Bloggasm

Gimmicky as hell.

Story That Takes 1,000 Years to Read Is Antidote to Media Whirlwind

The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

“The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so that the words will appear one at a time,” Keats said. “Provided that your copy of Opium is kept out in the open, and regularly exposed to sunlight over 1,000 years to be read progressively by the next dozen or so generations. Or very, very slowly if you happen to be Ray Kurzweil.”

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By the time I spoke on Friday with Nick Purdy, publisher of the music magazine Paste, the publication had received over $175,000 in donations from its devoted readers; less than 10 days had passed since the cash-strapped magazine had launched a campaign called “Save Paste,” in which it laid out in a letter to Paste readers the financial troubles that have plagued the company in recent months. “As the global recession has continued, many of you have written us (especially as ad pages shrunk) to say, ‘If you ever need help, let us know,’” the letter states. “That day has come.”

The magazine, launched in 2002, currently has about 200,000 subscribers (according to Purdy) and the publisher hopes that a significant portion of them, many of whom already pay $25 for an annual subscription, will cough up approximately $300,000 in donations, the amount Purdy says is needed to get the magazine through this rough patch.

“We needed some cash,” Purdy told me. “So we had always known that if we ever had to, we could go to our readers. A lot of them tell us — especially in the last few months, because they’re not dumb, they know what’s going on in the economy — they’ve written us and said, ‘hey, if things ever get rough on Paste, make sure you ask us for help,’ and so we took them seriously. We have a special relationship with out readers. We have a brand they know is built off authentic passion. We’re not corporate owned, so for our readers we have a high level of trust and value to them. So we took this campaign to them, with obvious hesitation; you don’t know if this is going to work. It’s highly unusual for a for-profit company to do. Obviously if you tell the world your problems it’s fraught with risk. But for us the upside was that as soon as we went to our readers, the response was loud, and strong, and fast.”

But the donations to the magazine were twofold; not only did it receive an outpouring of donations from its readers, but dozens of artists and music labels gave the publication not-yet-released music tracks to include as thank-you gifts to donors.

“What we wanted to do here was to give donors a thank you so they weren’t just giving us money for nothing, and what better way than to make this campaign about the music?” Purdy said. “So we went to the music industry, the labels we’ve worked with over the years, the ones that we’ve championed, and we said, ‘hey, here’s what we’re doing, we really love your art, and if you have a way to support us by donating a song that hasn’t been released before, be it a live track or something that’s coming out in the next few months, whatever it is, we’d like to just offer it to our donors as a thank you for being a part of the campaign.’ We’d give them away to make it clear that the industry supports us too; we’re supported from two directions: the industry we’re in and the readers who enjoy it. And the response was overwhelming, and songs continue to come in up until the last few minutes … Yoko Ono decided to premier some music that’s coming out later this year but is being premiered through our campaign. Yoko Ono, that’s great. Like, who are we?”

This campaign occurs while the newspaper industry as a whole has been contemplating the so-called “PBS approach” to bringing in money — that is, to solicit donations from publications’ most devoted news consumers. This strategy has worked for a few non-profit media entities — Wikipedia, PBS, public radio — but it’s unclear whether for-profit companies could succeed at such a tactic. Given that Paste is one of the few for-profit news outlets to try the donation route, can its success be duplicated across the industry?

“There are a few things here,” Purdy said when I raised this issue. “Our research has shown that we do have an unusual level of loyalty from our subscribers, so that certainly has to be playing in. I can’t assume what brand loyalty other magazines have because I haven’t seen their research. So is it something other brands can do? I suppose it’s possible. I think it’s going to be exceptional when someone can successfully do this. But I will say this: we view this as something we will only do once. We don’t see this as a model that’s sustainable, we don’t see it as how a for-profit business should operate. For us it’s an extraordianry one-time circumstance where we can say to our readers with confidence that if they rise up and help us through this patch we see a bright future. In spite of everything with the economy, we know our way forward.”

In other words, Purdy views this as a way for Paste to deal with a cyclical downturn as a result of the current recession, not a long-term business model. Given that the downward spiral of newspapers is only exacerbated — not caused — by the recession, such a strategy would have to hold up year after year, which means that a newspaper’s brand will have to be particularly strong if it wants to come back to its readers, time and time again, with its hands outstretched, perpetually hungry, waiting for them to cough up their life-sustaining dollars so that future issues can be published.

When the book on 21st century media is written, the day that a writer from the esteemable New Yorker, considered by many to be the most important magazine published, dipped her toes into the unchlorinated pool that is Gawker, will be noted as the day that old journalism was irrevocably adulterated. Not to issue a quote, mind you, but an entire 600-word guest post defending the labyrinthine, secretive modus operandi of the New Yorker institution.

What drew Susan Orlean — staff writer since 1986 and author of the excellent The Orchid Thief — into the welcoming arms of the media gossip site? It was Dan Baum, who decided over a week ago to tweet the story of his “firing” from the magazine.

What I’d really like to know is how this guest post came about. Surely Orlean would not have done this without a nod from those atop the invisible masthead (rumor has it that the New Yorker’s masthead exists between the 45th and 46th page of the magazine, just as John Cusack’s character in Being John Malkovich works on the 7 1/2 floor of an office building). Was this an approved hit job, signed off by David Remnick himself?

Just came across this tweet from Susan Orlean, in which she hints that she might counter the account of Dan Baum, who just finished tweeting the story of his firing from The New Yorker.

When I found out that former New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum was tweeting the story of his 2007 firing from the New Yorker , the irony didn’t escape me that the magazine is known for some of the longest articles in the industry — one of its most famous, titled “Hiroshima,” ran over 30,000 words — and here this person was writing about it in 140-character snippets. I brought this up to Baum in a phone conversation and he replied, “I haven’t thought of that, but that is funny.”

The writer joined the staff in 2003, and like all staff writers there, his contracts were each one year and were based on an annual quota of word output. In early 2007 he was informed that his contract wouldn’t be renewed. Why? Well he wouldn’t tell me; he didn’t want to ruin the story.

But why did Baum choose to tweet the story now?

“I’ve been out promoting a book, and people ask me all the time, ‘why did you leave the New Yorker?’” he told me. “I’m often introduced as a former writer for the New Yorker, and people are often like, ‘well god, why would anybody leave there?’ I realized that people were kind of interested in this story. So I thought why not share it.”

The magazine has always been known for its secrecy, and so when Gawker called Baum after his firing and then published some details of his contract, he said he soon received a call from the magazine saying “we do not discuss how we do business here.” At the time, Baum was still hopeful of getting his job back, but now it’s obvious that this “bridge is down, burned, collapsed and washed away.”

“I thought well, I’ve got an interesting story to tell, and I have a book to promote,” he explained. “I could just put the story [of the firing] on my website but if I put it on my website I still have to get people to my website. And if I can draw people to my website then they can learn about my book, and maybe I’ll sell a book.”

Baum is writing the story in a word document that is formatted for 140 character lines and so far has issued a tweet ever few minutes. When he started the experiment he had 25 followers, but a little over an hour later he now has close to 250.

He said he doesn’t know how long it will take him to tell the story. “What I’m trying to figure out, because I’m new at this, is what is the optimal pace,” he said. “Like 140 characters a day would make it difficult to follow the narrative. But you don’t want to give up the whole thing at once. You want to steer them around. Is it better to put up 10 little tweets at a time, or should I be stretching them out over the course of the day?”

I asked Baum whether part of the reason he’s tweeting the entire ordeal is out of some vindictiveness because of his firing, an attempt to embarrass the magazine. He paused for close to 30 seconds before answering the question. “Not so much vindictiveness against the New Yorker. I think when you lose a gig like that — and obviously nobody in his right mind would give up a gig like that; you’re involuntarily separated — then the question is ‘why?’ Why am I tainted goods? Why am I a former writer for the New Yorker? What mistake did I make? And I guess what I want to do is demonstrate that I don’t think I made any professional work-related mistake. I think my mistakes are more political than professional.”

As of this writing, Baum has published 67 tweets on the ordeal. By the time he reaches the story’s conclusion, judging by his current follower growth, the New Yorker’s closely-guarded inner workings may find themselves chewed over in thousands of 140-character morsels.

This is what The Aristocrats has brought us:The 1,001 Handjobs of Time Magazine’s Time 100

All of a sudden Bono and George Clooney come on stage. Bono drops trou and Clooney gets down on all fours. Bono is in a Nazi officer uniform and Clooney pretends to be Jewish. Then they puke in each other’s mouths, bow and exit stage left. Up next is a swarthy threesome. It’s Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini and Mark Zandi. Nouriel is in a KKK hood, Krugman has—offstage, I guess—smeared himself in shit, and Zandi, an economist, has very carefully made all his thigh hair ingrown, somehow. Anyway, so Krugman gets down on all fours, Roubini circles around his back while Krugman takes Zandi in his mouth. Then the hairy shit contagion shutters like a rickety train until they collapse in a puddle of santorum.

If the New Yorker were a planet, blogs like Emdashes and the New Yorkerest would be satellites orbiting around it, meticulously analyzing its landscape with fine-tooth photographic lenses. They are fan blogs that are specifically centered around the publication — in the case of Emdashes, it even takes on interns — and I find such devotion fascinating, not only as a fan of the New Yorker myself but also contemplating the promotional marketing aspects that sites like these can provide for a publication. But what is it about this Conde Nast publication that causes such brand loyalty?

For an article in PBS’s MediaShift, I decided to explore this issue:

The Twitter user who writes under the handle Vanityfairer would not tell me her real name. She began following me in December after I mentioned the magazine Vanity Fair in a tweet, and for the next few months we exchanged replies and direct messages about the magazine’s content and its writers. Though she made no claims to be associated with Vanity Fair, there were debates in the blogosphere over whether she was a marketing ploy for the publication. That speculation ended after the magazine’s web editor wrote a post thanking her for her coverage:

One of them is a mysterious and fascinating (to us, anyway) character who calls herself Vanityfairer…She has been doing an amazing job of covering our work here on the site without our knowledge.