Freelance Fizzle!
The Decline and Fall of the Writer
“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”
It all sounds so … uncomplicated, doesn’t it? Boozy lunches at Michael’s and evenings at Elaine’s, unlimited expense accounts, stories that took months to report and longer to write, maybe a ramshackle house in the Hamptons to complement the musty, book-clogged apartment on the Upper West Side. But above all, there was the sense that magazine writing was at the center of a vital intellectual universe, with New York as its capital, and vaunted writers and editors such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Willie Morris, Harold Hayes, Lillian Ross, Clay Felker, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Nora Ephron and the like as its reigning princes and princesses, with salaries and perks and moist-eyed acolytes to match. Not to mention scandals, sodden confessions and rumors that could be safely traded and tucked away among trusted friends, with no danger of being scattered like seed spores across cyberspace. Gossip was community-building, not community-busting.
What young Turk, as Esquire founding editor Arnold Gingrich called his up-and-coming editors (Mr. Hayes and Mr. Felker among them) in the late 1950s, wouldn’t want entree into this literary glam world? And until quite recently, landing an editorial assistant gig at Esquire or GQ or Elle, or the reporter-researcher job at The New Republic, or the two-year training program at Vanity Fair, or the (unpaid) internship at Harper’s, or the (nominally paid) internship at The Nation, or even, for the most well-connected and talented graduates, an assistant job at The New Yorker, was the ne plus ultra for the young, tweedy intelligentsia, those graduates of Yale and Vassar who had committed to memory the opening lines of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Of course, there’s more than a little romanticization that goes into any characterization of days gone by; nonetheless, there is a discernible sense in the air that, as one young magazine editor put it, “Those kinds of jobs exist, but just not for our generation.” This editor, who is 24, continued, “It’s weird, because I feel like there are certain people I’ve met who are young and super into magazines still, which is always surprising to me, because I don’t know why anyone who wants to be involved with the media would want to turn their attention to magazines.”
THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN overnight. But it’s been especially in the past couple of years that a confluence of factors has resulted in some young people turning their backs on magazines. For one, there is the industry’s notorious (some might say sadistic) gate-keeping, which keeps out a majority of those who would deign to think of themselves as worthy of the industry’s blessing, and which also requires an aspiring magazine writer or editor to commit to working in magazines, preferably while still in college, when an internship at a blue-chip publication (nearly any magazine at Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst or Hachette Filipacchi, plus, depending on one’s interest, most political magazines, low-circulation-but-high-influence downtown fashion or art magazines, plus a smattering of others like New York, Spy, Harper’s, Newsweek, etc.) could potentially cement one’s place in the firmament. (It could also leave the less talented, or more charitably, less lucky writers and editors to languish. “I guess my disillusionment is partly just that it’s taken me this long,” one 37-year-old editor told The Observer.)
A generation that is starting to see barely legal bloggers become more prominent in six months than even the most talented contributing editors may not see this path as necessarily the most appealing, or expedient, one.
One 23-year-old political journalist told The Observer that the New Republic reporter-researcher job—famed for launching the careers of Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza, Atlantic editor James Bennet and author Hanna Rosin, among others—is no longer quite the coveted position it once was. “Part of the reason why the TNR internship isn’t as big as it used to be is that if you were a young sharpie on the make in 1990 or even 1995, there just weren’t that many places where you could get your start,” the political journalist said. “But the rise of the kind of whole bloggy progressive thing has, I think, really kicked off the careers of some people, or at least for smart liberal college students.”
Another related issue is influence—whether the kind of buzz generated by a magazine story is the kind that young writers still want—that is, attention from a world in which someone may get news not from CNN but from a Facebook posting about a story on CNN. Nothing seems to live for more than a day without commentary; the contemporary version of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound” is “if an article gets written and no one blogs it, does anyone care?”
“It’s not like if you have a big magazine byline everyone is talking about you,” said the 24-year-old magazine editor. “People don’t really talk about specific writers anymore, in any sense, unless they work for The New Yorker.”
“How do you know you’re doing a good job?” asked a 29-year-old national magazine writer. “You have some general internal metric that says, That paragraph was well written. But you come out of fact-checking and editing, and you have no idea. It’s hard to get a sort of accurate gauge on how you’re doing. You have to just take it on faith that there is a real market out there and an appreciation for what you’re doing.” Next Page >
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So let's see -- all your named sources are age 40 or older, while everyone who's 30 or younger is anonymous; you site no one with any authority to verify that freelance submissions are down, column inches are down, or that freelance rates are down.
I don't buy this bogus "trend" story for one second.
Merit-based hiring is a rare occurrence in this business; you either know someone or you don't. And beyond that, it's really sheer luck. What I find interesting is that the writer didn't disclose how she ended up at the Observer. Does Gawker not count as a blog anymore -- especially as a breeding ground for ambitious young "writers"?
While I agree that if writers of any age are looking out for their best long-term interests, they'd steer clear of magazines as their main source of income. Even Gay Talese states that diversification among the various media outlets is the best path to secure income, both back in the day and now.
However, Gay Talese and his friends are hardly representative of the average magazine staffer of yore. It's cute that the young anonymous editors quoted have this fantasy that magazine jobs were once all lavish expense accounts and high salaries and long-form investigative articles and job security. For the average working stiff--the majority of the staff--it was (and still is) low pay, long hours, stories edited by committee until they bear little resemblance to the original, and switching jobs every couple of years in order to remain relevant and to make more money. And mags have always had high rates of folding like poker hands.
The young writers in this article are typical of young editors and writers in any era: They want glamour and prestige and respect and lots of money right out of school. That much hasn't changed, apparently. Nor has the rampant paranoia of magazine people, considering the number of anonymous sources in this article.
What else hasn't changed is that if you went to a decent school, made the right friends, and wrote for Gawker, you too can have plenty of opportunities in various forms of media. Not that these are bad things, mind you. Let that be the lesson for young journalists.
Given the low pay and unpredictability of assignments, can anyone without a trust fund still afford to freelance for New York mags and papers, and live in Manhattan? Brooklyn? Queens?
In 1971, after graduating from a decidedly un-ivy college and having served in Vietnam, I came to New York city from the midwest with $150, one suit and a dream to have my byline in Time or Newsweek or The New York Times. Totally unconnected and working as a file clerk at the Plaza Hotel, I literally pounded the pavement during a recession and came up with a job as an assistant editor at...Modern Floor Coverings. Two years into this gig and making great dough, I decided to make my move into the consumer press. Not so fast. They wanted me to start, again, at the bottom. I argued that I was running the staffs of two magazines, reporting and writing everything from investigative features to newsletters, but the reply was, "Yeah, but that's for a trade magazine." I was branded. I was a trade guy. It seems from this piece that "online" now carries its own stigma. And I can't imagine what people think of online writers at B2B titles. But guess what, there are thousands of writers making a living and doing excellent work (see the Neal Awards) who don't work for Conde Nast or The New Yorker, or any other consumer title and, of course, never will. Bottom line, if a young person wants to write for print, not so they can live down the block from the latest trust-fund darling whose mommy or daddy got them a job at one of THE titles but because they want to write for print, there are plenty of jobs available, and ones THAT THEY CAN AND SHOULD BE PROUD TO HAVE.
Oh, my random thoughts , I keep reading about how research is important for a writer. Do writers depend to much on the internet for their research?
Readers use the internet way to much to obtain any subject matter. Most of the material they read comes from websites and down there somewhere within the list of hits on their subject matter. Appears a magazine article that has to be paid before viewing. Most won't pay for the article.
They will read the information available on the internet first and then visit news websites for added value to their subject search.
Laptops are here to stay and before we used to carry magazines around to read. Now, the laptop is the gateway to the information or articles being seeked. As well as being the instrument of choice, to write for anyone in any industry.
The world does not use New York to be the center of magazine life anymore. It is now, where ever you can write from and where ever you can obtain your information for your research, is where you lay your writers hat.
An guess what, you get paid for writing articles sitting anywhere with your lap top in your underwear . If you happen to have a blog to suppliment your article, the more power to you.
It's embarrassing that a newspaper that published a brilliant deconstruction of trend pieces ("Now, Less Than Ever", Samuel Jacobs and Jonathan Liu), still puts out this kind of pabulum. At least Floppy Woo was funny. This reads like a bunch of bitter, entitled, anonymous people trying to rationalize their failures in a piece that is itself a rationalization of its own failures. If there were any numbers or statistics even remotely associated with this bogus trend piece it might be worth discussing, but it's just empty and lazy.
And almost all magazines still have expense accounts. Honor thy father and all, but things haven't changed as much as Mr. Talese seems to think. And "tape recorders" have gotten considerably more portable for field reporting.
I love the irony that everyone is commenting on the online version of a story that talks about how we should get out from behind the computer more if we want to advance our jobs in print. Is anyone really surprised, considering newspaper ad revenue is taking its biggest hit in 50 years, that mags are suffering as well? Shit changes, that's life. It's not the end of the world. Lack of expense accounts aside, I'll take the intro of this piece as advice that those of us younger than 30 should--like humans have been doing for thousands of years--learn to adapt. Why can't reporters forge new paths and make our journalism careers work with that intoxicating blend of youthful idealism, hard work and innovation. Once I figure out what that entails, look for my byline at a newsstand near you.
I agree with the comments about B2B magazine writers being unfairly banished from the world of consumer magazines. I, too, arrived in New York with no connections in the late 1980s. I took a job at a large B2B magazine company because it got me to New York from the Midwest and it paid a bit more than some entry-level jobs at consumer magazines. I even managed to maintain my residence in Manhattan. But making the transition to consumer magazines was very difficult.
The truth is, the quality of research, reporting and writing at many trade pubs is far superior to the work being done at a lot of mass market or special interest consumer mags. But the stigma against trade pubs is hard to overcome.
Years later, after serving in top editorial positions for a variety of trade pubs, I now have a successful freelance career in which I contribute to both consumer and trade magazines and write books. But the way I'm able to increase my income each year is by supplementing my magazine work with various forms of business writing and editing. Magazines occupy about 75% of my time, but it's the work I do during the remaining 25% that makes it possible for me to still call myself a magazine writer.
The established people quoted in this article love the system that gave them their starts. After all, they were successful at it. But what about all the people who were marginalized in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s because they didn't have access to the public.
Of course, blogging has its problems. But in terms of providing more access - not less - it does a lot better than the old model.
What's more, there's a sense of entitlement that because one writes, one is owed a six-figure income, or that holding down a second job is somehow beneath people who aspire to be writers. That's a bunch of nonsense.
I agree with Anonymous (not verified) - the one who noted the shocking elitism of the magazine industry.
I spent five years working in the editorial department at a trade publisher (Ziff-Davis). Several of my colleagues tried to make the jump to the "real world" of magazines and were rebuffed in a very cruel fashion. I jumped online as soon as I could because for the first time my words wouldn't be mauled by a clueless committee. Today I make more from my online writings than I ever did working for a magazine. I'm amazed that people still want to work for magazines and fear that the schools charged with grooming new writers are caught in a time warp.
Why am I not surprised that half the commenters either can't spell or are too lazy to proofread their submissions?
And don't get me started on anonymity. If you have something to say that I should listen to, tell me your name. (Oh, and pantsman and carguy aren't names.)
I know this is the "New York Observer" and the general reader is from New York City. But as a Texan who was born and bred in Chicago, I've found another problem facing freelancers trying to break into NYC magazines. It's called "East Coast bias."
In other words, if you're a freelance writer living west of the Hudson River, you may as well have "hick" stenciled on your submission. Yes, competition is fierce and yes, there are as many "wannabes" in the hinterlands who can't write their ways out of paper bags as there are in the city. But the preference for East Coast writers over everywhere else is definitely there.
I agree with one other poster on this site. You can find plenty of writing work in the business-to-business category. Sometimes the B2Bs are better, as they don't make the writers wait for six months until the article is published to cut a check.
Given all of the above, it's probably no wonder that the younger journalists are turning to writing outlets that are more inclusive and that don't require a a writer to wait months to get paid.
Just my two cents' worth :-).
It's brutal out there at the moment, and any writer who isn't worried about it is delusional. Newspapers are sloughing off staff even faster than they are losing readership. Magazine feature holes are shrinking to nothing. The big altweeklies, which used to be almost recessionproof, are all owned by a tanking conglomerate. Word rates are lower. And the careers of even ASME-award-certified members of the $5-a-word club often have the shelf-lives of yogurt - the rise of blogs has amply proven that there are thousands of people eager to do our work, or at least some facsimile of our work, for free.
Fresh out of an Ivy League school with nothing but raw ambition, I started my professional career as a fact-checker in New York in 1995. Exciting, for sure, but I found myself somewhat frustrated with how things functioned (i.e. on anything but merit). Perhaps I should have waited it out and patiently risen up the ranks and worked with truly great journalists.
But I guess I will never know. I only spent a year there before heading off to graduate school and then out to the West Coast to ride the wave of the Internet. I spent some of the best years of my career writing great stuff about the irrational exuberance--at a relatively young age. Life was good. (An editorial assistant wrote a novel on the experience at our business magazine. It was hilarious.) But then it all came to an abrupt end. And I have been trying to cobble together something of a career ever since.
I am now 34 and the editor of a small regional magazine. It's fulfilling to a certain extent and some people I know say I should be thankful to be employed, but I wonder why I am stuck here. 'Cuz I am stuck here. I really don't know where my next step is. Will I ever become the superstar editor I hoped to work hard to become? With so much media and no one really running the show (I think back to that scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheean asks a young Laurence Fishburne who is in charge, and he replies "I thought that was you?"), I wonder how the industry will truly regulate itself. It seems everyone and their brother has a different sense of what good writing and journalism is. Uninhibited blogging is embarrassing, yet we're told that this medium is the way of the future.
I sometimes wonder why I am still at it. I've got a family now, and all I think about is leaving the profession entirely to instill some stability in my life. Yet I always end up convincing myself that this is the profession for me, no matter how bad the industry is. It's like I am a glutton for punishment. East Coast bias, socioeconomic bias, age bias, you name it, it has this industry hamstrung. Can't we all just focus on what makes good writing and journalism, and say "screw you" to the forces that try to lead us astray?
This time of year brings out every college student desperate for employment (either full-time or summer internship). Because I work in a vacation destination, I get a lot of the latter. Lately, I feel like a hypocrite telling these kids, who are just like I was in 1995, that they should go into magazines. I am beyond saving. But I feel sorry for these 22-year-olds. They don't deserve this crap.
"Cite" is short for "citation"
"Site" is short for "website"
First learn to spell before you presume that anyone will care about your opinions on journalism.
Smokey-
"Cite" is short for "citation"
"Site" is short for "website"
First learn to spell before you presume that anyone will care about your opinions on journalism.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your feeling--see my post well above--cite is hardly "short for citation." You can look it up.
"Not verified" is "short" for "not verified".
Wow, how many commenters here are obvious sock puppets of Observer employees? Puts Lee Siegel to shame.
Here's a topic for magazine editors to ponder: editor rudeness. I am a semi-established freelancer with one book under my belt in the same genre for which I often write articles. I also have a blog but am making no money from it because I enjoy publishing my work for the joy of getting it out there without hassle and editorial predilections.
I have done this without an agent and periodic fits of tenacity. But it is wearing, especially when you discover that an editor for whom you've written many articles for in the past has published an article you pitched to them a year ago, that she never followed up about even though interested, and assigned to someone else. Or the promise of follow up to come from a new editorial relationship that just never comes, despite your ideas, your polite contact, their seeming enthusiasm. Or the lack of feedback about pitches, etc. in general. More than a few editors I've worked for in the past have often been indecisive, completely disorganized or end up rewriting the article to the point where there is no recognition of my own work.
It doesn't take long to e-mail "yes", "no" or "maybe" or to be at least semi-responsive. And I'm talking about established relationships between writers and editors, not an answer from the slush pile. It can be difficult enough to sustain and maintain these relationships where often the only contact is via e-mail or the occasional phone call.
If the magazines want good freelance writers and get them, they should learn how to keep them. Considering them "call girls" for hire or assignment and not returning their calls is not a good relationship or business methodology for anyone. Fortunately, I do not derive my sole income from freelance writing. Some would call this predicament not being "hungry" enough for it but I think J.D. Salinger had the right idea after all.
If magazines fail it is not because of the freelancers or the writing staff or the reading public or the internet. It is because magazine editors can be largely an unorganized, ungrateful rude bunch of folks and should court their writers--and photographers--as avidly as they probably do their publishers and advertisers.
It's the E-mail Culture. Having been in this business since 1959, I of course remember the days when you at least got in the mail a little 4x8 pre-printed boilerplate rejection note, and if you didn't, you wondered if your query had been lost by the Post Office.
Today, the routine is that total silence means a polite no thanks, even from the editors with whom you work most closely. They have too many e-mails to answer...or not. If I get total silence from my editor at Conde Nast Traveler, say, it's simply today's gentle way of saying, "We appreciate your interest, but unfortunately etcetera and so forth..."
So, I guess, deal with it. And no, I don't find them "a rude bunch of folks [courting] their publishers and advertisers." That's silly and shows no awareness of how magazines actually work. Only a freelancer's fantasy.
I completely agree with Catherine about editor rudness...It takes TIME (unpaid) to write a good pitch letter, and to know that most of my pitches are just tossed into a heap is completely insulting.
While many editors are sitting in their ivory towers, we freelancers are living real lives in real places...we have so much to offer, so many ideas, and we are often treated very, very badly.
If you don't like the idea that I worked on for 8 hours when you were having brunch at Balthazar and shopping in NoLita, then how about sending me (or e-mailing me) a short "no thank you" letter?
Oh, you grand editor, you... I used to be on your side of the desk, and I never, ever ignored a freelance pitch. Just tell us something: "Yes", "No", "Maybe".
Don't be rude. One day, you, too, may be a freelancer and you'll remember the pitch letters you never took time to read. Karma comes around.
Who reads magazines and blogs anymore???
Aahh, so much to relate to here.
Seeing the attention that the media lavishes on those 20-somethings who DO carve out a name for themselves before 30, who wouldn't want to achieve the same? So as for young writers having a sense of entitlement, I totally get it, and I too, suffer from it. Though at 28, I guess the clock is ticking on that one.
It's also sad about this business of dismissing writers as "trade" or "webby." Doesn't anyone value versatility anymore? This is probably why the bulk of consumer mags aren't worth reading these days: because the staff are all writing from the same nepotistic and Ivy-League educated point of view.
Yes, I am bitter. Because I've seen good writers get passed over for the hacky ones simply because they didn't know the right people.
Hear, hear, Catherine. Editors need to look at themselves if they're worried about a lack of good, young freelance writers. Their not even condescending to respond to a writer damages everyone.
Stephan, there is no excuse for rudeness and the e-mail generation of the writer-editor relationship, if anything, should make both jobs easier.
This is off topic but while I'm posting again I'd just like to add that I agree completely with Gay Talese that young writers should get off their "fucking laptops" and get out there and off Google. The real research is done in the trenches or from primary sources, whether they are people or scholarship. Not necessarily what's regurgitated on the internet.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've had experiences with two young writers in the past year (I'm in my mid40s which I guess makes me mid-career? Eek.) for major publications, neither of whom impressed me with their own knowledge of basic things in their fields, or their personalities. They came to their interviews with me ill prepared and hadn't even read my book. That was disheartening.
So I do realize it is not an evil empire of editors--I've had some great relationships, especially with those at my publisher.
Just a tough biz all around and those who persevere or have connections, not necessarily those with extreme talent, are the ones who succeed.
Catherine, the rudeness of folks cuts both ways. As EIC of a magazine I can tell you that I have encountered plenty of rude, entitled and very untalented freelance writers who seem to think I exist solely to let them write whatever they want, and badly at that.
I do get a lot of submissions; so many that just this year we changed our writers' guidelines to say that we will not return phone calls without first seeing an e-mail or paper pitch. We just have to do what we can to control the flood of submissions and manage our time effectively. Everyone is stretched to the limit, even here in the so-called ivory tower (I drive a Toyota. A dented one. There are no three-martini lunches for me, at least not with good gin.)
You're right, it doesn't take long to type "no" or "yes" into an e-mail; then again, it also doesn't take long to include a list of sources or make sure the names of the subjects are spelled correctly and consistently throughout. So what I do is extend myself where I think it will pay dividends.
Everyone deserves a response if they've taken the time to send a pitch letter, and believe me, I try to respond to them all -- even the purple ink-smeared mimeographed ones that reek of smoke. But if someone doesn't get a response as quickly as they'd like, it's not because I'm rude, it's probably because I'm writing marketing copy or doing something else that's not really my job. Things are tough all over, I guess.
SRSPHAR,
Thank you for that needed perspective. While I have only ever been an editor of a small alumni newsletter, where I wrote most of the copy, I'm not in a position to think from your perspective, but only from my experience as a writer.
I'm sure that e-mail capabilities have opened up a floodgate of unwanted letters and pitches. I was commenting from the already established relationship of writer-editor and how that might be better accommodated. Perhaps a monthly, brief phone call of pitch ideas to bounce around and follow-up on? E-mail, while facile, can be just as overwhelming as paper mail, I'm sure, from the editor's perspective.
And I know that the magazine industry is taking a hard hit from a drop in advertising base and reader trends. I met a self-published writer recently who said, "Everyone's a writer these days." I bristled and didn't know how to respond and am certain that this kind of statement might be at the root of what you are describing.
Ironically, the computer has made the writer's job easier but has also christened a great many writer-wannabes with a sense of entitlement, poor grammar and spelling, and certainly editorial nightmares in the making.
Young freelancers are always being told to get off line and hang out. Problem is, freelancing is piecework and volume is the key to survival.
If you stay home and watch the wires, the blogs, a couple listservs, some organizational websites, several newspapers, and your own inbox, you can probably come up with one or two pitchable ideas every day.
You anticipate that most of your pitches will be rejected. So, you must not invest too much effort until you make a sale. Hanging out on spec will drive you out of business.
Once you get a firm acceptance, then you can justify a few hours of old school shoe leather reporting.
Then, you file and return to scanning and pitching.