The Media Issue

VII

Ken Lee — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:00:33 PST

Ron Haviv, 41
New York, NY

Haviv utters the photojournalist's creed, "No picture is worth dying for," but he's come pretty damn close. Hooded and tortured by Serb forces, strafed by Taliban gunfire, and held captive by the Iraqi Republican Guard, Haviv documents the kind of history the world often chooses to ignore: war, famine, genocide. "Photography exists to hold people accountable, to keep anyone from saying ‘We didn't know,'" he says. At age 23, the New York native scored the cover of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report with a photo of a Panamanian mob bludgeoning their vice president, which Bush Senior partly used as justification for invading Panama. Over a span of 10 years, Haviv covered the Balkans-from the very first murders in the Bosnian war to Slobodan Milosevic's arrest-culminating in his acclaimed book Blood and Honey. A consummate freelancer, Haviv says his lifestyle is not conducive to having pets or plants. -KEN LEE

Places he's been in the last year: Haiti, Darfur, Democratic Republic of the Congo

More biographies at the bottom of this piece.

On The Bleeding Edge of Conflict Photography

"Sit down, shut up, and listen," said a concerned elder journalist to me, the young pup, on my first day of war reporting in Beirut. "There are guys you go into the field with and others you don't. Rule number one: stay away from the photogs.

They're all nuts. You go with them, you'll get killed; they'll take a picture of it and win a prize." The photographers were indeed fearless, but what the senior correspondent didn't mention was that they also had the whole place wired like no one else. Unlike the expense-account-larded TV and newspaper hacks who decamped together at the laughably overpriced Commodore Hotel, the photographers steered clear of the pack. They lived in small, cheap apartments scattered around town among Beirutis. They knew before anyone what was going on and, as a result, were always first on the scene. Misfits and danger junkies, war photographers are a breed apart. They are the lone wolves of the press menagerie, the kind of people who catch wind of a hellhole even bigger than the one they're in and immediately book a flight there.

And when they are talented, they produce images that slice through the digital morass of modern daily life, grab you by the lapels and force you to take notice. The work of these photographers-more accurately, photojournalists-captures a truth about their often horrific subject matter and tells us a story, often with extraordinary artistry. I'm thinking of James Nachtwey's harrowing 9/11 photo of the cross above Wall Street's Trinity Church, taken as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed behind it; Antonin Kratochvil's recent photo feature on the blood diamonds of Sierra Leone; Eugene Richards' photo essay on drug addiction; Lauren Greenfield's recent book and HBO documentary, Thin, about young American women with eating disorders. Their work appears in every major publication in the country, in museums like the Smithsonian, and in coffee-table books that turn horror into art. Their photos document the human condition and form our understanding of the events of our time. Sometimes, they also affect those events. During the Balkan conflict, for instance, Ron Haviv photographed a Serbian soldier kicking the head of a Muslim woman whom he and his fellow soldiers had just executed, along with her family. The photo, taken at Haviv's great personal peril, was the first unassailable documentation of the ethnic violence going on there and alerted the world to what was taking place.

Nachtwey, Kratochvil, Richards, Haviv-these are not the kind of people you imagine behind a desk keeping the books, balancing budgets, and attending to the minutiae of running a business. So when they and three other of the world's most acclaimed photojournalists announced days before 9/11 that they were forming their own agency, a lot of people in the photo world scoffed. "This was the lunatics taking over the asylum," says the agency's initial strategist, Gary Knight. "Even I didn't think it would last more than three months, to be honest with you." VII, named for its seven founders, has confounded Knight and everyone else twice over. If the Magnum photo agency, with its 59-year history and all-star roster that goes back to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, still remains the behemoth at the ball, VII is the bright and shiny new girl with whom everyone wants to dance. VII, in a word, is cool. "They're like the Rat Pack was in the '60s," says Vanity Fair's editor of creative development David Friend. "Marquee-name photojournalists who per capita have been the most celebrated, and whose high level of commitment and quality of subject matter is unique among peer agencies."

The photojournalists at VII actually practice what they preach by preaching what they practice-in seminars and exhibitions around the world that allow them not only to interact with the public, but also to shine a light on subjects the rest of the media is all too happy to ignore. Their recent exhibition "Congo: Forgotten War," was produced in association with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders). Five of VII's photojournalists spent four months combing the broken country to produce an exhibition as beautiful as it is horrifying. "MSF came to VII and said, ‘Help us. No one's looking at Congo'", says Frank Evers, VII's managing director. "There was no money at all in it. But close to a million people have now seen the show, and that's great. VII has a sense of purpose. We want to report on things that need to be reported on and that need to get through."

VII's existence is in large part thanks to the rapacious acquisitions of Bill Gates and Mark Getty. In the late 1990s, these two hungry titans began devouring photo archives and agencies as if they were potato chips. In a few short years, Getty Images and its competitor, Gates' Corbis, bought every image library they could get their hands on and changed the face of the picture industry. Some photographers were handsomely rewarded; others were arbitrarily marginalized. That's when Gary Knight and John Stanmeyer, two highly regarded photographers whose agency had recently fallen under the Gates Hoover, decided to take matters into their own hands. "We were inventing [VII] up as we went along," explains Knight in Friend's excellent book Watching the World Change, "everyone cleaning out their ATM. We paid the lawyer in [photographic] prints. We paid the accountant and the Web master and the guy who designed the logo that way."

But Knight and Stanmeyer's business model was counterintuitive. At a time when photo agencies were consolidating, Knight and Stanmeyer realized that the digital age permitted just the opposite approach. Evers calls it the "virtual model," where each photographer, wherever he is, takes the lead-from organizing his archives to writing his captions to determining how pieces are put together. "We have never accepted the traditional way of running a photo agency and have reinvented the model," says Knight. "We continue to evolve, and whether we succeed or fail, we will have challenged the status quo [of the photo world] in doing so."

VII rose from the ashes of 9/11. The day after VII was officially announced, one of its founders, Christopher Morris, a longtime White House photographer for Time, was about to embark on the agency's first official assignment: a story about internet gambling in Antigua. But Morris missed his plane from France. He realized he'd never be able to make it to Antigua and be back at his official White House gig on time, so he corralled fellow VII founder James Nachtwey to take his place. Nachtwey, the most acclaimed war photographer of his generation bar none, flew to New York on September 10, 2001, with plans to leave for Antigua the next day. But on the morning of September 11, as he was packing 100 rolls of color-negative film in his downtown apartment, he heard a bang. The images Nachtwey shot for Time were among the most iconic and harrowing of that day, and they almost cost Nachtwey his life.

That was VII's baptism by fire, and it put the fledgling agency on the map. Today, VII has offices in Los Angeles, Paris, New York, and Bali. VII is currently planning a two-day seminar at London's Royal Geographic Society in April for some 700 ticket holders, which is to be followed by VII's biggest event ever: a photo festival in the DUMBO area of New York City, where thousands of people can participate. "It's the next step to bringing the message to a larger audience," says Evers. It's not just about the images, but about getting the issues out there, to communicate part of our raison d'être to the larger world."

Will VII survive? "VII is a real family. It's not a feeling, it's a reality," says Marion Durand, a photo editor at Newsweek who worked at VII during its first five years. But families fight, and questions about VII's future direction have not always gone smoothly. A larger question is whether, in this age of image consolidation, a boutique agency like VII can compete effectively in the long term.
"There's a resistance to taking on new, young hot photographers at VII; its bylaws state it can't grow beyond 14," notes one critic who is nonetheless a fan. "That means that as the founders of VII age, in a matter of years VII will not be producing anymore." For the moment, though, the folks at VII remain unconcerned with that distant day. As Christopher Anderson, a Magnum photojournalist and a former member of VII put it, "For VII not to succeed is bad for all of us."

Eugene Richards, 62

After he cut up his Vietnam draft card, Eugene Richards assumed he'd be sent to prison. While he waited to find out what would happen to him, he started to focus more seriously on his photography. It turned out he was wrong about jail-no one came for him-but he ended up working in the shadows of crime and suffering anyway. His book Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue chronicled the impact of crack on America's inner-city neighborhoods, and had Richards spending weeks following addicts in Brooklyn and drug dealers, cops, and prostitutes in North Philadelphia. He documented a small community of about twenty users and dealers in Red Hook, Brooklyn. "It turned out everybody that I photographed in Red Hook died," he says. "Every single person." Most recently, Richards has been writing essays to accompany his photos of wounded soldiers and families dealing with the war in Iraq. "People want agony to be on a large scale," says Richards. "But, in fact, usually agony is little things that make life intolerable, and you can't show that in photographs." -ADAM M. BRIGHT

Recent locations: North Dakota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Massachusetts, Ohio

Alexandra Boulat, 44
Paris, France

Having dodged sniper fire in Sarajevo and watched bombs rain on Baghdad, Boulat says proving herself to grizzled male colleagues has never been an issue: "After being around soldiers all day, they're just happy to see a woman," she says. Growing up in Paris, her father, the respected Life photographer Pierre Boulat, gave Alexandra her first camera at age 8, but dissuaded her from his profession. "He said the industry was like a piece of rotting wood," she says, "and I wouldn't have a normal family life." But after struggling for 10 years as a painter, Boulat realized photography was her own suppressed dream. She first tasted war in the Balkans in 1991: "I hated the danger, and I still dislike it, but it awakened in me a journalistic intuition." Boulat plans to relocate to the Middle East: "It's where the story is, this clash of cultures between two worlds that don't want to understand each other." -K.L.

Last assignments: Covered civil clashes in Gaza; Covered daily life in Syria and Lebanon for a story on Hezbollah

John Stanmeyer, 42
Indonesia

John Stanmeyer has lived in Asia for more than a decade. In 1999, during East Timor's struggle for independence, he captured images of Indonesian police shooting a man begging for help. In 2003, in the wake of the Asian economic collapse, he documented the continent-wide mental health crisis. Facilities were desperately short of funds and mental patients were being crowded into cells and chained, naked, to the wall. Stanmeyer had just half an hour to photograph one particular children's mental hospital outside Karachi. He found kids as young as seven sleeping on bare floors behind bars. "They were living in dire conditions," says Stanmeyer. "I still think of that thirty minutes quite vividly, and regularly." His biggest project to date is an eight-year photographic study of how AIDS is migrating across borders in Asia. He's followed prostitutes, pimps, truckers, addicts, and orphans. "I'm a pretty simple human being," says Stanmeyer. "What I do in this life is important to me because otherwise I don't know what the purpose of existing in it would be all about." -A.M.B.Last places he's been: India, Peru, Tanzania, Zambia

Christopher Morris, 48

When his fellow Americans started rallying for a second war in Iraq, Christopher Morris, 48, was in absolute disbelief. After having covered nearly 20 conflicts in 20 years, it's still hard for him to accept how little the public really understands war. "It's pure evil," he says. "It's like you're in a horror film. You see decapitated children. People with their limbs ripped off." Morris puts himself on the front lines to document these tragedies firsthand, and he's witnessed some of the worst acts of war. He says one of the hardest challenges of the job is simply getting his photos into print. "If there's a child there and he's burned or his face is removed by shrapnel, I'll photograph that, but I also have to do it in a way that I know it'll get published," he says. "The role of a photographer or journalist is to try to convey that, but in the West people don't want to see reality. It's all very sanitized-the true horror of it." -A.M.B.

Last places he's been: Crawford and Waco, Texas (with the President); Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; North Korea

Lauren Greenfield, 40
Los Angeles, CA

With an almost omniscient presence in the private lives of teens, Greenfield has become the preeminent documentarian of youth culture in America. "I've always been drawn to the social/emotional lives of girls because of my own insecurities growing up," the Los Angeles native says. It was after a Cartier-Bresson exhibit that Greenfield, then 15, awoke to photography as a medium for social commentary. Her 2002 book, Girl Culture, was an unflinching mirror trained on the growing sexual precociousness of girls. "I realized the body has become the primary expression of identity for females," she explains, "fueled by enormous cultural and media pressures." Her acclaimed HBO documentary Thin, which premiered in November, and its accompanying book, is a searing look at eating disorders, with Greenfield having filmed for six months in a Florida treatment facility. "There are no easy solutions," she says about the self-esteem crisis facing American girls, "but prompting dialogue is a start." -K.L.

Last assignments: Covered the rich in China (in Shanghai and Beijing); The Renfrew Clinic for the treatment of eating disorders (where she shot Thin) in Coconut Creek, Florida; Sex therapist's clinic (The Female Sexual Medicine Center) on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; Transgender Professor from Omaha, Nebraska who got facial feminization and breast implants from a top transgender surgeon

Antonin Kratochvil, 59
New York, NYKratochvil suffers no guilt when pointing his lens at the world's dispossessed, having escaped totalitarian Czechoslovakia alone at age 20. "When I photograph people at the bottom, I return to where I once was," says the former refugee. Shooting in haunting black and white, Kratochvil has chronicled AIDS in Zimbabwean squatter camps, the killings fields of Rwanda, and the wastelands of Chernobyl. "Victims look to you as their messenger, with hope that someone out there will take notice," Kratochvil says. "A good photo touches universal truth." Today, his magnum opus is Broken Dream: Twenty Years of War in Eastern Europe, an account of life behind the Iron Curtain. Zooming in on misery does exact a toll: "My wife says that after returning from assignment, I'm like a strange man from a strange world," Kratochvil says, "and each time we have to get reacquainted." -K.L.

Last three assignments: Covered the war on terror in the Philippines, embedded with commandos for Outside; a story on blood diamonds in Sierra Leone for Fortune; a photo shoot called the "Religion of Beer" for the Pilsner Urquell Beer company in the Czech Republic

Joachim Ladefoged, 36

At 25, Joachim Ladefoged found himself wedged into the crevice of a valley wall in Afghanistan. Just to his right, Taliban soldiers were firing into the mountains. To his left, government forces were firing back. He was stuck in the middle, sucking in his chest with bullets whizzing by his face. "I became an adult at that moment. I found out that I didn't want to lose my leg or hand because of this stupidity." Ladefoged didn't even get good photos from the battle. Afterwards, he decided that he could help more people by working behind the front-lines, documenting the civilian consequences of war. His principal subject since then has been the prolonged suffering in Albania. He was one of the first journalists in the country after its economy collapsed, and he covered it through the Kosovo conflict with the Serbs. He spent his holidays photographing funerals and refugee camps. "I got upset," says Ladefoged. "I got personally involved in that story-and that's what you have to do to make a difference." -A.M.B.

Last places he's been: Norway, New Orleans, New York

Gary Knight, 42
Aix-en-Provence, France

"The only thing I was interested in was getting out of Margaret Thatcher's England and discovering the world," Gary Knight says of his early years. "Photography satisfied my need for adventure." By 23, he was running with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodian jungles, having freelanced from Bangkok for five years. A career ensued, but one forged on his own terms. "I'm not a surveillance camera," he says of his activist mindset. "Photographers must shoot with a point of view. You don't make a war criminal like Slobodan Milosevic look like Daffy Duck. It's important that arseholes are held to account, that's what drives me." Knight says any despair he feels for the human condition is only short-term, pointing out that 30 percent of the population was wiped out during the wars in Cambodia. "But today that country is basking in sunshine," he says. "I have to believe that will happen in other places." -K.L.

Places covered this year: Argentina, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kashmir, Kenya, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt

James Nachtwey, 59
New York, NYIn 2003, James Nachtwey was riding on patrol with a U.S. army unit in Baghdad when a grenade clunked into the bed of?his humvee. Nachtwey took shrapnel?to the?hands, legs, and stomach, but continued taking pictures until he passed out.?He's been this dedicated since he first decided on this career. He now sees his task as helping to create a collective consciousness about the world's tragedies, because, as he puts it, "from consciousness grows conscience." But Nachtwey has also put his camera down to help save lives; he has stopped lynchings, carried wounded soldiers under fire, and transported the starving to food centers. "You have to be a human being first," he says. "If it comes down to either saving a life or getting a picture, journalistic purity-if there is such a thing-goes right out the window."
-A.M.B.

Recent assignment locations: Iraq, Cambodia, Thailand, Milwaukee

The 51 Best* Magazines Ever

Graydon Carter — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:03:43 PST

Introduction By Bigshot Editor Graydon Carter

The essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world. Until recently, with the advent of USA Today and the national editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, newspapers were by and large local endeavors. Magazines were national, and as they became international, their power of amplification grew exponentially. A woman photographs a dam. Nothing noteworthy in this, except that the woman is Margaret Bourke-White and the structure is the Fort Peck Dam. A photograph from that shoot appears on the cover of the first issue of Life and becomes one of the most known feats of human engineering in the world. That is amplification.

A magazine-like the smart, charming gazette you hold in your hands, even in this age of electronic everything everywhere, is a marvelous invention. In America, Ben Franklin is credited with conceiving of the first such publication, in 1741. (It was called The General Magazine, and it began a trend that exists to this day-within six months it had closed its doors.) Another essential difference between newspapers and magazines is this: News-papers tell you about the world; magazines tell you about their world-and by association, your world. Writers, photographers, editors, and designers bundle the slice of the world they have chosen to explore and deliver it to you in a singularly affordable, transportable, lendable, replaceable, disposable, recyclable package. You can buy a magazine almost anywhere. Publishers will even deliver it to your door, for less than the cost of going out into the hurried street to find and purchase one.

I admire, or have admired, most of the magazines the editors of GOOD have chosen as milestones or bellwethers-and I don't mean just Spy or Vanity Fair. But I have my own temple of greats. These magazines were original in concept and execution, and in their own ways, either minor or major, helped propel the idea of the magazine to its current state.

I'll start with The Spectator, the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language. A political confection of the essayists Addison and Steele, The Spectator is an excitable, beautifully crafted Oxbridge pulpit for England's Conservative Party, and continues to be a launching pad for political aspiration: In recent times three contributors have gone on to hold cabinet posts.

Quote:

Newspapers tell you about the world; magazines tell you about their world.

There is the trio of magazines to emerge from the Henry Luce empire: Time, Fortune, and Life. During the early years of Luce's "American Century," Time compressed the world for its audience of "busy men," Fortune captured for the first time the look and might of U.S. commerce, and Life brought the exuberance and nuance of world events and other lives to its readers. Luce was going to call the magazine "Dime" (for its cover price), but his wife, Clare Boothe Luce-a onetime Vanity Fair editor-convinced him otherwise. (In the play The Philadelphia Story, Philip Barry parodied Luce's Time & Life empire, calling the publishing company in the play Dime and Spy.)

Few magazines capture an era the way The Saturday Evening Post did in the decades before and after the second World War. It succeeded because it took the new values of the American Century and placed them before readers wishing to believe in them. The magazine's reach was immense, as were its resources. During the Depression the Post paid P. G. Wodehouse $90,000 for a three-part serialization of one of his Jeeves books.

The fashion magazine Gazette du Bon Ton, part post-Edwardian fashion curio, part Art Deco masterpiece, lasted a scant 13 years (from 1912 to 1925), but it defined not only salon-age Paris in the years after the Great War, but also the American flapper

era of the 1920s.

The New Yorker, a ridiculed fribble catering to New York's smart set when Harold Ross founded it in 1925, found its journalistic footing during World War II, then went on to chronicle postwar New York and its suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. It hit a long patch of fossilized institutionalism during the next two decades, but continues today as one of the finest vessels for first-rate journalism anywhere.

I could go on. There was Liberty, a general-interest magazine that posted above every article the approximate time it would take the reader to read it. There is The New York Review of Books, which was started up by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein during the newspaper strike of 1963, and which today commands the high ground of American intellectualism. There was Esquire during the heady days of the 1960s, when its editor, Harold Hayes, was sending off the most electric writers of the age to capture the era. At Rolling Stone, founder Jann Wenner did the same for the late 1960s and the 1970s.

The single binding aspect of all the magazines subsequently mentioned in this issue, and this will seem obvious, but far too many editors ignore it, is that for a publication to succeed it has to have a point. It can't just come into being because the owner wants to impress his friends. Or because market studies have shown an opening in a certain line of interest. Many of the big magazine companies, such as Time Inc., are run these days not by people who love magazines but by people in search of profit. Great magazines come from the gut and the heart. Take anything that comes out of the Dave Eggers factory, for example-they are unique, irreplaceable, and should be cherished.

Magazines-or, rather, certain magazines-aren't going away anytime soon. They have survived radio, movies, and television. And they have, so far, not perished at the altar of the internet. It will take something not known of today to replace the power of the combination of words and image when, as I have just said, they are aligned by the right hands. Magazines that tell stories in type and pictures will survive the coming electronic revolutions. Magazines that merely deliver information will have to either become stronger and more vital, or drown in the turbulent wakes of change.

GOOD's 51 Best Magazines Ever:

1. Esquire

Under Harold T.P. Hayes (1961–1973)

Esquire had the men's magazine formula backward. An uncommon example of a magazine that sold out first before establishing itself as a literary force, Esquire was launched in 1933 as an early juggs-and-journalism rag (illustrated of course, not photographed), but its most important period began in 1961. Under the leadership of new editor Hayes, the magazine's pages got bigger, future celebrities Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe ushered in New Journal-ism, and design titan George Lois produced the most iconic magazine covers ever. Esquire captured last century's most dynamic decade, visually and literarily altering the way Americans thought about their changing country. Sonny Liston as black Santa Claus? The unsuccessful quest to interview Sinatra? Anti-Vietnam-War Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian? We rest our case.

2. The New Yorker

A rare cultural touchstone both relevant and revered nearly a century after its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has remained a beacon of intellectual clarity and incisive reporting to over-educated bourgeoisie far beyond the borders of Manhattan. With a design that has changed only imperceptibly over the decades (except for earth-shattering changes under mid-1990s editor Tina Brown,who allowed-gasp!-color and-the horror!-photographs), all that's different at the magazine are the stories it covers. The New Yorker today is just as willing to publish a barely illustrated, three-part, 30,000-word jeremiad on climate change as founding editor Harold Ross was happy to devote an entire issue to one article on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. This is not to mention the fiction, humor, poetry, criticism, and cartoons-all parts of a consistently brilliant editorial vision.

3. Life

(1936–1972)

Before cable TV and the internet, there was Life. Publishing giant Henry Luce (Life, Fortune, Time) helped fuel Americans' natural curiosity by turning a then-failing general-interest magazine into a glossy weekly with 50 pages of pictures (by photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White) and captions (written precisely to fit in neatly justified blocks) in every issue. For 36 years, Life showed us the world-for pennies a week.

4. Playboy

It would be tough to overstate the greatness of a magazine that had Marilyn Monroe as its first centerfold, and Kerouac, Steinbeck, and Wodehouse on call by its fifth anniversary. Launched in 1953 by the grotto-dwelling, robe-wearing Playboy himself, by the 1960s its table of contents was a veritable who's-who of the best writers of the day and their most compelling subjects. While the magazine has lost its footing as the culturally relevant read for men, its signature "Playboy Interviews" still deliver the kind of no-holds-barred ranting and raving that made it famous. All that, and we haven't even mentioned the naked girls.

5. The New York Times Magazine

Since Sept. 6, 1896, The New York Times Magazine has without fanfare done what it does best: publish smart, populist stories that no one else will touch. Never sold on newsstands, it is to this day perfectly positioned to uphold a sacred but troubled tenet of the journalist's code: reporting news that matters to the world, instead of news that matters to circulation managers and newsstand consultants. This same freedom spills over to the design-minimalist, original, and completely refreshing.

6. Mad

Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)

Mad was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. Mad transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.

7. Spy

Until it was sold to fun-sponge Jean Pigozzi (1986–1991)

With the exception of knock- knock jokes, most of what you find funny today probably came from these pages. In typical Spy fashion, that might not be exactly true, but it's certainly close enough, and the well-informed post-ironic humor behind everything from The Daily Show to Gawker owes more than a little debt to Spy and its founding editors Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter (see intro; 31). The design was pitch-perfect, the stories of office hijinks are publishing-world legends, and its impact on the landscape of American culture is immeasurable.

8. Wired

Early years until Condé Nast buyout (1993–1998)

Pages oozing with retina-burning inks and startling layouts broadcast a vision of the future that was both utopian and tangible. Wired was able to bridge the cultural divide between geeks and the rest of us because they saw that in our democratic digital tomorrow, we were all geeks. They let us in on the secret that technology wasn't news, but how it affected our lives was. But Condé Nast giveth (see 2; 31; 45) and Condé Nast taketh away: Its 1998 purchase gradually sapped the infectious energy that so characterized Wired's early years. Still, it's rare to find something as perfect to its cultural moment; both a mirror and a lens, a tribute and a battle hymn. What's next, indeed.

9. Andy Warhol's Interview

Until Warhol's death (1969–1988)

When an era's biggest celebrity/artist/pop-culture icon decides to start a magazine about celebrities, art, and pop culture (though mostly celebrities), it's bound to be interesting-if all you care about is interviews with famous people and their pretty pictures, that is. It turned out Warhol was onto something, as he often was, and even way ahead of the curve. Should you be tracing the origins of our present celebrity worshiping culture, this isn't a bad place to start.

10. Colors

The first 13 issues, under Tibor Kalman (1991–1996)

Like the screaming and still-bloody newborn that appeared on its first cover, Colors popped wildly onto the scene in 1991. It was an exuberant, often shocking magazine that fearlessly mirrored the world-in all its peculiarity, fantastic injustice, and rampant possibility. The brainchild of feather-ruffling photographer Oliviero Toscani and designer/big thinker/wildman Kalman, Colors was wholly underwritten by Luciano Benetton (and his clothing company), which kept it nicely free of common media constraints. Originally published from New York, an international staff put out front-to-back-themed issues in five bilingual editions, each one packed with in-your-face photography that could communicate to anybody, anywhere. From its conspicuous start, Colors challenged all sorts of expectations, including what a magazine could be.

11. Rolling Stone

Before the move to New York (1967–1976)

Rolling Stone, during its 1970s heyday, left a blank space on its letters page so that aspiring contributors could write a record review and send it to the editors in the hopes of being published. What's more amazing, this is how editor Jann Wenner found Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus. Before becoming disturbingly un-cutting-edge, Rolling Stone compiled the zeitgeist of a musical revolution.

Also try Creem

12. National Geographic

Founded nine months after the eponymous society in 1888, and framed in its instantly recognizable yellow, the magazine didn't publish photos as covers until 1959. Whereas it initially charted and shot unknown civilizations, it has now become a visual catalog of civilizations in decay, and is still the benchmark for global photojournalism.

13. Collier's Weekly

Reporters for Collier's, founded in 1888, were some of the first to get down in the muck and start raking. Its influence was vast-Congress passed important laws based on evidence printed in the magazine, including a 12-parter on unregulated medicines and a pre-The Jungle essay on slaughterhouses by Upton Sinclair.

Also try McClure's

14. New York

(1968–1976)

The model for pretty much every regional magazine since, New York (previously the Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune) was founded by editor Clay Felker and designer Milton Glaser. They curated a unique blend of local politics, gossip, national news, and lifestyle features-until they were forced out by Rupert Murdoch, who bought New York in a 1976 hostile takeover.

15. Atlantic Monthly

Founded by Emerson and Longfellow in 1857, The Atlantic was the Boston Brahmin answer to overly intellectual magazines from New York (until a recent move to D.C. stole its identity). Throughout its 150-year history, The Atlantic has continued to be both sophisticated and deliberate, while only barely dumbing things down for the increasingly culturally illiterate masses.

Also try Harper's

16. Ebony

Often called the Life of black America, Ebony was founded by John H. Johnson in 1945 with a $500 loan, borrowed against his mom's furniture. By the time Johnson died last year, his magazine had spawned a publishing empire, the first, and for a long time, only black-owned one in the country.

17. Details

Original incarnation, pre-Condé Nast (1982–1988)

Launched in 1982 under the legendary Annie Flanders, Details was the ultimate insider look at New York's downtown cool. It knew how to dress, what music to listen to and, most importantly, where to party. It went on to have countless identity crises, and no longer comes even close to downtown cool.

Also try Index

18. Ramparts

The most left-wing magazine on our list.

Famous for its radical 1960s muckraking, Ramparts broke the story on the CIA infiltration of college campuses during the Vietnam War, published the diaries of Che Guevara, and attracted some of the left's brightest stars. Rolling Stone's Wenner got his start there; so, too, did Mother Jones founder Adam Hochschild.

19. Might

More than the start of founding editor Dave Eggers' career, Might (1993–1997) was the definitive expression of Clinton-era/internet-boom post-college confusion. Admittedly and ambivalently entangled with pop culture, Might was nonetheless the exceptional youth magazine that refused to pretend the latest CDs, books, movies, and TV shows were the most important things in life. Also try Vice

20. Portfolio

Created by art director/ editor Alexey Brodovitch (of Harper's Bazaar) and editor/art director Frank Zachary (of Holiday and Town & Country), Portfolio only existed for three issues in 1950 and 1951-but its integration of form and content is still inspiring over half a century later. Brodovitch exploited his medium to its fullest, using foldouts, die-cuts, and other printing tricks to feature the work of artists and designers like Charles Eames, Paul Rand, Saul Steinberg, and many others.

Also try Artforum

21. National Lampoon

From its founding through its best-selling issue (1970–1974)

Started in 1970 by Harvard Lampoon alumni, National Lampoon obliterated the idea that a college degree made you a grown-up. Deeply profane and juvenile, it launched the careers of Michael O'Donoghue and director John Hughes; spawned a syndicated radio program that featured Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Bill Murray, and spun off a series of movies that began with Animal House.

Also try Army Man

22. Wallpaper

(1996–2002)

Founded by former journalist Tyler Brûlé, Wallpaper (like a lot of the magazines in this list) showed up in the right place at the right time. At the height of the dotcom boom, Wallpaper talked about "the stuff that surrounds you" to a gener-ation hungry for soft-core design pornography. Brûlé sold out to Time Warner in 1997, but the flavor of the magazine didn't change that much until he left in 2002.

23. Cosmopolitan

Under editor Helen Gurley Brown (1965–1997)

Launched in 1886 and later bought by William Randolph Hearst, Cosmopolitan already had a million-plus circulation by the 1930s. But it was Brown, who in 1965 single-handedly reinvented the magazine (and the genre) by giving ladies something to talk about other than falsies, pot roast, and marrying a lawyer: casual sex.

Also try GQ

24. Highlights

With a stranglehold on the dentist waiting-room market, Highlights has been entertaining (and subtly educating) the pediatric-fluoride set since 1946. From the vaguely preachy "Goofus and Gallant" to the awesomely interactive back covers (nope, that hammer doesn't belong in the tree), Highlights hasn't missed a beat in half a century.

Also try Dynamite, Nickelodeon Magazine

25. Sassy

The best teen magazine on our list.

Until it moved from LA (1987–1994) Rewriting the rules of teen magazines, Sassy addressed its readers in a smart, sarcastic voice. Its frank coverage of sex, drugs, and politics, and its support of indie music and fashion earned everlasting devotion from its fans and the ire of conservative groups who pressured Sassy's advertisers, resulting in its demise.

Also try Dirt

26. The Saturday Evening Post

It wasn't until 95 years after The Saturday Evening Post's 1821 launch as a weekly magazine of current events and popular fiction that its then-editor met a 22-year-old artist named Norman Rockwell. After running his first cover illustration in 1916, Rockwell churned out American classics for the SEP on a weekly basis.

Also try Newsweek, Time

27. The Face

(1980s)

Though ostensibly a music magazine, The Face realized that cool tunes didn't matter unless everyone looked good. With the innovative marriage of fashion and music, "the best dressed magazine" quickly became the arbiter of style and cool in 1980s England.

Also try i-D

28. Sports Illustrated

This ur-sporting tome brought joy and titillation through that unique magazine innovation: the football-phone giveaway in the 1980s. A golden age under Frenchman André Laguerre (1960–1974) saw the rise of serious reportage that baptized a generation of sports writers as legitimate cultural players. Also: Swimsuit Edition-a pivotal moment in the lives of young men everywhere.

29. Eros

The most controversial magazine on our list.

Ralph Ginzburg was the first American publisher ever to go to jail over the content of a magazine-this one. A gender-neutral quarterly devoted to intelligent eroticism, Eros helped spark the sexual revolution. Four issues were published in 1962 before Ginzburg was indicted for "distributing obscene literature."

Also try Hustler

30. Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts

"I'll print anything" was the motto of founder Ed Sanders, but Fuck You mostly printed work from famous Beat writers. A proto-'zine (it was printed on a mimeograph machine in Sanders' basement, starting in 1962) Fuck You was an inspiration to countless other out-of-the-mainstream underground publications.

31. Vanity Fair

If culture is the collection of stories we tell about ourselves, Vanity Fair might just be our greatest raconteur. Its contributor roster since its founding reads like a social register of talent (both words and pictures), and the 1980s revival at Condé Nast ushered in a renewed time of plenty: increased circulation, exclusive stories, and unparalleled visibility.

32. The Whole Earth Catalog

Original incarnation (1968–1972)

A bible for the counterculture proto-dork (read: the future billionaires club of northern California), WEC stuffed every oversize page with cheek-puckering idealism for purchase-think Buckminster Fuller manifestos and folk-style autoharps. Between the lines was the implicit power of centralized, comprehensive information-as Steve Jobs once said: "Like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google."

33. Fortune

Until the death of founding editor Henry Luce (1930–1967)

It was a different era when a great financial publication might also be one of the most beautiful. Launched just months after Black Tuesday, the oversize Fortune came with an exorbitant $1 cover price (most other magazines sold for pennies), justifying its cost with stunning graphic covers followed by hundreds of luscious pages brimming with business information and beautiful photography.

Also try: Fast Company, Inc.

34. People

A 1974 spin-off of Time's "People" section, notably read for its various annual issues of superlatives (most beautiful, best/worst dressed, sexiest), it occupies a unique space in the world of celebrity journalism: It may sit next to tabloids on supermarket shelves, but stars who grace its pages are covered willingly.

35. Ms.

The greatest women's advocate on our list.

Since its launch in 1971, Ms. has consistently informed policy, making it as much a provocateur as a political force. Gloria Steinem made history when, pre-Roe v. Wade, she printed the names of women who admitted to having abortions. It has since broken taboo stories like domestic violence and sweatshop labor-all before the colored ribbons made activism cool.

Also try Bitch, Bust

36. Games

Before it was sold (1977–1990)

Games' wonderful dreamland of mind-boggling conundrums-for a time edited by the New York Times crossword guru Will Shortz-was the perfect read for anyone whose mind required strenuous workouts. Lest it seem uncool, know that it was owned by Playboy.

37. The Paris Review

Until George Plimpton's death (1953–2003)

The first magazine to publish literature by Adrienne Rich, T.C. Boyle, and Phillip Roth, the New York-based Paris Review is renowned for its virtu, its interviews (Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac) and its community: 50 years of literati parties at founding editor-in-chief George Plimpton's East Side apartment.

Also try Granta

38. Popular Mechanics

In the golden industrial years (1930s–1950s)

Popular Mechanics was a perfect magazine at the perfect time. As the industrial age matured and science and tech-nology entered people's everyday lives, Popular Mechanics was there to hold hands and calm nerves ("Written so you can understand it," proclaimed every cover). The future never looked so good.

Also try Omni, Popular Science, Seed

39. The Little Review

Founded in 1914, this literary journal's list of contributors is eye-popping: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. And it wasn't just leftovers: Ulysses was first published in its pages, garnering founder Margaret Anderson a $50 fine for obscenity and an obscure but important place in the history of modern literature.

40. Ray Gun

During the peak of the grunge era (1992–1996)

Founding art director David Carson walked a fine line between typesetting brilliance and visual schizophrenia. Despite its eventual folding in 2000 and the appropriation of its style by mainstream outfits, Ray Gun spent its first few years laps ahead of the curve aesthetically and in its music coverage.

41. Brill's Content

Brill's Content was an inside-the-sausage-factory look at media for people who eat sausages, not those who make them. From 1998 to 2001, watchdog-in-chief Steven Brill demanded more from the press through accountability, transparency, and shame. Content's lasting gift was the awkwardly revolutionary premise that journalism is for consumers, and serving them should be a priority.

42. Domus

Founded and edited by the Milanese architect Gio Ponti (1927–1979), the monthly Domus shone a spotlight on modernist décor and architecture. Domus championed Italian forward-thinkers like Carlo Mollino, and international innovators like Charles and Ray Eames, who guest-edited an issue in 1963.

43. Wet

Maybe the weirdest magazine on this list.

The self-described "magazine of gourmet bathing" existed from 1976 to 1981 as a uniquely Angeleno tangent to New Wave-think Less Than Zero as read by an avant-guard artist. Published in Venice Beach, founder Leonard Koren featured young talents Matt Groening, Matthew Ralston, and April Greiman. Bright, bold, and bizarrely on point.

44. Lucky

Founded in 2000, Lucky is essentially shopping porn, though the "I read it just for the articles" excuse isn't transferable for the simple reason that there aren't any. Makeup brushes, silk camisoles and slingbacks make up the centerfolds-always with price tag and contact number-which helped Lucky mint the "magalog" genre.

45. Vogue

Founded in 1897, Vogue is as renowned to this day for its editrixes as for its fearless trendsetting-though it hasn't been the same since 1971, when they canned the infinitely quotable Diana Vreeland ("People who eat white bread have no dreams," "Pink is the navy blue of India"). The Starbucks of fashion mags, there's still a franchise based in every fashion mecca worldwide.

46. The New England Journal of Medicine

The peer-reviewed medical and surgery quarterly frequently boasts the highest "impact factor" (a measurement the number of times a journal is cited by other articles) of any American medical publication, and occasionally even flirts with casual readability.

Also try Nature, Science, Scientific American

47. Architectural Record

Architectural Record chronicled, in simple and elegant design, the blossoming of modern architecture in America, giving space to architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan to publish treatises that changed the field forever.

48. Punch

The longest running satire magazine on our list (1841–1992)

A direct descendant of French satirical publications like Le Caricature and Le Charivari, Punch counted Kingsley Amis, Quentin Crisp, and P.G. Wodehouse among its contributors; perfected what we know as a magazine cartoon (a one-panel gag with a caption but no dialogue); and coined the now-ubiquitous term "cartoon" to describe it-all under the aegis of its glove-puppet mascot, Mr. Punch.

49. Loaded

The perverted done-it-all older brother of the lad mags, the U.K.'s Loaded has, since 1994, outdone its American siblings in terms of nudity, crassness and, we suspect, binge drinking. It also nailed that irreverent I-know-you-are-but-I-am-cooler tone well before Americans started importing British editors to try to replicate it.

50. The Source

Until the start of the burnout (1988–1994)

Started in 1988 as a Harvard radio-show 'zine, it was the first magazine to give frontline coverage to the war on drugs, expose NYPD brutality, and introduce the world to a guy named Biggie Smalls. Its fall from grace was wince-worthy, but it wasn't called the hip hop bible (by its own founders, mind you) for nothing.

51. Tiger Beat

When they fell weak-kneed for Elvis, screamed for John and Paul, fainted for David Cassidy, swooned for Donny Osmond, or melted for Luke and Jason, Tiger Beat was there on the supermarket shelves in all its Technicolor glory, shining like a beacon of hunkdom for the teeny boppers of the day.

Not TV

Jack Lechner — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:18:58 PST

I can't be objective about HBO. Of course, a lot of people could say the same thing. Over the last decade, the innovative cable channel has convinced them that it's special, not subject to the laws and compromises of ordinary television networks-something worth paying extra for.

It's a feeling sufficiently widespread to make HBO's clever slogan-"It's not TV. It's HBO"-seem less like marketing and more like simple statement of fact.

Unlike HBO, most American television has always operated on an economic model in which programming is free, and networks make money by selling commercial time to advertisers. Consequently, the Scylla and Charybdis of TV are predigested blandness (to avoid driving away advertisers) and lowest-common-denominator pandering (to attract eyeballs, therefore allowing networks to charge advertisers higher rates for shows with higher ratings). Only the best shows avoid these two traps. A few years ago, for a book I was writing, I sat down in front of 12 television sets and watched hundreds of hours of American television in a single week-I still haven't recovered. So when I talk about blandness and pandering on TV, I know what I'm talking about.

But that's not why I can't be objective. Although I've watched and enjoyed much of HBO's work, I have different reasons. I worked at HBO's movie division for two years in the 1990s, and witnessed the network's rise up close, as it occurred. More recently, I was an executive producer on an Emmy-nominated HBO documentary. And beyond it all, I've had a fascination with HBO that predates my employment there, and that has continued in the years since. That fascination boils down to one question: How the hell do they do it?

My initial exposure to the inner workings of what people used to call Home Box Office was a meeting in 1985 with Bridget Potter, then the head of original programming. At the time, HBO's original programming mostly consisted of boxing matches; concerts; standup comedy; a sports show called Inside the NFL (which is still on the air); movies like The Terry Fox Story, about a one-legged cancer victim who ran across Canada; a cheap-looking sitcom called 1st & Ten, about a pro football team, starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson; and an anthology series called The Hitchhiker, which even HBO executives described as "The Twilight Zone with tits." But even then, cool and unclassifiable stuff was popping up, pointing the way to some unanticipated and unplanned future: Jim Henson's puppet series Fraggle Rock, or experiments like Robert Altman's The Laundromat. Meanwhile, long before Michael Moore and Survivor made reality sexy, Sheila Nevins, HBO's head of documentaries, had already established the network as a home for provocative true-life tales.

Bridget Potter was a pistol, a former Yippie who had channeled her anti-establishment mischief-making into the creation of unconventional television. My boss and I were attempting to pitch her a series of short bio-pics about R&B legends like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. Potter got it immediately, and spent time exploring the idea, its possible permutations and overall potential, before telling us bluntly that while it might be a good project, it wasn't a good HBO project. It's the quintessential HBO experience for visiting producers, a kind of Socratic dialogue:

What's a good HBO project?

Something new and different.

Isn't our project new and different?

Not enough for HBO.

So what's new and different enough for HBO?

We know it when we see it.

The difference between HBO and conventional television starts with a business model that doesn't rely on advertising. You pay a monthly fee to your cable system if you want HBO; and if you don't want HBO, you don't pay. Every month, some people pick up the service, and some people drop it. Cable executives call this "churn." The goal is to have positive churn rather than negative churn-to give people a network of shows worth paying for.

It's a tricky dynamic-just ask Carolyn Strauss. The 43-year-old president of HBO Entertainment started at the network as an assistant, rising to head of series before assuming her present position. It was Strauss and her boss Chris Albrecht, now the chairman and CEO of the network, who developed and oversaw the trio of original series that lifted HBO to another level: The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under. The last was Strauss's own concept, which she pitched to the Oscar-winning American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball; it's arguably the most notable network-generated series idea since NBC's Brandon Tartikoff scribbled "MTV cops" on a napkin giving birth to Miami Vice.

Quote:

At the time, HBO's original programming mostly consisted of boxing matches; concerts; standup comedy; a sports show called Inside the NFL ; movies like The Terry Fox Story, about a one-legged cancer victim who ran across Canada; a cheap-looking sitcom called 1st & Ten, about a pro football team, starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson; and an anthology series called The Hitchhiker, which even HBO executives described as ‘The Twilight Zone with tits.'

"I think that when your sole goal is to be good," Strauss says, "when everyone who's working there has that frame of reference, then, right away, you're dealing with something special. That may be a little bit different than when your goal is to sell ad time, or drive up ratings-not that ratings aren't important to us, they are important to us-but we live in a world where what we're selling is HBO." In other words, HBO is selling quality; and to sell it, it has to achieve it.

Amazingly, HBO gets its quality points even if no one is watching. HBO's single most critically acclaimed series is not The Sopranos, but The Wire, which gets a fraction of the ratings of the mob drama. David Baldwin, HBO's executive VP of program planning, breaks it down: "We don't have to have mass, broad audience hits. Because I have one segment of my audience base that do think [The Wire] is absolutely brilliant, and will not miss it, and that's a large part of their faith in HBO: that we could make something like this-the story of why urban America is failing-that no one else would touch."

So HBO's business model is to sell quality, or the perception of quality, directly to the viewer, and that model in turn assures quality. This would explain everything. Except that it doesn't. Specifically, it doesn't explain Showtime, the only other national pay-cable network with a similar mix of programming. For most of HBO's history, Showtime has been its closest competitor, and for all of Showtime's history, HBO has left it in the dust. It has more subscribers than Showtime; at a recent juncture, the score was 28 million to 14 million. This means it makes more money than Showtime, even before taking into account DVD sales and syndication, which are equally lopsided. Its shows get higher ratings than Showtime's: Showtime's highest-rated series, Dexter, averages two million viewers per week, while The Sopranos averages nine million. And it wins more Emmys than Showtime; in 2006, it was nine to one, with HBO beating its nearest competitor, NBC, by three Emmys. (As it happens, I am currently producing two documentaries and developing a series at Showtime. Believe me, none of this stuff is news to them.) If HBO is the Road Runner, Showtime is definitely Wile E. Coyote.

The history and evolution of HBO can be seen as a series of accidental discoveries, quantum leaps vaulting it from one level of success to the next. In the late 1980s, HBO took a leap with Tanner '88, directed by Robert Altman and written by Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau, in which a fictional presidential candidate-more than 20 years before Ali G and Borat-interacted with real people during election season. The first great HBO series, Tanner had a BBC-style limited season, running as a complete 11-episode arc rather than year-round and open-ended. It premiered in February, 1988, ignoring the longstanding TV tradition of launching new shows in September. It was driven by strong-willed creators rather than a studio or a committee. Like Curb Your Enthusiasm later, and the ambitious flop K Street, Tanner relied on improvisation as well as clever writing. And for HBO, Tanner's most striking innovation was perhaps that its difference from network television could be measured in its intelligence and artistic ambition, rather than in its number of exposed nipples per hour.

In this regard, Tanner '88 fell outside the prevailing philosophy of HBO as established by Michael Fuchs, the network's chairman and CEO from 1984 to 1995. When I went to work for HBO in the mid-1990s, Fuchs summed up the network's programming by telling me, "Randy guys are a major part of our demographic." He believed that broadcast networks were aimed primarily at women, whom advertisers considered the main consumers of their products, and so HBO would counter program by aiming for men. Hence boxing, foul-mouthed comedians, and The Twilight Zone with tits-not to mention uncut theatrical movies that often featured additional profanity and nudity. Tanner's comparative lack of testosterone may have prevented HBO from realizing that the show offered a powerful and attainable blueprint for future success.

Quote:

And for HBO, Tanner's most striking innovation was perhaps that its difference from network television could be measured in its intelligence and artistic ambition, rather than in its number of exposed nipples per hour.

Still, HBO was so prosperous under Fuchs that in May, 1995, he ascended within the Time Warner hierarchy to a brief and disastrous tenure as head of Warner Music. Shortly after Fuchs' departure, Colin Callender- who was then the head of HBO NYC, the network's boutique movie division-and his lieutenant Keri Putnam oversaw what turned out to be the next leap forward: If These Walls Could Talk, a triptych about women living in the same house in different eras, which earned HBO's single highest rating to date. Its success effectively exploded Fuchs's theory; rather than being a network for men, it turned out that HBO was neglecting half its potential audience. Without Walls, it's unlikely that an estrogen-laden show like Sex and the City would ever have gotten the green light at HBO.

I shouldn't have been surprised. Early in my relationship with my then-boss Colin Callender (who is now president of HBO Films), I asked whether there was any sort of master plan for the future of HBO. "Actually," he told me, "we're just making it up as we go along." I thought he was being modest, but once I was working there, I realized he was right. HBO's executives could take real risks in programming, because the network's financial success was predicated on its overall attractiveness to viewers rather than the ratings of any single show. Only HBO could get away with the gnomic cult comedy series Mr. Show, or the longer-running Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. What kept the results from feeling slapdash was the rigorous application of the old Bridget Potter metric: Is it new and different enough?

Hand in hand with HBO's improvisatory, experimental approach was its remarkable absence of middle management. It might be difficult for producers to

sell projects to HBO, but once they did, they had direct access to the executives in charge. I watched Colin Callender roll up his sleeves and supervise the edit of each movie under his watch, making adjustments both global and minute until literally hours before airtime. Sheila Nevins and her team did the same for HBO documentaries.

When Carolyn Strauss approached Alan Ball with the concept for Six Feet Under, he had just suffered through a disastrous sitcom at ABC. Ball recalls, "At ABC, I would get notes from literally like 10 people, and the notes would be contradicting each other, and the lower-level people were second-guessing what the upper-level people were going to say, and then the upper-level people would give you a note to undo the note that the lower-level people gave you. There was no respect for the creative voice behind a series. In my experience, it's been a polar opposite at HBO. They give very few notes; the notes they give are smart, and . . . you're only getting notes from, like, two people."

HBO's final advantage is probably its managerial stability. The average tenure of an executive in HBO senior management is 20 years. Maybe it's the absurdly luxurious package of perks, ranging from lavish 401K plans to full-service private dining rooms; or maybe it's just the feeling that to leave HBO is to trade down. Either way, HBO is the Roach Motel of television: executives walk in, but they don't walk out.

HBO assumed its present shape in the late 1990s, when it stepped up its initiative to create original series, largely in response to the sudden popularity of DVDs. HBO's broadcast agreement for feature films originated in the days of videotape, a medium that people tended to rent rather than buy. Theatrical movies would start playing on HBO six months after they came out on video, which was usually six months after their theatrical release. But then consumers began to buy new releases on DVD, half a year before the HBO window. This meant that for much of its audience, HBO was showing old movies.

Quote:

It's arguably the most notable network-generated series idea since NBC's Brandon Tartikoff scribbled "MTV cops" on a napkin and gave birth to Miami Vice.

Fuchs's successor, Jeff Bewkes, saw an opportunity rather than a disaster. Broadcast networks were having their own financial crises, thanks to the dispersal of eyeballs to cable, the internet and video games. With the decrease in audience came a commensurate drop in advertising revenue, and that affected the networks' ability to finance high-quality drama series. HBO was all too happy to step into the breach, with shows like Oz (something for the guys), Sex and the City (something for the gals), and then the behemoth hit The Sopranos (something for just about everybody who could afford cable). More than 25 years after its founding, the golden age of HBO had finally arrived.

Every golden age comes with its own anxieties, though, not least among them how long it can be sustained. HBO stands for something now-viewers have standards and expectations they associate with it, and executives can't quite make things up as they go along anymore, especially after creating a model that can be imitated. Showtime is making real noise, with shows like Weeds, Dexter, and The L Word. (Not coincidentally, Showtime's current president of entertainment is Robert Greenblatt, one of the producers of Six Feet Under.) Meanwhile, the FX network is striving to be "the HBO of basic cable," and even the broadcast networks have gotten into the act, with "new and different" shows like Lost and The Office.

Nobody's perfect: along the way, HBO has produced its share of awful shows. The George Clooney-Steven Soderbergh series Unscripted, while set against a Hollywood showbiz milieu, lacked the fun and dead-on satire that Entourage later nailed. And Lucky Louie-HBO's attempt to reinvent the three-camera half-hour sitcom by adding occasional nudity and copious profanity-felt like a throwback to the Fuchs era. It was so poorly reviewed that USA Today declared, "HBO's luck has run out." Perversely, though, even that seems like a tribute to the standards the network has set; when CBS cancelled Smith after three episodes, did anyone write that its luck had run out?

What's really going on is that, in some ways, HBO has had to start behaving like a regular television network. After years of avoiding the vast and expensive inefficiencies of the Hollywood black hole called "development," HBO has commissioned numerous scripts and potential series pilots. Recently, it brought on J.J. Abrams, the mastermind behind commercial hits like Alias and Lost, to executive produce a drama about cancer patients. On the other hand, its shows in the pipeline also include offbeat fare by Deadwood's David Milch, collaborating with the brilliant novelist Kem Nunn (Tapping the Source) on John from Cincinnati, about a family of surfers; Bert & Dickie, a show being cooked up by the improbable trio of Larry Charles (Curb Your Enthusiasm), the superstar record producer Rick Rubin, and the actor Owen Wilson; Alan Ball's True Blood, set in a world where vampires slake their thirst with synthetic blood and seek equal rights; and an ensemble drama about a sex therapist and her clients called Tell Me You Love Me, which promises to marry the complexity and depth of HBO's prime-time series with the explicit sexuality of late-night shows like HBO Real Sex and Cathouse.

A couple of years ago, I found myself back at HBO, trying to persuade Sheila Nevins to finance a documentary called Left of the Dial, about the first year of the left-wing radio network Air America. Sheila had already said no to the film after seeing a five-minute trailer and a twenty-minute reel of footage. Again, it seemed we had something that was new and different, but not new and different enough for HBO. It was a real dilemma, because we were out of money.

That day, Sheila began telling us about a recent visit to her dentist. "They were playing Air America in the waiting room, and all these conservative callers were giving hell to the host. And she was giving it right back to them! And I got it. For the first time I got it. I thought, if we can get that kind of rambunctious energy in this film, it could be very entertaining." Just like that, Left of the Dial made it through the gauntlet. It was new. It was different. It was HBO.

Nevins has been head of documentaries for HBO for all of 27 years, but she still approaches every day with brio. "You know how you touch something and it has electricity?" she tells me. "Well, that's sort of what it's like to be at HBO. It's like your skirt gets caught to your slip all the time."

HBO Original Programming: A Short History

Inside the NFL(1977–present)

It's the longest running show in cable history.

Awards: 1 Emmy

The Terry Fox Story (1983)

True Story Alert: Amputee Terry Fox ran across Canada on one leg!

Fraggle Rock (1983–1987)

An underground civilization of Muppets … enough said.

The Hitchhiker (1983–1991)

Once upon a time, began the story-telling hitchhiker, Kirstie Alley was hot.

1st & Ten (1984–1991)

This silly football sitcom ran for a surprising seven seasons-six of them co-starring O.J. Simpson.

The Laundromat (1985)

A chance encounter found Carol Burnett and Amy Madigan sharing secrets over fabric softener. Robert Altman directs.

Tanner '88 (1988)

Director Robert Altman considered this his most creative project.

Awards: 1 Emmy

Real Sex (1990–present)

Episodes of this long-running documentary series investigated

sex toys, trends, machines, and a cunnilingus seminar.

Mr. Show (1995–1998)

Stream-of-consciousness comedy that was funnier than it was weird.

Awards: 4 Emmy nominations

If These Walls Could Talk (1996)

First misty-eyed installment: three generations of women cope with abortion issues.

Miss Evers' Boys (1997)

The 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: U.S. government treated black men like lab rats.

Awards: 1 Golden Globe, 4 Emmys

OZ (1997–2003)

The first hour-long HBO series fused literary references with prison sentences for six staggering seasons.

From the Earth to the Moon (1998)

The producers and star of Apollo 13 stargazed and saw a hit.

Awards: 1 Golden Globe, 3 Emmys

Sex and the City (1998-2004)

The phrase, "He's just not that into you," ranks #13 on TV Guide's Top 20 All Time Catchphrase list.

Awards: 8 Golden Globes, 7 Emmys

The Sopranos (1999–present)

Creator David Chase on his mob hit: "Let's just say some people get hurt."

Awards: 5 Golden Globes, 18 Emmys

If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000)

This time around, three generations of lesbians search for love and acceptance.

Awards: 1 Golden Globe

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present)

Hilarious, awkward comedy with the scariest tagline ever: "Deep inside you

know you're him."

Awards: 1 Golden Globe, 1 Emmy

Band of Brothers (2001)

The main actors in this WWII miniseries were cast due to their likenesses to the soldiers they portrayed.

Awards: 1 Golden Globe, 6 Emmys

Wit (2001)

Metaphysical wit is no match for ovarian cancer. Human compassion trumps them both.

Awards: 3 Emmys

Six Feet Under (2001–2005)

The funeral director Fishers confronted death, sex, and faith unlike any TV family before them.

Awards: 3 Golden Globes, 9 Emmys

Cathouse (2002–present)

Crass reality series set in a legal Nevada brothel is a long, long way from Belle De Jour.

Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (2002–present)

Hosted by Mos Def, it occasionally features big talent (Amiri Baraka,

Saul Williams).

Awards: 1 Peabody

The Wire (2002–present)

A final fifth season will explore the

role of the media in this gritty West Baltimore cross-section.

Angels in America (2003)

Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson wrenched many a heart in this AIDS-focused miniseries.

Awards: 5 Golden Globes, 11 Emmys

Elephant (2003)

Most of the students were non-actors in Gus Vant Sant's disarming take on Columbine.

Awards: Won Palme d'Or at Cannes

K Street (2003)

The earlier and more notable of Soderbergh's two semi-improvised flops.

Deadwood (2004–2006)

Shakespeare in the 1870s Dakota Territory. Two full-length films are on the way.

Awards: 1 Golden Globe, 7 Emmys

Entourage (2004–present)

"A lifestyle is a ter-

rible thing to waste" reads the tagline to this Hollywood fantasy based on producer Mark Wahlberg's life.

Awards: 2 Golden Globes, 1 Emmy

Unscripted (2005)

Soderbergh's second flop was a near miss, maybe too sober for its own good.

Rome (2005–present)

It's Dynasty in togas; trashy fun, but not the classic it should have been.

Awards: 4 Emmys

Baghdad ER (2006)

The U.S. Army sent a warning to soldiers saying this medical documentary might trigger post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Awards: 4 Emmys

When The Levees Broke (2006)

Forget Inside Man-Spike Lee's

searing elegy for Katrina might just be his best film.

The Media Issue

GOOD — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:08:50 PST

We believe in the power of media, so it's hard when we see what a mess it has become. Technology has made it omnipresent in our lives. We are inundated by it, overwhelmed by it, and all too often depressed by its degradation.

Yet amid the confusion and chaos, there remain examples of profound creativity and value. In the following pages, we've collected a handful of people and ideas that represent media excellence: what it has been, what it is, and what it can be.

We love the possibility and the potential of media-that it can communicate to the world, break down barriers, open doors, and maybe even change things for the better. We're new to media, and we're making it up as we go along-but it is this ideal that inspires us.

-5 a.m., 3 hours to press time

[revised 5 p.m., 9 hours late-eds.]

MEDIA FEATURES FROM THIS ISSUE:

Bad News

When was the last time you watched the network news? DAVID PUNER examines the lengths the networks are willing to go as they try to keep your attention.

The 51 Best* Magazines Ever

Introduction by Vanity Fair editor GRAYDON CARTER

Not TV

It's where you will find the greatest shows on television. JACK LECHNER explains how HBO got to the top-and stayed there.

VII

Ten photographers are taking pictures that you needs to see. MICHAEL A. M. LERNER chronicles the birth of a renegade photo agency.

Bad News

David Puner — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 09:44:29 PST

Let the insiders tell it, and TV news has more to worry about than Katie Couric on prime time. As the old players intersect with new media's cast of characters, the future of network news is more unpredictable than ever.

I used to tune in to the network evening news by appointment. I grew up first watching Walter Cronkite, who was on before (and looked rather like) the Muppets, and then Dan Rather every night around dinnertime. With Cronkite, I counted the long days the American hostages were held captive in Iran, and with Rather, just days after he took over Cronkite's chair in 1981, I watched footage of President Reagan getting shot, over and over, while the story developed. It never occurred to me that maybe the world wasn't fully covered in those 22 minutes of CBS Evening News. Cronkite had that legendary, definitive sign-off, after all: "And that's the way it is." And that's … the way it was.

Two decades later, with Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather solidly entrenched in the Big Three's anchor chairs, I fickly switched between broadcasts, if I watched at all. Jennings spoke terrific English for a Canadian, while Brokaw occasionally spoke in a tongue foreign to everyone. Dan Rather, it seemed, sometimes just needed my support. Covering his last presidential election as CBS anchor in 2004, Rather was hands-down the most entertaining, though it was unclear how aware he was of his own entertainment value ("This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex" … "This situation in Ohio would give an aspirin a headache"). I rarely watch an evening newscast now because, as for most people I know, 6:30 isn't a convenient time. And now I can get my news elsewhere, at any time. I still have a TV, connected to a digital video recorder so that I can skip the commercials on the news I do watch-the fake news.

Television news now extends way outside the cable box and beyond the satellite dish. Networks have been asking us for years to stop by their silly little websites. Now, to ensure their own futures, mainstream TV-news organizations are pushing full steam ahead to join ranks with those scruffy antiestablishment bloggers. The establishment has taken its tie off, put on some Pumas, and might very well soon be shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon.

ABC News, for one, is taking steps-it even symbolically removed the "Tonight" from its venerable World News broadcast last July, conveying the idea that world news isn't just for dinnertime anymore. At the helm of the broadcast, and its World News website, is Charles Gibson. Sure, Gibson is a decent Peter Jennings understudy, but at the end of the program, instead of telling me "I hope you had a good day," I want him to say, "Peter will be back tomorrow."

Quote:

The [TV news] establishment has taken its tie off, put on some Pumas, and might very well soon be shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon.

In September 2005, as part of its push into cyberspace, Disney-ABC promoted Albert Cheng to the brand-new post of executive vice president for digital media. It wasn't long before it started incorporating citizen journalism on its website, with a video blog by Amanda Congdon, the former anchor and a co-founder of Rocketboom, a popular, irreverent, newsy video-blog. Learning about video blogging, says Cheng, who's an MIT graduate with an MBA from Harvard, is what ABC is doing right now; specifically, learning about how it can help secure an old-media company a spot in the future digital media world. ABC, says Cheng, is learning a lot from Amanda Congdon.

Congdon is in her mid-20s and is the current prototype of a tech nerd's dream girl who perhaps most tidily brings together the worlds of new and old media. In one of her first ABC video blog entries, Congdon starts her webcast wearing one of the tight T-shirts that became staples during her Rocketboom days. "New media," she says, then ducks offscreen. By digital magic she reenters from the other side, wearing a staid outfit much more appropriate to the prototypical anchorwoman. "Old media," she says, and then dives off screen again only to reappear wearing something between ultra casual and conservative. This is Congdon's new place in cyberspace.

The product itself has a way to go, she says. Most networks are a couple of years behind the current technology, and some ABC news insiders are uncomfortable with the bias and opinion that often accompany blogs, not recognizing them as legitimate journalism. Still, says Congdon, an online presence is no longer merely an option for news outlets. "Now if you don't, you're dead," she says.

Charles Gibson, for one, writes for "The World Newser," ABCNews.com's blog. Brian Williams, the original anchor-blogger, has his "Daily Nightly" on MSNBC's website. Over at CBS, the focus on Katie Couric, the $15-million-a-year, 50-year-old anchor, and her hugely hyped and supposed youthful revamp of the Evening News, has overshadowed her online offerings, "First Look" and "Reporter's Notebook."

"First Look" is actually a telling daily glimpse behind the scenes of the CBS Evening News. It is at first interesting for the reasons it is supposed to be: Couric or a producer tells viewers what's coming up on the big broadcast and sometimes gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the program comes together. The video blog invites outsiders inside. Arguably, though, the more notable aspect of "First Look" is how Couric doesn't seem to think anyone is actually watching. In one installment, she says to her producer with sarcastic punch, "Hey Andy, let's show folks how we track a piece, because I think this might be interesting to two people in our audience." In another segment, Couric begs a group in the newsroom: "Come on, is there some life in this newsroom, people?"

In yet another installment, Couric skips through the newsroom, microphone in hand, and plays an impromptu game of duck duck goose, patting a couple of pale staffers on the head as she whizzes by. It's a scene that could be on The Office-The Daily Show, even. Her video blog, then, is the occasional outlet for the morning-show silliness that Couric checks outside the studio before her television broadcast, where she assumes a demeanor that is, for the most part, traditional straight anchor. Straight-ish is a bit more like it.

In 2006, NBC Nightly News' Brian Williams incorporated viewer mail on his program, a way for the number one–rated anchor to connect his TV program with cyberspace. When I caught up with Williams on the phone just before Christmas, he was fighting a cold and, he told me, sitting on the floor of his cluttered office wrapping presents. Besides doing Nightly and wrapping gifts, Williams also writes regularly for his "Daily Nightly" blog and sits in front of an office cam for "Early Nightly," a video blog that serves a similar purpose to CBS News' "First Look." Williams says that it is incumbent upon Nightly to stay relevant and be on every screen people turn to, and in fact he really enjoys blogging. "If it's going to be refrigerator doors, by God, we'll be all over the refrigerator door. If it's going to be iPod screens, we're there now. If it's going to be cell phones, we're there now." He also relies on consultants. "I am forever seeing what's big on places like YouTube, and I've got a college freshman and a high school sophomore, so I'm dipping into their lives constantly, trying to figure out where it's all going."

Tom Brokaw did not have a blog, and Williams says he has joked with his predecessor about the new duties of the job. "It's hard," says Williams of his blogging. "[It's] not like I had an hour that I didn't know what to do with." Incidentally, he calls the act of writing an occasional blog entry on his BlackBerry "deadline feature writing by thumb."

While Williams welcomes digital media, he's not so quick to predict a future without a nightly television broadcast, which, he points out, on any given night still averages about 25 million viewers between the three 6:30 programs (with about nine million typically tuning in to NBC). "Predictability is part of our stock-in-trade," he says. "You're going to get a thorough, reasoned recitation of the events of the day when you land on NBC at whatever time Nightly News airs in your market, and I think that's one of the great things we have going for us."

If you've got a way to hook up to the internet, you can blog. Of the roughly 57 million blogs floating in cyberspace, those that filter specialty links-"aggregators," as they are called in industry jargon-are the ones that, at least in theory, compete with more traditional news sources. The TV industry's most popular is without a doubt TVNewser, written by a 21-year-old college kid who lives in Baltimore.

Towson University senior Brian Stelter's story is how one citizen journalist can make an impact with a tool that allows anyone the ability to publish instantly, worldwide: College freshman obsessed with news starts blogging about the inner workings of cable news; the self-obsessed industry takes notice and starts sending him anonymous tips; he soon adds traditional network news into the mix; he starts getting paid by Mediabistro, a media networking company; he gets the cell number of the president of CNN, among others, all of whom are reading the blog-and refreshing often. Stelter, empowered by his million-hits-a-month blog, visits newsrooms and gets invited to the White House Press Corps dinner. Now his friends try to steal his cell phone at parties, presumably to drunk-dial someone like John Seigenthaler.

Quote:

Until people understand the difference between what's been vetted and what hasn't …In some instances, we're just cross-pollinating ignorance.

Status doesn't seem like something Stelter cares much about-he says he has fun blogging about TV news. Stelter is professional, but not over the top; he's not the kid who's carried a briefcase to school since elementary school. As we speak, the TVNewser blogs inside the Towson University student newspaper office, dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt, olive cargo pants, and flip-flops. Stelter looks sleep- and sun-deprived-there's no anchorman sheen to him.

If it weren't for the rise of TVNewser, chances are that Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News from January 1996 to November 2005 (and the executive producer of Evening News before that), would not know Brian Stelter. "He's a great example of where I think journalism is going to go," Heyward says. "I think he's a huge success story. To me, the metric is: ‘Is he making a difference in the dialogue about television news and within the news community?' And I think the answer is, he is."

When the graphic where's obama? mistakenly ran on Wolf Blitzer's program earlier this year, as a teaser for a story about the search for Osama bin Laden, the Newser received an email from a viewer about the embarrassing CNN mistake. Stelter posted the image, and soon thereafter, CNN emailed TVNewser its formal apology statement. In turn, Blitzer apologized on the air and called Senator Barack Obama, who accepted the apology. Obama's spokesperson told the AP that the senator appreciated the bloggers who had brought the error to light.

Ironically, most of the news Stelter actually consumes is online, he says. Stelter agrees that people his age don't watch network newscasts. While Stelter talks, an instant message from a friend pops onto his screen: So no Saddam killing on TV, huh?

"I don't mean to be mean, but I don't think he knows why Saddam is being executed," Stelter says.Unless news becomes personalized, he says, "I don't think people care."

After Saddam's execution at 6:10 a.m. (10:10 p.m. EST), on December 30, Stelter posted the big three results: "Saddam: NBC Reports News At 10:14 p.m.; CBS At 10:18 p.m.; ABC at 10:25 p.m."

What makes a story newsworthy? Sometimes it's obvious: terrorism, natural disaster, war, major politics, disease. When there's a catastrophic event, like 9/11, news networks will devote the majority of their broadcasts to that one event. Gary Condit can speak to that. Remember him? He was a story du jour just before 9/11.

When an event of great national importance fades, news channels return to their tried-and-true formulas-reporting on stories that are not news at all, but appeal to the masses. With all the internet choices awaiting attention, the masses can spread out and head for specific points of interest within a particular story. I, for one, go for the Gruesome & Titillating; someone else heads right for the Unbridled Speculation & Fabrication. Will the tabloid news stories that have thrived on cable since O.J. find a petri dish in expanding internet video and further dilute the collective attention paid to hard news? Chances are, yes.

For a special-interest story to have widespread appeal, it will have drama, a good guy and a bad guy, some sort of scandal (preferably sex-related), and celebrity.

It also helps if a story is based somewhere where it doesn't require a lot of time and resources to send a network truck-like the Trump Tower in Manhattan.

NEWS BULLETIN: SHOULD TARA KEEP HER TIARA?

MISS USA - WILL TRUMP HAVE TO FIRE HER?

Chances are you saw the Miss USA-gone-wild story. The cable news networks in particular treated it as a major news event. It had sex appeal: a 21-year-old woman famous for her hotness; drama; alleged bad behavior with implied bad people and suspected bad substances; and it had a bigger-than-life hero. The director wrote himself into the script! … It continued to unfold on cable news like this:

Miss USA is at a podium within the Great Trump Factory. She's not drinking, snorting drugs, or having any sex. There are tense moments as we await her fate.

MISS USA - NOT FIRED!

The beauty queen has problems, just like everyone else and she has been given a second chance. Don't we all deserve second chances?

BULLETIN: MISS USA: TARA CONNOR GOING INTO REHAP TO KEEP CROWN

Wait, why's she going into rehab? When her fellow 12-steppers bravely admit they are addicts and alcoholics, will she say she wants to keep her crown?

MISS USA: I DID DRINK WHEN I WAS UNDERAGE, I AM SORRY

Oh, my bad-rehab it will be, then. She cries tears next to the positively Henry Higgins-esque Trump. … [flashes flash] …

Somewhere within the 5-o'clock hour, with vultures gnawing at the carcass of the Miss USA story, guest Danny Bonaduce tells Fox News' John Gibson, "Everybody won here." Trump, Miss USA, and the cable TV networks. MSNBC's Tucker Carlson, whose program benefited from the woes of Miss USA, sums it up for me a couple of days later: "Whenever you've got a story that includes pretty women, cocaine, and recreational bisexuality, people want to know more," he says, then pauses. "Don't you?"

Unlike some cable news, there is an expectation within traditional network news to provide hard news in proportion to importance. Heyward, who is now a senior advisor to Marketspace LLC, which helps companies use digital media to interact effectively with consumers, says it's always a balancing act for the evening newscasts. "I used to actually say this at CBS out loud: ‘Our job is to make the important news interesting and the interesting news important.'" Most people who choose to work in news, he says, "do so because they believe passionately in an informed citizenry as a cornerstone of our democracy. All the tabloid and titillating distractions from this ideal represent a cynical use of journalism just to make money, but the best news organizations, and I would include the broadcast networks on that list for sure, strive to meet their essential responsibility to society, even while trying to maximize ratings and revenues."

Quote:

You're going to see traditional news-content creators and editors bumping up against nontraditional ones.… It's going to be wild and woolly for a while.

But no matter the tinkering, network newscasts are not likely to draw younger viewers. As the core audience diminishes, network-news divisions lose advertising revenue and face difficult choices in coverage: what to cover, how to cover it, for whom to cover it, and where to present the coverage. Regardless of the intent of public service-minded individuals within television news, if younger people only gravitate toward stories they relate to, regardless of where they go online, chances are they won't know much about what's going on in the world. If people choose to consume news solely according to taste, we're facing the possibility of becoming an especially uninformed society.

It's a sunny weekday morning in December, and Steve Kroft sits at his desk inside his 60 Minutes office. Emmys stand bunched together on the windowsill-statues with Hudson River views. "I'll give you ‘It's more democratic,'" Kroft says of the digital explosion and all the choice in cyberspace. "But in terms of getting and providing the American people with reliable information-until people understand the difference between what's been vetted and what hasn't …" He pauses for a moment. "In some instances, we're just cross-pollinating ignorance."

Kroft is concerned that Americans possess less shared information than they used to. As news division revenues decline, he says, newsroom resources decline and actual reporting may become a luxury. "My main concern is that it's going to get to a point with all the audience fragmentation that the media companies are not going to be able to afford to tell people what the hell is going on."

On the day Miss USA gripped the cable-news world, Brian Williams told me, the story was discussed in Nightly News' afternoon editorial meeting and ultimately Nightly opted for a global-warming story instead. On that night, of the three programs, only the CBS Evening News ran a Miss USA story, complete with a clip of Trump from NBC's The Apprentice.

Tucker Carlson says what other television newsers may think but won't (or can't) say outright. It's kind of taboo to talk about how news stories rate within the business, admits Carlson, but minute-to-minute Nielsen ratings don't lie, and with the exception of dramatic moments in Iraq, such as a presidential address on the topic, there appears to be a startling lack of interest in the war. "You watch TV, you have no idea what's going on in Iraq or on the war on terror-you have no idea, none. Ratings tell you what people are interested in and we know, for certain, that people are not interested in Iraq. Well, that puts us in a pretty tough position because we're under more economic pressure than we have been and we're under a lot of pressure to provide what people want-and they don't want Iraq."

When I repeat this to Brian Williams, he doesn't miss a beat. "If that's true, we're in big trouble," he says. "That is our lead story more often than not. It has dominated our newscast since the start of the war. So we don't make decisions based on that, God knows. … When people see a piece by Richard Engel out of Baghdad, what they don't see is a three-car armored armada, and a security detail, and the dry-run that his security detail has to do the day before he goes out on a story. That is news gathering. That's journalism, in the modern context, in wartime. And we do that every day because that's what we do and we won't stop."

"I'm not sure I would call 80 percent of the stuff on the cable channels ‘news' by my definition," says Kroft, who has covered wars in Beirut and El Salvador, among other places, and spent years as a CBS News foreign correspondent covering international terrorism. "I'm a traditionalist in the sense that I consider news something that's been gathered, either from wire service reports, or put together by journalists who go out and try to determine what the facts of the situation are and come back and report the facts after having done some research and talked to a number of people."

It is true that the top evening newscast story of 2006, according to the Tyndall Report, was Iraq, with almost double the total minutes on the three 6:30 broadcasts than that of the second top story of the year, Israel's war with Hezbollah. Then again, these are newscasts watched by a group reaching Grand Marquis-driving age-so Williams' potential "big trouble," at least as far as the evening television programs go, could be prophetic.

Do a majority of 18-to-34-year-old Americans, the most coveted demographic market, care more about Lindsay Lohan's drunken pole dancing than Iraq? Is hard news being consumed by an ever-shrinking market? If TomKat and Brangelina decided to get married or adopt children or announce they're not gay in North Korea, maybe we'd watch a clip portraying the problems humankind faces in that neck of the woods-and maybe we'd care. If Paris Hilton would just bring her vagina to Iraq, the war's coverage would get much better ratings. The Simple Life: Baghdad would be a huge hit and Pat O'Brien might even drag his mustache over to the war zone. It could be a win-win for everyone; the kids might actually get fired up about what's going on over there.

"The pessimistic view is that the standards will go out the window," says Andrew Heyward. "The pessimists will say, ‘Well, forget it-there's no way to maintain standards if everybody and his brother and her sisters are journalists.'" On the other hand, he says, "The optimists would say that the wisdom of the crowd will ‘wikify' journalism"-he pauses, momentarily-"can I … I just made up that verb … and that the checks and balances will be provided by the users."

So, when's the future going to happen? ABC's Albert Cheng has one predictive formula: "You have a bimodal curve essentially with the way our nation is built," he says. Okay, I'm not lost yet. There are the baby boomers, he says, who aren't quite on top of technology (if you've ever tried to teach someone over 50 to transfer digital picture files from a camera to a computer, you can probably attest to this); then, there are millennials, who are digital-savvy. So, says Cheng, "when you see that curve start to evolve and change over time, project out over the next 10 years-that'll give you an indication at what point you'll see that change." This, it would seem, is a formulaic way of saying: when older people, who watch TV news, die, there will be new older people getting their news in a different way.

In the immediate future, Heyward says, "I think you're going to see brands old and new bumping up against one another. You're going to see traditional news-content creators and editors bumping up against nontraditional ones; see traditional distribution models, like the evening news, bumping up against nontraditional disaggregated ones. And, you know what, it's going to be wild and woolly for a while."

I just found Walter Cronkite's final CBS Evening News sign-off on YouTube. I vaguely remember watching it live when I was 7. Just preceding the signoff, Cronkite reads a story about the upcoming first launch of the space shuttle Columbia and a new age of space travel. Everyone will watch coverage of the launch on the Big Three. Cronkite speaks to his audience with an occasional glance down at his script pages: there appears to be no teleprompter. There is none of the extraneous audio or video that we have come to expect with our news; it's just Cronkite and his renowned voice with a still image of the future of space exploration serving as that small traditional backdrop over his left shoulder. It strikes me now how cheerful Cronkite seems in his country-club green blazer as he signs off on an almost 20-year anchor career. "Old anchormen, you see, don't fade away; they keep coming back for more. And that's the way it is. …"

Tomorrow, maybe I'll try to read the entire front page of The New York Times and maybe even a bit of the first section. Maybe I'll DVR an evening newscast. Then again, maybe I'll just DVR the fake news and never get around to watching it and put the paper under the dog's bowl. And that will be the way it will be.