E-Mail This Article to a Friend Caught in the act (continued)

Q: What documents are on your wish list?

A: The one thing that we’ve tried really hard to get — and as a Bostonian, you would appreciate this — there is a mug shot of George Steinbrenner that exists. When he got charged for those illegal campaign contributions to the Nixon campaign, we know that he was photographed by the United States Marshals Service. It’s not a document, it’s not a piece of paper, but that’s the thing — we hate the Yankees, for the most part; we’re Mets fans, and we would murder someone if we could get a copy of George Steinbrenner’s mug shot. We really don’t have anything else we would say is on the to-do list. But we have spent a lot of time over the years attempting to track [it] down and have been thwarted at every turn. We just thought, the posters and the T-shirts and the shrines — we have a whole merchandise thing ready to roll out.

There is one [other] thing we would like: we have a whole section on the site that is these backstage concert riders. We really would love to get the original Van Halen concert rider in which they ask for the brown M&M’s to be removed from the candy bowl backstage. That’s the iconic rider. We’d also love an Elvis Presley rider, if someone had one.

Q: Why are people so fascinated by concert riders?

A: I don’t know. I think it’s just the idea that here’s a free peek into your favorite artist’s or your favorite group’s needs. It’s not a public document, and I guess people just like to know what kind of sparkling water Aerosmith needs, or when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing, they’d like to know exactly what time Clarence Clemons’s whole chicken should be cooked and ready for him. I think the details can be amusing. I think it’s the desire to find out something about your favorite performer that isn’t readily available on that person’s Web site, or in the laudatory profiles that appear regularly about him or her or the group itself.

Q: Do you have any desire to dig stuff up that would affect the outcome of the election?

A: Sure. We would love to. Absolutely. It’s a tough thing to do when it’s not the only thing we’re covering, we’re not traveling with campaign people. We’re the ones who dug up that old Arnold Schwarzenegger interview during the gubernatorial race in which he talks about the drug use and having sex with women in gyms and these other crazy things. So yeah, we’d love to. That’s a tough thing to do with a small staff. If we had a bunch more people, I think that would be something we’d certainly want to do.

Q: Does knowing how easy it is to obtain so much personal information about people affect how you live your own life? Does it make you more careful?

A: My phone number is listed; if you want to know where I live or my age or my party affiliation, you can just pick up the phone and call the Board of Elections and you can get that. I do nothing to mask [it]. You could use the very same techniques that are available to any member of the public to figure out whatever you want about me. If someone is determined to find out that stuff, they’re going to find out that stuff. I have other things to do than worry about it. I mean, I wrote about the Mafia, and never wrote a nice word about it. I don’t think I ever wrote a nice word about anyone I ever wrote stories about. I wrote tough things about a lot of not-so-nice people, and my phone number was always listed, and if someone wanted to do something, they could’ve very easily figured out where I was, and it never happened. So I guess until that day comes, I don’t really give it much thought.

Q: What’s with all the reality-show people on the site?

A: We don’t really do as much stuff on reality-television-show contestants [anymore], because we kind of got a little tired of that. We did a lot of that. If we had to, we could probably do a site that was totally devoted to that. But we [recently] found out that one of the guys who’s on the new season of The Real World pleaded guilty last year to assaulting a police horse. If we had heard he’d been arrested for assault, we probably would have said, not so interesting, but he was roughing up a horse. That reaches a level where we’ll probably do something.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Things just kind of percolate. We follow a lot of different civil and criminal cases where we’re constantly reviewing new filings, and we’re checking court files. We have a large roster of things that we always have our fingers on to see what’s going on, and more often than not, when something happens, we’ll be the first ones to pounce on it, or the only ones who are even looking in the first place. I think one of the things we do fairly well is, we generate a lot of stories that are enterprise stories. We just come up with them. I think that’s one of the better things that we do; we try to do something so that a competitor or a fellow reporter wonders, how’d they come up with that? Why didn’t I think of that? Like anyone would want to do. I think we do that pretty well.

Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com