#311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED
The Tim Ferriss Show
How I Found My Way Out of a Difficult Career in Journalism
Nick Eft: My professional career in my, you know, the first six or seven years was not great. I have that kind of messed up period where I go to Africa. It's a period of getting rejected by 20 jobs before I get hired to the left. And then there's like a moment of awesomeness where for two years I'm editor of the Washington Monthly going back to New York playing a time on the weekends. Like if you look at it from now, it looks like a really fortunate thing that those things happened.
Nick Thompson (@nxthompson) is the editor-in-chief of WIRED. Under his leadership, Wired has launched a successful paywall, a Snapchat channel, and an AMP Stories edition; it has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards in design and feature writing.
Nick is a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning. He is also co-founder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award-winning digital publication. Prior to joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com from 2012 to 2017.
Before The New Yorker, Nick was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. In 2009, his book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War was published to critical acclaim. In February 2018, Thompson co-wrote WIRED's cover story Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook -- and the World, an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees.
In this conversation, we cover a wide range of topics, questions, and skills, including:
- What makes a good pitch?
- How does a good features writer (or editor) "map" a story?
- How does writing get optioned for feature film, and what are important deal points?
- How can publishers (and website or blog owners) hire and pay good long-form writers?
- And much more...
Please enjoy!
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