“It’s not lost on me,” Jason Bateman said, “personally, that the single most successful thing in my career is something that we never even thought was going to be a job.”

“She’s front and center, critical to everything NBC News will be doing, hopefully for a long time to come,” said Noah Oppenheim of Savannah Guthrie. “She does have this extraordinary expertise and aptitude for the political stuff. But her range is broader than anyone’s. There isn’t a story I wouldn’t feel comfortable in saying that she could dominate covering.”

“I remember sitting next to Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, at an internal Time Inc. event that was celebrating journalists. And he asked what I had done before Fortune, and I said, ‘Oh, I worked at Goldman.’ And he looked at me like, why would I leave that to do this? And I thought, Uh-oh, it’s over.”

“The whole ‘first thing’ is very nuanced for me,” Vega says. “I think about it in terms of my family. I think of my community. But I have to be very conscious about how much pressure I'm putting on myself. That can be an exhausting drumbeat to have to hit all the time. Sometimes it's just like, ‘Guys, we’ve got to fix this. It shouldn't be this hard. Where are the people? Why is it taking this long?'”

“Mad has always had a general mocking, class-clown approach to society’s ills, but sometimes there are things that we can’t ignore that are too serious to simply joke about,” Mr. Morrison wrote.

“These are big, big issues that we deal with,” Brian Michael Bendis said. “Truth, justice and the American way. These things are under siege. This is the world we live in. These are not absolute things anymore. These are things worth fighting for.”