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Friday, December 05, 2008
David Wild, HE IS... I SAY: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE NEIL DIAMOND author: Mr. Media Interview
Wild testifies to this forbidden love in a new sort-of biography, He Is… I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, which is, at times, as much about Wild as it is about Diamond.
You can LISTEN to this interview with DAVID WILD, author of HE IS... I SAY: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE NEIL DIAMOND, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!
Barbara O'Dair, "US Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published June 23, 1997
My first inkling that something was different about US magazine came as I settled into an airplane seat and reached into my briefcase for something to read. The airport newsstand was pretty thin and I had reluctantly settled for US.
On the cover was Sandra Bullock, an actor who doesn't exactly get my pulse racing. But as I settled in for the two-hour flight, I began turning the pages.
I'm not a big reader of celebrity gossip magazines. People magazine does nothing for me; the only advantage US had over it until recently was color inside photos. But as I read on, it dawned on me that much had changed at Rolling Stone's little sister magazine.
US shocked me with the number of pages it devoted to terrific photographs of its cover subject. And the story was lively and funny, letting Bullock be herself in a way few interviews do. Even more pleasing was the sheer volume of good stuff throughout the magazine. By the time we landed in Tampa, I had read US from cover to cover.
Two months later, I intentionally picked up the magazine. This time Jennifer Aniston, co-star of the NBC sitcom "Friends," was on the cover. Just as it did with Bullock, the magazine devoted several pages to eye-catching photos of Aniston and followed it with another well-written profile.
The clincher came with the May issue, featuring Gillian Anderson of Fox's "The X-Files" taking a big lick of her co-star David Duchovny's face. A little gross, true, but the cover story offered a ticklish interview of the two stars together, something few other publications have managed.
US began life as a New York Times magazine until Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner bought it eight years ago. Today, the magazine is a certifiable success, selling 1.1 million copies monthly, half via subscription and half at the newsstand.
Forced to admit I, too, was hooked, I called US magazine editor Barbara O'Dair for an interview. O'Dair, 37, already a veteran editor of Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, Entertainment Weekly and the Orange County Register, is also the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays titled, The Rolling Stone Book of Women and Rock: Trouble Girls (Random House).
In the spirit of her magazine, which makes an art of Q & A-style interviews, here are highlights of our conversation:
MR. MEDIA: Is it just my imagination, or has your magazine changed dramatically in the last year?
O'DAIR: No, it has changed a lot. Jann Wenner deputized me to conceive of and enact this new vision for the magazine. We introduced a lot of new features.
Editorially, what is different today than say three or four years ago?
O'DAIR: I think we improved the quality of the writing and, particularly, the photography. We signed up a number of top photographers, including Mary Ellen Mark, Mark Seliger, Matthew Rolston and Ruben Afanador. And we introduced "Portfolio," which is a collection of five or six fabulous photographs of a subject or subjects that often functions as a story in itself, in addition to whatever text that accompanies the piece.
The first one was the Brad Pitt portfolio, which featured Brad Pitt on the cover in October 1995. We have put at least one, sometimes two, portfolios in every issue.
I really like the use of the photos. Daily newspapers, most of whom have color reproduction and great staff photographers, never feature their art.
O'DAIR: I think it has definitely gotten people to look at US in a new light, and that feels really good. We are taken more seriously because we show that we care about good photography and that we care about our subject matter. We don't trade in cheap imagery.
The other thing that really impressed me was the frequent use of Q & A.
O'DAIR: Since its inception, US has had an interview which was kind of modeled on the Playboy interview. That has been an earmark of every issue. We do it with controversial subjects and people who are chatty and people who are funny. People want to hear from this person and not so much from the writer. We also cluster a series of one-page Q & As at the back of the book.
I thought that the Woody Allen Q & A was just about the best thing that I have read with him actually talking about what has been going on in his life.
O'DAIR: You get it from the horse's mouth. We had a really good Q & A with Charlie Sheen, a star who is not exactly bright at the moment but who gives really good quotes. You get the sense of what these peoples' lives are like, the kinds of decisions they make on a daily basis and how they are like you and me and how they are not like you and me at all. All those similarities and differences become crystal clear.
Basically, the goal is just a great, riveting read. Some Q & As are not as easy to do as some people might think; you don't turn on the tape recorder and then transcribe. It is an art in itself to make it lively and fun, while probing the subject with angled questions.
Who is the magazine's competition today? Is it still People, or is it broader than that?
O'DAIR: Everybody who puts a celebrity on their cover, basically -- Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, In Style, People, Premiere and Interview. On the high end, we are looking to nip some heels at Vanity Fair, and I think we do that pretty successfully from time to time. I think we used to be confused more often with People than we are now. Our mandate is really pretty different from People.
How so?
O'DAIR: For one thing, they are a weekly. They respond to people in the news in a different way than we do, and they also, for better or worse, on a case by case basis, often do stories without access to the people they are writing about. You know what I mean. They are taking a different tack. I think they do what they do very well, but we are rarely jockeying for the same cover.
There has been much discussion in recent years about how celebrities' press agents control stories, making demands about who conducts interview and is authorized to take photos. Have you experienced that at US, and if so, how do you deal with it?
O'DAIR: We have experienced it ever since I got into this business 10 years ago, and it became more and more intense as the years go by. We try to hold our ground. I can't say that we have never talked with a publicist about a photographer that will be acceptable to both parties, us and them, but we never let them dictate. We never let them say, 'Well, you can have Meg Ryan for your cover if she is shot by so-and-so.' We come up with the photographers and the writers and if, for some reason, they are not acceptable, if they committed some grave offense against the subject, obviously, we don't want bad chemistry, because we are not looking to enrage people. But we really need to be trusted on our editorial choices, and we make that very clear to the publicists. For the most part, they respect that. If we can't come to terms, we drop it. We have walked away a number of times.
Do you often fight with People or Entertainment Weekly over exclusive interviews?
O'DAIR: Well, we insist on exclusivity when we can. We don't want to appear with the same cover subject in the same month as one of our main competitors.
How much can you control that?
O'DAIR: Well, we ask them, and we make deals, and if they say, well, sorry, but Mr. X is going to appear on three other magazines, then we don't go there. It is as good as saying this person is not available. So basically, it is a race to get to these people first and to commit, but you can't over-commit for a year down the line, because with movies, for example, release dates are changing constantly. The Jennifer Anniston cover in March was originally timed to a movie called Picture Perfect which is now coming out this summer. Fortunately, it didn't really matter, because she is a TV star on every week.
The May issue of US featured an "X-Files" cover story that was worth the price, but it also offered an extraordinary Kelsey Grammer piece and a cheeky profile and portfolio of Julianna Margolis . . .
O'DAIR: Well, thank you. The Kelsey Grammer story was something we were really proud of. That writer sweated it, because it was not a publicist-pleasing story. But I think it was a story that was very good for us, and in the end, I don't think we did any disservice to the guy. I think we basically just told it as it was.
Tell me about your new book, The Rolling Stone Book of Women and Rock: Trouble Girls.
O'DAIR: Oh, a completely different topic! (She laughs.) That project actually originated when I was still at Rolling Stone. It was a book that I wanted to do since I was in college, and when it became clear to me that I really was working at Rolling Stone, I thought, well, gee, I ought to make this work in more ways than one.
What will the book consist of?
O'DAIR: Basically, I commissioned more than 50 original essays written by women about women and rock, from the blues up to the present day.
It sounds like a real interesting project.
O'DAIR:Rolling Stone has a long history of putting out great resource books such as The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. This is somewhat modeled on that, although it is specifically women on women.
Roger Black, "Reader's Digest" magazine designer: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published June 2, 1997
"There is a reason why they don't play Montovani in elevators any more," chuckles world-renowned media designer Roger Black.
He's explaining why Reader's Digest hired the man who freshened up Rolling Stone to bring its look and feel forward to the 21st century.
"You are more likely to hear Talking Heads than the old Muzak of the 1960s," Black says. "The baby boom is now Reader's Digest age, and that is kind of astounding. Does that mean we should have Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman in there? Well, maybe we should. Reader's Digest was really intended at a time when American society was much more homogenous and white and so forth, when who was reading it was much clearer. Today, it is very hard for an editor of any big publication to get a clear idea of who their typical reader is."
Black is the designer behind substantial facelifts of Rolling Stone , Newsweek, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Ad Age, and Esquire .
His San Francisco-based graphic design studio, Interactive Bureau, employs 50, with three offices in Europe and one in Mexico. It is engineering four major international newspaper redesigns this year, including Tages Anzeiger in Zurich, Svenska in Sweden, Dagbladet in Stockholm, and the business newspaper StraitsTimes in Singapore. In the United States, Black and his people are helping the Baltimore Sun with a redesign of its Sunday paper, following up on the studio's redesign of the daily.
They are also redesigning Men's Health magazine -- maybe soon we'll be able to tell the difference between one month's issue and the next. In Barcelona, Black's team is working on El Periodico. And although Reader's Digest has not yet committed to a redesign, it has hired Interactive Bureau to help rethink its design direction worldwide.
He's had some spectacular successes, influencing generations of magazine, newspaper and now World Wide Web page designers, which is why his new book, Web Sites That Work (Adobe Press), is invaluable to so many people.
And while the book, like much he has accomplished, is actually the work of several designers at his San Francisco-based Interactive Bureau (and New Yorker magazine columnist Sean Elder), it is a landmark in computer book publishing. Instead of one more tome crammed with HTML code and computer trickery, Black's illustration-packed book simply and effectively demonstrates what good design looks like in any medium.
Black, 48, isn't a newcomer to the wired world, but he still struggles with making it fit the old conceptions of print media.
"Interactivity takes the old-line media folks like me aback," he says, "because we are used to just packaging content up and sending it down the chute. The television people are pretty much the same way."
Black defines interactivity by applying the metaphor of a chicken in a carnival sideshow who pushes various buttons to get a piece of corn.
"In some web sites you feel like some very dumb animal trying to hit the right button so things happen for you," he explains. "In fact, there is a kind of interactivity called 'peripheralization' where people are trying to configure web sites entirely around the taste and interest of the customer."
But real interactivity, Black insists, is when it is completely two-way.
"The best metaphor is that the Internet is more like the telephone than like television, and for a print graphic designer or editor/writer, the challenge in the next few years for Internet design is letting the users get a hold of the design themselves and reshaping the site around themselves the way they want it."
That is a challenge: Newspapers change their look once a generation if that often; magazines -- with the exception of staid cash cows such as Cosmopolitan and Playboy -- typically remake themselves every five years or so. So asking them to redesign their look as often as tastes changes online -- or to let readers monkey with their graphical elements -- is a radical incongruity.
"I think that designers would morph their newspapers more rapidly if they had more power internally," Black says. "The newspapers are way too institutional for changing times. The Internet clock is running so fast that maybe its changes have been too quick. Take a site like CNN's. You may or may not like the design, but the content is so active that the structure of the site is only important in terms of navigation and architecture and understanding what is going on. It is not the design. I think increasingly that is true. The design -- the graphics -- is less important. What is important is the content."
Producing a web site that works means constantly refreshing it. If a site doesn't change in six months time, "Forget it," Black says. "You'll never go back."
"Don't have a lot of text. Nobody reads anything anymore; the only person you can count on to read every word of what you've written is your mother."
"Don't use tiny type. The general idea is to make everything bigger than you would in print.
"Don't use a lot of colors. Web clutter is typified by freewheeling use of color. Cautiously add one or two colors. Use red or yellow, but don't use them all!"
"Just because you're designing on the Web doesn't mean everything has to look like computer type."
"Too often the viewer is reduced to wildly punching the browser 'back' button or refer to the 'go' menu, which is basically an unreadable list of gibberish."
"Don't confuse the viewer. Your site needs to be consistently designed. If you have different pages and different sections, the navigational tools and graphics need to look the same throughout."
"Don't design pages that require scrolling. Just as 75 percent of people will only read the top half of a folded newspaper, most browsers will never scroll."
Not everything Black touches turns to gold. Smart magazine, imagined and edited by former Rolling Stone, Esquire and now Sports Afield editor Terry McDonnell, was too smart and too poor for its own good. It looked good -- Black uses many examples from it in his book -- and read like a classic, but lacked the resources to stay in business.
And Black is still frustrated by his other notable failure, Esquire. Under Black, Esquire's design was consolidated. Among other things, he put celebrities on the cover every issue with generally white backgrounds. Most memorable was a Madonna photo accompanied inside by a fantastic story by Norman Mailer.
"I worked on Esquire off and on for four years, 1991-95, and I don't think I moved the ball an inch," he says. "In fact, I think we lost ground. It was demoralizing. I am not used to it, but I think Esquire has a major problem in getting readers to understand why they need Esquire in the 1990s. Esquire has all the money that Hearst wants to put behind it, but it doesn't really know what it is doing. I have taken as much blame for that as anybody else, because I worked on it for a long time trying to figure out what it should do, and whatever it was I wanted to do, it didn't work."
Actually, he says, Esquire may be the next old-line publication destined for the magazine retirement home.
"The problem is that people look at Esquire and find it wanting or they have an image of Esquire that is really out of date," Black says. "My advice to Hearst is this: 'Close the magazine and start it over again in a year. Just make a total break.' "
Mr. Media always thought the problem was the title; when was the last time anybody put "Esquire" after their name?
"Exactly!" Black says, laughing. "Although if the magazine stood for something, then that's what the name would mean."
With everything he's already doing, Black still daydreams about jobs he'd like, including remaking the New Yorker and USA Today.
"I really like the New Yorker," he says, "and I think they came close, but they didn't quite do what the design should do. I would love to work with USA Today. I think USA Today is editorially the best presented, best packaged newspaper, but graphically, I think it looks hopelessly out of date now."
If those publishers won't take a hint from Roger Black, what hope do the rest of us have?
Rob Tannenbaum, "Details" contributing editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally Published November 4, 1996
In his fantasies, Details magazine contributing editor Rob Tannenbaum has a beautiful voice.
In reality, he has a beautiful . . . well, he types really well.
Have you ever read a magazine or newspaper story where a reporter steps into the shoes of someone in another line of work — as George Plimpton did, briefly playing for the Detroit Lions in researching his book, Paper Lion? The reporter naively suits up as a cab driver, pizza delivery driver or substitute teacher (three that Mr. Media tried as a young man), gets befuddled by the intricacies of the job, collects a few funny lines, writes a cutesy story and returns to journalism.
That was what Joe Dolce, Tannenbaum's editor at Details, must have expected when he assigned his writer a first-person story about what it was like to start a band and try to get noticed. Little did either of them guess that a year later, Tannenbaum and his faux sextet would have played a live gig at the legendary CBGB's nightclub in Manhattan, pressed a few thousand copies of its original CD, "Everything is Fun," and be considering offers from major record labels.
"In the usual Plimpton story, the writer takes over an unfamiliar job, fails and learns empathy for the professional," Tannenbaum says. "The story is not supposed to work out where the amateur can actually do it."
Now Tannenbaum, a singer in the band White Courtesy Telephone, is considering whether or not he should throw away his writing career to be one of the boys in the band.
"It'd be crazy!" he says. "I've got a lucrative job -- would I want to trade this for five months of touring in a broken down bus with five guys with bad breath sleeping almost standing up every night? Well, I'm starting to think I'm crazy."
What's really crazy is that Tannenbaum, a former rock critic who started his career with the now-defunct Providence Eagle, has no musical aptitude whatsoever.
"I've never been accused of having musical talent," he readily admits. "As long as I've had friends, they've begged me not to sing with the radio -- which is one reason I'm doing this. It's rock 'n' roll -- you don't have to be prodigiously talented to be in rock 'n' roll.
"Of course," he adds, "if I took the same approach to being a sculptor, I'd be laughed out of the art world."
At 35, Tannenbaum might seem a little young for a career crisis, but that's exactly what he's going through.
For years, Tannenbaum has made a name for himself profiling pop and film stars such as REM, Aerosmith, Brian Eno, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, Christian Slater, Julia Roberts, Heather Locklear and Uma Thurman. He wrote the first Rolling Stone stories on bands such as Guns 'n Roses and Bon Jovi (in fact, Jon Bon Jovi used to thank him by ridiculing Tannenbaum during his concerts). He anticipated the Kiss revival in a GQ story two years ago. His Details cover story on Cindy Crawford became the best-selling issue in the magazine's history.
Then one day he gets up on the wrong side of the bed and he's writing and recording songs instead of reviewing them, hustling A&R reps from major labels and performing with White Courtesy Telephone at CBGB's -- "a momentous occasion" -- mumbling, talking, shouting and spitting his lyrics on the same microphone as the Ramones, Tom Verlaine and Debbie Harry.
And how is White Courtesy Telephone's CD, "Everything is Fun"?
It's eclectic, loud, irreverent and a pile of fun -- just what you'd expect from song titles such as "Stephen Hawking's Wheelchair," "Eat What You Kill" and Tannenbaum's somewhat original composition, "Cobain(e)," which he executes to the tune of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine."
"I was listening to the radio one day," Tannenbaum recalls, "and 'Cocaine' was on. But I heard, 'Cobain, dead rock star, dead rock star, dead rock star -- Cobain.' "
And if there's any doubt in your mind about Tannenbaum becoming a rocker, be warned that he's already affected a misunderstood artist attitude. "People miss a lot of the subtlety of what we're doing," he says, "the literary references . . . "
As in the rather crude ditty "Prison Wife"?
"You got me there," he says, laughing.
The toughest part of being in a band isn't the late nights, loud music, heavy drinking, groupies (he's got one) or begging record producers to listen to his CD. No, the hardest part is going from a neatly organized life to one of total anarchy.
"One of the things I've learned," Tannenbaum says, "is that rock bands don't have plans. The notion of a six-month plan doesn't happen in rock 'n' roll. So the other guys looked at me like an accountant because I tried doing all these organized things."
The biggest difference between Tannenbaum and a true amateur is that the other guy couldn't get his calls returned by the president of major record labels. Tannenbaum's reputation as a reporter carries weight with these people -- at the very least, they'll humor him. Never know when he might be back on the music beat, profiling Alanis, Bono or Madonna, right?
"I have been able to get the CD to people who might not have been accessible to garage musicians," he concedes. "And I don't know how much they're humoring me. Because I'm trying to get an honest response, I haven't told a lot of people this is for a story."
Tannenbaum's report on the unlikely career of White Courtesy Telephone is slated for the January issue of Details. By then, his journalism career could be a distant memory. On the other hand, he still sings like a typist.
"This has been the most confusing assignment I've ever had," he says. "I've had so much fun -- anticipation, adrenaline, money lust -- I'm unclear now which part is the story and which part is my desire and my fantasy. I'm not sure when I'll get my life back. I'm not sure if I want my life back.
"If worse comes to worse," Tannenbaum says, "I'll tour for a year -- then write about that."
Bob Andelman is the host and producer of the “Mr. Media Radio” online interview show, now in its 4th year. He is also the author or co-author of 10 books including: The Profiler; Will Eisner: A Spirited Life; Built From Scratch; Mean Business; The Profit Zone; The Corporate Athlete, Stadium For Rent and several others. Complete biography & book reviews here. Looking to hire a collaborator or writer for a book? Contact my agent, Michael Bourret. Magazine editors can contact me directly.
Legs McNeil (Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk,” “The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry,” Punk Magazine)
Bob Gruen (John Lennon, The Clash, New York Dolls rock ‘n’ roll photographer)
Michael Uslan (The Dark Knight, The Spirit, Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, Catwoman, Constantine, National Treasure, Swamp Thing, Shazam!, The Shadow, Constantine)
Image via WikipediaRolling Stone magazine staff writer David Wild has harbored a secret man crush for decades. Today, he will come out of the closet and fess up:![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
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