POLITICS FEBRUARY 12, 2010
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When I was young, I enjoyed the romance of the garret. Poverty, or relative poverty, became me. I mastered arcane books and composed ambitious essays in the smallest apartment anybody ever saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When you opened the door, it hit the bed, which of course led to some misunderstandings. I rested my typewriter on a scarred wooden board that groaned every time I struck the keys. When what I wrote was published, I took my earnings to an elegant clothing store on Newbury Street, in defiance of the disconnection notice in my briefcase. (Balzac says somewhere that a student is a person who can afford only luxuries.) I was often broke but never destitute. Many years later Irving Howe used a phrase that described my state of happy indigence: “a decent poverty,” he called it. Lately, however, I have been observing a high incidence of indecent poverty. Many young writers and journalists I meet are close to penniless. They have almost not a hope of supporting themselves in the pursuit of their calling. A garret is no longer affordable. Jobs are disappearing. Internships are unpaid or barely paid, which has the consequence of corrupting a meritocratic system with the inequities of social class, as the fortunately born become the fortunately hired. And when they publish what they write--well, now we leave the honorable tradition of the struggling young writer for the unprecedented enchantments of the digital revolution.
Owing to its vastness and its velocity, no medium of communication and publication ever depended more desperately on “content”--the lifeless business expression for words and ideas--than the Internet. Some people celebrate this as a historic breakthrough for literariness in its various forms. They rhapsodize about the democratization of the writing life, about the demise of the “gatekeepers” and their institutions, about the pure and perfect autonomy of blogging and “self-publishing.” Who needs The New York Times if I can arrange for you to know what it is in my heart at this instant? Leave aside the question of the relation of blogging to writing, of posting to publishing. I wish to emphasize what the love songs omit: the economic and professional consequences of the cheap entropy of the web--its proletarianization of the writer. I wonder if people outside the besieged walls of the profession understand how little is earned with contributions to websites. The sums are scandalous. And sometimes there are no sums at all. Sometimes contributions to websites are produced for free. Writers are the only people I know who are expected to work for next to nothing or nothing. Without them, as I say, the intelligent regions of the Internet would not exist; but even as their skills are increasingly in demand, they are treated increasingly as worthless. You do not have to read the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to recognize that this becomes an issue of dignity.
From the standpoint of the owners of these institutions, this “business model” may seem rational--if they can save money on paper, printing, and postage, why not also save money on prose?--but theirs is not the only standpoint that matters in considering the future of our culture. (Leave aside also the question of paper, and of its almost spiritual necessity for serious writing and its betterment of life.) It is not the owners who make our culture, though some of them serve it admirably. Indeed, an enlightened owner is a hero of culture. And yet it is of no importance that the market will bear this immiseration of writers; the history of the market is riddled with injustices of all kinds. And what model of economic rationality is it that recommends the exertion of one’s skills for little or no reward? I refer you to a report by James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago about the reality of the contemporary freelancer: “what’s sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common perception that writing is a profession--or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage.” Is this really what we want? (About Rainey’s article, one of the brats on Gawker--see what insomnia can do to a man?--poignantly observed that “it’s a little disturbing that the job that pays my bills now may be helping to destroy the one that helped pay them when I was in college.”) And a similar indecency is taking place in book publishing. Laud the Kindle all you want, but who will pay the advance for the novels and the histories that you will cop for $8.99, without which they cannot be written? Not Amazon. A literary agent in New York was recently heard to remark that $30,000 is the new $100,000, and it takes years to write a book. Forward-looking thinkers explain that the money that the publishing houses, or their corporate proprietors, save by printing fewer physical copies will make up the difference; but anybody who believes that those savings will be restored to the primary mission of the editors and the publishers does not understand a thing about the corporate temperament, especially in the aftermath of a panic. No, nausea is in order.
In an interminable piece in The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley complains that newspaper articles are too long. “On the Internet, news articles get to the point,” my friend declares, whereas “newspaper writing ... is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.” He follows this with a quantitative and semantic analysis of various examples of “unnecessary verbiage”; and like much quantitative and semantic analysis, the results are clever and trivial. I do not doubt that newspapers are not as linguistically efficient as they can be, except perhaps USA Today, that ur-website. But Kinsley’s worry about the financial costs of prolixity is silly: no newsroom budget will be rescued by cutting “tag” and “context.” So may I say a word on behalf of necessary verbiage? Brevity may be the soul of wit, or lingerie, or texting, or quail eggs, but all subjects are not the same. Efficiency of expression is in some realms a virtue and in some realms a vice. Brevity is certainly not the soul of news, if by news you mean more than information. “The point” is not always easy. There is not always a “takeaway.” Anyway, this is already an abbreviating age. The forces of concision and distillation are winning. After the death of waiting, I do not see the wisdom of preaching impatience. A culture cannot thrive upon a fear of discourse.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.
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11 comments
And here I thought that teachers, especially non tenured professors at universities, were the "new proles" or are they the old "proles?"
- jdyer
February 12, 2010 at 12:33am
A more thoughtfully stated analysis of the problem of the unpaid internship I have not read. That part of this essay needs to be read, and read widely, for many years to come. While I appreciate Wieseltier's apt description of the Kinsley piece as "interminable" - damn thing just doesn't end - I think he misses the point. All of Kinsley's talk about the economics of publishing are severable from his argument against the vacuous verbosity of modern newspaper writing. The purpose of most newspaper writing really is - or really should be - to convey factual information not known to the reader. Nearly all of the conventions of modern newspaper writing either distract from or actually negate that mission. (I set aside Kinsley's odd misunderstanding of what the "inverted triangle" actually means, or meant back when it was taught by editors who understood the purpose of a news story.) And this gets back to the economics of publishing. Newspapers are not in dire financial shape today. Some newspapers are. Mainly, large urban dailies are failing. Smaller papers generally are doing just fine, and they're doing just fine for one of two reasons (sometimes both): Either they are privately owned, and thus can operate with a stable profit margin, rather than being forced to seek ever higher revenues demanded by shareholders of public corporations; or like most suburban dailies they have retained their focus on providing the reader with factual information of immediate importance to his daily life. The Washington Post does not cover my county board meetings; it does not even carry a listing informing me when county board meetings will take place. My local suburban paper informs me of the meeting in advance and reports on the meeting afterward, and in both cases its reporting offers none of the "analysis" or "snark" that have come to define the contents of the Post. I get the who, the what, the when, and the where, as well as the why and how to the extent appropriate for a medium that exists to inform me of what happened, not to instruct me what to think of it. Guess which paper I am willing to pay to read. Guess which paper is not on the verge of bankruptcy.
- rhubarbs
February 12, 2010 at 10:36am
"All of Kinsley's talk about the economics of publishing are severable from his argument against the vacuous verbosity of modern newspaper writing." THis must have been written by either a lawyer or a law student.
- jdyer
February 12, 2010 at 12:43pm
Neither, jdyer. I just find the word "severable" to be useful as well as aesthetically pleasing - in other words, fly.
- rhubarbs
February 12, 2010 at 2:22pm
"Neither, jdyer. I just find the word "severable" to be useful as well as aesthetically pleasing - in other words, fly." My, my touchy aren't we.
- jdyer
February 12, 2010 at 3:37pm
Not to hijack anything, jdyer, but I thought you were teasing up there, and I was attempting to respond with a little self-depreciation. "Aesthetically pleasing - in other words, fly" is a song lyric. If my intended tone of self-needling jocularity didn't come through, mea culpa.
- rhubarbs
February 12, 2010 at 4:49pm
That’s alright, rhubarb, I know you are tone challenged.
- jdyer
February 12, 2010 at 6:07pm
After deriding this article as "nonsense from top to bottom," Matthew Yglesias informs us: -- Wieseltier works at a print magazine called The New Republic and he knows perfectly well that the researcher-reporters at The New Republic are paid less than entry level bloggers at, say, Think Progress. Indeed, they’re paid so little that The New Republic (a print magazine, I hasten to add) seems to have recently decided to relabel the salary as a “stipend” presumably because if the salary were a salary it would violate minimum wage laws. I don’t really understand how you could muster the lack of self-consciousness to be a top editor at that publication and then turn around and say that the sums “earned with contributions to websites” are “scandalous.” http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/wieseltier-on-the-journalistic-proletariat.php Of course, one reason the magazine is hurting is that it is running out of people looking forward to articles like Wieseltier's recent intemperate attack on Andrew Sullivan or, for that matter, the latest demented rant from Martin Peretz.
- ndmackenzie
February 13, 2010 at 3:31pm
...Brevity may be the soul of wit, or lingerie, or texting, or quail eggs, but all subjects are not the same. Efficiency of expression is in some realms a virtue and in some realms a vice. Brevity is certainly not the soul of news, if by news you mean more than information. “The point” is not always easy. There is not always a “takeaway.” Anyway, this is already an abbreviating age. The forces of concision and distillation are winning. After the death of waiting, I do not see the wisdom of preaching impatience. A culture cannot thrive upon a fear of discourse.... Whoever said brevity was the soul of wit anyway: why no one but that old fool Polonoius. A piece that is a pleasure to read even on a tiny computer, with me embowelled in the Dominican Republic. With the smiting of Sullivan, calling a spade a spade has rarely been done so profoundly, Wieseltier is in my book two for two. And this time I noted a paucity of run on sentences. Or do my eyes deceive me?
- basman
February 13, 2010 at 6:15pm
Rhubes, Although I agree with some of Kinsley's specific criticisms about style and content in news writing, I disagree with his overall take that news stories are too long. I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism that news stories focus too much attention on the political horse race and not enough on the substance of policy. This is an old problem that James Fallows nailed in his book "Breaking the News." It has many reasons. Political reporters are part of a culture that obsesses over the political horse race. Reporters are not experts on policy. Policy is often difficult to explain in a clear, simple way. The notion of objectivity sometimes seems to conflict with serious policy analysis. And so on. But even if the health care story had been more focussed on policy, or had put policy description higher up, would that have made the story shorter? Does it take fewer words, or does it take more words, to describe policy? I'd say *more*. I also agree with Kinsley's irritation with the feature lede -- e.g., "Joe Smith, 47, went to the market one day." I scream at my paper when I see these ledes, "Who cares?!" But this is really a style choice -- as opposed to a length issue -- and one that readers may like. I'm sure there's plenty of market research on this point, and my uninformed guess is that that research shows that people are, on average, more drawn to the Joe Smith intro rather than the dry, get-to-the-point lede. In fact, I bet readers tell researchers that they would like more stories that are *entirely* about individual citizens' triumphs and tribulations. How else to explain the proliferation of such little-picture stories on the front page of the Chicago Tribune of late? On some points, the public's taste may diverge from mine and Kinsley's. Meawhile, I don't agree with Kinsley's criticism of the inverted pyramid structure, which is very reader-friendly and all about getting to the point. In a straight news story using the inverted pyramid -- one that foregoes the irritating feature lede -- the very first sentence or two comprise the "point." As you go along, the information becomes less and less essential, such that the most important, or "biggest," material is first, and the least important, or "smallest," material is last. News stories are not built to necessarily be read all the way through. You're supposed to be able to stop whenever you feel like it, and not miss the most important material. And, if you want to delve deeper -- and get further elaboration -- you are free to do so by reading on. It's not only reader-friendly, it's wire-service and editing-friendly too. Editors and other papers can take your story and simply chop it, and still have a coherent whole. Some papers take long New York Times stories and stuff them into their heavily abridged digest of world or national news by basically chopping off most of the story. You still end up with the main points -- what you might hear on an all-news radio station. Is this what Kinsley envisions for newspapers generally? I know what Kinsley means about repeating yourself. The inverted pyramid will often mean that a point will be previewed before it is dealt with in full. I don't mind this. A lot of clear, efficient writing involves repeating yourself. I also disagree with Kinsley's other main criticism, which is that straight news stories tell you a lot of things any reader who would bother to start the story would already know. He has no support for this other than pure speculation. I don't know that it's true. I find myself far more frustrated with news stories that assume I know something that I don't than with those that assume I know little. Yes, sometimes the main point of the story will involve a characterization about its importance -- such a characterization is neither automatically useless nor out-of-bounds in a straight news story. The mere choice to highlight the news in the way you do involves a judgment, and hopefully a politically neutral judgment about the event's significance, and so can the sort of lede to which Kinsley objects. Also, Kinsley ignores one of the main purposes of newspapers -- still -- which is to provide a contemporaneous record of events for posterity. Therefore, they shouldn't assume a lot of familiarity.
- JakeH
February 16, 2010 at 4:28pm
mackenzie is again showing his jealousy of TNR. He probably was denied a job here.
- jdyer
February 18, 2010 at 3:34pm