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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The book makes many references to editorial cues that you picked up from your predecessors at the Nation. Are there any traditions that you're carrying forward on the business side?
Yes. The Nation has always flown in the face of conventional magazine wisdom. My favorite example is the first sentence that ran on the first page of the first issue of the Nation: "The week was singularly barren of exciting events." Could you imagine seeing a sentence like that in Tina Brown's Talk or Vanity Fair? It's inconceivable! The conventional wisdom is that you need buzz, buzz, buzz. The Nation thumbs its nose at buzz, and that's a tribute to something that E.L. Godkin, the original founder, understood. Carey McWilliams, the editor for 25 years before I got there, used to say that the main job of the magazine was to question the official line. That's not just about politics writ large but also about how you do the business itself.
Did spending time with your fellow managers at Harvard Business School change the way that you perceived the business world as a journalist and editor?
Well, I liked my classmates a lot. One of them was David Karam, whose family owns 75 Wendy's franchises in Ohio. On the one hand, he's a very conservative guy, an anti-union guy. On the other hand, when you ask him what's the job of the business, he gives you his list: quality product, a fair profit, and to improve the lives of employees. They have to share in the proceeds. He's not advocating worker ownership, but the general sophistication and caring nature of his approach ... it wasn't true of everybody up there but it wasn't that much of an exception either. David was just a little more articulate about it.
How do you imagine the Nation's public? Who are your readers?
To put it simply, I think we have two overlapping but very different constituencies and a lot of single-interest groups. The first constituency is the classic constituency for journals of opinion, who are people who are interested in ideas. They range from teachers to college professors to students, to people who write the nightly news and people who read it, to members of Congress. Generally, these are the people who have more influence in the culture than the person in the street. The other constituency tends to be younger. These are the movement activists who count on the magazine to rally the faithful whether it's gay rights or anti-nuclear arms or globalization.
I would say that there's more distinguishing the positions of our various contributors than there is separating the Democratic and Republican parties. For instance, the difference between our old-fashioned socialists who believe in top-down planning and the Greens, who believe in bottom-up politics, is greater than the difference between the two major parties. You don't find those debates in the mainstream media, but they surface in our magazine.
Christopher Hitchens left the magazine because, he said, it was no longer a productive forum for debating the war in Iraq. In the book you say that you wish he'd stuck around, and that the magazine could have accommodated his views.
I do wish he'd stuck around. For a while, there seemed to be bad blood. There were things written about what Katrina vanden Heuvel and I said about him that he didn't take well to, and the way we read what he was saying, he seemed to be lumping the Nation in with some mindless mythical left that thought Osama bin Laden was less of a threat than John Ashcroft. That's not Katrina's view. That's not my view. That's not the Nation's view. And yet Christopher said "my former comrades believe that." Then lo and behold, I open the May Vanity Fair and there's Christopher Hitchens nominating me for Vanity Fair's hall of fame. I guess you never know.
Doesn't the magazine have an urge to eventually form a collective opinion on questions like the war, to settle the larger issues into a unified platform?
I think it is appropriate for a magazine like this one to have an internal debate and eventually, where it can, to come out and take its own position. But that doesn't mean that you exclude views that disagree with you. You start from a set of shared values. The right starts from a very different value system. Whereas we have pacifists and non-pacifists, they have isolationists and unilateralist, jingoistic "patriots." We don't have to waste our space on that. And yet we can print articles for and against intervention.
Other magazines have found one big sustaining donor who intervenes on behalf of a pet candidate or issue but otherwise leaves the editorial side alone. You, on the other hand, have had to continually balance the competing interests of multiple shareholders and smaller donors. How do you keep all of these groups identifying with the Nation, even when they disagree?
I don't know if there's a simple answer to this one. I've tried to set up a system that would insulate the magazine from intervention by its investors. So the simple explanation is that we're organized as a partnership, the same way a Broadway show is organized. Everyone who invests in a Broadway show knows they have no say as to who gets the leading part or whether Arthur Miller has to change the last act of "Death of a Salesman." It's a given that the creative people put on the show.
Secondly, I didn't subscribe to or install a system of collective decision-making about what should be put in a publication or where the money should be spent. I just accepted what I thought of as the New Yorker model, where business had nothing to say to editorial and the editor was a dictator. Finally, it's not as if I started this magazine. I don't want to be the person who brought down this great cultural treasure which I've been given custodianship of during the period that I'm here. Much of the work is a matter of improvisation and discovery as you go along. I always thought the job of the principal is to keep everybody working together insofar as you can. The fact that there are differing points of view is a plus to the magazine, so long as you can keep things from getting physical.
