Editor of Slate at Columbia J-School

Jacob Weisberg, who edits Slate, the award-winning general interest web magazine, has a more than passing resemblance to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He is at Columbia University's Journalism School on 6 March, delivering the latest of the Delacorte Lectures on magazine journalism.

Weisberg has been with Slate since its founding in 1996, serving as political correspondent and columnist before becoming editor. Before Slate he wrote for the New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. He co-authored with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin the 2003 book In an Uncertain World. He also wrote the 1996 book In Defense of Government, the 2000 eBook The Road to Chadville, and several books on Bushisms.

Among Weisberg's many credits, says moderator Victor Navasky, is that at Yale he declined an invitation (from John Kerry) to join the Skull and Crossbones secret society -- on the grounds that it would not admit women. His brother "wrote a book about the CIA;" and his mother was also "a literary figure." Navasky does not expand on that, but googling later I find that Weisberg's mother, Lois, was a major arts and culture figure in Chicago, whose 1999 profile in The New Yorker began: "She's a grandmother, she lives in a big house in Chicago, and you've never heard of her. Does she run the world?" Brother Joseph Weisberg is a former CIA agent who wrote the critically acclaimed novel An Ordinary Spy (December 2007).

Weisberg begins the lecture by calling up on the screen behind him a computer-generated image of Slate. Founded in 1996 as a web publication. From the beginning it has been "a native speaker of web." That was a distinct advantage over print magazines struggling to adapt. Web style is different from print. It is less formal, more personal, a "cross between an expository print essay and e-mail;" there's humor in it, a certain intimacy with the reader; online readers treat writers like people they know. At Slate some readers have an established presence; one specializes in finding mistakes; "he's the only fact-checking we have. "Post-publication fact-checking."

The online medium is not friendly to long articles; if you have a long piece it must be broken up. But short pieces add up. Slate "puts out the equivalent of a short book every week." The medium does allow innovations like group blogs; links within an article can nest a a great deal of information, different perspectives. The medium is addictive. Slate's daily report on what's in the newspapers is an addictive element; so are its videos, offering crisp, short, humorous takes on stories, always with a point. One on Hilary was downloaded 400,000 times.

Journalists of the future will be able to write articles and code, work with developers to convey information in new and innovative ways. Slate staffer Chad Wilson produced a new feature: "Map the Candidates," using Google Maps. Weisberg calls it up on the screen. You can also map correspondents, know where they are, where they've been. Some reporters now file "twitters" from cell phones, each fewer than 140 words. There's a strange haiku affect, but the story gets through. News about Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly misbehaving at an Obama event came through first as a twitter. The New York Times has labeled it "micro journalism."

There is constant innovation online. An example is The Root, a new launch that allows readers to input genealogical data, and see where it leads. One tool on the site allows African Americans to input DNA information and "reverse the middle passage" -- find out where in Africa their ancestors came from.

Answering a question about the ideal length of web articles, Weisberg says short is better; but "long form journalism" is not excluded; it has to be presented in shorter bits. There's been an extended dialog on Slate about the HBO series The Wire; probably 25,000 words by now. Another book-length effort is "Blogging the Bible," which intends to cover every chapter and verse.

Questions about the model for successful online magazines brings some obvious responses -- no printing costs, all the money can go towards content and design -- and unearths some unexpected revelations: "investigative journalism doesn't fit closely with what we do." News gathering is very expensive, and it is not something Slate has contemplated. In the beginning -- 1997 -- Slate was available only to subscribers. It had 20,000 readers. It is now owned by the Washington Post Company and offered free to a much larger readership. Advertising pays for it. Slate makes money.

Who reads Slate? About 85 per cent of readership is within the United States; the rest is mostly expatriate American or other native English speakers. The number of readers ranges from 500k to 1.5 million a day. There are about 10 to 11 million unique users per month.

After the presentation I go up and ask Weisberg if Slate tries to put a frame on the world as print magazines seek to do. He seems momentarily nonplussed, so I explain. Do you try to make sense of the world for your readers? Define what is important? Foreign news? He still seems puzzled, so I get really concrete. Does Slate, for instance, try to cover Africa? Oh yes. We have a Foreign Editor. We've had quite a few articles on Africa.

I checked for foreign content in Slate all week. There was little. Maybe because of all the excitement generated by Geraldine Ferraro's novel insight into the role of race in presidential politics, or the crash and burn of Governor Spitzer's political career.

Foreign Affairs Editor at Columbia J-School

James F. Hoge, who has been editor of Foreign Affairs since 1992, looks like Kirk Douglas and, at 72, has the same rock-like affect. He is trimly suited, silver-maned, entirely comfortable before an audience that has left a wide swathe of seats unoccupied in front.

Hoge began his career at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he worked for over a quarter century and was successively, Washington correspondent, editor and publisher. He went to the New York Daily News as publisher in 1984, and in 1992 was the unlikely pick of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to edit Foreign Affairs, long the gray and solemn voice of the "Eastern Establishment." Picking a journalist from the world of tabloids to edit the most important policy journal of international diplomacy was a daring move by CFR. It worked, for the circulation of the magazine has gone up by about 60 per cent since Hoge took over, and now stands at 160,000 (ABC figures for December 2007).

The Council was founded in 1921, in the wake of the First World War; Foreign Affairs began publication a year later. Americans discovered there was a "lethal world out there" which had to be engaged. CFR is no longer the voice of the "Eastern Establishment" Hoge says; "that doesn't exist any more; it's national now." He does not go into the exclusive nature of CFR membership (it is open only to American nationals) , but the Foreign Affairs web site boasts about its elite cachet:

"Its 3,400 members include nearly all past and present Presidents, Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, other senior U.S. government officials, renowned scholars, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups. Each year the Council sponsors several hundred meetings including televised debates and other media events, and publishes Foreign Affairs, the preeminent journal in the field, as well as dozens of other reports and books by noted experts.

Since 1922, the Council has published Foreign Affairs, America's most influential publication on international affairs and foreign policy. It is more than a magazine — it is the international forum of choice for the most important new ideas, analysis, and debate on the most significant issues in the world. Inevitably, articles published in Foreign Affairs shape the political dialogue for months and years to come."

That is not hype. The magazine's reputation for heralding the agenda of American foreign policy has made it required reading for generations of diplomats.

The magazine is nonpartisan, self-funding and editorially independent, Hoge says. It has a small staff, no more than himself, a managing editor (now Gideon Rose), and support staff. As a "contributor magazine," Foreign Affairs is a forum for a wide range of opinion. "I spend a lot of time traveling, attending conferences ... finding out what people think." About a third of the articles are commissioned. Others "come in over the transom ... I wonder why we say that when we don't have transoms any more."

The magazine's primary aim is to educate people on foreign policy issues; there is also a "think tank aspect" in that it seeks to influence policy makers. "Every so often, we'll have a direct impact." George Kennan's anonymous article on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (signed by X) in the July 1947 issue outlined the need to contain the Soviet Union. "That was the basis of American foreign policy for 50 years."

Another influential article was by Samuel Huntington on the "Clash of Civilizations," in the Summer 1993 issue. There have also been cases when articles in Foreign Affairs had no impact: one such was a piece by Bernard Lewis warning about Osama bin Laden that appeared well before the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center. It went completely unheeded.

After every issue "there's usually someone protesting." The most recent notable flap was the "Lavrov affair." Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister (former UN ambassador), had submitted an article which needed to be edited. After he had signed off on the edit, just as the magazine was about to go to the printer, he called a press conference in Moscow and accused us of grossly distorting his article. "It was just to get on Putin's good side." No harm was done; when Lavrov was next in New York, he called and he was once again the smooth UN diplomat.

Much more unpleasant was the Kissinger affair. He objected to what an article on Chile said about his role there in the 1970s, threatened to resign from the Council, wanted Hoge fired. Also unpleasant was the fallout from an article detailing the "unethical maneuvering" of Zbigniew Brzezinski in pushing for the American recognition of China before the signing of the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which Cyrus Vance had labored over. Brzezinski too threatened to resign from the Council. As editor, Hoge said, "you've got to be prepared to take the heat."

Then there are the "expose pieces."

In 2001 Foreign Affairs printed the "politbureau transcripts" -- a record of the discussions of China's top leaders at the time of Tienanmen. "There were doubts about its authenticity, but we printed most of it." Authentification came when the Chinese didn't make a big fuss about it, and had a low-level spokesman dismiss it as a fabrication. They banned the issue, but it was widely available on the Internet. "There was no firewall then."

Another notable expose came from the thousands of secret documents the US Army discovered in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We devoted most of an issue to them. They made blood-curdling reading." Saddam's view of reality was remarkably distorted. Even as he could hear the rumbling of American tanks approaching his bunker, he believed that Iraqi forces were winning.

Hoge considers the situation in Afghanistan the "most dangerous" today. More broadly, there is danger in the fundamental shift of power from West to East with the rise of Asia. The last time such a shift occurred, when Germany and Japan tried to find place in the imperial European world order, it led to war. Properly managed, such a power shift need not cause conflict.

The Worldwide Web was not expected to make much difference for a magazine with 5,000-word essays, but it had a radical impact. It opened up an "enormous international audience." Hoge and his staff now spend "as much time enriching the web site as on the print magazine." The period after the end of the Cold War has also seen "an explosion of content." And Foreign Affairs is becoming a truly global publication. It is preparing to put out an edition in Chinese, and another in India. There are already versions of the magazine in Japanese, Russian and Spanish.

Foreign Affairs is now fully archived on the Web. (Hoge did not mention this, but subscribers to the magazine can access only a year of content.) The electronic archiving makes it possible to produce customized books for classroom use, instant books tailored to events. After 9/11 they ran off an instant best-seller titled "How Did This Happen?" which is still selling.

The circulation of Foreign Affairs has grown "dramatically" in the last ten years; in readership it is in a "league by itself." Other policy magazines like Foreign Policy (which was founded to remedy perceived shortcomings in the public discourse during the Viet Nam war), and World Policy Journal (intended to give the "thinking left" a voice), only have small circulations (below 20,000). Foreign Policy would not even be financially viable without a foundation to support it. The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker and The Economist also dealt with policy issues, but there was no "head to head competitor" for Foreign Affairs.

Questions range widely. Is he was aware of his own political biases? (Yes) Does the magazine have a position on the Iraq war? (It has carried articles pro and con.) How do you edit big-name writers? ("We call them big foot writers; I talk to them before editing.") Do you ever look back and say, "Man! I can't believe we ran that! (Yes, but nothing specific comes to mind right now.) Did Ronald Reagan read Foreign Affairs? (He read a lot but not FA. Other presidents did. Kennedy, Carter and Clinton were especially close readers.) Would you like Condi Rice as a reader or 4 million ordinary Americans? (I'll take the 4 million; that will make Condi pay attention.) If John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt had offered their article on The Israel Lobby to Foreign Affairs, would you have published it? (I was mad that they didn't.) But would you have Published it? (With another balancing article, with some editing.) So you wouldn't have!

I want to ask why Foreign Affairs is so relentlessly committed to manipulative politics, whether he sees any hope for a world in which (according to the latest issue), a "Clash of Peoples" is to be laid over the "clash of civilizations." But I hold my peace. I know it will come out wrong. Americans of a certain age and background get very uptight at questions like that. But after the presentation, I go up and ask Hoge when the Indian edition of Foreign Affairs will be out. It's already out, he says. It's called "India and the World." Can I get a copy in New York? He shakes his head. Who is the publisher in India? He shakes his head again. It is very strange. I pose the question on the discussion forum of the South Asian Journalists Association, and find out that the Sakaal Group in Pune has the contract to publish the magazine in India, with former Times Of India editor Dilip Padgaonkar in charge; the content will come from New York. Hoge's reluctance to tell me that is mystifying. The inscrutable West.

One final note of interest: Warren Hoge, the UN correspondent of the New York Times, is the younger brother of James.

Ted Genoways at Columbia J-School

Ted Genoways is the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, a publication I have never read. But I went yesterday with considerable anticipation to his presentation at Columbia Journalism School (the second in the Delacorte lectures on magazine journalism). In 2003 he had taken over the VQR, a staid university publication founded in 1925, and worked such magic that in 2006 it got six National Magazine Award nominations, more than The New Yorker, Harper's or The New York Times. And it won two of the awards, including the one for best fiction, beating out the Atlantic. It was, said Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, "as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

Genoways is not your stereotypical Southern litterateur (which I had half expected; but he is in the South, not of it). He has a lean skinhead look and not a hint of drawl. There was no talk of poetry or anything overtly political, which was strange, for he is a poet with strong political views. On the web site of Poets Against the War (poetsagainstthewar.org), his poem Rural Electric appears with a statement, which says in part:

"In July 1917, Siegfried Sassoon composed his famous statement of conscientious objection "as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." Here now, we stand at a still more dangerous precipice, because I believe that war is being perpetrated by those who have the power to avoid it. As poets, we are obligated to speak out against this prospect, even as it begins to appear an eventuality. Disgusted as I am by the reprehensible actions of our unelected leaders, I am equally appalled by the ignorance displayed by Laura Bush when she states that "it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." No doubt she would have found it inappropriate for Walt Whitman to speak out against the horrors of the Civil War or Wilfred Owen to decry the use of mustard gas in World War I or Miguel Hernandez to warn of coming floods of blood if no one opposed the Fascists in Spain. ... She is wrong, as this entire administration is wrong. A literary event is an ideal political forum, and we must not fail the generations of poets who came before us by falling silent now."

Genoways spoke of how he had "reconceived" the VQR, pushing the journalism at the front of the publication towards literature while seeking in the literary work at the back the "urgency of journalism." There were only three people on staff; he and a managing editor ("editorial meetings" consisted largely of their back and forth through the open door between their offices); and a P.R. person. The annual budget was $400,000, much of it coming from old endowments to the university. Of the $100,000 for each issue, $65,000 was for editorial use. With each issue running to 300+ pages, that did not allow VQR to pay writers anywhere near what they could get from commercial magazines; 20 cents per word, compared to the low-end $1.50 paid by the competition; the National Geographic paid $5 a word.

The questions from students focused on the journeyman issues of whether VQR welcomed young writers (yes!), and what he looked for in poetry ("reading a couple of issues will give you a clearer idea than anything I can say").

Professor Victor Navasky, the moderator of the Delacorte lectures (long-time editor, then publisher of The Nation), asked about the sources of financing of VQR; he recalled the Cold War era scandal of the CIA financing influential small magazines;* was Genoways concerned about the sources of his funding? The National Endowment for the Arts? There were "enough layers in the NEA" to protect recipients of its funding from political control, G said. The CIA had intended and exercised political control. It set firm ground rules, including who could write for the publications and who could not. That had led to the loss of influence of the publications they funded. Absent such political control, "I'll accept money from anyone."

I tried to get Genoway to speak more openly about political issues; how did he see the world and the large discontinuities that were taking shape? Democracy in America? But he refused to be drawn out.

[*Note for those too young to remember: during the Cold War, the CIA funded about 20 small literary publications in countries around the world. In the United States these included the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review; in Europe the best known were Preuves in France, Encounter in the UK, Tempo Presente in Italy, and Der Monat in Germany. There were others in Asia and even in Australia. The magazines were able to maintain a radical image largely because they were vocal on human rights issues and supported avante garde movements in art and music that were anathema to the Soviet establishment.]

Jon Meacham at Columbia J-School

Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek (2.5 million hard copy circulation, 50 to 60 million www page views per month), gave the first of the Delacorte Lectures at Columbia University's Journalism School yesterday evening. When it came to question time the event turned into a very polite lynching, for which Meacham brought the rope and the audience provided an incurious ignorance.

The rope was a presentation decidedly narrow and a tad too smug. Meacham said little that illuminated the substantive travails of a weekly news magazine in the age of the internet. He did not say how -- or if -- Newsweek dealt with the themes explored in his excellent books (Franklin and Winston: An intimate portrait of an epic friendship. Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the civil rights movement. American Gospel: God, the founding fathers and the making of a nation.) He said little about the personal and professional difficulties of vaulting to the top at Newsweek after a very short career that began at the Chatanooga Times (the first newspaper that Adolph Ochs acquired on his march to The New York Times). And his response was almost comically inadequate to the second questioner, a blonde with an Australian accent who wanted to know how he had "paid his dues" (as journalism students are constantly told they must, before hoping for advancement). For three years, said Meacham, he had a "stress vomit" at the end of every week. After asking if anyone in the audience read Newsweek, Meacham greeted the "nice lady" who was the solitary respondent, only to be told "I work in the library. I'll read anything." Meacham danced on the rope a few more times by quizzing a young man who said he read The Economist but not Newsweek.

As for the audience, it seemed to be unaware that Meacham is a gifted and insightful writer who has explored in his books issues that should be of consuming interest to every young journalist.

• The Roosevelt-Churchill "friendship" was hardly that, and encapsulating as it did the changing equation between two super-Powers, it is the essential backdrop to a time of renewed tectonic shifts in international affairs.
  
• The American civil rights movement changed race relations globally, and its legacy, mixed as it is with that of Gandhian nonviolence, is critically important at a time when enormous adjustments are necessary in the structures of economic and political governance to avoid cataclysmic disasters.
• The deistic beliefs of America's founding fathers might seem irrelevant to our Godless age, but precisely for that reason they are important. There is a quantum difference between secular humanism and belief in a universal creative intelligence; one is rooted in a mechanistic, and the other in an organic conception of universal reality. How journalists report on world affairs will certainly be affected by how they view themselves, as cogs in a lifeless universe or as sparks of a greater fire.