Author: Hans Eisenbeis

We never did get a satisfactory answer as to why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzer prizes, although yesterday we received word on who’d won. Fiction, history, drama, poetry—musical composition, fer chrissake—are all Pulitzer categories, along with fourteen newspaper categories, but no room at the table for the glossies. What’s more, newspapers are actually free to nominate themselves for the ASME national magazine awards—the Chronicle of Higher Education managed nominations in both the Pulitzers and the Ellies this year.

One colleague reported to us that he’d asked Marlene Kahan about this—she directs the American Society of Magazine Editors. Given that Columbia University sponsors both awards, why not just fold the less pretigious NMEs into the Pulitzers? (Well, we in the magazine industry have certainly committed our fair share of sins—but, you know, glass houses!) Kahan reportedly had no idea.

But we’re not here to bellyache about awards and the politics of awards, we just wanted to note that the Star Tribune was nominated in one category—Jim Gehrz in feature photojournalism. More impressive, editor Anders Gyllenhaal was on the nominating board.

Of course, the biggest surprise in this year’s Pultizers was Willamette Week, the Portland, Oregon, alternative weekly that broke the sordid story of a beloved state legislator’s involvement with a fourteen-year-old girl, and the subsequent decades-long cover up. Today, the editor of the daily Oregonian congratulated the local upstart on its massive national scoop—this is a newsworthy development in itself, given the arrogance and complacency of Big Media Newspapers these days (as eloquently opined by Jack Shafer more than once).

On the face of it, the Plain People of America no doubt wonder why such an apparently pointless, salacious, and sensationalist scoop is worthy of the highest award in journalism in the nation. Here, we que the usual pre-prepared clips about “speaking truth to power,” “comforting the afflicted,” “if this prevents one future case of child abuse from happening, it’s worth it,” and so on. (Do we sound cynical? We only wish to admit that there is a not very noble, animal satisfaction that accompanies the journalistic “gotcha” moment. This tragic tale of corrupted power and child abuse translates directly into huge numbers in the circulation category—driven by the satisfaction of the morally righteous, but essentially depraved mob of single-issue buyers. We know, Willamette Week is a freebie, but the rubric is the same. If you think the Oregonian didn’t get a bump in sales by following the parade, you missed the note of earnestness in editor Peter Bhatia’s congratulations.)

But the real achievement—the whole, implied basis for the Pulitzer honors in the category of investigative news—is not so much reporting or composing an unpleasant story. It is a skill that actually preceeds all that: it is the power of private persuasion, which allowed Nigel Jaquiss to turn a gossip story into a news story by convincing key sources to speak on the record and offer real evidence. Thus a rumor that was undoubtedly circulating in the corridors of power for years rose to the level of real journalism, by meeting its professional and ethical standards.

It’s a fine achievement (we especially like the part about the Oregonian eating crow), but one that is leavened by a heavy dose of sadness for all the victims of this story. Despite appearances, we are a rational people that tends to believe that bringing a story out into the light is the first—and best—step toward justice and peace. We’re not always so sure about that.

We detect a recurring meme on the subject of product placement as an alternative to advertising. An article last week in the Times made it clear that the cost to place a product in a popular TV show or movie can be roughly the same as buying an equal amount of advertising, and the impact can be singificantly higher. Yesterday, Rob Walker’s column in the Times magazine looked at the acme of product placement, Donald Trump’s silly television show called “The Apprentice.” In the last season of that show, teams of contestants were given the difficult assignment of producing an advertisement for Dove Body Wash—an actual product that won the right to be featured front and center for the low, low price of $2 million. Dove was less a placed product than a featured player, and they were undoubtedly thrilled with the results.

This is relatively easy to do in the surreal world of TV and film, where the line between fake and fact is gone—if it was ever there. In print, it is a much thornier proposition, although there is one very interesting way that it DOES happen. We’re not thinking of the redoubtable Carl Steadman, who once launched a website called “placing.com” that proposed to create an entertaining fictional narrative out of brand-names. (That conceit didn’t ultimately work, because the result inevitably looked exactly like hipster ad copy rather than fiction. Maybe it would be more convincing in the hands of a novelist, rather than a pranking disciple of Lacan and Derrida.) No, we’re thinking of the rise of targeted Google “ad-sense” panels. These are ads that are generated after Google’s search spiders have automatically crawled a body of text, and then generated advertisements based on key words. (This results in some pretty funny, unintended bedfellows, particularly at the more heated political blogs that have signed up for ad-sense.) The result is that technology is allowed to do what no human editor would ever do—place an advertisement directly adjacent to copy that refers to that product, service, or brand name. Why is this not a problem? Because readers are assured that it was the search engine that recognized the relationship, not the writers, editors, publishers or even the advertisers.

There is an editorial reason to place products that has nothing to do with a behind-the-scenes transaction: In an age of hyperactive consumerism and intense, ubiquitous advertising, successful brands become a kind of short-hand in themselves. No one has to ask twice what a NASCAR dad is anymore, right? We think it would be useful to develop a kind of dictionary for editorial product placement. It would be especially useful to understand the more subtle distinctions between closely related brands in the same market. (Please feel free to join in!)

Nike= Proud but aging; tarnished by scandal

Adidas=Resurgent, hip on the streets, possibly shoddy

Lexus=Bullheaded solipsism; flaunting neo-con values

Dodge=Utilitarian; never too proud to steal good ideas or theme music

Coke: Don’t fix what isn’t broken

Pepsi: No matter what the ramifications, more sugar

Budweiser: Lacking imagination, safety in numbers, xenophobic

Miller: Contrarian, willful, individualism

Cooking Light magazine: Living right is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable

The Rake: Living wrong is easy/fun/brightly lit/profitable

Ken Auletta had a nice article in last week’s New Yorker asking the question we’ve been asking around here recently—does advertising work? The short answer, we think, is that advertising is just like any other “content.” If it’s good, it works. If it’s bad, it doesn’t. That doesn’t go very far in describing or explaining the trillion-dollar advertising industry today, and we’re forever intrigued by the imbalance between the cost of a page of advertising versus the cost of a page of edit. (Speak with a commercial photographer sometime for a graphic description of the contrast between ad budgets and edit budgets.)

We felt a little short-changed by Auletta’s piece, though, because he focused almost entirely on TV advertising; he made some of the usual common-sense observations about web advertising, and did not even mention print advertising. The reason to focus on TV is because it has a more easily reduced history— there was a time, he points out, when a major ad buy on one of the three national TV networks would literally reach 80 percent of the public. That sort of audience consolidation ought to result in a pretty clear picture of whether (TV) advertising works in any meaningful sense.

As any advertising professional can tell you, one cannot think too simplistically about advertising. If you buy an over-the-counter ad and expect to see an immediate increase in business, you will be disappointed. This partly explains the massive explosion of the ad industry in the past fifty years—an ad is not in itself a commodity, and therefore the people who conceive, create, and buy ads rely on developing a relationship. Today, ad people call themselves “partners in your branding initiative”—and they fulfill the McLuhanesque prophecy in which the package fully eclipses the product. (In fact, the advertising begins to eclipse the physical packaging; it’s an information age in an attention economy, baby!)

The point of all this is a simple one: Contrast. Distinguishing yourself in a busy, noisy marketplace is ninety-five percent of the battle. That is why we read and actually enjoyed Tina Brown’s little whine yesterday at the Washington Post—and why it always gets our hackles up when someone says nobody under the age of fifty is interested in reading long-form narrative journalism. “Elitist” is just a dirty word for contrarians, troublemakers, smart-alecks, and bred-in-the-bone attention-getters, and they are ultimately the only real economic engines in a marketplace that would die without constant, fresh inputs of restless novelty. Julie Caniglia recently foretold the rapture that may one day attend the End Times of ad-driven consumerism and media. She noted that inner peace is not a revenue-generating proposition for capitalism. In other words, we may not know whether advertising works. But we do know that not advertising does not work. You don’t want to be left behind, do you?

Our dear old friend Ana Marie Cox , aka Wonkette, has certainly had a hard time staying out of the limelight these past twelve months. As James Woolcott points out today, there are good reasons to worry for the welfare of the funny, smart, cute little pill in D.C.—a town where, we have to admit, someone with a real sense of humor stands out like teats on a boar.

Now the NY Daily News reports that Wonkette may be sniffing around Richard Leiby’s gossip-mongering beat at the Washington Post—this despite her declared preference for humor over reporting. We’ll take her word for it, but we know that Ms. Cox has considerably more staying power than her fleeting daily output of punchlines would suggest— her real strengths lie along editorial lines, both in story concepting and editing, but also oversight.

Now we’re not going to dwell too much on Q-Rating here, but she does seem to have the knack for somewhat less substantive media forms like TV punditry. Her metoric rise to the cover of the New York Times magazine occurred about the same time she stopped answering our emails, so we have no inside information here. But we can say it made us feel a little disappointed, knowing that she deserves to be writing in that magazine, rather than being glorified on its cover.

We may have the distinction of being the last print publication to publish a piece from her that exceeded the blogging threshold of about 150 words with twelve bullet points. As we say, we would not presume to make career decisions on her behalf, and they say you gotta dance with the one that brung you—so we may not see her get off the carousel of blogging conferences and panels anytime soon.

In the meantime, we’re happy to have her doppelganger firmly in place doing the things HE does best.

Last week, a landmark case was settled between freelance writers and some of the nation’s largest publishers. It was a long-running, complex case, but it basically came down to this: Freelance writers believed that electronic archives of their work—from articles on the web, to paid-access databases like Lexis-Nexis—amounted to republishing their work, without any additional compensation to them.

This probably would not be a big deal if there wasn’t a lot of money at stake. In other words, if the magazines and newspapers archived freelance articles and offered free access to them. That approach might be considered a brand of largesse something like the public library keeping back issues on hand, or in microfiche. But as soon as the Times, or AOL-Time Warner, or Lexis-Nexis tried to make money a second time (after buying first serial rights—the right to publish a piece first and once, exclusively), they crossed a line. Now, of course, they explicitly require writers to sign away these rights— and writers are free to negotiate in the event, or take their work elsewhere.

The problem, from a writer’s point of view, is the incredible imbalance in such a negotiation. You have to have some pretty big cajones to say no to the New York Times, when you are trying to make a living as a freelancer. It’s rather like telling your health insurer to go to hell when it informs you that your premium will be going up, please remember to pay promptly in the enclosed envelope, post office will not deliver without postage. We know from experience that any antagonism at all gives editors at prestigious publications the slimmest excuse they need to unofficially black-list a writer just as surely as if she blew a deadline or turned in a page of phone numbers.

Know why? Here’s a shocking figure that came out incidentally in the case: For the period in dispute, the New York Times used more than twenty-seven thousand freelancers to write more than one hundred thousand articles. (Doing some rough math, that averages fewer than four articles per freelancer, probably in the range of a couple hundred dollars per article. That is a number that will be crossing our lips for years to come whenever anyone asks us about the prestigious, romantic, lucrative world of freelance. Despite the fact that some winning freealncers in this lawsuit may receive a six-figure payoff, and despite the fact that this is a huge moral victory for writers everywhere, it is highly depressing to realize why so many editors are merely frustrated freelance writers.

Now, perhaps the next frontier will be the poor, indentured crossword writers at the Times–who are asked to sell all their rights forever for the price of a good dinner, while the Times republishes their puzzles at will and with impunity.

One of the great myths promoted and promulgated by the me-first neo-con crowd is not only that the mainstream media is lousy with liberals and liberal bias, but that liberals are inherently “elite” or elitist. We’re not sure where this whole idea comes from, given the well-documented connection between labor and liberalism, as well as the more subtle connection between obscene wealth and selfishness. (This bizarre “limousine liberal” inversion has reached all quarters: Teaching evolution, fer chrissakes, is now considered a badge of liberal elitism, which means that every credible scientist on the face of the planet is a deluded elitist liberal.)

But if you’d like an object lesson in reality, you could do worse than checking out “Left of the Dial,” the Air America documentary that will be broadcast on HBO Thursday night. We haven’t seen it ourselves, but we read that it is a more dramatic story than you might think—the story of how the liberal radio network got off the ground, after very nearly dying in childbirth. As it turns out, the only limousine liberal involved in Air America was Al Franken himself, who in the eleventh hour had to step in and write some hefty personal checks to keep the nascent network going. Many of the network’s key employees worked without pay or benefits in order to see the mission through.

See, there’s the difference between the left and the right in a nutshell—only a Democrat would spend his own money on a cause that was larger than himself. In some quarters, this is called a non-monetary return on investment—but you didn’t hear it from your present goverment monopoly, which looks upon all such do-goodism as essentially evil. (God helps those who help themselves, you know… and presumably punishes those who help others.)

Sometimes editors are assholes. Lots of times. Most of the time. This seems to be a job requirement. But editors should really be assholes for the right reasons, and we certainly try to be an asshole for the right reasons. Still, even if we do it for the right reasons, we’re still being an asshole.

There is a lot of talk these days about how an editor must “personify the brand,” to put a face on the operation, and we try to do this too, whenever we are called on. On the other hand, our first and highest committment is to the magazine itself—to protect its integrity and quality, and this can be an all-encompassing activity all by itself.

We were thinking the other day about the Ross and Shawn years at the New Yorker. Few people realize why the New Yorker is the best magazine in the world today: It is largely because of those legendary editor’s unquestioning, unwavering, absolute committment to their magazine. Harold Ross never had a byline in his magazine, and William Shawn had just one. That amounts to more than sixty years of a weekly magazine in whose pages its editors-in-chief appeared just once. (Since the New Yorker has never published a masthead, the words “Harold Ross” did not appear in the magazine until a week after he died, in 1951.) It’s hard to imagine that sort of thing happening today.

Another anachronism: Staff writers at the New Yorker were never really guaranteed anything. Even the finest feature writers of the time received no assurances that what they wrote would ever get published ~unless it was good enough~. They got no preferential treatment, other than assurances that what they wrote would be given all due consideration of the editors. In the meantime, writers could borrow money against their “drawing account” and they might sign first reader agreements that paid them a little bit of dough, but they were expected to eventually write something publishable to cover their debt to the magazine.

Such a scheme would never fly today, and it shouldn’t. All things considered, writers probably have less security today than they did back in the forties and fifties—if for no other reason than the rise of the middle-class, and the widespread belief that writing is a romantic thing to do, and anyone can do it. But it is astonishing to consider how Ross and Shawn were able to float such an operation (it continued, we have heard, well after Conde Nast bought the magazine in 1986). They could for one very simple reason: They valued quality above all else, and the result was that any serious writer would die (then and now) to get into its hallowed pages. (Some have literally paid to get into the magazine—though in the advertising space, of course.) Ross and Shawn were, therefore, assholes for the right reason, in all probability. But writers seemed to understand that no matter how maddening the editors were, they advocated (politely, diplomatically) first and last for the integrity of the written word. That actually meant something to everyone involved in producing the New Yorker.

A couple of interesting meditations on the newspaper industry today. Generally, we just feel like we want to disagree on principal with such grandiose pronouncements as Michael Malone makes today over at ABC news, namely that “newspapers are dead.” All you need to do to refute such a silly claim is to look over the past fifty years of media history. Both television and radio were supposed to obsolete the printed word, but they didn’t—in fact, they helped build a readership which saw the inherent, qualitative differences in media. Now, according to Malone—a weird holdover from the heady days of the Web’s initial revolutionary zealots—the web will be the final coup de grace.

We hate to break it to Malone, but he simply doesn’t matter as much as he thinks he does: It is not the readers who will determine the fortunes of newspapers. It is the advertisers. We all know that readers are the third wheel in this relationship, have been for a long time… Recent circulation scandals are not scandals because they reflect badly on Americans reading less. They are a scandal because newspaper executives are lying to advertisers about their rate-bases. The basic paradigm—that advertising in print works—has not changed one iota, and there is a massive support industry designed to convince advertisers and publishers that their endless toil has the result they want to believe it does. (Interesting, innit, how there has been so much trouble transferring that same confidence to the web, where the science and technology of tracking actual readers through the content is so much more advanced.)

More to the point, as Jack Shafer makes clear in his excellent piece today about the strange maneuvers of Philip Anschutz, the only thing that is really outdated about newspapers today, in a concrete business sense, is the margins in which they continue to operate. Thirty percent is typical at a strong metropolitan daily! Those are numbers anyone in the media buisness, outside of television, would die for.

We’re not sure we agree with Shafer’s assertion that these healthy margins are due to “harvesting market strength” in the short term— but then we live in a city with one of those exceptional dailies that has actually managed to sustain growth in circulation. The other thing that is exceptional about the Twin Cities is that Kinght-Ridder—the bedraggled bridesmaid here—is everywhere else considered forward-thinking, whereas here the Pi-Press’s website is one of the most shamefully useless sites on the web, which comports well with the generally cadaverous scent of the whole operation down on Cedar Street.

No, newspapers will stick around just as long as TV, radio, and the web stick around, but they will continue to evolve—some for the better, some for the worse, many for free…. but all somewhat independently of whether the reading (listening, browsing) public thinks there is any value in them.

We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far outmatched in wits by Coleman, who is, after all, a professional.

But that little flap went nookular when the bloggers’ boss at TCF Bank decided to step into this little flea-circus with a sledgehammer. Bill Cooper, an excitable, longtime GOP honcho, pledged that his bank would buy no more advertising with the Star Tribune so long as he was at the controls. (We commented at the time that TCF stockholders and directors were no doubt gratified with Cooper’s decision to make sure the last anyone heard about the company was that its CEO was making such an aggressive personal stance with ~their~ money.)

Now TCF has ingeniously gone one better—they’ve committed to buy the naming rights to the new stadium at the University of Minnesota for the kingly sum of $35 million. That kind of cabbage would have bought a lot of advertising in the Strib, of course, but we think it’s a brilliant move. Given that the daily—and all dailies like it—have rolled over on this insidious form of commericalizing public information, TCF will get its advertising and brand extension into the fish wrap anyway, without having to give the employers of Nick Coleman one red cent. Take that, you pantywaist, glue-sniffing liberals!

We note that the words “Target Center” have appeared in the pages of newspapers around the land more than one thousand times in the last month—ninety-seven times in the Strib. The cancelled NHL season didn’t prevent the words “Xcel Energy Center” from being recorded in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities nearly sixty times in the last three weeks.

This give us a great deal of Adidas-brand pride in the Visa-Mastercard ingenuity of the entrepreneurial spirit, still so manifestly alive and well here in the United States of Halliburton.

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.