I get asked this question all the time in one form or another, because I meet a lot of students and I meet a lot of aspiring journalists. And I think it’s really, really important for us to help people who want to see it as a legitimate career option — so they don’t go to law school or graduate school or, god forbid, become a consultant somewhere — because it’s very hard. I think this is something we really fail at in the business and something that I’m not really in a position to change because I’m not an editor, but I wish we had a systematic re-examination of this, because we make it very, very hard for people to break in to the industry.

It’s not just the economic conditions. I mean, yes, it is economically difficult to hire a lot of people, I understand that, but we also have this bias against people that don’t have experience. And we shut out people at a very young age where, if your didn’t write for your high school paper, therefore you didn’t write for your college paper, therefore you don’t have any clips, therefore you couldn’t get an internship at a small daily paper… well, you know you are done! Go ahead and do something else with your life, because it’s too late! That’s a terrible system! We need smart, good people, and we need people who, if they decide at 25 that they’d rather be journalists than keep doing what they’re doing, have a way to get into this business. Not even journalism school guarantees that, so why should they pay the money or take the risk?

That’s a big problem. I don’t know what I would do now. I didn’t know what to do then. I kind of bounced around, from speech writing and to graduate school, and I never knew quite where I belonged. [Today,] I would certainly be looking at Web sites. I think if I could still write for the Boston Globe, I’d probably do that again — that was a great career break. But if I were casting around, looking for a job as I was when I was younger, I would have certainly been looking at Web sites because I think that’s where the growth is and I think that’s where people are doing some of the most interesting work, and playing more with the genre than other people are.

What worries me about it at the end of the day is, even for a political reporter, the most valuable kind of experience is the actual street reporting. There’s not a day that goes by that my experience covering murders and fires doesn’t translate to this job. So I fear that we’ve increasingly become people whose primary experience is in glibness and opinion and analysis, and who haven’t actually seen how communities function and how families are affected by policy and actually learn to gather original information and challenge their own preconceptions. The thing about covering news for some tiny, daily paper somewhere, is that it humbles you very quickly. Anybody who covers daily news may think they know what happened in a story, but it often turns out they were wrong. You think you know who committed the murder, but it turns out it wasn’t the spouse; it was some other guy. There’s a humility that comes with that experience, and I find that lacking in people who started their careers in Web sites or journals.

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

Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent of The New Yorker, but his National Magazine Award nomination for Reporting was bestowed upon a story that appeared in National Geographic, “China’s Instant Cities,” where he’s a contributing writer. Although the title might lead one to think he wrote a sweeping analytical study of the country’s unprecedented urbanization, Hessler instead built his narrative around a year in the short life of a single factory in one of the country’s youngest factory towns. The product of roughly 100 days of on-the-ground reporting, the story will be folded into Hessler’s third book on China, after River Town and Oracle Bones. mediabistro.com spoke with Hessler (who has since moved back to the United States) about his meticulous reporting and writing techniques.

Considering you’re The New Yorker‘s Beijing correspondent, why did this story appear in National Geographic?
I started writing for National Geographic even before I did work for The New Yorker. The first time I wrote for them was in 2000, and I always had a good experience with those stories — it’s a different audience. The New Yorker doesn’t let me write for other people, but occasionally they let me do a story for National Geographic. That [permission] is written into my contract.

I’ve always felt that, as a writer, it’s nice to have outlets, but you don’t want to have too many because it can be exhausting and you’re juggling relationships. In this case, I just decided these were the two magazines I was interested in. I primarily write for The New Yorker, but this is the fourth story I wrote for National Geographic. It’s a slow magazine as far as producing each issue goes, and sometimes that leads me to do a different type of project for them.

The other reason I embarked on this project is that I wanted to work with a particular photographer who’s a friend of mine, Mark Leong. We worked together on The New Yorker stories, but that’s usually one photo for him, and it’s not shot simultaneously with the story. We were interested in trying to capture — both visually and in the text — the changes in China. I guess it ended up being more ambitious than we originally planned, partly because of the way things unfolded; I happened to stumble on good material and the magazine let me stretch the project out, so I just went from there. That’s the working pattern I often have with The New Yorker — just explore something and let it take its own form.

How did you find the story — or even find the town of Lishui — in the first place?

I had been in China for a long time, and at that point I was planning to leave and only wanted to start projects I was really interested in. One of the gaps in my knowledge was the factory town. I wanted to find something in that area — southeast China — and I wanted it to be something I could follow over time, something that would allow me to return to the same place every year or so and track the changes through that. There was a link to driving — the reason I began to explore this region was because they were building new highways there, and I had always heard about how regions adapted very quickly to new roads. I looked at how a village responded to a new road outside of Beijing, but I thought it would be interesting to see what happens in the factory world. They were building a new highway [outside of Wenzhou] and we knew it would be finished in a few months, so what would happen in the first year or two after it was done? The first thing I did was to fly down to Wenzhou and rent a car.

When and how did you meet Wang Aiguo and Gao Xiaomeng, the factory bosses who were the catalysts of the story? And I assume you speak fluent Mandarin, because there never seems to be a language barrier in your reporting.

Before I met them there was a lot of groundwork involved. Mark and I pinpointed this region as a part of China we know has a big factory economy, and we knew a highway was being built along this stretch, heading northwest from Wenzhou. So we started exploring. My first trip down there was very open-ended. I rented a car in Wenzhou and spent two weeks just driving, stopping in towns, talking to people, and looking for a place to focus on. When I passed through Lishui, they had a few things that really jumped out at me. They had a factory zone that was in the process of being built, a new dam, and you could tell it was a place about to boom. And we had found it at this interesting stage of development. So, by the end of that first trip, I decided this town was the focus.

On the next trip, two months later, my goal was to find some people or some particular institution I would be able to follow for the rest of the story, hopefully. It’s a little bit frightening when you go into something so open-ended, but I also kind of liked that because I prefer that to having focused on something too early in the process. It allows me to respond to what I’m seeing.

So I went back, lived in the hotel for a while, and just got up every morning to drive around the region talking to people. I spent a lot of time talking to construction workers because I originally thought I would follow a group of them. I also talked to some government people, and to people setting up little restaurants and shops, and I stopped at the factory district as well, where I happened to meet the young man whose name is Boss Gao.

I was just walking around, and I saw this guy who was dressed pretty nice, which is unusual in a place like that, where everyone is pretty much a construction worker, and they all look like people from the countryside. This guy was different, so I walked up and started chatting with him. He said he was from Wenzhou and had come to open this factory, and he was a little distracted and nervous. People are quite friendly in these areas, and if you’re a foreigner it works to your advantage, because you’re a bit of an oddball and they’re interested in you.

But in this case, he and his uncle showed up, and they were so distracted by what they were doing — they had to set up this factory — that they didn’t care too much about my hanging around. I spent two hours with them — we had no introduction, and they didn’t know me beyond my name. I showed them I was a journalist, but really they were intent on other things, and it was neat to watch.

I felt very fortunate — at that point I had already spent a month in the area, so there had been a lot of investment already. That’s how things work — you can’t predict these. By the end of the trip, that was the most vivid scene I had, so I thought, “Well, maybe this will be promising; let’s see how I do the next time.” I showed up the next time and they were setting up the machines. At that point, they had seen me before, they were getting to know me, and we had a relationship developing. Later, I was closer to their workers than I was to them, and at various points they seemed to get worried about my presence. Often in China, they aren’t nervous when they find out you’re a journalist; they’re concerned later, about what’s going to happen when your story is published, and whether it’s going to get them in trouble.

How did you overcome that and build trust? I would think that any journalist reporting overseas must work twice as hard to build trust and ensure steady access. How did that work with the bosses?

One of the things I had to deal with, repeatedly, was the concern that maybe I wasn’t really a journalist. Maybe I was an investor, or maybe I was a competitor and I wanted to steal the plans, because I was spending a lot of time with their equipment, which, as you can tell from the story, was acquired in a surreptitious fashion. In this world, that’s how things work, and people often say they are people they are not. So I was constantly fighting that battle.

I became very close to the person in the story identified as the mechanic. He was probably my closest friend among those groups, and when I would take him out to dinner, the bosses seemed very nervous about it. I thought, “God, this guy has been poached so many times, they can’t trust anyone.” So I would show them things I had published, copies of my books, and so forth. In the end, they trusted me to a degree, but there were some things they wouldn’t let me see.

The fact that it had developed organically helped a lot. If I had gone through an intermediary and said, “I heard you guys are starting a business and I’d like to follow you for a year,” I don’t think they would have gone for it.

How much time did you put in at the factory? The story spans a year, you’ve mentioned several trips already — how many visits did you make, and how much time and money did you ultimately invest in this project?

I made 10 trips, and spent a total of almost exactly 100 days on the ground. And that doesn’t include any research I did in Beijing. There were a couple of factors involved when it came to expenses. One was that I was living in China, so National Geographic didn’t have to pay for a trans-Pacific flight every time I went. While the flights aren’t cheap, their stories are well-funded. It’s pretty cheap on the ground, however. Renting a car down there costs $25. I stayed in the same hotel in Lishui every time, so I had a relationship with them and they charged me $20 a night. It’s not that much, and meals are dirt cheap.

The larger issue is that it’s not a smart way to spend more than a third of a year on one story. As the project went on, I began to realize this was something that would be part of the book I was working on, and at that point I figured, “Well, even if this doesn’t make sense for a magazine story, that’s fine, I’m going to invest extra time in it.” Even after the story was published, I went back twice to follow up for my book.

The magazine was willing to do it because I’ve done stories for them in the past and they trusted me; I give them a lot of credit for that. We couldn’t tell where the story was going, and I couldn’t tell them until about the third or fourth trip. By then, I could sketch out something I thought was going to happen, but there were points when the factory might go bankrupt, and I didn’t know what that would do to the story.

Well, the factory did go bankrupt in the end, not that it hurt the story. What else did you think was going to happen, and how did you prepare narrative contingencies plans for each?

By the third trip, I had a pretty good sense that it would work, one way or another, and in some sense, it didn’t really matter what the final outcome was. It’s going to tell you something, and it’s nice, in a way, that you can’t choose. I can’t decide if the factory is going to be a success or a failure, and that means I’m not making judgments about that — I’m looking to see how it unfolds. In the meantime, I’m looking at a lot of research on the side, because this narrative is only the skeleton of the story, and you can hang a lot of things along that structure — things like the real estate deals in town and how that works with funding — so you know you have lots of stuff that’s going to contribute to your portrait of this place.

It’s a mistake to look at it, when you’re in the middle of it, and say, “everything depends on this one factory.” It’s never that way; it’s very important that it’s there, but there was lots of stuff I was researching on the side, and I had faith that it would work out. I became very careful about the timing, and I would call people there all the time so I could be there and see things that were happening, whether they were hiring workers or testing a machine, or whatever�.

Did they try to cut off your access at any point? How did you manage to win their trust so completely?

If it had been Nike, this wouldn’t have happened; if it were a big factory, no way. That’s sort of how I envisioned this when I was planning the project — I thought about finding entrepreneurs, but I realized a big plant wasn’t going to give a lot of access. So I had my eye out for smaller entrepreneurs, because I knew that was my best chance. When you’re at that level, the relationship is what matters, so they’re more tolerant of me because we hang out and share meals, and it doesn’t take long for you to talk to 20 people. I know everybody there quite well, ranging from the young women on the assembly line, to the main mechanic, to the bosses.

That must have produced a stupendous amount of material over the course of a year. How did you set about streamlining the story? You ultimately chose a chronological structure, which sounds like the simplest in retrospect, but did you consider any others while you were writing?

There was a lot of material, obviously, so the challenge is focus. But I guess I’ve been through this before, gathering material that’s ready for a book while working on one story, so I just needed to be judicious about it. In this case, I remember that this one came pretty naturally. I was on a tight deadline, because when the factory was moving, I needed to see that, obviously, and the magazine’s deadline was right after that. I made the trip down there, watched them move, and then I immediately flew back to Beijing and went to my place in the countryside and wrote it. But it was relatively easy to write because things had fallen into place and my structure was going to follow a linear narrative, so it was just a matter of whittling down the material and calling out the key themes I wanted the reader to understand.

I thought it was very important for people to understand the seat-of-the-pants aspect of China — this amazing resourcefulness, which can be a type of inefficiency. Everybody in that factory — from the bosses to the lowest worker — came from a farm. It’s really stunning in that it says a lot about what’s happening in China, all these people leaving the countryside. They have to recreate themselves, acquire new skills, and do things they’ve never done before. The other thing I wanted people to think about is all the energy that goes into these products that you’d never pay attention to — a little ring on a bra strap, something you’ll never think twice about.

Three tips for reporting an in-depth feature
1. Shoot low
Hessler knew he wouldn’t have access to a big factory like Nike so he found a smaller one.
2. Build trust
Hessler spent 100 days on the ground reporting, during which he spent hundreds of hours talking with the subjects of his story.
3. Let the story develop
“The fact that it developed organically helped a lot,” Hessler says.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

The evolution of presidential campaigns from whistle-stop tours to televised spectacle to post-modern Mobius strips of narratives and meta-narratives has forced a similar evolution in campaign reportage. Read The New York Times on any given day this primary season, and you will find (especially online), various strains of typical “horse race” reportage, boys-on-the-bus-style meta-media coverage, and even minute-by-minute bloggy coverage of debates, practically scored like a boxing match. But what you will not find is the journalism of rage.

Rage was Hunter S. Thompson’s specialty, and he may have been its sole practitioner (at least in its most lyrical form.) Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 has its rightful place on the (short)list of great campaign books, but no one has ever been able to channel his bitingly funny rage, disgust, and thwarted aspirations since then. Not many have tried.

His closest heir may be Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who has spent the last five years on the magazine’s National Affairs desk — Thompson’s old beat at the magazine — chronicling the worst aspects of American politics and having a wickedly good time doing it. When he wasn’t busy skewering one candidate after another this primary season (which seems like it started sometime in 2006), Taibbi was writing his third book, due out in May. The Great Derangement is his immersion into the far-Left and far-Right wings of American politics, as makes the argument that a shared middle ground has simply fallen away.

While no one can replace Hunter Thompson, Taibbi openly aspires to one aspect of his legacy. “When the other reporters came home from the campaign trail, their wives had to ask them what it was really like out there,” Taibbi says. “But Hunter Thompson’s wife didn’t have to ask him, because she just read his pieces.”

Name: Matt Taibbi
Position: Contributing editor, Rolling Stone
Resume: Prior to Rolling Stone, he was a columnist for the New York Press and before that the founder of The Beast, a Buffalo-based alt-weekly. He spent 1991-1994 and 1995-2002 in the former Soviet Union and Mongolia, playing professional baseball in the former and basketball in the latter before resettling in Moscow to co-found an English-language newspaper, the eXile.
Birthday: Born 1970; “I’m 37.”
Hometown: Hingham, Massachusetts
Education: BA, Bard College
Marital status: Single
First section of Sunday Times: “I don’t read the Sunday Times.”
Favorite TV shows: The Wire
Last books you read: Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal; The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl
Guilty pleasure: “Hours-per-day scanning of obscure sports Web sites like Baseball Prospectus.”

The dominant tone or emotion in your Low Post columns — and just about everything you write — is disgust. With that mind, who or what disgusts you the most this primary season?

That’s a tough question. I think Hillary disgusts me more than anyone else. Obviously, I wasn’t a big fan of Rudy Giuliani and I’m still not a fan of John McCain, for a lot of reasons. The way he talks about the war is unbelievably irresponsible and kind of scary, but Hillary is the one who really, really gets to me. I was at an event that she did in Youngstown, Ohio the other night, and she comes in there ranting and raving and presenting herself as this great ally of the working man, and she’s talking about how NAFTA has to be fixed and free trade agreements have had such a terrible effect on communities like yours, but she supported every free trade agreement that ever crossed her desk.

Three months ago, she voted to expand NAFTA to Peru, and she’s got one of the biggest union busters in the country, Mark Penn, working as her chief campaign strategist. She’s sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart for years while they crushed unions, one after the other, and without skipping a beat, she presents herself as a modern day Samuel Gompers. All politicians do that — I get that — but there is something about the way Hillary Clinton presents herself as a critic of the war even after she voted for it. People forget before the war that she was one of the first people to talk about how Saddam Hussein was harboring Al Qaeda. I guess it’s normal political behavior, but there is something about the way she does it that really, really gets me.

Are there any actual heroes in this campaign? Barack Obama has been cast in that role by the press, but does he deserve the tongue bath he’s gotten from the media?

He’s running an unbelievably cautious campaign and has really worked hard to not say a thing. I think there’s deliberately a lack of substance in a lot of his policy proposals, and it’s hard to say what he’s all about on the issues. My sense of him — and this comes from talking to people in Congress — is that he’s real on enough issues to take him seriously when he talks about change. I know people in the campaign finance reform community, for instance, who think he is the best in Congress on the issues. When they want to get something done, they go to his office. I genuinely believe that his feelings about the war were more critical from the beginning, and I think he’s probably more in line with most progressives about the war than Hillary is. I think Hillary, deep in her heart, believes the Democratic party needs to be more aggressive and militarist to survive politically.

If there is a hero, I really like how John Edwards ran his campaign. The thing that bothers me about American politics, more than anything else, is that these guys know what goes on behind the scenes. They know how legislation gets passed, they know how the money works, and they never, ever educate us about any of this stuff. They just get up there and pander to us — they talk about themes they think we’re going to respond to — and Edwards didn’t do it this time. In the Iowa campaign I watched, he was very explicit about how the money game works in Washington, and how companies pour cash into both parties and to obtain very specific results. In one speech I watched, he pointed out that when the pharmaceutical industry was heavily supporting the Democratic Party, they convinced the Democrats to slow down legislation that would have sped up the production of generic prescription drugs. He was giving specific examples that were really teaching people about what was happening, and regardless of the fact he didn’t win, it was a public service.

And yet that message didn’t resonate enough with Iowa voters — maybe Edwards’ most natural constituency out of any state. So whose fault is that? The electorate? The candidates? The press?

It’s all three. For the candidates, the easiest route for them to win an election is to identify through polls what voters respond to, and just hammer them again and again. That comes down to the specific words like “values” and “security” and “strength,” and saying those words over and over again is soothing to a lot of voters. They try very hard to do that, because they know they can be criticized by taking specific positions on things. On the flip side, the mainstream media doesn’t really have a strong interest in covering heavy issues, because for the most part it’s boring and it’s much harder to sell tabloid newspapers or to keep the 24-hour cable news cycle buzzing. If you just watch television, you’ll notice that you never see poor people on TV unless they are being chased by cops, and that’s because poverty is depressing. And depressing things don’t sell advertising.

So there’s never any overt commands from the editors to the writers, but it’s built into how reporters perceive reality. They can tell what’s a juicy “news” story and what isn’t. So when, for instance, Hillary takes a shot at Obama that’s a little bit personal, the media immediately gravitate to that moment because they know it’s going to be the headline. It’s not because they’re consciously trying to hide the truth — that’s just the way the business works. And it is a business.

And so is Rolling Stone. With that mind, who are your editors there, why did their hire you, and what are your marching orders on the campaign trail?

I have three editors I deal with. At the top is [editor-in-chief] Jann Wenner. [Managing editor] Will Dana and [executive editor] Eric Bates are the two I deal with on a day-to-day basis, mostly Eric this week.

I think they hired me because they were familiar with my writing and because I have the same sensibility as these people. They said, “go call it as you see it,” and it just so happens that I happen to see it in line with their point-of-view. There’s an argument that Rolling Stone isn’t counter-cultural anymore, and that we’re a part of the mainstream now, but I think we are trying to provide something that other publications and news organizations can’t. We have the license to talk about things that other people won’t because we’re a music magazine and we don’t have to worry about access for anything. The Washington Post can’t be completely over the top about how it covers the Bush administration because they need to be traveling with Bush all the time. We don’t have to, so we don’t worry about it. We say whatever we want, and the best thing about the American media is that if there’s a market for something, it’ll exist. People still apparently want this, so we get to give it to them.

So what kind of access do you have? The inevitable fallout from taking a hot poker to seemingly everyone in the political establishment must mean that a lot people won’t return your calls. How does trafficking in angry journalism affect your ability to do day-to-day reporting?

Obviously it’s hard on that front, because some politicians don’t want to deal with me, or anyone like me. But there are some who will. There are a lot of guys in politics who are really mad and really committed, and they’re primarily motivated by disgust over what’s happening. [U.S. Senator] Bernie Sanders [D.-Vermont] is a great example of a guy I can talk to as a person because we mostly feel the same way about things. He’s a guy I really admire, and he’s given me a lot.

Hillary Clinton is not going to tell me anything I don’t know already. When I’m talking to politicians, I’m trying to learn something. And if I can’t do that, I don’t see the point. There are people out there who have got a hold of an issue they think they’re on the right side of, and they are more than happy to talk to me. And that’s refreshing.

Is writing with anger and scorn and disgust really the best way to connect with readers? Or is the problem with American journalism the absence of that?

It’s funny; I lived in Russia for 10 years, and there reporters are given license to editorialize as much as they want in their stories, even the investigative reporters. They’re allowed to write with style and a point of view. I don’t think it adversely affected the product at all, and in fact it enhanced it, and people become attached to their favorite writers, who they responded to as they would to a character they could trust.

I haven’t really tried to consciously imitate someone like Hunter Thompson, but I do remember one line from the Boys On The Bus, that when the other reporters came home from the campaign trail, their wives had to ask them what it was really like out there. But Hunter Thompson’s wife didn’t have to ask him, because she just read his pieces. That’s the way I’d like to do it. If we’re presenting a version of reality that’s different from what we actually experience, then what are we doing out there? If we’re adding an element that isn’t really there, then there is some kind of deception going on.

It’s better to show it the way it really is. And the way I perceive it is that there’s always a lot of fakery and falseness, and it’s kind of disgusting and offensive. I’m not trying to make people angry, I’m just trying to show them the way I see it, and I think most readers appreciate that. I think some people find the style abrasive, or disrespectful, but those people have plenty of other coverage they can read.

I take it that’s your approach in The Great Derangement as well. What was the genesis of your and how much (if at all) will it reflect your early coverage of this campaign?

It’s not really a campaign book, and it’s not a collection of pieces; it’s all original. Basically, while covering Congress and Washington politics, I noticed the book’s basic theme, which is that Washington doesn’t really work for the voters at all. It’s a very closed, money-driven dynamic that’s been described as “politicians get elected and serve their financial masters the entire time, and as a result you get a dysfunctional situation where the voters want one thing and get something completely different.”

What’s happened on both the Left and the Right is that people feel alienated and distrustful of mainstream politics, and they’re gravitating towards extreme and paranoid politics instead. On the Left you have the 9/11 Truth movement, which has developed tremendous momentum, and a lot of that is driven by the fact they feel sold out by the Democrats. On the Right, you have the Christian conservatives and these apocalyptic cults that have popped up, because a lot of these Christian conservatives elected the Republicans to cut spending and have small government along with enacting conservative social policies and they got none of that. So they gravitated towards something more extreme. I did some undercover stuff on both sides, and talked about Washington dynamics at the same time, how laws get passed and how the money thing works.

Is it still possible to even write a classic campaign narrative at this point? As The New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai put it in January: “I don’t feel like reading the vast majority of political books that are being written right now, and if I don’t feel like reading them, then no ordinary voter will feel like reading them.” Is it still possible to write such a book that anyone would want to read?

I’m primarily a comic. I was away from the United States for so long, I thought I would love to go home and cover a presidential campaign because it looks like such a disgusting black comedy from the distance. But one of the things that I’ve found is that since Joe McGinnis or Hunter Thompson or Tim Crouse were covering them, is that people are aware of the other story out there — the behind-the-scenes thing. Everyone is so much more tight-lipped, because everything is in play now. It’s much more antiseptic on the bus, and the whole atmosphere of the aides and the reporters is not a whole lot more interesting than what you’re seeing on television actually.

You have to go a bit further to find out what the story is, and what’s funny about. The real story on the campaign trail is unfortunately not the candidates, because what’s really happening is these politicians are taking an enormous amount of money behind the scenes, and four years down the road, after they get elected, they have to start delivering on those favors. And we don’t see that dynamic. That’s the real story, if you could cover it. In the meantime, you have to try to find on the surface whatever evidence you can, and whenever you get a chance to talk about it, you take it. But it’s mostly hidden from view, and you’re deducing it, as opposed to covering it. It’s definitely harder than it used to be, that’s for sure.

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

When Stephen Drucker was hired two years ago to remake Hearst’s House Beautiful, he decided to chart a third path between his predecessors two extremes. Marian McEvoy had attempted to be avant garde; after 9/11 and a million trends stories on “cocooning,” she was replaced by Traditional Home‘s Mark Mayfield, who was traditional to the point of terminal dullness.

Enter Drucker, the former editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living, to reboot it with a Q&A format and a formula that blends the best of traditional shelter ‘porn,’ i.e. richly photographed rooms, with the unstuffy service to younger competitors like Domino. It seems to be working — ad pages are up so far this year, while Hearst has doubled down on the title by increasing its trim size and its cover price to chase more affluent readers. More to point: Drucker found an identity for a magazine that, by his own admission, “had lost its way,” which is more than can be said for the late House & Garden,” which Cond� Nast closed in November after reportedly losing nearly $100 million over the past decade. Shelter editors were shocked, but not surprised at the decision, which begged the question: What is the model of a modern shelter title?

Name: Stephen Drucker
Position: Editor-in-chief, House Beautiful
Resume: Editor, The New York Times Home section; launch editor, NYT Styles section; editor-in-chief, Martha Stewart Living
Birthdate: June 24, 1953
Hometown: New York City
Education: BA Vassar College; MS Historic Preservation, Columbia
Marital status: 14 years with Frank
First section of the Sunday Times: Real Estate
Favorite television show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: London at the current exchange rate
Last book read: John Fowler: Prince of Decorators by Martin Wood

I’ll cut to the chase. What does the untimely death of House & Garden — if not quite the doyenne, then the former belle of the ball — mean for the shelter category as a whole? When you consider the rise of ‘makeover’ television, the advent of interiors shopping magazines like Domino, and the invention of design blogs, are the classic shelter magazines’ days numbered?

It doesn’t necessarily say anything about the rest of category. It’s terrible to see any magazine die, but you can also read too much into it. It’s a reflection of one magazine’s strategy and one company’s business. It’s like saying, because one store goes out on Madison Avenue, that “Uptown is dead.” They’re not really connected. There’s always competition, there’s always turmoil in media, things are constantly changing, and that’s the ins and outs of running a business. We’ve had enormous successes here in the last two years at House Beautiful, that really show you that it’s about creating a magazine for what the marketplace wants.

And what do the readers and advertisers want, exactly, from a classic shelter magazine today? How will they be forced to evolve?
House Beautiful has been around since 1896; this is not the first time it’s evolved to reflect the times and the current marketplace. What’s happening now in shelter magazines, is that there used to be a few, and now there are hundreds. How people think of their homes has changed enormously when you live in a world where people go to work in short sleeves, and get on airplanes practically in their underwear. They’re not necessarily living in homes with Georgian furniture, either. What they think of as “home” is different, and you have to reflect that. I’m trying to create a magazine that is a reflection of American homes and American life, right now.

But you can’t rewrite the magazine’s DNA, either. How do you strike a balance between readers looking for DIY information and the decorator crowd?

Well it’s an over-simplification to say that it’s either for do-it-yourselfers or decorators. What really has happened is: everybody is involved in every decision. Nobody says, “I want that decorator’s look, give it to me.” Everybody is involved, and you never know who’s going to do what. A person with all the money in the world can get their kicks from painting a room themselves. A person who has more modest means can go out now and buy a $5,000 or $10,000 bathtub because that’s what their dream is. It’s the high/low thing that happened in fashion — there really are no rules anymore. The only rule is that people do it their way, and you have to give people a lot of choice. You used to be able to tell people what that was, and now people really want to choose.

You recently increased the page size and the cover price while cutting back on the circulation. It seems like you’re trying to move more upscale. Is that your strategy?

It’s really very simple. People buy shelter magazine because of the pictures. That’s what it’s all about. They want beautiful photography, and they want to see every detail, in every corner of the room, and with a bigger page, the more they see.

Does that help make shelter magazines Internet-proof?

They are safer in a lot of ways. In a funny way, shelter magazines are like books — readers keep them, and they really can’t bring themselves to throw them away. It’s not the same looking on the Internet at a photograph of a room. The Internet is a stimulating medium, and when people read a shelter magazine, they go into a very introspective, relaxed mode. It’s like the opposite of being on a computer, they want to get lost in the magazine.”

That’s very Marshall McLuhan of you. You’re saying the Internet is a hot medium, while magazines are cool?

It is, in a way. It’s almost as if the Internet is too hot for the core readers of shelter magazines. The Internet is still great for commerce, and it’s great for that needle in the haystack search. We recently launched a fresh design of the Web site. We have this amazing tool called “Paint a Room,” where we give you this library of rooms and about a thousand different paint colors, and you can change the colors of any of room into any color. Now that’s great use of the Internet.

The most endangered parts of print are the really time-sensitive ones. There’s nothing urgent about a shelter magazine. You can’t become yesterday’s news; you never feel like you got it out a month late. But nobody wants to read business news a month late.

You once said in an interview that some shelter editors “over-intellectualize” their subject in an attempt to imbue it with significance. How do you strike a balance between being that and just being a resource for someone who wants to decorate?

It really isn’t that hard. I’ve been involved in shelter magazines for nearly 30 years. One of things I’ve noticed over the years is that editors feel the need to make it really important, and they make it important by over-intellectualizing it. It’s really about pleasure. It doesn’t need a big intellectual justification. It doesn’t have to be puffed up into something big and important. What often happens is that while everyone is intellectualizing, all the reader just wants to know is, “What’s that great color blue on the wall?” Every good design magazine is a balance of some level of service, and some level of dreaming and aspiration. Even the magazines you think of as compete dream books are filled with the service; it’s just a question of how you package it. People want to see beautiful pictures, but you also have to give them some tools to get them there. For us, the main tool is color. Color is to decorating magazines what sex is to women’s service magazines. There is an endless fascination with this unknowable subject. It’s always mysterious and one step ahead of everyone, and no one has figured it out. As with everything else in our world.

How have the skill sets for shelter editors changed over the course of your career? My understanding is that the staff is composed of visual people — the stylists — and words people, the writers and editors. Are those skill sets merging, or is your staff still composed of editors who do one or the other?

When I started, it was really very simple. You started as an editorial assistant. You hoped your boss left, retired, or died, and you stayed, stayed, and stayed, and the last person standing, with luck, got to be editor-in-chief in their 40s or 50s. [Ed. note: This is almost exactly how Margaret Russell became editor-in-chief of HB rival Elle D�cor.] It was really a very linear career path. It was about digging in, and one person rose to the top.

Now, it’s very different. It’s much more of a meritocracy. Staffs are much smaller than they were 25 years ago. It used to be that every assistant had an assistant, and jobs were incredibly specialized, and you started out writing one caption an issue, if you were lucky. Now, there is much more respect for people at every level of a magazine, because the staff is smaller. It’s recognized that a 24-year-old editorial assistant may have a lot to contribute with voice, their knowledge of the Internet, and what they like, because it’s an indicator of what’s to come. It’s very different from what it was. It used to be, “Go stand in the corner and be quiet until you are spoken to, 10 years from now.” As staffs have gotten smaller, the specialization has ended. A person who is a stylist may jump in there and write a story. Look at our magazine; it is a Q&A magazine. It’s very deliberately not about formal writing and word-smithing. It’s about good ideas and straight talk, and the way people say it is the way we print it. You can do that whether you are an editorial assistant or a senior writer, you can be equally good at it.

Where have you looked for staff? Are shelter books a very self-contained world with a self-contained pool of talent, or have you looked outside the usual suspects when hiring?

At a national magazine you have the advantage of being able to recruit from other publications, even for the entry-level jobs. Very often we’ll recruit from regional magazines, where we’ve seen people that show real talent. Or we’ll recruit people from interior design offices, people looking to make a career switch. They started off as interior designers but decided they don’t like being designers, although they do love the industry. We usually don’t get people who just want to work at a magazine.

Yes, shelter magazines always struck me as being similar to fashion magazines that way. Each is a universe unto itself in terms of the talent.

It’s a great art to write fashion copy. It is a really specialized and under-appreciated skill to write those haikus that go into fashion magazines. To write captions for magazines like ours, they have to sound really musical. It’s all in the ear, and you either have it or you don’t. There is such a thing as a natural writer. Writing is all in the ear — people think it’s in the eyes, but it’s not. When you read, you are really hearing it as you read, and it’s like having perfect pitch; it’s a musical talent. You can teach a person to be a serviceable writer, but you can’t teach them to be a good writer.

You’ve been on the job for two years now, and you were essentially brought in to lead a turnaround effort at a magazine that had lost its way, at least editorially speaking. The turnaround would appear to be over, and a success, but is it? When you arrived, did you have a one-year plan, a two-year plan, or a five-year plan, and when did the magazine stop “turning around” and find its stride?

When you come to a magazine, it’s a mistake to think you can just walk in and succeed. No matter how much experience you have, you have to come in and get to know the reader of your particular magazine, even if you’ve worked at five other magazines in your category. The reader of your particular magazine has very particular likes and dislikes, and it takes an ear to learn what they are, no matter how astute an editor you are.

I would say the rebuild of any magazine is about a two-year process. The first year, you’re learning. The second year you get to put it all into action and see if it’s working. From then on, it’s just fine-tuning and evolving it. Personally, I hate it when a magazine changes its identity all the time; it drives me crazy. It is to your benefit as an editor-in-chief to get it to where you want it to go as fast as you can, and then just keep fine-tuning it, but the key is you can’t change the it of it.

Here’s a good analogy for you. Think of a hit TV show. Hit TV shows usually do not generally become hits out of the box. The first year, you are getting the rust out of your faucet. You are learning what works and what doesn’t work, and everyone on the team is learning to work together, while just a few people out there are discovering the show. The second year, you start to hit your stride, and audiences start to talk about it. The third year, that’s when a show really becomes a monster. It’s not until the second or third year that cast and writing team are firing on all cylinders, and it spreads like fire through the culture. It’s really the same as a magazine. It’s not fair to an editor-in-chief to think, “Oh they just put out their first issue, and it’s brilliant and they are there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you ever feel your life was in danger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, really? In Forbes, Fortune and Time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s incredible. They actually told you that?

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

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

I don’t want to comment on that.

Has someone ever threatened to kill you?

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm… everything.

(Laughs.)

I’m serious.

I know. Sadly it’s the truth.

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

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.