WHO WE ARE

Sam Apple
Publisher, Editor-in-Chief

Sam Apple, a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, is the former director of interactive media at Nerve. He has served as the editor-in-chief of New Voices Magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005, he received the annual Faux-Faulkner award. His second book, American Parent, was published in 2009 (Ballantine). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Email: samapple@thefastertimes.com

Adam Wilson
Editor

Adam Wilson’s first novel, Flatscreen will be published by Harper Perennial in Winter 2012. He is a former culture columnist for Blackbook, and a former TV blogger for Flavorwire. His journalism, criticism, and fiction have appeared in many publications including Bookforum, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Meridian, Washington Square Review, Gigantic, Time Out New York, The Forward, Paste, Boldtype, The Rumpus, JBooks, Ralph Lauren’s Rugby.com, and the anthologies Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, Promised Lands: New Jewish Fiction on Longing and Belonging, and the forthcoming A Friday Night Lights Companion: Love, Loss, and Football in Dillon, Texas. He holds a BA from Tufts University, and an MFA from Columbia University, where he received a Merit Fellowship. He has thrice been a finalist for Glimmer Train story prizes, and was also a finalist for the 2009 Canteen Prize, and the 2009 Gulf Coast Prize. In 2007 he was honored as a Distinguished Lecturer by the Lewis and Mildred Resnik Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life at SUNY, New Paltz. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat.Email: adamwilson@thefastertimes.com

Joe Lazauskas
Director of Content and Community

From the yet-to-be-released July 14, 2014 edition of the NYT: ”Joe Lazauskas ’one of the most troubled young writers and editors we’ve seen in a long time…Why he moved in with Charlie Sheen, we’ll never know.” Joe has worked for the sex and literary magazine, Nerve, and it’s parenting-minded offspring, Babble. Currently, Joe lives in the East Village, but plans on sleeping at TFT’s Soho headquarters once the couch arrives. He’s known in Sarah Lawrence College circles for his self-destructive behavior and strong work ethic. Email: joe@thefastertimes.com; Twitter: @joelazauskas; Facebook: Joe Lazauskas

Kathleen Hale

Senior Editor

Kathleen Hale is a writer from Wisconsin.  Her work has won awards from PRISM International Magazine, Glimmer Train Press, and has been nominated a couple of times for The Pushcart Prize.  You can email her at kathleenhale@post.harvard.edu or follow her on twitter here.

Adam Baer

Editor-at-Large, Travel Editor

A former Travel + Leisure correspondent and NPR producer, Adam Baer has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, GQ, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Men’s Health, among many other publications. In the online sphere, he has contributed to Slate.com, Salon.com, the New Republic Online, the Atlantic.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, NPR.org, and CondeNet. His essays have appeared in books including “A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise” and “Lost and Found: Stories from New York.” A born and bred New Yorker, he has lived in Los Angeles for five years and still wakes up on Eastern Standard Time..

Anna Pamela Calinawan
Managing Editor

Anna Pamela grew up in the Philippines and lives in New York.

Nathan Hegedus
News and Politics Editor

Nathan Hegedus blogs about the changing nature of fatherhood and life on paternity leave in ”socialist” Sweden at Dispatches from Daddyland.

He has lived for the past two years in Stockholm with his wife and two small children. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and lonelyplanet.com, among other places. He also spent five years as a reporter and editor at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York covering the expanding edge of the New York City exurbs. He graduated from Swarthmore College and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and also spent three years in rural war-torn Croatia towns working first in grassroots peace projects then for an American non-profit.

Michelle Koufopoulos

Tech Editor, Assistant Editor

Michelle Koufopoulos is a writer, editor, book lover and tea enthusiast. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year studying at Oxford University, being indoctrinated into British culture while working on her novel set in Paris in the 1920s. She writes regularly for theFairfield Minuteman and splits her time between Connecticut, Westchester, and New York City. You can reach her via michelle@thefastertimes.com and follow her on Twitter @_belletristic_

Daria Vaisman
Senior Editor, World Editor

Daria Vaisman’s writing has appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic Online, among others. She recently received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The MacDowell Colony. While living in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 2004 to 2007, Daria briefly worked for the country’s former prime minister, was an analyst at Transparency International, and later associate country director at Eurasia Foundation. She now monitors the post-Soviet “breakaway” states for Freedom House. She received a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University and a certificate from Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Her first book, a narrative non-fiction account of US foreign policy in the former Soviet Union, will be published by Free Press in 2011.

Zoe Singer
Food Editor

Zoe Singer is a freelance food writer and co-author of The Flexitarian Table. Her food writing, photography and recipes appear in publications including The Financial Times, Body & Soul Magazine, Epicurious.com and Chow.com. She is a regular contributor to Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan and is included in an upcoming collection of essays published by Edible Communities. A former food blogger for New York Magazine, she edits cookbooks for Food & Wine Magazine, blogs for FitPregnancy.com and still eats for two even though she already had the baby.

Lincoln Michel
Books Editor

Lincoln Michel’s fiction and criticism appear in The Oxford American, Mississippi Review, Bookforum, Esquire.com, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. He is a co-editor of Gigantic magazine and keeps a personal blog at lincolnmm.blogspot.com.

Katharine Whittemore
Parents Editor

Katharine Whittemore was the features editor at Wondertime magazine, the parenting magazine that didn’t read like a parenting magazine. It won two National Magazine Award nominations in its first two years, though that wasn¹t enough to keep it afloat in this economy. But it was a beautiful ride. She has also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon.com, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. She lives with her husband and two children in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Mason Lerner
Sports Editor

Mason Lerner is a freelance writer and stand-up comedian in Austin, TX. His works has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, ESPN the Magazine and many other publications. Lerner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Anthropology. He has a football soul that was torn in two by decades of torture at the hands of his hometown Houston Oilers before their exile in 1996 and their subsequent replacement by the Houston Texans, an organization that has been like an infestation of incurable head lice in its ability to keep Lerner scratching his gigantic dome. You see, Lerner was essentially a life-sized bobble-head doll until an extensive weight training program allowed his body to catch up with his planet-sized melon in 2003. When he is down, he closes his eyes and imagines Hakeem Olajuwon shooting baseline jumpers. He still believes that VY will be back. And don’t expect him to have anything nice to say about Oklahoma. Ever.

Lindsey Kempton

TV and Entertainment News Editor, Associate Editor

David Martin

Assistant Editor

Born in Luxembourg to a German mother and an English father, David Martin left the small Duchy to London, where he is currently into his last year for his BA in journalism and contemporary history. He just returned from a year abroad in Toronto where his affinity for Smokes’s Poutine and Canadian Club flourished, while his conviction in the Maple Leafs proved disappointingly short-lived. David writes about the politics he finds important, the sports he worships religiously and the technology he can barely afford. He implores you all to follow on him on Twitter, although he predominantly uses it to abuse Piers Morgan.

Andrew Meyers

Design Editor

Andrew Meyers writes extensively about architecture, design, and the fine and decorative arts for the Robb Report and Modern Luxury families of magazines, as well as 1stdibs.com and a catalogue of shelter magazines too long (and boring) to mention. But the fun doesn’t stop there: He is also editor-in-chief of Men’s Book Los Angeles, a biannual oversized glossy focusing on the big questions of the day. No, not healthcare and global warming; the really big questions. Like what is the new star-studded restaurant that probably won’t last six months; why you owe it to yourself to buy bespoke; and what does the perfect jean make. Myers, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and studied at Stanford (undergrad) and UCLA (grad), knows it’s all about priorities.

Veronica Mittnacht
Associate Editor, College Editor

Rebecca Taylor
Assistant Editor, Help Desk Editor

Rebecca Taylor was born and raised in the Virginia woods. Now she lives and writes in New York City.

Contributing Editors

Josh Hersh
Oliver Miller

Design:

Mandalee Meisner
Designer-at-Large

Mandalee Meisner studied journalism in Kansas before moving to Brooklyn. In 2005, she began designing for Nerve.com. She designed Babble.com and now keeps it looking pretty. She dreams of one day bringing competitive empty beer can stacking to the Olympics.

Amanda Walgrove

Editorial Assistant

Amanda is a native New Yorker. She has written for Moment Magazine and Lilith Magazine but is more than willing to write for secular publications as well. In her spare time, she enjoys long walks on the treadmill, 90’s sitcoms, and copious amounts of peanut m&ms. Reach her at amanda@thefastertimes.com

Alex Hughes

Editorial Assistant

Alex Hughes was born in the Bible Belt and moved to New York to study at Sarah Lawrence College. Although his first year’s studies revolved around lesbians, city planning, and feminist film, he tries to focus his academics on journalism and nonfiction writing. He is an editorial intern at The Faster Times this summer while living in Harlem. He can be contacted at:alex@thefastertimes.com

Kyle Kouri

Editorial Assistant

Kyle Kouri is a writer. He lives in New York. Follow him @KyleKouri. Email him at kyle@thefastertimes.com

Matt Albersworth

Editorial Assistant

Matt Alberswerth was born and raised in Washington D.C. He voluntarily subjects himself to Redskins games on a regular basis. Currently, he attends Sarah Lawrence College  where he studies literature and history.

Ella Riley-Adams

Editorial Assistant

Ella Riley-Adams comes from a small town in Southern Oregon. Please pronounce her home state correctly. The “gon” is in fact, “gun.” Aside from exercising her love for grammar, Ella also enjoys champagne, soccer and swimming in ponds. She is a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studies French, writing and digital media. She recently founded an online magazine, SLCSpeaks, which aims to create community and curate intelligent commentary. Read more of Ella’s musings here.

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OUR MISSION

The print newspaper is in trouble. A lot of journalists joke about it. We don’t think it’s funny. Most of the writers and editors at The Faster Times have written for a print newspaper. They were our livelihoods, but they were also much more than our livelihoods. They were a way of pushing back the chaos of the modern world. Things happened, and the next day you could read about those things in your morning paper. The orderliness might have been an illusion, but it was a comforting illusion.

Time is always fast, but some times are faster than others. For American journalism, these are faster times.

A few years ago, a daily accounting of the news still felt sufficient. Now, by the time our newspapers arrive on our doorsteps, we already know what they will say. This, of course, is not news. Everyone recognizes that the medium of the daily newspaper is too slow for our faster world. But the slowness itself is not the fundamental crisis facing American journalism. If speed is the solution, then the problem has already been solved. We have all of the blog posts and tweets we will ever need right now.

The crisis of American journalism is, instead, a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive. So, the question is not whether there is a way to keep up with the constant appetite for news, but whether there is a way to keep up without foregoing great writing and reporting.

There will be many different answers to the questions facing the journalism industry in the coming years. Our answer is The Faster Times, a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.

The Faster Times is a collective of great journalists who have come together to try something new. As we launch this July, we will have more than a hundred correspondents in over 20 countries. We have someone on the ground in Kenya and someone else reporting from Lebanon. Our arts section will cover not just film and books, but also theater and dance and photography. We will launch with seven writers on books alone. These writers are not “citizen journalists” but among the most accomplished and recognized names in their respective fields.

We’re not kidding ourselves. The Faster Times is not going to solve any major crises by itself. We are an organization owned and created by journalists. We have not sought any funding and, for the time being, we have very limited financial resources.

But while our limited resources will limit the number of reported pieces on the site in our first months of operation, we have no intention of shying away from the challenge. Our goal is to do what great papers have always done: look at the world with skeptical eyes and uncover information that the public needs to know. We will not, in most cases, be publishing 1200-word reported pieces, but we will be making calls and asking hard questions. And when our reporters discover something of interest, they will publish it and invite our readers to help push the story forward with their tips and insights.

Of course, these are not just faster times. They are also stranger times. And a quick look at The Faster Times will reveal that, despite the seriousness of our intentions, we also have a great appreciation for the not-so-serious. In our “Nonsense” section, we will have coverage of pro-wrestling and also a writer dedicated entirely to feet. In our Tech section, you can find not only great writing on the computer industry but also regular reports from our jetpacks correspondent.

We hope you’ll join us for this experiment in journalism. We are not sure what’s going to happen, but we are sure that we need new approaches. Time is of the essence.

The Faster Times is a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.