John Heilemann is the managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and the co-author of Game Change and Double Down.

"If you're a writer, and you're not an asshole, you want the maximum number of people to read your stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no great glory in cultivating some niche audience. I do this work because I believe in what I'm doing. I'm not trying to compromise my principles or my standards to get a larger audience. But once I've written the thing of which I feel confident and proud, which I feel is ethically and journalistically sound, I then want the maximum number of people to read it."

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Show Notes:


@jheil
[9:15] "Congress's Watch Dog: The General Accounting Office" (Washington Monthly • Nov 1989)
[23:15] "Can the BBC Be Saved?" (Wired • Mar 1994)
[24:00] Heilemann's New Yorker archive
[33:00] "The Networker" (New Yorker • July 1997) (sub req'd)
[34:30] The Valley
[35:00] The Reckoning (David Halberstam • 1986)
[37:00] "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth" (Wired • Nov 2000)
[41:30] The Pride Before the Fall (2001)
[44:00] "The Power Grid" archive
[44:45] "The Choir Boy" (New York • May 2005)
[48:00] What It Takes (Richard Ben Cramer • 1992)