Let Us Now Praise Famous Editors

Bombarded by communication we may be, but there is still the possibility for something personal within our over-ripe and festering mass media.

We can watch television — doesn’t matter if it’s traditional network or streaming — and not really have a sense of who’s running the business. 

Same thing goes with traditional news organizations, those things we used to call newspapers that now have little to do with paper. We may read The New York Times, but where do we see the publisher’s personality reflected?

Those big media conglomerates that produce our music and entertainment are as bland as soda crackers — and could well aspire to be that imaginative and crunchy.

But consider the magazine. Good and important magazines still exist and carry forward the DNA of their founders or longtime editors.

Hugh Hefner

Think of Playboy. Its founder. Hugh Hefner, made sure his magazine reflected his interests and tastes. 

When he hopped off to the bunny ranch in the sky, the magazine went into an immediate skid. 

Does it still exist? Does it matter? Let me know, will ya?

In the early 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown took Cosmopolitan, a men’s magazine that had published fishing and hunting stories by Ernest Hemingway, and turned it into the bible of the single working woman. 

It was a brilliant move because it created an ever-renewing demographic. Brown is getting mani-pedis in the sky, but her work lives on.

Helen Gurley Brown

The New Yorker has been blessed with strong editors. Its founder, Harold Ross, liked humor, cartoons and fiction. There was no doubt who ran the place in his lifetime. 

But when Ross died, his No. 1 assistant, William Shawn, became editor and changed the magazine as he served for the next 35 years. 

This is the New Yorker issue that published John Hersey’s masterpiece of reporting, “Hiroshima.”

Shawn’s interests in long-form nonfiction reinvented the magazine. Few venues of any kind will give storytellers the space that Shawn allowed. 

This is a blessing yet also a curse. Some New Yorker writers began writing sentences in the 1980s that have yet to conclude.

Time shuffles on.

Esquire magazine (under Harold Hayes’s editorship) became the defining voice of the 1960s. 

The magazine published so much brilliant stuff in that era that it’s difficult to think of a publication with a better voice for the times. 

Its collection of articles from that decade was titled by Hayes: Smiling Through the Apocalypse. (Has there ever been a better title for anything?)

Harold Hayes

As Hayes was leaving the editor’s chair, along came a rowdy rock’n’roll magazine based in San Francisco that put itself on the cultural map by publishing a full-frontal nude photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (This exposure of celebrity genitals drew the fans-of-famous-foreskin demographic.)

College dropout Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and for the next quarter-century, under his tight control, the magazine published things he found interesting. Those things became our interests.

Wenner also liked to put his friends on Rolling Stone’s vaunted cover, which was fabled in song.

As Wenner withdrew to the ski slopes and left running the magazine to others, it began losing its way and discovered its problem was the reverse of what happened at Cosmopolitan

Whereas there will always be single working women to read Cosmo, Rolling Stone was faced with a critical problem: its core readership was tied to a generation that was rapidly aging and dying. In the early years, when Wenner was young, so were his readers. He published the magazine for his peers.

Advertisers looked at Rolling Stone as a clear connection to young, affluent buyers.

But then we got old. The magazine had a core interest in popular music. As the subscribers aged, the magazine sometimes tried to push flavor-of-the-month artists at the Classic Rock audience. It was like the old guy showing up at a college kegger wearing a gold medallion in a desperate stab at youth.

Jann Wenner, when Rolling Stone was in San Francisco

For a while, Rolling Stone was the magazine that defined its times. 

I was part of its target demographic from the start. When it would arrive in the post, I used to go into what my then-wife called my “Rolling Stone coma” until I had sucked all of the marrow from all of the worthy articles I found between the covers.

The magazine peaked in the early 1970s, when its roster included David Felton, Grover Lewis, Hunter Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres and Annie Leibovitz, among others.

You’ll notice Leibovitz is the only woman mentioned. The only way a woman could get a job on Rolling Stone‘s editorial staff was to start as a secretary — perhaps another reflection of the founder’s personality. (Leibovitz was the exception. )

Wenner developed so much talent at the magazine, but once the magazine had made it, he sought the big names — Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Caroline Kennedy, who acquitted herself in her coverage of Elvis Presley’s funeral. (Her kicker quote was from the Elvis minion who shaved the King’s sideburns one last time before he was planted in the back yard.)

But Rolling Stone’s relevance dried up by the end of the 1970s, around the time it moved from San Francisco to New York.

Tina Brown

The magazine that assumed the mantle of most-likely-to-send-me-into-a-reading-coma came along in the 1980s: Vanity Fair.

The original VF had died before the Second World War, and when it was revived . . . who could tell? It was underwhelming.

The revived magazine committed the worst sin in journalism: it was boring.

Fortunately, it was saved by Tina Brown, the British editor brought over to turn it around, two years after its weak re-launch.

For the subsequent three decades and change, few magazines could compete with Vanity Fair.

Brown left the magazine after eight years to breathe life into its sister publication, The New Yorker, which was staggering along after the departure of Shawn. 

Brown prepared that venerable publication for the 21st Century by making necessary overdue changes. For one thing, she acknowledged the existence of photography. Until she took over in 1992, the magazine had never published a photo with any of its editorial copy.

Graydon Carter

It’s Brown’s successor who deserves the lion’s share of credit for Vanity Fair’s brilliance. He made it into the must-read magazine for a couple of generations.

Graydon Carter recounts his life as a magazine editor in his new memoir When the Going Was Good (Penguin Press, $32).

Journalism is my jam, so naturally his inside baseball stuff is appealing to me.

But I ended up liking the book more for the pleasure of getting to know this guy.

I think this is what I admired the most:

Carter at Spy.

Here is the editor of one of the greatest magazines on the planet. Sure, there are a lot of social obligations and events and dinners and balls. That’s what we expect of the high life, right?

Instead, we find a guy who passes up all of that stuff in favor of a family dinner. He’s home by six every night, and the whole Hee-Haw gang sits down to the table. Everyone talks, everyone learns about what everyone else did all day … you know, wholesome stuff.

Graydon Carter is Ward Cleaver with a better wardrobe. I admire parents who take their job seriously.

He could be hanging out with some boldface names, but prefers family dinners, game nights and fishing in the wilderness with his children.

His tale is a successful story of work-life balance.

Carter was born in Toronto and attended a couple of Canadian universities without graduating. The rigidity of schooling sometimes gets in the way of education, which is something best left to the individual.

He learned on the job, starting with The Canadian Review, which unfortunately went bankrupt.

He moved to New York, worked at Time and Life, co-founded Spy magazine, edited The New York Observer, then took over Vanity Fair in 1992.

Carter belongs in the history books if for no other reason than this: while at Spy, he coined the term “short-fingered vulgarian” to describe President 45-47. What a rush it must be to have a quip remembered so.

Still, this isn’t a book of journalism gossip. It’s an absorbing, superbly-written account of a well-lived life with a lot of accidents and surprises that led to the pot of gold. It could serve as a guidebook on how to be a good parent.

When Carter edited Vanity Fair it was a work of art, essential to life. Each issue was a king’s feast to be devoured.

Since he left — and started the digital-only Air MailVanity Fair is skidding. It’s no longer a must-read.

Magazines are bound to the personality of the editors. They follow a life cycle, like a human being.

Carter has left the building and that great magazine is having a midlife crisis.

For now, read Carter’s book and remember the great times and the great stories.

A Full Life, Well Lived

Jack Corn in his younger days.

My friend Jack Corn died this week.

Though he was a quarter century older than me, we became close friends during our years together at Western Kentucky University.

We were both rookie teachers, trying to navigate this mystical new process of education.

Jack came to the job as a much decorated photojournalist.

I was just a punk.

While Jack served as a full-time teacher (his title was Photojournalist in Residence), he also worked on a bachelor’s degree. He’d started work as a news photographer right after his high school graduation, so now he was tying up loose ends and getting a degree.

So he took my journalism history class one summer session.

What a treat that was. Since he’d had such a long career, he knew some of the characters I talked about in class.

Hodding Carter, for example. He was one of my heroes and the definition of an independent, autonomous journalist.

While talking about Carter, I told the class that I might be guilty of over-romanticising the guy, because he was a white newspaper editor speaking out against segregation in the heart of Klan country. Carter’s office was bombed and his home attacked.

“Oh no, Beell.” (That’s how Jack said my name.) “That’s exactly how he was. You got it right.”

Jack asked me to help him do a book on a 1918 lynching in East Tennessee. One of his uncles was part of the mob trying to kill this young man. Jack’s grandmother went into the street and stop it. She was unable to protect the poor kid, who was murdered by the mob.

I wrote most of the book. Jack was handling the visuals. He finally sent the manuscript to journalism guru John Seigenthaler, one of his old pals. Seigenthaler told me later that he stayed up all night to finish it.

He also sent a copy to another old pal — a guy he worked with on several stories over the years, David Halberstam. Halberstam asked his agent to shop it around but nothing came of it. It’s a shame that story is still waiting to be told.

By the way, when Jack and I met Halberstam for drinks, I asked David to sign my copy of his wonderful book, The Powers That Be. He signed it, “From one of Jack’s collaborators to another.”

That’s some good company. I feel that I am part of a special tribe that got to know and work with this man. He was a great storyteller and a great teacher. He sometimes used draconian methods — if he didn’t like a print one of his students turned in, he might drop it to the floor and grind it into the linoleum.

He was tough. I didn’t have his level of gravitas and so I could never do what Jack did. He pushed people to think and to do their best, most compassionate work. I’m not sure you can teach empathy, but students absorbed Jack’s caring and commitment.

His methods worked spectacularly well.

His students went on to tremendous heights in journalism. Jack was proud of all of them and they were lucky to have him as a teacher. I was a colleague but I often felt more like one of his students. He taught me so much and I became a better teacher because of him.

Below is one of his portraits of coal miners. I may look for a few others to post. Watch this space. To me, Jack’s work has the power and intelligence of the work by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Jack was 96 years old. He was married to Helen Corn for decades. They were beautiful people and their love gave us all something to which we can aspire.

Goodbye, Pal. We’ll miss you.

Photograph by Jack Corn

Death in the Family

Rob Hiaasen’s cover photo on his Facebook page, which soon after his death was given over to tributes from colleagues, friends and strangers.

When I heard about the shooting at the Capital Gazette in Maryland, I had the feeling that I might find connection to a victim.

Journalism is a small family, after all. I’ve been teaching for more than 40 years, so I figured that one of my students was there, had been there, or had some connection there.

I awaited the names of the victims, fearing I’d find a name from a long-ago class roll on the list. When I saw the names, I was punched in the stomach, and all I could say was, My God.

Rob Hiaasen in his office. This photograph appears on the Capital Gazette’s Facebook page.

I didn’t know Rob Hiaasen, but for years I’d heard from those former students lucky enough to work with him. He was their mentor, dean of their newsroom grad school, the man responsible for their continuing education.

I didn’t know him, but I knew what he did and that he was much beloved.

I’d also known his brother, Carl, and his nephew, Scott, for 30 years.

Carl was an esteemed graduate of the University of Florida program I served for 24 years, and he was always generous with his time — for students and for faculty members such as me.

Though a best-selling author and media celebrity, he gladly helped provide succinct and snappy quotes for the dust jackets of my books. Coming up with something good for someone else’s book jacket is an often-thankless job with no reward, but he kindly — and regularly — did so.

Scott is my argument for the hypothesis that writing talent is genetic. Even as one of my freshman students, Scott had a gift, which he has since shared with thousands of readers.

So though I didn’t know Rob Hiaasen, I knew of his work — thanks to the legions of grateful young journalists who shared with me tales of his generosity and kindness.  I could only imagine the anguish of his family, people I cared about deeply.

Wendi Winters. This photograph appears on the Capital Gazette’s Facebook page.

And I hurt for the families of the other victims —  Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara.

The gunman had no argument with any of them, but they were caught in the brace of his rage.

In the aftermath of the shooting, a lot of newspaper journalists recalled dealing with the public — those members of the public who walked through the newsroom doors and presented themselves at our desks.

In one of my newsrooms, office geography dictated that I was usually the guy who dealt with the walk-ins. When the other reporters saw someone wandering into the newsroom, they’d bolt for the canteen or the head.

Lacking social skills, I never really knew how to negotiate myself out of such situations and often ended up listening to a reader endlessly rant. But once in a great while, I was able to find the seam of a great story in these diatribes.

Years passed. I was going to visit a student intern on the job, when I made my first newsroom visit that required a security checkpoint.  I had to empty my pockets and go through  a metal detector at the door of the newspaper building.

Has it come to this? I thought.

Yes. And now: this.

Stunned by this horrific news, we turned to social media for minute-by-minute updates.

I heard from a lot of students who’d been touched by Rob’s kindness. I read tributes from people with whom I had no connection but the common denominator was that the man freely shared his talent and gifts with others to better this profession.

The next day, still reeling from the news, I heard from my colleague Noelle Graves. She knew that her four years of former students were shaken by the on-the-job murders and asked if it was all right to send them a note from her university account. She’s cautious that way.

Of course, I said.

As usual, Professor Graves spoke with eloquence and grace, articulating what we felt about these deaths in our family.

With her permission I post her note below:

I’ve been thinking of you all since the news in Maryland broke yesterday.

Rob and Carl Hiaasen. This appears on Carl Hiaasen’s Facebook page. As Carl wrote, ‘We called him Big Rob because he was so tall, but it was his remarkable heart and humor that made him larger than all of us.’

Some of you were students of mine four years ago, some just this spring. All of you, though, are close to my heart.

We stand shoulder-to-shoulder, you and I. Whether your path has taken you into news or another field, we shared a time of learning about this great tradition of providing the truth in context to the public.

On Thursday, five of our colleagues who shared that mission lost their lives to a gunman apparently bent on mass casualties and destruction.

We talked in class about the beauty and value of life, that each person is unique and irreplaceable. We stand in grief with the families and loved ones of the five – Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters.

This unthinkable loss of life is difficult to fathom, impossible to comprehend. The loss, as with all the similarly horrific events our nation has seen, is truly senseless.

Overarching this event is the environment in which we find ourselves today. These are such perplexing times to be in journalism with headwinds from Washington and the amplifying effect of the Internet.

We’re not alone in these times though – history indeed repeats itself – and the framers of the Constitution enshrined a free press anticipating its vital role as a bulwark against tyranny.

The five who lost their lives in Maryland were part of that proud tradition of a free press.

Noelle Graves

And so, our hearts are broken, but our resolve remains. We are committed more strongly than ever to find and report the truth to the public.

We will not be cowed into submission. We will not forget our Constitutional mandate. We will not abandon our public trust.

We stand together. Shoulder-to-shoulder.

Take care of yourselves, and I’m here if you want to talk.

All my best,
Noelle

 

Some final words from David Carr

David Carr

We are dealing with the second anniversary of David Carr’s death. There were so many tributes after this death, so maybe this ‘last interview’ (with Stefanie Friedhoff of the Boston Globe) got lost in the mix. Thought I’d reprint it. We were lucky to have David on the Boston University faculty. He was a gifted teacher and we all looked forward to many years of his friendship. This was published February 13, 2015.

New York Times
columnist David Carr, who died Thursday at the age of 58, had a reputation for going after his own tribe with bracing honesty and clarity. With his unusual past as a crack addict, a distinctive scratchy voice, and quirky character, he had become a media figure in his own right as he chronicled journalism’s struggle to reinvent itself in the digital age. Carr shuttled to Boston once a week to teach journalism at Boston University, a routine he had started last fall. In one of the last interviews he gave before his death, Carr talked with Globe correspondent Stefanie Friedhoff in late January about his rookie teacher mistakes and the future of writing.

[Friedhoff’s questions are in bold italic. Carr’s answers are in regular type.]


What was it like, working with this next generation?

The first time they said, ‘Here comes the professor,’ I turned around looking for him, then realized, oh, that was me. I asked them to call me David. I did not feel a huge generational divide. I was not parenting or patronizing them. As long as they didn’t call me professor.

One generational difference is that they rely on texting, which is not a good business or academic application. I much prefer e-mail, which allows you to keep an archive, send attachments. I also made it clear that there was no texting or Facebooking during class. When someone did it, I would stop and say: ‘Do you need a few moments so you can finish what seems so important?’


The platform you used, Medium, allows for storytelling in all media. Did students experiment with different forms?

Some students included extensive video and audio, and some built stories around photographs, but writing played a distinctive role. Students were far more traditional than I thought they’d be, they were extremely animated by idea of longform narrative. I weighed heavily on blended content but they were not as interested as in big narratives.


Is there a future for writing, for the careful crafting of sentences and narratives, in the digital age?

Well, there are two problems with it. One, if you look at The New Yorker, GQ, and the Atavist or Longreads, there is a good supply of deep immersive writing, but there is an audience problem, in terms of what people are willing to commit to. And two, there is a business problem: getting paid enough to do what may pass for literary journalism.

Some signs are encouraging: Engagement levels, people staying until the end of the story, are quite high. But you have to earn the readers’ interest. Turns out that the phone, which was thought of as the enemy of longform — people read a lot on phones, they have become used to the infinite scroll. I read a lot on my phone, and I am old as dirt.


Did you like teaching?

Oh, this class was like a bomb going off in my life. I thought I could zoom up on an airplane on Monday, teach the class, do office hours, go to sleep, take the train back in the morning and be fine.

That is not how it went. There was a lot of steady communication with students. We produced a lot. Sixteen students wrote over 60 pieces, published in four collections on Medium. Four articles are on their way into the commercial market.

I enjoyed it all. The truth about teaching is, whatever you expect from them, you should be ready to give back. I’m glad I’m like a vampire. I still keep college hours and stay up late.


You have guest taught a lot. What surprised you about teaching a semester-long course?

I made a fair amount of rookie teacher mistakes. I brought in too many guest speakers.

I said ‘I love your personal essays, I will put comments in’ and then I had to really do that. It took me five seconds to say in class but 12 hours to finish.

I learned I talk too much. Every time I went quiet and solicited discussion, wonderful things were said and I thought, ‘Duh, of course.’ Part of the reason was that I wanted to look like a serious academic. I did not want to be one of these newspaper people who show up and tell stories.

There was also an important business lesson: My teaching assistant insisted I give students some class time to collaborate on their projects. I asked, ‘Why? They are doing this online all the time.’ But she was right — face-to-face time led to amazing cross-team collaboration and improvements. We think online communication works, but a well-run meeting has a lot of value.”


Are you a tough grader?

Not as tough as I thought I would be! When I was an editor, my office was known as Cape Fear. I did give out some rough grades to start with, but if kids demonstrated improvement, I gave them better grades. I was kind of torn about what to do when someone was a good writer but didn’t try very hard, versus someone who tried hard but wasn’t so gifted. It was very much a learning curve.


What did you tell students about their future in journalism?

I told them it’s a good time to be looking for a job. There is a lot of money in content in New York. You can’t be too picky about what you want to do initially. And you need to make your own judgments about where you want to [go] — regardless of where you went to school or who you know.

There is no doubt students will be walking into a news ecosystem that has more information, more sources, more providers, and more clutter. And they have to think about what value are they adding that will make them a signal above the noise and make their work stick out and have value — both in terms of who they work for and the kind of work they do. They have to [go] from creating commodities and toward creating things of value.”