Category: Blog Post

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.

To anyone who has ever built a business, the logic of Bill Bradley’s op-ed piece in today’s NY Times is second nature. Build a strong base, add creative theorists, and hire great strategic sales people. From a strong organization, strong leaders will emerge. And such an organization will continue to grow and prosper.

I’ve always said the reason the Republicans continue to kick Demo butt on a regular basis is that Republicans take a purely business-like approach to politics. They’ve built an organization. They have the thinkers who can construct cogent arguments for their positions. And, they have great marketers who understand how to make their positions attractive to the mass market. If you have such an organization, the actual top leadership is often secondary–indeed, if the presidency of the current moron in chief tells us anything, it’s that anyone can be a leader when the only thing he has to do is sit at the top of the heap and take credit for the work of the organization.

Today, Bradley, one of the few people who seem to understand just what the Republicans have wrought, calls on Democrats to do the same thing. It will never happen though, because unlike the Republicans, Democrats have no patience. They’ll never have the “Emotional Intelligence” top business people possess in abundance. And that’s why they’re doomed.

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.

Well, if you didn’t already believe the people who run the National Rifle Association are crazier than a hummingbird on crack, read this from NRA first vice president, Sandra S. Froman.

It seems that if only the teachers at Red Lake had been totin’ heat themselves, they could have protected their students from Jeff Weise’s rampage. I bet the good folks of Red Lake wish they’d thought of that themselves. Yup, all we need to do to make our school safer is bring in more guns.

Damn near as funny as Ms. Froman’s pronouncements were those of President Bush, who this morning talked of how committed the federal government was to the people of Red Lake. If you’ve ever been to Red Lake, and I have, you’ll know what an utter crock that is. Of course, maybe W will introduce an amendment to the No Child Left Behind act that would fund body armor for all students. We could use the money that we’re not spending on the body armor for our soldiers in Iraq, perhaps.

P.S. If you want to read a good series on what life is like for some people on an Indian reservation, look what the Strib did here.