The Press Box - Ep. 161: 'The Press Box' With Terry McDonell

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis brings on the former top editor at Sports Illustrated, Us Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Esquire to discuss the appeal of a magazine (5:00), Rick Reilly's SI career and departure (12:00), handling the SI Swimsuit Issue debate (21:00), and his new book, 'The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers' (30:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the press box is brought to you by Seatgeek, our presenting sponsor, and the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling sports and music tickets. I wanted to give a shout out to Seatgeek on some major news. They've just cut a huge deal with major league soccer to help improve sports ticketing from the ground up. They'll be building a new ticketing system for teams that will be far more fan-friendly than the sites you've been stuck with for years. So drop your old site and experience buying and selling tickets the way it should be. To start using Seatgeek, download the free Seatgeek app or go to Seatgeek. geek.com. Also wanted to mention the ringer now has merch. Go to bitly.com slash ringer merch

where you can find shirts and hoodies. A portion of the proceeds from each purchase will benefit charity water, a non-profit organization that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Again, go to b-it-l-y.com slash ringer merch for all the latest from your pals here at the ringer. I'm Brian Curtis and this is the press box podcast. My guest Terry McDonnell has edited more magazines than Howard Schnellenberger has coached football teams. That's a sports joke, Terry. Here's a partial list. That's a good one.

That's good. Partial. I get that. There you go. Here's a partial list. Esquire Men's Journal, us weekly, and smart and most interesting for our purposes here today, Sports Illustrated, which he presided over from 2002 to 2012, and everything is recounted in his new book, The Accidental Life, and Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers.

Terry, thanks for doing this. It's a pleasure. I follow the podcast. I like it. So here's where we have to start in 2016, unfortunately, which is going back to the question of what is a magazine? I think because I think anybody younger than me doesn't quite know the magic. You write in this book, books were too slow, newspapers get thrown out, but people saved magazine. So remind us, what was the appeal of a magazine?

Well, they were get new ideas, especially reflection on the culture movement. There was what we now understand to be media, celebrity, celebrity for that. You found that in magazines. Yeah, and you sort of carried these things around with you, right? And you'd read them again and again. Well, sure. Well, I, you know, people would wait, I would wait for the mail to come. I think I imagine you know you're waiting for the mail to come

yeah it's an incredibly antique concept now right yeah it makes me tired did you you have such a such a wide-ranging list what was the hardest magazine for you to get as editor? Probably us weekly how so I was like a magazine editor put a magazine together

did not know the subject beyond my experience. I was not very good on lipstick. What did you ask? So I had to, you know, you rely on people and you, you know, you work with people who know what they're doing, what the subject matter is, and you're okay. Tricky there for me sometimes. Well, we came up with stuff that I thought was funny or kind of a tone where.

Right. And then you go to SI in 2002. And are you a, are you a sports guy editing a sports magazine or are you a magazine guy? editing a sports magazine. I'll tell you the story of how I got hired. I was being recruited by Time Inc. And I thought they were talking about people because they had entertainment. And then I was having dinner with John.

And he said kind of as a joke, but in retrospect it was obviously a probe. He said, can you name five NFL coaches? And that took him back. And then we had to talk through that. And the truth is, and then I played for Marv Levy as a freshman at University of California at Berkeley. I was recruited there by, and Mike White was the freshman coach. So that's four right there.

So, you know, college football was my sport. That's where I did have some expertise. But to get to the point of your question, I was a magazine guy editing it. And did you think that helped you or hurt you? I think it did both. It made me more collaborative, I think. I really depended on the people that I was working. didn't know something, it did not take long for somebody to pop up and have exactly that

answer, no matter how obscure it might have been. You know, people could tell you how many stuff like that. Yeah, you're surrounded by sports nerd. So you can kind of steer the ship in this kind of looking for writing and angles and things. Well, that would be a little pretentious. I mean, those guys were so good at that already. I felt like I was, you know, somebody airlifted. Remember 2002, a long time ago, different days.

For sure. You were in the book, yeah, the SI got 36,000 physical letters to the editor every year and employed three people to handle them, which feels like something from... Answered those letters, most of them. Yeah, we had, it was a smart thing to do. We used to brag about how many letters have we got. That was the old measure of reader interaction. Yeah, it was.

Well, really, well, and it was true. It was a legitimate measure, I think. Did you, you subscribed S.I. You write from the time you were a kid. I was just going to say I'm one of those stories. I got a subscription from my grandfather. Did you, was there any temptation to try to create some of the classic Andre Legerre magazine? Or was that, did that just belong to a particular place and time?

All the time. The simplicity of them, I remember one specifically. it was Bobby Lane when he was I tried to create that a couple of times. I think we did it once with Tom Brady. But of course the mask was different, but things like that. Yeah. And you get this bucket of research on your first day or one of your first days there at SI. And it turns out all the readers say they really like short pieces and they like the NFL and college football and kind of the meat and potato stuff.

And they don't think they like those big long, strange bonus pieces that SI is famous for. But then when you run those big long piece, the readers like them a lot. Is that what a magazine is giving us something we didn't even know we wanted in that way? That's what I always thought. I think it was very true of SI because the magazine had subtext and, you know, it was all about the culture as well as sports. It was about civil rights.

You know, all of that stuff was always there. So when you find a good place and people would be very happy with the stories, I don't think it would be the same at more about, should give them jeeps and sewing machines. But at SI it was just, you know, far too. Your star writer, or one of your star writers is Rick Riley, who you write as the, was the highest paid writer at Time, Inc. Not just SI when he was there. Did any, did you ever work with somebody who owned a magazine, like Riley kind of owned SI at that point? O'Reilly, beyond Amadextrous, he could do so many things so well, and he had that great swagger. He was my, you know, I used to think of him as a, you know, a wonderfully cocky teenager riding around in a convertible.

And he would stop, stop, he could come up with a wonderful story. And week to week, he did that. Why was he so perfect for that back page of SI, do you think? Yes, I think between humor and seriousness. really based on was that Rick has his great. He loved to find underdogs. He had causes he wanted to fight for, you know, that nothing but Nets thing. But it was all, he had a great heart for people. So he would write about not just sports stars, but sports fans in the same way. And everybody had dignity. He responded to that. Preoccupied, not preoccupied, occupied, occupied. Did you, so you preside over two essentially free agent periods for Riley, which are almost as big as like, you know, NBA free agent. because he's the most popular sports writer in America, I think, fair to say during that period. Absolutely. What did you try to do?

How did you go about trying to keep Rick Riley? I tried to be friends with him. I wanted to be friends with him. Not that that was my only motive to be friends of them, but the better I knew him, I thought the more he would trust what I was telling him about why he should stick. This guy, and he understood him to accommodate him and make it easy for him to write what he wanted. and to Yeah, for sure. And I love this scene

in the book where you're negotiating what turns out to be a million dollar a year contract to keep him when you successfully keep him the first time.

And he comes into your office and symbolically kind of puts his feet up on your desk. Like, you know, hey boss, you know, this is how this negotiation

is going to go. Well, that was fine, though. I had, as I write in the book, I had taken the author photograph recent book and framed it.

and hung it behind my desk. So I figured that he would, you know, I would point that. He sat right across from me and put his feet up. He looked on the wall and there was that picture. And, you know, that got his attention, made him smile a little bit, I think, that we got off to a pretty good start that way. He eventually leaves. But then I did this horrible thing when he was leaving.

It was a thing that I really regret to this day. I did not write about, I tried to spin it, and that was a, that was. And he writes you this angry email that ends with a sign off, Screw You Sideways. Well, he was right. That was a mistake. And like I say, I regret it. I ran into him on the street. He boss again, which he always did as a joke, but not in that letter that you just referenced.

What's the tangible effect or what was the tangible effect of losing a guy like that? I tried to measure that many, many times. And I never came up with a satisfactory. We did not immediately have a full. all, like I say, we didn't have any. It did cost the opposite, inside back cover to be opposite him because he was so well read. So other interesting thing happens, too, when you're there. It starts before Riley leaves, I think, which is that Peter King, who is contributing to the magazine,

but also writing this Monday column, Monday morning quarterback online, kind of becomes, starts to become SI's most popular writer. How did that happen? And he's abound. And he, to be the editor of s.i.com, it was going to be part of Turner then. Nobody in, he did it as a, we did that. And moving it back and seeing what was happening with Peter, we, the ideal among other writers, and stepped up on everything. He was one of the first people to recognize the power of social media.

He wrote more and more. He just got bigger. Yeah, and a bunch of your writers didn't want to write for the Internet, right? They saw the Internet. That was a, yeah, that was the ongoing, revolution that I think finally. And they saw it as like the AAA team basically, that that was, that was. No, they wanted to be paid extra.

They demeaned it. It was a very passive, aggressive sort of line between the people working online and the people working in print. And this is just sort of like... And a lot of other writers picked that up, too. Tom Burducci became extremely... Yeah, for sure. and it's just like an era of journalism changing, right?

This old the 90s, which is sort of a glory time for magazine writers, right? Making a lot of money, being paid by the word in a lot of cases. And being told, well, there's going to be this new reality where you, you know, you get to do your sort of fancy long lead time magazine story. And also you have to kind of write a lot of stuff in the middle. And it may be that those kind of stuff you kind of toss off in the middle becomes even more popular than the feature you were slaving away over from. month. And when they did that though, they would see what it happened and then they

would take to it or most would. So and that was a gradual progression of course. For sure. You got a credit ESPN they went out there they built a wonderful website really before anybody else in sports was thinking about that. And did you feel when they did that Starwave project. Right. And was that your competition ESPN.com by that point? We were trying to catch them. They were they were their website was way ahead. Yeah. They put a lot of resources into it.

That was a problem. The economics of trying to manage those knives, as they say, on Wall Street, because the advertising was just leaving. And so it was difficult to get development research money. And ESPN had, I mean, you know, development money. And ESPN had already... The one thing is funny to me about SI is it was always slow, even back into the 60s.

you know, glory period, right? By the time someone read Dan Jenkins's account of a golf major, they'd already watched a major on TV and seen it shoot over in their local newspaper. But around the turn of the century, I remember as an SI subscriber and reader, all of a sudden it started to seem really slow, as if by the time the game happened on Saturday or Sunday and I read, I saw the cover for the first time on Thursday or Friday, there'd been like a hundred news cycles between those two events. When did it begin to feel slow? to you. Walked in, I had, I had, there were two things about that, though. One was that the tradition at SI was that you would do such a good story, Dan Jenkins, for example, would do such a wonderful

story about whatever that event was that was true of the long bonuses. People would read a bonus and they would think, my God, that's so great, I'm going to stay with SI just on the chance that something that wonderful will happen to me again. So there was all this residual goodwill that way. And there was a lot of opinion about timing or it's not really about. I understood that, but I was very worried about, as I said, what you just defined as the quickening news cycle. So we tried to play it forward as much as my intention. What was your strategy? Think beyond, try to get ahead. Where are we going to be next way? Just to think that way. Previews and not cover in another way with more so that you would get the sense that you were getting everything you wanted. Was there a point in this 10

year period where you're editing the magazine where you say, okay, there was a great Michigan Notre Dame game on Saturday. It was the biggest story in sports, but we can't put it on the cover anymore because it's just going to seem like it's too late when people see it on Thursday. It sounds to me like you were sitting in those cover meetings. We talked about that all the time. And was there a point of... Something that would, something enormous that would happen, something monumental would test that. But still, I don't think I did that very much. One of the things you are given, one of the things you find in the closet when you become the other of S.I. is a swimsuit issue,

which accounted for a giant part of S.I.'s annual revenue back in those days. You write in your book that a decent-sized portion of your staff didn't like it and found it humiliating and sort of degrading. How did you make your peace with a swimsuit issue? I remember about how can you, how can you cover great, got me out of that question. I think the thing about that was that the attitude of the people who were doing swimsuit was not exploitive. And the women were held at that, and I believed that speech. I didn't think it was, might have been, which it was not, but it was going in that direction. And at one point, many in that issue with their tops off.

And so I said, I understand the concern about that. And I launched a survey within the magazine, took all the people, all the staff. You know, what do you think of swimsuit? It's part of the business. Sometimes it's disgusting. It embarrasses me. It's not hilarious.

They were very wry about it. They could not believe that I had done this survey. That was their response to it. And you as the editor had to make the final call of which picture you put on the front? I did, but that changed over the years too. When I got there, small room, six or eight pictures, a little bit of research, okay, let's do that. Over those years, and more and more people came into the room, consumer marketing, as it was called, it was just such a big business for us. It wasn't like giant like you suggested, but it was like 10% of a business that was a very big business.

And by the time I left, I still made the decision, but there were 20 people in that room, all with an opinion and a point of view and a stake in it, and I had to somehow bring points of view. For sure. And I loved a couple of nuggets, one that readers did not like swimsuit models with sand on their butts. That was just a total turnoff to everybody. And the other one year you had a model on the cover holding her bikini top in her hand, and the next year you had a model with just a model. wearing a swimsuit in the proper fashion, and the latter sold like half a million copies fewer than the former. If you can go into those numbers into that data and just have a ball with it about, you know,

you can prove almost anything. There was some, the people, Wall Street did a thing once where they determined that the market did better over the course of the swimsuit year if the model on the cover was American. This is like the SI swimsuit index, you know, downtown. And they could prove it is why I mentioned it. Did you, if you had to do it in 2016, just given the way the world has moved where we are now versus when you were there, would you do it any differently now today? Swim suit? Yeah.

Well, they're doing it differently. I believe they're having, it's going to be an event also. There's going to be a swimsuit festival, I believe. as a way to make more money, whatever. Did you admire what ESPN did with its bodies issue, putting players, men and women? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was good. The pictures were great.

But there was no way that I could stop swimsuit and do that. We did put, you know, we put men in the swimsuit issue. We did athletes and their wives. You know, they were in there. Wonderful naked men were doing. I read some excerpts from a speech you gave in 2012, the magazine editor's Hall of Fame. You said, I think being an editor right now is the most interesting time to be an editor because of all the possibilities that are coming.

And you also said, change or go home, no fear, and bring it. Do you feel the same way in 2016 as you did in 2012, given the way the media is gone? I think that would depend on where I was a magazine editor and whether or not I had control over the website and all the digital, parts of the brand as well. Those are split up now. I don't think you'd want to edit a magazine without it. I would not like that. That would not be interesting. What can a magazine do now, do you think? I mean, a print issue of a magazine. Let's assume it's yoked to some kind of digital operation. What can it still do? I think that if you look at the success that the upscale magazines

are still having, they're beautiful objects. Fashion, that's working. If you go to the magazines that I always read, I look at the New Yorker and I see that their website is, you know, very energetic and they're breaking news and there's a lot on them and coming and coming and coming. And I think that's very good. And they did very well with that. I love the thing that Graydon Carter just launched at the feel of what he did back when he launched Spy. It's a great thing for me. It covers what I'm interested in.

And I get it twice a day in a newsletter. The saddest part for me, and I've worked, I think, almost all my career in the digital world, but is the death of the headline? Because it just doesn't translate over to the way it did on a magazine page. What could a great headline do for a magazine piece? You could write headlines on deadline. It was like walking around your newsroom, like one of those Looney Tunes behind their back, beholding a stick of dynamite that was Anvil or one of those funny cartoon guns.

It just exploded the interestingness of the story and, you know, drew people in. And if they had humor, which all the good ones really do, it was a wonderful game, both to play at writing and to play at reading. Is there something you didn't get done at SI that you wanted to or a problem you weren't able to solve? We wanted to get the video faster. We wanted to be better. Launched all kinds of things from 2012. I gave this keynote at a Google, Iowa, in San Francisco, and we, you know, it's mobile. Two. Yeah.

Oh, for sure. There's a lot of psychological perks to being a magazine editor in the Golden Age of Magazines. You're hanging out with Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane, I would assume, would be in your top ten somewhere. but put those aside for just a second. What was the best material perk of being a magazine editor? You could get anybody pretty much that you wanted on the phone. So if you wanted to talk to somebody, you wanted to find something out, you could call them. And if you were at a magazine like Sports Illustrated, all those magazines, that was.

Who were your top gets? I don't know. You know, you could get, you know, I could call and talk. to Roger Goodell. Who I liked a lot. But that, just because that was, you know, in our interest in our business. You know, I would call by someone who had never written my magazine was about you. Why don't you write for us?

Yeah. I thought you were going to say Jack Nicholson or something like that. Roger Goodell. Well, that happened. I'm sorry. I should have said that. It did? Yeah.

Yeah, you could do that. Just put in a call and get right through, huh? Well, you had to get the right phone number. But nobody ever got mad when they picked up the phone, and there you were. And, you know, the offices that you would go through more attuned to the power of magazines. Sure. I would think they are now. Terry McDonald's club.

Because now you wouldn't do it that way. Now you'd do it with email or you'd go that way, which is the way I was doing. Yeah. But you'd be on the same plane as BuzzFeed, right? It's not Esquire calling. Wouldn't have quite the same ring to it in 2016. That's right. but that's constantly changing.

Terry McDowell, the book is The Accidental Life and Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers. Thanks very much for being here, and joining us. It's a pleasure.