Ask Aspen: What's the Most Misunderstood Aspect About Your Job?
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, we're asking the jet-setting attendees one big question a day. Today: What's the most misunderstood aspect about your job?
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Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
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"The most misunderstood aspect is definitely that I don't like old media. I love old media. I don't think it's either or. I read The Atlantic regularly, I subscribe to eight newspapers and I think the future will be hybrid—a combination of old media that get new media and new media that get the values of traditional journalism ... It sometimes takes longer than we'd like for the narrative to change."
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Peter Orszag, vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup.
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"Especially in Washington... the perception, the misunderstanding, that people who go from government to business only wind up doing lobbying and that has zero to do with what I'm doing. I'm doing a lot of corporate advisory work, I'm doing a lot of data analystical work and I'm having nothing to do with my previous existence."
Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans.
"People think I fill pot holes and actually handle zoning law day-to-day, and everyone expects the mayor both to be the firefighter and the guy that sets major policy every day all day. But I think people understand the job really well. They expect you to be here all the time, they expect you to respond to their phone calls ... It's like being an emergency room physician in a war zone, is what being the mayor of a major American city is like."
Andrew Ross Sorkin, financial columnist for The New York Times, editor of DealBook and co-host of CNBC's Squawk Box.
"One is that reporters are really ultimately just good at picking up the phone, meaning, that people are just somehow calling you and telling you the news. I wish this was the case but it isn't. For me, personally, because I'm on TV in the morning and then writing by day, people think I don't sleep and that's not true; I actually sleep a lot. And also, there's a lot of misperception about the bias of business reporters. Historically, in my experience, you're usually writing a story so fast that you traditionally don't have time to think about what your view of the world is in this context."
