Why There Are No Starving Publishers

An email exchange between an award-winning freelance writer and an editor of the Atlantic online has sparked the latest debate on how media is changing in the Internet age.  This time it is from a writer's point of view.

Nate Thayer was asked if he could "repurpose" for the Atlantic online a piece he'd published elsewhere.  He started a correspondence on adapting it, and soon asked the usual questions about length, deadline and payment.  The answers: end of the week, 1200 words, "unfortunately we can't pay you for it."

Thayer responded in part:  "I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children...I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts... Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them." 

Thayer posted the email exchange on his blog and got lots of comments, many about the new realities for writers.  Unfortunately however this is not an entirely new reality.  For-profit publications have been cajoling writers into writing for free since I started writing professionally in the 70s.  And when they couldn't get you to work for absolutely nothing, they kept their fees very low.

Except for a few writers in a few places, that still seems to be the rule.  Some freelance fees have not changed in forty years, some longer--that is, if you got paid $50 in 1972 for a review, you might well be getting paid $50 (or less) today.  (The rent for my Cambridge MA apartment in 1972--admittedly not in a better part of Cambridge--was $150. It would not surprise me if it were ten times more now, but certainly 5.)

It's possibly even worse for literary writers, who almost never get paid now.  But even when magazines were still publishing and paying for poems and stories back in the 70s and 80s, I recall reading that many of their rates hadn't changed since the 1940s or even 1920s, despite inflation.

Everybody loves to make arguments about costs and circulation, etc. that are probably all valid, to a point.  And the point is this: the editor gets paid, the accountants get paid, the janitors get paid, but in a business with written words as a main product, it's okay for the writers not to get paid, or to get paid the least.

Even at the enlightened liberal cutting-edge electronic age site the Huffington Post, I'm willing to bet that Arianna Huffington takes home some dollars, and that Howard Fineman gets a paycheck, benefits and probably stock options, etc.  But the "bloggers" get nothing but the chance to look like they're important.  This may or may not lead to paying jobs (why would it?  They work for free for Arianna, why not for me?) but I'm pretty sure they can't pay for groceries with page views.

Writers in the realms of journalism and the general area of non-fiction may not have a great deal in common with literary writers, but they do share this.  I recall a conversation long ago with a freelance theatre artist--performer, puppeteer and writer.  "I know starving artists," he said dryly, "but I don't know any starving arts administrators."

The arts in America have long been subsidized by artists, through their unpaid or badly paid labor and creativity.  Journalists and non-fiction writers had it a little better in the 70s: writing for nothing or almost nothing was something you did when you were young, because it could lead to paying work.  If it didn't, you found something else to do that earned an income.  Writing record reviews for five bucks (and the record) for alternative newspapers could lead to staff jobs on weeklies or dailies, and/or magazines. Well-known names at the New York Times etc. started that way. That might lead to books.  There was some kind of path, and risks and inadequate pay all along the way if you didn't take the unionized daily newspaper gig, but at least something like a path existed.

Maybe for the young today there is a similar path that starts with free or very badly paid writing online.  But it's not just the young who are being starved by the collapse of periodical and book publishing.  That makes it worse.

I'm sure that today there are also overworked and underpaid editors and others as well. Still, the fundamental disconnect has been there for a long time.  Nobody would dare ask anyone else in the business to work for free--they only ask that and expect that of writers.  And writers are arrogant and unrealistic for pointing that out.            

R.I.P. Ada Louise

I never met Ada Louise Huxtable, though for a brief period we were both writing for the New York Times. She even quoted me in one of her books, and I certainly quoted her in The Malling of America. She was one of its guiding lights. She died this week at the age of 91. Here's her LA Times obit.


Her beat was architecture for the Times, their first real architecture critic, and she was up there with Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford in reshaping New York City and how architects and planners thought about cities and how people live in them. She shaped criticism itself as a journalistic pursuit involving reporting, scholarship and taste.


In particular I found her work revelatory on the South Street Seaport in New York, when it was about to host another urban "marketplace" mall built by the Rouse Company, after its successes on the waterfronts of Boston and Baltimore.

At retirement age she instead became the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal. She also wrote books (I'm footnoted in The Unreal America.) Her influence was highest in the 60s but her work inspired me in the 80s and I'm sure is inspiring others right now. No reason why it won't for a long time to come. May she rest in peace, and her work live on.

Big Deal on Ross Street

After a Christmas that involved waiting out cyclonic winds before setting forth on a 6 hour car trip, and a return on a bus with a driver who wasn't really sure where we were going--aided by what might be described as in person crowd sourcing--New Years was quiet.  New Year's Eve I was the only one awake as usual, watching Charlie Rose ask inane questions about Shakespeare which nevertheless elicited interesting answers when I heard a few distant firecracker pops to note the passage of the old year.  Then the Day was spent in an epic Scrabble game and watching a lovely old Italian comedy I don't think I've seen since college, Big Deal on Madonna Street.  It's a kind of neo-realist comedy, a 1958 spoof of caper films, with a working class crew in Italy.  Their goal is a pawn shop safe but they wind up with pasta fazol.  Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale are part of the ensemble.  A nice way to end the day and start the year.

True Blue

When did I start identifying with blue?  Blue eyes maybe. Blue blankets and other blue baby stuff for a boy.  It became at some point my favorite color and has grown in that regard.  So that now blue is an essential marker of me.  And my blue voice.

It turns out that "true blue" has a colorful meaning. In the New York Times:

For the French Fauvist painter and color gourmand Raoul Dufy, blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.” Darkened red looks brown and whitened red turns pink, Dufy said, while yellow blackens with shading and fades away in the light. But blue can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and “it will always stay blue.”

 And that blue fascinates more than me.  The Times story by Natalie Angier goes on:

 Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe."

All that and more.  Blue by the way is the color of the throat chakra.  Blue voice.  How about that for metaphorical fluency?

The artist of blue most people think of is Picasso.  The Blue Period (brought on by the combination of the suicide of a friend and--at least according to Gertrude Stein--because someone gave him a lot of blue paint, and he was too poor to buy other colors.)

But I like blues in Klee, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe, Monet, Severini, Morris Graves, and Rene Magritte.  Magritte paints blue skies, usually in that mysterious luminous blue that partakes of both day and night.  It is the blue of dawn and the blue of dusk.  And one of the features of these paintings I love is, you can't tell which it is.  Everything is the dawn of something, and the dusk.

I wear a lot of blue. I enjoy it.  Beginning with its third season, the George Reeves Superman TV series of the 50s was filmed in color, even though it would be shown in black and white for the next decade or so.  When color TV was more widely available in the 60s, the series had a big revival.  But to both film in color and principally for black and white TV, almost everybody in Superman wore blue. I assume that was the reason.  All shades and patterns of blue.  Blue sweaters with blue suits. (And they didn't seem to change their outfits very often.)  Even the cars tended to be blue. I've got these on DVD.  It's my kind of world. 

Superman wore blue.  Doctor Who in his blue box. Spock in his blue uniform.  Now that new BBC Sherlock wears blue.  But it probably all comes down, or up, to that blue sky.  The blue ocean.  This blue planet.  This blue voice.

The Amity of Influence

In a nifty collection of interviews (Talking Music), William Duckworth asks composer Lou Harrison why he brought together divergent influences to his own work.  Harrison says it wasn't conscious, but the reason he does give is forthright and true at times for most creative people.

DUCKWORTH: How did they get in there?

HARRISON: Well, because I loved them.  "Me, too," that's the idea.  If I like something I want that too.  It's greed--that's the basis of it."

September Song

Martin Amis is a writer I've admired mostly from afar.  I've enjoyed the novels I've read and the non-fiction collection about the 80s, The Moronic Inferno, a title that describes the 80s and a lot of the ever since.  But I haven't read a lot of his work, for often his most urgent concerns are not mine--at least not of the same moment. 

Maybe it's just that his life has been so different from mine.  But he was quoted making an observation that I've not only never read anybody else making, I've never heard anyone else say.  He was describing something that happens to him, that I thought that for all intents and purposes, only happens to me.

He said that he is often caught offguard by a memory of something that attacks him with regret and chagrin, seemingly out of the blue, just walking down the street or in any daily situation.  In fact, I referenced this on this very blog:

 Several years ago I was pleased to hear novelist Martin Amis admit that small regrets hit him suddenly every day, to the point that they stop him in his tracks, literally, as he walks down the street, and he involuntarily winces and mutters to himself because of some small memory that emerged with the peculiar force of shame and the pitiless, bottomless thump of regret. I was pleased because I thought I was the only one this happened to.

Now he's done it again, in a recent interview (published at Smithsonian online and flagged by Andrew Sullivan's site.)  He has identified something I am dimly aware is happening to me--that in recent days I've become more conscious of.  Here's what he said:

"Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin [Amis is 62], but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.”

Yes, there is that "huge new territory inside" which is "the past."  But especially, "in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again."

It does.  It's a bit easier to appreciate the moment.  I'm very aware that this is a golden time--I'm reasonably healthy, I am without physical pain, temporarily secure--well, the sense that it is certainly all temporary.  But it is, right now.  And the day is easier to appreciate.  People, relationships that are good--and the blessings I have here, of this lovely air, especially in the sunny autumn of the North Coast.  It is fascinating and it is poignant, and it's sharpened by the awareness not only that it will all soon end, but you don't know when it will start ending, or how.

Accessing the Slow

 

Students are back at Humboldt State University here.  Perhaps the novelty of seeing so many on campus after the summer opened my eyes to noticing yet again how universally they are wedded to their cell phones--walking or standing anywhere on campus, they are either talking or texting or staring at them.

In June Margaret and I were down in Menlo Park, visiting her daughter, son in law and grandson who had just turned 1.5 years old.  Besides hanging out with him--even at this early age he demonstrated good taste in taking a shine to me--I spent pleasant hours at a fine cafe called Cafe Borrone.  Very good coffee, very good food, excellent staff and great atmosphere, especially in the large outdoor plaza area pictured above.  I snapped that photo in the lull before the late afternoon crowd, which I was around to see.  I was there at Sunday brunch time as well, so I saw a fair number of people. 

The cafe is close to Stanford University, and in the vicinity of Google and Facebook hqs, and lots of other tech related firms.  I'm sure some of the young crowd sipping beers or coffee were worth millions, or soon would be.  So this has to be one of the most tech savvy places in the world.  But what struck me was how few of them in that environment were plugged into cells, smartphones, tablets or laptops.  I saw far less of it than on the HSU campus.

I did see people reading newspapers and books.  I saw a woman using a pen and writing on a paper tablet.  The cafe is itself adjacent to a bookstore.

It seemed to me that these people had restored some balance to their lives.  Electronics have found a place, doing what they do best, but the slower media still have their functions.  I could be projecting here, but it gave me some hope that people who are most familiar with these devices are not enslaved by them.  And they can still enjoy simple conversation with people actually present, or a quiet newspaper or book with a cup of coffee in the sun, as have many generations before them.