Category: Blog Post

Much has been made of how the Daily Show is capturing the young, 18-34 year old demographic which newspapers would love to get their hairy palms on. For some reason, the big newspaper companies across the land think the way to do this is to print bigger pictures and fewer words and vulgar jokes. If possible, they’d like to reduce the paper to a lot of grunting. The main reason they insist on this tragically misguided approach is that, being big, they are also incredibly arrogant and corrupt with personnel issues. It makes no sense to hire a forty-something, mid-level company man or woman to edit a paper supposedly designed to attract a twenty-something reader, and yet that’s what they’re doing in Chicago, Denver, and elsewhere.

They seem to think–and we’ve heard their editors say—that they are creating papers for people who don’t read papers. But that is a much different thing than creating a paper for people who CAN’T read papers. (We think the reason the kids aren’t reading the newspapers is that they are more critical and savvy than their parents, and their parents’ friends who edit newspapers. In other words, the editors of youth papers are reducing the product to the purest form of what turns OFF young, smart readers.)

It is also an old prejudice and stereotype that, because a newspaper is cheap or free, then the content has to be compatibly low in value. (They’ve been hearing it for so long from advertisers that they actually believe it; why shouldn’t they? Advertisers are paying the bills, not readers! But if your publication is worth a damn, the readers pay the advertisers to pay you. See?)

But we’re not going to let the kids off the hook here. There is real risk in putting the kids in charge. We note with horror a few recent misfires, and we have some sound advice earned the hard way. Listen up, children: Humor does NOT work if you don’t care, in your heart, for your target. The difference between good satire and bad satire is this simple smell test—if the humorist lacks compassion or interest, it will show, and it will suck. Make fun of the things you care about. If you care about money and power, get out of the humor business now. (Hint: The Daily Show is genuinely funny because Jon Stewart cares.)

This is, by the way, a corollary of the longstanding Taking Candy From a Child principle. It is not funny to make fun of the weak, the infirm, the powerless, the dead, or the unloved. It is just mean, and you will go to hell where no one will ever laugh at you again.

There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among the people who write about media concerning the case of NY Times reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who are facing prison time for doing what they think of as their jobs.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to such things, Miller and Cooper are in trouble with a federal judge for their refusal to name confidential sources to a grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Bush Administration shill Robert Novak after Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson contraticted the President’s assertion Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. (You can also read Novak’s explanation of how and why he did it here.)

Now a lot of us have been wondering why Novak isn’t under threat of jail, because he’s the one who certainly knows who told him about Plame, when Miller, who wrote not one word for publication about the matter, and Cooper, who wrote about the investigation into the leak, are.

Miller and Cooper are asserting their First Amendment right to keep sources confidential, but that ain’t flying with either the judge who is threatening them, or the three judge panel of the D.C. Appeals Court who affirmed his decision. Unless they can get the full Appeals Court, or the Supreme Court (which has already issued a ruling that doesn’t exactly support their position) to hear the case, it looks like the reporters are headed for the hoosegow.

Now, these reporters make a good argument that reporters can’t do their jobs if, in effect, the government uses them as extentions of their own police investigative powers. After all, who in government or industry is ever going to blow a whistle if they know the government can force reporters to give them up?

Today in Slate, Jack Shafer, (the most thoughtful media writer around for our money) has a different take. He suggests Cooper and Miller get a better lawyer, specifically the guy who wrote the law being used to pummel them.

I’ll leave it to you to consider what Shafer hopes will be a better legal strategy to keep Miller and Cooper out of jail, and whether or not, in this case, it’s better to plead it out and let the First Amendment live to fight another day.

Of course, this could also be resoved by a Congress who has the best interests of the nation at heart. Such a Congress would extend its previously passed protections for whistle blowers to those who provide the loud whistle in the first place–the press.

We have always had mixed feelings about Michael Wolff, the media critic and self-appointed expert on the nexus of Internet, media, and business. His main credential has always been his spectacular failure at publishing on the web, so it has always seemed odd that his judgment is considered golden when it comes to all things related to media. (The things we admire about Wolff: He’s a pretty good stylist, and he is fearless about skewering sacred cows in the media business. When you’ve been burned like he has, and still have the bank book he has, you know there’s an invulnerable safety net of some kind under the man.)

In his remarks to some convoluted conference on information, transcribed today at I Want Media, we started to realize precisely what it is we don’t like about him: He is a black-hearted cynic and a crab. Today, the tune he is singing goes basically like this: “Information wants to be free. (By the way, I was the first one to coin that phrase, y’know.) That is a truth that will kill media companies, because it devalues information across the board. If you are in the information business—as all media companies are—you are in a dying industry. You’re like the farmer who keeps planting corn after the industrial revolution.”

Here, we’ll let you read a few telling points for yourself:

“In the marketing and information business, there’s always a balance of power. In the magazine business, because there was this other revenue stream that allowed the magazine people to maintain what was commonly referred to (but what is almost never referred to anymore) as this church and state separation, we can do this thing. We can put out our product and we can have a marketing relationship with your product at the same time. It’s a sort of a parallel relationship.

“…As soon as you got rid of the subscription side, that parallel relationship started to change. And what you had was a marketing relationship, which almost in every case — certainly in the magazine business — took over the information side. And so in all but a few cases magazines have become marketing vehicles.

“…Why can’t anyone hold an audience? Well, people can’t hold an audience because there’s lots of competition and lots of other things to do. And media companies can’t hold an audience because what they produce is shit.

“…they just turn the dial or throw the magazine. We’ve created a situation of such high disposability of information that, of course, the value is going to drop.”

By way of illustration, Wolff suggests that the Wall Street Journal “stopped mattering” after it started charging for its content online. We’re not sure what this means, considering that the WSJ is still one of the most widely respected, profitable media companies in the world; if it is not the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, it is its second-largest. Wolff admits that the product did not change in any way—and he admits that it is still one of the greatest periodicals around. So what does he mean when he says it does not matter anymore, merely because Dow Jones clings to the silly idea that people will pay for their content online? If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say he’s talking about the elusive, evanescent quality of “buzz” that is primarily an inert gas that changes the voices of publishers, editors, and media critics—and that’s about all. (In the best case, ad buyers begin to huff the stuff, and then it’s Katie-grab-your-guns.)

See, the basic problem here is that Wolff reduces all information to a commodity—at the same time insisting that the media biz is dying because it provides a steady stream of “shit” for content. He gets moralistic about media content when it suits his grumpiness, but this is logically inconsistent, because he seems to believe that all content is interchangeable—it’s just ones and zeros, afterall. The steady move toward free content has, in his mind, compromised the line between marketing and credible editorial content.

He is probably right in the main, but this should be seen as an opportunity for contrarians. Just because the trend is toward free content does not mean that content has to be shit. The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are not crap publications because they make no money from their readers—nor because their cover price is but a laundering operation to defray the high cost of distribution. They are good because they are good.

Being a free publication ourselves, we have a few ideas on this subject. It is certainly true that readers have come to expect a great deal of information for free—both on the web and in the analog world. But the widespread availability of information does not automatically equalize all information, nor “devalue” it. (One could ask a very telling question from the other side of the equation—does the ubiquity of advertising devalue all advertisements? Maybe—but that just means there is pressure for advertisers to produce more memorable, higher quality ads, not fewer, less memorable ones. ‘Twas every thus: Quality is judged by, well, quality.) The existence of blogs does not compell us to set aside our dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, nor does our rereading Moby-Dick prevent us from checking up on our favorite blogs.

We’re honestly kinda tired of this widespread dyspepsia that reduces the human mind—and the human attention span—to a sort of closed-economy with only so much warehouse space. The attention economy is merely the normal, longstanding human transaction of making quick, precise judgments as to what is worthy, and what is not. The vehicle of delivery, and the price of delivery have merely been distractions from which Wolff has fashioned a very lucrative punditing career indeed.

In yesterday’s Times Book Review, A.J. Jacobs was allowed a rare privilege—he wrote a review of his Times reviewer, the alleged humorist Joe Queenan, and it was better than the original review. Heck, it was better than Jacobs’ book.

You may recall that A.J. Jacobs was a front-of-book editor at Entertainment Weekly and then at Esquire. At one point during his illustrious rise through the magazine world, he proposed a very funny article—he would attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. That article then became a book, with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.”

We’re green with envy that Jacobs was granted this sort of favor (we assume his claim to have received the meanest review in Times Book Review history carried some water with editors there; this guy has made a very handsome living indeed on hyperbole. Watch your back, Neil Pollack!). Especially after he admits that he’s had quite a ride on a PR shimmy-shimmy that included our humble little magazine. We were tempted to leave it at that, because there is nothing more pathetic than a writer complaining that his tea is not sweet enough.

But we went back and re-read Queenan’s review, and we’ll hold Jacobs’ coat on this one. The hemorrhoidal Queenan accused Jacobs of writing what he calls a misguided, juvenile, tired book just “to fullfill his book contract.” What a grump!

If there is one thing that is harder than writing humor, it is writing about or reviewing humor. It is an old adage of editing that a humorless piece about humor is less fun to read than the phone book. Couple that with an assignment you’re not crazy about (making fun of the weak, a wicked path indeed), Queenan is certainly projecting. He either can’t stand other humorists (yawn, how predictable is that?), or he was pissed at his editors at the Times for charging this book against his account, or he’s just an ungracious, unfunny jerk. Among humorists, the biggest cause of spleen-inflammation is a fat wallet, maturing irrelevance, and jealousy of youth.

As a young friend of mine once said, “We will bury you.” Depending on how long you intend to live, it is probably wise to cultivate sympathy for your pallbearers.

James Rainey writes in the Los Angeles Times today about bylines—the credit writers receive at the top (or the bottom) of their work. It’s an interesting world of arcana, and one of those professional vanities we afford ourselves. We used to think that most readers frankly don’t give a toss about bylines, and we still think that—generally speaking. Like anything else, if the product is good, people want to know the brand. If it is unremarkable, they have no reason to care.

The common line among journalists is that readers DO care, because they develop a taste and loyalty for particular writers. It’s a nice thought, but probably delusional. We have wasted many words in this particular space identifying and describing writers who we think are tops—but we’re writing for ourselves and for a small minority of obsessive-compulsives who want more inside dope on the magazine and the magazine industry.

If readers DO develop loyalties based on byline, there are two points we wish to make: First, we sincerely hope that byline readers do not disqualify writers they don’t recognize. Second, they surely end up favoring just a handful of writers—how many favorite writers can one person have at any one time? (Incidentally, we think the number is around six—also, this number is counterbalanced by about six bylines that really do send us quickly to another page.) So is it worth publishing a hundred bylines in order to please six readers desperately seeking six writers?

We occasionally are asked why we do things the way we do them here, with regard to bylines. (By the way, these questions have come almost exclusively from writers.) We do not put writer’s bylines on our cover because we don’t think enough readers care about bylines to justify the space dedicated to the ego of one person. As another twist of logic, we feel that selective bylines on the cover subtly devalue stories that are not pitched on the strength of the writer’s name.

There are a couple places inside the magazine where we don’t use bylines on editorial content. The first one is “Good Intentions,” the first item in the magazine. For lack of a better term, this piece is a sort of letter from the editor—although it is intended not to be a vacuous, self-serving exercise in self-promotion, the way most editor’s notes are in most magazines. Instead, it is supposed to be a substantive commentary on some pressing issue of the day—issued in the old-fashioned editorial “we.” The point is, this welcoming mat to the rest of the magazine is a sort of institutional statement that we want to reflect the personality and voice of the magazine, not any single contributor. (For what it’s worth, we—and by we, I mean I—write this piece each month. For certain technical reasons, we typically byline this piece when it appears on the website.) Big fans of magazines and magazine history will recognize a couple of inspirations for Good Intentions—most obviously, Spy magazine’s “Great Expectations” which served the same purpose, though it ran quite a lot longer and ranged more broadly into issues of the day. Might magazine also started this way. And the New Yorker of the thirties began “Talk of the Town” with “Notes and Commentary”—also an unbylined statement of editorial views and anecdotes, whose greatest practitioner was E.B. White.

Now, the other place where we don’t use bylines is in Broken Clock, the section that describes arts and entertainment events during the present month. The main reason we don’t use bylines here is that most of these pieces are very slight, and contributed by staff members who have their bruised egos salved by The Big Bucks. We wanted this section, too, to reflect the institutional voice of the magazine (we use the editorial “we” here as well).

Pragmatically speaking, this kind of section runs the very real danger of reading like a phone book, with all kinds of raw information—phone numbers, web addresses, street addresses, dates, and so on—so that we wanted to eliminate any extraneous distractions. (It’s the same reason we don’t print the record labels or publishing houses behind titles that we are recommending; how many readers choose their books and CDs based on the media company that produced them? We thought so, too. There are good reasons we might reconsider this policy though, which we won’t go into here.)

Now we have heard a great hew and cry from freelance writers about this policy, and we’re sorry about that. (Well, no, not a great hew and cry. There have been six complaints in three years, two from the same writer.) We feel their pain, but we also insist that the quality of the writing is far more important than the quality of the byline.

We were saddened the Mark Dayton won’t be running again for the Senate. Oh, we didn’t harbor any illusions about his winning. He would have had a six year record as an unapologetic liberal to run against, he’s not the best speaker in the world, and he can’t finance his own campaign this time.

Although the national Dems would come to his aid, he’d still have to raise millions to fight off the anticipated Republican flood of money. And he hates that…probably because he quaintly believes being a Senator is not about where the money is coming from. As a friend of mine who used to work for Dayton once told me, “He’s a really good senator and a really lousy politician.”

So, whoever is the DFL candidate, and we think it will be Mike Hatch, he’ll have a relatively open field ahead of him, and the ability to run against Bush lapdogs Gil Gutnecht or Mark Kennedy. I really hope it’s Kennedy. That creep has to answer for what he said about Patty Wetterling on earth before he lands in the eternal fire which will be his eventual reward.

We hereby summarize a couple of Rakish get-togethers in the last two days. Last night, we made our way to the monthly writers’ round table with the usual wits, including a very punchy Irish lad, JC, who is touched with the gift of blarney, and occasionally joins us. Also, we were surprised to learn of a romance blooming in our midst, just in time for that upcoming hallmark holiday—how sweet! Well, just when we’d invited the general public to crash this monthly binge among Rakish regulars, the deputy editor gets a notion to move the whole operation across the river to The Times cafe. The Times is a fine joint, and we enjoyed the opportunity to hear our own CC take the stage and croon “What A Wonderful World.” With ace copyeditor (and chanteuse) LL,we briefly discussed the difference between karaoke and “open mic night.” Also, the present first-person subjunctive of “to be’. (If I were an all-powerful copyeditor, I would insist that one never write “if I was.”) As in all things, we deferred to her.

The suggestion to move the soiree had a rather demoralizing consequence: the Rakish regulars who are normally pleased to accept the generosity of the publisher were on their own, as the publisher had other appointments to keep. Tattered wallets and pathetic pocketbooks were brought out into the cold light of hard truth, upended. Change clattered on the table.

Also noted: There was an unfortunate scheduling conflict. CK’s brilliant storytelling series, On Tap, also went down last night at the Bryant Lake Bowl, and reports today say the program was very moving indeed.

On Tuesday night, we were back in the old digs—the Titanic Room—for Raking Through Books. Sheila O’Connor was our guest as she read and discussed “Where No Gods Came,” her award-winning novel of last year. Now, during discussion of the book, one of our incredibly smart readers asked O’Connor to confirm or to deny the rumor that her book had been repeatedly rejected by publishers for being “too literary.” What does that even mean?

We all understand the tremendous pressure publishers are under to produce books that become massive best-sellers—and there is no surer way to do that than to print a book that peddles some new snakeoil about how Americans can, in ten easy steps, lose weight, get smart, get rich, have sex, tone up, turn on, and so forth. Also, really crappy books about fake international conspiracies written by trained monkeys with typewriters seem to do pretty well. But how can these publishers look at themselves in the mirror in the morning? How can they pronounce the words, “I love this book, but it will never sell. It is too literary”?

We’re not saying what you think we’re saying. Every self-respecting publishing house, big or small, has a process of triage. When a manuscript or a book proposal comes in the door, they instantly know if it comports with the book list they already publish. Some publish literature, some publish complete shite, but even their summer interns know the difference. What we’re driving at here is one of our lifelong crusades against disengenuity in the literary industries. It is not possible for a book to be “too literary” in itself. It can very easily be too literary for any particular publishing house, and they should either say so out loud, or they should send it along to their own literarture departments through the pneumatic tubes or the homing pigeons or the US Mails or the coke bottle in the ocean or whatever method they prefer presently. (Book publishers are forever denying the existence and facility of email, we’ve noticed, and seem to have a strange love affair with SASEs, which they never use but apparently hoarde somewhere.)

And you thought you were going to escape this little monologue without a sermon! Begob, there’s our bus…

The Editor in Cheese beat us to the punch today in commenting on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay in the NY Times on the Iowa brain drain.

Klinkenborg blames it a lot on the state’s encouragement of industrial farming and the resultant slaughtering not only of pigs, but also the family farm and all the real jobs that went with it.

The only part of Iowa I know well, where I grew up, is the example of exactly what Klinkenborg describes. The downtown, which used to house all local businesses, including two department stores, a mens clothing store owned by my girl friend’s father, a record store where you could actually listen to the record before you bought it, and an appliance store where the owner would wait on you personally and give a deal on a portable stereo to an impoverished college student who had once dated his daughter (after the clothes store daughter dumped me.) There was a movie theater that had a Saturday kids movie club for 35 cents a ticket, (Disney movies were 50 cents,) and another movie theater across the street that had a short life as an “adult” movie house before becoming a teen concert venue briefly before being torn down. The tallest building in town–at six stories–was full of doctors and dentists and lawyers.

The upper floors of that building are now condos. The main floor, is now home to a “loan” business. There’s one new office building built several years ago for an agricultural insurance company which was run into bankruptcy by its corporate controllers, destroying the pensions of their employees while enriching themselves. There’s a forlorn four-plex movie house at one end of the erstwhile retail mall, which received government subsidies to supplant the local merchants, then failed itself.

The rail yards which used to handle the farm produce have moved north and west, mostly to Nebraska, where they got a better tax deal, no doubt, from a state that turned Republican before Iowa did. The local food processing companies have long since sold out to Con-Agra. Immigrants were imported (no kidding) to fill the jobs the native Iowans didn’t used to want.

There used to be three funeral homes near downtown. Now there is one big one–part of a chain that has bought them up all over the Midwest. Here, dying is big business.

On the far edge of town, there is some economic activity: a new mall full of chain department stores and, you guessed it, a Wal-Mart. But, the biggest industry in town is now gambling. Like Pawlenty here, they saw gambling as the solution to their economic ills. A lot of jobs were created in the three big casinos, but you know the sort of jobs we mean–the sort that employs the locals to sweep up, make change, deal the cards and clear the buffet tables. The management talent comes from Vegas, and the profits go back there, less, of course, what they cosmetically donate to civic projects like the community college where they train their next generation of food service workers.

All evidence suggests Iowa is the next state about which someone will write a book like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” The state turns conservative at the same time it is turned into a third world natural resource and labor supply for the corporate grist mill. The sweet smell of the freshly fertilized rolling corn fields has been replaced by the sour mountains of pig shit from the pork factory farms. The sound of the train whistles I could hear from my bedroom window late at night is drowned by the clinking of the slots.

We’ve never understood what, exactly, Verlyn Klinkenborg did to land on the Times editorial board. Besides, what kind of a name is “Verlyn”? Anyway, it becomes clear from his editorial today that his main achievement seems to have been moving from Iowa to California in 1966. Ever since then, he’s been hopscotching around the country taking fellowships and visiting professorships and writing soft-focus expressions of the rural life for people who consider the lawn a somewhat threatening form of wilderness.

We kid. We kid because we love. Actually, Lyn—can we call you Lyn?—finally made us proud to have once dropped his class at St. Olaf College. With today’s solid if unstylish essay, all is forgiven. The meritocracy has been paid off in full.

So, anyway. Lyn writes about Iowa’s new proposal to eliminate income tax for everyone under the age of thirty. This would be an aggressive attempt to put a stop to the “brain drain” that takes Iowa’s finest away from Iowa to places like Minneapolis and California. The problem is serious but the strategy is kinda dumb. As the Klinker points out, South Dakota right next door has no income tax whatsoever, and their brain drain has been just as bad—stemmed only by poaching Minnesota and Iowa businesses away from Luverne and Cedar Rapids. (A fact that has got outstate neo-cons all aroused in recent years.)

No, the real problem is Iowa’s complete immersion in “industrial farming”—the kind of petrochemical agribusiness we’ve been bitching about for years now. But what really compounds the problem is that no one seems to care. Owing to the emigration of Iowan artists, writers, professors, entrepreneurs—even publishing geniuses from Council Bluffs—to greener pastures, there is literally no one left to point out the obvious. This is why we’re half serious when we say Verlyn’s main achievement was moving away from Iowa as a young man. The drain has been going on for fifty years, and that makes a serious, thoughtful, well-networked literary writer originally from small-town Iowa a rare thing indeed.

And let’s just say this, as long as you’re still listening. The Plain People of America would probably profit more if the Borg moved back to Iowa as an example to his countrymen. Scribbling his best work for the indigo pages of the Times, he may as well be writing on the bathroom walls of a Whippy Dip.

On the other hand, we welcome all Iowans here to Minneapolis. We urge you to turn out the lights, and move to Uptown. We have arts! Music! Theater! We have visiting professors! We have SuperTarget! To ease you through this exciting transition, we wish to inform you that it is possible to continue working in agribusiness while you get your bearings here; there are plenty of jobs down the street at Cargill, where through the magic of GPS-enabled technologies, you can remotely spray soybeans and kill hogs and mismanage manure lagoons in the depopulated farming territory formerly known as Iowa.