A New York Post columnist with a degree in political science, John spent most of his adult life in Washington, D.C. and now lives on the Upper Westside of Manhattan just one mile from where he was raised. He blogs for National Review Online’s The Corner.

John Podhoretz – An extraordinary life with the written word

I am one of the few people who can honestly say I worked for a daily, a weekly, a monthly and a bi-weekly. I’ve worked as a political columnist, movie critic, TV critic, humor columnist, newspaper editor, magazine editor, newsletter publisher, (starts chuckling) proofreader, book editor, television series consultant and freelance writer! When I graduated from the University of Chicago, having already been published in places like American Spectator, Harper’s and New Republic, I got a job as a researcher at Time magazine. Even though I had published by that point 40 articles in major magazines, I was deemed insufficiently experienced to be an actual magazine writer.

So I left and went to work for the Washington Times, writing about pop culture from a conservative perspective. It was genuinely crazy, with people being hired and fired and quitting and sexually harassing each other. If you were there six months you got a job doing something bigger. So at age 23, I became features editor — by default.

In 1985 a group of us started a magazine at the Washington Times called Insight, one of four publications I have either been involved in, or responsible for, starting. In ‘93 I started Republican Faxwire, which became the seeds for the Weekly Standard. During all my career, I spent eight months working as a speechwriter for Reagan and a special assistant to William Bennett when he was drug czar. Yet whenever anybody writes about me they always say I was in the government. And I was not a speechwriter for Bush, which they often get wrong.

On his blog – Making ‘hot off the presses’ look slow

Blogging is a very interesting experience because I make my living writing twice-weekly newspaper columns for the New York Post, and writing books. I almost always write my column the day before. I can write fast, and often write about presidential speeches from that night or major news that breaks at 6 p.m. The column, which I have written for nearly six years, is as close to being a blog item as a newspaper can have — it’s as fast as I can do it. What makes The Corner satisfying is it allows me to throw off comments on things going on at the very time they are going on.

I am also very conscious — as Jonah Goldberg, who started The Corner, is — of the extent to which the internet is entertainment. The ability to click through — if I think something is funny or worth experiencing, I can share it through a link. That is the light aspect, the jokey aspect, of the internet. I think it’s vital. I think it’s crucial to its appeal. If you are a person with a variety of political and cultural interests, you can bounce around and sort of leaven the most serious things you are considering with something much more lighthearted.

On our direction

I don’t think anybody knows where this is going. But it’s clear to anybody who has a sense of the future, and has gotten into the business of writing or reporting or opinion, that many things that were done pretty much the same way for that last 100 years — in terms of words — are undergoing a gigantic transition to something else.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn’t understand that the internet was the direction computing was going. This guy, who became the richest person the world had ever seen by inventing software, didn’t understand this, you know? And nobody does. My view is that any effort to figure out how to combine the internet with the act of gathering and processing and relaying info and opinion and analysis to people is very important.

The mayor of my own city, Michael Bloomberg, years ago invented a proprietary system for relaying bond prices to people, and now he is worth $9 billion and has a company that if sold would be worth $30 billion. None of that existed before. And until 1996, Matt Drudge was working at gift shop at CBS. That is what happens in a time of change. So getting in the game with citizen journalism, which Pajamas Media represents, provides one possibility. Thirty years from now, we may say ‘Can you believe 30 years ago there was a group of people called reporters, and they were hired by things called newspapers?’