Would a newspaper publish 25 pages of Mike Schmidt on a Sunday today?
(“Road Work” contains Bowden’s profile of the Philadelphia Phillies third baseman, originally published in the Inquirer’s Sunday magazine in 1982.) It would depend on the newspaper, but fewer, I think. That ran in the Sunday magazine and the Inquirer doesn’t have a Sunday magazine… Having said that I think there are actually more opportunities to do that kind of work for magazines and on the Internet than when I was starting. Have you recently read or watched something, narrative journalism, that really intrigued you? I think there’s a lot of good documentary work that’s being done on the History Channel. They’ve done documentaries about terrorism and Osama Bin Laden, stuff which I found, journalistically, in my opinion broke ground. But they don’t really get recognized journalistically…. I see a lot of good reporting and writing in magazines. The New York Times Magazine, I read with great interest Peter Maass’ story about the Iraqi forces working alongside American forces that are
