Re-education and Its Discontents

Apologies for the gap between postings. I’ve been scrambling to meet several deadlines, the most intriguing of which is the course work for a course on starting online on magazine publishing.

A necessary and yet humiliating aspect of losing one’s job on the pretext of technological change is the sense that one needs to be retrained, reeducated to keep up with the changing job market. Of course, this notion is generally a byproduct of anxiety rather than reason because in the job market—insofar as such a thing can be identified—there is very little that can be accomplished in technical or vocational training for the vast majority of fields that couldn’t better be learned through the experience of an actual job. The fact is that in terms of sheer economic efficiency, shrimp fishermen are most productive when they are fishing for shrimp rather than sopping up oil and manufacturers are more productive when they are manufacturing rather than working as a hostess at Appleby’s. And, in my specific case, online editing is far less demanding and complex than print editing, so the idea that anyone with experience in the latter would be unable to do the former is absurd.

Just the same, having worked for only one magazine over the last thirteen years I have wondered, over the past few months, how universal and transferable my skills are. So, the email advertisement for this course that came through on a job site I subscribe to caught my eye. The instructor has a solid reputation in marketing and advertising for several glossy magazines in New York. I was reluctant, though, to pay the money for the tuition. The next day, however, I got an email telling me that I’d sold a short story for the exact same amount as the course cost, so I decided it was kismet of some sort and enrolled.

The course is designed with a conventional advertising/subscription for profit model, so not exactly my area of expertise, but, as I said, the idea was to see how magazine work is done for profit. Over the next few days, I will provide an account of what I have learned.