Recently in the writing life Category

Simon Dumenco at Advertising Age calls it "the Award for Most Bitterly Ironic Media Award," and he bestows it upon the Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award, of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, for giving itself to Arianna Huffington:

Really, the school -- which exists to train journalists -- should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!

Funny how the fact that The Huffington Post fails to pay most of its bloggers didn't come up when Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham gushed about the blog mistress in a prepared statement: "Arianna Huffington was ahead of the curve with HuffPo. She embraced the use of new media but never forgot that no matter where or how you tell the story, content is still king. This is what we teach our students."

Oh, give me a break! Content, in Arianna's world, is not king, and it never was. Link bait is king; opportunism is king. If content was really honored at The Huffington Post, the site wouldn't have gotten in trouble last December for lifting content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content. (In case you missed the scandal, HuffPo's Chicago outpost got caught red-handed stealing detailed, bylined capsule concert previews -- not just quoting them but copying them in their entirety -- from the likes of the Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago. See "Arianna Huffington's Scuzzy Copying Pisses Off Chicagoans" on Gawker.)

I've been raging about HuffPo's devaluation of content -- and, ergo, content creators -- since late 2007, when HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer told USA Today the company had no plans to ever pay its bloggers: "That's not our financial model. We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company."

Amen.

When I'm not watching and reviewing movies, TV, and DVD, I support myself by working as an editor and copywriter, for such companies as Cosimo, which reprints classic works -- including many that rarely see the light of day in print, and if they do, often not in handsome editions. We also publish new books, typically of the kind that traditional publishers bypass because they're not the stuff of bestsellerdom, even though -- as with muckraking journalist Danny Schechter's Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, there's plenty of interest.

Anyway, the point here is not to toot Cosimo's horn but to highlight something I just posted at Cosimo's blog wondering about the future of "the book" and of publishing as a traditional industry. If you're at all in the least interested in such stuff, please check it out and comment over there, if you have something to say. I'm trying to jumpstart conversation over there...

Is writing for the rich only? I asked in a recent post, and it seems like maybe it really is. Matt Haber in The New York Observer decries the rise of celebrity dilettante journalistm in connection with actor Ethan Hawke's current Rolling Stone profile of Kris Kristofferson:

For a working hack--that word is used here without judgment--it's hard enough to get a pitch accepted by an editor (much less an 11-page evergreen on a 72-year-old who's in not in the Jonas Brothers). But now you gotta compete with writers editors think are cooler, better connected, and who don't even need the money.

Haber also points out recent journalist endeavors by Brad Pitt, apparently also a writer and photographer as well as an actor; Sean Penn, who fancies himself a foreign correspondent; and others.

When you take a day or two off -- like, you know, a weekend, like how some other people get to have Saturday and Sunday off -- you pay for it with sleepless nights rushing to get the work done you would have spent Saturday and/or Sunday doing.

Frances Wilkinson asked this question at The Week last week, and it's hard to argue with him:

It's not obvious how young writers without accommodating, well-to-do parents or a trust from gramps make it these days. Surely they can't spend a year or two blogging without pay until an audience evolves to nurture them. They'll starve.

As someone who has created her own career as a writer online, I can assure you that even 11-plus years as a blogger -- since before the word blog was even conceived -- isn't enough to evolve a large enough audience alone to fend off starvation.

So now we hear that Tom Daschle, Obama's choice for Health Secretary, somehow got away with not paying more that $100,000 in taxes he should have paid. He's now paid those taxes, plus interest (no word on whether he paid penalities), but:

The information about Mr. Daschle has come to light in different ways. He disclosed some to the transition team, including the taxes owed on the car and driver. The transition team spotted a problem with his charitable tax deductions, and the Senate Finance Committee discovered the failure to pay Medicare tax on the use of the car.

So, it wasn't just the deal with the car and driver -- honestly, who knows what the tax sitch is with one's chauffeur? -- but charitable contributions as well? And what kind of person is able to come up with more than $100,000 at the drop of a hat:

God-fucking-dammit, why didn't I think of this:

That seems impossible, at least from my perspective as a New Yorker. There are places in Manhattan where there are Starbuckses across the street from each other, and still they have both lines of caffeine fiends out the door.

And yet... I popped into a Starbucks today as I ran between three movie screenings, and it was almost empty. Which is bizarre for a Starbucks in Manhattan, at least of late. So perhaps it's not so strange to hear that the chain's earnings dropped 69 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and that the chain is about to cut 6,700 jobs and close 300 more stores (that's above the 600-plus stores the company had previously said it would shutter).

...when it's news that a new hot Web site backed by big names and venture capital will be paying writers:

Sharon Waxman's TheWrap launched yesterday hoping to be the Politico of entertainment news. So naturally, all we wanted to know is if they pay writers.

Sharon left in our comments:

Part of our mission is to provide a home for quality journalism, and that means being willing to pay for it. Great reporting can't be done for free. Consider that an invitation to all talent out there.

Noted.

Not one word of this is true:

Honestly: coveted positions as editorial assistants? *wipes tears of laughter from eyes*

(via Boing Boing)