As I wrote in the magazine, “Today, as Washington has become known not just for its diplomatic and federal power but also for its technological, financial, and cultural clout, there are dozens of new power venues. While power breakfasts in DC are generally focused around three hotels—the Four Seasons, the Hay-Adams, and the Mayflower—lunch can mean anything from gumbo at DC Coast to veal ravioli at Teatro Goldoni to a steak at the Capital Grille to a sandwich in downtown Bethesda.”

Huffington Post, reacting to the CNN piece today, focused on the transactional nature of many of these lunch spots—they’re close by the Hill often and thus places where lawmakers can raise money easily. That’s certainly a not insignificant part of their appeal. “You’re going to be seen, you’re going to see who else is there, and to sort of hobnob and be part of the club,” I told CNN. “The private rooms, the private dining is an important thing if you’re holding a fundraiser or you’re trying to bring together a group to try to have a private conversation.”

While my lunch favorites rotate through the year, I often end up at the Palm and West End Bistro, both of which are just a few blocks from the office.

WP Photo by Bill O'Leary

I’m not sure that I fully buy the Washington Post’s headline about me today over it’s enormous Style section profile, though it’s certainly quite the treatment. Howard Kurtz devoted his entire column today to examining my new job at Washingtonian and my path to the magazine and the Style section almost the entire above-the-fold to the accompanying photo with the print headline of “Meet the New Boss.” Thankfully, most of the Washingtonian staff knew me before the piece went up on the bulletin board in our office kitchen, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to meet me.

For the Cliff Notes version of the profile, I’m going to boil it down to the adjectives Kurtz uses to describe me: one of Washington’s hottest young journalists, neatly organized, preppy-looking, soft-spoken, relative newcomer, placid, a flair for self-promotion, methodical, meticulous, and fair. He also makes reference to my “New England reserve.” All-in-all, there are worse words one can use to describe me, although my friends I think would take issue with the “placid” and “soft-spoken.”

The Kurtz piece also led to a post on PRNewser, an amusing piece on Portfolio.com, the standard liberal media conspiracy piece on Newsbusters, and was excerpted in Politico’s Playbook. All-in-all, a big media day.

Print:

• CBS’s Public Eye (January 20, 2006)
• Washington Post’s The Reliable Source (November 28, 2005)
• The Hill (September 9, 2005)
• Washington Post’s Names & Faces (August 17, 2005)
• New York Times (March 7, 2005)
• Washingtonian (March 2005)

Television:

• CNN’s On The Story (October 22, 2005)

Radio:

• NPR’s On the Media (March 11, 2005)
• KCRW’s To The Point (March 9, 2005)
• WBUR’s On Point (March 7, 2005)

“’The best newspapers are going to end up looking like the best blogs, and the best blogs are going to end up looking a lot like the best newspapers,’ predicted a 20-something new-media prodigy named Garrett Graff five years ago. Now, ‘that’s virtually happened,’ Mr. Graff says. In 2005, he made news as the first blogger ever to be issued credentials as part of the White House press corps. This month, he takes over as editor in chief of long-established Washingtonian magazine, with 400,000 monthly readers of print and 400,000 more online.”

Probably the most interesting thing to watch is how the traditional media is giving way so quietly. There’s certainly a lot of attention about the failing of the print media empires, yet the rise of the first online media empires aren’t nearly as well covered. As I told the CSM reporter,  “It’s a really fascinating evolution that I think has happened much more quickly and with less hurrah than most people expected it to.”

For their segment “Unplugged Under 40,” CBSNews came by my office last week and spent some time talking with me about the magazine and my new job. If you watch the interview, you can see lots of my office and the strange things on my walls—plus get a nice fisheye lens-view of my nose:

There was a fair amount of pretty amusing media coverage of the announcement, most of focusing on the handover of the magazine from a 75-year-old longtime magazine legend to a 28-year-old new media newbie. Here are some of the choice excerpts:

The Washington Post called me a “hotshot” in their write-up; Portfolio headlined “And a Child Shall Edit Them,” noting that Jack’s been editor “12 years longer than his replacement has been alive”; and the Washington Examiner noted that I was “a 28-year-old former blogger who has been with the magazine for one-tenth of Limpert’s tenure.”

Gawker’s post made me laugh: “Young Garrett Graff, who started at Fishbowl DC at the age of like 15 (ROUGH ESTIMATE) and then got a job at Washingtonian, is now the new editor of Washingtonian. He is an up and coming whippersnapper if we have ever seen one. Don’t end up a cabinet member recommending foreign wars based on vague Georgetown cocktail party gossip ten years from now, Garrett. That’s how they get you.”

Perhaps my favorite commentary on the incident was the mean-spirited back-and-forth on the Washington Post’s story, including this one: “Ben Bradlee he ain’t.”

Anyway, I’m quite excited. As I told my hometown newspaper, The Times Argus, for their story: “Becoming editor, I’m not sure there is a better job in Washington, except for maybe President of the United States.”

Here’s my top ten:

1) Heyday :: Kurt Anderson’s novel about the joy and wonder of the U.S. circa 1848 was great, filled with historical nuggets about the characters who inhabited the era of Manifest Destiny.

2) The Forever War :: The memoir of the NYT’s Dexter Filkins’s coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was strikingly good and has been compared to many reviewers to Michael Herr’s Dispatches from the Vietnam War-era, although to Filkins’ credit (?) there are many fewer mind-altering drugs involved.

3) Team of Rivals :: I never tire of reading about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, at any time, I have a half-dozen such tomes in my reading pile by my bed. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s now-famous Cabinet-focused opus was a particular treat after the first third, which was as good a sleep aid as I’ve found.

4) America America :: Ethan Canin’s novel about a New York politician’s fictionalized 1972 presidential run is loosely based on Ted Kennedy’s career, though it’s worth reading more for the portrait of political hope found and lost.

5) The Best and the Brightest :: Too often when this phrase is used today it’s forgotten that David Halberstam’s classic is an indictment of the best and brightest rather than a celebration thereof. It’s amazing telling of the descent into Vietnam is all about the small decisions with outsized consequences and how we stumbled into something we didn’t really think about.

6) Nixonland :: I just finished this a few days ago here at home and am again impressed with Rick Perlstein’s ability to tell history. Following on the heels of his Goldwater history, he traces how we as a nation went from an overwhelming Lyndon Johnson victory in 1964 to an overwhelming Richard Nixon victory in 1972.

7) The Race Beat :: Looking at this third consecutive book about the ’60s and ’70s, I seem to, without realizing it, seemed to have spent a good chunk of this year reading about that period. This history of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of the reporters who covered it is half-journalism story, half-social history and a great all-around education of the period.

8 ) The Looming Tower :: One of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books I read this year as part of my budding 9/11 research (the other was the also excellent “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll), this was a fascinating history of al Qaeda’s rise and the missed opportunities we had to stop it.

9) God Is Not Great :: I spent a week in 2006 drinking my way through Scotland with Christopher Hitchens and he convinced me then, despite his famous propensity for drink, that he was a tremendous scholar. His treatise on the ways that God is corrupted on Earth was really influential in my still-evolving faith.

10) Here Comes Everybody :: Clay Shirky’s new(ish) book on social media helped refocus my teaching and thinking on the subject and has now become a central part of my class.

For 2008, I also need to give a nod to two friends who had books out this year. My college newspaper editor/mentor, Sugi, had her first novel published, Love Marriage, which draws on her Sri Lankan heritage to tell a great love story. Meanwhile, the debut novel, Blood Kin, of another college classmate, Ceridwen Dovey, reminded me of Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto, one of my favorite books of all time.

As I continue my way through all of Graham Greene’s canon, I had a number of strike-outs this year before I landed on “A Sense of Reality,” his collection of short stories, that renewed my faith in him as my favorite writer.

[Check here for my past lists: 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]

The subject of new media seems particularly of interest to foreign political groups visiting the U.S.; I’ve spoken recently to groups from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and a whole host of Latin American countries.

Here are some of the articles that I’ve been quoted in recently:

Miami Herald:

Garrett Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, believes young voters — especially the first-timers — are savvier and more committed than they’re getting credit for.

Graff pointed to the Iowa caucuses: “Four times as many under-30 voters participated in the Iowa caucuses this year as in 2004. In Missouri we saw three times as many, and in Tennessee three times as many.”

Graff believes that outreach to younger voters using technology familiar to that age group — text messaging and social websites such as Facebook — will keep them engaged through Election Day.

I was also a guest on The Guardian’s weekly tech podcast: “Garrett Graff of the Washingtonian told me more than a month ago that if Barack Obama won the election it would be because of his innovative use of the mobile phones. Mobile phones were part of an overall digital strategy that turned millions of supporters into an army of volunteers and donors. Even before the general election, Obama’s internet strategy had already proven decisive, Garrett said. He had already defeated the most powerful machine in the Democratic Party: The Clintons.”

The Boston Phoenix: “McCain is actually no Luddite…. But you wouldnít know that from the way the McCain campaign has seemed to distance itself from technology. Though the Republican candidateís Web site does have the nowadays-requisite Flash videos and a blog thatís updated a few times a day, ‘the McCain campaign seems like itís going out of its way to avoid using modern technology,’ says Garrett M. Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. ‘There is no documented proof that the McCain campaign has sent out a text message. I have never heard of it [a McCain text message], and I know of no one who has.’”

Now, just for the record, the McCain campaign did, after this article came out, send a single text message to voters the day before the election. One text message. Once.

Continuing my unofficial international speaking tour, I’m off to Duke next weekend for a panel and then on to the University of Missouri, Westminster College, and then, of all places, Spain to speak at the 2008 NewsXchange conference.

I’m happy today that it was caught on video. On the other hand, if Hillary had won, I probably wouldn’t be bragging about my crystal ball powers.