When Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker in September 1992, I happened to be seated to her right at a small celebratory dinner. She asked what I was working on and I mentioned a book idea. She was obviously unimpressed with the book, for she phoned the next day to see if we might meet that day. We met and she asked if I might like to do a media column that naturally sprang from my last book, Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way. I said no, I really didn’t want to get diverted from doing a book. But we talked about how the communications business was both broadening and changing, and how the beat should be broad enough to encompass not just the networks and the press and the studios but cable and telephone and computers and publishing as well. Think about it, she said.
Can’t do it, I said.
Then I thought about it.
To escape the frenzy of deadlines, which prevent most journalists from having time to think or to dive below the surface, I suggested that for the first several months I write nothing. Instead, I would read and conduct background (not-for-attribution) discussions with fifty or so people in the communications industry. No problem. She would subsidize my education. I would guess that these casual, candid conversations planted seeds for half a dozen pieces in this book.
Four years later, the book idea we discussed at dinner is dead and I’m grateful to Tina Brown for providing a front-row seat to witness the information revolution. I’m also grateful to others at The New Yorker: Pat Crow and Jeffrey Frank edited these pieces with care and craft; the miraculous fact-checking department spared me from obvious mistakes (any remaining mistakes in this book are mine); Pamela Maffei McCarthy, Dorothy Wickenden, and others too numerous to mention from the editorial, art, and production departments were of immense help.
I am grateful, as always, to Jason Epstein and Random House, who have edited and published six of my seven books, and to the many diligent people there who improved this work, particularly Jason’s assistant, Joy de Menil, and copy editor Virginia Avery. I acknowledge another ancient relationship—with my literary agent and friend, Esther Newberg, of ICM. The title The Highwaymen was suggested by another friend, Tully Plesser. Khrystine Muldowney spent the summer of her junior year in college cheerfully transferring these pieces onto computer discs and marking those sections of the original manuscript that for space reasons did not appear in The New Yorker. This book therefore contains previously unpublished material; most of one piece, “The Power of Shame,” appears for the first time in this book.
My wife, Amanda Urban, lent her superb editorial judgments to most of these pieces before they were dispatched to The New Yorker.