when I started working at a magazine in 1994, I didn't have Internet access and there was no texting. I had to call every source on the phone. It took a certain courage and energy, like being a door to door salesperson. I think it favored people with a certain personality type, and language skills, so more voices were excluded...with that exclusion, there also wasn't bot or AI created content. I can't remember what my point was!
I've definitely felt this change and I think its part of the reason I've started falling out of love with Basketball to some extent over the past few years - even as someone who has consumed a lot of basketball and sports 'content' for the better part of my entire life now, its hard to find things that you connect with. Maybe thats just getting older, but alot of it is just swallowed up in being over commodified or obscured - much like the sport itself is.
So good. “It takes too long on either end.” This is the thing: having the time and space to actually write. I try (and have lately failed) to get just one essay out each month. As a non-writer who likes writing, it’s tough to squeeze in this hobby (I think I am also probably really inefficient and spend way too long thinking about thinking) but still having actual writers paid to have that time is important or we’ll end up with even more atomized one offs as people come and go and then, like, 25 people who work at the New Yorker, and nothing in between.
"I think I am also probably really inefficient and spend way too long thinking about thinking"
One of my fave writing tips: reframe 'procrastination' as 'rehearsal'. You're practicing the piece.
I've been writing stuff professionally for, like, 12 years and eeeeeverything good I've ever written started as something I wrote in my head. Whole essays or blurbs or whatever just bouncing around in there until, one day, I sat down to draft because it was time to do so. It's all rehearsal.
Thinking about thinking is a key part of the game. Gotta stare at walls to get to the good stuff.
Thanks for this one, Katie. You talk through and explore so many thoughts that run through my head these days, especially with regards to writing in an exploratory manner, and the temptation to bend towards Content. Water to share this with my friends, and to bounce our ideas off each other.
What’s your thoughts on WHY these former, now dissolved publications (who, mind you, were full of written artistry) went away? Do we crave Content more than we do art now? Have we be conditioned by social media to doom scroll through half-hearted, generic matter-of-factness?
Is it a generational gap? Etc etc etc., not to ramble.
I think it's myriad but touches on our relationship to art and labour (to work and labour, too) — what we think deserves time and money and what doesn't, how that's been accelerated by tech in how much of day-to-day life is automated for us. I think it also has to do with critical thought and curiosity, that there's less inclination, even anxiety (to "look dumb"), to learn beyond what you already know, and that's tied up in education and economics and the social priorities of those things — which is a huge other thing to talk about.
Most directly, if we're talking about publishing, the dissolution is coming from greed. When millionaires with no experience in publishing buy up newspapers or digital publishers and try to change what is a sustainable model into a profitable one, and inevitably sell them for parts and/or run them into the ground as they fail.
I think we (not me but the collective we) have gotten accustomed to speed. Consume fast, especially in sports, probably the only television left that I still have to watch live (or live in fear of encountering the score if I watch it later).
The time element – things taking "too long on either end" – is massive, I think. And it's not just the writing. Like, getting the juice to write things from a different POV, to bring together multiple interests and reference points, to learn how to mix all that together into a distinctive voice/tone/whatever takes years.
Who has the time and space to develop that? In public? (The answer, same as it always was, is the rich or the patroned. But still.)
Even people like Bill Simmons, who's imitated to death now, was once novel because of his voice and pop-culture inserts. He had the time to work that out and to build up the catalogue of media from which to draw.
That stuff takes time. And, if time's short, writers and media companies tend to fall back on patterns. Hot take, trade machine, embed tweets, 4 dudes on the podcast.
So few people break through that and offer something new. I feel like Shea Serrano did it? And I loved the POV the Spinsters podcast brought. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. (And discoverability is a whole other thing.)
I've been thinking about it myself for a while. I've toyed with the idea of writing about basketball, just for fun. Got an article noodling around about watching DeMar during the Spur's limbo years and how I didn't appreciate his play enough until he was gone.
But, despite being a writer with 12ish years experience, I have no idea how I'd do it as me. A lot of the skills transfer over but not all of them. Trying to decide if its worth it.
when I started working at a magazine in 1994, I didn't have Internet access and there was no texting. I had to call every source on the phone. It took a certain courage and energy, like being a door to door salesperson. I think it favored people with a certain personality type, and language skills, so more voices were excluded...with that exclusion, there also wasn't bot or AI created content. I can't remember what my point was!
I've definitely felt this change and I think its part of the reason I've started falling out of love with Basketball to some extent over the past few years - even as someone who has consumed a lot of basketball and sports 'content' for the better part of my entire life now, its hard to find things that you connect with. Maybe thats just getting older, but alot of it is just swallowed up in being over commodified or obscured - much like the sport itself is.
So good. “It takes too long on either end.” This is the thing: having the time and space to actually write. I try (and have lately failed) to get just one essay out each month. As a non-writer who likes writing, it’s tough to squeeze in this hobby (I think I am also probably really inefficient and spend way too long thinking about thinking) but still having actual writers paid to have that time is important or we’ll end up with even more atomized one offs as people come and go and then, like, 25 people who work at the New Yorker, and nothing in between.
"I think I am also probably really inefficient and spend way too long thinking about thinking"
One of my fave writing tips: reframe 'procrastination' as 'rehearsal'. You're practicing the piece.
I've been writing stuff professionally for, like, 12 years and eeeeeverything good I've ever written started as something I wrote in my head. Whole essays or blurbs or whatever just bouncing around in there until, one day, I sat down to draft because it was time to do so. It's all rehearsal.
Thinking about thinking is a key part of the game. Gotta stare at walls to get to the good stuff.
Well written.
Thanks for this one, Katie. You talk through and explore so many thoughts that run through my head these days, especially with regards to writing in an exploratory manner, and the temptation to bend towards Content. Water to share this with my friends, and to bounce our ideas off each other.
Phenomenal work as always, Katie.
What’s your thoughts on WHY these former, now dissolved publications (who, mind you, were full of written artistry) went away? Do we crave Content more than we do art now? Have we be conditioned by social media to doom scroll through half-hearted, generic matter-of-factness?
Is it a generational gap? Etc etc etc., not to ramble.
I think it's myriad but touches on our relationship to art and labour (to work and labour, too) — what we think deserves time and money and what doesn't, how that's been accelerated by tech in how much of day-to-day life is automated for us. I think it also has to do with critical thought and curiosity, that there's less inclination, even anxiety (to "look dumb"), to learn beyond what you already know, and that's tied up in education and economics and the social priorities of those things — which is a huge other thing to talk about.
Most directly, if we're talking about publishing, the dissolution is coming from greed. When millionaires with no experience in publishing buy up newspapers or digital publishers and try to change what is a sustainable model into a profitable one, and inevitably sell them for parts and/or run them into the ground as they fail.
I think we (not me but the collective we) have gotten accustomed to speed. Consume fast, especially in sports, probably the only television left that I still have to watch live (or live in fear of encountering the score if I watch it later).
So many directions to take this, which is lovely.
The time element – things taking "too long on either end" – is massive, I think. And it's not just the writing. Like, getting the juice to write things from a different POV, to bring together multiple interests and reference points, to learn how to mix all that together into a distinctive voice/tone/whatever takes years.
Who has the time and space to develop that? In public? (The answer, same as it always was, is the rich or the patroned. But still.)
Even people like Bill Simmons, who's imitated to death now, was once novel because of his voice and pop-culture inserts. He had the time to work that out and to build up the catalogue of media from which to draw.
That stuff takes time. And, if time's short, writers and media companies tend to fall back on patterns. Hot take, trade machine, embed tweets, 4 dudes on the podcast.
So few people break through that and offer something new. I feel like Shea Serrano did it? And I loved the POV the Spinsters podcast brought. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. (And discoverability is a whole other thing.)
I've been thinking about it myself for a while. I've toyed with the idea of writing about basketball, just for fun. Got an article noodling around about watching DeMar during the Spur's limbo years and how I didn't appreciate his play enough until he was gone.
But, despite being a writer with 12ish years experience, I have no idea how I'd do it as me. A lot of the skills transfer over but not all of them. Trying to decide if its worth it.