Publishing For Dummies

Harry Siegel, the still bedewed editor of the New York Press has resigned–along with his entire staff, after being ordered not to publish “those comics.” He’d been on the job for something like six months. In his public statement, he makes a cogent argument from the farther reaches of journalistic idealism.

Not a lot of people in the press today see themselves as standard-bearers of modernity. Even fewer put themselves in the position of activists for the industry’s values. Lately, there have been some not-very-saintly martyrs to that particular cause.

Siegel says it would have been hypocritical to stay on the job after aquiescing to the wishes of the Press’s owners. So his protest is less about free speech and the clash of civilizations than it is about editorial independence. Like the man always said, freedom of the press belongs to those who own presses… not those who run them. This whole story draws the fine line between covering the news and making the news. Weekly alternatives have traditonally been comfortable with either mode– especially ones that are engaged in desperate, dirty street fighting with dozens of competitors. It’s not a bad thing, but larger media companies can be forgiven maybe for being a bit more circumspect.

The Press, though. They can’t seem to find a management team that works, and the strategy of complete top-to-bottom breakdown every fiscal year does not seem to be working. It seems to me that there is a pretty simple formula to establishing some stability in a publishing operation, but perhaps no one has passed it along to the Press folks, so I’ll do it here: (1) Hire a good editor with a vision for the publication that nicely jibes with your business strategy, if you have one. (2) Give the editor the tools and the freedom to realize that vision. (3) Do not tamper. An editor who has always made a big, public stink about editorial integrity and independence at a publication with a tradition of same? Red flag! Red flag!! (4) If or when the vision goes off the rails, you don’t interfere in the production room. You ask him to come to your office, and you fire him. (5) Then you issue a statement: We disagreed about the direction of the paper. No hard feelings. Settlement package. Voila! Neither of you looks like a professional hack or a wannabe. Live to fight another day.

To be fair, it seems to be an intractable NY Press tradition to do everything dramatically and in public and in the most extreme way possible. The paper has so few friends who will actually come to their defense that when they do take a courageous stand, they seem to stand alone. As an institutions, they remind me most of that tee-shirt from the seventies–the one showing a tiny, terrified, but defiant mouse giving the finger to a dive-bombing eagle with its landing gear down. A good first step would probably be to either get a spineless, sycophantic editor or a courageous, publicly savvy publisher. They should be on the same page, up until the moment the pink slip is printed.