Balancing your inner and your outer readers

Bruce Headlam, who worked once at Saturday Night and Canadian Business, is now the media and marketing editor for the New York Times and in charge of Business Day, the Monday special section of the Times. (If you want to ask him some questions -- maybe about the good old days -- you can do so Oct. 9-12. Send your questions to askthetimes@nytimes.com.)

Before joining the business section, Headlam worked on two weekly sections, Circuits and Escapes, at The New York Times and was an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Slate, says a Times notice, which goes on:

Before that, Mr. Headlam was an editor at Saturday Night magazine, "which is sadly no longer with us," he said, and the still-thriving Canadian Business magazine. His first professional writing — "if you can call it that," he said — was for the comedy group “Nasty, Brutish and Short.”

Headlam answers a series of questions in the "Talk to the Newsroom" feature, one of which is why the Times gives so much coverage to media and advertising. He says he thinks there are two kinds of readers, inner and outer.

The inner reader is someone either employed or deeply involved in the media or technology businesses and the outer reader is an interested spectator. When the section works well, we hit the perfect balance between those readers’ interests. If the casual reader isn’t drawn into any of the articles or finds the section too "inside baseball," then I haven’t done my job.