Archives for November 22, 2003

When I was first getting started in professional journalism, every writer I knew dreamed of becoming a syndicated columnist. Back then, columns really did shape the political conversation, and to a lesser extent the cultural conversation as well (though the Eighties, lest we forget, were very political, to the point of virtually excluding art and culture from what got written about on op-ed pages).

I don’t think younger writers feel that way any more, and one sign of the sea change is the fact that you simply don’t see all that many younger syndicated columnists. I started to notice this as early as the Nineties, at a time when I shared the responsibility for editing a major op-ed page, that of the New York Daily News. We were constantly looking for new faces, but the syndicates weren’t offering any, and it never occurred to me that the problem might be a lack of interest on the part of younger journalists, much less a lack of interest on the part of young people in journalism.

Now we all know better. Of late, the only significant change in the op-ed scene has been the hiring of David Brooks by the New York Times, and Brooks isn’t a new face but a well-established writer of a certain age (mine). What’s more, I don’t get the impression that his column is causing all that much of a stir outside narrowly politico-journalistic circles. I don’t think that’s because of the quality of his work, either: I think it’s because op-ed pages in general are losing their traction. I may be wrong, but it’s not my impression that any newspaper columnist, syndicated or otherwise, is capable of stirring up any vast amount of talk nowadays.

You won’t be surprised to see where I’m heading: my guess is that the buzz in opinion journalism has shifted to the blogosphere, partly because it’s new and partly because it’s so much less rule-bound. You can say anything you want on a blog (though I’m sure the day is not far off when one of the big bloggers will get sued for libel, which will doubtless cool things off considerably). Just as important, you can say it right now, not next Tuesday. Needless to say, none of this is true on an op-ed page, or anywhere else in a newspaper, for that matter.

Sooner or later, existing newspapers will make themselves over in response to the challenge of the Web. Probably later, though, because they’re intensely bureaucratic institutions and thus are reflexively resistant to change. The New York Sun is an interesting case in point. It’s a daily paper of conservative hue that was started from scratch a couple of years ago in an attempt to provide an opinion-driven alternative to the New York Times. In this respect, it’s failed almost completely: the Sun‘s paid circulation remains trivially small next to that of the Times. Why, then, didn’t its founders simply do an end run around the insurmountable difficulties of launching a newspaper in New York and instead conceive of the Sun as the first on-line daily paper? That would have gotten them instant attention, not to mention slashing their overhead to pieces. Yet not only did the Sun stick to the old printed-paper model, but it has lagged consistently behind the Times in establishing a meaningful Web-based presence. (At first, the Sun didn’t have any Web site at all.)

The reason, I suspect, is that the Sun was launched by newspapermen who never gave any serious thought to making a complete a break with the traditions in which they were raised. The blogosphere, by contrast, is for the most part the creation of non-journalists and amateurs for whom such time-honored traditions carry no weight. Instead, it has arisen naturally from the organic properties of the Web.

I write for The Wall Street Journal, so you can take what I’m about to say with a stalactite of salt, but I think the Journal‘s Web site (which turns a profit) is the most potentially significant thing to happen to the newspaper business in decades. Yet the Journal is a quintessential establishment organ, the kind you’d assume would find it impossible to break with the past. That it has done so fascinates me. That no other newspaper has done so doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Which is why I’m betting that the first successful on-line “paperless” daily paper will be started by some 25-year-old hotshot who’s never worked on a newspaper, and thus has nothing to unlearn.

As for the coming revolution in opinion journalism, it’s already happened. I like David Brooks (he’s an old friend), but I think maybe he got on the wrong boat. Not that I blame him in the least: after all, he gets paid for his opinions, which naturally matters to a family man. But for any writer who’s more interested in changing minds than making money, the blogosphere is the place to be.

Is it just me, or are any of you out there offended by the tone of the countless clever-clever op-eds, think pieces, and thumbsuckers of the past couple of days that have sought to “interpret” and pseudo-intellectualize the Michael Jackson story? Jackson’s arrest isn’t a Media Phenomenon, nor is it a sign of the times. It’s a news story about an alleged pedophile, one who has spent millions of dollars to keep himself out of jail. And I don’t give a good goddamn about the social significance of his mug shot, either. If he did what he’s said to have done, I want to see him in a jail cell, and once he’s there, my interest in him will be over and done with.

As for the interest of the mass media, my guess is that at some point fairly soon they’ll wake up and realize that the youthful target market after which they lust so desperately couldn’t care less about Michael Jackson. His arrest may be news, but his music is yesterday’s news, if not the day before. Big Media is so Eighties.

I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.

That’s it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters.

I described the difference, as I understand it, in a 1990 essay:

The line of eligibility for military service in Vietnam divides the baby boomers almost exactly in half. The older boomers, the ones who faced the dilemma of whether or not to serve in Vietnam, are the people you usually think about when you hear the term “baby boomers,” and Vietnam seems to have broken them. They were the ones who lost their nerve and were never heard from again. Were they victims of the damage the war did to America’s national self-image? Or was it that most of the boomers didn’t serve in Vietnam, that an entire generation of spoiled middle-class brats never had to undergo any kind of testing experience at all? I can’t tell you. But it’s clear beyond question that the older boomers, whatever their reasons, simply gave up somewhere down the line.

I didn’t include that essay (it’s called “A Farewell to Politics”) in A Terry Teachout Reader because I don’t think it’s held up very well. Among other things, I completely failed to predict Bill Clinton, or anyone like him. But I do think I was right to differentiate pre-1956 boomers from post-1956 boomers. The older ones were touched by the Kennedy assassination, while the younger ones merely remember it, and not very well, either.

Today, of course, We Are All Boomers Now, at least in the eyes of the Gen-Xers and their younger brothers and sisters. I have lots of friends in their thirties and several in their twenties, and for them, JFK is…history. Likewise Vietnam and LBJ and Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan. And, of course, the older boomers are history, too. Clinton was their last hurrah, the exemplary figure who summed up in his person and actions the ethos of the pre-1956 boomers. Even before he came along, I didn’t partake of that ethos, which may explain why I have so many younger friends.

For me, nostalgia is a powerful emotion (if it can properly be called an emotion), and many of the things for which I feel most intensely nostalgic took place in the Sixties. Yet I feel no nostalgia for The Sixties: The Decade, none whatsoever, no desire to hop in the time machine and check out all the things I was barely too young to have experienced at first hand. I’m much more interested in our current nicknameless decade, this astonishing age of anxiety and possibility, of terrorism and Two Americas and the Web.

As for John F. Kennedy, he doesn’t mean a thing to me. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of the latest Kennedy biography:

Once he was a young, glamorous president-martyr whose posthumous reputation was scrupulously tended by the journalists and intellectuals he had so assiduously courted while he was alive. Then a new generation of scholars born too late to be seduced by Kennedy’s charm took a closer look at his life and legacy, and discovered that the crown prince of Camelot was a reckless womanizer who installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office, was soft on civil rights and won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he hadn’t written.

And, needless to say, the victim of an assassin’s bullet, a dark day in American history that I barely remember. It’s…history.

A reader writes with further reflections on Stephen King, Shirley Hazzard, and the National Book Awards. Hazzard, you’ll recall, told King that literature is not a competition, to which my correspondent replies:

Of course literature is a competition. Writers compete for prizes and readers and laurels, and anyone who fails to get all three (which is just about everyone) suspects the game is rigged in favor of the other, whoever the other might be.

But the real competition is for longevity, and this contest is the great equalizer. There are NBA winners that will fade into obscurity, just as there are million-book sellers who won’t outlast their own lifetimes.

King chose to champion popular bestsellers. (Oh, and primarily men, in genres he likes, as opposed to women writing romance, which outsells everything else.) But what about midlist writers working in genre? What about the one-in-a-million self-pubbed writer who has something to say? I agree with Hazzard on this point: this was not the time or place to give others a reading list.

By the way, I never understood the outraged reaction to King receiving an award that had previously gone to Oprah Winfrey at an event that’s been emceed by Steve Martin. I wonder if those who objected so vociferously to King have ever looked at the complete list of NBA winners over the years, which in 1980 recognized mysteries and westerns. John D. MacDonald is an NBA winner. As is Lauren Bacall, for her autobiography.

I’d noticed that Winfrey (not to mention Ray Bradbury) was among the previous winners of the lifetime-achievement award received by King, but I hadn’t looked at more than the last couple of years’ worth of National Book Awards. Very nice catch.

My correspondent is Laura Lippman, whom I cited
the other day as a genre writer whose books I read, enjoy, and admire. If you haven’t read any of Laura’s Tess Monaghan novels (there are several) and want to try her out, you might consider starting with her latest book, Every Secret Thing, which is her first non-series novel. (Laura might not agree with me about this, but I think the Tess books, like the Aubrey-Maturin novels–or any other roman fleuve, for that matter–profit from being read in sequence. If that piques your curiosity, the first one is Baltimore Blues.)

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting on Bill Clinton’s favorite books:

In re books & favorite books, I think in this case everybody is right, or nearly enough right. Greenfield, Clinton, and you. Most politicians would name the Bible and, if pressed, the Gettysburg Address (I know it’s not a book, but you get the idea). Their favorite car is any model American, a dwindling option. Their favorite food, hot dogs, fried chicken, or whatever inedible dish renowned in their constituency. Clinton at least came up with enough titles to start a neighborhood library, OK, a small neighborhood library. And I suspect that he has read them all, unlike me. That’s not to say that Greenfield’s and your skepticism is not well-founded. I spent 20 some years working in the Congress and I can testify that it is. In fact, I wrote a few of those lists.

Like I said, here’s hoping.

An hour or so ago, “About Last Night” was being read in 12 different time zones around the world (there are 24, duh).

That’s a nice number, but here’s a nicer one: OGIC and I racked up just short of 3,000 page views on Friday, an all-time record for this site. And we did it without benefit of any links from non-arts blogs.

The distinction is significant. Our previous sky-high days have been fed by one-time mentions on such heavily trafficked warblogs as Instapundit, Lileks, andrewsullivan.com, and BuzzMachine. Yesterday was different. “About Last Night” posted its best numbers ever solely because of a profusion of links from the arts-related sector of the blogosphere.

This puts legs under my growing conviction that blogging might end up being the most important thing to happen to fine-arts journalism in my lifetime. It’s not that, not yet, but when a four-month-old blog has a 3,000-hit day, something’s happening out there.

To every arts blogger who mentioned us on Thursday and Friday, Our Girl and I thank you and thank you and thank you. And to every reader who visited us for the first time as a result, thanks for coming…and please come again.