Politinerds: The Andrew Malcom Interview
This week on Politinerds, Jazz Shaw and I interview Andrew Malcom, currently a columnist at Investors Business Daily, and previously a national and international correspondent for The New York Times. Andrew’s time in journalism stretches back to the era of the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and Watergate. During his time at the Times, he reported from several American cities, as well as Toronto and Tokyo, where he served as Bureau Chief. He is also the author of ten non-fiction books, two of which have been made into movies, and has won several prominent journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for National Reporting, two Page One Awards, a National Headliners Award, two Penney-Missouri Awards for feature writing and the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. Award for Editorial Writing. In the 1990s, Andrew entered the political world and served in the cabinet of former Montana Governor Marc Racicot as Director of Communications and Executive Assistant. In 1999, Malcom went to Texas to work for the campaign of then Governor George W. Bush, eventually becoming Press Secretary for First Lady Laura Bush. After that foray into politics, Andrew returned to journalism at the Los Angeles Times where he helped established one the massively successful Top Of The Ticket blog, one of the first real blogs at a mainstream press institution.
In our interview, Andrew shares stories of his early years in journalism, including the ways in which the world of journalism has changed, as well as some of the stories behind the books he wrote. At one point, he gets into a fascinating story about walking through the battlefield at Waterloo in Belgium and running across a Flemish farmer who lived on the land. We ran well over the thirty minutes we typically try to limit the show to, and even then there were subject matters we didn’t have time to touch on, so we’ll be having Andrew back at some point in the near future to share more stories, including what it was like to get nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Here’s the full interview:
Reading the name Andrew Malcolm reminded me about a tv series from 2002 starring David Morse.