Getting to chat with two of the best New York Times writers ever

My press ethics class with David Margolick meets every Wednesday night at 5:30 p.m. I never know exactly what to expect, as the class tends to easily spin off onto free-wheeling ethical tangents. Such is the nature of ethics, I suppose-- slippery.

One of the best things about the class is Prof. Margolick's ability to put us in touch with some of the greatest journalists around. We talked to the Arkansas reporters who covered the Little Rock Nine and school desegregation. We talked to New Journalist Joe McGinniss who found himself under attack in Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and The Murderer, a seminal text on the parasitic relationship between journalists and their subjects.

This week, we had the incredible opportunity to talk with Gay Talese and John McCandlish Phillips, considered to be two of the best journalists ever to work at the New York Times. Talese is known for his books on the mafia, Americans' sex lives, and the building of Staten Island's Verrazano-Narrows bridge, as well as his magazine articles on Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Floyd Patterson, and Joe Louis. "Frank Sinatra Had A Cold," written for Esquire Magazine, is considered to be a perfect piece of magazine work.

John McCandlish Phillips is not a well-known name; he wrote for the New York Times for 21 years starting in the early 1950s. Among writers, he's considered to be one of the most talented to have graced the craft. Towering over us all at six feet, five inches, he was skeletally thin. His voice choked with age. He was there to talk to us about an article he wrote in 1965 where he revealed a Ku Klux Klan leader's Jewish background. The subject of the story killed himself the day the story ran on the New York Times' front page. In answer to our questions, Phillips said he was "not a deep thinker." He did stories as they were assigned to him and that was that.

Gay Talese has an incredibly powerful personality. Dressed to the hilt in a three piece suit, his presence seemed to fill the room from the moment he entered. He led the discussion off on all kinds of tangents, though he returned again and again to his disgust with the New York Times' present Washington bureau. He was emphatic about the need to eliminate anonymous sources from stories.

Talese named the three worst stories of the last few years: 1. The Los Alamos spy story; 2. the anthrax story; and 3. the Duke lacrosse scandal. "The Hester Primming of those boys was disgraceful."

An interesting point raised by Talese was the need for class differentiation between journalists and their sources. He said it was different for him and Phillips in the 50s and 60s. Talese went to the University of Alabama, while Phillips never went to college. They were on the outside looking in, and had a distance from their assumedly more elite and powerful sources. Journalists nowadays though often come from the same places and top schools as those in power. Talese objects to reporters' social lives being so intermingled with those of their sources. I definitely saw a lot of this in Washington.

In a really beautiful moment, Phillips read a story to us from City Notebook, a collection of 60 of his articles. All but one was published in The New York Times. This is the one he read to us. It recounts the artistry of a Ringling Brothers clown, Otto Griebling. Phillips tried for years to write about Griebling for the Times, but they would never approve it. In 1972, one editor finally agreed to run an article on the clown, but when Phillips called the circus, he discovered Griebling was in the hospital. The circus promised him access to Griebling as soon as he recovered, but Griebling died. Phillips' greatest regret is that the clown was never recognized for his artistry in the pages of The New York Times.

The Nation's Capital vs. The Nation's Cultural Capital

Today marks my unofficial two month anniversary in New York City. I am not sold on the place yet, but I hear it takes time. It has until next December (when I complete my master's) to grow on me... Or for me to grow on it... Or some such thing.

Just a skip and a hop from the political mecca that is D.C., New York's character is utterly different. I've traded the banks of the Potomac for those of the Hudson. (Though the East River is my more frequent haunt-- I've put in quite a few miles on its shores during morning runs). At this point, I must admit that I kind of miss the old swampland of D.C.

A few differences between the places:

1. There are lots of crazies in NYC. At the last two panel events that I've attended (the Taibbi-Herzberg event and a "Future of Journalism" panel with Dan Rather, the New York Times' Jill Abramson, and AP's Tom Curley), the first people to approach the mike during Q&A use the opportunity as a platform to attack the speakers and air extreme views. In D.C., people tend to be more subdued and less confrontational. New York is not a place for subtlety.

2. New York media events are cooler. In D.C., most media events are held in the basement ballrooms of grand, but aging, hotels. You can usually count on an open bar, three-course meal featuring tilapia or sea bass, and a few recognizable political faces. I had the chance to attend Atlantic Magazine's relaunch party in New York earlier this month. It was at an art gallery. There were Flavin-esque flourescent light installations keyed to past Atlantic feature stories. There was popcorn and a screening room with film shorts created for the launch, posing Atlantic questions to people on New York's streets. Party attendees were encouraged to draw graffiti on blown up Atlantic photos on the walls. It was cool. D.C. is many things, but it's not very cool.

3. New York is professionally schizophrenic. In D.C., the city revolves around politics and the federal government. Almost everyone you meet is linked into politics in some way-- whether working on the Hill, for a law or lobbying firm, for a non-profit, in media, etc. That common thread does not exist in New York. Journalists, artists, bankers, lawyers, doctors, PR folks... there are tons of professional worlds here, with little overlap. It's harder to learn the "language of the city," since you really have to develop fluency in several languages if you want to move between groups.

Between Above The Law, working at The Week, grad school, and social engagements, life has been busy, busy, busy. I've been doing lots of fact-checking at The Week, and research for the Consumer and Arts pages. I wrote the copy for this little gem: Last-minute travel deals.

The highlight of last week was speaking with David Lat at Columbia Law School: ""Will Review Documents for Food: Law and the Economy." Even if it is depressing to talk about the economy right now...

Health Insurance, Bike Messengers, and my first NYU-published piece

NYU's Pavement Pieces published a story that I wrote for my Reporting and Writing class. The assignment was to take a story on a national election issue and make it local. Health insurance is an issue close to my heart since my family lacked it growing up. I chose to focus on bike messengers in New York City. Here's the lead paragraph:

Eating a turkey burger and munching on French fries at the 7A diner in the East Village, bike messenger Austin Horse, 26, talks about the perils of working in a physically harrowing profession without health insurance. Last January a taxi swerved into his path and ran over his right leg.

Click here to read the full article.

Bike Couriers Without Coverage [Pavement Pieces]

Talking Shop with Hendrik Hertzberg and Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi's political columns for Rolling Stone have become increasing vitriolic to the point of sounding like the rants of a misanthropic mad man. I love them though. His editors let him go where few professional journalists would be willing to stray, including the extended use of masturbatory metaphors. A sample quote from his recent column on "The Lies of Sarah Palin:"

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Tonight I attended a seminar featuring Matt Taibbi and Hendrik Hertzberg, political commentator for another of my favorite magazines The New Yorker, discussing the media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Impressions
Matt Taibbi is goofier and less angry than you would think based on his columns. Conveys his thoughts better on paper than in person. Most stinging quote came in his advice to journalism students: "Journalism school is the most useless thing in the world. Quit immediately." Most interesting life fact: Played pro for the Mongolia Basketball Association in the 1990s.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in a brown corduroy suit and yellow tie, goes by Rik. Is more in love with Obama than most journalists are willing to show. "Obama is potentially another Lincoln." But that's okay because what Hertzberg does is not "objective reporting. It's objective judgment reaching." Most stinging quote (from my perspective as a blogger): "Reporting is expensive. The web is feeding on the corpse of the mainstream media. Just adding snark and commentary."

The Election Coverage
Hertzberg and Taibbi agreed that election coverage is lacking. "TV has pushed politics into the direction of being a spectator's sport," said Taibbi. "Politics used to be about the exchange of ideas. Now it's about winning and numbers."

"But in sports, commentators don't get to decide who won," added Hertzberg, referring to the post-debate round-ups.

On Writing
After graduating from Harvard, Hertzberg passed up a job at the New Yorker to work for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering hippies and the summer of love. After a stint in the Navy, he went to the New Yorker, doing Talk of the Town pieces on music and sports, but he was growing bored with journalism. Left to be a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, and went back to journalism as editor of the New Republic with a new love of politics. "I didn't become a writer until I found a different passion."

Taibbi on his writing style (quotes are approximate): "I get an assignment. Then I will do nothing for a while. I will calculate the shortest time it will take me to write the piece if written in absolute high panic. Then I wait until the last minute and write in a state of sheer white terror."

Hertzberg: "I don't like writing. I like having written."

J School: A month in review

It's a cold, gray, October Sunday, and I am curled up in my Gramercy apartment reading about Joe Louis as a middle-aged man. A month into the journalism master's program at NYU, the most frequent question I get from friends these days is, "How's journalism school?" The answer is, "Good."

That's a bit understated. I really like the program, the professors and my classmates. And I love being in grad school. Having been out in the working world for five years, I have a much greater appreciation for higher education than I had as a high school senior going to college. I no longer see a list of class assignments as a checklist, but as readings and experiences to be savored.

For those curious, here's the extended (and meandering) answer to "How's journalism school?":

Reading about New York in the 1920s through the eyes of New Yorker writers A.J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, and Meyer Berger...

...discussing "press ethics" questions, like "is it okay to clean up quotes? how clean can you make them before you're doing something dirty ethically?"...

...a Saturday night at the Musician's Union Local in midtown Manhattan, interviewing lawyers, anti-war veterans and a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who was born without legs, suffering from second-generation effects of Agent Orange...

...meeting up with uninsured bike messengers at an East Village diner and hearing about using super glue to treat wounds instead of getting stitches...

...falling in love with the work of Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe(!!!)...

..watching the Biden-Palin debate with classmates, enjoying lots of wine and lots of heckling...

...listening to The Week editors digest the debate...

...writing writing writing and trying to master "color"...

...resisting grad school laziness by waking up at 7 a.m. each day to write Above The Law's Morning Docket...

...reading Village Voice articles from the 70s and having Karen Durbin's "On Being a Woman Alone" resonate too deeply...

...excursions with classmates to discuss journalism while indulging in falafel, bubble tea, vegan red velvet cupcakes, and coffee, coffee, coffee (but not all at the same time)...