Every time my writing is published, my husband asks me if I’m going to be paid for it.  I nearly always make some sort of snorting sound and say something defensive.  I tell him that’s not how it works, or point out that no one gets paid because the site in question is about writing and not crass commercialism, blah blah blah.  But it’s a fair question, and one that is plaguing writing and publishing and all sorts of virtual media.  To date, I have made roughly 150 dollars from writing (which was actually in the form of a partial scholarship to a writing workshop, not cash, so maybe that number is actually 0?).  This despite the fact that I have had pieces published in a couple of well-regarded online mags, on the main site at Salon, and by a writer’s collective that requires two essays a month from its contributors.  Most of these publications are somewhat apologetic in their submissions guidelines, which invariably include language somewhere along the lines of “we are sorry we cannot pay for your work but we hope to be able to do so in the future,” often followed by something clever about intrinsic rewards, the admiration of friends and neighbors, bragging rights, etc. 

Of course, part of the reason we writers give it away for free is because we just want people to pay attention.  We write because we love to do it, sometimes (often) because we feel compelled to do so.  But we also want someone to read our work.  If we didn’t, we’d keep a journal and call it a day.  It would be so much easier that way.  Instead, we struggle and self-promote and wheedle until someone, somewhere, says we’re good enough. It seems fair to expect that those efforts would result in some sort of fair compensation.

I wonder, then, why I find myself balking at the New York Times paywall that went up last night at midnight.  If there’s anything we writers worry about more than getting our own work published, it’s about the state of publishing in general.  On one hand, there are more and more ways to get eyes on our work, and self publishing no longer means paying a vanity press and selling books out of the trunk of your car.  On the other hand, newspapers and magazines and journals are struggling financially.  They, too, are having to give it away for free just to get eyeballs.  I understand this, I relate to it, and yet I am resentful that I am likely to burn through my twenty free articles at the NYT before a week is out.  The online subscription is pricey, even more so if I plan to read via my preferred platform: on my iPhone or iPad, or god forbid, both.  (For some unfathomable reason, the apps are priced separately for each device.)  At almost 450 dollars a year for full functionality, I have no plans to subscribe.  It’s just too much money for something I can get elsewhere for free.

See?  There’s the rub.  I know that I’m contradicting myself, but it’s a hypocritical business these days.  I’m not alone.  When AOL announced its 315 million dollar purchase of the Huffington Post, the blogosphere lit up in protest because the writers who had been providing free content for so long were not going to get a piece of that pie.  Some of the protests came from publications that don’t pay their own writers.  The underlying theme was, “Well sure, but we would if we could.”  

I will be interested to see how things shake out at the Times.  Several years ago, they tried putting certain content behind a pay wall, but it wasn’t long before people just stopped reading that stuff and went for the freebies.  I’m sure that exhaustive analytics went into building the new model, but I can’t imagine that it will work.  I already know that the way I interact with the Times will change dramatically.  There are many times each day when I click on a headline and read the first two inches of the story just to get myself up to date.  Those days are over.  There are already work-arounds. (Clicking on a linked article from Facebook or Twitter, for example, won’t count towards your 20 article total.  It took all of five seconds for someone to start a Twitter feed called @freeNYT.)  Free or not, I'm not likely to go that route.  

Deep down, I suspect that the Times has overestimated the loyalty of their readers.  I wish they’d use models like some of the other publications I subscribe to.  I have made a point of supporting the kinds of publications (and often the very publications) that have used my work for free.  McSweeney’s has a fabulous app that costs only $5.00; The Rumpus offers a mystery subscription that supports the site and earns me swag every month. And even though entering fiction contests sometimes feel like paying to be rejected, I usually get something tangible in the bargain, like an issue or two of the literary journal, or sometimes even a full subscription.  I’d be more than willing to buy a five dollar NYT app, but a 450 dollar subscription is too rich for my blood. 

Originally published March 16, 2011

Last week, I wrote about the New York Times coverage of the brutal assault of an 11-year-old girl.  The reporter pointed out that the girl had been dressed provocatively and quoted several townspeople who were concerned about the perpetrators’ lives being ruined.  

I have already ranted enough about the million things wrong with that story.  The editors’ tepid response to the one letter that was printed claimed that the reporter was just reflecting the sentiments of the community.  The public editor's response did take the reporter to task, but also blathered on about “balanced reporting.”  I’m not sure I get where a balance might be struck when pointing out a victim’s style of dress or blaming her mother (yes, that too), but whatever.  For the most part, it seemed as though the Times had shrugged its collective shoulders and moved on.  (Comments on both stories are “closed.”)

But today, I learned that Florida Representative Kathleen Passidomo actually used the story to encourage passage of -- brace yourself -- a student dress code bill:  

“There was an article about an 11 year old girl who was gang raped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed up like a 21-year-old prostitute. And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it's incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn't happen to our students.”

Defies the imagination, doesn’t it?  

I wrote to her to complain.  I do not live in Florida, and I know she doesn’t care what I think, but I wanted her email inbox to be jammed with expressions of outrage.  So I composed the most indignant, venomous, horrified response I could muster (which didn’t take much effort given that my hands were shaking with rage).  An hour or so later, I got a reply.

You know what her form autoreply says?  It cites the New York Times story.  That’s right.   Apparently, because the New York Times blames the victim, it’s okay for her to do it too.  

I hope you will consider emailing her (kathleen.passidomo@myfloridahouse.gov) and forwarding her response to the Times.  Bad reporting has consequences.  It perpetuates evil by apologizing for perpetrators of violence, and by blaming victims (and their mothers).  It re-injures already grievously injured parties.  Make it stop.


AUTHOR TAGS:

(originally published on Open Salon, March 11, 2011)

Last fall in Cleveland, TX, an eleven year old girl was brutally gang raped by eighteen young men.  An investigation began when the victim’s classmate told a teacher she had seen cellphone videos of the incident.  This week, the New York Times ran this article.

Since then, the blogosphere has been on fire.  At issue:  that the Times' story, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” focuses on the aftermath in the community.  The boys’ lives that will never be the same.  The shock that a mother would leave her eleven-year-old unsupervised in a rough neighborhood.  That the victim “[wore] makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.”

Sit with that for a moment.  

I don’t need to go into all of the reasons why mentioning what a child was wearing in a news story about a savage crime against her is reprehensible.  The victim blaming in this piece of “reporting” is so egregious it speaks for itself.  That the article focused more on how the “boys’” lives would be ruined (they ranged in age from middle schoolers to one 27-year-old) is bad enough on its own without my pointing out that nothing was said about the soul crushing death of a little girl’s childhood.

The New York Times’ response to the single letter to the editor they printed was, in short, that they were just reporting on what people said, reflecting the sentiments of those they interviewed accurately.  No one bothered to ask about the girl or her family, apparently.

To be fair, perhaps it doesn’t need to be said that a crime like this is monstrous or that the victim’s life was ruined.  That is more than understood.  Perhaps concern for the child’s privacy entered into the picture on some level.  But none of that excuses the fact that the article mentioned what she was wearing, and printed a quote from the child’s neighbor, “What was her mother thinking?”  Don’t those boys have mothers too?  

How a major news outlet could still be perpetuating a rape culture and defending it as “reporting,” truly defies imagination.  On a personal level, everything from the atrocity itself to the reporting to the Times’ defense, fills me with despair.  All this time, I have thought my teenaged daughters were living in a more enlightened time, or that at least by steering them to the most enlightened outlets for information, I would be protecting them from such myths.  I was wrong.

(For an excellent overview of this issue and an intelligent discussion about the language of sexual assault, please read this article by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus.)

Update:  Friday afternoon, the New York Times Public Editor posted this response.  (The public editor is a "readers' representative whose views are his own.)

(originally published at Open Salon, March 1, 2011)


I love the Oscars.  I grew up watching them with my mom.  Long before I was old enough to see or understand most of the nominated films, I loved the glitz and glam, the montages of eras gone by, the tributes to the Hollywood legends who’d died that year.  Even in my thirties, when I was too surrounded by babies and too broke to go to first-run movies, I would brave sleep deprivation and my husband’s eye rolling to watch until the bitter end.  It would never have occurred to me not to. 

As a somewhat blind devotee, I’ve been an apologist for plenty of boring hosts over the years.  I may have been the only person on the planet who didn’t notice how bad David Letterman was.  It was the Oscars.   I couldn’t not love it.

So the other night, I snuggled up on the couch with my whole family and settled in for a night of snarking about dresses and cheering for underdogs.  The opening montage with the much-ballyhooed fresh-faced hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, was clever enough.  But when Franco came out shooting video with his iPhone, I should have known that things had nowhere to go but downhill.

I am not a crabby old traditionalist.  I appreciate the fact that the Academy is trying to woo younger viewers.  I was game for a change in format.  I think both of the young hosts are talented, and I wanted to like them.  But really, James Franco?  Did it have to be all about you?

I get that he is the talk of the town, a Renaissance Man who writes fiction and  gets his PhD and acts and paints and experiments in performance art. But apparently, he was so busy shooting video and Tweeting backstage and making everything very postmodern and ironically detached, he couldn’t be bothered to be entertaining. I think Annie was just overcompensating, poor thing.  She came across as silly and cloying and trying too hard, but I can hardly blame her.  I think I knew how she felt.

I had a boyfriend in college who was Mr. Cool.  He was good looking and aloof and shunned anything remotely trendy.  Why he wanted anything to do with me (trendy sorority girl, good student, former show choir member, slightly gawky) I’m not sure.  But watching poor Annie Hathaway with the reluctant (or vacant?  or absent?) Franco on her arm, I was reminded of the handful of times I took Mr. Cool to a sorority function, or to a family event, or well, basically any time when we weren’t alone together or with  friends of his choosing.  He’d be rude to my friends or make snide comments about the event or whatever, and I’d get exhausted trying to apologize for him and make everyone see what a great guy he was.  (This begs the question why, if he was so great, he acted like such a jerk, but as every young gal with a Bad Boyfriend knows “he was different with me.”  The grownup me cringes.  I digress.)

Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Franco is talented.  Perhaps I should blame the producers for selecting someone so ill-suited to the task.  The fact that Billy Crystal, a 94- year-old stroke victim, and a digital Bob Hope were the highlights of the show pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?  Still, I find that I’m slightly irritated with Franco anyway.

What I loved about the Oscars when I was a kid was that it celebrated everything great about movie making.  I would watch actors accept their awards and imagine doing the same one day.  Last night, I watched with my 15-year-old daughter, who is just back from her first trip to New York and completely in love with the theater.  I wonder if she imagined the same.  Say what you will about Academy politics and Hollywood cynicism and promotional campaigns and whether the most deserving “art” wins.  The Oscars, at their best, are a lovely fantasy, and they honor good work.  For Franco to make the evening about anything other than the honorees was colossally self-indulgent.  On Oscar night, I’m not interested in performance art or sly meta commentary that blurs the lines between audience and host, breaks the fourth wall, blah blah blah.  I just want to be entertained.  For the first time in my Oscar viewing years, I wasn’t.  But then maybe I’m just grumpy because I stayed up too late, True Grit didn’t get a single award, and not even Annette Benning could stem the Portman tidal wave.  Sigh.

(originally published on Open Salon, February 10, 2011)

Did you ever have a crush on a guy who was just too good looking to be trusted?  One who was just a little too conscious of his looks?  One who possessed an effortless cool that probably required quite bit of effort?  And yet, you couldn’t help but blush when he looked your way, because well, shoot, he’s awfully cute; and gosh, he has a way of making a girl feel like she’s the only one in the room; and gee, a little harmless flirtation never hurt anyone; and what? Who, me?  Aw shucks. Giggle. 

I know.  Me too.

But hanging out with one of those guys, my friends, is the sure road to heartbreak.  Eventually you’re going to find out that the package is too good to be true; that he relies on his looks too much, that his charm is only skin deep.  You are going to find out that he is not all that he is cracked up to be.  And then you will have wasted your time and your poor tender heart only to wish you had said yes to the cute guy from Ohio who didn’t care who designed his shoes and who didn’t have more hair products in his bathroom than you do.

Sigh.

My affair with Steve Jobs was just like that.  Or rather, that was how my reluctant love affair with anything adorned by a cutely bitten Apple started out.

It all began with the iPhone.  It was offered to me by my husband in a genius I’m-sorry-I-just-bought-a-motorcycle-but-maybe-this-shiny-Apple-will-get-me-out-of-the-doghouse move, and my first impression was, “Nice try.”  I was a little miffed that he’d spent the money.  I did not need bells and whistles.  I already wasted too much time online.

But wow.  It was so pretty.  I mean really gorgeous.  I mean, if it vibrated a little harder, my husband would be out of a job.

Just kidding, of course.  But by the end of a couple of weeks, I was in love.  I had thought that phone was just another pretty face destined to disappoint me with its shallowness.  But no.  It was better than I thought a phone could ever be.  True love at last.

But soon, that little phone wasn’t enough, and I moved on to the MacBook.  I knew that my novel lived inside one of those slim, silver beauties and not in the wonky old PC on my kitchen counter.  Surely the constant virus scans and ugly interface were thwarting my creativity.  It suddenly became critical that I spend twice as much on a laptop (never mind that I didn’t need it for much other than word processing and web browsing) as I strictly “needed” to.

Oh, needs.  I do have needs.  By the time the iPad was released, though, I had my guard up.  On a trip to the Apple store, I flirted with poked around on one for a few minutes.  “Meh.”  I pronounced.  All style and no substance.  I would not lose my heart again so easily.

Until my boss said, “I have some iPads for department use.  You interested?”

I know what you are thinking.  I should have said no.  But I went in with both eyes open.   I took that pretty little pad home and I loaded books onto it.  I downloaded free apps and synched my music and mail.  And I said, “Meh.”  Sure, it was nice to have one for a little while, but my resistance was perfected.  It did not, like its predecessors, wend its way into my heart.  I didn’t even bother to buy a case for it.

So when the email came from IT asking me to turn it back in after the trial period, I shook it off.  “Meh,” I said.  I convinced myself that the only thing I needed it for was reading.  Christmas was coming, so I told my enablerhusband that I might like a nice Kindle or Nook to take its place.  Nothing fancy.

But you know what he did, don’t you?

So on Christmas day, I pledged my eternal love to my very own iPad.  Suddenly its beauty became more exquisite, its utility more indispensable.  I paid good money for apps.  I bought a case.  Now that I knew it was mine forever, I could love it the way it deserved to be loved.

Plus, my husband just got his third motorcycle, so fair’s fair.