The Press Box - The Glory Days of Entertainment Weekly and Covering the Olympics With Ty Burr, Owen Gleiberman, and Jason Gay

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Bryan is joined by film critics Ty Burr and Owen Gleiberman to break down Entertainment Weekly dating back to the '90s. They discuss the evolution of the magazine, the environment and culture that Entertainment Weekly fostered, and of course, the letter-grade reviews (0:33). Later, Bryan is joined by The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay to discuss his experience covering the Winter Olympics in Beijing. They touch on preparations prior to flying to China, what it’s like covering the Games in the middle of a pandemic, and weigh in on why it’s important for reporters to be on site (50:51). Additional information: Ty Burr's Watch List (https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com/) Host: Bryan Curtis Guests: Ty Burr, Owen Gleiberman, and Jason Gay Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Production Assistance: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Benefer is back. Brad and Jen are friends again, and Paris Hilton is somehow still making headlines. 20 years later, we're living in the world that the 2000s tabloids created. On this series, I'm going to tell you the story of a decade of American life through the trash we love to consume. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Claire Malone, and this is just like us, the tabloids that changed America. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the ringer here, along with producers Erica Servantes and Isaiah Blakely. In case you missed it, our Super Bowl pod that covers the announcers, the commercials, and everything else about the game went up last night. Thank you to

everyone who tuned in live to that one. Please check it out in pod form if you haven't. We're going to have our pal Jason Gay on in just a minute to talk about covering the Winter Olympics in Beijing. but first we got some news last Wednesday that there will no longer be a print edition of the magazine Entertainment Weekly Entertainment Weekly by this point in history was a monthly magazine in print IAC the magazine's owner will make it all digital from here going forward

now this news while not surprising really struck me because back in the 90s I subscribed Entertainment Weekly or maybe it's more correct to say I inhaled Entertainment Weekly. I remember when I got to college in Austin, Texas, and this is mostly the pre-internet era. I did two things. One was get a Dallas newspaper so I could read the Cowboys News, and the other was to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, so I could race to the mailbox and admire that cover treatment of Seinfeld or Allie McBeal or Air Force One. This was the 90s, remember. EW felt like it was written for people like me. It told you,

when movies or TV shows were coming out, it told you what to think about them. It had this magazine voice that was very snarky, very knowing, and very, very obsessed with strained puns. So what was it like to work at Entertainment Weekly in the 90s? I got two writers to explain. One is Ty Burr, who contributed to EW beginning in 1990, went off to the Boston Globe to review movies,

and now writes a substack newsletter called Ty Burr's Watch List. The other is Owen Glyberman, who was a movie critic at EW for 24 years and now writes for a variety. The discussion we had is about a magazine on the one hand, but it's really about how we write and read and think about pop culture. Here's Ty Burr and Owen Glyberman on Entertainment Weekly. All right, Ty, let's start at the beginning for anyone who wasn't lucky enough to be alive in the 90s. starting in 1990, Entertainment Weekly was a magazine that wanted to be what? Oh, it wanted to be the new kid on the block that explained everything you needed to know about all aspects of entertainment. It wanted to be the Time magazine, then Sports Illustrated, of entertainment.

It wanted to cover the waterfront. And nobody was doing that. Owen, would you say the tone of Entertainment Weekly was like in those early years? I think there were a lot of things about Entertainment Weekly that were sort of a paradox. It sort of combined one thing and another, and that's what really worked for it. For instance, the word that was always associated with it, at least once the magazine kind of kicked in and became successful after first year or two, was snarky. Everyone talked about how the writing in Entertainment Weekly is snarky. And this was, you know, before Internet snark.

And our snark seemed a lot more innocent than Internet snark. but there was a certain biting, witty, fun tone to it. But I think the secret of Entertainment Weekly is that it was a Time Ink magazine. The tone of Time magazine could be snarky sometimes, but basically the TimeG magazines were very straightforward, very earnest. There was a real kind of, here's the facts, here's the information, here's the meat and potatoes. And Entertainment Weekly had that. And our Snark sort of balanced that out.

we were both at once. So we were a publication that you could really rely on. And even if you read a sort of short piece in the news and note section, you know that it was, you knew that it was going to deliver the information you wanted in a very kind of traditional way. At the same time, it had that snark that was more associated maybe with sort of hip New York publications. And I think that balance really appealed to people. It was sort of square and hip at the same time. Yeah, it, if it had just been snark without the knowledgeability, the expertise to back it up, I think it would have been unbearable. But because we had so many talented writers who brought so many, so much knowledge to the table in all their various areas. It really, it was an education as well as an entertainment in itself.

And I do think that we probably got some of the, borrowed some of the tone from Spy Magazine. You know, a little bit of that, that bounce came from, when did Spy? How long did Spy last? Did it make it into the 90s very far? Yeah. It did, but its real moment was the 80s. Right. And right, coming out of that, we definitely were influenced somewhat by Spy.

But I think by a lot of magazines, I mean, Entertainment Weekly seemed to sort of soak up bits and pieces of the DNA of Spy and of Rolling Stone. and there was some people magazine in there. And Premier. Premier, no question about it. But, you know, one of the things that really defined it, when you were there, I mean, it really was an extraordinary place to work. I mean, just a bunch of great people, and it was totally fun to be there. And a thing a lot of people have talked about is that everybody there were these sort of encyclopedic entertainment junkies. And so the water cooler conversations about entertainment that had sort of started to,

go on everywhere. Well, Entertainment Weekly, having that water cooler conversation was your job. And so we did this all day long. But a remarkable thing about it is that the people at Entertainment Weekly who had this insane knowledge of popular culture was everybody in the office, not just the writers and editors, but the design people, copy editors, the kinds of people who didn't actually need that knowledge to do their jobs, but they all had it down to the last person. And it made that place feel, I know this is the ultimate cliche, but I really mean it, it made it feel like a kind of family of people who were united by this almost missionary feeling about entertainment, that it just defined our lives, it defined our passion, and you walked in every day and knew

that everybody shared that. And I think, you know, people in magazines share the obsessions, the magazines are about. But I think Entertainment Weekly, that was a really rare and cool thing. and just made the place, a very happy place to be. To me, a really good example of that is when we were putting together one of our covers and eventually a book, The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, we sent out a email not just to the movie section, not just to the critics, but to the entire magazine for suggestions. And everybody responded.

It made things incredibly difficult to window it down, but everybody felt part of that same mission as Owen was saying. I think when I was reading EW in the late 90s, I had this vision, even before I knew anything about magazines that staff meetings were like a monologue or a conversation in a Kevin Smith movie with people arguing the fine points. Was that pretty close to reality? I think that wasn't, there was some of that at the meetings. You know, you would have that kind of thing,

But the meetings also had a, you know, they had a reason for being people were making a case for doing this cover story rather than that cover story. There were some, you know, pretty witty arguments and some cutting remarks. But I think that kind of Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino conversation really just went on all day long, like in the hallways. And it could go on anywhere. I mean, my experience, I always said I loved being in the office and I did. And back when journalism at a place like EW. insisted of just putting out a weekly magazine. There was no web. There was no 24-7 deadline that never ended hanging over your head. Back then, the truth is, there was a fair amount of time to waste.

And, you know, I'd walk into somebody's office just to say hi, or we'd start chatting about a screening. We just saw something like that. And I'd walk out 45 minutes later. I'm not kidding, after having just, you know, shot the shit for 45 minutes. This happened everywhere to everybody all over the place. It's tough to get work done sometimes. Yeah. But that was part of the joy in the place. And it's also that the people there were so smart.

Like, you know, Ty and I were critics, and so our jobs were supposedly to be these experts on pop culture. That's one of the jobs of the critic. Well, I felt that way about everybody there. The cliche, everyone's a critic, is never more true than at Entertainment Weekly. Everybody there had that sensibility. I loved talking about movies with everyone there because their opinions, were all so informed and so valuable. So that was just there.

A word about those meetings. They were also really, and this is a testament to sort of the spirit there and the openness of the editors, most of whom came over from, you know, older time Inc. magazines, managing editor Jim Seymour came up with the number two at people. But here you have this very young, very knowledgeable a very witty staff.

And you could, if you had a good idea, no matter where it was coming from, you got a sort of carte blanche to follow it up. And I remember sitting in a meeting. And I was just, I was the video critic at that point. I hadn't written many features. I don't know if I'd written any features. But it was the week that Peewey Herman got busted for being in a porn theater. And everybody was sort of, and we were talking about it in the morning meeting. and everybody was talking about what a shame it was.

His career was over. And I piped up because I've been reading stuff, you know, obviously there's no social media there around, but I read a couple of things that suggested to me that people are actually on his side, that they're more sympathetic to him than you would normally think. And I mentioned that, and Seymour says to me, oh, great, that's a feature, that's a cover story.

Go and do it. And you did? And I did. That's pretty brave for that moment to take that kind of stay. And what if, because I remember there was a lot of, there was a lot of peewee condemnation, Paul Rubin's condemnation out in the world. Right. Well, like, you know, could I back it up with specifics?

Yeah, I did. And the cover was peewee and sympathy, which I always thought, I don't know who came up with that headline. But the other thing I remember is going into an editor's office and brainstorming headlines with like five people. And it was the most enjoyable part of the day. Okay, can we stop and talk about pun headlines for just one second before you make that point, Owen? Because the pun headline has to be one of the absolute standbys of VW.

Everything I know about pun headlines I learned from reading Entertainment Weekly. How did those come about? It became our signature. Well, there were those sort of brainstorming sessions, and they were fun, although they were sometimes arduous because we would sit and, you know, four people. would sit around trying to think of a headline for half an hour or 45 minutes. And one of the things you had to be willing to do was to sort of toss out into the room your bad ideas. You know, you had to say the things that would just make people grown. But out of that, you know, an idea would take hold and you would find that, that perfect headline. And it was fun to do. And when you, and when it

finally happened, it was like, you know, you score. It was like, oh, there it is. I believe my, one of my scores, the one I was happiest with was when we had an interview with John Hughes, the director, who didn't give interviews very often. So it was a bit of a coup. And the headline I came up with is, look, comma, Hughes talking. And somebody else, somebody else mentioned one on Twitter that I'd forgotten about for the review of Ed Wood. And I don't remember whether it was the film reviewer when it came out on video, the man, comma, would. Who? Be King. Oh my gosh. People don't know.

Those are masterpiece EW headlines. Brian Raftery did a whole thread about these. And, oh, and this was the headline of your review of the messenger, the story of Joan of Arc, the martyr load. Yeah, right. Your review of the mummy, the original mummy was matter of corpse. I mean, these things were just threaded through the magazine every week. And they did give it a tone, right? And you talk about snark, you talk about wit.

That was very much part of the tone. Well, they made it fun. And the whole thing that I think everyone understood at Entertainment Weekly is that a magazine about entertainment had to be, had to have that sparkle. It had to be entertaining. On every page, every box, in Entertainment Weekly, you know, the smallest box, you knew that there was going to be a little nugget there. It was worth reading. I wanted to go back to something that Tai said about, yes, I think the editors are very open, but part of the Yin and Yang of Entertainment Weekly, I was talking about how it was sort of square and hip at the same time.

Well, another thing is that a lot of the editors, or at least the top editors, did come from Time, Inc. They were, they seemed older. I mean, they were much younger than I am now, but at the time, they were like, whoa, they're like in their late 40s. And, you know, they were from, in a sense, a different generation. They were boomers, so most of the people, a lot of the people in Intertable Weekly were a little younger than that. and there was this sort of back and forth. The editors would come at it from a sort of more conservative, stodgy place. The writers and younger editors were the kids who were, you know, the equivalent of people today who would be plugged into TikTok,

whereas older editors would be going, what's TikTok? And out of that synergy of those two generations, great things happened. And they would sometimes, you know, rein us in a little bit. And, but we, we took those editors to, to wilder places than Time Inc. Magazines had ever gone. Well, they would rain us in or they would express complete bafflement. I still remember Jim Seymour's response to Pulp Fiction. He was horrified. He thought it was like the, he thought it was the devil film. He thought he couldn't believe people liked it. And we're all like, no, man, this is the future. Although, you know, one of the things I'll say at Jim's behalf, in other words, yes, I'm a, I'm a

Pulp fiction person. I didn't agree with Jim about that. But I remember the line he said at a meeting, because Jim was, you know, he had pretty wide-ranging tastes. He was not like, you know, some uptight person, but Pulp Fiction really bothered him. And what he said was, he, meaning Quentin, he's bringing sadism into the mainstream. Jim was really obsessed with the mainstream. He knew that all kinds of culture, all sorts of culture burbled around the edges. But he was, he'd been the editor of People magazine. So he was into what is mainstream? And in the sense, even though I don't agree with him about Pulpiction, he was right about that. He was very smart in marking a moment and saying, hey, this is a change, this kind of sadism or whatever that was there in the movie in certain

scenes coming into the mainstream. And sure enough, I mean, he may have sounded like Bosley Crowther talking about Bonnie and Clyde, but here we are 28 years later. And I'm not blaming Pulpiction for this, but we do have a coarser culture now. Our our culture is heading in this direction that sometimes I'm not crazy about, not because I'm approved myself, but because, you know, I wonder what it's doing to us. And Jim would raise this kind of questions, and I respected that. Yeah, there definitely was a tension between old-time, old-school time, and by old school, I mean, you know, 1970s and 1980s. And, you know, some of these guys came from people in the 80s, which was its own, you know, kind of crazy experience.

Yeah. But they're, you know, especially in the very early days, the first year, I mean, you know, they almost pulled the plug on the magazine entirely. It was, it almost didn't make it out of its first year. And that was for financial considerations or because of the editorial? Well, yeah, I think it was, I don't know the numbers. It was slow to take off. But I do know that the, and it's funny, because I wasn't on staff until Jan 1, 1991. and I guess it launched in when?

February 1990. It launched in February 1990, yeah. Right. But I was freelancing that whole first year. So I had stuff in the very first issue, and I remember that first issue, which had Katie Lang on the cover, horrified the higher-ups at Time Inc.

They just thought it was like the worst idea for a first issue. What happened in that first year is that the magazine kind of fell on its face commercially. It wasn't doing well. So ultimately, when they were thinking about pulling the plug, that's why. But part of that was that there was a culture war going on at the magazine. And the culture war was about, yes, putting someone like Katie Lang with her whole look and

vibe that was very, very new for that time. This was 1990. And for Time Inc., they weren't saying even, you know, you can't have Katie Lang in the magazine. They were saying, is this really how we want to define Entertainment Weekly, the very, very first issue of it? The editors had said, yes we do. The old-time ink people were like, no, we don't. The critics also were right in the middle of the culture war because Jeff Jarvis, who had been the television critic of People Magazine, and who was basically the founder of Entertainment Weekly, along with Mike Klingensmith from the publishing side, Jeff had said, let's make Entertainment Weekly a place where critics can really do their jobs and be honest, which is to say to have an edge sometimes, to sometimes pan a blockbuster, whatever.

he was right that's what he hired us to do that's what we did but the time ink people got really uptight when we started to pan some movies that were popular i mean my review of pretty woman in issue number six which was a pan and probably way too negative a one i've re-evaluated that review and written about it since then i gave it a d right i gave it the big d and uh you know i had to turn around a 350 word review of it that night and as i've said not because under any pressure, I stood by the review at the time, but I've gone back and I've said, oh, you know, I don't think it's really a good piece. I don't actually stand by that opinion in the movie, but I stand by most of my opinions, even the controversial ones at Entertainment Weekly. But that stuff really got us in hot water because there was this culture war aspect that's

sort of eerily reminiscent of the kind of thing that goes on today between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Time Inc. Brass said, this magazine isn't doing well, and it's not doing well because you guys are out of the mainstream. You're like what people say about, some people say about the Democrats now. You're trying to impose your elitist view on good old red-blooded Americans. Those kind of tensions were there

in the first year or two of Entertainment Weekly. And Jim Seymour, to his credit, he was like the Gorbachev figure. He came in with basically the orders to fire us. He was of that older school, very into what was mainstream, didn't trust things like Indie. film. But he looked around, he had orders to fire me, but he looked around and he said,

Owen is not the problem. None of the writers here are the problem. He saw that the problem with the magazine is that Jeff Jarvis, though he knew how to create a magazine, didn't really know how to run one. I say that with all respect to Jeff, but he had never done it before. Whereas Jim was, this is a timing phrase, he was a veteran magazine maker. And I love that phrase. And knew how to make a magazine. He knew how to make every page work. That is what was missing from the first year. Jim identified that it was not the culture war problem. And that's why Entertainment Weekly, once it was successful, could go on being the kind of magazine that Jeff Jarvis had imagined with honest criticism and willing to take a stand on things. And that's part of what people

loved about it. But I also think we had to create our own place in the culture, because nobody had really done this. And once we've been doing it for a year, people say, that understood what we were doing and gathered around it. And really, you know, the people who subscribed to EW, they were huge fans of it. I mean, I don't know how many people subscribed to Time Magazine that were just in love with the magazine.

That's right. Maybe, you know, and that was absolutely true. Well, something happened at Entertainment Weekly by the end of that first year that was quite magical, which is that as it started to do a little better, and as all these elements that had been thrown together started to coalesce, the magazine really did become greater than some of its parts.

And what it became in terms of how it defined this new world of entertainment became surprising to everybody there. Nobody quite knew what it was. We'd created this beast. And what we were doing was, you know, Entertainment Weekly sort of marked or channeled or in some ways created the rise of this new entertainment culture, or as I like to think of it, the national entertainment state that we now have. But it's worth asking, you know, what was it that set off this era of entertainment

from what had come before? I mean, when I was coming up in the 70s and 80s, the world seemed saturated with entertainment. I mean, I'd grown up watching all the course. crap TV I could gorge on. We had rock and roll culture. We had 1970s movies and then the change that came with Jaws and Star Wars and Rocky. We had blockbuster culture in the 80s. How could the world become any more saturated with entertainment than it had become? But what no one could have guessed is that starting in the 1990s, America would become sort of addicted to entertainment in this new way. And in some ways what was happening is that the culture was really, was

starting to fragment, and all these little entertainment cults were kind of the only thing that were holding us together. That's why entertainment became so important, I think. And Entertainment Weekly was at the forefront of that. We were like, you know, this is what you care about. This is your identity. Entertainment was now your identity. And Entertainment Weekly, without necessarily even planning to, tapped into that. Well, I think there are also a handful of technological developments that helped create that world and that being, you know, in the 90s, the 90s straddle that era. First of all, you had the videotape revolution and everybody is going down rabbit holes of their own interests. They don't have to go to the theater to see movies.

They can go to the video store and pursue whatever avenue they want. So there's greater choice. Cable TV, HBO was just taking off. Yeah. With original programming. And in fact, TV was fragmenting. further and further and further. And then in the middle of the 90s, this thing called the internet pops up. And I remember, because I was, me and Michael Rose, who is one of the IT guys, we were like the first person by 30 seconds to say, what's this World Wide Web thing, which meant we were the experts. And at all the magazines, there's one person or two people who go, what's this World Wide Web thing? Oh, you're the guy. So Michael and I hand-coded the very first DW web page. You were like Seth Rogan and Pam and Tommy.

Right. Basically. Not quite. But yeah, we hand-coded the first EW web pages and tried to make this timing initiative called Pathfinder that was going to be the gateway work. It was a total boondoggle. But, and I ended up actually running the multimedia section

and covering this further fragmentation of CD-ROM games and stuff that looks totally primitive. now, but it is the open door to where we are now. Yeah, we're now the United States of fragmentation. One of the things I really regret, I'm showing my age when I say this, but one of the things I regret just as a human being, and as a critic, is the way that the culture in general, but popular culture, which I love, is so fragmented. I mean, yes, it means that people who have all sorts of voices and maybe people whose voices were repressed before can come out and express who they are on TikTok or whatever, and I celebrate that in theory. But I just mean we're so fragmented that one of the fundamental

reasons I became a movie fan and wanted to be a movie critic, that movies were popular culture and therefore united people. We could say, good, bad or indifferent, everyone's going to see Jaws 2 this weekend, so let's talk about it. That sense of a conversation that sort of bonded the whole culture, I think it's sort of disappeared. And ties right, of course, about how the technology changes everything. The Internet obviously revolutionized the world. But when I think back to the first five years of Entertainment Weekly, the first half of the 90s compared to now,

I have a lot of nostalgia for that period, but I feel like I'm talking about 1952. It's so long ago. And even though the culture was really fragmenting then, and television was starting to multiply with cable, channels were starting to multiply, but it still seems so such a smaller universe and a more unified universe than the one we have today. And I think a lot of people have nostalgia for the 90s and Entertainment Weekly because it was such an expression of the 90s for that reason. When you guys look at entertainment publications now, especially websites, there's this real divide between hype culture.

You know, there's a Jordan Peel trailer injected into my veins, here we go. and critical culture, which is smart people telling you what they like, what you might like. How did EW straddle that divide within the magazine? We were part of the hype machine in that we were used by the studios to promote their wares because we wanted to do articles and put people on the cover. But our tone was not part of the hype machine. Generally speaking, some of the features could, into that. But I do see a real distinction between what I think of as, you know, film bro culture

and what, and the sense that there was a critical voice to the magazine as a whole and not just with the individual writers. We had a step back. We had one or two steps apart from the machine, you know, from the hype machine. And I don't know if that's, true the magazine anymore or, you know, if they were able to keep that distance tenable over the long haul. Well, I would argue this. I don't think we have to go on at great length about why Entertainment Weekly sort of, I think, kind of faded out of the culture and ultimately resulting in the demise of the print magazine. But I think there was a turn at one point where it did become more publicist-friendly, more friendly to the industry. It wasn't like black and white,

but I think it, you know, it tilted 15 degrees in that direction. And I think to the magazine's detriment. And I think, because it lost its edge, it made it less interesting to read, the two elements you're talking about, where the Jordan Peel trailer is injected to your veins and then real critical thinking, those kinds of things have to coexist now. I write. for variety where I love being there and there's a real, a spree decor that reminds me in many ways of Entertable Weekly. And we do all sorts of incredible journalism there. But we have the pieces online about Jordan Peel's trailer just dropped. So you have to do all of it. But going back to what Ty said, the thing that defined, well, that's a complicated, yeah, that's a complicated conversation

why sites feel that they need to do, but what I mean is they feel that for them to be commercially secure, they need to do some of that stuff. And we can, you know, we can debate that. But what I was going to say about what I said, about the writing, it's all about the writing. If you're doing a magazine cover story on it doesn't matter, Pulp Fiction, Melrose Place, whatever, you're tied into the hype machine. Your story is publicizing that piece of product. And it might be an empty story that's nothing more. than hype. What makes it a great story? The writing. And you have the opportunity there, even though it's got a PR peg, to do a great interview or simply with your observations, with, as Ty said, the kind of

critical sensibility that you expect from critics, but that was there in all of our writers, our feature writers who were amazing in Entertainment Weekly, they all injected their features with a feeling of here's why this matters. And that's how you escape the trap of hype and put out a weekly magazine that's publicizing all this entertainment but still has integrity. And one of the reasons they were able to do that

is because we were able to maintain a position of independence backed up by the editors all the way to the top. And I do remember there would be, you know, we'd be doing a cover story on a major star, Tom Cruise, and they would say, you know, if you want to get an interview,

we get to edit. We get to look at the piece before it runs. And we would always say no. To my knowledge, we would always say no. And gave up some interviews, some access because of that. The cover of EW, very much like time itself had, I feel, in that moment, an agenda-setting function, right? Ali McBeal is on TV. This is a show people are watching.

Here you go. How did you guys think about covers during that era? It was always, and this is what some of the meetings or arguments at meetings would be about, it was always a balance between, you know, it's like an expression of what goes on in the entertainment industry itself, between what's important because it's popular, what's important because it's artistic, and where the Venn diagram of that meets. And what's going to sell on the newsstand? And what's going to sell on the newsstand, which probably mattered more than now. I know that every time we put Julia Roberts on the cover, newsstand sales went up like 30% in the early 90s. So we got her on the cover as much as we could. Absolutely.

I want to ask you guys about the reviews in EW because they had letter grades. And as we all know here, critics can occasionally get a little huffy when movie reviews have stars attached to them or a thumbs up and thumbs down attached to them. Where did you guys fall on letter grades? I ended up really liking the grades in the sense that I have a sort of pure side of me that wishes we didn't live in a world that had any sort of star ratings or whatever. A variety, I don't do those kinds of ratings, and I'm fine without them. But given that we did live in that world, I mean, I had worked at an alternative weekly before Entertainment Weekly,

and we had star ratings in our capsule section, so you can't be that much of a purist about it. Given all that, I found the grades were probably the best system of that sort. You had the most gradations, you know, if you go, as opposed to two and four stars or maybe three and a half stars, but if you go through A, A, minus B, you could actually, you know, categorize where a movie stood with some subtlety. And, you know, you came around to sort of using the grading system in a certain way. I often thought of the grade as almost the last sentence of the piece, your button. You know, you'd have the last sentence, and then it would be B, or sometimes if it was a negative grade, you know, that was like C minus.

That was the kick in the balls. And so you could sort of use the grades in a way that became part of the piece, and it was clearly part of our identity. I really enjoyed them after a while, and I thought a lot about the grades. I really thought about, you know, you would come out of a movie sometimes. I mean, I wasn't obsessed with this, but you would sometimes go, what is that? You know, it's a B. It's a B minus, and you knew it.

And that, in a funny way, that sort of infantile thing would help clarify your thinking on the movie. You would say to yourself, I'm going to go, I haven't even written my review yet, but the bottom line is, this movie ain't that good. And I think a lot of critics now, even when they're not writing with grades, forget that kind of thing. They forget that this has to be grounded in whether the movie is actually succeeding on its own terms. The grades kind of kept the critics honest, I would say. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. And absolutely, there's a distinction between a B and a B-minus, you know it and you feel it. And it's funny. I didn't mind the grades. Oh, you know, I knew going in what I was going to be doing. And like Owen, I have a purist side that no, no, it should be all

about the criticism. But, you know, then I left Entertainment Weekly in 2002 and went to the Boston Globe for 20 years where I was working with one to four stars with half star increments. And I have to say, I think I prefer the grades a little bit. Although, ironically, I've left the globe. I started my own Substack newsletter for a subscription base, which is going very well. But I initially, when I launched it last summer, was not doing any rating system. I was just putting reviews of new stuff out there, and people wanted the dingbats. People wanted something to, so now I'm doing stars, one to four stars. I think the thing about these systems is that they just don't seem very classy. And if you say

grades versus stars, which is the least classy? The answer is probably whichever one you're reading. I knew that I had been at Entertainment Weekly a long time and maybe too long. When I started to make distinctions in my head about grades that weren't even on the grading chart, I mean, I would literally see a movie and I would say, well, you know, I actually think this is sort of B half a minus or C, half a plus. Yeah. No, I very much wish I could do a two and three quarters star. Somebody sent me a cover of a 1992. issue of EW. The cover is

Arsenio Hall. I'm going to kick Jay Leno's ass. Oh yeah. I remember that. But then I would my eyes were drawn to the roof lines. These are the three. 25 years of spinal tap. Patrick Swayze's latest. And the third one, TV and abortion ads. So can we just focus on the last one for a second? Because did every issue of EW have to have a serious story with a capital S like that? Was that a focus?

I don't think that they necessarily market tested it like that, but what a good editor does is always give you a mix. I mean, you saw that on the cover of magazines. And what it was saying is that, hey, if you're the kind of person who would actually be interested in reading a story like that, it's here in this magazine. You know, one of the things that there was an incredible outpouring when they announced last week that the print edition of Entertainment Weekly was folding on social media from a lot of the people who work there, but also just a lot of fans of the magazine. You really saw how much people loved it. Of all the things that people miss about a magazine like Entertainment Weekly back in the 90s, one of them I think is the cover, the way it's so defining, so iconic, but it also is about the way the culture was more centralized.

If you look at an old cover of Entertainment Weekly, you can say, yeah, there's no question. Everybody was talking about Ali McBeal or something like that. And that feeling that everybody is focused on this thing, I think it's a tremendously comforting feeling. And I think it's one of the, I do believe it was one of the last things that was actually holding America together. And when you talk about how America seems to be falling apart at the seams now, I don't think it's just about our political differences. I think there's this sense that we are atomized, that, you know, the web, I believe, tears us apart more than it brings us together. and yet the grand irony of it is that nothing symbolizes America falling apart more than the words Donald Trump. Guess what? It looks like he might be coming back. We might, we've got to gear ourselves for the sequel.

And of course, Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the entertainment president. He's such a destructive figure. He's such a true fascist that one forgets he is a creature of entertainment. He would not never have become president if it hadn't been for The Apprentice, and even 40 years before the apprentice, he created himself as a character. Donald Trump is a master entertainer. So the national entertainment state is a thing that cuts a lot of ways. Brian, going back to your initial question, I don't think we had a mission that, a mission statement that we had to cover the serious side of entertainment. But what I do know is that all the section editors all had as part of their understanding, and it's what they came to the job with, that they were going to cover all

aspects of what they were assigned to. So the frivolous and the serious, because you can't have just one. And I just, I think that was intuitively an understanding that we had to strike that balance. I think it was integral to what people liked about the magazine, too, because what you knew when you held a copy of Entertainment Weekly in your hands was that the people who put this magazine together are covering the waterfront. If it matters, if it's abortion ads on TV, or if it's, I'm obsessed with Melrose Place, it's in this magazine. It's funny, the bullseye became a sort of short-form version of that.

And the bullseye started, I don't know, late 90s, early 2000s. Yeah, Rick started it, I think, so probably early 2000s. Oh, then I'd already left, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I'd already left. But I remember that just sort of like was a fractal of Entertainment Weekly, you know, what everybody's talking about this week on one page. Ty, can I get you to tell the story you told on Twitter the other day how you got the underground cartoonist Robert Crum to contribute to Entertainment Weekly? Well, I mean, I tell that story because it is so emblematic of the not the chances we took, but this sort of freewheeling atmosphere.

where you could throw out the most far-fetched idea, and if it made sense and it was doable and it was funny or interesting, the editor would say, yeah, let's do it. Somebody, Chris Nashuaderie reminded me, we were doing a piece on Witt Stillman, and somebody said, let's get the singer Slim Whitman to interview Witt Stillman, and we did. Why? Because it was goofy. But in the case of this video, it's a video release from Shanaki

of very rare old blues footage, from the 1920s and 1930s. Really rare stuff. And as the chief video critic, I, you know, I thought that it was coming in and thought, you know, because I did have an interest in that stuff, I thought I might review it. But then I remember talking with David Haydo, the editor, why don't we, you know, who would really be fun to write about this was Robert Crum, because I knew, if you know anything about the guy, you know that he's a blues fanatic,

a collector of old 78s and that's drawn a lot of those stories. And, you know, this is really his bailiwick. But he's living in the middle of France out in the boondocks and doesn't talk to anybody. So what are we going to do? And I can't remember whether I got him on the phone or I sent him an email to his agent, but somehow I got through to him. And once he heard two things, what the subject of the tape was and how much we were going to pay him, he was like, sure, I'll do it. And And, you know, because he had this ancient, you know, crumbling villa in France that he had to, you know, keep up. So weeks go by, and the deadline's coming there, and we haven't heard anything. And finally, I get this envelope in the mail, and I open it up.

And he has hand-lettered the review. And if you read any Robert Crum, you know that hand-lettering. It really is a font. It's a Crumb font. And he'd hand-lettered the review. And I just went to David and said, we got to run this. and in fact we actually asked him to do it a little more, you know, do it one more time just a little bit more clean.

And that's the one way ran. And I think the intro said, you know, we asked our crumb to review this tape and this is what he said. And we just ran that as a visual. I have a story about that sort of pings off our crumb that kind of defines the sort of hot water I would get in and Entertainment Weekly. In 1995, the year that the documentary, the great documentary about Robert Crum, called Crum, came out.

It really is a magnificent film. And it's an interesting film to look at now because in 1995, one of the many things it was about was what we called back then political correctness and the attacks that were made on Crum because he was not very correct. And, you know, I think that is a relevant theme today for obvious reasons. But anyway, I love the movie, and I decided to pick it as my number one movie of the year because I thought it really was the best film of the year. And Jim Seymour, the editor, was not happy about this because he, just the whole idea of picking a documentary, let alone a documentary about this subject. It just didn't seem very mainstream to him.

But part of the way it worked at Entertainment Weekly was that he gave the critics the leeway, to be honest. and the art department commissioned a drawing for our year-end issue to go with my movie of the year choice by, not crumb, but I can't remember the name of it, but a well-known artist who was sort of an associate of crumb, and they were all, it wasn't Drew Friedman, but it was somebody like that. And it was a beautiful work of art, and they were all excited about it, like, look, we got this, look at this piece of art. And then, at the last minute, because they saw. screened this movie right at the end of the year, I saw a big studio movie that was going to be

an awards film or that they were putting it up for awards, which was Oliver Stone's Nixon. And I loved this movie and became obsessed with it. To this day, I don't know if Nixon has the reputation among Stone fans that say JFK does, but I think it's a magnificent film. I really became obsessed with it, and I decided that it was the movie of the year. I decided that I had to make room on my list for it and move crumb down to number two, which doesn't seem like that big a deal, but all these people at the office had seen Nixon and had not liked it very much, like our film editors.

And the art department had to commission a new drawing. So Jim Seymour hated me. The art department hated me for having to nix their drawing. And the film department at Entertainment at Entertainment Weekly hated me for picking Nixon as movie of the year. I think that was my most hated moment. Nick's, no pun intended. Last one for you guys, the 1990s is considered the end of the golden age of magazines.

Maybe we can extend it a little bit into the early 2000s. EW is a Time Inc magazine, as we have mentioned. In what way did each of you get to enjoy the spoils of that period? I'll answer that question very simply. I don't know about spoils, but when I think of that period, the 90s, working at entertainment, weekly. I wrote a memoir called Movie Freak, where I wrote a lot about Entertainment Weekly. And one of the things I wrote, I'll say this now, it was embarrassing to write. It's embarrassing for me to say this, but I'm an honest critic, so I'll be honest about myself. I used to go into work every day at

Entertainment Weekly with such a sense of joy, just being so glad to be there and being so lucky to be a critic at a magazine that was successful and that would pay me to do this every week. This remains so stunning to me that on Monday after the weekend, when I would come out of the subway at 50th Street and Broadway, and I would walk out of that same subway, I would feel like Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air. That's how I felt. And I think the reason I say that ridiculous statement is that I think maybe I'm speaking for more than myself when I talk about the kinds of joy that people felt getting to work at magazines during that Golden Age of Magazines. It was an incredible.

job because it was fun. You were working with incredible people. But you also felt that there was a sense of mission, that everything you put into this magazine was getting out there to people and that maybe in some small way you made a difference. I think that kind of feeling that you had a little bit of power, a little bit of agency has been lost in our culture for everyone. I think that's everyone feels so powerless now. And that was that was a great feeling. That to me was the spoils. Well, you know, one of the things that's changes that everybody has a voice now and so the voices are so many, so fragmented,

you know, and in the 90s, because the internet had not taken off, social media had not taken off, there was a lesser amount of voices and so there was greater authority. We had greater authority because, you know, we were a national publication. But what I think, when I think of the 90s at Entertainment Weekly,

what just makes me so happy, It was like being in a candy store working there because I not only wrote about videos. I wrote about music. I wrote about books. I wrote about theater. I kind of ended up covering the waterfront while still and multimedia. But I could go into Greg Sandow's office and look at the CDs that were coming in. And that looks interesting.

Yeah, maybe I'll write about that. And I would get a chance to write about it. And I would get letters from people saying, this is really incredible. I had never heard of this person. and thank you for turning me on to it. And the one I remember, some guy actually a couple of weeks ago posted on Twitter, I bought the Entertainment Weekly Bookazine, a word I hate, 100 greatest movies of all time, 25 years ago,

and I just finished watching the 100th movie. I just finished going through the mall, and he was holding up the book and saying, and I responded and I said, even Celine and Julie Go Boating. He said, yeah, yeah, well, it's on Criterion Channel now. But I remember because I wrote that book and I said, you know what, if I'm writing this book, I want to get one of my favorite movies that's completely obscure and you couldn't even get it on video at that point.

This French film called Celine and Julie Go Boating. So I got it in there at 100. And that has come back to me more than almost anything I've done at that magazine. Yeah, I remember you put that in that book. and I somehow got a chance to watch it, and it blew my doors off. So just the incredible richness that we were exposed to as people covering this. So, yeah, we're getting all the CDs. We're getting all the VHS tapes and then DVDs.

We're in a position to just sample all this stuff and bring the riches of it to the reader. But also, I never had this in mind an educational mission, but an enthusiastic mission to share the stuff I loved. And being able to do that at that magazine, and yes, there was a community at that magazine, and I knew enough of the other magazines to know. There was a community at each magazine that really did have a sense of joy with what they were doing.

I think pop culture means basically two things to people. There's the work of art itself, a song you love, a movie you love, a show you love, just that experience and how it nourishes you, etc. But there's also, this is why we call it popular culture, there's the feeling of connection that comes that you have with people that you share those passions with and that you talk about. It's not like that's completely, doesn't exist anymore, there's plenty of that. I mean, just look at Taylor Swift fans or whatever. But I think that Entertainment Weekly existed and thrived at a moment of supreme connection in terms of what

pop culture was able to do. It was holding people together. In some ways, I think it was holding the culture together. It's just about America's last export. I mean, you know, we don't make anything here anymore, but we make entertainment better than anybody. And what I think Entertainment Weekly symbolized for people was the feeling of connection that popular culture gave them. And the magazine became part of that. It was part of that circuit. They connected to the magazine. They connected to the writers that connected to other fans through all of that. It was like, it was a real circle of connection. You can read Owen Glyberman in Variety and Tyber on Substack at Ty Burr's Watchlist. Thank you both so much for coming on the press box. Thanks for having us. Thanks for happiness.

In other news, as they say, I had to check in with our pal Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe check on is a better way to say it, because last week Jason was covering the Winter Olympics in Beijing, and by Sunday night he was sitting in the press box at SoFi Stadium here in L.A. writing a column about the Super Bowl. It's the first part of Jason's round-the-world journey I'm interested in, because this year covering the Olympics wasn't as simple as showing up at the site of the luge. With COVID and the regulations imposed by organizers in Beijing, covering the Olympics, Jason wrote, was like being in a bubble with a view through a pinhole.

So what was it like? And what's the point of being at the Olympics in person instead of staying home and writing columns off TV? Here's an official debriefing with Jason Gay. All right, Jason, before we talk about the Olympics, just a quick check-in. Are you okay? How are you holding up?

I'm not sure, Brian. I'm not positive if this is, Sunday or Thursday. My sleep seems to be straddling three or four different time zones, not to brag to you. But I just am, I'm

befuddled and even more confused than I am usually. But you filed from the Super Bowl last night. Mission accomplished. Did I? Did I? I believe I did. That's true. No, this was really fun. I mean, this was something that we talked about

in advance. Of course, you know, there had to be some logistical arranging happening, but, you know, a real privilege to be able to do and something I'll tell my grandchildren about, you know, five minutes when I get home. Let's walk through your Winter Olympics journey. First off, what did you need to do to get into Beijing for the games? Just pack. You know, do a little bit of credentialing, of course. You know, these were different games. because of the COVID era, but we had a little bit of a advanced run with Tokyo and some of the, most of the, the prerequisites were similar. We had to do testing, I believe, 96 hours out, 72 hours out. You know, not to be, you know, I'm not trying to be glib about it, but the

main thing was to not get COVID. You know, that was the great fear of anybody was to get COVID. You know, and this was not just a media thing. The athletes were in a much bigger jackpot that we were. They were people who were, you know, preparing four years for this. So they felt that very, very strongly. So I spent a pretty strong paranoid week. And as you know, you know, as everybody knows, it's not been the greatest month or two for trying to not get COVID. I mean, it's been through a pretty infectious period. So that was my, the main ambition or really the only ambition. You know, if you brought your socks, that was, that was pretty good. You fly into Beijing and you wrote this in your column, my journal colleagues and I were met at the airport by friendly men and women dressed in

hazmat suits, some bedazzled with cutesy Olympic pandas. And then what happens from there? Yeah, just to point out, these were different hazmat suits than the typical hazmat suits when you land at like LaGuardia, you know, in the peak LaGuardia era. These are, you know, real hazmat suits. These were people who were there to both guide us through the airport protocols. But also to test us and we were given PCR tests right there in the airport. They were going by a very strong standard of testing there. There were no rapid tests for the Beijing Olympics. This was all the, what do we call it, the gold standard of testing. And there was a lot of waiting around the airport for that to happen. But, you know, considering what was being done,

impressively efficient, I should point out, before we got to China, we actually stopped in Tokyo our plane was pretty empty coming from New York, but we picked up the entire United States men's hockey team, a member of which I had just recently written about and it only contacted via phone and now got to hang out with him briefly in the Tokyo airport. So, you know, it was a very strange experience. Normal circumstances, that play would be full of people

coming from around the world because the Olympics were just such a massive global draw. because of the fact that they were only admitting credentialed personnel, these athletes were not allowed to be accompanied by parents, spouses, children, anybody. It was skeleton crew only. Speaking of phones, do you use a burner phone in Beijing? How did you approach the whole information security part of this? Well, Brian, you know, I always try to carry at least two burner phones around with me at all times. But, you know, backup technology was essential. You know, you saw a lot of the advisements that were given to Team USA and to other people about what they were going to bring into Beijing.

And we took all the necessary technological precautions. So you are in Beijing. I guess one doesn't just get a cab at the airport and then go to the hotel. How does this whole work now? What kind of bubble are you in? Yeah. Yeah. You're in a bubble that if you're not immediately aware of, you quickly become.

aware of because you realize that you're not interfacing at all with this incredibly massive city. You are, from the moment you step off the airplane, you are funneled in this Olympic travel area. And the bus, I mean, gosh, I believe that plane arrived at 2, 3 o'clock in the morning and you're taking a bus to your hotel. And the hotel is very specifically for Olympic personnel. the hotel itself is kind of behind a wall, behind a wall that has got security guards around it. You're traveling from that hotel the next day to Olympic buildings, you know, whether there's media centers or arenas or people who are going off to the mountains. But they are not, again, intersecting at all with everyday life in Beijing, which is something that, you know, is what makes the Olympics great.

is the ability to experience the host countries. Now, we can get into the whole other elements of what was happening and is happening in China, but this was not a games at all that was in any way typical. You were not allowed to interact with people outside the bubble, essentially. Yeah, and you weren't really even given opportunity. You know, it wasn't as if I was standing in any kind of, like, town square with the opportunity to interface with, you know, just everyday life.

It was not something that was permitted. Can you give me a little mison scene from the hotel and from the bubble? This was from Nathan Fenno's piece in the Los Angeles Times. He writes, disinfecting robots, roam hotels, plastic dividers separate each person in dining rooms. Dot, dot, dot. That's all in addition to the mandatory smartphone app where credential holders are required to input their temperature and answer a list of questions about their health each day. Yeah. I mean, you know, that all rings exactly true.

And I think that, you know, you just fell into this ritual where you'd wake up in the morning and you'd get tested first thing because you wanted to start the clock, so to speak, on your COVID testing day, because the earlier got tested, the earlier you got a result, the earlier you kind of relaxed about the fact that you were, you know, through to the next day. You know, pretty typical hotel arrangement with, you know, breakfast, and so on, but it wasn't like, you know what, I'm just going to go out to the, what do they get around here, the coffee bean, you know, there was none of that. There was none. I'm going to go for a jog around the block. There's nothing like that. You were limited to staying in the hotel.

You were limited then to, if you were going to go anywhere, it was on a bus to a transit hub for other stuff. So media facilities, arenas, stadia, And of course, the mountains. Does you get to hang with other reporters? Because that's part of the fun at being at something like this. A little bit, although that is cut back too. You know, both of us have had the experience of being at large sporting events and meeting friends that we haven't seen in a long time in those, you know, big fun nights

where everybody gets together and complains about their lives. And there's not that kind of opportunity for camaraderie. I mean, there's limited stuff. You run into people. You see them at stuff. But there's not, you know, there's certainly not, let's all get together at 9 o'clock. and, you know, have a big night. There wasn't any of that at all. You see people and you say hi, but again, everyone has this low-grade paranoia of, you know, positive testing or, you know,

contact tracing and falling into that kind of jeopardy. So what happens, remind us, if you test positive for COVID while you're in China covering the Olympics? You are quarantined. I mean, you're immediately quarantined. You're put into your room. they have the option of taking you somewhere else. We saw this happen a bunch of times with athletes and other personnel, people who were there to compete at the games, and all of a sudden found themselves extracted. And in a few fortunate instances,

they were able to test quickly and get out of it. In other instances, they indeed had COVID and were in there for longer periods of time. So, you know, again, you just sort of always were panicked that this was going to happen to you because you didn't want to have a situation where you would be taken away from the thing you were there to do. Okay. So you wake up in the morning. You get your COVID test. You get on the bus. You go to the site to cover downhill skiing or the luge or figure skating and whatever it is you're covering. Was there at all a sense of normalcy when you actually get to the venue? Or is it still really different? There was a degree of like 2020 to 2020 normalcy in that you were

watching high-level competitions with no to a small number of fans, which is absurd on the face of it, but we have all become sadly accustomed to over the last 24 months. So there was a degree of that kind of normalcy. But no, it was preposterously different. And again, the Olympics are an event that, you know, in a normal calendar would be packed to the room with people from around the world. There would be relatives, families, associates, associates, It's all sorts of human drama off of the playing surface, and you had none of that. And there were, you know, elements of it that made it interesting, like, you know, things that we got to see when we watched, you know, basketball with no fans, for example, like, you

heard the players, you heard the interaction, you heard the combat with referees. There was a little bit of intrigue that way, but it's no substitute for what the full thing would be. Yeah. And then you get sent to, like, a media room for people that are writing on. deadline, those poor souls who actually have to write about these events rather than, you know, people like us who do quirky feature stories and stuff like that. Yeah. I love this from Nathan Fenno, too.

He said, when a journalist slipped her mask down for a half second to bite into an apple inside the media room at one of the facilities, a staffer ran over and demanded she stop. You know, I read this story before I got there, I believe. I believe this story was written rather early in the cycle. And that jumped out at me, too. I was like, man, this is going to be really something. I did not have that experience with that kind of officiating, but maybe, again, similar to basketball,

you kind of loosened up by the third or fourth quarter and they let us play a little bit. You know, we weren't having the same kind of strict regulation. But you certainly didn't feel that you were, you know, at liberty to kind of wander around without your mask on. Like I've seen a lot of since I've come back to the United States. there's definitely not any of that. And I feel like the main physical feeling of my experience in Beijing was getting home

at night and just feeling incredible relief being able to take off this KN-95 mask because that was a standard. There was no like you weren't getting to wear your beavis and butt head cloth bandana mask or anything like that, Brian. It was strictly medical grade 95 masks. And, you know, those are strong things. When you get home at night, you feel it when you take that thing off. Yeah, nobody was intervening on Radio Row when somebody bit into an apple.

Of course, you know, somebody would have to bite into an apple rather than a burrito or something. I mean, it did look like all bets were off in Radio Row. What was the, you know, regulation standard there? We'll cover most of that offline, I think, but let us say. Zero COVID did not exist. No, no, it did not. Now, help me out with this one, because I've never covered in Olympics. In pre-COVID before times, how close could you get to athletes during the games as a reporter?

Well, one of the things that's interesting, it's a term of art that we don't use in the United States, but is familiar to anybody who covers the Olympics or any kind of international competition is what we call the mix zone. It's also a phenomenon in international soccer. But instead of having locker room access, which you don't get, because of the nature of the games, the athletes will be funneled through kind of a maze of, you know, media from around the world. They're sort of broken up by, in some cases, media organization, but in most cases, by nationality. You know, here are the American reporters. Here are the reporters for Spain, France, and so on. And you do get a chance to interface with people, you know, them in person.

It wasn't done over Zoom. And precautions were taken, like distance and so on. people who are all en masse, both the reporters and the athletes. But you do get the opportunity to ask questions, which I still appreciate. You know, that's a significant part of learning about things that are happening at the games. And as you learn rather quickly in covering the Olympics, there are a few topics that wind up being sagas that span throughout the two weeks that are there. And so having the ability to contact athletes specifically, and they're not kind of handled.

You know, in some cases, you know, they'll try to do their best to avoid, you know, questions or they have their stock answers and rare cases they'll avoid the mix zone. But in most cases, they're really available. So no mix zone. And you did get to do press. No, no, no, you did get the mix zone. You did get the mix zone in China. I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to make it seem like we did. We got all this. That's good. Okay. So you did get the mix zone stuff. This did all happen in China. Yes. And then there were some press conferences, too, where you sort of a more formal arrangement and

all the journalists are in one room? The International Olympic Committee has a daily press conference where they get in, they assess the games and they give you their spit on how it's going or events of the day. That can be a pretty combative press conference at times. And then when you have sort of marquee events happen, like, you know, somebody like Nathan Chen winning gold, they'll do press immediately after winning. But then they'll also maybe a day or two later meet, you know, the broad press constituency at the main media center and do a big, more formal press conference there. You mentioned the hockey player. This is a really cool column you wrote about Pat Nagel, who's sort of the crash Davis of American hockey. And when the NHL decides not to send players, he winds up playing goalie on the U.S. Olympic team.

Now, do you try to get him before you get there and get all that done so you can have that ready to pop in Beijing? Yeah. You know, that's the goal, right? You try to go in there with a little bit of string in advance, a few stories that worse comes to worse. you at least have these few things, right? And with Pat, that was a case of, as you said, USA hockey had to scramble at the last minute, the NHL withdrew from the Olympics, the third week of December, I believe, and they had to scramble together a team that was not composed of professional hockey players,

but collegians, ex-pros, pros that had availability, and minor league pros, such as Pat, a guy who has played 11 years of minor league hockey in the AHL and East. CHL and not had the opportunity to play at the NHL. And suddenly, you know, kind of like a fairy tale, has given this opportunity that he never dreamed possible. And so that was, I believe it was somebody at the journal gave me the heads up on that one. And Pat was a pleasure and talked to his family and talked to as many people as possible before getting out the door. Same with Aaron Jackson, who ended up winning gold medal a couple days ago. You know, you try to do as much of that conversation before you get on the plane because you, you know, you're going to be a lot of the plane.

you don't know what kind of assurance you're going to have of being able to get people. So as a writer, you want four or five stories that you're going to be able to do before you get on site and then have the ability to pivot and do things that... Sure. Listen, everybody does it a little differently, and that's part of what makes it fun to watch and watch other people's coverage. But what works for me and works for a lot of people, I think is like, yeah, having a mix of stuff that you know that you can turn to that are good, compelling stories that are informative

for readers. but then also being able to move quickly when, you know, events warranted and things develop. Because there's always a degree of unpredictability to all this. But I can tell you, like, the first couple times I did it. I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. And I tried to figure it out as I got there. And that didn't work for me at all. So we want to have a view in the pocket now.

Where we go here? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that, honestly, there are probably most events are like that, right? you have to be prepared. You definitely can't and shouldn't be so confident that you can make it up as you go along ever. When we talk about press restrictions, it's always funny because readers I find don't care at all, really, right?

They may be mildly interested in what we're going through, but their interface with us is I'm going to read your article, I'm going to listen to your podcast, and I want it to be good no matter what you had to go through to get it. So do you feel happy with what you wrote from Beijing? I mean, look, there are always things that you would redo or rewrite differently. There's no way for me to ever read anything that I write without feeling those strong feelings. But, yeah, I feel, I mean, I feel like I got lucky with a couple of good stories. I got very lucky in being able to write extensively about somebody who I believe is one of the great stories of the Olympics in Aaron Jackson, the Speed Skater.

but yeah you there's always a degree of variability the other background story here jason is that the chinese government expelled american journalists in 2020 including some from your paper now as a sports writer i think when you go to the olympics you're always interested in the socio-political backdrop did you feel like you're carrying an extra load this time around given what the coverage of china's been like over the last couple years i mean we're certainly aware of you know of that have happened in the past and, you know, recent history among news organizations. But, you know, our job is exactly the same as it would be in any other circumstance, which is to tell the truth fearlessly, fairly. And, you know, that was the objective from the get-go. And I think

we've met it. You know, I think, obviously there are elements of this that are not sports. But as you said, the Olympics are always a vigorously political event. You saw this. You saw in the outrage among many people about the very idea of Beijing getting and being able to host these games, what the games were being used in terms of presenting a country that has existed under a litany of human rights concerns. This is not the kind of thing that any of us are. trying to wipe away or take lightly. It's something that you deal with and address head on. I feel I have the enormous fortune to work in a news organization equipped with a tremendous

amount of reporters, not only just experienced reporters, but people who live and know the region and have direct experience with this. Speak the language. Many colleagues who speak the language. I mean, so I feel very fortunate to be able to ride in their wake because they're doing the hard work. Now, I am in favor on principle of an owner of a newspaper website, buying a sports writer a plane ticket to cover something. Send us around the country, send us around the globe. But let's tease this out for a second. What is the case for sending you and your colleagues to Beijing to cover the Olympics rather than you writing a funny, delightful column off television? I mean, I think there's a case to be made for both of the things. I think that sometimes when you're at

the games, you lose sight of the fact that the prism through which your entire audience is watching this thing is television and that you're oftentimes describing things that are never going to fall into the purview of the audience at home. But that's also the great thing, right, is that you or eyes and ears on the ground and you are, you know, additional journalistic accountability that exists beyond television cameras, which are there for entertainment purposes, I think that's a really important thing. I think it's an important thing to also try to figure out when people really start paying attention to the games. I mean, one of the things that is a challenge for us and for any other news organization is that the Olympics have like a long lead-up, right?

You have years to get ready for the Olympics. And you start seeing games about athletes and dreams and ambitions, I don't know, six to eight months out of the game sometimes. And you're certainly seeing a much bigger buildup, right? You'll all see, you know, Olympic cover stories and so on start to happen weeks, sometimes months out from the games. And yet, I feel in a increasingly distracted world, people don't really turn their attention to the games until they're right there in front of their face, right? You know, I think that look at this year where we had to compete the first week of the games had to compete with the Super Bowl. Very hard to get reader bandwidth at that time. And yet, I think we were able to, because we,

have been prepared, but also know the kinds of stories that readers are drawn to and know how to tell them. I was going to ask you about that because it did feel very interesting to be here. Certainly people perked up Nathan Chen and moments during the first week of the Olympics, but as you say, it was competing with Super Bowl hype. Yeah. Which is one of the most powerful forces in American culture. Can you feel that even from abroad like I am trying to get people's attention and focus their eyes here rather than over there? Sure. You feel that. But, you feel that. But you also feel, candidly, the fact that there's a, you know, significant chunk of the population that is not interested in these games, specifically because they have a real problem with China

being the host. We definitely got some of that energy from people who said they were just opting out of these games. I think there are hashtag movements and so on that exist in social media in this country, like not one minute or not watching, et cetera. And, you know, again, anything you cover nowadays, even if it is, in fact, the Super Bowl itself is competing with more stuff than ever before, behaviorally in terms of people's news diets and so on. But I think you feel it acutely. And it's also a very strange feeling because you're so removed from it, right? You're 12 hours ahead or 11 hours ahead of the news cycle. So you really do feel like a little bit you're in the International Space Station as everyone's, you know, hubbubbing about Matt Stafford.

How many Olympics is this for you? I sort of went as a passenger to Vancouver the last couple of days, not as a credentialed reporter for the journal. I started going for real London. So I believe that makes six. But, you know, Brian, I don't know math. This is good that you're getting into the Jim McKay, Bob Costa zone here. A veteran. Yeah. Yeah. No, again, I, you know, listen, the Olympics have preposterous problems with regard to scale, cost, corruption, all kinds of just ugly business. But I do feel there's an element of the Olympics that remains compelling in that you have all of these athletes who, you know, these are not athletes who you are following on a day-to-day basis. They are

largely toiling in obscurity for very little money. And the theater that the Olympics offers you, and this is not just, you know, the domain of, you know, United States Olympians, but the, the theater of the Olympics can offer at its best is every day you get to see the greatest day of somebody's life. You really do. If you're fortunate to move from events and event, you see these individuals, maybe it's just by, you know, virtue of their participation. Maybe it's a medal. Maybe it's a world record or something like that. But the theater of it remains remarkable, I think. And for a sports writer, that's a particular joy here versus covering Super Bowl World Series, all the other big events on your calendar, Tour de France. I won't forget that one.

I think so. And again, the other parts of it, you know, the seriousness of the socio-political part of it is huge. I think that, you know, which is not. Not to say that other major American sporting events or worldwide sporting events can't have political elements and most of the most of the time they do. But when you just consider, you know, opening ceremonies where you have the leader of China and also Vladimir Putin. You're not getting that at the NLCS game four. You know, it's. I don't remember Putin being there last year, but you got a missed it. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Gay, get some rest champ. Thanks for coming on the press box. appreciate that. Happy Friday to you. I mean, I don't know what day. Monday. Great talking to you as always. And we'll talk again soon. Huge thanks to Ty Burr, Owen

Glyberman and Jason Gay. Production magic by Erica Servantes and Isaiah Blakely. This Thursday, folks, the press box is going to roll on. John Darniel of the band The Mountain Goats is going to stop by. He has a new novel called Devil House.

which is really, really good, and for our purposes, contains a really interesting meditation on true crime writing, a genre I am very eager to dissect with him. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic week.