Here is a true-life fairy tale for all embattled and embittered freelance writers everywhere—and we can say with some satisfaction that we know this fable by heart. But let’s run through the paces anyway, and we may arrive at a new and surprising moral to the story.
A solid mid-masthead writer at a New York magazine has been writing good if not sizzling feature stories for several years. He is already way ahead of most of his peers; it is a dream job to have a writing contract for a Manhattan glossy, a lot like reaching the Major Leagues. But after a change of management, he is suddenly out of favor, and he is fired. He spends the next year or so trying not so much to get another contract as to merely land an assignment. He finally gets one at another major publisher, and he produces the story. It is killed. He progresses slowly down the long list of potential markets, hitting what finally appears to be the bottom of his list—some city magazine in the outback, which likes the story and publishes it.
In the meantime, the writer manages to land another assignment back in Manhattan, but this story too is ultimately killed—for no apparent reason other than the caprice of the editors. This story too finds a home at that same humble city magazine. So now virtually every prestigious magazine publisher in New York—Conde Nast, Rodale, Wenner, probably Hearst too—has had its crack at Potter, and has taken a pass.
Early the following year, both stories are nominated for the industry’s highest honor—the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers (?) of the glossy world. So, then. A happy ending indeed, for Max Potter—and, one surely hopes, a shaming experience for Jim Nelson, Michael Caruso, Jann Wenner. And a sobering one for any other editors-in-chief with nose to grindstone in the slabs of Mid-Town. (Well, we don’t really expect such a widespread deflation of ego over there, but it’s fun to fantasize.)
As Potter mentions in today’s Observer, though, the really shameful thing is that his story is literally the exception that proves the rule. One can only imagine the hundreds of stories that never get published nor even written, because New York editors are too concerned about lunch at The Four Seasons and too worried about out-manuevering one another for whoever passes for the A-Rod of the moment in magazine writing. See, the thing is, the reading public cares less than anyone dares to imagine about bylines and mastheads, and while we editors are busy googling ourselves and calculating our own Q-ratings, the public yearns to be surprised, entertained, enlightened—and they do not need to see a writer’s resume first.
What we’re trying to say in our clumsy way is that there simply is not enough curiosity, good humor, and open-mindedness in an industry that takes itself far too seriously, and honors committments to ego before it ever gets around to processing and properly rewarding solid journalism that happens to be produced by a nobody.
Now, the surpising moral of this story: It is the same editors who rejected Mr. Potter’s stories the first time around who sit on the juries that this time not only accepted them, but considered them some of the best journalism produced in the nation last year. How did that happen? Whether this confirms or contradicts your own worst impressions of the magazine industry, we say bravo to 5280, and we think it bodes well for publications that don’t operate with the same levels of narcissism required of our New York friends.
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