When Paul Slavin took control of ABC News’ digital properties in September 2007, he had little experience in the realm of online news, which was — and continues to be — rapidly evolving. Since then, he’s had a crash course in the tools and economics of content online, which he describes as undergoing a “revolution” as a result of the 3G iPhone and the movement of television out of the home. He will appear as a panelist to speak about “The Digital Network” at the TVNewser Summit in New York on March 10. Here he talks to mediabistro.com about his chance start at ABC, how mobile content is reshaping TV news, and his company’s experiments with social media.

Name: Paul Slavin
Position: Senior vice president, ABC News Digital
Resume: A chance internship with ABC’s radio division after undergrad set Slavin on a career with the network that has lasted 30 years. Having started as a desk assistant, he went on to many positions throughout the company, including stints as the producer of World News Tonight and as senior vice president for Worldwide Newsgathering. He became ABC’s head of digital news in 2007.
Birthdate: November 16, 1956
Hometown: Chevy Chase, Md.
Education: BA from the University of Chicago, graduate work at New York University.
Marital status: Married with three children.
Favorite TV show: The Sopranos
Last book read: Gettysburg, by Stephen Sears

How did you get started in the news business?
I had just finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and was going to finish my degree in either law or economics — and I needed some time off. I moved to New York in pursuit of a woman, planning to hang out here for a little while and get a job. I was at the Ford Foundation interviewing for a job, where they very unceremoniously told me that I wasn’t “their kind of people.” I didn’t have enough money for the subway back home (if that tells you what my financial situation was like), so I walked — and on my walk back I saw WABC, walked in the door, and asked if they had any jobs. They said, “No, but the network might — they’re hiring anybody.” So I walked up the street to personnel, and I interviewed for a job doing overnight radio. The guy asked me if I could start that night. I said sure, and so I ended up as an overnight desk assistant in radio. I had no experience and no inclination toward it, and I thought I’d only be there for a short time. And the rest is history. I’ve never left the mothership since then.

So you had no training in journalism beforehand?
Like in any business, I had a lot of on-the-job training. I got tremendous opportunities to travel and to learn from people who knew a lot more than me, and that has been the way my career has gone. I find the very best people and I latch onto them, and learn whatever it is that they can teach me — and hope that I can return the favor to other people who are coming into the field.

What was the transition like from World News Tonight and TV news to your current position as the head of digital?
The biggest change is really just a change that the entire industry is going through. That’s [knowing] how ruthlessly we must understand our audience and our consumers. Understanding them, understanding the business, and understanding the technology. It’s not massively different: It’s still about finding the very best people that you can, giving them clear instructions, and hopefully letting them execute against it.

I really find this whole space flat-out fascinating. I think the whole silo-ing of digital or new media or broadcast is a thing of the past. As soon as our companies start realizing that it’s all just one giant multi-platform content delivery system, the better for all of us. But it’s complicated and chaotic and fascinating to be involved in it.

How is “understanding your audience” different online than it is in a network newscast?
A program like World News has been around a very long time; it has a loyal audience; you know who that audience is in many respects; the lead-in is the local news, and you understand a lot about that… So it’s not as mysterious as when you get into the digital space. [With digital news] you have different consumers on different platforms, and they are in the process of morphing all the time.

A recent study found that the greatest growth in Facebook is in 45-and-older; it’s no longer an 18-year-old demo. So it’s evolving. Whereas World News has been a very clear group of folks that you got to know pretty well — it wasn’t changing platform-to-platform, and it wasn’t changing year-over-year. If you were interested in the evening news, there used to only be three places to go at 6:30; and if you’re interested in that kind of news, then there are really only a few more places to go. If you’re interested in new media [news], there are three million places to go. So your competition is huge.

But of course you’re still bringing the ABC News brand with you.
No question. But the ABC News brand is also competing with “Joe’s News.” And when someone goes to search on Google [for a news item], the story from “Joe’s News” may show up right next to yours — and it may pop up there with a better headline or something else. So, yes, we have a huge advantage and a powerful, historic brand — and we have to emphasize that brand day-in and day-out to keep that moat around what it is that we do. But we still have lots of people competing with us.

There’s been a big debate recently — particularly as concerns newspapers — about micropayments, and other ways of paying for news on the Internet. ABC News originally had a subscription service, which was discontinued. Is there any idea of reviving that?
First off, I cover ABCNews.com; I cover ABCNews Now, which is a 24/7 multiplatform-distributed channel; and I cover mobile and mobile WAP [Wireless Application Protocol], etc. So there’s a lot of things we’re discussing here. In terms of micropayments: we’re again going to experiment with something — I don’t know if you’d necessarily call it “micropayments” — like a sort of pay-by-subscription model on one platform. We do get paid for our content by places like Verizon and Yahoo and Sprint.

But it is not inconceivable that a reader will pay for content if it is of a high enough value and they are getting enough for their money. The question is, do we have enough of that content that we can create at any given time?… I don’t know that much else that we do would necessarily lend itself to micropayments, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look into other content areas that might fit.

As old media companies go online, they have different kind of content that they are leveraging. How is television-backed Web news different than, say, a newspaper site?
Broadband penetration has increased dramatically since 2005, and that has really favored video producers. There is a lot of interest in video, and the cost of entry to video continues to be reasonably high, so it helps us moat off some of our advantages. It does reduce the number of people who can compete with us. I look at it as a distinct advantage as the technology evolves, and platforms like the iPhone come out that are really video-centric. Our skill set in video gives us a leg up. Text is still important in a lot of respects, but I think that we have to look at what we do better than most other people, and that’s video — and we need to emphasize that more as time goes on.

With this broadband and mobile penetration, do you think that there will be more of an emphasis in video over text in news?
It’s hard to put a certain date on it, but — for those people who are interested in historical movements and media — in the last year or so, television has finally left the home. And that will have huge implications for our business. With Verizon V-Cast and its proliferation; with Sprint; with mobi.tv; with MediaFlow; and now with the iPhone application. Television is now totally out of the home, totally mobile and easy to use. And who knows what the implications of that will be.

How does social media fit into ABC’s plans, and are you doing any kind of new stuff in that space?
We’re looking at the Facebook Connect system — we’ve been talking to them for some time. Everybody loves Twitter; I do. It’s just fun, and maybe it’ll turn into something more than fun.

We’ve not had a lot of success with social media to date. We were one of the first news organizations to partner with Facebook, and that was really successful for what it was — but we haven’t really figured out social media. I think it’s important, but it takes a tremendous amount of resources for us to get involved in. We will continue to look at it, but I couldn’t tell you 100 percent that social media is the way we’re going to go for our news product. But I think it’s incumbent on us to experiment with it, and have conversations with social media providers, and see whether or not it can be an effective driver for us. It’s definitely a tool, [we just need to find out whether] it can be more than a tool.

What do you mean by “tremendous” resources? What’s involved?
Just building and maintaining the social media. For instance, if you’re going to have groups of people talking, you need someone to moderate that. We have comments, but I don’t think that comments do much without a moderator attached. So there’s a technology side, an editorial side, and from a resourcing point of view, we just haven’t had enough resources to put against it to see whether it works. I’m not sure that any news or information service so far has really done anything sustainable in that area yet. But everything is evolving so rapidly, so ask me again in six months and I may have a different answer.

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

Guy Kawasaki has been involved in the tech biz for a while: He cut his teeth as an “evangelist” for Apple’s Macintosh computers in the mid-1980s, and has been involved in a wide variety of media technology companies since then. His venture capital firm, Garage Technology Ventures, has been operating for over a decade, and he currently also heads up the startup news aggregator AllTop.com. Kawasaki will be one of the keynote speakers at mediabistro.com’s User-Generated Conference & Expo on February 9-10 in San Jose, Calif. Here he talks to mediabistro.com about his passion for Twitter, the fate of media tech companies in a down economy, and where AllTop fits into the media spectrum.

Name: Guy Kawasaki
Position: Managing director, Garage Technology Ventures; Founder, AllTop.com
Birthdate: August 30, 1954
Hometown: Honolulu, Hawaii
Education: Stanford for undergrad, MBA from UCLA, honorary doctorate from Babson College
Resume: His career has included stints at Apple marketing the Macintosh, separately as an Apple fellow, and as CEO of ACIUS. He founded Fog City Software, and was among the founders of Garage Technology Ventures and Alltop. He has written eight books about business and technology.
Marital status: “Married, very.”
Favorite TV show: The Unit
First section of the Sunday Times: “I don’t read The New York Times unless someone points me to a direct article. I barely read any newspapers.”
Last book read: Divine Justice by David Baldacci
Guilty pleasure: Playing hockey

What’s the thinking behind your aggregation site AllTop.com, and where do you hope it’ll fit into the media landscape?
We have more than 300 topics right now and we’re just barrelling along. We want to have all topics covered — using the word “all” loosely — I think at about 500, we’ll have the world pretty much covered. We just want to provide an alternative to search engines for finding news and information.

Think of it as a digital magazine rack. If you went to a newsstand you would see racks of sports magazines, celebrity magazines, car magazines, wine magazines, and food magazines; we have our own virtual rack where we aggregate the Web sites and blogs of the top feeds for each of those topics, and we show the latest five headlines from each source. With Google, you ask Google questions like “How many people live in China,” with AllTop, you ask “How do I keep on top of what is happening in China?” So it’s a very different question.

What separates this from the other news aggregators out there?
We don’t think that most people want to create their collection of feeds. A good analogy is: let’s say you wanted to eat a hamburger. You go to Safeway and you buy the ground beef and you buy ketchup, mustard, relish, cheese, charcoal and a charcoal lighter and you take it home and have a barbecue; you mix up the stuff, light the coals, and cook it. That’s one way. That’s for people who want to build their custom feeds on Netvibes, Google Reader, etc. Our theory is that if you want to eat a hamburger, you just drive to In-and-Out, you stay in your car, you tell the person what you want and five minutes later you’re gone. That’s what we do. Arguably you could make a better burger because you’ve picked the special organic beef raised by Tibetan monks, but at the end of the day, if you want a hamburger in five minutes, that’s what we do.

How do you pick the feeds?
Thank God for Twitter. The people on Twitter suggest the feeds and suggest the topics. Some of them deliver the entire collection of feeds. And we also have two and a half people working on the project on any given moment, and we just build feeds; people tell us they’d like to have, say, “adoption” at AllTop or “Vietnam” at AllTop and we can have that ready in two or three hours. For any given topic, it’s probably been done somewhere before — someone has aggregated all of the “adoption” feeds or all of the “autism” feeds, but we’re trying to be a site where everything is done. We want to be like Google in the sense that if you want to find any topic aggregated you can find it at AllTop — not only “autism” or “addiction.”

With the economy constricting, what do you think is going to happen to all of the user-generated content and the companies that facilitate it?
Clearly companies that were depending on online advertising — i.e. I’ll get a lot of eyeballs and then I’ll sell ads for 50 cents CPM — that’s a very challenging model these days (though it’s not impossible). On the other hand, I don’t think anything can stop the expansion of user-generated content, and you could make the case that all these people who are less employed or unemployed have even more time. I mean, it’s a cycle, and we’re in the down part of the cycle, but I don’t think everyone’s going to be turning in their computers and washing dishes all day.

But how about the kinds of new media companies like Twitter, which have so many users and which have become so pervasive, but still don’t have much of a workable business model?
I actually did a completely unscientific and informal poll on Twitter, and much to my amazement, 30 percent of the people who responded said they would pay five bucks or more per month to use it. That’s remarkable, because I would have guessed less than one percent. And even if, of that 30 percent, 27 percent of the people were lying and only three percent will pay five bucks a month — three percent of six million is 180,000. So that would be about a million dollars a month there; that’s not nothing. And if it came down to bailing out General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Citibank or Lehman, versus Twitter, guess which one I would support — and it would take a whole lot less than $700 billion to keep Twitter going.

I have a hard time believing that it could go away. But on the other hand, if someone had told you that Garage Technology Ventures would outlast Anderson Consulting, Enron and WebVan, you would have laughed at me 10 years ago. So you know, things can die.

The big pain in the ass for me if Twitter died would be my 29,000 followers — if we all scattered to the wind, it’d be tough to get them all back. That’s why I’m actually willing to pay $100 a month.

How could the media do a better job of using user-generated content?
They can definitely use it better to source material and to spread the story better once it’s done. With Twitter, The New York Times does a good job and CNN does a good job, but the other media just aren’t using it very well. Having said that, it is a little early and there are only six million people on Twitter.

But media companies should get Twitter accounts and do keyword searches. Let’s take an extreme example: let’s say I publish the magazine HVAC World for compressors and air conditioners. I would plug in HVAC into the Twitter stream, and every time I see that word, I would send that guy a message and say “We’ve got a product that can help that, or let me help you with that problem, or here’s a resource.” I would do that all day.

I use TweetDeck and I am parked in front of it, and I’m constantly looking for “Guy Kawasaki” and “AllTop”; and when I see it mentioned by anyone anywhere I send them a message. But I’m kind of extreme. Many people view email and Twitter as kind of an adjunct to their main function; for me, it is my main function. and everything else is adjunct. My main function, in a sense, is marketing AllTop. Twitter for me is not something I do when work is done for fun; Twitter is what I do.

There are those things like NowPublic and CNN’s iReport, though, and I love those kinds of models. It’s the democratization of information. Now you don’t even have to own a blog or Web site or pagemaker. Now you can be a “journalist.” It’s got some drawbacks, but a lot of highly prestigious organizations got the George W. Bush military record wrong too. So it’s not just the shmoes that have the monopoly on poor reporting.

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

To say that the media business is competitive is an understatement. After all, it’s not easy to form true friendships with colleagues who are often angling for the same coveted few positions you are. But when Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King first worked together at a local news broadcast in Baltimore more than 30 years ago, the two bonded instantly.

As Winfrey went on to build up a massive media operation around her brand, including a magazine, book club, and now the nascent OWN cable network, King has supported her through it all. But she’s more than just the talk show queen’s confidante. The self-proclaimed “TV baby” earned old-fashioned broadcasting chops by working her way up as a reporter and anchor through various markets, and for the past decade she has been editor-at-large at O, The Oprah Magazine. Now that Winfrey has announced the end of her longtime show, might King make a return to daytime?

Name: Gayle King
Position: Editor-at-large, O, The Oprah Magazine; Sirius XM host
Hometown: Chevy Chase, Md.
Birthdate: Dec. 28, 1954
Education: University of Maryland undergrad
Resume: Started as a TV news production assistant at WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Md. Became a reporter trainee at WTOP-TV in Washington, D.C., and then moved to Kansas City, Mo., to be a reporter and weekend anchor at WDAF-TV. Moved to Hartford, Conn., in 1981 to anchor the nightly news broadcasts on WFSB-TV, where she stayed until 1999. Meanwhile, she co-hosted short-lived NBC daytime show Cover to Cover in 1991, and hosted The Gayle King Show from 1997 to 1998. Signed on as editor-at-large at O, The Oprah Magazine in 1999, and began her XM Sirius show in 2006.
First section of the Sunday New York Times: “I love the Style section. Then I go to ‘Week in Review,’ then to the front page.”
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: “Cupcakes — preferably from Magnolia. Or Sprinkles.”
Last book read: Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
Twitter handle: @kinggayle

What were your goals when you first started out in TV, and has your career gone at all as you would have expected?
I majored in psychology, and I intended to either be a psychologist or go to law school. I never had any intentions of getting into television. But I ended up getting a job at a TV station — an entry level position — and from the moment I got into the newsroom, I was hooked on media and on TV news. I love the immediacy of it. I love that you’re live every day. There was no looking back for me after that. Had I thought about it, I probably would have been more strategic. I was never strategic about it. It’s always just sort of happened. That’s the beauty of the media business: You can talk to 10 different people and get 10 different answers for how we got started. There is no, ‘This is the way to do it.’

You and Oprah met as co-workers at WJZ-TV in Baltimore. How were you able to put aside the normal competitiveness of the media business and become one of her biggest supporters?
When we met, we were at two different levels. She was the anchorwoman and I was the production assistant/news writer. We became friends when we were 21 and 22, and now we’re 54 and 55. Nobody, myself included, could have foreseen that she would become ‘Oprah Winfrey, global media mogul/superstar.’ We’ve both just progressed along the way. But I never feel in competition with Oprah… I really don’t feel that I’m standing in Oprah’s shadow. I always feel that I am standing in Oprah’s light. And I am, by far, one of her biggest supporters. So it isn’t hard for me. Oprah and I are very similar. We think alike, some people say we talk alike. But I don’t think there is anyone who can do what she does.

Tell me a little about how you became editor-at-large at O.
Well, my background is TV. I’m definitely a TV baby. TV was my first love. I anchored the news in Kansas City and then anchored the news in Connecticut. I was about to sign a new contract after being there for 18 years… And just before I was about to re-sign, Oprah called me up and said she’d been approached by Hearst — and Ellen Levine in particular, who she had a relationship with — and Cathie Black had come and made a presentation to her at Harpo about starting a magazine. And she was calling me because she said they needed someone at the New York offices who really understood Oprah and her sensibilities, since Oprah had her show and couldn’t be there on a day-to-day basis. She called me up to ask who I knew who could do that. She said, ‘It’s really funny, Ellen Levine suggested you, but I told her there’s no way you’d do that.’ And I said, ‘No, I’d never leave TV for magazines. I don’t know anything about magazines.’ Then I went to bed that night, and I woke up the next morning, and I said, ‘Let me see. What is it exactly?’ And I called her back and asked, ‘What is that job?’ She said. ‘I don’t know — you should go and meet with them.’ So I came to New York and had a meeting with Ellen and a meeting with Cathie Black, and I realized very quickly that you really need someone who is on staff who really understands Oprah’s motivation; her philosophies; her sensibilities; what would work for her and what wouldn’t. I realized that I could play a role here, so I called her up and said, ‘I think I’m going to do it.’

When I started [in] magazines, Oprah and I kid that we were like Stevie Wonder and Jose Feliciano — literally it was the blind leading the blind. I mean, when we started out, Oprah said, ‘We need to do something. There’s too many ads in the magazine.’ Or I would be in a meeting and someone would say TOC, and I would say, ‘What’s the TOC?’ Duh, the table of contents. So we didn’t even know the basics. But I like to think I’ve progressed quite a bit since then.

Our mission here at the magazine is “Live your best life.” And those aren’t just empty or shallow words to us. It really is a mantra and a philosophy that permeates through every single page of the magazine. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘The thing I like about the magazine is that I read it and I don’t feel bad about myself.’ As opposed to other magazines where you look at things that you perceive to be unattainable — whether it’s your body or your finances or your place in life. I think people read our magazine and they feel infinitely better. Nothing thrills us more than for people to read an article and say, ‘I never thought of it that way,’ or, ‘I’m thinking of it differently because of something that I read,’ or, ‘I’m encouraged by something that I read in the magazine.’ It started out as “a personal growth guide,” and I don’t think that’s changed so much. We really do meet women as they are.

Do you prefer working on the magazine to television at this point?
No, television is still my first love…. I’m a TV baby, and my training was in TV, but I realize the value of the magazine and I’m proud of the magazine, and we’re going into our 10th year. A lot of magazines have come and gone in the time that we’ve been here.

Would you ever consider hosting your own TV show again?
I never say “never.” But my schedule is really pretty damn good — and I get to do TV, I get to do radio, and I get to do [the] magazine. Hosting your own TV show, as we know, is more than a notion. But I would never say “never” to any opportunity that comes my way. I just have to figure out if I’m interested, and does it fit with my lifestyle that I have now.

Tell me a little about the experience of hosting your Sirius XM show.
Well, I love it because it’s live every day, and every day is a new show. There’s no planning what can happen when you’re in a live venue. People can call in and say the craziest things — or they can say the most heartwarming and gratifying things. I base it off of daily news. To this day I am a news junkie, and so the show is really driven by what is going on in the news, or just my observations of life. I’ve interviewed a whole range of people, whether it’s politics or music or food. I’ve done everybody from Bon Jovi, to Jay-Z, to Barack Obama and Michelle Obama during the campaign, to people who are just newsmakers, if something in the news catches my attention. So it’s free-flowing.

What role, if any, are you going to be playing at Oprah’s soon-to-launch OWN network, and what kind of programming do you think we can expect from it?
I don’t know what role I will play, but I can tell you I want to play a role — put that in capital letters, exclamation point. I definitely want to. And they have made clear that they would want me to play a role. So what exactly that will be, I don’t know yet.

How involved were you in the decision-making process of Oprah deciding to end her talk show?
Oprah shared her thoughts with people she trusts, but at the end of the day, she made this decision on her own.

Oprah has expressed the idea of retiring before. Why do you think she chose now to finally do it?
I believe she said it best, when she addressed her audience saying, ’25 years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit.’ She knew it was the right time, and she’s going out on top. She’s very much at peace with her decision.

Oprah has said that she doesn’t watch TV, and that she finds out about pop culture events through you. What news stories or TV shows are most intriguing to you right now?
I follow so many things. I’m big on Mad Men — I love that show. And I love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Not a big reality TV person, although there are a couple that I watch. I have something that I like to watch every night of the week. Monday is Two and a Half Men, and I’ve just discovered Sherri Shepherd’s show — it’s very funny. And I have such a big, wide range of stuff that I like. And I love the news — I watch a lot of news magazine shows.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into media?
I always say to people that want to get in this business that you should find an entry-level position and glom onto somebody who is willing to help you — and along the way you will always find somebody who is willing to take the time, because we all remember how we got started. Everybody has somebody who helped them along the way. I can always tell interns that are going to make it, because those are the ones that go above and beyond the call of duty.

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

On the 23rd floor of a relatively nondescript office building on in lower Manhattan, the ProPublica office is almost totally empty. The spacious newsroom has rows of cubes at the ready, and will soon be the home of what could be the largest investigative reporting team in the country, but for the moment the team consists of just six. Former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s office is in one of the corners, with views stretching down Broadway, and baseball photos on the wall.

ProPublica is Steiger’s brainchild, and was hatched over the course of the past two years. A nonprofit backed by billionaire former GoldenWest owners Herb and Marion Sandler, ProPublica was conceived as an organization that could do the kind of “deep-dive” investigative reporting that so many newsrooms around the country are no longer able to afford. Armed with a $10 million-per-year budget, Steiger will soon employ an investigative team of 24 journalists to dig up stories of abuse of power and corruption in the highest echelons of business, government, and society.

These stories will be published on the ProPublica Web site, but, in an unconventional twist, many will be syndicated — free of charge — to newspapers and other outlets around the country where the organization thinks they can have the most impact.

Having weeded through an unexpectedly high number of applications (850) from journalists around the country over the past few months, Steiger is now revving up ProPublica’s engine and seeing where the project can go. In December, the organization named Portland Oregonian managing editor Steve Engelberg as managing editor for the organization, and earlier this week Steiger appointed a 12-person journalism advisory board that includes such notable figures as Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro, New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson, and Boston Globe editor Martin Baron.

mediabistro.com caught up with him last week to discuss his career path, and what he expects from ProPublica.

Name: Paul Steiger
Position: Editor-in-chief of ProPublica
Resume: Yale University for undergrad. Reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times from 1966 to 1983. Various editing jobs at the Journal culminating in a managing editor appointment in 1991.
Date of birth: August 15th, 1942
Hometown: Born in the Bronx, grew up in Stamford, Conn. and Princeton, N.J.
First job: Wall Street Journal reporter based in San Francisco
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page, followed by Sports, and Sunday Styles
Marital Status: Married
Favorite television show: “In terms of what I watch, it’s sports, but my favorite primetime show is Without a Trace. I watch 60 Minutes, but if the football game is running long I’ll stay with football.”
Guilty pleasure: Chocolate
Last book read: Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris. “It’s an absolutely excellent narrative of the horror that we have in the credit markets right now. … It’s a wonderful explanation of how it happened and why it’s so rotten, and why it will take a long time to unwind.”

Tell me a little about how you got started in journalism.
I was an economics major in college, but at that time I hadn’t ever read the Wall Street Journal. Still, when I was looking for a job in San Francisco, I sent them some clips, and, in those days life was much easier — they said, “If you can get yourself out here, you’ve got a job.” … It was very exciting. I got to do things like cover California politics. A guy named Ronald Reagan was that year elected governor, and I wrote a number of front-page stories suggesting he would never amount to anything in politics. I’ve tried to destroy all of the microfilm copes of those stories, but I haven’t been able to track them all down [laughs]. But in the process I also found that I liked business news. There was drama, personality, action, and it was meaningful to people’s lives.

After two and a half years, the L.A. Times came along, and they made an offer I couldn’t refuse — a 50 percent increase in salary, to $13,000 a year — and so I spent the next fifteen years at the L.A. Times and loved it, doing a wide range of business stories, as well as investigative [and explanatory] stuff.

Do you go still read the Journal cover-to-cover, now that you’re no longer editing every day?
It’s very different than it was just a few months ago. In the past, with the Journal, I would turn every page. But there’s too much in any big newspaper to read every word, and a lot of it I had read the night before, but I would turn every page. And I would turn every page in The New York Times business section. I don’t do either of those things anymore, even though I am a close reader of them both, as well as the Washington Post on weekends.

Explain a little bit about the genesis of ProPublica
In the late spring and early summer of 2006, Herb and Marion Sandler sold GoldenWest financial to Wachovia for $24.2 billion, of which they got something like $2.5 billion. They had decided that they wanted to devote the next stage of their lives to giving this money away in an effective manner.

I had known them for many years. … They weren’t really close friends, but they were people I respected as sources and we would go out to dinner maybe once a year. But in the fall of 2006, they called me and told me they were thinking of giving $10 million a year to support investigative journalism, and they asked for my advice on how to spend it. So I thought about it and talked to them again at the beginning of 2007, when I laid out the rough outlines of what became ProPublica. They liked the idea a lot, and while they didn’t offer me anything, they asked if I would be interested in running it.

This was before Rupert came along with his offer. I didn’t have a successor yet. Under mandatory retirement rules at Dow Jones, I had to leave by the end of the year. I told the Sandlers that, in any case, the earliest I could start would be January of 2008, so we agreed to talk some more.

[In looking forward to my retirement] I had the notion of running public boards, some deanships of journalism schools came up, and in one case, an opportunity as the president of a university. But the more I thought about it, and the more I talked to the Sandlers, the more excited I got about [the idea of running ProPublica] and so in late August we decided to do it.

Why was there the need for an investigative journalism operation like this?
Irrespective of [need], I felt there was the opportunity to do good work and have impact. With $10 million a year, you can do a lot of investigative journalism. But the more we thought about it, the more it was also clear that we would be operating in an environment where this was precisely the kind of journalism — one of two categories, along with foreign coverage — most hurt by the destruction of the business models of, in particular, big metro newspapers.

What we have now is a mixture of plenty on the one hand and famine on the other. The plenty is that because of the Web, you can get all kinds of news that interests you instantly. … The Web is also good at surfacing very quickly significant single facts — like the documents in the Dan Rather situation. But what is going missing is the kind of expensive journalism that made sense when metro newspapers had a local monopoly — this is not true throughout history, but it began in the early 60s and continued until recently when the rise of the Web blew it up.

Without that monopoly, all of a sudden, your revenue stream stops growing, and now they’re starting to turn down, so you’ve got to cut costs. If you’re the L.A. Times, and the person who covers the Dodgers gets hit by a car or retires, you’ve got to replace them. Same with the person who covers city hall. But if one of your six project reporters leaves and you’re being squeezed to cut your budget, you say no, or you delay for six months or 18 months replacing that person. Or never. Or your overseas reporters, and so those are the two areas that are getting starved. And I think the starvation will continue. It’s not as though they’ve found the bottom yet. [Newspapers] will find the bottom ultimately — they’re not going out of business. But they’re still cutting back.

So there is an opportunity and a gap here. I’m not saying philanthropy is the only answer — but it is one answer to that gap.

How will the syndication of your stories work?
Our basic connect with the public is going to be through the Web. We’re going to have a blog that we’ll update at least once a day and hopefully more often where we will aggregate investigative reporting from everywhere. It will be the default publication spot for our own stuff. And then we’ll provide it as well, free of charge, our deep-dive stuff to those platforms that we think will give it it’s greatest visibility. We will give them an exclusive — if they’re a daily or a weekly — of a day or two. With the idea that their having the exclusive on it will be a tool that allows them to increase circulation and put advertising against it, and we don’t care, because we don’t have to get revenue against it.

Can they edit your stories?
We’ll work with them both on editing and legal vetting, and we would have sign off on the editing, because we don’t want a story taken where we don’t want it to go, but they may have an idea for a whole new avenue of reporting, and if we think that makes sense, we’ll encourage them to pursue it, or pursue it ourselves.

What is your timeline on hiring and your expectation for this year?
We’re now starting to make offers to people, and I hope to have, by the end of [February], essentially all of the hiring done. I hope by March to have a critical mass here, and the critical task will them be getting the Web site designed and up and running. My goal is to do that by the end of April. And so in the spring you’ll start to see stuff from us. The first deep-dive stuff, who knows when that will start coming out? That stuff you can’t force.

What are the key areas you’ll be covering?
We’ll try to have a beat system, and the areas we’re mainly looking at are abuse of power, violation of trust, and threats to the public well-being. And where is most of the power? It’s government and business. But we will also look at unions, and a doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. We’ll look at lawyers and courts, we’ll look at universities and school systems. At non-profits. Anyplace where there’s power.

Why not just create a publication of your own as well?
It’s very expensive to publish daily in print. I would say we could do our own monthly magazine or something like that, but the Web is so flexible and fast and cheap. Why lash ourselves to a more expensive technology. At a big paper, if you look at the total budget — newsprint, delivery, ad sales people, management — news costs represent 15 percent of that. Whereas we figure we can spend two-thirds of our budget on newsgathering. It just makes much more sense.

Do you have any plans to incorporate “crowdsourcing” and citizen journalism into ProPublica?
I don’t have any current plans to do that, but there may be some opportunities. What we’re about is finding stuff ourselves and communicating it through the channels that are available. And if we think the most efficient was to get something is to use crowdsourcing, then hey, fine.

I’m really just focused on getting us producing the kind of flow of journalism that makes a difference. That I know is possible with the kind of money that the Sandlers are making available. We want to be making a difference, that’s really the ultimate goal. With 25 journalists, we’re going to be the biggest investigative reporting team that I know of. I want us to be seen as a force for the public good, and to be a source of stuff that is interesting and that people feel is important, something that people want to read and need to read and connect to.

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