Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

I’d like to join the chorus wishing for Om Malik’s speedy recovery. In today’s New York Times, I have a story about how Om suffered a heart attack just after Christmas — and how other A-list bloggers like Paul Kedrosky and Michael Arrington warn how stressful it is to have to constantly update a site.

Om was already wrestling with the issue. His chief operating officer Paul Walborsky told me that others, most notably Martha Stewart, have had to figure a way to extend their name across a media business in which others do most of the work. Martha’s staff was forced to work without her through one kind of hardship; Om’s staff is coping with another.

It can be done. Utne Reader survives without founder Eric Utne (although his wife Nina, who sold the magazine, is still an editor-at-large), and Collier’s survived its founder for nearly 50 years. (Others haven’t fared as well: Jane magazine didn’t last long without Jane Pratt, and let’s not even get into what happened to Rosie.)

As a writer, length has always been important. As a newspaper reporter, I tended to write long stories, trying to cram in every detail I had gathered. As a freelance writer, I’m frequently paid by the word. I love long-form journalism, and am enjoying writing for magazines and dreaming up book projects.

 Yet I struggle with the notion that longer is not always better. Mark Twain summed this up in an epistle: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Editing takes extra effort.

 Now comes proof, in several delicious forms.

First was a story by Motoko Rich in the New York Times last month, about how Raymond Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher wants to publish the original versions of some of his marvelously minimalist short stories. These versions reveal that Carver wasn’t always so economical with language, and his editor stripped out entire sections, imbuing them with the ambiguity that made them so intriguing.

Almost immediately thereafter, Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker wrote a fascinating piece on how the British publisher Orion is releasing new, heavily edited versions of old classics.

The subtraction does not turn a good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It is all Dick and no Moby.

 And  today, in the Times, David Carr extolls the virtues of The Week, Felix Dennis’s weekly magazine that summarizes the long stories published elsewhere in favor so that busy readers can know what’s in the news.

Yet shortening a lengthy work is not always an improvement. And I was reminded of that as I put together this post, and looked up Gopnik’s piece online. The piece is not there, but an abstract is.

I recently read Matt Richtel’s Silicon Valley thriller “Hooked,” and loved it. Matt is a tech reporter at The New York Times and a versatile talent — he even writes a comic strip under a pen name — and he really nailed a key element of modern computing culture: Addiction.

It’s the feeling of being exhausted, yet logging on to check e-mail before bedtime — and finding that you’ve been up hours longer without even nodding off. It’s working online and realizing that you kept typing away hours past lunchtime. It’s chatting online and checking your social networks, when you need to make phone calls to complete other assignments. It’s forgetting to exercise, clean house, or bathe, while you bask in the glow of your monitor.

Matt’s novel suggests that companies might even be inclined to deliberately make the technology addictive, that there’s some chemical reaction in the brain that keeps you working against your better judgment. And that companies could easily use metatags and other features to induce subliminal suggestions.

It’s pretty dystopian, yet as with most good satire, it’s not too far off the mark of where we are now.