From the “What Publishing Needs to Know” files:
I read the cover story of Time that week, “The Clean Energy Myth.” The piece was a winner – a conceptual scoop, an important and timely topic, and – this was the really surprising part – a true argument, an attempt to make a point. It was so refreshing, and so different than the warmed over “on the one hand, on the other hand” pap I was used to from most newsmagazines. This article was great journalism, and it had a serious point of view.
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But in any case, it struck me that Time was starting to realize what conversational media properties already knew inherently – you can’t survive on distribution alone. You need Voice and Point of View.
I noticed another thing about Time recently: The magazine now writes a leader opinion piece, often strongly worded, to kick off the entire magazine. I love this idea, we did it at The Standard. It says “This publication stands for something. We’re leaders, arbiters of analysis.” ^
The illusion that journalists can be objective has already fallen. You can try as hard as possible to be objective, but you’re limited to what you see. You’re also limited by the market forces that limit you. You’re also limited by your intelligence, time on task, mobility and even eyesight. So the idea of a “100% objective” article is not sound, but so is the idea of objectivity in anything. That requires a God-perspective that can only be found after entering cheat codes in video games.
Now that we’ve done away with that illusion, we have another: that good journalism mimics objectivity by taking down the points of view of the parties involved, repeating them, and adding a sappy ending so we can “feel the pathos” of the situation. It’s called dueling press releases in practice, because in the three hours allotted for an article in our very competitive media, there’s time to call a few people, type in a few quotes, and then send it out the door.
Dueling press releases has gotten old, as has its corresponding gesture in literature, which is the “profile” story or book that tries to show us the point of view of a character far different from our own. From this we get the real weirdness and sappiness that has afflicted the book industry for the past decade: divorced mothers saving baby basilisks from that evil corporation building a new highway, urchins who live to hack for a free Tibet, drug addicts who have secretly discovered mathematical truths to the universe, and so on. When you step back from it, it’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit about how writers are morons.
What this has done is make literature and journalism almost totally irrelevant to the lives of the average person.
The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.
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While the strike has been joined by an estimated 250,000 novelists—225,000 of whom have reportedly stopped in the middle of their first novel—it has done no damage to any measurable sector of the economy, including bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, all major media, overseas markets, independent film studios, major film studios, actors, editors, animators, carpenters, those in finance or banking, the day-to-day lives of average Americans, or anything else anyone can think of as of press time. ^
It’s amateur hour out there, folks. The publishing industry did not know how to react to the onslaught of the internet any more than the record industry did. They opened up the floodgates and tried to inundate us in “exciting” but not adventurous books, books that had no voice or point of view. They’ve bored us into tears and we want something more.
It’s that something more that literature has always been about.
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