E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hard times (continued)

Q: How would you have suggested that the Times move forward, and do you think it’s done a good job of that?

A: I think they have done a good job of moving forward, in some respects. I think that having an ombudsman was jumping off a cliff for them, and I don’t know if they’re totally happy they jumped off that cliff. The one thing that I really would recommend, and do recommend, is doing random spot checks. I know [publisher] Arthur Sulzberger feels like there are very good reasons not to do them, and I just don’t understand what those reasons are. He says, well, there are whole categories of stories, like intelligence and some forms of reporting defense, that you can’t do random spot checks on, and that’s fine. But there are huge swaths that you can, and by the time someone gets to do intelligence reporting, they generally have a five- or 10- or 15- or 20-year track record, so those people probably are less likely to all of a sudden start changing the way that they work. I think that’s also something that could help reassure the public. There would still be a lot of cynicism and a lot of distrust, but it would be something.

Internally, I’m somewhat of a Kremlinologist and have been following what they’ve been doing, but I haven’t been following this era as closely as I did when I was either covering the Times for a daily or a weekly, or writing about it. But I think they have taken — and in particular Glenn Kramon, who heads up the new division in the paper that is in charge of internal communication and career development — I think they’ve done a good job of trying to rebuild things internally. And what Glenn says, and I would agree with him, is that the test is not really what’s going on [now], but it’s what’s going on in five years. You can plan on doing anything for a month, but when your next deadline comes, or when all of a sudden you have a supplement that is crashing, and then an interview subject that cancels, this is a business where you don’t have a lot of time, and anything that doesn’t directly impact what you see in the next day’s product can get dropped by the wayside. So I think the real test will be what happens when this memory, the memory of this trauma, fades even more.

Q: Have you heard from anyone at the Times who’s read your book?

A: I have. The reason I don’t want to say specific names of who I’ve heard from is because people there, I think, are understandably reticent about appearing as if they’re institutionally endorsing it. But I got a very nice note from someone who’s been there for a couple of decades who said he thought it captured the flavor of the institution better than any other book he’s read. And I’ve heard from a lot of people, and the general tenor seemed to be that they didn’t expect to enjoy it, or they didn’t expect it to be a good book, and they thought it was. That said — and I’ll toot my own horn all day long — I probably would be less likely to hear from the people who didn’t like it. But so far the comments I’ve gotten from people at the paper have been very generous.

Q: Was it always the goal that you would one day be writing about the media, and not just for the media?

A: Not at all. Like almost everything in my career, it was a complete and total accident. In 2000, I was working for a small Jewish newspaper called the Forward, and I was covering politics for them, and I got a call from Brill’s Content, and I was interested in them because it was a big national magazine, and they were interested in me because I was doing politics. They initially hired me to cover the presidential campaign, and I did, and that was one of the absolute thrills of my career. That’s how I got into media reporting. It’s been interesting and I think it’s served me well, because there are people my age doing much more impressive work, but because the media tends to be a pretty solipsistic and self-involved industry, they might not get noticed as quickly, because they’re not writing about all these characters. We tend to notice people who are writing about our own industry. So it was not something that I set out to do, but it certainly, in the end, ended up serving me well.

Q: The book is blurbed enthusiastically by Hunter Thompson, and I read that he’s a friend of yours. How’d that happen?

A: He was the other reason that I decided I wanted to be a writer. [When I was] growing up in Newton and reading some of his political reporting or his collection of stories, he obviously made journalism seem incredibly glamorous and exciting. I wrote a story about him a couple of years ago for Brill’s Content and went out to Colorado and visited him, and we just got to be friends. I spent a couple days out there, and then have seen him again a couple of times, and we got to be friends, which is quite a trip, as you can imagine.

Q: How important a role did your heroin addiction have in shaping you as a writer — or did it play any role at all?

A: I think that probably one of the things that was going on when I was using — among a lot of other things, and this was probably one of the smaller things — [is that] I definitely had this romanticized notion of myself as this sort of junkie outlaw writer. And unfortunately, I wasn’t an outlaw and I wasn’t a writer. I was just a junkie. I think the way it impacted me is that I didn’t start working on my writing until later than I would’ve. I spent a bunch of years doing nothing, or almost killing myself, and I could’ve been spending those years working at a daily paper or figuring out if I wanted to write magazine pieces or newspaper pieces, or if I wanted to write fiction or nonfiction or whatever.

Q: On the flip side, did your desire to be a writer have anything to do with your kicking your addiction?

A: No, I don’t think so. I think at the time that I finally quit, I was so far gone that it was much more primal. It was really like a life-or-death thing, and not a "I’m gonna make something of myself or not." That didn’t play into it. I was really hanging on by a thread. And the only thing that changed is that I finally, somehow, was able to realize that.

Q: Coming from a place where you were, at one point, hanging by a thread, are you surprised at where you are now?

A: When I think about it, sometimes I am. I’ve been sober now for, I just passed seven years not that long ago. It doesn’t feel quite as immediate as it did when I first got to New York, or when I first started writing for magazines, but the other day I out of the blue got an e-mail from someone who had known me when I was down in treatment in Florida, just saying how happy they were that I was doing okay, and it made me really think about, yeah, where I was at the time. When I think about that, it feels like a lot has happened. But the shorthand, from being a junkie to going on a book tour, feels more vertiginous than what actually happened, which was, you know, I started out at a daily paper in Florida, I moved to a weekly niche publication in New York, went to a struggling monthly magazine, went to a national magazine. So it was a more organic process than it sounds.

Q: You left your job at Newsweek to write the book. What kind of anxiety does a move like that bring with it?

A: I don’t have a family to support, and I didn’t have 10 years’ tenure there, so I didn’t have a big retirement account built up, so I think there was less anxiety than there might’ve had I had more outside obligations. I was talking with a friend before I wrote it, and I was talking about the reasons why not to write it, and the only reasons I could come up with were a fear of failure. It seemed like the worst thing that happens is I write the book, it’s a horrible failure, and I go and try and get another job. I was hopeful that I had a good-enough reputation that I would still be able to get another job.

Seth Mnookin reads from Hard News at Newtonville Books, in Newton, on November 16, at 7:30 p.m. Call (617) 244-6619. He also reads at the Harvard Coop, in Cambridge, on November 17, at 7 p.m. Call (617) 499-2000. For more information, visit www.sethmnookin.com. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com