Television's not going read stories to you.

It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.

So, yeah, I think it had a major effect. I think in franchising younger people, it was just an idea that's never been trotted out before, but it makes perfectly good sense.

I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.

Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.