‘Innovate or Die’

The front wall of the U.S. News & World Report building is glass, a fragile housing for the magazine’s new editor, James Fallows, who spent most of last spring throwing stones at his colleagues in the media.

Fallows’ best-selling book, “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy” (Pantheon Books, 1996), criticized many of his fellow journalists for becoming too rich, too egomaniacal, too pompous, too greedy, too simplistic and too negative. He concluded that, “The institution of journalism is not doing its job well now.” So, last September, U.S. News owner Mort Zuckerman gave him the chance to do it better.

Now, after editing 22 issues, Fallows has undoubtedly found that it’s easier writing books than editing the nation’s third-largest news weekly. The merciless Friday deadlines, the sassy new hires at odds with the serious old guard, the workers grousing from below and the owner nibbling from above, the steady trickle of staffers to other news organizations and the Washington media establishment rooting for him to fail--it’s not exactly the glory life for a 47-year-old journalist-cum-intellectual.

“This will probably not be my life’s work,” a tired-looking Fallows said at the end of a long interview last week. “I’m doing this at a pace that could not last long, you know, mentally or physically, and [Zuckerman] and I have an understanding that for a certain number of years I will do this and then I will do something else. You know, I will take enough time to make a difference, to take the magazine up its next step in its evolutionary chain.”

For those interested in the national media, this evolution bears watching. As one magazine executive puts it, there are two big questions for Fallows, who has never before run a large popular newsmagazine. First, can he manage a big staff, and second, can he sell his lofty journalism to the masses? It is a challenge that Fallows apparently understands: A picture of a tyrannosaurus Rex hangs on his office door with a caption that reads, “Innovate or die.”

Fallows predicts that it will take a full year to see his innovations, but already there are signs that the magazine and its culture are evolving. Although Fallows suggested in his book that journalists might look at a new and controversial trend called “civic journalism” or civic-minded journalism, so far the most noticeable change outside Washington may be that U.S. News seems to be mutating into U.S. Themes.

Insiders at the magazine worry that the old-fashioned reporting that was once the mainstay of the publication is no longer good enough. A successful Fallows story must be well-argued, like a legal brief. It has to have a theme, an angle, a coherent analysis, even an opinion. “Good lord,” said one horrified reporter, “he is letting the chattering classes take over the magazine.”

“It’s Atlantic-Lite,” said another, referring to Atlantic Monthly, where Fallows worked for 17 years before taking over U.S. News.

What Fallows has said--not only in his book but in his chatty memos to the staff--is that he wants to move away from political battles that miss the underlying issues or foreign stories that don’t bring home their impact on the ordinary reader. A piece called “Santa’s Helpers,” for example, explained how Third World slave labor produced many of the shiny new toys under America’s Christmas trees.

Tabloid-style scandals about celebrities, violence and sex should also be avoided, Fallows has preached in his gospel of issue-oriented journalism. Still, when he is asked about his best work, Fallows says he is most proud of a story that appeared earlier this month on pornography.

That is pornography, the business, he stresses, noting that the magazine bared only a little cleavage in accompanying photos.

“I think it’s the best article that’s been in the magazine in my time here . . . because it told you . . . a whole lot of new things about a major part of our society that people had--for major reasons--not looked at in this way,” he said.

“Overall,” he added by way of simplification, “I want to do a good job of making things that matter interesting.”

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The pieces that have been given some of the best play in the magazine and some of the most praise from Fallows have been heavily “themed” more than they have been doggedly “reported,” as U.S. News staffers describe the changes from pre-Fallows days.

One piece, for example, was a long discussion about how Bill Gates was being tortured by the federal government. Another, titled “Albert the Brainiac,” argued that Vice President Al Gore is an intellectual.

Time and Newsweek also do this kind of thing, of course, but they have room for the traditional kinds of news stories as well. And even though Fallows tells his staff that news is still important in his magazine, it is this shifting of the balance that has prompted some of his staff journalists to start looking elsewhere for jobs.

Last month, for example, veteran investigative journalists Ed Pound and Brian Duffy moved to USA Today and the Washington Post, respectively, and while neither wanted to talk about his departure, a press release drafted in December gives a clue about why they left. The release, dated Dec. 13, said the upcoming issue would report that the Clinton’s former business partner, James McDougal, had accused Clinton of helping secure an illegal loan for McDougal’s former wife, Susan.

The release was scrapped and the story did not appear in public until the New Yorker reported many of the same details last week. Fallows said he and Duffy had decided not to run the story because it was too explosive to come from only one source. Duffy, however, said Fallows wanted his investigators to identify the source. When they balked at giving Fallows a name--citing the possibility that the editor could be subpoenaed or he might slip and tell someone else at the magazine--the story was put on hold indefinitely.

“I think on investigative work, you have to look at what we have done, not what we haven’t,” Fallows says when he hears criticism about his investigative unit. He lists three pieces that were drifting in the magazine’s backlog before he pushed them into print.

But for Fallows, even departures of people like Pound and Duffy are simply part of the process of change. As he argues, how can you be creative without turmoil? Would you criticize the Chicago Bears if a new manager came in and fired a few coaches to get the team winning again?

Although U.S. News is not a public company, the impression among several experts in the magazine industry is that it has been “drifting” in the last year--even with highly successful “service” journalism like lists of best hospitals, colleges or places to live.

Thus, within a few days after moving into his third floor office at the magazine, the “Fallows Gallows” went into action. Besides a number of top editors, Fallows quickly got rid of political writer Steven Roberts, whose television appearances and speech-making to corporations had come in for heavy criticism in Fallows’ book. Roberts, whose wife Cokie Roberts of ABC News was another of Fallows’ media villains, has said his public appearances were part of an effort by U.S. News to get more publicity about the magazine.

Even though the Roberts firing took place five months ago, it is still a subject of intense discussion in Washington when anyone mentions Fallows or U.S. News.

“When he took on Steve and Cokie, it took a lot of guts because he took on one of the great power centers of Washington,” said Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly and Fallows’ acknowledged mentor in journalism.

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After Fallows made it clear that he thought U.S. News had too many political columnists, Michael Barone, known for his encyclopedic knowledge of American politics and political history, moved to Reader’s Digest.

But after Zuckerman reportedly stepped in and asked her not to cut her ties to the magazine, Gloria Borger decided to stay part time, writing two columns a month.

As for the flurry of applications elsewhere, there have been about 3,500 people trying to get onto his 200-plus staff. And, he has hired about 19 people to help make up a core of loyalists that the old staff nicknamed “the acolytes” or “Peter Pan’s Lost Boys” (before he added several women to his new roster in the last few months).

Many of Fallows’ new team members have Ivy League and journalistic backgrounds similar to his own--except perhaps that Fallows is the only one who grew up in Redlands, Calif. Fallows remembers picking oranges as a summer job as a youth--an experience that taught him one major lesson, as he wrote in a recent memo to his staff: “It is important to go to college.” Fallows went to Harvard, where he was editor of the Harvard Crimson. In the summers he worked for Ralph Nader.

“He was regarded as a giant among men,” said Michael Kinsley, one of his former Crimson staffers who now edits SLATE magazine on the Web. “He was widely considered at Harvard to be someone who was going to be one of the great people of his generation.”

After studying economics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Fallows joined the staff of the Washington Monthly. There, he wrote an emotional piece about why he and his peers avoided the draft for Vietnam, leaving the poor and less privileged to serve and die. Shortly afterward, President Jimmy Carter hired him as his chief speech writer.

From the White House staff, it would have been an easy launch into politics or even business, but Fallows left before the end of Carter’s term and wrote about what he thought was wrong with the president’s character. The president micromanaged, from the Middle East to the White House tennis courts, Fallows revealed.

The piece hit the Carter camp like a hurricane and many Democrats still believe it contributed heavily to Carter’s devastating loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

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It is a background that would be hard to be humble about and Fallows apparently isn’t. For anyone who wants more detail about him, the U.S. News editor has a home page on the Web. It is called, “Fallows Central; the Work and Links of James Fallows.”

The page (https://www.net/pub/rothman/fallows.htm) and its contents are so unusual, especially for a man who has criticized the media for self-promotion, that the Weekly Standard did a parody called “The Sayings of Archbishop James.” In it, a pretend Fallows explains how, “with a sense of austere yet bland high-mindedness,” he assumed the title as editor of U.S. News where, among other changes, he would quickly convert the magazine’s successful “News You Can Use” section into “Human Imperfections and How to Eliminate Them.”

In reality, Fallows works 12 hours a day trying to eliminate such imperfections as bad layouts, flaccid prose and faulty grammar. Take the Great Comma Debate, which took place over the Christmas holidays. Fallows asked his staff to comment on whether a sequence of nouns needed a final comma--as in apples, oranges and pears. The response covers many days and a number of pages. In the end, the decision was made to go with Fallows’ own view--that a second comma was necessary. But included in the responses was an anonymous message that summed up the comma controversy this way: “All great editors must be idiosyncratic bordering on loony (a good kind of loony).”

If Fallows turns out to be a great editor, then the parodies, comma debates and even bitter criticism from the establishment press won’t make much difference. “If the magazine is good, it won’t matter if some people don’t like me,” he said. “If the magazine is bad, it won’t matter if people do like me.

“This is a place where the real test is 50 issues a year.”