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.

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.

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.

But music raises a lot of issues. Music is something that matters to people a lot, and they put a lot of passion into it. And I think when you have an area like that, you're gonna find a lot of issues coming up.

I think television often has dismissed younger people. They figure, well, they're not really watching news, that's not our audience.

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

And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with.