Dana Goldstein

So, You Want to be a Magazine Journalist.

I've been meaning for awhile to write a long post culling the advice I regularly give students and recent college grads when they ask me how to jump start a career in magazine journalism. While there are some great websites out there for early career newspaper journalists -- my favorite is Joe Grimm's JobsPage -- there's a general hush-hush quality around magazine journalism career paths that, IMHO, does a grave disservice to the profession, maintaining its essentially homogeneous, insular quality. A lot of that, of course, also has to do with the crappy pay (or no pay) in this field. But that's a topic I've covered before.

Today we'll talk nuts and bolts career planning for the folks who are absolutely certain they don't want to go to law school. For those who have accepted that this is a highly competitive and contracting field rife with nepotism, yet who fall asleep at night dreaming of seeing their byline in the New Yorker. Who actually subscribe to the magazines they love and want to write for. This post goes out to you, my dear, fellow crazies.

News and Views

I've got two new pieces for you to check out. Top at The American Prospect today is my column on why Hillary Clinton might consider running for governor of New York -- not just because it would be politically expedient, but also because she might actually be good at the job.

And last week over at RH Reality Check, I offered seven possible policy solutions to battle the epidemic of sexual assault in our military. RH has been nominated for a Webby award in the category of best new political blog. At Slate, Jack Shafer has a bug up his butt about the Webbies, but hey, for small sites like RH, it's a real boon to be recognized for filling a new space in commentary and reporting. And it brings new readers! Seriously, nobody else is writing as comprehensively on issues of reproductive health and justice. It's a project I'm really proud to be part of.

In other news, I'm happy to report that I'm now officially a staff writer at TAP, after serving as a writing fellow since last July. Exciting! This also means that we are hiring writing fellows, so please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the program, which is -- hands down -- the best entry level job in magazine journalism.

Be Not Afraid of the Future!

Many journalists I know have been chatting this week about Eric Alterman's New Yorker piece on "the death and life of the American newspaper." Alterman focuses on Huffington Post as the epitome of the "new," newspaper-killing media, portraying the site as the bad cop to Talking Points Memo's good cop. TPM, of course, is a site that does real reporting and digging, while HuffPo's news gathering apparatus is secondary to its function as a gathering place for liberal punditry. The risk of all this online news, Alterman writes, is that eventually, with advertising dollars moving to the web, no one will be able to afford expensive, real-time reporting projects such as the New York Times' Baghdad bureau, which costs $3 million annually. Alterman, somewhat credulously, quotes Arianna Huffington's more positive forecast of the future of news:

"As advertising dollars continue to move online—as they slowly but certainly are—HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism—wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom—with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times."

Like Alterman, I believe the Times deserves more credit than that, but I'd caution against devolving into full on hand-wringing over the future of news. For one thing, online-only, analysis-driven news sources have been around for way longer than Alterman admits, since the advent of Salon and Slate in 1995 and 1996. Slate especially has a model that relies upon a parasitic relationship with the traditional press (see "Today's Papers"). Secondly, non-profit journalism is a business model that can yield excellent, independent reporting, from the St. Petersburg Times, to new projects such as Pro-Publica and the Washington Independent, to our very own American Prospect. And third, for-profit online journalism is actually becoming more and more reported. The Politico, for example, no matter what you think of their coverage, employs dozens of reporters who are traveling around the United States breaking news on the presidential election.

In other words, there are lots of hopeful models out there for online news gathering. Let's not be afraid of the future.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

I Admit It!

It feels like a coming-out-of-the-closet moment to admit I have more than a passing knowledge of some of the games described in this Slate article about Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Yeah, I know, I seemed like a healthy, well-adjusted young lady before this. But seriously, I'm not lying when I tell you that my friends and I who participated in role-playing weren't total dorks. For one thing, we weren't celibate. (Mom and Dad, please disregard that last sentence!)  We were the theater kids -- faux suburban hip hop culture just wasn't doing it for us. Most of us are pretty normal these days.

In any case, during my adolescence, it never really occurred to me to think about the ethics of D&D, mostly because I was a dabbler and not a hardcore fanatic. In Slate, Eric Sofge -- who, as an editor at Popular Mechanics, I assume is a far more typical former role-player than I -- argues that the massive killing of entire races encouraged by Gygax's gaming system is akin to genocide. Think of the hated, dark-skinned orcs from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series; those greedy (Semitic?) dwarves; or the high-cheek boned, delicate, Northern elves. This is partly what I was drawing from when I wrote an essay back in the day on how the Harry Potter books conform to some of the more conservative identity politics of the fantasy genre. Looking back, that piece seems over-argued (after all, I enjoyed the Potter books!), but there's definitely a there there.

By the way, if anybody wants to use this moment to also publicly confess they once role-played, I'll be your friend forever.

Annoucements

Beginning today, I have a twice monthly column at RHRealityCheck on the intersection of reproductive health issues and national politics -- look for it every other Tuesday. My first piece is about how Republican primary exit polls ask voters how they feel about abortion, but Democratic exit polls don't:

...some reproductive health advocates might argue that leaving abortion out of Democratic exit polls is helpful to the cause, since it clamps down on potentially divisive media coverage of abortion around election time. But in actuality, by including questions about abortion on Republican exit polls, but not Democratic ones, pollsters have guaranteed that the media pays extra attention to how conservative, anti-choice voters feel about the issue, while largely overlooking the majority of Americans' support for broad access to abortion and contraception.

And over at the Prospect, my latest piece is an examination of Obama's challenges in appealing to working class white and Latino voters.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

For all the kind, supportive words I've received about my CNN appearance. It really means a lot, especially after hearing from conservative bloggers about how I sounded "like a middle schooler." Ugh. And then the commenters over here at The Guardian totally missing my tone of deliberate hyperbole. I intend to get back to reporting the next few days, since all this punditry is really raising my blood pressure. I'm currently working on a print feature about schools and the achievement gap. And as always, blogging daily at TAPPED.

As for all the strangers who suggested we go out on a date or who referenced sex in messages to me after I appeared on CNN...um, not so appreciated. It's hard enough putting oneself out there without fielding comments like that. Don't be icky.

Yeah Yeah, I Was On TV Last Night

I participated in a left/right bloggers debate over Ann Coulter and Al Gore last night on CNN. The host was Tony Harris and my counterpart was Mary Katherine Ham from Townhall.com, both of whom were a lot of fun. Only regrets: I feel like I wasn't quite looking in the correct place, and also, that I made some wacky facial expressions. But all in all, I'm pleased with my first real TV appearance.

Creepy Russian Propaganda Hits Our Shores

As Jack Shafer notes, this Russian government ad supplement published in yesterday's Washington Post is almost comically clueless in its attempt to reach out to American power-brokers. But I don't think the regime's bad English and media naivete is indicative of "Putin's fall," as Schafer proposes. Rather, this shit is scary. It serves not only as evidence of the censorship of Putin's KGB-redux regime, but it also clearly articulates an increasingly confrontational, Russia v. West foreign policy. There's the small stuff -- Russia amping up Arctic exploration under the rationale that it is the rightful sovereign of the ice cap -- and the truly disturbing, including an essay entitled "When a Little Paranoia is Good For You," that claims it is not minority ethnic and linguistic groups within Russia that need protection, but rather the Russian language itself:

The concept of Russian world (russkiy mir), ushered into the public sphere by President Vladimir Putin in his State of the Union speech in April, came into being at the right moment. Never have we been more concerned about the state of our language as now. Not only school teachers, but even taxi drivers complain about the “contamination” of the language by Internet Newspeak, criminal jargon and plain swearing. Never have we heard more about the “retreat” of Russian in all Eurasia.

On the major question -- who will be President Putin's hand-picked successor -- the supplement has this to say about the weakened pro-democracy opposition:

The opposition is in a different situation. They have nothing to lose. Not one of their candidates stands a chance of winning, and their nomination race makes only inside-page news. Russians are skeptical of the opposition.

Nevertheless, opposition candidates still might run for the presidency, and they need a candidate. He or she will certainly not be a strong rival to the Kremlin nominee, but at least they can publicise an alternative platform and show that Russia still has people with different points of view, even though they do not make up a majority.

In other words, this is a government completely comfortable in saying that the only purpose of an election is to show the world that Russians are allowed to have differing views -- there's not even a head nod here toward debating policy or giving the Russian people a chance to determine their future. That's a propaganda election. And as we know from Putin's complete crack-down on independent media, persecution of independent journalists and academics, and show-trials of political enemies, censorship is a way of life in Russia.

This Post supplement crudely confirms that, and makes old Bush administration attempts to buy education columnist support for NCLB look almost elegant.

Leftiest, Youngest Debate Ever

What's so different about this debate? The people asking the questions. Maybe because only people under 30 can operate a webcam, the men and women addressing the candidates here have a very different set of priorities. A lesbian couple from Brooklyn asks if they should be allowed to get married. A young black man demands that the candidates reveal if they support reparations for slavery. A student wonders if 18-year old women should be required to register for the draft.

I'm watching the debate on DVR, so I'm behind. But from what I've seen so far, a highlight was Obama saying he'd meet in person with the leaders of Iran, South Korea, and Syria within the first year of his administration. Hillary wouldn't make the same promise, saying she feared rushing into such a meetings would lead to her being used for propaganda purposes, and Edwards agreed with her. Saddest moment? Edwards saying he was personally against gay marriage because of his Southern Baptist faith. I can't presume to know how Edwards truly feels about marriage equality, but either he has a moral view I deeply disagree with, or he's pandering to an extent with which I'm uncomfortable.

cross-posted to TAPPED

That's an Angle?

When I reported on the presidential candidates' speeches to Planned Parenthood last week, it didn't occur to me to draw a ton of attention to Barack Obama's joking recollection that his one-time Senate race opponent, Alan Keyes, had criticized him for supporting sex-ed for kindergartners.

Funny, because that's the headline of some news organization's only coverage of the event.