In Slate, Adam Kirsch begins his review of Samuel Johnson, Jeffrey Meyers‘ new biography, with this scary observation:
If you get a group of writers together these days, you are guaranteed to hear a lot about death. Not just the deaths of once popular genres, like poetry or the literary novel; those reports have been commonplace for decades, and the practitioners of these arts have more or less gotten used to the obituaries. Now, the worry is that book publishing itself is dying. When a major house like Houghton Mifflin stops buying new manuscripts, the handwriting seems to be on the wall for the whole industry. Even more shocking is the death of the newspaper, which is turning before our eyes from an idle prophecy to an immediate prospect. In the current Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn suggests that the New York Times could go out of business as early as May. That is unimaginable, of course—as unimaginable as the sack of Rome must have been until the Goths came over the horizon.
None of these deaths will mean the death of writing. Human beings wrote long before there were newspapers or books or even paper, and they will continue to do so when these have been replaced by pixels and bytes. But something precious may be coming to an end in our lifetimes: the age of the professional writer. For the last three centuries or so, it was possible to make a living, and a name, by writing what the public wanted to read. The novelist, the essayist, the critic, the journalist—all these literary types flourished in that historically brief window, which now appears to be closing. In the future, if fewer people are interested in reading and few of those are willing to pay for what they read, all these kinds of writers may go the way of the troubadour and the scribe.
To read the entire review, click here: New biographies of Samuel Johnson. – By Adam Kirsch – Slate Magazine
The subject of your recent posting, “Scariest News of the Century,” is something I have been thinking about a lot these days.
When I was in high school I published an article in a small-scale model train magazine, Southwest Prototype Modeler. It didn’t pay anything, but to see a four-page article with my byline in a magazine with 5,000 paid subscribers was pretty cool.
Because of my love for writing and magazines, my Dad thought I should go to college and become a writer or an editor. However, my high school English teacher Mrs. Mitchell thought there was no way I could be writer, given the competition (this was in the late 1970s). Since the only magazines I knew about in Chicago were Playboy, Chicago and Ebony, I figured she was right and entered the University of Illinois at Chicago’s accounting program. (Of course, neither one of us knew that Chicag o had trade magazine companies like Cahners Publishing [now Reed Business Information], which published 60 or more books.)
For the first five years of post-college life, I worked my way up the corporate accounting ladder of Zenith Electronics, before I decided that bean-counting wasn’t my thing. I then returned to writing, first as freelancer covering trade shows and speaker presentations for the plumbing industry’s American Supply House Association, then as an associate editor and senior editor at Building Design & Construction (a Cahners’) book and finally as the managing editor and executive managing editor of Plant Services (Putman Publishing), a trade journal for facility engineers at large-scale process plants (chemical, oil, pharmaceutical). Each job paid better than the last, and soon I was making more money (adjusted for inflation) than I did as a supervisor of financial consolidations at Zenith (where I supervised two financial analysts). I got up every morning and actually looked forward to coming to work everyday. I thought—and still do—the coolest thing you can do in the world is be paid for working on a magazine, doing writing and editing.
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In 2002, I returned home to my alma mater to edit UIC Alumni Magazine, not so much for the pay but for the opportunity to write human-interest stories versus articles on how to maintain equipment (compressors, pumps)without blowing up your plant.
However, I have lots of former colleagues who have felt the impact of changes in the way information is delivered. And this concept of free content—something that’s being done increasingly at paid consumer books via their websites—only conditions people not to pay. For example, why pay $16 a year or more for a subscription to Playboy when you can read the entire Playboy Interview with Hugh Laurie for free on playboy.com? It also has me wondering aloud: How do we pay for the writers, the editors, the photographers and the graphic designers to produce the content? Especially, when advertisers would rather throw their limited ad dollars into places such as Myspace and Facebook? If content is king, as everyone tells me, and that we need to be platform neutral, then why are us content providers being left behind?