Ramiro Burr interviewed Billboard Editor Timothy White on the occasion of the magazine's major redesign in late summer 2001.

Q: WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH WHEN YOU REDESIGNED BILLBOARD??
A: In some ways, it’s really a change for its own change. I think in conventional magazine wisdom, you need to have a redesign every decade or so. Even when I was an editor at Rolling Stone, there was always that feeling. You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency. People take it for granted and they get to know all the different neighborhoods, and the impact of what’s being provided can be lessened. No publication is a staple of life. It’s not bread and water. You have to make it noteworthy in people’s minds and even in their hands as they’re holding it. The whole point of Billboard is that it’s got to be maximum new information for people who are absolute experts. Virtually our entire readership is super-expert in everything there is to know about the music industry, and we’ve got to get them an issue that says, ‘Surprise, you didn’t know any of this.’ But design can help telegraph that. It can clarify the fact of it. Billboard is exhausting to do every week. It’s really the most exhausting job I’ve ever had, and everybody seems to agree. It’s fun, but it’s really draining. And to put that much effort into it, and have it not feel fresh when it arrives in people’s hands, it would make no logical sense. I’ve been at the magazine 11 years. I was part of someone else’s plan to really change the magazine. So I think we need to change it again so people didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, we’ve gone through an evolution and there won’t be another one.’ There will always be another one.

Q: WHY IS CHANGE IMPORTANT?
A: I think people take the fact of things for granted. Particularly established things.

Q: DOES THIS HELP TO KEEP YOU FRESH?
A: I think it revives our dedication to the task, too. The nature of the task needs to be renewed so people just don’t feel that all the hard work is in the same groove all the time, under the same circumstances and in the same environment.

Q: GOAL TO MAKE IT MORE READER FRIENDLY?
A: It’s supposed to be a combination of things. We found, in talking to people, that they’d begun to feel that the charts were very dry looking. There was a time when people used to post the charts in stores. And very often they still do. But people had started to feel that the information was kind of dry looking. In most cases it was just pure black and white with a little bit of a color tint. We wanted them to be more dramatic. There’s so much information in them. We wanted to kind of accent the presence of all that information. Publishing information. Whether it has a video or not. Obviously things like bullets. Writer credits, production credits. We wanted to make people realize that it’s not just a gray blur. There’s a lot going on there. The charts are an information resource, not just for sales and relative positioning, but who’s helping fuel these accomplishments. The label, the people involved. There’s a lot there. We didn’t want for people’s eyes to glaze over and just go to the chart positions and leave the rest of the information behind. The second thing that we did was create these indexes, so people realize now, that at a glance, you can see an enormous amount of information as a cross-reference. You can look at the chart/artist index and the chart/song index, and you can go to an artist name and find their position on every single chart in the magazine. There are like 37-odd principal charts and a long list of other charts—subsidiary and ancillary charts, including international charts. To be able to look up an artist’s name, and see where they are everywhere that week, we’ve never been able to do that before. The charts and the changes took almost a year. That took longer than anything else. Technically, logistically, it was an enormously difficult task. Everything’s got to be super-double accurate, and it’s got to come out every single week. All these vessels have to come out with brand-new information in them and everything’s got to be perfectly delineated. And just the programming headaches of any kind of redesign were almost too difficult to face.

Q: WHO ELSE HELPED YOU IN THIS PROJECT?
A: Me, Howard Lander, all the writers, we’re all custodians of this long, long tradition. A lot of people feel that this is their publication. And we come in and start rearranging the furniture, it’s like we came into their house and redecorated and didn’t even bother to knock. I think Billboard is a very intimate experience for a lot of people. And it’s like ‘Hey you, what are you doing with that lamp?’

Q: HOW IS THE REDESIGN IN LINE WITH THE MISSION OF BILLBOARD? 
A: We want everybody to read all of it. We don’t them to just go to certain neighborhoods and not read the rest. If people were just thinking ‘I know what Billboard is,’ it would be disheartening to us, because it’s meant to share a lot of information. We want you to subscribe, but we want you to steal us blind. Take everything. It’s really great information, because it’s where the music business is going to be 3-6 months from now. Right now, these are the great albums that are coming. These are the issues that will be most important. Particularly for the consumer press. I’m going to the David Letterman Show to see a taping of this woman, Jamie O’Neill. I did a column on her and now she’s got two Number Ones and has won a bunch of awards, and it’s like ‘Hey, this is great.’ But I know Shelia Rogers at the Letterman Show when I’ve seen her on the street, that they try to get Billboard on a Friday, when it first comes out, because they will use it to book the show. But we have to make sure that they still care on that level and there’s still plenty for them to steal.

Q: IS THE LATIN MUSIC EXPLOSION COMING FROM THE STREETS AND IS THAT WHAT BILLBOARD TRIES TO COVER?
A: I think it’s true of the No. 1 culture in the Americas, particularly North America, and I just think it’s a consequence of the mainstream impact that the music is having. I was talking to Tito Puente’s son the other night at the Billboard Dance Music Conference. I grew up in Patterson, New Jersey, which was a mill town on the eastern seaboard. Had a lot of West Indians which was how I got into reggae, ska, and calypso as a kid. A lot of Latin people, a lot of Puerto Ricans, a lot of black people. And these were all my friends at school, No. 25. I remember when I moved to New York and started going to school, I went to Corso and those Latin clubs. I used to see Tito Puente. You knew because of your range of experience what a superstar he was, but he was not a superstar the way he could or should have been in mainstream music culture at that point.
It’s not an Anglo-Saxon country anymore. And it’s never going to be again. And that’s really exciting and so great, but it’s also business. We’re how to reflect really accurately where the audiences are.

Q: HOW ARE YOU WORKING TO ENSURE CHARTS ARE ACCURATE?
A: We constantly review the panels. Geoff Mayfield would be the best person to talk to. You could give him a shout as to the kind of rigorous process of making sure the panels are honest. Checking any kind of bell curves and strange blips. Are people buying airtime? Are piece goods flying out the door in some sort of curious way? Anytime we see some kind of odd ripple that can’t easily be explained, we’re on the phone to the chains and the labels and everybody. We’re not taking their word for it anymore. We’re looking at hard numbers, computer-monitored play, and we want a really close relationship with our panels and the people who report to all the different charts. People get kicked off on a need-to-do-so basis. There are a lot of hard feelings. They have to live up to really rigorous scrutiny. It’s such a funny thing because people try to so hard to get in, to get under, to try to find an attic window, a cellar door, but I think that at the end of the day, we’re kind of like their parents. They want to have someone who they know that cares about the high ground. People have always said to me, ‘We can’t be so bad if we’ve got someone like you, meaning Billboard, standing for something and trying to keep it honest.’ That translates into the coverage, too. Billboard has taken a lot of stands that could only make us lonesome in our ideals. It doesn’t make us friends easily per se, but we just had to do it. Like the whole work-for-hire controversy and things, it’s just too bad. People don’t have a right to do that. People have to think about everybody else’s interests and not just their own. The Congress and the Senate backed us up on a bipartisan on a story that we discovered and followed the thread of all the way through. We understand the business so much better than civilians do. We’re backstage and really see the mechanisms and if we don’t tell the truth, who the heck is going to tell the truth? I’d rather have people be angry at us but respect than be really happy and smiley with us and have no respect for us whatsoever.

Q: WHAT ABOUT OUR CELEBRITY CULTURE HOW LONG WILL BIG TEEN-POP TREND GO ON?
A: I think it’s very possible for reasons that aren’t germane to NSync. When things get generic in a genre, you’ve got problems. Whether it’s heavy metal, or reggae, or pop music of any strain. When things are getting more are more similar, because people are going out and trying the best they can to imitate the success of someone, it’s just really difficult to maintain the mystique that entertainment has to have. Mystique is not a toy clock that you can pry the back off and think, ‘I see how this works.’ You have to feel that it has an element of surprise and a dimension to it, and it’s constantly unfolding. This business can be very greedy and unrelenting in how they choose to market something. They won’t leave it alone until it’s just completely exhausted. On the other hand, if someone is really excellent and has the capacity to reinvent themselves, then anything’s possible. You can only point to the truly exceptional people to make those kinds of points. The Beatles were part of the British Invasion, but they’re not even seen as part of the British Invasion. Reggae was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, but you look at Bob Marley and reggae, they have almost nothing to do with each other, because one was so much more excellent and self-revelatory than the other. Madonna was part of a really strong modern resurgence of female pop. But she prevailed, because other people weren’t half as good as her. I think a few years ago when women across the board were really riding high on the charts, and there were a lot of people signed that weren’t half as good as the key ones, but I think also it was because it was one of the best things available at that time. Women were writing the best songs and leading the best bands.

Q: DO YOU THINK IT IS CYCLICAL?
A: I think the music industry can deliberately create artistic seasons. But there’s a whole different artistic landscape that has nothing to do with those seasons. I think the music business is sometimes successful in creating artificial season. I think that one or more of these teen-pop acts may endure because they’ll mature, the way the Bee Gees did. Most of them, I believe, will not, because after a while they become a known quantity and you’ve got to be better than the best. You’ve got to be truly exceptional because people want exceptional things at the end of the day. Also, historically, it’s been very hard to sell back catalog for any teen trend. It just hasn’t. So we’re talking about the teen-pop thing right now, whether it’s male or female. I don’t think it makes much difference. There isn’t going to be another Madonna or another Beatles or another Bob Marley. What there’s going to be is something completely unique and to itself. There’s not going to be another Bee Gees. There’s going to be something that’s so unique, that the only fit adjective for it is its name. However, in terms of cycles, which I thing is a different thing, we’re talking about marketing. Trying to sell something that the industry sees as catching on. In terms of cycles, I think the industry has always gone in eight- to nine-year-cycles. I think how that works is the industry gets very good at commodifying and packaging popular things, but then people get tired of being oversold. Little kids, adults. It’s at that point that the more organic music rises to the surface and finds its own natural audience, and that prevails for another eight or nine years until they find ways to commodify it again. It’s like a marketplace where people gravitate in an instinctual way to things they find worthwhile. Then, something that started out worthwhile gets really commodified and turned into a breakfast cereal or something. I think we’re coming into a eight- to nine-year cycle where roots music of all kinds is going to be really important and really popular in the United States. Roots music and modern incarnations of it. I think that’s true for everything from conventional country music, to regional Mexican, to rock ‘n’ roll, to anything. I think the fact that the ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou,’ soundtrack is No. 1 in country and continues to be No. 1 is a very inconvenient thing for the country industry. It’s not what they wanted or intended. Now that said, it’s still on a major label, so you want to give people credit where it’s due. But it was not this thing that they were shoving down the world’s throat sideways. People want this pure, deeply felt music that doesn’t feel really self-aware and really conscious of its being a product. It’s more than that.

Q: CONTINUING COARSENESS IN CULTURE, NO WAY OUT?
A: I think we get the culture we deserve. If you’re diving for the bottom, there’s no bottom to the bottom. If you want to make the most money, dive for the bottom. There is nothing we could talk about on the phone right now, no heinous, horrible, racist, misogynist, bigoted thing you and I could think of out of thin air that hasn’t already been done by human beings. Nothing so awful or terrible that people haven’t actually done it. The point in life and in culture is to lead people and teach our kids, ‘You don’t go along with everybody.’ There were pro-lynching songs. One of the most popular songs in America was ‘All Coons Look Alike To Me,’ the song that Sophie Tucker sang. She had it in her set up until the 1950s. A heinous, racist, utterly worthless song. But if you want to sell that to people, you’re going to get rich. But you’re a bad person who should ashamed of him or herself. Everybody needs leadership. I think we’ve had a situation where we haven’t had much leadership, across the board. Bob Marley could have gone with his friends and been a Rude Boy. Then he would have grown up and made gangster reggae instead of the reggae he made. All his friends were Rude Boys. What did Bob Marley become a Rasta instead? Because he was lonely in his ideals. As a journalist, if you don’t feel lonesome most of the week, you’re probably not very good at your job. As an artist, you should feel lonesome in your ideals, too. Take the difficult, lonesome path. It’s usually the better path. If you want to sell racism, or anti-Semitism, or bigotry, you will sell more than anybody else. Because human beings are weak. And they need strength in leadership from other people. We don’t have a lot of leadership. My feeling in terms of the music industry, in terms of the artist community, and in terms of the journalism community, is if you’re looking for weakness, you’re going to find it very easily. But if you’re looking for strength, you’d better look for it in yourself. If you and I want better journalism, we’d better create it ourselves. If we want better kids, we’d better raise them ourselves. If we want better songs, or better music to dominate the marketplace, we have to create it ourselves. Cancel all your meetings, write the better songs. Get used to being lonesome. We should all feel a little lonesome, all the time, and let our children see that we’re comfortable with that lonesomeness, and not just play to the house, and go along with the crowd. Doing that creates every horrible racist, nightmarish thing that’s ever befallen humanity.

Q: KIND OF LIKE THROWING CHRISTIANS AT THE LIONS?
A: I don’t think they ever had an empty seat. Slavery became a worldwide institution because no one would be lonesome and say ‘No, I’m not doing to do this to this person. I’m not going to tear this family apart. I’m not going to diminish the human spirit this way.’ That’s true for me, too. I’m going to turn 50; I’m going to be the lonesome person. If it makes my life hard, which it has, if it makes my job hard, which it has, too bad. This is the moment. I say it to my friends at MTV, my fellow journalists, the artists. It’s not important to get rich. What’s important is to get off this planet with a clean slate. My parents used to say to me, ‘You got to be willing to be the last good person.’ I’d just say, ‘Mom, don’t say that to me! It’s too hard!’ She said, ‘No, I love you, that’s all you need to know.’ Both my parents are gone, but hey, they’re my heroes. And I’m going to take their advice.

Timothy White passed away June 27, 2002 in New York City at the age of 50.