Bloggasm

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.