{"id":247,"date":"2008-04-02T07:43:35","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T14:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/04\/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-writer\/"},"modified":"2008-04-02T10:47:46","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T17:47:46","slug":"the-decline-and-fall-of-the-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/02\/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decline and Fall of the Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Observer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Freelance Fizzle!<\/h1>\n

The Decline and Fall of the Writer \u00a0BY<\/span>\u00a0DOREE SHAFRIR<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not one path anymore,\u201d David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of\u00a0Esquire<\/em>magazine, said the other day. \u201cThirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"GayIt all sounds so \u2026\u00a0uncomplicated<\/em>, doesn\u2019t it? Boozy lunches at Michael\u2019s and evenings at Elaine\u2019s, unlimited expense accounts, stories that took months to report and longer to write, maybe a ramshackle house in the Hamptons to complement the musty, book-clogged apartment on the Upper West Side. But above all, there was the sense that magazine writing was at the center of a vital intellectual universe, with New York as its capital, and vaunted writers and editors such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Willie Morris, Harold Hayes, Lillian Ross, Clay Felker, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Nora Ephron and the like as its reigning princes and princesses, with salaries and perks and moist-eyed acolytes to match. Not to mention scandals, sodden confessions and rumors that could be safely traded and tucked away among trusted friends, with no danger of being scattered like seed spores across cyberspace. Gossip was community-building, not community-busting.<\/p>\n

What young Turk, as\u00a0Esquire<\/em>\u00a0founding editor Arnold Gingrich called his up-and-coming editors (Mr. Hayes and Mr. Felker among them) in the late 1950s,\u00a0wouldn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0want entree into this literary glam world? And until quite recently, landing an editorial assistant gig atEsquire<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0GQ<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Elle<\/em>, or the reporter-researcher job at\u00a0The New Republic,<\/em>\u00a0or the two-year training program at\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>, or the (unpaid) internship at\u00a0Harper\u2019s<\/em>, or the (nominally paid) internship at\u00a0The Nation<\/em>, or even, for the most well-connected and talented graduates, an assistant job at\u00a0The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0was the ne plus ultra for the young, tweedy intelligentsia, those graduates of Yale and Vassar who had committed to memory the opening lines of \u201cFrank Sinatra Has a Cold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, there\u2019s more than a little romanticization that goes into any characterization of days gone by; nonetheless, there is a discernible sense in the air that, as one young magazine editor put it, \u201cThose kinds of jobs exist, but just not for our generation.\u201d This editor, who is 24, continued, \u201cIt\u2019s weird, because I feel like there are certain people I\u2019ve met who are young and super into magazines still, which is always surprising to me, because I don\u2019t know why anyone who wants to be involved with the media would want to turn their attention to magazines.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN overnight. But it\u2019s been especially in the past couple of years that a confluence of factors has resulted in some young people turning their backs on magazines. For one, there is the industry\u2019s notorious (some might say sadistic) gate-keeping, which keeps out a majority of those who would deign to think of themselves as worthy of the industry\u2019s blessing, and which also requires an aspiring magazine writer or editor to commit to working in magazines, preferably while still in college, when an internship at a blue-chip publication (nearly any magazine at Cond\u00e9 Nast, Time Inc., Hearst or Hachette Filipacchi, plus, depending on one\u2019s interest, most political magazines, low-circulation-but-high-influence downtown fashion or art magazines, plus a smattering of others like\u00a0New York<\/em>,Spy<\/em>,\u00a0Harper\u2019s<\/em>,\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>, etc.) could potentially cement one\u2019s place in the firmament. (It could also leave the less talented, or more charitably, less lucky writers and editors to languish. \u201cI guess my disillusionment is partly just that it\u2019s taken me this long,\u201d one 37-year-old editor told\u00a0The Observer<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

A generation that is starting to see barely legal bloggers become more prominent in six months than even the most talented contributing editors may not see this path as necessarily the most appealing, or expedient, one.<\/p>\n

One 23-year-old political journalist told\u00a0The Observer\u00a0<\/em>that the\u00a0New<\/em>\u00a0Republic<\/em>\u00a0reporter-researcher job\u2014famed for launching the careers of\u00a0Slate<\/em>\u00a0editor Jacob Weisberg,\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza,\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0editor James Bennet and author Hanna Rosin, among others\u2014is no longer quite the coveted position it once was. \u201cPart of the reason why the\u00a0TNR<\/em>\u00a0internship isn\u2019t as big as it used to be is that if you were a young sharpie on the make in 1990 or even 1995, there just weren\u2019t that many places where you could get your start,\u201d the political journalist said. \u201cBut the rise of the kind of whole bloggy progressive thing has, I think, really kicked off the careers of some people, or at least for smart liberal college students.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another related issue is influence\u2014whether the kind of buzz generated by a magazine story is the kind that young writers still want\u2014that is, attention from a world in which someone may get news not from CNN but from a Facebook posting about a story on CNN. Nothing seems to live for more than a day without commentary; the contemporary version of \u201cif a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound\u201d is \u201cif an article gets written and no one blogs it, does anyone care?\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to view full article at the New York Observer<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Observer Freelance Fizzle! The Decline and Fall of the Writer \u00a0BY\u00a0DOREE SHAFRIR\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s not one path anymore,\u201d David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of\u00a0Esquiremagazine, said the other day. \u201cThirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}