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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gay Talese has a cold. Well, the flu, actually, and he’s just getting over it. It is the middle of January, and I’m sitting with him in his Upper East Side townhouse, surrounded by books—many his own—as he talks about writing and prepares for a television appearance on New York 1, the local all-news channel.

We talk for a few minutes about the process of interviewing, and I realize that, unlike most Q&As with writers, in this case I’m talking to the master about his own game. Talese, long a prominent journalist and writer, has made an art of the interview; in his pieces, incisive observations about a subject’s personality, character, and setting often take on more weight than the questions and answers themselves. It is a daunting challenge for a young writer to take on Talese.

I should admit that the famously sharp-dressed writer is a hero of mine, as he is to many writers in the generations following his own. Talese, in the magazine profiles he authored, challenged the way in which information was gathered and presented, creating much more intimate portraits of famous figures than had ever been attempted before. His most famous piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a profile of the singer that is perhaps the apotheosis of the New Journalism form, was labeled “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in Esquire‘s recent 70th anniversary issue—that is, the very best article in the magazine’s long history of very good articles.

Talese is originally from Ocean City, New Jersey, and he started his journalism career in 1953, right after graduating from the University of Alabama. He was first a copy boy and later a sports reporter for The New York Times, and he went on to write for many magazines and published several books, including one, The Kingdom and the Power, about the culture of The New York Times.

He’s now in his eminence-grise phase—The Gay Talese Reader, a thick collection of his best profiles, was published late last year—but, at 71, he still cuts a sharp figure, donning a vest, well-tailored jacket, and hat to emerge onto 61st Street and settle into a chauffered car for the trip across town. In the car, in the NY1 studios, and also in his basement home office, Talese spoke to mb about his place in the journalism pantheon, the writers who have followed him, and why we’re choosing not to call him the father of the New Journalism.

Reading “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” in that recent Esquire, it was striking to realize how much the style you developed has become the standard form for profiles—and how original it was back in 1966. How did you develop this style, using the devices of fiction to tell a nonfiction story?
I’d always read short stories, and the short story writers—and the playwrights and the novelists—were just writing about people, about the interiors of people. And that’s what I always found challenging about nonfiction. My favorite short story writers were John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, and I figured I could do what they were doing without changing the names.

I wrote my impressions of people. But I did so with a real sense that I knew what I was talking about, because I spent a long time studying them. And I think I was never so incorrect in this assumption that people got angry with me. I never had a person that I interviewed or spent time with that I couldn’t see again. I never had a libel suit or a defamation of character lawsuit because I took very seriously getting my facts and my characters right.

It’s how you write it. I was always very careful with my writing. My turn of phrase was always an understatement; I got my point across without being unnecessarily harsh. I’ll give you an example of how to under-write a sentence. I was writing about the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was a notorious womanizer and who was ill at the time. And while I was talking to him an attractive young nurse came in. As she turned to walk away, I saw him looking at her and it immediately struck me that he was probably having an affair with her or whatever. But in my writing, I simply put that “Mr. Sulzberger had an eye for an ankle.” It was a small turn of phrase and you got it all.

This style you pioneered has been called the “New Journalism,” a term you dislike. Why do you dislike it?
I’m often given credit for “starting” the New Journalism. Tom Wolfe mentioned me prominently in a book he wrote in the ’60s called The New Journalism, and, while I was kind of flattered that people were, for the first time, starting to take notice of what I was doing, I have always kind of thought of myself as rather traditional in my approach and not so “new.” I never wanted to do something “new;” I wanted to do something that would hold up over time, something that could get old and still have the same resonance.

Some of the recent big journalism scandals—Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair—arose to some degree from reporters wanting to be celebrities themselves. Isn’t that a legacy of the New Journalism?
Again, the reason that I never liked the term “New Journalism” was that I think it marked the beginning of journalists wanting to be celebrities, and often of journalists thinking of themselves as celebrities. You can be a celebrity and be a very fine journalist; I’m not opposed to that. I’m just absolutely opposed to all forms of shortcutting, whether it is in the work that I do or the work that someone whom I respect does. What I disliked most about the idea of the New Journalism was that it seemed to be founded on the idea that you could get results quickly and easily by doing things in a certain way, which was attention-getting, whether that be by style of writing or in its destructive intent.

In some ways, I think the high point in this whole celebrity journalism thing was Woodward and Bernstein, which casts no doubt on the veracity of their work or their talent as reporters. It’s just that because of their work and the fact that they toppled the government, they became really big stars, all of a sudden portrayed by the likes of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men. You don’t get much bigger than that. And journalism students in the ’70s all wanted to be that kind of reporter, who, in their investigative fervor, could be capable of such power as to take on the White House itself.

But magazine writers like me, and like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam, and even book writers like Norman Mailer, what we did was done with the intention of achieving remarkable things through reporting. What some of these younger writers started doing was inserting more of an editorial voice into their own writing, filled with attitude which wasn’t supported by the required amount of legwork. They would spend the minimum amount of time on research and devote more effort to the style or shine or sheen which would get them noticed.

“New Journalism,” to me, came to represent this easy kind of writing. I mean, Tom Wolfe himself is such a unique talent, but he is also a dogged reporter of facts and a researcher. A lot of these so-called “New Journalists,” however, were really sloppy people in terms of facts, and I didn’t want to be typecast as this. I mean I have boxes and boxes of files and careful recordings and impressions and notes that I jot on shirt-boards about every single thing that I publish. I keep outlines and letters of everything I’ve done, every little note and event and impression. As I go along, all the little details are part of the writer’s work and I try and keep as much of it as I can. But here these people were coming up with stuff off the cuff, without the proper research.

So then how do you feel about the journalism of the ’90s, when buzz ruled all?
I can’t fault anybody. I mean, Tina Brown is often given as an example of this kind of thing, but she is a very nice woman. I almost worked with her on a piece about John Bobbitt for The New Yorker, back when she was editor there. The buzz thing was true about her, but I still liked her very much. She was always very polite, very sensitive, and very respectful with me. Eventually when the piece didn’t work out, I was rejected in the most nice, well-mannered way.

In the process of writing a long piece, how do you approach it? Outlines? Diagrams?
Oh, yes. I do that extensively. I keep changing it; it’s like a storyboard for films. I once saw Francis Coppola, whom I am friends with, in the Napa Valley, near San Francisco, when he was doing a film called Tucker. I saw how he arranged the scenes with different note cards and outlines, and it seemed to me that his way of doing a movie was the same as the way I do even a magazine piece, certainly a book. It’s because I write things scenically.

What is the most difficult part of the whole process? Is it finding a subject and doing the research?
No, the most difficult part is when you’re done with the research and the interviews and you have all of this material and you have to organize it and make sense of everything. And even after all that is done, I work over every sentence and every page over and over again.

What are you working on now?
I have a new book that should be coming out soon which deals a lot with my efforts to get to people and to write about people and what happens when it doesn’t work out so well. It’s the story about the mind of the writer. It’s my story, which is the story of trying to get access to other people. I’ve had some trouble in the writing of it because I had to answer the question at the beginning “What is my story?” If my story is about writing about other people that I can relate to, then where is the me and where is the them? It’s a bit of an identity crisis.

Do you look for yourself in your writing about other people?
What draws me to people, in general, is that there is a vantage point that we share. There is something that I can hook into that is legitimately a part of these people’s lives that I write about. It may not be full, but it is enough that I can go further with it.

A lot of the people that you picked to profile were people who were past their prime, like Floyd Patterson and Joe DiMaggio. Why?
It’s because they had that experience of being up and down in life, and sometimes staying down. These are people who really have lived, and who have seen both sides of life. There’s a lot to learn from people who are down and who have been down, about friendship and relationships and who sticks with you when the buzz is gone.

If your new book is about not being able to get the access you need, it’s a book about failure more than success, then.
The thing is, in some ways it often works out better than if you’d gotten what you wanted. For instance, in the Frank Sinatra piece, the best thing about it is that I was able to write the thing without ever having talked to him. If I had gotten that interview, then I was stuck with his version of the events. This is not to say that his version would not have been valid, but it would have given the piece a sort of filter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One would imagine that a deputy editor of Cosmopolitan, the staffer in charge of overseeing all book excerpts or reviews, would be in a pretty good position to promote his own works of fiction. And John Searles is. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t go through the months of sweat and hard work it takes everyone to complete a work of fiction. When his first novel, Boy Still Missing, was a national bestseller in 2001, Searles was named a “Person to Watch” by Time magazine. Now, with his second book, Strange But True, which is out next week, the young writer and editor has cemented his reputation as a serious writer of fiction. mediabistro.com recently caught up with Searles, just as he was beginning to promote his new book, and asked him about his work as an editor, the process of writing, and whether he’s got the inside track on promoting his book.

Tell me about the interaction between your job at Cosmo and your work as a novelist.
I always wanted to be a novelist; the magazine thing kind of happened by accident.

Neither of my parents went to college. My dad is a truck driver, and my mom is a housewife. They weren’t so keen on me going to college, but I put myself through. I had come to New York and went to NYU for my MFA, which I loved, and I studied with a couple of really good novelists. After I got out of the program I was waiting tables and trying to write, and I went to a writer’s conference in North Carolina and met the fiction editor at Redbook. She offered me a job reading fiction submissions for 50 cents a story—slush pile stuff. But to me it was great because at least I wasn’t serving nachos and Caesar salads. From there I heard about a job upstairs at Cosmo, and I went on the interview.

My first day on the job there was the day of the O.J. Simpson verdict; I remember because we all watched in Helen Gurley Brown’s office. Everyone was glued to the screen, but my head was cocked around staring at Helen. She had this miniskirt on and this plunging top and all these bracelets, and her office was like this I Dream of Jeannie bottle, color everywhere.

So how do you balance that magazine life with writing a novel?
I write in the mornings. I get up every morning at about six in the morning and write until nine, hop in the shower and go to work. Nighttime I usually reserve for re-reading what I’ve done that morning. I would be lying if I said I stuck to that schedule every single day. There are times when I’m just not feeling particularly inspired, or things are just too chaotic at work, and I don’t have the focus. I don’t force myself to do it when I’m not feeling it. The hardest thing is that I have to say no to going out a lot. But I never regret it, because I’m home and working, and I’m always happy that I did.

I wish I could say there’s a five-step formula or something. But the truth is that I follow different rules at different times. There are stages where I do the 6 to 9, and then there are stages where I take off a week from work. I usually don’t write at night, but there are times where I wake up at 3 in the morning and write all night. It’s different each time.

When you’re working on a novel while you’re also working on a day job reading other novels, is it hard to keep track of the plot you’ve been working on, or is sort of just this other world you just step into?
It depends on the book. For this new book I got the idea on the subway home from Cosmo one night last spring, and I came home and wrote it longhand. I wrote longhand for three weeks, the first draft.

The whole novel?
Yeah, I just did not stop. I wrote on 23 pads of paper. And it’s a rough rough draft, but then I spent about a year, well eight months, revising it and shaping it and transcribing it. I did probably six subsequent drafts after the first one. It was so freeing to be able to just write on a pad of paper and just have fun with it. I had a lot of fun doing this book. Really happy time for me.

How do you think that your work at Cosmo influences your fiction writing?
I think seeing the number of books that come out—and seeing so many writers, and talking to editors and publicists and agents all the time—makes me much more sympathetic to the struggle that all writers have. Working at Cosmo has also taught me the value of keeping readers entertained and the importance of writing the sort of books that people will want to turn the page. My goal is to write books that are quality books with very real characters and a gripping plot.

As you say, there are so many books that come out each year. You’re in charge of excerpts for the magazine; how do you decide which you’ll excerpt?
At Cosmo we like to do sexy, fun things, and we’ve done everything from A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing to Bridget Jones’s Diary. The readers are women, 18 to however old. We try and pick books that will appeal to single women.

We’re sent hundreds of books every months. My assistant and I sit down and go through the books; we try to figure out what sort of books we think would appeal to the reader. If the book has a particular buzz, we like to look at that. If it’s an author we’ve excerpted before, we like to look at that book too. It’s Cosmo, so we want something sexy and fun and entertaining that will be a good read. Also something that I hope that the readers will go out and buy. Beyond just reading the excerpt in the mag, they’ll go out and pick up the book. The main thing I want is for it to be entertaining in the magazine.

Are you using any marketing strategies for Strange But True that you’ve learned from the other side?
I’ve been meeting so many writers over these years who I think are just really brilliant. Because of my job I’m lucky, I get to do lots of television. I’ll go on and talk about the hot summer reads or the hot fall reads, I’ll do a roundup of books of particular interest to their audience, their viewers. I’m fortunate that I have that to do in terms of publicity. But I also get in my car and I drive around to bookstores, introduce myself to booksellers, and do readings and signings.

But also in terms of the way people approach you with their books.
I never pitch anyone if it’s inappropriate. I read a magazine before I do. We get a lot of science fiction at Cosmo, and things that we aren’t able to cover because it’s not appropriate for our readership. I only bother people and bug them if I think there’s a chance.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s news editor and a reporter for Metro New York. You can buy Strange But True at Amazon.com.

Authors tend to think of The New York Times Book Review with a mixture of awe, fear, and reverence. One writer recently compared the Review to the Soviet-era Kremlin: a tremendously powerful institution with often inscrutable methods and protocols.

Thus it was big news earlier this year when editor Chip McGrath announced he was planning to leave the section. Soon thereafter, two top Times editors—including then-recently arrived executive editor Bill Keller—revealed in an interview that book coverage in both the Sunday section and the daily paper would likely move to “emphasize nonfiction books, demote literary fiction, promote (judiciously) commercial novels.” Across the country, writerly jaws dropped.

Enter Sam Tanenhaus, who took the helm of the Book Review in April after working for many years as a writer, reporter, and editor. He was most recently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he was also a Pulitzer finalist in 1998 for his biography of Whittaker Chambers. Keller called him a “literary and intellectual fire-hose” in announcing his appointment, and then added: “To anyone who might have fallen for the notion that we were looking to dumb down this precious franchise: take that!”

Now that he’s had time to settle into his new gig, Tanenhaus recently talked with mb about his job, his techniques, and running a politburo.

Birthdate: October 31, 1955
Hometown: New York. “But also all over. I spent some time in Iowa growing up.”
First section of the Sunday Times: “I guess first I look at the front page and op-ed, and always the sports. I’m a big sports fan.”

Let’s start with your career path. How did you get to this pretty big-deal job?
I’m not sure I would even dignify it by calling it a “career path.” Really, it’s just been one accident after another. I started out in book publishing after I finished grad school and did a lot of freelance work with publishing companies, mostly editing and publicity. I always wanted to write, though. As it ended up, I’m a failed fiction writer who moved into nonfiction. I got into journalism late, after the publication of a biography I did of Whittaker Chambers. I was given an opportunity by Katy Roberts, who was then the editor of the Times op-ed page, and I learned some of the rudiments of daily journalism. Eventually, I went to Vanity Fair as a contributing editor.

The Times Book Review has a pretty central place among authors and the writing community. Authors sometimes talk about the section with a kind of awe and fear. Do you think this idea of the section is justified?
I relate to it differently, I think. I grew up reading it in the ’70s, when it was edited by John Leonard and Harvey Shapiro, and read it closely and admiringly. My first journalism job was actually as a fill-in copy editor at the Book Review, which didn’t work out so well. I think they liked my enthusiasm, though. That was one of the satisfactions of coming back. At the time I was working at Oxford University Press as a rewrite specialist, and I admired the writing and range and depth of the Review.

There were so many great writers who appeared in it back then. There was less competition then from The New York Review of Books, and the Times Book Review had pretty much the run of the field, with people like Mailer and Styron and, as I mentioned, John Leonard. Pretty much everything was in it. I also liked the gravitas and august quality of the writing.

How have you dealt with the history of the section? How are you making it your own?
I don’t know that it’s my own. It still feels like there’s an institutional history that I don’t want to necessarily disrupt. We’re responding to the cultural moment, which seems a contentious one, and trying to capture those diverse energies. We’re also trying to capture the breadth of the literary culture, the highs as well as the lows. We’re trying to do justice to commercial and mass-market books as well as the serious and rarefied works of literature that come out. We’re trying to have a balance, and trying to have a mix of voices—the established writers but also newer writers. We’re encouraging reviewers to speak in their own voice and trying to accommodate their sensibilities. We might run a very long review for one writer and also run some short punchy reviews of mass market books and mix the two together.

The biggest changes will probably be in appearance and presentation, though. This will be more evident in the fall when we launch our redesign, in early October. This won’t be dramatically different; it’s just mainly a matter of making the section more contemporary and incorporating new elements into the page.

You’ve been criticized lately by some writers for giving too much space to mass-market books and nonfiction, and not enough to young writers or serious fiction in general. Is this on purpose? How does this relate to Bill Keller’s comment about moving toward more mass-market and genre books?
There’s a lot more nonfiction published these days than there used to be. We do our best to do fiction; our cover review for this Sunday is a novel and it is for the next week after that as well. It’s interesting, though. I know there was some discussion at the time about Bill’s comments, but the general assertion wasn’t so controversial. It has been an ongoing conversation at the Review about how best to present mass-market books to readers.

For instance, last week we ran an essay by Alan Wolfe where he went through many polemical books. There we were addressing mass-market titles, but dealing with them in a specific way.

How about poetry? How does poetry fit into the mix as part of modern literature?
We are now in the planning stages of a major issue focusing on poetry, because it is an essential part of the literary tradition we are living in. Poetry doesn’t have the immediate authority that other kinds of writing do, but our objective is to introduce readers to poetry as a vital part of contemporary literature.

How do you choose which books to review, and how do you decide which reviewers to match with them?
We have a staff of previewers, editors who read galleys as they come in. We then discuss what we will do with a particular book and what reviewer would be a good match, as well as what length we’d want to give it. We try to think of someone who will connect with the book, but one of the pleasures of the job is that you don’t know what you’ll get. Much of the time we’re very pleased. We like to think that in making the match-up we’ve created some kind of interesting tension so that the reviewer will come up with something unexpected. But when we send them out, we don’t know whether a review will be positive or negative.

Do you favor a particular writing style in reviews?
I am not a big fan of the extended plot summary, and I like it when a reviewer is concise. We all here admire the daily reviews that Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin write. They often have less space to work with, and they are especially skilled at responding to books in a direct way.

Dale Peck has gotten a lot of press lately for Hatchet Jobs, a collection of his more scathing reviews. What do you think of this kind of reviewing?
Sure, there’s a place for it. But it has to be justified. I like to think I—and the rest of the people on staff—feel sympathy for writers. No one is more distraught than we are when we send out a book we thought well of and then we get a review that disagrees. But we try to frame it as best we can on the page, and I trust the instincts of readers. They know that the review is one person’s opinion.

For example, we recently had Walter Kirn review a book by David Foster Wallace, and, in bald-faced terms, it was a somewhat negative review. But what I liked was that it conjured up Wallace’s world in an interesting way so that, even if Kirn didn’t like the book, the reader could still become interested with the book and want to read it. I think any book we’re reviewing is something we think is important and is of some interest, and readers, by and large, respond to that.

What do you think were some of the most important novels to come out in the past year?
Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow is really a substantial book. Also stuff by a lot of major novelists: Philip Roth, John Updike, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, E. L. Doctorow. The new book from David Foster Wallace. Also, particularly, Colm Toibin’s The Master, which we ran a substantial review of.

Do you get to read a lot yourself?
I try to read a lot, particularly fiction. Part of the joy of the job has been the opportunity to read a lot of contemporary fiction, usually on my commute in and out of the city and on weekends.

What’s your favorite book?
The book I admire most, or that made the biggest impression on me, would have to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s news editor and a reporter for Metro New York. Photo courtesy The New York Times.

New York Post mag wag Keith Kelly had great fun handicapping which contender would fill Art Cooper’s chair at GQ—a tastefully accessorized leather club chair, one assumes—when the longtime editor of the stalwart men’s mag retired last year. (Cooper died unexpectedly just 10 days after his official retirement.) But all the discussion of Zinczenkos and Andersens and imports from Conde Nast’s British cousins turned out to be for naught: Ultimately, Jim Nelson, an executive editor at the magazine, was picked to step into Cooper’s shoes.

It wasn’t merely the obvious decision; it was also, as it turns out, a good one. By the end of Cooper’s regime, the magazine had seemed at times to meander, lost between the ever-popular world of dumbed-down lad mags, the exercise demi-monde of books like Men’s Health, and the rarified air of smarter general-interest publications like The Atlantic. Nelson has found a sweet spot, however, and GQ‘s circulation is up 24 percent in the past year, even while the mag’s cover price has risen and many of its competitors have lost ground. Perhaps most significantly, a whole new generation of big-name writers and photographers has signed on.

As his first anniversary at GQ’s helm approached, Jim Nelson spoke to mediabistro.com about the past year, his vision for the magazine, and the tradeoffs between editing and writing.

Birthdate: March 8, 1963
Hometown: Greenbelt, Maryland
First section of the Sunday Times: “The front section. I just love the news. I love dissecting every little sad mistake that John Kerry or George W. Bush makes.”

How did you end up in what is one of the most prestigious spots in men’s mags?
I started out at the D.C. bureau of CNN. I was a writer and producer for them, and I was mostly drawn to it because I was a news junkie and could never seem to get enough of that stuff. But once I did that job, I did kind of get enough of it. There wasn’t enough creativity to writing news, and I felt like I wanted somehow to work more creatively.

You mean on longer pieces?
I thought I wanted to write movies, so I moved to L.A. and worked in Hollywood. I ended up writing for TV, though. I was a writer’s assistant, working on really bad sitcoms.

And that was more creative?
Well, that was what I was looking for. I had very nebulous ideas about creativity. I wanted to quote-unquote be creative. Moving there was great fun, and it was a great time of my life—this was I guess when I was 25 to 30—but then I grew frustrated with the process in TV sitcoms where you start with an idea and then don’t have any control over it and you watch it become diluted. You watch the premise of a sitcom turn into something that the networks and the studios and everyone has their say in, and it becomes ultimately uninteresting.

In the meantime, I kept gravitating toward magazines. My favorite magazine at the time was Harper’s, and by coincidence I met some friends who worked for Harper’s, and I probably freaked them out with my adulation, to the point where they offered me a stringing job. I started off as a stringer in the “Readings” section, finding things, looking for art, documents, essays, pieces, and found objects. And I loved it so much that I just wanted to pack up everything and move to New York and try to find a job there. So I did it.

I applied to the internship and got it, and I had to work for no money, which is hard to do when you’re 30. But it just plopped me in the center of my favorite magazine, and working on things I just loved. I learned a lot really fast. That’s probably why the internship there is so well regarded—because, basically, the magazine needs the interns so badly that they have you do real stuff. You have to proof the “Index,” you have to scrounge around for documents and call government agencies, and the editors expect a really high level of competence.

But you must like working on the longer pieces, too.
Yeah. That was the real lure of coming to GQ. I’d done a couple of longer pieces at Harper’s, but mostly I was in the “Readings” section. I was really drawn to the idea of becoming an assigning editor and working on meatier features. Art Cooper had a great way of making you feel like you were a part of a family and you were working on the best magazine that ever was. He just had this great morale-boosting way about him, as though he was empowering you to bring in great writers. He loved nothing more than to have editors who wanted to bring great writing to the magazine, and I really took to it.

Did you do any writing as well?
I did. And that was the other thing that was very attractive to me. Right away I started writing. I always wanted to both write and edit. For a brief beautiful time there, I was able to do both.

It’s often really hard for people to combine the two, working as an editor and doing writing on the side.
I think in some ways you can do it; the two really feed off each other very well. It’s hard to balance, but as soon as you get sick of tearing your hair out writing in the lonely universe of your home or desk or wherever, you just want to connect with humanity again. And editing a piece connects you right away to the community of working for a magazine. But by the same token, when you edit a lot of pieces and you’re working to make other people’s pieces be good, sometimes you kind of feel like, well, where am I in all of this?

What in the past year have you been proudest of? Do you feel like you’ve changed the magazine substantially?
I think so. I feel like we have thrown ourselves into the task of re-imagining the magazine and re-invigorating it with a lot of enthusiasm and zeal. I feel like the writing is really hitting highs right now, and people are really motivated to raise the bar all across the spectrum of the magazine, in the writing and the ambition of the reporting.

I’m also really proud of what I think of as the elevation of photography and the new mission statement of the fashion, which is really to be a lot more definitive and more useful. We’d always been the fashion bible, and I just wanted to play off that authority even more. I really wanted to work with people like Bruce Weber. I just think that he’s one of the people who defined the visual imagery of the culture.

Along with that, with that lush kind of romantic photography that is becoming an increasing staple of the magazine, the other important thing for me that we’ve done in fashion is to be simply more accessible, to demystify it. When I said that we want to use our authority more, we want to actually be more useful, more helpful—give more guidance and tips to guys. And of all the changes that I think we’ve made, that’s the one that I think readers have responded to the most.

That sounds almost like a response to our Queer Eye and Cargo culture, with people more responsive to “how do I do this?” articles.
A lot of times magazines are very flip about it; they don’t embrace that role. GQ is very much unconflicted that way. We love being helpful, giving that advice, helping guys develop their own style. That’s what we’re all about.

You’re working with a several month lead time. Does that make it hard to keep articles relevant?
It’s roughly two-and-a-half months, in the strictest sense. But when I got the job, right away—my first issue was September last year—I was already thinking about how we could be a relevant magazine as a monthly and engage in political issues that I cared about in the months and the year leading up to the election. I wanted political stories—important political stories—in every single issue. And that’s difficult when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

As an example, I wanted to have something when the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries were happening. I knew that no one was paying attention to politics, but that as soon as those things happened everyone was going to be turned on to it. So I had to have something right then that not only was timely but also relevant. So we hooked up with the Howard Dean campaign, and Lisa DePaulo tracked Joe Trippi, the campaign manager, for months and months. By the time we released it, the Dean campaign kind of—well, you know. We had to very quickly change the scope of the assignment, but all the months of hard work that Lisa had done on the piece completely paid off. Because she had been tracking him for months, and it really became a better story, because it became about a trajectory. There was a great arc to the story, of the great wild ride of the genius behind Howard Dean.

What has it been like, coming in after Art Cooper—someone who’d been in that job for 20 years and was quite an icon?
It was damned hard. It was hard personally because he was a mentor to me, and it was hard in the sense that Art had been around so long that people just took him for granted. They didn’t realize everything he had done, which was really to create an entire style of magazine.

In that way, he made it easy for me because there was such a strong foundation here, the sensibility he created. But I love what I’m doing. It’s definitely been a hard year in that I’ve had to balance the new responsibilities, which sometimes seem infinite and overwhelming, but now it’s all bearing fruit.

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

It’s an unusual trek through magazineland: A longtime editor at Crawdaddy—considered probably the coolest music mag ever—who subsequently edited Nuclear Times, Greg Mitchell is today the editor of Editor & Publisher, the widely respected trade journal of the newspaper business. (And he’s also written a number of nonfiction books on the side, ranging from Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, on Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, to the recent Joy in Mudville, a memoir of his years as a Little League coach and his life as a baseball fan.) Mitchell has been at E&P for four years, the first two as its articles editor, and in his time at the helm the 105-year-old mag has gained a new relevancy. Bolstered by an impressive web presence, the magazine has grown from a stodgily obligatory read to a vibrant source of breaking news and commentary on the media business. In fact, last week E&P announced that it was pulling back the mag’s frequency to monthly so that its breaking-news coverage could be concentrated on the web. Soon after the announcement, Mitchell spoke to mediabistro.com about his magazine, his underground junior-high paper, and objectivity in news.

Age: 55
Hometown: Niagara Falls, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports
Yankees or Mets? Mets

Tell me a little about your eclectic career. How did you get into journalism, and how did you then get into media writing?
I like to say that I probably came to journalism by comics. When I was a kid in the late ’50s, I was an enormous fan of Superman, the TV show and comic books. But I was probably one of the rare people who wanted to grow up to be Clark Kent instead of Superman.

I also believe that I probably ran the first underground junior-high newspaper in the country, in 1961. I almost got kicked out of school for running it. We covered junior-high injustices, gossip about teachers, various bad things students had to put up with. From there I was on a straight line to journalism school and working for a daily newspaper in the summers, the Niagara Falls Gazette. And then I got out and was offered jobs at daily newspapers, but instead came to New York and got involved in counterculture magazines.

I was in charge of the non-music coverage at Crawdaddy, which was the first what you might call “serious” rock magazine. We had a lot of political coverage, films and books and so forth. I was into music and did a lot of music stuff, but my specialty was political stuff and books and things like that. Then, for the past 25 years I’ve been more involved in political or social issues.

How did you then get into media studies?
I had written a lot for Channels magazine, which was a magazine in the eighties that had to do with cable and television. I never was a media critic or anything like that, and I can’t point to having worked at Columbia Journalism Review. It just evolved.

The big news at Editor & Publisher is that you’re going from weekly publication to a monthly and beefing up the web presence. Tell me about that decision.
Editor & Publisher is one of the oldest magazines in the universe, and certainly one of the oldest weeklies. It’s been weekly for 105 years. It’s not something you take lightly to go away from that. On the other hand, we’re not in the horse and buggy days. The news business has completely changed. People now expect to get news quickly, daily, hourly. Crawdaddy was monthly, and, working there, we always kind of envied people who came out weekly and didn’t have to sit on news. When I started at E&P, it was great to get stuff out weekly. But even just in the short span, we spend a tremendous amount of time here, every week or every day, debating, well, should we put this up on the web first?

Which usually gets preference? Is based on news value?
Yes, it’s the news value, whether we think it can get picked up elsewhere. Some of the stuff appears only on the web. Some of the stuff is both print and web. But a lot of the stuff, a lot of the newsmaking stuff, a lot of the publicity we get, are web-only stories. We’re constantly debating, well, when should we put this up? If we hold it, what day of the week do we put it up? Or if we put up too much stuff from the magazine, then why should people subscribe to the magazine? Just constant debates over this stuff. Eventually, it became apparent that the way to go was to have a thick monthly magazine with trend stories, analysis, and commentaries.

And totally separate from the web?
They would go up on the web after the issue comes out. But the rest of the month, there would be just constant news stories on the web, so people will know that the website is filled every hour with new news stories. And at the end of the month, they’re going to get a thick magazine with a bunch of features and profiles and analysis, so it’s kind of like putting everything in perspective and context. We’ve been going that way anyway. Issues of E&P in the last couple of years have increasingly become more analytical, and news has migrated more to the web. It just makes that more formal. This is a long-term thing. This isn’t a desperation move. This is well thought out and we’re keeping all our staff. It’s not like the usual case where it’s cut and slash, cut and slash.

How badly do you think the recent New York Times scandals have hurt the news business? Do you think consumers were cynical before, or did it make people more cynical about the news?
I think the biggest problem is the growing ideological response to the news. 50 percent of the people think the news is biased in the liberal direction, and 50 percent think it is biased in the conservative direction. That’s been the continuing trend, and I think it’s a far bigger problem. There’s always been problems with accuracy in newspapers. I think it’s a problem, that the press has to do a better job, but I think they’re policing themselves tremendously more than they used to. But the biggest problem is people responding to news as if it’s biased. You tell a story, you reveal a story or honestly express something that happened, half the people read it and say, “They’re making that up.” They take each story as ideologically driven. Someone of one political party or another does something horrendous, and you write about it and stick to the facts, and people say, “Oh, you’re out to get them, it didn’t really happen that way.” That’s terrible.

But even sticking to the facts, is there really an objective story for any one event?
Well, going back to when I was in j-school, we always talked about the myth: “There’s no such thing as an objective reporter, but there are facts.” I mean if we want to throw open the question of whether there are facts, then we’re really in trouble. But there are facts, there are things that happen, there are people who are arrested, there are documents that reveal if somebody did something or somebody lied. You report that and people constantly make choices and say, “Well, we could ignore that. Here’s someone who documents show lied. We can ignore it.” But you’re constantly having to make choices on what’s important.

So if someone is in a responsible position and is shown to have lied about something and it had consequences, and you cover it. That would seem to be a no-brainer, but half the people say, “Oh, you’re out to get that guy.” Or, “You’re twisting it somehow.” Or just doing it to make the Republicans look bad or the Democrats look bad. So I think that that’s the biggest problem.

But isn’t that partially true, that some news organizations are doing it to make one side look bad? I mean, watch al-Jazeera and then Fox News, and it is like two different stories, even of the same event with the same facts.
Well, that’s the problem. You can make a judgment on how objective people are. It’s all relative. But the problem is Fox is a response to the perception by some people that the media was too liberal. I could question that, but that’s a response. That drives the ideology. Because there’s a perception. So then the liberals say they’re going to form their own liberal network, so we have a liberal news network and a conservative news network. It’s a big problem. It becomes all relative. Everyone has their own bias, no one’s 100 percent objective.

You can say such and such a newspaper seems to be fairly on the middle and others less so, but lumping everything together, “The media is such and such,” is really wrong. And I’m not a champion of newspapers. But I think practically any newspaper is more objective than practically any television network. But people will say, “Oh, this newspaper’s biased; they had an editorial on such and such”—well, that’s what editorials are for. They confuse the news pages with the editorial pages.

Do you think bias is necessarily bad in something like Fox News? I think it was Walter Lippmann who said that people will eventually just go to the news that fits their ideology.
I think that’s a problem. Some people, 30 or 50 percent or whatever, watch Fox and get no other view, get that reinforced, listen to talk radio. I mean you don’t have to say that 50 percent of people have to listen to Michael Moore, but if there are vast numbers of people on both sides of the ideological spectrum who are turned off to objective reports, and then there’s 30 percent left in the middle who are fairly open-minded, that’s a big problem.

It may have already led to one war that is going to have enormous consequences for generations. E&P, going back to last fall, had the first reports on the embedded reporters program, we had the first reporter who actually went into a training for embedded reporters, we were the first magazine to expose the limits, the regulations that embedded reporters have to sign on to. We’ve done 200 articles related to the war and the media that I would put up against anybody’s. It’s an important question.

Tell me about your personal view of the embedding campaign. Was it successful, and for whom?
It was successful for everyone, to a point. Newspapers benefited because they got reporters close to the scene. And got a lot of stories. It was cheap, you didn’t have to pay for them. And they got a lot of vivid action stories, a lot of great copy, and a lot of great work overall. The problem was that they relied on that almost exclusively; they had very few independent reporters over there and they didn’t acknowledge enough in their reports the restrictions they were under. There weren’t enough people who would say, “I saw this,” but then say, “I was only allowed to see this. I wasn’t able to see that. I wasn’t able to report this.”

Do you think reporters dropped the ball on questions of what would happen afterwards?
Absolutely. Again, even little E&P was raising these questions in February. It’s about buying the rah-rah-rah. Anytime there’s a war and the media covers it in a rah-rah way, and then after the war, all the questions come up and then we say next time we won’t do that. Then there’s another war, and it’s back to rah-rah land. This war already has and will continue to have enormous consequences for future generations. We’ll pay for this for generations. Enormous financial costs. It’s going to be incredible. If people are for the war, that’s fine. But understand what the consequences are going to be. If it’s worth it to you, then God bless you. But be aware that there are enormous, enormous consequences.

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

In most high-end glossies, the editor’s note that opens the book is nothing more than some aspirational puffery mixed with requisite high praise for that month’s cabal of must-read articles. But a little over a year ago, readers of Vanity Fair started noticing a different tone creeping into Graydon Carter’s monthly dispatch. Carter’s letters—already notorious for their screeds against Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking ban—were becoming more and more pointed in their attacks on the Bush Administration‘s policies. The venerable editor was becoming, dare we say, a little bit truculent.

It’s clear now, though, that Carter’s letters weren’t just dashed-off, kneejerk cynicism. Carter recently released a new book, What We’ve Lost, which outlines his frustration with the Bush Administration and spells out in no uncertain terms his desire to see the current president booted out of office come November. Carter took some time out recently to chat with mediabistro.com about his new book, the fizzling of Graydongate—the mini-scandal that erupted but quickly lost its legs when it was revealed that Carter had taken money from a Hollywood studio in exchange for suggesting a film adaptation—and why his political voice is now louder than ever.

Birthdate: July 14, 1949
Hometown: Toronto, Canada
First section of the Sunday Times: The Week in Review

Why did you think that it was necessary to come out with something so political right now?
In the buildup to the war in Iraq, common sense told me that this was a war that was an optional war rather than a war of necessity, and this has proved to be the case. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no biochemical weapons; Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11, had no real links to Al Qaeda, and was not really an imminent threat to the United States or to our western allies in almost any way. I started writing about this in the magazine, and then an editor at Farrar Straus called me and asked, “Would you be interested in doing this as a book?” My first impression was that it would be a very small, pamphlety-type book.

Just a collection of the columns?
Like a voter’s handbook. The trouble was, though, once we got into each area the thing just grew and grew. It wound up being 374 pages, and I would have preferred a book of maybe 120.

A lot of what’s mentioned in the book felt like things I’d heard before, but somehow got swept off of the media’s radar. Do you think people are just unaware of all this stuff?
The news comes at you in three-minute chunks, and what I wanted to do was put together a book that pulled together what the Bush administration’s been doing in the environment, on healthcare, in education; what it’s done to our reputation around the world; how they’ve operated in such secrecy, more secrecy than any other administration in recent memory; then going through the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. I wanted to pull this all together so that a reader could make an informed decision.

“Informed” meaning—
Not voting for Bush.

Do you plan to keep Vanity Fair more political? How will that change if Bush is not re-elected?
Vanity Fair‘s always covered politics quite heavily. I think that my own participation has probably run its course. I’ve said everything I want to say. If Bush is re-elected, the magazine will continue reporting on this administration, as it will if John Kerry is elected. I think that we ran very tough pieces on the Clinton Administration during their eight years, and have been equally tough on the Bush Administration over the last four years. I don’t think that’s going to change, although my voice in the magazine will probably change.

There was a piece by Toby Young in the New York Observer that seemed to suggest that you might be positioning yourself to run for mayor of New York against Bloomberg next year. Clearly you’ve been antagonistic towards the mayor and his smoking ban. Do you plan to take him on?
The funny thing is I actually like Michael Bloomberg. He and I are friends, even though we disagree over this one issue. My feeling is that if a politician’s going to make some sweeping lifestyle change when they get into office, they should just announce them up front while they’re running for office.

You think he sort of snuck it in afterwards?
Just like the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration ran on a centrist platform, and since they got into office, they did anything but that—even though they didn’t even have a mandate. There was no public outcry for more right-wing judges, for fewer environmental protections, for more secrecy. This was all sprung on us after they got into office.

Do you have any other political aspirations?
No, I have no goals outside the magazine. I have a lot of different passions and this magazine is almost the perfect magazine for me. I’m not highbrow; I’m sort of upper-middlebrow, and I put things in the magazine that I’d like to read. We don’t do any research studies about what readers like, or anything like that. I’ve been doing it for 12 years, and I could easily see doing it for another 12 years. I’ll do it as long as they keep me around here. I’ve never thought of another job after this.

Let’s talk about Graydongate. A couple of months ago, there was a smattering of articles in The New York Times and the L.A. Times about money you received from film producers. What was your take on the whole thing?
I was sort of confused by the whole issue, because it’s virtually no different than a writer selling their book to the movies. I just couldn’t figure out where it came from, and then it went away just about as quickly as it came. I’ve been very fortunate—I’ve had a very good run of the press. Every once in a while an issue comes up, but it’s not common. I’m not going to suggest movies to producers anymore, that’s for sure.

What’s your take on the cultish following that Spy has developed recently?
It was actually pretty popular in its day. But it makes me absolutely thrilled. I have four kids, and three of them boys, and they’re obsessed with Spy, which makes me incredibly happy.

So what kind of vindication will you feel if Bush loses in November?
I did this book as a sort of completely comprehensive guidebook—a report card on the administration—and you come away on almost every area with a lot of Fs, and a lot of Ds. When students get that kind of report card, they don’t get asked back the next year. I just felt that this is the one time in my life when I had to do what I thought I just had to do something. If it makes any difference whatsoever, I’d be very gratified.

Are you planning any more books?
I’m thinking this is kind of it for me. I’m not great on deadlines, I have a book that’s outstanding with Knopf, and is seventeen years overdue about a World War I aerial photographer. I’ve just got to get that finished.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com’s news editor and a reporter for Metro New York. Photo credit Mark Seliger. You can buy What We’ve Lost at Amazon.com.

John Sayles has spent the better part of the last three decades making such iconic films as Eight Men Out, Lone Star, and Passion Fish, and along the way, he’s become one of America’s best-known independent filmmakers. But what most people don’t know is that before he joined that small pantheon of Oscar-nominated screenwriters, Sayles was a National Book Award-nominated novelist and short-story writer. And in a way, the revelation of Sayles’ lesser-known writing life fits. His films are often thoughtful ensemble pieces where characters and sense of place are the thing—the very stuff of short-story writing. Now Sayles has released Dillinger in Hollywood—his first collection of short stories in 25 years—and mediabistro.com recently caught up with the auteur to talk about the new collection, the new (and timely) film Silver City, and the current climate in the news media.

Birthdate: September 28, 1950
Hometown: Schenectady, New York
First section of the Sunday Times: Doesn’t read it

Obviously, you’ve been a very successful indie filmmaker over the past few decades. How does writing short stories fit into that?
I was a novelist and short-story writer before I was a filmmaker. That was my segue into the world of screenwriting. But writing fiction takes a lot of energy. The new collection, Dillinger in Hollywood, is stuff I’ve written over the past 30 years or so. Every once in a while I come across an idea that is best told in short-story form. It’s usually because the short-story arc is so tight. Short stories can only get into the details so far. A novel has to go in deeper, and so, for a novel, I have to take a year off of filmmaking. These stories have been published in various places, but they’ve never been collected before.

The subjects of your stories—the Hollywood leftovers, the barflies, a rock drummer who finds himself drawn to the life story of a janitor—often reflect the themes you touch on in your films. Do you have a specific reason for telling the stories you tell?
My short stories are immersions into very specific worlds. There’s this idea implicit in my writing that Americans have these parallel lives—all over the place, these parallel cultures and societies exist independent of one another. People live in their own little bubbles and only occasionally do people in the media have a reason to cover them or find out what they’re all about. These are people who are in the police force or who are firemen or in the world of newspaper reporting—all of these are tight little worlds. It’s such a bubble that if you’re completely immersed in it, you may not hear about O.J. Simpson or whatever. In my longer fiction and in my movies, I tend to immerse the reader into one of these worlds and try to express the hermetic nature of those worlds. Some of them are just funny kinds of micro-communities that may only last for a little while and then evaporate. A particular bar with a particular clientele or a sports team. There is a culture in any sports team and then the next year it’s totally different. It even changes when someone gets hurt—within that culture, if they’re not playing, they’re not a person. Three weeks later, when they’re done with their injury, they become a person again. Almost every world has that. A sort of office politics—either you’re in favor or you’re out of favor; either you’re a player or a loser. These kinds of social dynamics are very particular to a place and time.

How do you infiltrate these communities and find the people to write and make movies about? How much research do you have to do?
Some of it is that I take the time and woodshed the stories. I get interested in something and then it may be a couple of years until I go investigate it. I talk to people and have them explain to me how things are. Usually I’ll create the story arc but the world that the story is set in is very real. I’ve been backstage at a Cajun restaurant and watched people peeling the shrimp, to find out what those people are like. The worlds that you go into are fairly real, just people living their lives, and I try to observe them realistically. Afterwards, I try to spend some time and do some checkup. The important thing for me is to try to go in as open-minded as possible.

In writing about other people’s lives, do you ever worry that, simply observing from your vantage, you might get it wrong?
I usually feel like they’re pretty well researched. The last draft that I write of screenplays is always after we got to the place where we’re going to shoot. Usually, I’ll show what I have to locals and ask people if anything rings false in the characterizations or whatever. Sometimes it’s something big and I have to make big changes. I definitely get good ideas from the local knowledge of things.

What do you like about writing rather than making a film?
Making a film is a long job, particularly the way I do it. There’s all the campaigning, raising the money, and doing the publicity. We have our own company, but each movie we have to raise the money all over again with a different set of investors. Out of all the movies I’ve made, I’d say there are only a few that have been distributed by same company. In the independent film world there’s definitely a lot of risk for investors, and there’s a lot of people who go out of business.

But you keep managing to get the money to release these great, quirky pieces. Tell me about Silver City, the movie you currently have in the theaters. That deals with these communities you’re talking about to a certain extent, but there’s obviously a more wide-ranging satire going on.
A lot of it came from this feeling that the political conversation was very one-sided. It’s really about the failure of the massive mainstream news system. It’s about journalists being intimidated. People are called investigative journalists, but they’re still looking at the bottom line so much. People like these confrontational shows on TV; people like sound byte news better than something in-depth. During the war in Iraq, I found the U.S. news totally useless. BBC did a little better and I watched that.

What Silver City is about is trying to get another side or two into the conversation. Sometimes I feel like we’re stumbling towards democracy as well as running away from it. It’s a participatory process, and if people just accept the official story, they’re not getting what’s really happening. Journalists are always wondering, “Should I check on this source?” and “How thin is it?” You have to do that as a citizen as well.

You also helped to organize the Imagine Festival in New York during the Republican National Convention, when hundreds of artists staged events as alternatives to the convention. What was that all about?
The Imagine Festival was an escape valve for New Yorkers who resented their tragedy and their city being co-opted by the Republicans. For New Yorkers, it was a great thing to be able to see the other side.

David S. Hirschman is the news editor of mediabistro.com and a reporter for Metro New York. You can buy Dillinger in Hollywood at Amazon.com.

After making a name for herself covering the publishing industry for Inside.com, The New York Observer and most recently, the New York Post, Sara Nelson has finally reached the place where she was headed all along as the newly-appointed editor of the venerable publishing trade book, Publishers Weekly. Having said that she will try to “modernize” the title, which has lost some readership in recent years due to competition from web sources like blogs (see MB’s Galleycat), Nelson talked with MB’s David Hirschman about the specifics of her new position.

Tell me a little bit about how the new job came about.

The short answer to that is that I’ve been at the Post for about seven months, and about a month ago I got a call from PW to see if I would be interested. They knew my work and it went from there. The long version is that I think I have been unconsciously moving toward this, or something like this, for a long time. I have been a reviewer at bookreporter.com, as well as for Glamour magazine. I was then at Inside.com at the very beginning of 2000, from before the beginning until after the end a couple of years later.

Will you modernize PW specifically online? How can you make a weekly magazine more relevant in the age of blogs, when news is broken in such a widespread, instantaneous manner?

Well, that’s the $64,000 question. PW the magazine has stuff that exists on the website but that you probably wouldn’t read on the web. For instance, I don’t think most people are going to read all the reviews of the week on the website. The fact that they are there is good, but when you want to see what’s going on this week, you are much more likely to want to read it in the print form. I think that’s not going to change significantly. There may be individual changes in the physical layout of the pages, et cetera. It’s really going to look very different than it does now.

Blogs? More blog content?

I don’t think so, at least not in the print magazine. One of the early priorities however, will be to redesign the physical magazine. The second priority is to make some significant additions, and shuffling of the web products.

Who do you see as your main competition?

I believe that Publishers Weekly does at least three things and the nearest competition does some of those three things but not all of them. There’s Publisher’s Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, and there is a new product coming from VNU, which is the BookStandard.com. I think if you look at those things, you see what they have and what they don’t have.

I think PW needs a lot of changing and I think everyone in the industry agrees on that; in the few days since my appointment was announced, that’s what I keep hearing. I don’t disagree. There’s a lot that needs to be fixed, updated, etc. But the truth is that it really is the brand of the industry, and that it just needs to be spruced up and shined up and modernized.

Do you anticipate it being tough to take over such a well-known brand and making changes?

I don’t know. I’ve frankly never run something of this size before. I feel like it is going to be hard in the sense that people involved with Publishers Weekly, you have to keep reminding yourself that things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. For instance, maybe we shouldn’t have this column, or maybe this review should go in the front and maybe it should be in black and white and not have any color pictures or vice versa. So it’s a question of sort of releasing yourself from some of the things that have existed. And that’s hard for the people who have been there. But, while it needs a lot of change, it does function well and it’s profitable, and so you want to make sure you don’t fix the parts that aren’t broken.

Are you going to try to expand the target audience at all? Do you think that PW has the potential to be more generally read?
It’s always going to be a trade publication. I mean the industry is so disparate anyway; you have publishers and editors, and then you have publishing houses and you have agents and booksellers, who are all in the same business but who all have different agendas.

It used to be that every writer, either published or who just wanted to be published, felt they had to have a subscription to PW. They felt that it had information that they needed, and I think that some of that has fallen off.

Is that because news now is overwhelmingly broken on the web?

It’s partly that and I think that the web cannot be underestimated in how it had changed the business. But the business has really changed and the magazine got tired, and I hope that some of this will be remedied by new energy and a new pair of eyes.

What are some of the major publishing industry issues that you’re going to focus on when you get started?
Certainly the conglomeratization of both the publishing side, meaning publishers gobbling each other up, and on the bookselling side. Online selling has changed the way people buy books, and the superstores.

Are you particularly in favor of small stores? Do you have any political angle to take on that?
I don’t think you can do that anymore. It was sort of fashionable to do that once, but this is really a question of survival of the industry. I think the chains do some things really well and I think the independents do some things really well.

I don’t intend to support one way of doing business over the other. I would not like to see more independents to go under, but I would like to find a way to talk about these issues better so that independents might find a way to do business better, so that everyone can co-exist.

How about the whole idea of E-books? This idea seems to be gaining steam a bit in recent years.
I don’t know yet. I did a lot of coverage of electronic publishing when I was Inside.com, and while I do believe that it will be the way that some books will get published and read, I don’t know if the time is right just about now.

Who are some of the people doing innovative things in book publishing these days?
Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press has really turned that place around, making it into a really smart, tiny venture. There are a lot of really terrific young agents and editors moving in. Actually, I don’t really want to name anyone else, because I feel like I’d be leaving someone out. I guess the thing is that, for all the people who say that the book business is dying, there seem to be an awful lot of really great people who are in it and who are so smart and interesting that they could easily be in a different business and they don’t want to be. I mean, nobody goes into book publishing because they think they’re going to get rich; a lot of people in publishing really love what they do.

Do you read a lot yourself?
Yeah. Actually one of the emails I got when I took this job said “So much for having the time to read all those books you love.” I mean, I’m a crazy, nutty reader. I’m always reading something and easily go through a book a week. Mostly fiction. I read some nonfiction but I’m really a fiction person.

How are you feeling about the job?
I’m definitely really thrilled and excited and nervous, but somebody said to me the other day that if it doesn’t make you feel at least a little bit nauseous, it’s probably not worth doing. I am really interested in and knowledgeable about the industry and more optimistic that many people about the future of publishing. I mean, a lot of things may change and a lot of things may need to change in book publishing, and I’ve read all the studies that say people don’t read anymore, but people do read. There are more book groups than there have ever been, there are all those TV book clubs, and there is just a lot going on and I believe it will continue.

Are you going to write for the magazine at all?
I expect to write on a regular basis.

Have they found anyone to replace you at the Post yet?
Nope.

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