#311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED

Nick Thompson (@nxthompson) is the editor-in-chief of WIRED. Under his leadership, Wired has launched a successful paywall, a Snapchat channel, and an AMP Stories edition; it has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards in design and feature writing. Nick is a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning. He is also co-founder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award-winning digital publication. Prior to joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com from 2012 to 2017. Before The New Yorker, Nick was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. In 2009, his book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War was published to critical acclaim. In February 2018, Thompson co-wrote WIRED's cover story Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook -- and the World, an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees. In this conversation, we cover a wide range of topics, questions, and skills, including:What makes a good pitch?How does a good features writer (or editor) "map" a story?How does writing get optioned for feature film, and what are important deal points?How can publishers (and website or blog owners) hire and pay good long-form writers?And much more...Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn and its job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you've ever hired anyone (or attempted to), you know finding the right people can be difficult. If you don't have a direct referral from someone you trust, you're left to use job boards that don't offer any real-world networking approach. LinkedIn, as the world's largest professional network -- used by more than 70 percent of the US workforce -- has a built-in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them, their connecti