The Daily Plan-it / Dean of Students Blog, Columbia J-school

Many thanks to Rebecca Castillo, J2006, for sharing these notes from the recent lunch with Dean Lemann. Unlike other sessions where students talk to deans about administrative matters, graduation, etc., the purpose of this event was to hear Nicholas Lemann, one of the country’s best magazine writers, talk about the art of magazine writing.

“Everything you wanted to know about magazine writing but were afraid to ask” - notes from lunch with Dean Nicholas Lemann
Monday, April 17, 2006

By Rebecca Castillo, J2006
rc73@columbia.edu

The following are some of the highlights from Dean Lemann’s lunch event.

Dean Lemann began by prefacing that he would to prefer speaking about editorial aspects of magazine writing and would save the business aspects until the end.

• When getting started with a subject, ask your subject for a list of other people you should interview about them and then go out and interview them. Word will get back to your subject that you are following up on this and prove you are serious about your reporting. But don’t get hostile with your questioning in the beginning, get more information about your subject by listening.
• Our culture with the assistance of TV has helped people have a conception that being interviewed is an honor. There are not many times in peoples’ lives where someone wants to just listen to their stories.
• When writing about a well-known subject, make sure you do your homework. Read what is available about them and any writing that they have done, including dissertations and academic writings.
• If the person (your subject) is no longer alive, look for their archival history. If the person is well known then go to their peers and contemporaries. Use social history to find out if they left a paper trail.
• When approaching your subject about interviewing them, be honest and upfront at first approach. Make it clear how many times you will be visiting them and for how long. Lay it all out and don’t take an answer at that time, tell them to think it over and when you come back, if they are not sure or say no, move on to the next potential subject. There will always be another individual who can fill that role unless that person is unique in their role, such as Secretary of State, (there is only one person in that role). Always have others in mind who can be interviewed.
• Do not engage in debate or controversal confrontation unless you believe the reaction will make it to paper. If it will not cause your subject to add to your story don’t engage in it.
• Try not to write about characters who won’t let you use their real names. Some may argue with him on this point but he thinks if the name is not real, then what else is made up in the story? He recognizes that there are times that it is necessary to use a pseudo name - your subject may be engaging in something unlawful - but always attempt to get your subjects to let you write about it truthfully, without anonymity.

Dean Lemann’s final point of advice was about getting published after graduation: It is better to work at a small weekly or an alternative magazine than sitting in your apartment writing query letters to the popular magazines. By doing this, you will continuously be writing and getting published as opposed to getting published maybe twice a year. You will have to pay your dues but you will move up on the ladder.
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