 Those of you who don't recognize me, I'm David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the Communications Forum. My job today is a very light and delightful one. It's to introduce our moderator who will handle things from there. Our moderator today is my friend and longtime colleague, Tom Levinson, who's a professor in the program of in comparative media studies and writing. He's the winner of the Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award. He's the winner of a Peabody Award. He won an Emmy from the New York Chapter Emmy for his work as a filmmaker, and he is the author of a series of distinguished books in cultural and scientific history, the History of Science. Newton, the Counterfeiter, and Einstein in Berlin are two of his most recent titles. It's a delight and a pleasure to introduce Tom Levinson. Thank you. Thank you very much, David. And thank you all for turning out in the holiday season when it's sometimes difficult to find a moment. I want to just note one thing, the Communications Forum, which David has headed for many years, is the program that made this event possible. They've been an integral element in thinking about writing, communication, other media, and speaking to the public about important issues for now decades. And David's been the major domo for, I think, just about all that time. And I personally am very grateful to be here under that banner. So our two guests, I want to get into it very quickly because we've got a lot of ground to cover. Our two guests today are probably very well known to you by reputation and byline. James Fallows, Jim Fallows, and Corby Kummer, both employed by the Atlantic for many, many years. Jim Fallows has been national correspondent in the Atlantic, again, for decades, written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He's edited the US News and World Report. He has worked as the chief speechwriter to President Jimmy Carter. He is the author of 10 books, most recently, China Airborne. And he is one of the most consistently excellent writers of long, thoughtful, on the news, but not in the news of the moment, necessarily, journalism that we've seen for a long time. And I apologize for that incredibly poor locution. I think you get what I was trying to say. In addition to China Airborne, his most recent book, he's written Blind into Baghdad, 2006. Postcards from Tomorrow Square, 2009, amongst his many other books. It is, one never wants to sort of name people by their partners, but Jim's partner, Deborah Fallows, is his partner on his current blog exercise of traveling around the country, has been the source of much of his own interesting reflections on language and should be mentioned. And I should say that one of Jim's perhaps not as frequently acknowledged excellences as it might be, is that he's one of the leading beer bloggers in the country. And I think that's important to mention on this, the 80th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. So, Corby Comer is a senior editor at The Atlantic, the instigator and leader of the Atlantic's food channel for its great life. I wish it were still there, and I'm sure he does too. He is the winner of several James Beard awards. Not sure how many, six now? Six, okay, it's hard to keep up. Including given that this is named for one of the people I regard as one of the great American writers of the 20th century, my favorite one, his MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing About Food in the James Beard series. He's the author of The Joy of Coffee. He's written, I can't count how many articles in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He has been the restaurant critic for New York Magazine. He is the restaurant critic for Boston Magazine. And for tonight's Ferago, most importantly, he is one of the most well-regarded and sensitive and skilled editors of long-form journalism that are working today. And I should add that Corby is at least temporarily, and I hope for a long time, one of us here at MIT, he's advising two MIT graduate students in their master's thesis. And next year, for those of you who are students here, next semester rather, he's teaching the science essay class, and you have a chance to learn how to write essays from one of the hardcore working editors right now. So sign up, don't be stupid. With that, let's get the program started. Okay, we can arrange that. All right, so what we're gonna do tonight over the next little while is I'm gonna try and get out of the way as much as possible while the two men next to me speak about a series of editing encounters that they've had on major pieces that Jim has written and Corby has edited or has worked on if he hasn't edited entirely. And we're gonna try and draw out some different themes in what it takes to do long-form journalism at the level of quality and expectation that the Atlantic Monthly brings to the table. So I guess I'd like to start asking you, Jim, about the process that led to the work you did on trying to help us understand the Iraq War. So as you were talking to me earlier, I'm just gonna crib, September 11th happens, and it's clear to at least some people, yourself included and some of your colleagues, that whatever the kabuki going on in Washington maybe we're gonna be at war in Iraq. The Atlantic is a monthly magazine, it has a long lead time. How do you start thinking about covering an event like that? So thanks for that question, thanks for the introduction, and it's really nice to be here. And so I'll give a couple of points of background. You know, Corby and I have worked together for now more than 30 years, almost every article I've done for the Atlantic in that time Corby's been the editor of, and most of the time we worked with Bill Whitworth, who was the editor there for 20 years, and we've had a succession of other great editors since then. In this case, in the fall of 2001, I'd been living for three years on the West Coast. I was in Seattle for two years and Berkeley for a year, and I moved back to DC, flying in my little plane. We dropped off our son at college up here in Boston. We flew down to DC in our little plane on September 10th, 2001. And so the next morning we woke up in DC, and suddenly there was a news of September 11th. The editor of the magazine then was Michael Kelly, whom many of you know of. He was the editor until he was killed in Iraq as an embedded journalist in the first two weeks of the invasion. When the phone started working again in Washington and we started talking about how the magazine could cover events there. And by a few two or three months after that, Mike Kelly, who was preparing to go into his embedded journalist role, Colin Murphy, who'd been the managing editor under Bill Whitworth and under Mike too, and was essentially editing the magazine then. And Corby and I, we realized that for news that was changing day by day, and when we had our six month lead time, we couldn't do things other places could do. What we had to do is figure out what other people weren't going to get around to covering. And I think it was Colin who came up with the idea that we know 10 months ahead of time, we know we're going to war, and we know the US is going to win. And so let's start doing the article people would want to know after that invasion happened. So I spent three or four months talking to people who were experts in Iraq itself and people who were experts in military occupations and people who were expert in how things went wrong in military occupation. So I finished by, I guess, late July, early August of 2002, this article we decided to call the 51st state, what would have, we call it the predictable consequences of victory in Iraq. And then I fed it into the grinder that consists in a good sense of Corby and Colin then and others, and that was, so that's how we decided to do it. That, one other point here, I think the distinctive skill of being a monthly magazine editor is being able to imagine what will be interesting six months from now that the big newspapers won't have gotten around to doing it. And this was exactly a point I was going to make. It was a prescient piece and it's one of our great pieces ever. And it was in not in the context that I was trying to think, were you still, were you yet writing nearly as frequently for your website then? Our website was still in its baby stages then. It was in its baby stages and in fact we're all going to go celebrate the publication of a book by the woman, the brother, the sister of our current editor, Sage Tosla, who was running the website at the time. But what I was thinking as, I was thinking of the process of what will people need to know in a few months? What will they need to know into the future? Which during the entire time of the Whitworth tenure we always had to keep in mind. It is what we still have to. We will, some of us will be, you won't be there at an all day planning meeting on Tuesday for mapping out long range. What do we need to be thinking about for the next year? I've been to enough of those meetings, so. Oh yes. Yes, yes. You are, you. I've done my time. You have more than done your time. Yes, you both did. No, no. So in any case, it's a hugely challenging process. But now as I think back to what the distillation process was, it was the daily news in a newspaper still. It was kind of what the posts in the times were doing. And as the FT really emerged as heroic in its daily coverage. But we knew that we had to think of what will be a monthly piece that will stay in the test of time. It somehow was easier and more apart to think of that then without the daily noise of the web and the commentariat, which hardly existed then. The daily constant commentariat. Although I imagine if the web had existed then in the same volume and highs and lows, in a way it would have made this exercise more valuable because I remember that the DC journalism is so like a three year old soccer game where everybody's around the same ball all the time, that then all of it was sort of this minute by minute plant, the stuff that was not looking forward at all. So that gave us the opportunity to do it and maybe that immediate centrism would be even stronger now. I hope somebody tweeted that remark about, make sure it gets out there in the world. And I should really say a six year old soccer game. Three year olds can't play soccer very well. And you all have to read Jim's Breaking the News. Which is from a sort of age of lost innocence of the news media that came out in 1996 which in retrospect looks like the Helsingen era. Not that you thought the media was at all innocent including this and this was, but for those of you who haven't read it, it was the antidote to the kind of in baseball media coverage that Jim's so strenuously objected to that was so self-referential and that is still a detriment of journalism was just the kind of long range pieces that we were doing but somehow it seemed more distinct and sharply distinct the idea of a piece that would have long range value as opposed to daily journalism than it does today. I think those distinctions have started to bleed a bit. Let me actually ask you to drive a little deeper specifically into the Iraq situation. So Lee, I remember the journalism of that period. Very well and there's a lot of dishonor there. I mean, you know, real failure to cover some of the presuppositions for the war. How were you able to avoid those pitfalls that is a covering what, this isn't really fair, but the first time I ever encountered you Jim, I'm sure you don't recall that encounter. It was at a Crimson alumni dinner where you and Michael Kinsley were talking during the Carter administration and Kinsley said under some prodding from a number of people that of course journalists have to follow what the president says. Why was the coverage of Reagan as it was was the question and you said slightly plaintively, I hope I don't do that. Well, here in 2001, you had that challenge and you managed to negotiate that. I wanna know how. So I think there was the Atlantic during Bill Whitworth's 20 years. Bill Whitworth's still very active in Little Rock, Arkansas's hometown as a book editor and who we talked to frequently. He had come of age journalistically at the New Yorker when he was probably in his late 30s, mid or late 30s, he did a famous piece whose title, I forget, but it was an interview with Eugene Rostow. Oh, some naive questions about war and peace. So this was during the ramp up to the Vietnam War and Bill Whitworth, then a young man, wants to talk to Eugene Rostow, not Walt Rostow but the brother Eugene who was, I think the Dean at Yale Law School then or something was a big, big hawk. And Bill asked him essentially, okay, suppose we pull out of Vietnam and Rostow said, well, that'd be bad. And Bill said, well, how exactly would it be bad? We lose credibility. Well, what exactly would that mean? And so that sensibility, I think one factor is that had permeated into all of us of let's try to get through this, whatever are the catchphrases of the foreign policy cabal or greater DC and as a side note, DC in New York after the 9-11 attacks had its understandable trauma and everybody in New York was sort of radicalized. DC just had a William Randolph Hearst war fever for which the Washington Post was the cheerleader and it just was horrible. And so Bill's sensibility is one thing. Also, I had done a lot of, since my first work for the Atlantic had been essentially trying to get an outsider's knowledge of the military. I did a book called National Defense early in the Reagan year saying what's all this money for? And it was mainly based on reporting with actual soldiers and Marines and going around. So I had a lot of contacts in that world and I was asking these people, okay, we know there's this big war fever going on. What are you going to do there? And the most interesting thing I did in reporting this 51st state piece was going up to the Army War College in Carlisle, PA flying my little airplane to the Carlisle Airport. And they had this whole future of Iraq project where they mapped out in great detail what the problems were going to be after you invaded Iraq and how you could prevent them. Number one was looting. Number two was you shouldn't disband the Army. Number three was going down this whole trail of things we actually did. So people who were military professionals, they had a very clear-eyed look of, and so you remember my joy when I came across these people from the Army War College. Right, but we should be talking about two pieces. The 51st state and blind and de-bag-dad. One perspective, one rhetoric, right. Right, because blind and de-bag-dad was talking about all the mistakes that were made that could easily have been foreseen and in fact were foreseen, which Jim went to. Again, the kind of long-term piece that seldom happens in any other form of journalism besides a monthly. Well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that claim in a moment because I don't think that's true anymore. But again, to dive a little deeper into that process, you get what was the amount of time you took from conception to final? So if we say that we thought maybe in February or March of 2002, that is to say a year ahead of the war, when still it was, in theory, an open option. Again, one other side note, on the afternoon of September 11th, I called a guy I knew who was then an Air Force Colonel who I'd met long, long ago and I'd actually ridden into F-15 with this guy long ago. And he was then in the Air Force's planning. He said, you know, we don't know where this came from, but I can tell you the answer's gonna be in Iraq. And so, you know, three hours after the attack, they were knowing that. So from- The answer or the action? They actually thought that the answer- Whatever, what they were going to do. You know, he was not saying, Saddam Hussein is to blame, he said, what's the, this is the action, the reaction is going to be Iraq. So from February or March until early, late June, so two or three months of traveling around interviewing people, that was the time of the reporting, and then the nightmare of writing begins. That's what I wanna get at. You've got, you're still in June or July, seven or eight months before the actual invasion. So you're writing a piece against an event that's a very long time away. What did you have to do and how much did you have to sort of, how much did you find out doing the piece that you had to then revisit? There was almost nothing that the people I was quoting projected that didn't happen. I mean, there was things that were off in detail, but it was really, they were depressingly prescient about what was going to happen, mainly this Army War College Survey and also these experts on Iraq itself. So I think the, I'm trying to remember how it began, something like everybody knows we're about to invade Iraq and everybody knows we're gonna win or something like that. And the question is what happens there? If there was some way to look this up online, perhaps we could. But whether it's online or not, the idea, that idea was in advance. We are going to invade and we will own this place. Hadn't Rumsfeld already said you break it, as Colin Powell, I think that was earlier. And maybe it was when he was rationalizing why they didn't go into Iraq the first time, under the first bush, I believe. So this is the main thing I regret about that piece is not more clearly saying the end. I was saying, here are all the things that are gonna happen. I should have said more clearly. Therefore, for God's sake, don't do this. But that's, but I read the implication. I remember and I read that entire piece as a cautionary, these are all the reasons not to move forward with military action, which was very much in that Bill Whitworth. Here are all the terrible, irreversible things that will happen. Because we knew it was gonna happen. The way you actually ended that piece is, if we can judge from past wars, the effects we can't imagine when the fighting begins will prove to be the ones that matter most. This is a theme for Jim. You've said that in many ways. But what was the lead? The lead was incredibly subtle. Over the, or just sort of, you know, soft. Blah. No, no, no. Or written at 2 a.m. when he had to. Yes. It sort of is softly, softly trying, I think you were trying to persuade people rather than tell people, persuade people that they might be wrong rather than tell people that they were. It begins, over the past few months, I interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam Hussein. That's not the actual lead. There's something else that's the actual lead. Really? I don't write this stuff. I just deliver the lines. Yeah, I don't, huh. Okay, so I was thinking the second paragraph was the actual lead, any while. So it's saying that this is gonna happen, what can we expect? Yep. But, and I guess that lead that I, to my horror, is the actual lead. That's a showing your homework kind of lead. You know, here's what I've done. Here's the facts and. But this is a, this is a, this is a tendency of yours that I don't try always to erase. The tendency is I am not going to claim that I have come up with the ideas here. I am going to say, I've spoken to many people who formed this general drift and this general current of thought, which I'm going to report to you and then let us decide together what we think. It's a very collegial and considerate way of presenting information, which has never been the columnist's way, for example. And I think in the modern journalistic mode where we have our daily and hourly blogs and we have articles, you can have a range of registers. There are things on which I can say, I've thought about this for a long time and the following is true. You know, I'm gonna tell you, America depends on immigration. We have to keep immigrants coming. That is true. Other things I can say as a reporter, I'm gonna tell you what the range of opinions are or what the range of opinions is and so here, you know, make your, draw your own conclusions. Okay, so two quick things. One is to those of you standing in the back, there are many seats in the front. I know it's terribly intimidating to walk down and sit in the front, but you will be more comfortable. We did enjoy it. You'll have the joy of a close-up perspective. Come keep us company. Come on down. So, and David's about to herd you down so you have no choice. Yeah. But the question I wanted to put now to you, Corby, is all right, so Jim goes off on reports for three months on a piece that has real consequences and then the writing process begins and it's very difficult because for all the reasons that you've just been talking about, what's the first thing you do when this first draft manuscript comes in that you can describe the state you saw it in as Jim turns in that first manuscript? Well, the first draft ever comes in whole. That's true. It's very hard to, as Colin would say, take the temperature of a piece because it comes in in pieces and Jim has many patented ways of presenting articles, but the main one is to submit partial drafts and I just have to lend a discourse of a young kid I've been helping a lot and I'm crazy about. Got an assignment from Harper's for a very long piece and he was a very long way away from being able to finish it, but he had 80% of it. I mean, you would consider that done. Yes. So he had 80% of it. Ending TK. Right, exactly. Patented ending TK is Jim's three most favorite words. I was going to do a slide of just patented ending TK on the end of his cover letter, so a draft doesn't come in in full length. In any case, I told- You should explain what TK means. Oh, to come. And there's a whole quaint lingo from type setting days so that you wouldn't, a type setter wouldn't mistake something for an actual word. We have the master, the most masterly copy editor of all time, Linda Lowenthal in our front row, our longtime beloved colleague now at Tech Review. And we rely on her to know all these things. TK. Coming, K-O-M-I-N-G, lead, L-E-D-E, you've probably all seen lead spelled strangely. And this was so that one wouldn't confuse it with an actual word. It was so quaint. You know, the idea that people actually knew how words were spelled. And then they would be thinking whether or not to use it. So TK means to come. So Jim will have thought out most of what, but you know, the here is one of the main take home points of our collaboration, the way you work. You have a large body of information you wish to present. You're very good at organizing and presenting it. Sometimes the structure changes greatly, but not that often. It gets, things get alighted and things get compressed. But we all are able to tease out the themes that are of most interest and seemed to be almost dominating and telling the story themselves in a way that for the writer, him or herself isn't always obvious with a large crush of information. And this is why collaboration between teacher and student and writer and editor can be quite as valuable as it is because now James Bennett, Scott, Stossel and I can all confat, confat and compare notes. And in almost every single case when we do this, we have precisely the same take. We've all read it independently and the same themes leap out at us. Therefore, when Jim is writing his conclusion, he has ideas of his own. And we say these are things that are, that seem so important to us and so important to bring out. And these quotations are so provocative. Sometimes we'll move up a quotation that's particularly provocative. We'll discuss where that should fall and where that should land in the piece for maximal impact. We tend to have things fairly high in the piece even though we don't wanna be unsubtle. The New Yorker is famous for, and it's never happened to me so I can't directly report it, taking a really provocative, really sexy quote and making sure it's two thirds the way through the piece. That's, I'm told by New Yorker writers as one of their patented things. You have to put the really sexy quote two thirds the way through. It's the keep you awake. It's the keep you awake or save the best or we are the New Yorker and we assume you are going to read this piece through the end. But themes emerge and also you generally, we can encourage you to be stronger and more emphatic in your conclusions than you who are a very careful reporter and allergic to people who prognosticate and have spurious heirs of authority are shy of taking. And so everything that Corby says is true but it's also the case and also it's the case that as the writer you think about these things as time goes on. And so if everything were obvious to you when you started you wouldn't need to do all the sort of work until the end but by the time you finish you hope that it goes in a completely inevitable seeming logical train but it's not inevitable until you figure it out. And also this is where readers help. Of course. How much Jim, I will, I mean what I'd like to know is how much does it help you when you have Corby in effect tell you what you've written? Does that enable you to understand what you're trying to do? So there are two stages. I mean the Atlantic has many, many stages of editing. Some of them become exasperating at various points but they're all- Oh I can't imagine why you would say that. I'm not talking about you. I mean you know what I'm talking about. But it's, so I think conceptually from my point of view there are two and maybe two and a half ways in which as the writer you really rely on this organism. One is the thought editing as Corby is describing. When I worked my first magazine job was at the Washington Monthly where Charlie Peters and some of you encountered who is this crazy genius type of guy. He'd have what we call the rain dances of telling you how you had to shape a piece but that kind of thought editing is crucial. But then there's another kind of polishing editing where over the years I entirely trust Corby's judgment to spend 20 hours a day, I know what you're doing the other four making me look better than I would otherwise. And that is, so that's the second stage. Now we have a third stage of all this very, very intense fact checking and other things which have a sort of, it's like a German car where the door closes the right way. You don't notice it unless it doesn't work. So it's three different ways in which you rely on the system to make a good product. Okay, I'd like now to not switch gears but to switch focus to a couple of different pieces that Jim and Corby have worked on. You recently Jim did a profile of one of my absolute favorite Californians, Jerry Brown. And about a year ago, I guess, a little more than a year ago you did a piece about Barack Obama. They're both ostensibly profiles. They're both long, they're very considered interrogations of those subjects but they are quite different as you read them and I understand they were quite different in construction. Yes, and my short version of each of them, I'll say a little more about the Jerry Brown one first and Corby will have the high view is I had really a lot of fun doing this Jerry Brown piece and it was sort of near a close call. It was almost off the precipice. And the short version is it really mattered with the Jerry Brown piece that the last minute I could spend a lot of time with him and it probably was good on the Obama piece the last minute I couldn't spend time with him. That probably made both of them turn out better. But also why don't you give a little color and texture of what it was like to try to wait to see if they would give you interviews? With the Brown piece, so the backstory here is I'm from Southern California. I view the sort of arc of California replicating that of the United States in various ways. One is the innocent, well the main thing is that everything that's good and bad about America on the world stage that is vibrant, all this private activity incorporating the talent of the world, et cetera that is but also having a dysfunctional government those things are more true about California. Now California has more sources of innovation and a worse government than most countries do. So I wanted a way to tell that story, America's story in California's time. I'd seen Jerry Brown as a, when he was a young governor and I was a young person in California I had a chance to see him as a return governor and I'd seen him about a year ago there was a dinner in Washington where I got to sit next to him just by chance and really enjoy talking with him. And then we decided that we needed more profiles. This was a way to write about governance issues and a way to write about California too. And so I then started the watch to try to get an appointment with this guy. And so first there was one in DC in February of last year, February of this year. February of this year, National Governance Association. So I was supposed to meet him at 9 a.m. in the JW Marriott downtown. So about quarter to 10 he and his wife stroll in with no entourage which is interesting. I talked to them for a long time. Then I was gonna go to California for a follow-up interview. I was there for 10 days in California waiting, nothing happened, flew to DC that night I got a call we'll get back to San Francisco the next day and I can talk with you. So then I flew out there and I had the lead for the story which was so I had this come to California the next day. I get into San Francisco airport before noon my cell phone starts ringing and it's Jerry Brown saying, well okay you're in San Francisco airport. You get your car, you take the Bay Bridge to the 605 then take the 110. Have you seen the Californians on Saturday Night Live? It was Jerry Brown doing the Californians riff entirely unselfconsciously. And so I had a nice lead for the story. I spent several days with him and his wife and it was really interesting. So that turned and I felt as if thanks to your guidance and Scott's and James I was able to tell the California story plus this interesting guy. Can I push you on that just a little bit? I mean the rap on profiles is it's the great man approach to history which has all the flaws that Tolstoy and many others have said. How do you avoid that either as an editor or as a writer? Conceptually we won't assign a profile now until there seem to be larger themes that a person has illustrated. It's very seldom that we would just think that somebody has such an odd person like Donald Trump who's so colorful and strange that why don't we do that? We leave that to other magazines. It's not particularly our problems. Most magazines if they're going to do a story about a subject they make it a profile. I mean that is the sort of the stick of most high end magazines and our stick is the reverse actually. We do a profile as an exception rather than rule where we try to do more of them. But the great man theory I think in the case of Jerry Brown actually was applicable because you have a large drama of California going into its problems. Sort of the descent from Pat Brown through Schwarzenegger and coming back up. But Jerry Brown himself, I mean he is really interesting as a guy. I will attest, I've known a lot of politicians, he's the only one I've enjoyed talking with as opposed to being talked at by politicians. Bill Clinton is really fascinating to be talked at by but it's a talking at experience. So he's interesting as a guy and if you think of his background. So he grew up when his father was the Sun King God of California and he then was governor himself in his 30s and then we ran for president three times and lost. He was eight years the mayor of Oakland and now he's back as governor and he's the only person in California who knows politics. And correctly if I'm wrong but a lot of this was it was really going to be a profile of California and the California that you knew when you were growing up which had endless amounts of money, huge investment in education and then a completely different California that Brown the Sun different from his father and different from the one he knew when he was first in politics. And as I remember this was going to be a lot, Jim doesn't write about himself much except on the website sometimes. This was going to be a lot about your view of California and the two California's that you knew as well as Brown. But then you found Brown sufficiently interesting. So but that was part of the theoretical underpinning of it. And there was the what would became clear when you both saw the flatness of the California political landscape where the term limits had such an effect that there was a time under Schwarzenegger where the speaker of the house was a freshman was a freshman legislator. You know that's how sort of raised it was. And by contrast you have Jerry Brown and the image I had it would be as if Bill Clinton got to come back to be president again with everything he'd learned and Bill Clinton had been raised by LBJ. You know sort of that sort of steeping and see somebody that in Jerry Brown's case he was very much anti-politics in his 30s and now he just loves everything about how the political machine works but in a good way. So it became a defense of politics too. I'm so glad everybody got the Bill Clinton raised by LBJ in a moment. I tormented Jim over that line. Yes, he said what does this mean? Just how deeply do you want people to consider this analogy? But the answer is not at all. It's a laugh line. So thank you for mentioning that again. Any time. So the Barack Obama piece very different. There's just a faint distant echo of you know Sinatra's got a cold in it. You never. Yes. President Obama didn't show up. That's right. Yes, yes. So the idea was this was trying to think of the timing of this. This came out. There was some horrible Christmas party the holiday part of the Atlantic had where we decided that I had to finish this piece like 10 days. We're having one tomorrow night by the way. We're all looking forward to it. No, it was a great party. It was horrible for me because the decision made on the fly was that actually this piece had to be for the next issue. So I had like 10 days to grind a piece out of out of nothing while we were still waiting for Obama to say we'd had like a six month ramp up. Oh yes, Obama was going to give a big thoughtful pre-election interview to us. And why not? We were a good thoughtful magazine. We'd been more sympathetic with his ideals and many others. We had run a cover by Anderson Sullivan while Obama matters or while Obama now in which we essentially said this magazine is backing this guy for president. It was ahead. And there was a there's our various vulgar terms I was going to use but I won't hear in academia about the way they treated us. But I understand why the press resents Obama because they really gave us a hard time including I was out in California seeing our kids for Christmas vacation and the idea was I was like a moment's notice to fly to Hawaii for an interview. And then that you were on standby and including on Christmas Eve. Yes. And then finally I said no, no dice and we're doing something else. And so but that made for a better piece because I had to say talk about the situation of the presidency now and what you could say why all presidents fail in certain ways and how Obama was failing in a different way but why still. So this was a piece that it had a couple of ideas behind it that you went into because you had a very carefully prepared set of questions. And instead of having Obama answer them however he might answer them essentially we said Jim you answer them. What are the best guesses we can have and what does history tell us about second terms? And as a result it became the roadmap for every other writer to still use in in fact the difficult opening of Obamacare. How can we say that euphemistically? It was something that was predicted essentially in Jim's piece. There are disasters in every second term it is very hard to overcome them and drive forward one agenda. And you notice it in his radio address Obama has just said it's going to be economic disparity. That's the rest of my economic opportunity. And this is like they've all read Jim's piece and it's the playbook. It never would have been that thoughtful that analytic or a playbook if you'd had to be respectful of what he said. And also I mean it is in the modern high velocity news industry if I'd had an interview with him there would have been a sort of two day flurry of whatever we actually said in that interview which would have to dominate the piece because there was this formal bargain that the press office was making at the end which is yes we might humor you with this interview if we know it's going to be the center of the piece and what he actually says. And that would have been it's good that didn't turn out. I was mad at the time especially having to that was a real that was a very unpleasant writing experience as they all are. No, no that was particularly unpleasant because we were holding the piece and literally holding the presses something that never happens anymore. And then at the very last minute they were negged. So in your 51st state piece you spent several months reporting with people who had insight into the history of invasions and we're using it expertise to drive your thinking and you quoted them. In this piece you're making judgments about a second term. And I mean I read the piece at the time but it's been a while I've just been skimming through it here. There are very few quotes. You are really distilling your own judgment. And this was in the category of things I can purport to say ex-cathedra and also with a lot of urging from Corby saying don't rely on the sort of journalese prop of quoting somebody. Professor X from George Mason University says this. Just say it. I'd worked for Jimmy Carter of fond memory back when I was in my mid 20s and had spent a lot of time seeing administration struggle and in preparation while biding my time to see Obama. I've been talking to historians and they're reading lots of stuff and so the leitmotif was and I guess the other drama of actually living half the time in DC over all the years since Carter is recognizing that the job of president is literally impossible. It requires a combination of skills no human being has ever possessed and so what happens in the first term is seeing the ways in which this incumbent will fail and to see whether he or she gets better on the areas of inevitable weakness and so in which ways has Obama failed. And more than that you talked about the impossible pressures of the daily stream of web reports and everything being tweeted and remarked upon at the time. You made a great point of that. And the ways in which the ups and downs of a conventional wisdom are so extreme. I mean it literally is the truth. You can go look it up that Bill Clinton's healthcare plan was very popular until there was a congressional there was a congressional recess in the fall of fall of his first year and fall of 1993. And then all Time Magazine and everything Time Magazine which then existed and others publications were saying yeah this is Clinton care looks great and then there was a Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia and suddenly there was everything look bad for Clinton and that's when popular wisdom changed and Clinton looked terribly vulnerable after the midterms that he was gonna be a one-termer. So going against you never go wrong betting against conventional wisdom in DC. So another tweet. Yeah really. Another quick segue and then there are a couple of things I hope we get to do before we open it up for questions but I'd really be curious now for you to talk about a couple of you know these were profiles they're focused on however much you create a thematics around they're focused on a single point but you've also done a lot of writing about different international matters of import and sort of national and or historic destiny kind of pieces. And those are much more diffuse in some sense. And so we were talking before this about is America going to hell and China makes and the much more recent piece China makes and the world takes. You've never been to Trenton? You all know the illusion from the Trenton bridge right? Trenton makes the world takes I love that. One of my grandfathers was a ceramics manufacturer in Trenton and he was killed tragically in a car crash when he was 30 and his company went bankrupt a year later in the depression but so Trenton makes the world takes always has resonance in our family. Okay so yes I interrupt. So one of the titles I'm proudest of I had. Congratulations. I had no idea to have this familial resonance of James. I now can't get Reno's slogan the biggest little city in the world out of my head because I have no reason. But you know so there's a different kind of sort of ex-catheter reasoning and there's a different reporting problem when you do that kind of piece. So the great narrative theme of my life as a journalist in person is that of assessing decline. And one of the points I made in this America going to hell piece is from America's founding the prevailing idea in America has been imminent decline. I think John Winthrop gave some sermon in 1630 about the decline of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and it's been a theme ever since. And you reminded us that Jeremiah had to come from Jeremiah. Exactly. And there's a wonderful, what's his name? Sack Van Berkowitz wrote a wonderful book Who Knows Sack Van's Parents? What were they thinking of when they named him? Wonderful book on the American Jeremiah tradition and how it's been very prominent in our national life. And so in my national life has been very interesting too. And so when I lived in Japan 25 years ago very interested in those things. And in China I had what I thought was a contrarian take. I'm urging people take China seriously but do not be afraid of China. You would have a hundred times more problems as Xi Jinping than you would as Barack Obama. But that was sort of what we were dealing with this America going to hell piece where I went to a lot of academics and historians and other people and said, okay, are we going to hell? And they would laugh and I'd say, no seriously are we going to hell? And just trying to chart all the different ways. And the report I gave was number one, we've always thought we're going to hell which is a useful sort of self-motivating narrative for the US. Economically, actually things are looking better than they do for most other countries and then they have recently. But number three, our government is broken in a way we probably can't fix because it's the Constitution. And so that's, that is a challenge. And can you remember the conversations leading to this? I have a feeling what I imagine is we're desperate to think of huge ideas because we need big ideas on our cover. And whatever you were talking about, I think you said to Scott, yeah, I wonder if America, is America going to hell? Yes, so I just moved back from China. Been there for three plus years. I was in James Bennett's office where Scott was, I think you were on the speaker phone, said, well, I really wonder if we're going to hell. And so he said, well, that's a story. So we made it into one and it was fun. It was sort of a profile of an idea. It was also because you were ready to give a new view on this country after you had spent so much time talking about a very different country that, I was going to say on the rise, but it's too facile to say on the rise and on the decline. But that phrase you just used, Jim, a profile of an idea is actually a fairly pregnant one. And I have to say the sausage is being made kind of inside of, I say, is America going to hell? And it's a cover story in the Atlantic. It's like the old cartoon, step one, an equation, step three, an equation, an answer. What's happening in step two? You need to work on that a little. Yes, right. And so the idea of, there's a slogan, our ad department has used over the years of breaking ideas as opposed to breaking news. We're having breaking ideas. I do think of profile of ideas because you can think of ideas, journalism as being some kind of thumbsucker essay writing with the quill pen. And I think what's different from what we do, we try to have more ideas than just a normal news magazine, but ideas that you illustrate by showing what it's like inside a factory or going out and asking people, or this is what it's like at a military base, or just trying to have all the tools you would use for descriptive investigative journalism towards some idea. So this is very much your particular joy in reporting and discovering new places. For example, factories. I love factories. Jim Laws, factories and breweries. These are two of his favorite places. And if you read his American Future series, which you should all be doing on theatlantic.com, you'll see he makes a point of going to factories in many different places. But from there, his range of reading and knowledge allows him to do it with a lot of people who enjoy visiting factories because it's enjoyable, frankly, aren't able to do, which is a certain larger trends about what this means for our country. And in terms of its openness or closeness, its encouragement of innovation or not, and its political future. So there is an intellectual part I have missing from my brain, many of them, but there's one that I can address by being a reporter, which is I can't really be interested in something until I've seen it. And so countries where I haven't been, I don't really care about it. But so I like going places and seeing things and then reading about them. Once I've seen something, I can be interested in it. There's one thing that I'm looking at the, how America can rise again, is America going to Hellpiece? It's actually, if you're looking for it on the web, it's how America can rise again, is the title of the cover in? Yes, there was dissent by our business leaders that we couldn't have a cover story called, is America going to Hell? We should have, but it's called, How America Can Rise Again. Well, I don't remember that cover line at all. Yeah, well, it should have been. The real title is, Are We Going to Hell? But what's interesting is there's a lot of sort of classic reporting. You go to places and you talk to individuals and you report on what you see and you tell us what they say. But obviously that's a piece that at least conceptually could rely on enormous amount of empirical research, the data that no amount of anecdotes would work. There is evidence of some of that in the piece, but not as much as you might expect at MIT. Sure, and journalism is not academics. And journalism, there's many definitions of it, but one is the best available version of the truth by deadline time. There's not a deadline, it's not journalism. So you're doing your best to sort of these serial approximations of truth and even monthly magazines have deadlines, as we know. And as I always push just beyond. Not even just. Not even just. He says lovingly. So it's, here's another side note. The only thing I know by having done hundreds of Atlantic pieces now is that finally it will work out even though it will be right at the margin, finally it will work out just by having done it so often. And when, so, but the point is you, this was a subject I had thought about so much over decades, you know, there was a time back in the early 80s I spent six months on a big immigration piece for the Atlantic. And Bill Whitworth was not a pro-immigration guy. And so he was pushing back against my bring him in, bring him on conclusion from going to see the Vietnamese and the Haitians and going to the border and Yuma and all the rest. So these were things I had been background processing and sort of accumulating data on for a long time. So you can, I mean, to paraphrase what I heard you just say, not necessarily what you said, you can get away with reporting a piece that has a substructure of information. If you've got enough, you know, if you've been at it long enough. I think that our magazine, we have a reputation for not publishing things that are really half-assed, you know, that people think we will have applied some process to this. And I don't, I try not to write about stuff that I just don't know about. And so there's a diverse but sort of visible range of things that I cover. And if I'm not writing big stories about Brazil and Argentina, because I don't know anything about Brazil and Argentina. But you know, Jim's very much the exception in the way our editing and writing works in that you are always the constant in the pieces. It's your sensibility in your wide range of knowledge, your modesty and relying on actual reporting and people you trust to make sense to echo. Whereas with other, we have maybe no relationships now with writers like that. We used to have several, but time, money, mostly money. We don't. And with others, we have to think that this idea is a good match with the writer and that the writer is actually qualified to report on this and that the reporting backs the idea. And although things always work out with you because the collaboration in your native reporting and writing ability will always make it work. With other writers, we spend enormous amounts of time because of course, Jim's not the only person who's laid on a deadline and you're not particularly laid on deadlines. Other writers... I can't believe you said that. Are way like, but we have to have backup pieces for other writers because pieces fall apart. They don't work out. Or they go back for, we're writing a piece now that was in the shop for a good three months. And often pieces are in the shop for longer before the idea can match the ambition and the reporting. Well, just in the relationship between the two of you, Corby, when you're looking at, especially Jim's submissions in their earlier phases, do you ever find yourself saying, okay, that makes sense, but you haven't made me believe it yet enough? How do you, you know, how much of a push do you give Jim? And what are the sorts of things that you find yourself pushing on? Well, the push will often be to have less on the one hand on the other hand, and to condense ideas and to bring out themes where you'll say very modestly that you think one thing and I'll say be very, be just hammer that. That's something that I often say, you can't hammer this enough because Jim's very modest and things can leap out at the reader and if they're sufficiently strong and it's such a good quotation that we can all trust that it's gonna leap out at the reader in the New York or two thirds the way down or fairly high up in the story, that's fine. But other than that, sometimes we need you to say, this is why this is important. So often I will ask Jim to be more emphatic in what he says and guiding us as readers instead of trusting us to be able to sift through a lot of the information. And it's not that it doesn't matter whether I'm persuaded or not, it matters whether I think Jim is persuaded or not of what he's thinking. And sometimes you yourself haven't completely made up your mind about something and that makes for a less satisfactory reading experience than if you have. And for example, this tech piece we did two months ago or so, which was a very unusual piece, 50 Greatest Breakthroughs, that's about the only piece I can remember having, I can remember writing sort of two spec, we knew we were gonna have this tech feature, somebody had to write what they used to call the violin in the news magazine industry to accompany it. So I was the guy to write the violin but in the process of interviewing all these people, the first draft I did was just saying, here's the list. And then we discussed it and saying, okay, here's the point we actually wanna make about the process of innovation and why we should assume it's an open frontier rather than a closed frontier, et cetera. But that's another piece that, as you were describing before with interviews that came in late. A couple of interviews came in very late and changed your ideas about what the guiding themes would be for it. And then you were made to write to space, you had to mention all kinds of things and touch all kinds of bases. It was an exhausting exercise. But once you touched all those bases in your usual masterly way, there were themes that came out that we could. And it turned out okay. I didn't think that was ever going to turn out okay. But actually I think through collective effort we made it up to our normal standard. Right, yeah, of course, of course. This is just a remark within our little crowd here. Yeah, okay, well. But it's also a great segue because Corby, you have some visible evidence of what is involved in- Oh, I didn't know that I was going to be allowed to show these. Well, we'll show you and then we'll switch to our- Linda is going to- Linda, this is so similar to what Linda does. So what you need to say is when you can- So here are very similar things. On the right, I say it's a stronger kicker without. So these are just simple things that editors often say to writers. Somebody else came up with that. Didn't somebody come up with that unpleasant flashbacks line other than me? I think somebody plugged that in. But you are right that it's stronger without it. Anyway, two things. What you're seeing here are the raw documents of Corby's edit of Jim's works. We're just gonna- This is a little bit of a look under the hood. So if you see track change and what we have to say about beloved track change is, Jim is one of the inventors of track change and it was based on the Bill Whitworth editing system. And so you have all worked, if you've worked in a Word document, you've worked on something that makes easy and possible on a computer what we did at the Atlantic. Because Jim actually, just talk about your time at Microsoft. So there was a time, I won't go into all the backstory, but for various reasons I was spending six months on a program design team at Microsoft when they're putting out the release of Word XP. And the one thing I did that changed history was to provide the sort of tie-breaking vote to get rid of Clippy. You know, you seem to be writing a letter. Welcome. So the backstory there is that Bill Gates's wife had been the original guiding vision genius behind Clippy. So nobody in house could say, this is stupid. So I was there and I could say, this is stupid. You appear to wish to write a letter. Yeah, which I'll say for the 50,000th time. And the other was this track changes feature which existed but in a very crude form. So I worked with some engineers there to give you the track changes you now say. Yeah, and you asked us, and the balloons on the right, which were not the way I think comments were shown before. It's based on Bill Whitworth's writing with circles around them. And he wrote the best comments ever. Yeah, so Linda has writing that is smaller than a like 10 point type face. And it's printing and it's perfectly legible even in a blue pencil. And she would often write more on the right than there were printed text on the left of a galley. She's remarkable. She was saying, why couldn't I do this on a machine? I don't know the answer to that. So this is from the tech piece. This is from the tech piece trying to come up with large themes. So this is a point where I will actually ask you something thematically because I objected to making Borlaag a hero. Do you all know Norman Borlaag, father of the Green Revolution was? We were looking for cuts that time. I'd said that one of the themes of our list was it wasn't individual contributions except maybe the Gregorian calendar. But then I thought that we needed to mention, what is this? So why have I put this up? Oh, because this is where I'll say, this is the kind of thing. My comment on the right, this needs more of a drum roll. This is the kind of thing where an editor will try to guide the writer. And this is not a fault of the writers. It is because Jim spent so much time thinking about themes and what else to emphasize in this piece. Only when you've gotten it all down on paper can you understand how do I wanna direct the reader? What's the most important point to bring out now? And so this is where I'll say, please make much more of this. Tell the reader we need to know about this in- This is the idea editing which is so indispensable. But it's also the kind of thing that reporters and writers cannot be expected to know in a first draft and know how to do. And that's where I think the editing process can really help with structures. Where well-edited magazines of which there are a handful are so different from the book publishing industry where it just doesn't have the time to do this kind of editing. Not true in my experience. I've had only brilliant book editors. That's why I have no, I love my book editors. I'm just saying they don't have the time. Well, Tom is the exception. When you talk about your book editors, it's like nobody talks about their book editors the way you do. Yeah, I've had the experience of this level of, but I mean, nevermind, it's off the subject. No, it's just disappointing that it doesn't, it's not prevalent in book editing and we are lucky that we have the luxury. So this is something that a lot of writers will do. This is telling something in advance that we don't need to know in order to streamline the story. And it's the kind of thing, Jim as a fault is gracious and courteous to always keep the reader in mind. Why am I telling you this? Let me explain why I am telling you this. Here is why it is going to be important. Most writers are much too egocentric. I mean, they just, or whatever the word is, they don't keep the reader's interest in mind. This is a way, but every so often, it's not worth it. We just wanna get to the story. However, the fault that preceded this is a much better fault to have than not to have, which is essentially, I know that your time is valuable. Here is why I wish to take it up. So here's another thing. I don't know if the comment on the right is legible, is it? So this is the kind of thing you can only come up with, I think after you've laid out a series of themes. It's also the idea of the collaboration of how to help structure a piece. It's once all of the themes have been laid out is when someone else can come and talk about it. And if you wanna talk more about China it makes China take such results. And a side note is that a first draft of the piece is essentially wrestling into command all this various stuff and figuring what 5% of the things you've found out are you going to use. And so there is a sort of wrestling or herding cats exercise. Is it fair to say that that statement, combined with what Corby's trying to say, suggests that the primary job of this first edit is helping to think about structure. Is that what you're doing? Structure and point and evidence and all that. Well, Jim is so good at structure and so much better than most writers that it's thinking about major themes that need to be taken out and cuts of things. Like every writer, Jim falls in love with people and characters he meets along the way. Sometimes those in fact inform the main conclusions of the piece and become the dominating themes. Sometimes they are side lights. For example, I will, may I mention another piece? We have a piece that was a joy to work on by a guy named James Summers in our previous issue, not this current issue, about Douglas Hofstadter, the founder of artificial intelligence. And there were many points that he fell in love with and that led us way afield. And it ran at a little over half its original length, maybe half its original length. And it's one of the few pieces, I think is much stronger and clearer at its length. And he was a joy to work with because he really believed in the cuts. But again, you or writers fall in love with lots of facts that don't need to appear in the final piece. And that is something that often comes clear only when someone else is reading it. There's a related point about a famous writer who you all, whose name you would know, but I'm not going to name him or her. This is a person whose main, I think you'll figure out who I'm talking about, who presents information and the space devoted to it in this person's books is directly proportionate to how hard it was to find out this information. So points that are of no intrinsic importance, but this person who you know had to work really hard to find out this point, that would be 10 pages long, even though it's 10 lines worth. So we'll talk about this later. But it's a very understandable impulse. Yes. Okay, so at this point, I want to open it up to questions soon, but I want you to spend a little time pulling back from the immediate work that the two of you do together and to talk a little bit about the history and future of long form, because speaking from a science writer's perspective, even though the issue of actually paying for this writing is very, very hard to figure out, the number of venues that are offering smart editing and lots of room for thoughtful, deep, thematically based rather than on the news-based stories, Ian, Pacific Standard, Nautilus, the Atlantic when it chooses to do science stories, the New Yorker when it chooses, and on and on, they're on the web and off, matter, medium, and so forth and so on. And you know, more than half of those I just mentioned are places that popped up in the last very few years, they exist only on the web, and they- I'm very glad you mentioned Pacific Standard because it is, I actually edit a lot of their cover stories on the side. And it is started by Maurice Trashinsky, a former managing editor. Right, and there's Atavist with its New Yorker connection. I mean, these venues are popping up and many of them are producing work that used to be the exclusive province of the Atlantic and the New Yorker and a handful of other major glossies. And it seems that despite the predictions that I recall reading for 20 years now the internet and cable TV and MTV was gonna destroy our ability to focus on anything for more than 140 characters or whatever, the reverse or at least a counterpoint seems to be emerging. We each have probably views on this. Would you like to offer yours? All right, so I will offer mine and Corby's may be different. First, I think the natural situation of journalism as long as it has existed has been flux. And we were sort of lulled into thinking that was not the case by the sort of artificial lull of the post-war era, but we're, the normal condition of journalism is things starting and failing. And so number one, that this is consistent with the past. Number two, I am in most things an optimist and progressivist and think that change brings at least as much good as bad, not everything politics has its problems. And I think that in most ways, the supply of just information about the world is better now than it's ever been before, richer, more varied, et cetera, et cetera. Then there are two problems that those previous points don't address. One is you say paying for it. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have spent 30 plus years as a paid writer for the Atlantic. I don't know how many people will be able to do things like that. But so the economic model, which is a whole separate topic we can talk about, is to be solved. And second, the other one consequence is the public knowledge problem. That in the 50s, 60s, early 70s, there was a sort of enforced centrism of views. There were only three TV networks. There were three national news magazines. Now there are thousands of options. And that leads to some of the chaos and public discourse we have now. But there's more good stuff being written now than ever before in history, I think. Corbyn? And there are more places to see it. What kind of took me backwards, there's plenty of places with smart editing. Because I'm not aware of the out of is to an extent, or I think the out of is that it's everything. But I'm not aware just because I don't know what is the editing policy of a number of these places that are publishing long form and how much. I know because it happens that one guy just edited for a Pacific standard is the managing editor of the out of is. And so I know, and I was editing a friend's piece, a former kind of mentee on the side. He was being tormented by the guy I was tormenting as a writer and he's the editor of the out of is. So I know that there are some web based places that are doing really superb careful hands on editing. But I'm aware of medium doing it only for a certain number of writers. And otherwise they're just making it look beautiful and you have no idea whether it's been through another set of eyes and hands or not. I mean, I think that's true. I know Eon edits with some care, I think. I know that as you say, medium has a sort of two tier policy that pieces it pays for, pieces it pays enough for it edits and there's a lot of unpaid stuff on medium. And we have that in effect of the Atlantic too, that the print magazine is produced to a level of editing and burnishing that simply would not be possible for the website. It puts out hundreds of things a day, don't we? Well, that's just things a day. Yeah, I mean a whole lot of stuff which you just could not machine to the same level. To say, to fact check. Jim has just made one passing reference to fact check. But, and we've glorified as well we showed copy editing and text editing as we do here in Linda is a master of. But fact checking takes up every bit as much staff time as anything we've been talking about now. Often more, it progresses into the night and on weekends and it's just, I'm inspired by our fact checkers and it is the difference between print and web. And they're able to, part of the person I've worked with most often over the years what makes her so effective is that she's able to put on this effect of complete literal mindedness. That so nothing will ever escape her. It's like the Robert Heinlein fair witness from that concept. I will say fact checking used to be and one of the problems is that you're right that's in decline. It used to be one of the entryways into serious journalism. I fact checked Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould back at the start of my career. Carl Zimmer was a fact checker and he's now a prominent writer and so forth. I think a lot of people did that and that's fewer and fewer places have that. We can keep on telling stories about things but there's a wonderful audience here and I'm hoping you have some questions. James, I just heard coming in that. Oh, excuse me. There are microphones and we are taking this. So can you go to the microphone and say who you are? And those of you who have some questions start lining up behind either of the two microphones. Hi James, my name is Greg Beyer. I just heard coming in on my smartphone that Nelson Mandela just passed away. What would you write about him? If anything, that's sort of a great man, particularly as it relates to US and compare and contrast maybe US and South Africa sort of social situation. That's, I'm sorry to hear that news although it's not unexpected, given the last two or three months. And this is a case where I probably would choose not to write anything on the website about Nelson Mandela which is the only way I could do it because the magazine, we're working on the March issue now of the magazine. Because I don't feel as if I have any special standing to say anything about Nelson Mandela there. So it's, I think an impulse of conventional journalism that leads people arise or astray is feeling as if you have to opine on things and that's, I think columnists feel like they have to do that. And I respected Nelson Mandela, obviously. I met him one time which was very impressive and interesting. I worked for Jimmy Carter who was of course involved him so, but I don't think I have any, I don't think I would have anything to add to the public discourse. Whereas if there, I mean someday Jimmy Carter will die. And when that happens I have a lot to say about him and then we'll say something at that point. It would be respectful and other people he's worked with. So that's an interesting question which has helped me focus on who would say something about Mandela on our site. Is there anybody who has standing to speak? I think it's a matter of what he feels if you have something more to say then I'm sorry. Well what I was, the main point I was gonna make without actually naming the Atlantic is the impulse to not say anything unless you actually have something to say is the opposite of today's Intervent impulse. And so, it's just so rare that someone would actually add that. And I hope that, I don't think we're going to have personal reminiscences. There's somebody, I can think of somebody who is a perfect example of the young self-named authority who now no longer works in the Atlantic who will say something authoritative and magical. This person already has. And this, yeah, and we will all look agog like you were born yesterday. But it's just a question of, and it's not old people resenting young people, it's talk about what you know and you're qualified to talk about and you're able to say something about it. There's one technical note though. Because you have this connected to the internet, I saw our yellow banner. We have designed a yellow banner for breaking news and I don't think that I've ever seen it. It's a feature of our web redesign. I'm biting my tongue. Do bite your tongue. When I first saw the mock-ups for the new website, I said as gently as I could, is that going to be on every home screen? And they said, no, only for important breaking news. For the latest breaking news. And in fact, there it is. And it's the first time, I'm sure it's the first time we've used it, but it's the first time I ever call. So the Atlantic is a business success now because it's as a 156 year old publication because it has continued to evolve. So we have our print magazine, which is very strong. This last issue is reading on the way here is really good. We have our events business, which is a lot of our work, but we have our website, which has a gigantic number of readers around the world. And part of the way you do that is by having it, it's a news site along everything. I mean, it has a whole range of stuff. Just for the record, Natasha Joseph has already put up something on your website called Nelson Mandela's Death in South Africa's Next Great Struggle. Well, there's someone who has standing to speak. And I, if Tana Hase has anything to say about what Mandela meant to him as a youth, when he was a youth, Tana Hase would never take the pose of I can speak for anyone but myself. He will always speak for himself. And that's part of I gather that the Coruscant Voice is teaching. He will post if he has something he feels he can add and say. So, Phil. James and Corby, you've had a fantastic three decade plus relationship as well as exceedingly rare. It doesn't happen today. What advice do you have for writers and editors today who aren't going to have that experience? One thing I would say is I treasure the relationship with both writers and editors so much that I now will keep up and somehow manage to insert myself into editing writers I've had particularly fruitful collaborations with who don't happen to be writing for The Atlantic. And sometimes they can arrange for me to get paid, but they will just, there are certain writers I love so much they will show me what they're doing no matter who it's for or who where. If you have someone you really like working with who's helped you, beg that person to look. So many times it's one spouse. You know, one spouse could be the first reader. But in any case, once you are fortunate enough to encounter a good editor at a publication, somebody I use on the food channel, a section of the website that indeed I miss every day, every hour, worked once as a writer at a local newspaper in Montana. And his editor lost his job and started doing other things. But they kept up this relationship and the writer paid a portion of what he makes on the internet for his food pieces, which are very thoughtful food pieces. He won't let a piece go up without showing it to that editor he happened to have worked with and forged a good relationship with. And I'll say, I never expected to have this long term at a situation in The Atlantic. I worked first with Washington Monthly the day after I signed on with the Washington Monthly and declared bankruptcy. And it still is going. I worked for Texas Monthly for a while and that was a very up and down operation. So I feel very fortunate, but I think again, the natural condition is as Corby says to have unstable business alliances and you try to have these personal relationships that endure. Philip from MIT Sloan. You guys have mastered the written word of The Atlantic long form journalism. And I'm wondering now with the emergence of multimedia video. One, whether The Atlantic would consider going more in that direction as a source of potential long form journalism. And two, if you would have any advice about how to bring the same level of editorial quality that you've produced in the written texts to more interactive or multimedia journals in the long term. We each have experience in this too. So I have done some video work over the years. I did a series a long time ago for PBS on Asia and I also have a New York Emmy for documentary work. So we share that wonderful niche achievement. But I think there's a, I think the leap from printed work, whether short or long to video is a bigger leap than from printed work to audio. I've done radio work for decades. And I think that that's a very natural transition for people to make from writing to broadcast to audio broadcast. There's so much more stuff involved in video presentations. I do think of it as a distinct skill, but The Atlantic has a very good video team that we're putting a lot of resources into now. And so I think we recognize that you have to reach people in all different ways you can. So I think this is, if I were starting again, two generations earlier, I would want to have better video skills too. Well, indeed it's where we're putting a lot of money and hires and we had barely one person and now we have three full-time people on video. And to an extent they produce and cut stuff, but it's also, in their sense, creative aggregation. It has to do a lot with finding things they think are worth bringing to readers' attentions and editing them well, as well as producing original stuff. But it's really expensive and I think it's another discipline. I had conversations some time ago with tech reviews people when they were ramping up video. And the point I tried to make to them is that reporters and writers are really good at difficult tasks. And if you ask them to do video as well, bring along a camera, stick it on a tripod, record their interview, do all that sort of stuff, you're asking them both to do more for the same amount of time or money or whatever, but more importantly, you're asking them to expand out of a skill set and that you will, as it's much more naturally productive if you really want to build a multimedia capacity in a media organization. This is my view, but I hold it very strongly. Therefore, it must be true. It's a great motto. It makes much more sense to get people who are really good in the different media and form them into teams when you want them to produce pieces that have elements of the different media than it is to expect people to multiply skills in what, in each case, are genres, media's crafts that take a lifetime to become excellent at. And just kind of like a panel there for a second. I agree with that, but I do think that writing and radio broadcasting pills are more likely to coincide in the same person as opposed to video, which I view as a different thing. I think that's, yeah. Hi, I guess it's my turn. My name's Melissa Leipke and I'd like to ask a question that would call on your time spent in China and looking there today. I know it's not necessarily a long form question, but in order to do long form, you actually need journalists to be there to observe and to see what's happening. And when we look at the situation today in China, I'd like your thoughts on what's happening with the visa situation. With both the New York Times and Bloomberg looking like at this point, they may not have any of their reporters have their visas renewed by that government. So the way that you look at China in terms of whether you, A, think they're calling a call a bluff and in the end they'll give the visas or what you think is in play at this moment with this kind of censorship, that seems. This is a serious and bad situation in my view. And it's sort of a couple of big background points. One is most people I know and trust in China, I was there like four or five days ago. I came back relatively recently. They believe that she's- Can I just tell us a typical Jim story? We were together at an Atlantic event where we were both moderating panels and we were also, we had the rare joy of sitting side by side and going through galleys and editing them together, just a joy. And then I said, since this was the first of two days of this event, I said, so I'll see you tomorrow at the event and we'll finish up any questions. And Jim said, oh, no, but I'll explain later. So an email arrived at 11.45 p.m., a very normal time for Jim to send an email. And it said, I'm going to China tomorrow just for a few days. So, and it was, yes. So I was in China for about a week talking to various party officials there. So I think that in terms of economic reforms, I think that the Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang team actually does intend to try to deal with some of the economic imbalances, but it does seem as if this is coinciding with a political, either steady state or crackdown, both domestically and internationally. Situation on journalist visas, in my view, so that's one background point. And that's often the Deng Xiaoping era was sort of the same way, the domestic control in order to have some liberalization. Second point is, often the explanation for things in China, as you probably know, seems to be chaos as opposed to central master planning. The main illustration would be seven years ago when they had the anti-satellite weapon test, which was extremely disruptive internationally. There was debris in the satellite past worldwide. People's Liberation Army Air Force set this thing off. Still nobody knows where the order for that came from. Was it Hu Jintao? Was it somebody in the PLA? It's just, I think that lack of coordination is a way, as big a problem as central coordination. So I don't know the extent to which this or the air defense zone are top-down orders, but it's a real thing. And so I got the visa for the trip Corby's talking about an hour before I would either go or not get on the airplane. And I got a single entry 10-day visa. And this is, which just was, how it is, is that people in the Bloomberg case is different from the New York Times. There's a whole case of whether Bloomberg is censoring itself. New York Times, they simply won't give visas or renew the visas for anybody there. And I think that Biden talked about this this last week. My point is this is a really stupid thing for China to do because by far the best soft power initiative they could have would be just let people in. Because my view at least has always been there's a lot of terrible stuff in China, but there's always incrementally more good stuff. And so if you had really thorough coverage, it would be more positive than negative. But you guarantee negative coverage with this sort of clamp down. And so I think it's bad. And I think they'll finally let somebody in there, but it's a bad situation. I'm a sophomore at Tufts. You talked about how a piece takes something like three or more months to actually workshop and put out the process and thought and text editing. I was wondering if you, in your process, at what point do you feel like you start developing these larger trend ideas that allow it to be on the online version? Is there a typical process is it usually in reporting versus the editing version? That's a great question. And Tufts was my mother's alma mater. So I always feel like a Tufts connection. So I think that I'm gonna use an analogy of foreign travel for the structure of a piece. It seems to me when you travel someplace for reporting or anything else, there's a set of sort of questions or expectations you have to have that you're going to say, I wanna find out about X, Y, and Z. And you find out about those, but then it's always the things you didn't know you were looking for until you got there, that matter too. But you have to have the questions begin with and then leaven them with what you learned. So too with the structure of a piece. You start out with a question you wanna answer. And then every single day when doing reporting or reading, I'm sort of testing hypotheses. And the nightmarish moment when you have to actually write it is when you say, okay, now I have to start figuring out what I think. But many times authors who you and Tanahasi maintain very active daily websites. And often those web entries will be little rehearsals for and little snippets toward a longer piece. And in Tanahasi's case, all knowing that he is working on a longer form themed piece, I will write them and say essentially, do you think you could knock it off? Because this is coming so close to the main points that you're going too far into the rehearsal territory. But that is, it's often a very useful way if you maintain your own website to come up with reporting. They're like exercises to get yourself into the larger theme. And so it's not wasted time. And there are some ideas that you've been thinking about, I will name them because they're going to turn into pieces, I hope, but they've been on our books for almost two years now. Right, and there's a piece that we're planning as a giant big deal story, nine months from now, which I'm very religiously not going to do anything on the website about, even though I'm going to be traveling around doing reporting for this, and I'll be sort of working, I have a set of hypotheses for that, but then we'll, we have even a sort of cover line, but then I'll see how it actually looks when I travel around. Right, and you thought of that piece for a long time. You came up with that in a little time. I just haven't done it. I'm Caroline Adonis, and I'm a writer at the New England Journalism Lab. And I wanted to go back to the Obama thing for a second. I was wondering if you think that his relationship with the press is based more on a personality issue and the personality of people that work for him, or if there is a really a substantial element of technology in there and accessibility that he has to voters or whatever you want to call them? Can I just say you did an exegesis on Obama's personality, and I think it was, it happened to me in the moment when you were remembering, gee, he didn't seemingly promise he was going to. I think it's in that very piece, but I'll let him answer that, and it's worth reading that explanation of his personality. So I think that there is a technological factor, as you say, there's been this big flap over White House press photos. I don't really take that very seriously because the supposed golden age that the press is trying to recreate is having 500 people taking the same photo, and I don't think there's any real value added to that. It's always been very, behind-the-scenes photos have always been for logistics reasons, confined to somebody who's in the White House press. So there are technological reasons why the White House has different ways of getting its message across, but that's always been a theme. There was that famous case in the early Reagan years, where I think it was Leslie Stahl did some harsh interview with Reagan and Mike Beaver, who was then his PR gay, said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're all criticizing Reagan, but who cares? The picture was of this big, smiling, handsome guy that's all I remember. So I think the technology has been of each era. I think, in Obama's case, it's the every politician ends up hating the press. And even if they like individuals, they end up hating the press as a collectivity, especially presidents, because any president thinks, I spend all my day making these impossible decisions, and you're concentrating on this trivial crap. That's what every single, regardless of party, that's what ex-presidents talk about when they get together, how much they hate the press, because they think the press is pack-minded, trivia-minded, et cetera, et cetera. And the good ones don't let that show. You know, they find ways to seem charming to the press. I think that Obama has that small-sea constitutional disdain for the pack journalism of the White House press combined with his intellectual sense of being smarter than they are. And he's a very smart guy in my judgment, who probably is prideful in his intelligence and recognizes how smart he is and may not fully appreciate some of the limits of that. And so I think that, and finally, the people around him, those he trusts, are not in general experienced in the national media, don't nationally pal around with them. So I think it's all these forces that make the natural reaction of administration being who needs these jokers? We know they're gonna have John McCain on the Sunday talk shows every single week. Why should we play into this stupid game? So I think that maybe what's going on. So, well, actually, just to push you a little further on that. So the certain aspects of that assessment of Obama are very negative, but there's an open question as to whether or not he or any president has been correct in the degree to which they can bypass or without consequence to stay in the press. Let's recall that I worked for Jimmy Carter, who struggles, I think, point out the fact that finally it's huge objective forces that determine whether or not presidents are seen as successful or failures. We view Jimmy Carter as a failure now because he was defeated for reelection. One of the big themes in my Obama piece is that it's really important to try to assess presidents at the end of their first term because after they're either re-elected or beaten, everything about their first four years we view it a different way. There's no way to view the first four years, George H.W. Bush, we can't view him as anything other than a failure because he was beaten, even though very successful in many ways, the same with Carter. So I think that presidents have ways to get their message out, but finally it's the larger trends of war and peace, of jobs, of inflation. When Carter ran for reelection, who remembers what the prime interest rate was when Carter ran for reelection? It was 20%, 20% prime interest rate. He was challenged by Teddy Kennedy in the primaries who wouldn't shake his hand at the convention. We had the hostage disaster. We had all the things, and still a week before the election he was within about a point or two of Reagan in the polls. He'd run against Ronald Reagan. So it was still, even despite all those large forces, Carter was able to almost eke it out. And one thing that makes me so proud of the Obama piece was that the idea of the difficulties and first terms only coming, always being judged by the results of a second term, whether someone wins or loses, was just going to be one premise of the piece, but it became almost half of the Obama piece. And it's still a definitive piece about how we view presidents and which terms matter and the pitfalls of first and second. It's such a lasting piece. Because he didn't just... And thank you for that. And just one thing to add. I mentioned earlier a sort of a throwaway line that nobody can be a really successful president because there's so many different impossible things to do. You have to be a good speaker like Reagan to big audiences, which Carter was not. You have to be a good sort of extemporaneous speaker. You have to have good judgment and temperament. And I think I would rank Obama very high on those two categories of judgment and temperament. I'd put him quite high. George W. Bush, who became a much better speaker, I view, I think his judgment was, you know, that is, was his great weakness and that mattered more than the things which are problems with Obama. Seth. Seth, my new man, MIT. And you're talking about your Obama story and also waiting an hour before you were going to China, wondering if you were going to go to the visa. It reminded me of how often I find journalism to be sort of demeaning. Because I'm begging people to spend time with me. Colonel, it is to me. Well, it is to me. Well, and so it's someone who has actually worked in the real world and not just. So one answer is journalism is, by far, the best job that exists by far. It's the most interesting way you can spend your life. You know, you can have the equivalent of 50 people's different life experiences in your own life experience. You can be in a coal mine in China. And the next month, that person in the coal mine is still there. And you're someplace else. You can see all these different things. You have a chance to sort of share your views of the world. I can give you a whole speech on why this is so satisfying, a way to live despite its ups and downs. I think the built-in demeaning factors of being a journalist, that's one of the good things about this line of work. And when people get out of debt and they start taking themselves as poobahs and not reporters and pundits and all that, that is a bad sign, intellectually, here's what I like about the process of being a journalist. When you're interviewing people, you're always structurally in the position of talking to people who know more about something than you do. So you're always in the sort of ignorant position. Eventually, you then tell it about it to people who know less than you do. You're the middleman. But I really value the ritual need to go see people who know more about something than you do. And so you learn more about it. And it sort of keeps you, it's one buffer against the big head, which you get otherwise. Remember when I was in college, when I was working on The Crimson, Harrison Salisbury, who was then a venerated, venerated New York Times reporter, probably 20 years younger than I am now. But he seemed like this ancient figure. He'd just been to North Vietnam. And he came to talk to reporters in The Crimson. He said, one great thing about being a reporter is that most people who are reporters were temperamentally introverts and shy, and they welcomed the structural need to go out and see the world learn about things. Certainly true of me. And most people I know who are reporters are introverted and shy, and they like being in a job which forces them to go out and be exposed. So are you, are you or not an introvert? I agree with everything Jim said about the joy of learning from other people, but I would add and extend it to the enormous pleasure and satisfaction of being an editor because you are exposed to so many people's finer minds in your own who have thoughts very deeply about subjects that would never occur to you to research and you're able to help them in a certain way that's kind of like Dr. Patient, but really you're learning so much from them as teachers learn from students. Pam? Hi, Catherine, I've been learning freelance since I was right here, we've had that for about 15 years. And my question is in regards to the economic model and listening to the wonderful experiences that Jim has flying all over the world and being supported financially need to do so and for his amazing work and learning. And then living that kind of the reality of freelance journalism today and knowing that there is a two-tier system and a lot of magazines, some of you guys refer to that too at The Atlantic, the print magazine versus online content. And I know several people who work for The Atlantic and are published online and are not paid by the online presence and are told we're sorry we just can't afford it. And they're really doing great stuff. They're young journalists, they're trying to get a toe in the field and they don't see other places who are willing to pay them for their work. They go to The Atlantic because of the reputation of the magazine and they work for free. And I would just love to figure out and hear what you guys have to say about how we're gonna close that gap between the two-tier system because I imagine a lot of folks in this room would love to be in their shoes one day. And so again, this is a very serious question. I should clarify something about my own situation. I feel extremely lucky to have had a job ahead with The Atlantic. I am paid much better than I expected to be when I got into this business for the bankrupt Washington Monthly. Almost none, in the years I was living in China, The Atlantic's paid zero of my travel expenses there. It was always just funding some other way to pay things and I think in the typical year my travel budget for The Atlantic, apart from events, is maybe $1,000, maybe $2,000. It's always just a matter of catching some way to, this was a, there was some exchange program. There was who taking this trip to China so I got a ticket to go to China. So it is the consciousness of, I think there are publications which had the image of sending people with fancy cars every place. We've run on a really bare bones model all the way along, even though I feel very lucky to have a job. I think we can just talk about paid for work here. Yes, and so I just wanted to give a realistic image of how the actual magazine works. There has always been, journalism has always been like both sports or entertainment and there's been a supply, demand and balance of people who wanted to get into it. And so there's always been the period of self exploitation for people who want to get in and that was what I spent a couple of years as a freelancer when I was living in Texas and just on basically no money. And the web model is the modern incarnation of that. And so I think we need to, there are 20 different experiments going on now. What's gonna be the new model for paying people to have an institutional professional journalism core. If we knew what the answer was going to be, it would already be in place. Journalism schools will be part of it, they'll become practice places. I think the philanthropist model, only VR may be some bellwether here. There'll be some new model, but the web model we have now is not entirely different from what was the case 40 years ago when I was starting doing this and there were all weeklies where you get paid $10 for writing something. So it is, getting in has always been a sort of self-exploitative way and you try to, you hope there's a model after that to pay people off to get in. We hope, but what you really have to hope is there are any places left that will pay people to get on a plane and fly and will pay any travel expenses. So I believe you were leading in the black sweater? You were next, I think. Hi, my name is Ann Donahue. I'm just wondering how you know there's a magazine article or books and it's the framework. Tug of war between you and me about which way you should go with something. The tug of war, we did a blog piece in the magazine but there's no published books, so we do see new books. So to my mind, there are, you should only do a book if you feel you can't not do it because books are so discouraging and hard to do and there are too many of them published anyway. There are too many books that actually should have been op-eds or should have been magazine articles. So I only do it if I feel that I can't not write it. And I guess a blog post versus an article is whether for an Atlantic article, we know it has to be something that's six months from now will still be viable and there's something more you can bring by reporting it. But I have to say something else about you cannot do a book. Books are still, I think, a more viable business model than trying to make living as a magazine writer and if you're able to price out a book advance so at least it will pay your research expenses because it's very hard ever to get a book advance that would pay living expenses while you're writing the book. But generally the best you can do is something that will cover the cost to research and write it. That can be more than a magazine or websites that pay nothing would pay you. It says, Sam, is there an answer you were looking for that we have not given? I just wonder it's sort of, well, yeah, like how do you know an idea is big enough to be a book versus just an article? And again, for me, as I think of the books I've done it's because I felt that this is, there's something I really have to bit in my teeth and I have to make this case at some length and it's not because a magazine article, even very long ones in the Atlantic there's a finiteness to them. You know sort of the scale of ideas you can get to in a magazine article and the amount of stuff you'll be able to include or not. And so for me personally, it's I feel I've had just occasionally the sense this is something I have to write as a book and so I'm going to do that now. I will also say that for, I would say occasional means 10 times in Jim's career with everything else he's written, which is formidable. But I just wanted to throw in one more complication which is the Atlantic now publishes e-books like many other places. And the first one they published actually just to put in a little promotion for something MIT does was by our former MIT science writing graduate student, Amanda Martinez, who wrote a really wonderful piece that didn't fit either as a full length book. It wasn't quite that scale and it wasn't just a magazine piece either. It was a 20,000 word or so piece on this really intriguing attempt to rid islands of invasive species. And that was published as a distinct e-book by the Atlantic. I don't know how successful it was. It was one of the first. One of the first, okay. Mistaken, I'm sorry. And so one of the things that I am thinking about and Seth thinks about and many of the writers in the room I'm sure thinking about is what happens when you have a piece that is sort of in that middle of ground which we now can publish or at least think about publishing in ways that didn't exist five years ago. Kindle singles now. Kindle singles, TED books, Atavist runs those lengths. I mean, there's this sort of e-book, e-single 10 to 25,000 word sort of length is a sort of genre that didn't really exist except as the rare John McPhee four-part New Yorker piece. And they're still editing involved with it. I have huge hopes for that. So let's just call it up as a model of enormous hope. And I'll say also just on the book theme, my wife wrote a wonder, she's written a couple of books. She, her most recent wonderful book is called Dreaming in Chinese. She's a linguistics person. That's what you learn about China by learning Chinese language. And this came to her when we were living in China and she just felt as if there was so much she was seeing about the intersection between Chinese language and Chinese life that would really require a book. And it's one of those books that is informed by the love of discovery when you move someplace and this is just rain of new information. It's hailing at you every day. And this was her way of making sense of it. And that love of discovering new things. It's made it a handbook for many people who are just more moving to China. Which is another way of saying that books force themselves upon you. We have time for two questions if the questions and answers are quick. So those two, yeah. Those two people and that'll close out the evening. Oh. I'm Lakshmi and that question was related to the freelance question earlier. Is long-form journalism given the amount of time you sort of brainstorm on a particular idea? Is it essentially institutionally updated? I mean, is there a space where people say we're out of academia, they're kind of a job market right now, they're bright right now and all they want to do something different. They want to do journalism. But how do you see the conjunction with your academia, freelancing and long-form? So your question is it institutionally located? I do think that certain forms of journalism require strong institutions. I think it's very important that the New York Times in particular survives because there's a kind of repertorial depth that it has and national public radio also. And I think that long-form magazine-style journalism will probably continue to have a variety of homes. There was a time 25 years ago when there were more people like me who had jobs as magazine writers. I think probably more of them will have their day job in the academy and companies and whatever, but they do require some sort of institutional base to, and then the institutional editing structure is indispensable. Right, the editing that I would have questions of that because academia and journalism are now much more intertwined than they ever were, many of our best and most substantive pieces on our website are really funded by the academy. And they're by teachers who know how to write. And really the website would not have substance without the academy. And it's just producing a lot of good writers and writing. I just want to clarify my question again, I think. Is it possible for a freelance writer to actually think about being participating in a long-form idea with an advantage? Yes, if you have a number of freelance writers who write for us in the academy, for example. The people who are independent writers, it's a matter of, as it always has been in journalism, sort of covering the rent. If there's a way that you can have a income to tide you over while you're working on it, certainly people who are not staff writers for the magazine do a lot of our important pieces. Every copy of the magazine has a long-form article that was written by a freelancer who may never have been in the Atlantic. That sounds wonderfully helpful and we're enormously encouraging. We have this huge, like 99 to one rejection rate of ideas to get those. But of course, we're always asking for ideas. We just have this huge bar that we don't want to have because we have such a tiny amount of space per year to put it in. It's no way to make a living. Yes, I do. I'll ask my question and then I'll just frame it a little bit. So my question is, 30-year career is mentioned and I'm interested to know over the course of that career and the technological changes that we've been experiencing if the role of reporting has changed, the role of the reporter. And let me explain that a little bit. One of the things I've been writing about recently is the history of the role of the reporter in journalism and starting in the late 19th century, reporters became very central, of course, to making news and initially I would say that at least in the United States there was a sort of heroic view that reporters brought. People were fond of calling reporters modern nights. And then you could move into ideas about the investigative journalism starting around the turn of the 20th century, then moving from there into ideas about the view from nowhere, distance to objectives, so-called reporting. And you could tie all those changes to technological changes, I think. So I'm interested to know what you've seen in your experience is the role of the reporter changing now and would you relate that if it is to digital media? Well, let me say one thing about our website. We have the most enormously talented young people who produce an enormous amount of stuff a day. But they don't have time to go out and do a lot of reporting. They have time to email with people, which is the way most reporting is done as opposed to telephone, often to telephone people. But for a lot of the very rich color and texture that we have all over the website, that comes from people who are not employed by us or employed by any particular media outlet, that that's a result of reporting they've done for some other walk of life that they're in or some other project that they're doing. And they found something incredibly sharp and vivid that we could use. So the actual role of the reporter, it's there are so few newspapers that are actually fielding reporters and saying, go out and find this. But haven't you described yourself as a reporter? So, yes, I try to call myself a reporter as opposed to a journalist, because a journalist sounds sort of like, I love the act of reporting. I hate writing, but I love reporting. The, of course, the role is changing because of technology, because it always is at every moment. And I think there's a, whatever is the technological vacuum of a given moment is what a reporter fills with his or her presence. So for example, when TV, when radio first became prominent, you would have these voices, the CBS team from Europe and then Murrow during the Blitz and things like that, where there was a, that was the first time people could really hear a real person that you would know better than I, but it seems to me like the first time people could hear real personalities. When TV first became prominent, you would have these familiar figures who are showing you things you hadn't seen otherwise. Now I think the vacuum that professional reporters can play is for when there's breaking news, say from Egypt over the last year or wherever, you have a richer array of information than ever before because there's real time, YouTube, amateur video, there's experts from academia who can sort of contribute on blogs. And professional reporters would apply their respective skill, which is saying, okay, here are the actual facts going on here. We know this many people were killed, here's what the foreign ministry says, and that becomes their distinctive role. The Atlantic in a way has had a consistent voice through different times of technology because we've always known we couldn't compete with the actual news. It had to be sort of the informed, clear-voiced, not expert but observer. So it's sort of the somebody a step up from just the UPI reporter, but he's still using repertorial skills to say, here's what we can think about Burma. We often, a side note for the Golden Age of the Atlantic, in the mid-60s, there was a 70-page special supplement on Burma. I think we call it Wither Burma. Wither Burma. We always call it Wither Burma. So I think that, yes, the role is always changing, and whatever the technology of the time sort of leaves out is the vacuum that a professional journalist can then enter, I would say. Thinking Wither Burma, I want to cue Bing Crosby singing Road to Morocco. That's it. Anyway, that, I think, brings us to the hour. Thank you all for being here. Can you please thank our speakers?