How American Journalism Sells a Phony Dream to Young Professionals
I’m tunneling these days through Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good. If you blink and skip the title page, you’ll miss that it’s written “with James Fox,” and call me old-fashioned, but it strikes me as peculiar that one of the most celebrated editors of the Condé Nast glory years needed a co-pilot (again, in the old-fashioned sense, not in the insipid Copilot AI sense).
Carter’s book is engaging, entertaining, certainly a must-have for journalists and writers who either fondly remember or feel nostalgic about an era — mainly the eighties and nineties — when newsstands weren’t embarrassments. I certainly do. I didn’t mail off any thick cardboard subscription cards because I never had enough disposable cash to be so loyal. You might have enjoyed a great lineup last month with The Atlantic, but the crisp new issue on the racks this time might be a snooze while the fresh New Yorker had a got-to-read-it long feature. And there was a wide selection of offerings to stimulate the mind: Details, Spin, Omni, GQ, Harper’s, Spy, Discover. Not all of these I’ve rattled off are dead, but their print editions definitely limp their way today to the racks.
I was devouring magazines through those years while I tried to build a career in journalism and then simply get by on the compromise detour path of communications. When I earned better money, I spent Sunday mornings with my then-partner eating a long, long brunch at the Mövenpick restaurant that used to be packed each weekend in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. On that glorious, lazy days, you could stretch out and abuse your right to coffee refills, giving the Sunday New York Times a thorough read. It was clear that like Graydon Carter before me, I was dreaming of being somewhere else.
Carter, however, was the Ottawa boy who made good — not only good but spectacular. No “settling” for an editor post at a publication in Toronto. No, he went where his efforts unquestionably mattered, and that meant New York. Toronto, by the way, has caught up to New York lately — but the New York of the 1970s, with a hopelessly inept transit system, rising senseless crime, crumbling infrastructure, and exorbitant rents for shoebox apartments.
In his book, Carter naturally puts his best face on his managing tenure, you can’t help but think you would have liked to have had him as your boss, a self-declared champion of writers. His taste in juvenile scatological humor probably would have grated now and then, but at least he had a sense of humor. He was the brains behind Spy magazine, a mix of Atlantic meets Mad magazine with a layout that tried to be edgy but often came across as high school yearbook. Nevertheless, it had its pearls, like captioning a photo of the diminutive Ralph Lauren “Not actual size.” A fellow karate student and I got a kick out of its article that skewered Steven Seagal long before Hollywood realized they needed to ditch their badly behaving action hero.
Because Carter devotes so many pages to the high life, you wonder whether he likes the photo-flash glamor and the booths in top-end restaurants more than a great insightful investigative piece. Of course, the Defense can roll out brilliant articles by Sebastian Junger, Michael Lewis, Maureen Orth, Christopher Hitchens, and Dominick Dunne before he became a crashing boor and repetitive in his crime coverage. But with the exceptions of Hitch and Dunne, the writers never really come into focus in his book, and I would argue the writers really made Vanity Fair what it was, along with the shots by the legendary Annie Leibovitz and other photographers.
The spotlight stays on Carter, and to be fair, it’s a memoir after all. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’re left with an intense envy because he relentlessly reminds you of just how thin and sweet the air was up on his publishing summit: “When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Suites, room service, drivers in each city. For European trips, I flew the Concorde.”
Carter assures us the good times rolled for almost all. “Everybody at Vanity Fair had an assistant,” he informs us a page and a half later. “All the deputy and senior editors. The photo editor. The art director.” Staff lined up to see a woman who did eyebrows free of charge every month. Eyebrows. And Carter is as gently stunned by this revelation as we, his readers, with the implication that this in-house service continued, business as usual. “One major advantage in these early days,” he informs us, “was that there was no budget at all — that is to say, the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted.”
No wonder the title chosen for the book, When the Going Was Good, is so apt. Celebrity names are naturally hurled more than dropped, with an obligatory mention of Hitchens’ prodigious alcoholic intake.
Which brings us to our theme. And that’s because Carter’s memoir leaves the impression of a golden age (and he does use that term later in the book). Vanity Fair journalists run around the world while their editors go to parties and pad their expenses as if they’re off to meet Gatsby in a hot New York bistro or Berlin nightclub of 1925, not 1995.
It’s interesting to compare his memoir with another book of bygone journalistic glory, The Freaks Came Out To Write, Tricia Romano’s riveting oral history of The Village Voice from its conception to its current coma state online.
While Carter and Company were playing editorial brahmins at Condé Nast’s skyscraper in Times Square, the awkward yet equally talented kids were typing away in a squalid block in Greenwich Village for the Voice, often getting paid dirt as they wrote with activist zeal on social issues. The Voice broke important stories on the sleazy backroom machinations of municipal planners, real estate developers, and Mafia capos. The Voice is remembered as one of the first outlets to cover the Stonewall Riots in depth.
In the 1980s, I would happily spend the transit fare just to head down to a newsstand in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood where new issues of the Village Voice were delivered every Thursday. I will never forget marveling at the reportage of its regular “Worst Landlords” investigation and its cover feature on the infamous Central Park Rape case; the cover photo alone of that stretch of lonely, dark path in the park is seared into my memory.
The Voice’s newsroom culture seemed to be unique in one aspect, in that it hardly cared if certain private feuds went public. In 1979, James Wolcott and Andrew Sarris, both prominent Voice writers, fired childish barbs at each other through their respective columns and in the Letters section. In that same decade when the Voice was about to run a homophobic story on “how gay people were ruining the Village,” one of its arts editors, Ralph Goldstein — who was still in the closet at the time — leaked the copy. Amidst the outrage and fallout over the material, he admitted it to the paper’s editor in chief Marianne Partridge, and to her credit, she didn’t fire him.
Ironically, the Voice enjoyed this atmosphere even when it was owned by Rupert Murdoch.
But there’s a reason the cliché adage goes that an outside look is often better than the view inside. The Voice had markedly few women and no African Americans in senior editorial positions late into the 1970s. In the eighties, one of its most talented Black writers and jazz critics, Stanley Crouch, finally got the boot for his erratic bullying and violence in the office. Colleagues recall in The Freaks Came Out To Write how Alexander Cockburn was predatory towards young female staffers, coaxing them into his bed, and the paper suspended him when it turned out he’d accepted a $10,000 grant from an Arab Studies organization in 1982.
I can promise you that most fresh journalism graduates of the eighties, nineties, and even the early 2000s would have traded a back molar or maybe even their souls to get into either of these editorial bullpens, never mind that one of them paid crap. They wanted to be part of the glory. They wanted to help make that glory. This is the dazzling fairy tale of success that many journalism schools sell you, that journalism culture, and the journalism business — don’t kid yourself, it is a business — sells you.
An immigrant friend of mine who got a scholarship at Columbia years ago could not break into the fabled newsrooms of Manhattan after she graduated. She is talented, writes well, is fully fluent in English, but it’s easy to see how white Anglo editors could look suspiciously at her Eastern European name and then be privately dismissive over her slight accent. I often encountered the same sort of reserve when I tried as a Canadian to break into newsrooms in London. It’s not so much about you, as the parochial urge to always hire local and more importantly familiar. Johnny Boy is dumb as a brick and can’t write, but he’s from Queens, he’s from Tunbridge Wells, we’re comfortable with him as our selection.
So, there is an understandable note of bitterness to my friend’s assessment of her journalism education and her professors. “Yes, I resent them because they told us that if we work hard enough, we’ll make it, that we’ll be able to change the world.”
Journalism generally attracts individuals who aren’t in it for the money, at least not at first. Certainly, the drive for great work is what kept many in the trenches at the Voice and what first attracted those who found themselves in the “Magic Kingdom” of the Condé Nast stable of publications, working for the New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair or Vogue. But first you got to get in the club and be accepted.
And for those who care, anything less is… Well, who are you again?
Touching the Dull, Gray Ceiling of Canadian Journalism
Carter obviously knew this. Like all the working boys with their noses pressed up against hotel lobby windows, he is at heart a snob. I can’t blame him. He knew editing a literary magazine in Ottawa was a dead end. He knew the key to everything he wanted was down south, and it wasn’t particularly because he was aching to do quality journalism.
Tellingly, Carter thinks he’s paying his homeland a compliment when he writes that Vanity Fair’s slice of the culture is “sophisticated, knowing, and international. This may have had something to do with being an outsider — from Canada, no less. When I was growing up, half of our imported culture came from the giant to the south, and the other half came from Britain and Europe to the east.” Ouch. The implication being that we borrow and keep borrowing. And he’s not wrong.
While Carter escaped, those left behind have tried their best to create a journalistic hierarchy in Canada that’s laughable in its pretensions. When I worked for Rogers Media for a couple of years, editing an innocuous little insurance periodical, I occasionally had to visit the floor that held the bullpen for Maclean’s magazine or attend pointless group “check in” meetings for what the different publications were up to. For those who don’t know, Maclean’s has for decades struggled along as first a monthly and later a shameless weekly rip-off of the Newsweek/Time format, and now it’s mostly in a digital incarnation with a wafer-thin print edition like so many other mags. By the time I was there, it was long irrelevant thanks to the Internet. But then it’s always been hard to figure out just who reads the damn thing. The same problem existed with an equally dull Canadian rag that was periodically resurrected, Saturday Night.
And yet Maclean’s staff would come to the meetings or speak to you in corridors as if they were waiting for their entourages to bring them an appetizer tray. Only there were no entourages. They were full of themselves in a way that irritated staffers from other publications. I wondered at first if it was just me, but nope, my view was confirmed by others.
The attitude that “surely, we have stars, too” has been perpetuated, I suspect, at the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where the same “commentators” and analysts appear with tedious frequency week after week. I have nothing against Chantal Hébert or Andrew Coyne, who both have keen minds — and point of full disclosure, Coyne and I went to the same high school in Winnipeg. He was a casual friend of my brother’s for a while. But why are these the go-to folks all the time? Nor does anyone question on a regular basis that the CBC — a public institution — is essentially giving a platform on a regular basis to a representative of the National Post, an increasingly rabid right-wing newspaper.
But the heart of the problem is that the media pond is so small in Canada that hawks do not share. And there is no “leveling up” for most journalists beyond Toronto or Montreal. Genuinely gifted and skilled reporters like Dawna Friesen (a classmate of mine at the journalism program in Winnipeg’s Red River College) flee south and get snapped up to be an international correspondent for NBC News for a while; more recently, Daniele Hamamdjian also made the jump to NBC.
Why not? Especially when CTV News — aping a practice that even the BBC now regularly uses — doesn’t even bother to regularly fly reporters out to major stories anymore. Instead, its “correspondents” narrate a summary of the facts over footage obtained from NBC in a charade that fools no one. Must be nice to work out of New York or London and do real reporting again.
My guess is that this sort of shrinking media landscape exists in many countries around the world where starry-eyed, would-be reporters hoped to get into journalism programs in North America and the UK (hoped in past tense, thanks to Trump’s policies and the new immigration clampdowns of Canada’s Liberals and the UK’s Labour). They dream of working with papers or networks built on legends.
But now they’re discovering the legends are cliques, and they are often not welcome.
Close Encounter
In When the Going Was Good, Carter marks the end of the golden era with the 2008 recession. I would argue that the first heart attack really came with 9/11. In the autumn of 2001, I was corralling a group of talented writers to create a new magazine to rival Vanity Fair and The Atlantic with twin bases in London and New York. My then-business partner was literally scouting real estate for us in Manhattan, and thanks to a veteran reporter opening up her Rolodex, I was able to recruit some of the top writers from GQ, The Guardian, Time, and other outlets. After the towers went down, any investors for a pitch like ours disappeared overnight.
But now I recognize we likely would have survived five years at most. What happened in the early 2000s and the new digital era was a publishing bloodbath. And with hindsight, I wonder how much of my editorial vision could have really stood out enough to build its audience. To look at issues of Carter’s Spy, you knew immediately what it was and yet it never quite found its footing. My business partner and I had settled on the name, Encounter, conjuring memories of the once well respected literary and commentary mag. Maybe we jinxed ourselves. The original Encounter was later outed as getting funding from the CIA, something for which its duped editors didn’t have a clue.
But our new mag, had it even run a few issues, might have put us on the map. As late as 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates could still rocket to stardom through The Atlantic and his long feature on slavery reparations. Adam Serwer coined the phrase, “The cruelty is the point,” and got a book deal out of it. The problem is that it’s still survival of the fittest at these legacy outfits, or so J-school graduates are led to believe, and while more Graydon Carters might step off the bus from Ottawa (or a flight from Istanbul or Sofia), alternative voices are seldom welcome. Not just “ethnic” voices but voices for truly unique and unconventional thinking.
No wonder then that the freshly minted journalism graduates of Columbia or Harvard or yes, Toronto Metropolitan University soon realize their only viable future if they want to keep writing is in alternative media. Not only have the big media brands been tarnished over time — what with not reporting what’s going on in Gaza and failing to properly report the slow decline in American democracy — they can’t even live up to the values espoused by J-school professors in classrooms. Unfortunately, alternative media often barely pays your groceries, let alone your rent.
The young journalist learns all about the “inverted pyramid” of news structure but is a babe in the woods over career paths. No style guide for that.
No one told me, for instance, that if I just raced down to Manhattan without a degree like Graydon Carter, I could talk my way into a job. I did take the chance to fly down at my own expense — twice — in the nineties for job interviews, both in PR work, not journalism, first at Newsweek then at PBS. My prospective boss at Newsweek started the interview by warning me that if I thought of trying to cross over to editorial, forget it, and if I ever tried, I’d be fired on the spot.
And then there was that pesky issue of getting a work visa, and what operation needs that headache and paperwork?
Back I went to Canada, where there was no easy avenue to do the kind of stories I always wanted to cover. Stories about the rest of the world, which was routinely, almost spitefully ignored because the sage wisdom of journalism was “Well, who cares about that here?” Never mind the fact that over there most certainly did matter and could have impacts economically, politically, socially, on our country, and that year after year, more folks from over there were coming here and eventually becoming our citizens with a perfectly understandable interest in the events still affecting their distant families and friends.
The old wisdom of my generation was that you “paid your dues” at a local station or newspaper, “graduated” to a respectable city paper and tried not to snore through city council or legislature sessions, and if you were good, maybe the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail would hire you one day. And after you covered Ottawa, you were burnished enough to get an overseas posting. But it was bullshit. Time and again — and I’m not exceptional in having this experience — I got hired because I lived where the job was. I was just familiar enough and close by enough for editors.
My first period of substantial overseas reporting came when I used my own vacation to go cover an aspect of the war in Iraq in 2015. I literally gave myself a dangerous assignment for the magazine I edited. And only a bunch of insurance brokers and risk management executives would have read it. Nevertheless, I remain proud of the work.
Years later, in writing investigative articles on Ethiopia for my own Medium pages, I got the troll treatment from supposedly “respectable” journalists at top brands, including harassing DMs. The issue always came back to whether my platform was “legitimate,” even though one of the stories I worked on inadvertently wound up rocking the United Nations and making headlines around the world. (The short version is that my digital tape recorder was stolen, and my sources were outed, but the effort blew up in the faces of those trying to shame them and get at me, and I recount it all in my book, The Hyena War.)
And though it took close to forty years, I woke up and realized that the mastheads should not be the monuments. They celebrate only themselves and on the rare occasion, their all-star lineups. Unless you’re in that lineup, you don’t count. I always find it interesting how journalists who write books include in their bios that their work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, the Wolverhampton Screaming Devil, the Croydon Morning Screed and who honestly gives a flying rat’s ass?
Personally, I’d rather people recall some of what I write rather than everywhere I published it. And when the going’s been good, they have.
