The Rum Life

You might have thought I was in Puerto Rico at that glamorous American Magazine conference, but no. I don’t think I could afford the gas to get to the airport, much less leave the country. But I see my old friend Wonkette is there stirring things up a bit. It’s been a few months since she was pinging loudly on my radar screen, needling powerful media people in expensive offices–Jon Stewart briefly took over that role in her absence (finishing that novel)–and now she once again enjoys another upswing in the Tao of celebrity. Good for her. She must be in galleys.

I do envy all those magazine big-wigs down in the Caribbean, even if they were in the path of the world’s largest hurricane ever. This year’s conference seems to have been topically pretty interesting, from an editor’s point of view. So often these trade pow-wows are an excuse for all kinds of expense-account flapdoodle, and the only meaningful work gets done by the same people who already know how to play while they work–the business folks on the advertising, marketing, and publishing side. Editors and writers are the real culprits who view such events as paid vacations in every sense of the word–moral, professional, and personal.

But I see where the chiefs of ASME have issued a new set of guidelines to shore up the eroding walls between editorial content and advertising content. I keep a copy of the old guidelines at hand, although most of the rules are simple in spirit and in practice. A little magazine like ours is not going to attract a lot of attention if we DID mess with these rules (for example, no advertising on the cover–not even a sticker that announces advertorial content inside). Indeed, our two main competitiors tamper with the limits all the time–and not just the ASME guidelines, but the US Postal service guidelines governing media-class postage, ad-to-edit ratio, and so forth. It is for precisely this reason that we wished ASME had a bit more sway at the local level, so that advertisers and potential advertisers had a better understanding of what editorial credibility is, what it’s value is, and why there should even by third-party audits and ajudication. In a lot of ways, ASME guidelines might seem quaint or dated, and as a supposedly young and open-minded provacateur of the publishing industry, I like to think about how we in the publishing industry can innovate in both the edit space and the ad space. You gotta pay the bills, and you hope you can do it with great content and great ads, and you trust that each must excel independently of the other. I hear all the time from people, especially the smart and engaged people we most like to reach with our magazine, who are in some state of disgust over editorial content they see in various places that is tainted by a direct commercial interest. As I say, I am not a stodgy old-school cynic about these things–the church/state divide is, to me, more of a saturday/sunday divide. One follows the other, they have equal value, but they are clearly separated by midnight.

Thus, we went on the record with the whole New Yorker/Target flap with basically a two-word assessment: Big deal. True, it was a minor violation of the ASME guidelines, and this was talked about down in Puerto Rico… not that Target bought every ad in the magazine, but that there was no editorial statement in the magazine that explained (excused) the sponsorship, and reassured readers that the firewall had not been breeched. For the New Yorker, this must have been a bit of a conundrum, because it is not a magazine that, in its edit space, allows for a sort of loosey-goosey editor-to-reader bedtime prayer. The closest they ever come to this sort of thing is the legal fine print required by the postal service, usually found in the last handful of pages. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty confident that the New Yorker’s readership can without much difficulty identify and distinguish advertising from editorial content. (Now, whether there was any Target influence on the cover art of that issue is an interesting potential consipracy theory.)

Coincidentally–and to bring this full-circle–I have been in the magazine-geek’s cognitive equivalent of Puerto Rico for the last two weeks: I bought the complete New Yorker DVD set, and have been catching up on all my old favorites from the Ross and Shawn years. I have to admit that I bought this in a hurry, because it is not entirely a clear cut ‘n’ dry legal issue as to whether the New Yorker has the right to republish and resell every issue ever printed, and (for strictly personal, selfish reasons) it would suck to have this particular archive deemed a violation of individual copyright. For years, I have spent long, frustrating, expensive hours at the microfiche machine at the public library, and I have bought expensive, damaged backissues piecemeal from eBay, and I have coveted the impossibly rare bound volumes that exist like authentic splinters of the True Cross in a few libraries around the country. So this… this was quite a moment.