Category: Blog Post

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.

We’ve been on vacation in Florida this week and for us news junkies it’s been a pleasure to partake of the St. Petersburg Times, and ignore the usual suspects. In consequence, we’ve been able to read the local, rather than national, coverage of the Terri Schiavo case, and get the perspective of the people who have been covering the story since way before DeLay and Frist decided to play God.

One story today noted the outrage of Florida Republicans at DeLay referring to Florida judge George Greer as a murderer and terrorist. It happens that Judge Greer is himself a Republican, and has a lot of Republican friends who have rallied to his defense. The irony of the Republican Congress violating its own oft repeated mantra of states’ rights to interfere in a Florida matter is not lost on the people down here. Say what you want about Florida (and we are certainly guilty of calling them names ourselves on many occasions,) but the folks here, even many right-to-lifers, don’t care much for DeLay’s cynical grandstanding.

Also today, an editorial pointed out that President Bush’s pronouncement that he should “err on the side of life” rings a bit hollow when one takes a look at the executions he approved while governor of Texas, including that of Gary Graham, the last American to be executed for a crime committed while a juvenile. As the Times points out, Graham was almost certainly innocent, and yet Bush rationalized his execution by asserting that he was guilty of other crimes. Actually the Times didn’t equivocate at all on the topic of Bush’s pronouncement: “That is a contemptible hypocrisy,” is the exact language they used.

Finally, columnist Howard Troxler asked today why DeLay and Frist waited during a legal procedure that has been going on for years before they acted “to say our [Florida’s] law does not count.” He recounts the story of Thomas More, albeit the fictionalized one of A Man for All Seasons. You may remember Thomas More as a genuinely religious man who gave his life for his principles when he refused to approve the divorce of Henry VIII. Troxler notes that the government of Henry was willing to trample its own laws for its political ends.

No matter what you think of whether Terri Schiavo should be kept alive or allowed to die, it is clear that the Florida judiciary did not take the matter lightly. The litigation has been going on for years. All sides have had their day in court, and the Florida legislature has had ample opportunity to make its wishes known.

In that context, the self righteous Thomas DeLay stands out in sharp contrast to the righteous Thomas More. One can only hope the Christian voters in Florida remember the difference the next time they get a chance to make their opinion known as to which sort of religion they prefer.

We hate being the center of the national news when it means yet another school shooting. And we hate having to write this: What possible service can this news be to the Plain People of America? It most certainly is news, even though we detect a certain low-level anomie—even a perverse detachment developing, as each new shooting story trickles into the living rooms of an increasingly jaded public. Normally, these sorts of stories are justified in newsrooms under the “protect the children” code that all professional journalists learn today—there is much danger in the world, even (especially?) in its most isolated corners. We report on these sorts of tragedies in the hopes of averting future tragedies. Right?

But that would require some pragmatic answers to complex problems. (More security? Trigger locks? Outlaw video games and trench coats? Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Uh, no, we were thinking a bit more serious than that.) Instead, what we see is something of a circus of gory detail, the voyeuristic stenography (block that ironic headline, please) of reconstructing a crime scene, without a lot of analysis or thoughtful consideration. Most efforts to process such an incident are feeble, moralistic, empty, soft-headed. What is a reader or viewer left with? What is the take-away?

We can’t bear to read through the reams of sensational coverage (the silver lining of heinous news: Nice work, Bemidji Pioneer, drinks for everyone in the newsroom—after a tasteful moment of silence, of course), so we don’t really know what we’re talking about, frankly.

But one thing we did notice this morning was a humble little press release from the National Mental Health Association that linked to an important resource page: Bullying and What To Do About It. Here is a salient extract:

“Although its always been around, bullying should never be accepted as normal behavior. The feelings experienced by victims of bullying are painful and lasting. Bullies, if not stopped, can progress to more serious, antisocial behavior. Recent incidents of school violence show that bullying can have tragic consequences for individuals, families, schools, and entire communities.”

See, gaining a little insight into the news is a lot easier than anyone could hope.

We would never be so simple-minded as to suggest that certain geo-political situations bear any relationship at all to the insular, microcosmic, uniquely troubled world of the Red Lake reservation. But it makes a guy think.

If reporting terrible news actually made the world a better place, well, we should be on the threshold of an honest-to-God golden age. But all signs point in the other direction. Still, there are a few heroes of the dawning Post-American Sino-European world. (Pre-emptive rhetorical device: Forced to live? Or allowed to die? It’s how you frame the question, innit.)

We are pleased to report yet another first here at the magazine: Last night, we finally took a nap on that old seat-sprung couch over there. (Photographic evidence to the contrary was carefully staged.) This morning, there are lots of reasons why we might want to just close our eyes and make the world go away—but last night’s little episode of shut-eye was actually the direct consequence of the subscription model for online content.

Let’s explain. Many readers have commented on the simpatico they see between the magazine and radio—specifically the more playful versions of public radio—and we frequently work directly with MPR. The relationship extends from a basic story-telling ethic. Great radio, like a great magazine, does not waste words. It rewards you for listening by creating vivid mental pictures (in print, we have the luxury of giving you pictures, true, but we do not have the passive immediacy that a voice in your car has).

Anyway, our obsession with radio’s story-telling possibilities goes way back, predating even a short run of writing for Garrison Keillor. (He didn’t like us very much.) It goes back to the 80s, specifically to Sunday nights in Eugene, Oregon, lying on our back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, and listening to “Joe Frank: Work in Progress” on KLCC. And occasionally we drifted off, in a sort of narrative-induced trance. If you know Joe Frank’s work, you need no explanation—indeed, you realize any explanation is invariably feeble. Frank is typically described as “the master of noir radio,” but that implies that there really is something called “noir radio” and that there are other people producing it. (They aren’t. Well, they ARE, but they are not really being broadcast anywhere. The whole thing with radio is that it is a “push” technology—it comes to you. You get to be passive about it. Any radio-style production that uses a pull model—you go and get it because you know you want it—is probably doomed to fail.) Anyway, noir radio, if there is such a thing, is this: creative monologues, dialogues, fictional sketches, audio experimentation, typically produced with or without sound effects, soundtracks, sound loops, and so on. Ira Glass occasionally tinkers with the form, but less so in recent years. Keillor’s “Guy Noir” has nothing to do with it.

Since we ended up working in a parallel industry, we actually got friendly with Joe Frank a few years back, and we commissioned a story on KCRW, the legendary Santa Monica radio station that used to employ Joe. (A long aside, for extra credit: KCRW is frequently cited as one of the prototypes for our shiny new radio station, the Current. Which reminds us of a conversation we had over the weekend—a smart friend indeed was pointing out that public radio’s original insight was that commercial radio couldn’t or wouldn’t do news in a way that fully took advantage of the medium. Commercial news at the time was pretty much what commercial news is today—top-of-the-hour soundbites and summaries, barely going beyond what in print would be a headline and subheadline. NPR’s genius, born at St. John’s abbey lo these many years ago, was seeing that the listening public could short-circuit the traditional ad-based model and pay directly for more substantive news and thoughtful round-the-clock broadcast journalis. Now, the genius of MPR, and visionaries like Bill Kling and Sara Lutman, is that ~music~ is the next frontier of public broadcasting. We’ve been meaning to say this for a while: it is very gratifying indeed to see that there are still some new tricks left in this old dog!)

So we heard a while ago that there was supposedly some strange falling out with KCRW (and its legendary director, Ruth Seymour); but in hind sight, it might be that Joe Frank had a falling out with public radio in general—although we note that he recently participated in the pledge drive of New York’s WMFU, where they still broadcast back issues of his many, many radio shows. Joe seems to have little or no interest in producing new shows for radio. Instead, he has cast his lot with the Web, appealing directly to his fans to subsidize his work.

Last night we popped for a one-month subscription—feeling magnanimous, we guess, after becoming founding members of the Current—but then realizing we deserve no such pat on the back, having been public broadcasting free-loaders whenever the personal well had run dry. It is an interesting model; Joe is now producing a three or four new audio pieces per month, usually one long piece, several shorter pieces, sometimes posting short films based on his work, and so on.

We intend to make good use of our month-long subscription, and if it means naps every Sunday night on our couch, then so be it. We encourage you to do the same.

UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that there is an advertisement for The Current that pops up right over there, to the right of your screen. We–meaning me, the writer of this particular blog—have no control over which advertisements appear over there. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of control over what I end up writing about each day, either!