I
usually have at least 100 people read (a new book). They have to be
people I don’t know. Because my books are positioned initially to be
used at work, we will contact a person in a company and someone who has
bought one of my books before or one of the training programs based on
the books, and we ask them if someone else in the company would like to
read the manuscript. I ask people to ask other people in their office
so that there is no direct connection and I am not told what they think
I want to hear.

In
the past three weeks, Newsweek’s covers reflected the good, the bad and
the ugly in American popular culture — and offered a lesson to
magazines at the same time.

The magazine’s editors determined
that there could be as much value in focusing on the hoi polloi
crowding around your office water-cooler as the policy wonks at the
Brookings Institution.

Recently, the weekly’s cover stories
had nothing to do with such Ivory Tower staples as the U.S. economy,
Iraq, the Middle East, President Bush’s declining approval rating or
Wesley Clark’s emergence.

Instead, Newsweek widened its lens
and highlighted the last season of America’s favorite television show,
“Friends” (the good), Kobe Bryant’s rape trial (the bad) and Rush
Limbaugh’s addiction to painkillers (the ugly).

“We make these judgments based on what people are talking about,” said Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker, 46.