Questions, Anybody? — Nov 30th 2007

By James Marcus

Since the launch of the NewsQuake blog earlier this year, we've featured quite a few interviews, with personalities as diverse as Geoff Emerick, Michael Musto, William Langewiesche, Rob van Hattum, and Carlo Bonini. In all these cases, we've welcomed comments from visitors. However, this top-down approach didn't feel quite right for a social news site. To a great degree, it still left the community on the margins, which contradicts the fundamental fact about any social news site: the community belongs in the center ring.

So we're going to try a different approach. Below you will find the subjects of three impending interviews here at Propeller. What we're asking is for community members to submit questions in advance. We can't promise that all questions will be included in the final product--there may be duplicates, or questions that simply don't fit into the conversation. We will also experiment with different ways of integrating these questions: they may be threaded into the interview proper, or grouped at the end as a kind of lightning round. But we hope as many members as possible will join the party. We'll probably set up a mail queue for this express purpose, but for now, please do send those questions to James Marcus via Propeller site mail. Here are the subjects, folks, along with some relevant information about each one:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Francis Ford Coppola is the writer and director of such classic films as The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). His new film, Youth Without Youth, is based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade, and will open in the U.S. in December.

ALEX ROSS
Alex Ross writes about classical music for The New Yorker (and occasionally contributes profiles of such hard-to-pigeonhole performers as Björk). He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was just chosen by The New York Times as one of The Ten Best Books of 2007. Ross blogs about his many musical interests at The Rest Is Noise.com.

GARRETT M. GRAFF
Garrett M. Graff is the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com, and was the first blogger ever to cover a White House press briefing. While still a teenager, he worked on Howard Dean's campaign, serving as the candidate's first webmaster. He is currently an editor-at-large at Washingtonian magazine, and is about to publish The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. You can learn more about him here, and check out his personal blog here.

Tags: interview

1 Comments