Who says every written piece of work has to be “literary?” What defines “meaningful” or “good” writing, anyway?
Recently fired Harper’s editor Roger Hodge stood behind a podium last Friday in Durham and told the mostly gray-haired audience why we should despair.
“We as a society have made bad decisions,” he said.
“People in the business are panicking. They won’t talk about it—that’s bad business—but they’re panicking. And now that I’m not in the business anymore, I can talk about it.”
Hodge isn’t new to this area. He told us he got his start as an intern at the Independent Weekly, wrote reviews for a newspaper in Chapel Hill, and even did some work in Pittsboro.
But now he’s very well-known in the industry as an eloquent editor. Even though he’s had quite a lot of criticism, too.
Watching his responses to the audience’s questions, I can understand why.
He shrugged off one person’s comment about making an iTunes-like gallery for articles. Hodge said: “The idea of consuming writing the way people consume music makes me want to become a farmer.”
That sounded kind of classist and elitist to me. What’s wrong with farming?
Why I’m not panicking
There’s an upside to all of this. People who are not ready to evolve will, eventually, die. They’ll just go away. And in the meantime, the new generation will come up, do its thing, and then, when it’s time, fade out.
See my post inspired by a TED talk, called “Many to Many: How the Internet Revolutionized Media.”
Maybe the web way of talking isn’t neat around the edges the way magazines are trim and glossy and full. But the new way of sharing words and ideas is just getting formed. Like the primordial soup from which life evolved on this Earth.
OK, I know this is a stretch, but things start from embronyic places. They germinate and flower. They don’t just start out being perfect, and then, when they evolve enough —like the “beautifully typeset magazine you can sink into your couch and disappear into” that Hodge described when he talked about Harper’s—they die.
The beauty of a page typeset with care and love is amazing. I admire everyone that does this with pride and certainty and craft. But if lovely typeset books and magazines are beauty, I’m more partial to the beast.
The uncouth, uncertain about itself but bumbling about because it can beast. Like Twitter streams, teleconferences, messaging chats, and blogs. And… I’ll even give in. Facebook. Even if the CIA is behind it.
I’ll tell you why. New media outlets like blogs are free, mostly, to publish and to read. And I’m an idealist, so I’d like to think they’re independent. Democratic. A place to critique and offer counterpoints. They’re interactive—you don’t have to be a longtime fan or wait a million years to get your Letter to the Editor published, you can just comment right now. Conversations spark other conversations in real time.
What do you think?
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