The Sideways Ladder
2/4/2010
By Clayton Purdom
A year ago, The Daily Beast debuted a brand new term: "The Gig Economy," meant to reflect an increasingly decentralized workplace, where careers are composed not of long service to a single corporation but as a busy piecemeal aggregation of "free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces." Accompanied with exclusive poll results and a breezy commentary by editor in chief Tina Brown, the term packaged the then-terrifying zeitgeist as an opportunity for hardscrabble upward mobility. In January 2009, such optimism was rare, and remarkably comforting.
A year later, it may seem a little less realistic. “There is absolutely no freelance work anymore,” Choire Sicha, co-founder of the media and culture site The Awl, says. “That is just done.” Sicha was involved with the blogging juggernaut Gawker as a managing editor and editorial director, and transitioned into print publications like Radar and the New York Observer before this newest editorial venture.
"Pretty much everyone's in the same boat,” he says. “I was talking to a friend this morning where he was saying he still has this old mentality where he looks at people who worked at places like The Washington Post as if they're super removed and super accomplished and that they've made it, they're finally a success. The fact of the matter is, that's done. Those people are still as concerned about having a job as the rest of us."
For journalists, who regard ship-jumps and freelance stints as par for the course, this means a dissolving reverence for the forum where their work appears. At the highest levels of magazine journalism, shrinking page counts have turned freelance contracts into a precious commodity, pushing more and more writers online--or elsewhere. In a Jan. 25 New Yorker article on the nanosecond-based newscycle, Ken Auletta lamented that, “In between (deadlines), you’ve filed for radio, and appeared on TV, and maybe done a podcast or a blog.” He concludes, “Everything is rushed.” (Tina Brown’s commentary a year ago said, “Doing three things badly is the name of the game.”)
Sicha, who received his formal journalistic training not in college but after moving into print publications based on his Gawker resume, sees less to mourn. “I know there were people in print like, ‘He's just some dipstick with a blog, so what.’ But that faded pretty fast throughout the past decade. And people started realizing there wasn't a de facto difference between people who write.”
The narrative of the recent past has been of old media adapting with various levels of success to new media: of dusty news giants creakily looking into Twitter feeds and of bloggers like Sicha landing columns for major papers. But it may be time to retire those narratives.
Jessica Coen, managing editor of nymag.com and its blogs, also started her career blogging for Gawker before transitioning to the online appendages of old-guard magazines Vanity Fair and New York. When asked if she saw more journalists following this path of matriculation, she replied, “The environment right now is blending and shifting so quickly that I'm not sure the people who are working at some blog now think that getting a job at Conde Nast is the endgame.”
Certainly, amid continued shutterings and wholesale downsizing, the old glossies look less glamorous. She continues, “It's like the ladder has been turned on its side, or upside down, and it’s not what it used to be. It used to be that you were an assistant and if you were lucky you got promoted to some low-level editor. I think five or six years ago the way in to that low-level position was through blogging. It was a way to get noticed. And now it's more than a way to get noticed. It's an actual platform, a way to continue a career as opposed to launching a career.”
Sicha agrees. "Maybe bloggers don't have to live under the umbrella of having their blogs hosted at The Atlantic and not have to go to the level of the $50,000 speaking gig, like Malclom Gladwell. There's a place in-between where there's actually like a livable wage that's not based on word count."
Next month, Coen will move out from under such an umbrella, leaving her position overseeing New York magazine’s blogs to become executive editor of the acerbic women’s interest site Jezebel. While she takes care to note that New York is one of very few print publications allocating appropriate resources toward its online face, she says, “I am excited to be working on something that is not a sibling of a larger. It's not a tentacle of Jezebel the brand. Jezebel is Jezebel.”
Both editors seem excited to be returning to their roots in new media, rather than serving as its ambassador to print publications. But perhaps that's the new journalistic archetype: the born-and-bred blogger. "The prevailing metaphor from the Tina Brown set back in 2002 or 2003 was, ‘Oh, the barbarians at the gates with their blogs,’” Sicha says, referencing the onetime New Yorker editor who now helms The Daily Beast. “And that's kind of done a 180 since all she has is a blog now."
Making the Pitch
Both editors agree that publicists need to change their biases against online journalism, just as journalists have. Coen says, “I still encounter, even now, publicists who would rather not deal with us at all than be on the Web site as opposed to a magazine. I understand wanting to be in print, but any one of these Web sites might be getting 100,000 unique visitors a day. There's this conception that it's not as good for eyeballs to be online as in print."
She would like publicists to think more about the different needs of an online audience. “You need to be able to envision what (your product or event) would look like on a blog, and what that blog post would look like.” She adds, “The good blogs run off of news. Maybe fashion or food news, but it has to be some furthering of a story.” In regards to contacting her, she says, “I live online, so if you really want me to hear you, e-mail. I don't just delete pitches. I most of the time don't write back because I don't have time, but I put every e-mail address in my contacts. Voicemails that are 20 seconds, you lost me after 10. It drives me insane, and I know I'm not alone in that.”
Sicha agrees that publicists have been “slow to adapt to changes.” He says they need to tailor pitches more closely to the demands of an online editor. “The luxury of newspapers is that you would be the TV editor, or the dance editor, and now (bloggers are) all those things. So the side-product is that we're not so intimately related with all those fields. I don't know the things I should be paying attention to for the next theater season, I need someone to help me with that. We all kind of need a little more detailed attention.” In regards to the types of pitches he wants to receive, he says, “I'm definitely interested in culture. I'm definitely interested in people who make culture. And honestly, one of the things we are is a place where people can pitch things that everyone else would roll their eyes at. We don't care that it's not going look good on the cover of a weekend section.”
Contact Information
The Awl
Choire Sicha, blogger
New York
75 Varick St
Fl 4
New York, New York 10013
212-508-0700
Jessica Coen, online managing editor
212-509-0709