Gatekeepers

“First, would you trust a citizen surgeon to remove your son’s neuroblastoma?” asks Parisian media consultant Frédérick Filloux. This question, while intended as an argument for the necessity of professional writers and editors, actually points more directly at the dilemma facing writers and editors today. Most people—other than those who boast that they don’t read—believe that they could be writers themselves. In fact, during my tenure there, the Northwestern University Press published collections of poetry by four physicians, while during the same time period I know of exactly no poet who dabbled in surgery.

As for editors, the prognosis may be even more bleak. To the extent the editor is given any thought in the age of the Internet, it is as a crusher of dreams. There is a pervasive belief among unpublished writers that editors act as bouncers—“gatekeepers” being the popular term—who prevent a certain type of writing from being published. “Yes,” reply we editors, “bad writing.” “No,” protest these thwarted aspirants, “my writing.”

Now that the creators of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of new online magazines that spring up each year are free to publish all the neglected or misunderstood work they wish (without even the burden of word limits), what will come of this trampling down of the gates? a new literary renaissance driven by bold experimentalists heretofore gagged by the dictates of prevailing literary taste as held uniformly by every magazine editor in the country? We shall see.

Give 'Em Enough Rope

Reading over Ken Auletta's piece in the New Yorker on the e-book platform wars, I was struck by a quote by an unnamed publisher who complained that "[Amazon] chose to do something irrational—lose money—in order to gain a monopoly."

In fact, as the ghost of Sam Walton would willingly attest, selling products at a loss to drive out scrupulous, non-conglomerated competition could be deemed highly rational for the right CEO—unethical, perhaps, and illegal in many cases, but not irrational.

The Reality of Copyright

David Shields writes in Reality Hunger:

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Or at least you might think he did, until you check out the appendix of citations in the back and find it was said by Wlliam Gibson in Wired.

I read Reality Hunger with a thumb planted in the appendix to check the source of each section as I finished it, even those of a sentence or less in length—the exact opposite of the Shields’ intention, I know, but it’s how I was raised.

New Pages

I received an update from the New Pages website that the final issue of TriQuarterly, which is good excuse to call attention to them and to Poetry Daily, two excellent examples of online organizations, supported by member sponsorship, that guide new readers to their member print magazines.

Better Mousetrap/Same Old Mouse

Andrew Rice’s article in the Sunday Times magazine is admirable both for its scope and for its narrow focus. The piece profiles a handful of editors of online news and feature magazine start-ups. Many of them are refugees of paying jobs at now-defunct print magazines who have found that existing technology allows them to start up handsome ventures online on a small investment of time and capital; in the process they have also found making money is a separate matter, altogether.

What each of the editors—including Sam Apple of the Faster Times and Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant—have in common is that they had developed a new business model in hopes of circumventing the most pressing obstacles of making a profit writing online, one being that ad revenues are small and hit driven and the other being that no one will pay for news and features online. Implicit in the article is a new normal in which the energy, creativity, and innovation that used to be channeled into content is being channeled into a quest to find the means to earn a living online. A corollary to this new reality is that the content suffers in the process.

Rice quotes a passage from the Faster Time’s mission statement that proclaims: “The crisis of American journalism is a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.” Perhaps so, but each of these editors is aware that it is the tawdry and the profane that generates hits, and “great” journalism may be the very definition of an expense few online reader are willing to pay for.

Magazine Editing by Flash Mob

When I read this article in the WSJ, my first question was Why? However, the more I thought about the idea, the more worthy the experiment seemed. Magazine editing is an act of aggregating energy—the energy of contributors, or editors, of printers, and distributors—toward a goal of turning out an issue on a deadline.

Having 1500 submissions to cull from, the issue is unlikely to suck. Whether it will cohere is a separate question.

One objection might be to the theme, hustle—“which,” the article says, “can refer to anything from speed to the actions of a con artist”—as another example of how the point of the thing seems always these days to become the thing. It would surely be more compelling to see a magazine produced in 48 hours on the theme of sloth—which can mean anything from slow to an animal that dangles languidly from tree limbs.

h/t R. Faust

A Message from Abroad

in a post on the Author, Author blog in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra salutes the pluck of American little magazines, commends the work of recent TriQuarterly contributor Eliot Weinberger, and closes with this:

This is the kind of desanctified criticism little magazines have always excelled at: reconsiderations of often canonical figures that dispense with plot summaries and prose connoisseurship, and move quickly beyond their declared subjects toward a larger moral, social or psychological insight. The light it sheds on literature is brighter than that of the post-publication review, theory-addled academic appraisal or bookchat on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Notwithstanding the new virtual communities, little magazines continue to be the main sponsor of the vital US tradition of intellectual dissent, which one suspects may be needed more than ever in our busy new century.