My mother turned 80 and we had a party last night, and I had a conversation with an academic friend about monetizing the internet. She is worried that I won't be able to support myself as a journalist. (So am I). And she is worried that she won't be able to read good writing anymore. She gets pleasure from reading good writing.
Like every other journalist, I find these issues fascinating. But one problem in her formulation is the belief that the old system somehow created profit for good writing. It didn't. Good writing was cleverly bundled within profitable enterprises and thus was subsidized by other parts of the enterprise. When Mark Bowden (he of Black Hawk Down) built up his African storytelling skills years ago by going off for months to write about the rhinoceros for the Philadelphia Inquirer, his salary wasn't paid by his readers and the advertisers who followed them; no, he was subsidized by more profitable portions of the newspaper. Like the weather story. (When I was in newspapers I was told it was the most popular story in the paper, so work hard at it, kid.) Good writing has always been an elite choice. Maybe that's what makes it good writing. The problem for traditional journalism is that the internet has unbundled the old relationships, leaving the rhinoceros-writer unsubsidized.
Citizen journalists on the internet are self-subsidized, but so were a lot of magazine journalists. When I went into magazine journalism 25 years ago or so, I lived with my grandmother for years so as to enable my training, and I learned that many of my magazine journalist friends were from wealthy families. They were subsidizing their work. I bet that's true of many magazine journalists to this day; they have trust funds. They're volunteering just like the people on the internet; but they had more social status.
Woolf
My friend last night recalled that Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas that to be a writer, you have to have an independent income. So-- some of this is an old story.
My friend also worries about the loss of the civic function of newspapers. I believe that volunteer journalism will surprise us on that score; and I wonder how much of the piety about the old system comes from corporate journalists who are experiencing salary tailspin (as I have) and are trying to valorize their old activities as somehow more responsible than journalists today. When it was precisely those journalists, as I constantly point out, who gave us the Iraq war on a silver goddamn platter. The new journalist is someone like Rob Browne, who writes about Middle East policy for DailyKos and subsidizes his work through dentistry. He feels privileged to be a journalist, and takes the work enormously seriously, and doesn't have the kind of elitist mentality that would allow him to sleep well while directing other people's kids to fight a war. If there are a million Rob Browne's out there, I don't see a civic deficit.
How much of the lamentation over the internet is strictly a class issue, with a highly-connected losing their traditional privilege--Informing Society--to a much broader group. Of course they're bitching about how it's tearing the fabric of society.
I've gone on long enough. It's the internet, people have short attention spans! And that's the last point about good writing. My friend likes to read pleasurably. She means a book, or a magazine, and a sustained experience of being inside someone else's head. I love reading for that reason too: the book I look forward to ending the day with. I'm reading Herzl's Complete Diaries with devotion. I don't think that pleasure is ever going away, but the social/temporal space for it does seem to be eroding. People are choosing to read in a different way. The readers are choosing.
link to nytimes.com
And That’s Not the Way It Is
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 25, 2009
WHO exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon? …
What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.
…
Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.
The support for writers now is in academia. There are a finite number of “chairs” or “fellow” that are funded, provided they offer a token amount of lectures and mentorships.
There are think tanks, and some privately funded fellowships.
Those paths though have limited interface with the general public. Professors as a rule do not dialog publicly, do not give public and free lectures. There is no venue circuit for them.
Books that are published must have a commercial catch, a bubbly headline or title, or a film based on them, to be successful.
The best way to promote good writing is to practice it.
There is a bit of a disconnect between your primary skill and contribution and blogging. That is that the time scale of this blog is the same time scale as the daily news cycle.
I always understood that you were more interested in longer time scale, weekly or monthly output that allows you dive into a subject, think it through, frame it, draft it, publish, discuss it. Not an annual biography, still topical, but not reactive in any way, thoughtful.
Is there a blogging format that facilitates that?
Anyone who wishes to write fiction, faction, or “journalism” about a sacred cow such as Israel must be self-supporting in one way or another. Obviously that’s harder for lower
socio-economic strata “honest injuns.”
Is there another point to this article, Phil?
What a delightful, incisive and beautifully written piece – hitting the nail on the head!
Yes, times are changing [not necessarily for the better!] but it is sites such as this, with its “news” and insightful analysis, which will increasingly be the cornerstone of reporting to the world what is going on “out there” – replacing the concentration on mindless drivel and trivia the mainstream increasingly does.
Woolf’s persona in *Three Guineas* reads 3 newspapers a day in order to get some kind of reasonable perspective on events — which leads me to believe that she’d have loved the Internet, where it’s possible to get 6 perspectives on a given issue before breakfast. Another reason she’d have loved it is implied in her use of biography and almanacs and newspaper stories as her chief sources in *Three Guineas* because the more exalted sources were chained down and kept under glass in university libraries. In sum, every blogger should read *Three Guineas* in order to sharpen their sense of their mission. I’ve taught that essay every year since just before 9/11 happened — indeed, I just happened to be teaching it on the very Tuesday of that event. Talk about relevant!
RE: “…a sustained experience of being inside someone else’s head.”
MY COMMENT: Beautiful! You really nailed it.
link to nytimes.com
And That’s Not the Way It Is
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 25, 2009
WHO exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon? …
What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.
…
Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.
The support for writers now is in academia. There are a finite number of “chairs” or “fellow” that are funded, provided they offer a token amount of lectures and mentorships.
There are think tanks, and some privately funded fellowships.
Those paths though have limited interface with the general public. Professors as a rule do not dialog publicly, do not give public and free lectures. There is no venue circuit for them.
Books that are published must have a commercial catch, a bubbly headline or title, or a film based on them, to be successful.
The best way to promote good writing is to practice it.
There is a bit of a disconnect between your primary skill and contribution and blogging. That is that the time scale of this blog is the same time scale as the daily news cycle.
I always understood that you were more interested in longer time scale, weekly or monthly output that allows you dive into a subject, think it through, frame it, draft it, publish, discuss it. Not an annual biography, still topical, but not reactive in any way, thoughtful.
Is there a blogging format that facilitates that?
Any ideas?
That was my attempt to move the post past “consideration” to actual posting.
A very big hassle.
My skin has a kind of iridescent sheen. I have no idea why.
Earlier, my son said “pop–how come we can’t be more humanitarian and asphyxiate all the arab people? Like put dry cleaning bags over their heads? Wouldn’t that constitute a Mitzvah, of sorts?”
He still has a lot to learn. But his heart is pure.
NOT LIKE HAMAS WHO HAVE THOUSANDS OF ICBM’s pointed AT EVERYBODY.
We got to see a special part of the Chinese terra-cotta army exhibit, not open to the general public. WOW is all I can say right now.
..thank you for reading my post!
–Richard Witty
Please sign your own name to your own thinking.
And, I and the world would appreciate if you represent my views, rather than demeaningly misrepresent them.
I’ve always believed that Phil and Adam should use the content of Mondoweiss to create a monthly newsletter to be sent to every member of Congress in .pdf format. There are still some practical aspects to a monthly news cycle, and MW could take advantage of it.
It would change their reporting. For the better, I think.