Kevin Allman

Write for free! at Examiner.com

The latest in the Write For Free! series:

Chris Landers at the Baltimore City Paper notes that Examiner.com is adding a lot of bloggers to its site. Their compensation?

"Consideration: In consideration of the Services, you will be provided exposure of your name and the Web Page. You understand that you will not initially receive any other compensation for performance of the Services. However, if the Web Page obtains traffic levels and/or other performance metrics determined by Examiner.com from time to time, you may be eligible for a performance-based incentive ("Incentive"), which would be paid according to a formula and metrics to be provided to you by Examiner.com, as modified by Examiner.com from time to time in its sole discretion."

De-bullshitted, I think that means that Examiner.com might pay its bloggers someday, if the site achieves some amount of traffic that they will determine, though they could move the goalposts at any time, and then they'll decide what the pay might be and let you know.

I'd say that the best way to get "exposure of your name" is to start a blog under your own name and not someone else's umbrella, but I guess that would limit the chance ever to earn a "performance-based incentive."

The entire blogger agreement is here. I ran a word count: 4266 words. I guess the Examiner.com bloggers are expected to read that for free, too.

Another casualty of the newspaper buyout frenzy

Peter Carlson, who wrote the funny and revealing Magazine Reader column for The Washington Post for 12 years, is taking the paper's buyout. Today is his last column, and as usual, it's smart and trenchant:

For nearly 12 years, I've been paid real American money to read magazines and write about them. During those years I've pondered the glories of magazines ranging from Life to Sounds of Death, from Reason to Paranoia, from George to Jane, from Spy to Sly, from Good Dog! to Murder Dog, from New Beauty to New Witch, from Modern Maturity to Modern Ferret to Modern Drunkard. And let's not forget Wrapped in Plastic, a magazine devoted to David Lynch's long-dead TV show, Twin Peaks.

He sums up the appeal of magazines as well as I've ever read:

Human beings love stories and a magazine, at its best, is where a writer can take the time to sit down and tell a good story: I went off on an adventure and here's what I saw and heard and how it felt and what I think it means. Newspapers sometimes do this, too, of course, but not as often as they used to, alas. Most magazines don't do it very often or very well but some do -- Esquire, Harper's, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly, National Geographic, and, of course, the best of them all, the New Yorker.

Thanks for sitting down and telling a good story, Peter Carlson.

R.I.P., Dakin Williams

David Cuthbert of The Times-Picayune has a nice memoir-obituary of Dakin Williams, the brother of Tennessee Williams, who died last week at the age of 89:

Dakin was a dependably colorful addition to the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, in his offbeat theatrics (once playing Blanche Du Bois in drag), being interviewed by Al Shea and wearing wildly hued Versace jackets and jewelry that veered toward ornate crucifixes....

Dakin called himself "a professional brother." Williams scholar Kenneth Holditch called him "dramatic and unpredictable." In Dakin's early appearances at the festival, one attendee remembers, "You just wanted to hide under a chair when he 'performed.'"

When his health permitted, Dakin used to come to the Tennessee Williams Festival every year -- it seemed to be the highlight of his calendar, a time when he could enjoy a bit of celebrity and spend a weekend in a place where his eccentricities were both indulged and appreciated. I never got to see his interpretation of Blanche Dubois, but I did get to appreciate his psychedelic wardrobe and hear his theories about how the C.I.A. had assassinated his brother because he Knew Too Much.

Every year, the Festival has held a panel called "I Remember Tennessee." Next year I hope they stage "I Remember Dakin" as well.

Now you can track the death of newspapers -- interactively!

GraphicDesignr is tracking newspaper layoffs with a nice interactive Google Map graphic called "Paper Cuts." Here's what it looks like as of this afternoon:


Each pushpin corresponds to a newspaper, and each is color-coded according to the number of jobs lost (white is 1-25; red is 100+). Click that red dot in the Southern California media market, for instance, and this informative graphic appears:


According to GraphicDesignr's calculations, 3,020+ newspaper jobs have been eliminated so far in 2008 (not counting unfilled positions). That's in addition to 2,000+ positions cut in the last seven months of 2007. Reporter, can you spare a dime?

And a very happy Memorial Day to all! 

The Publishers Weekly pay cuts

Over at Critical Mass (the official blog of the National Book Critics Circle), Jane Ciabattari reproduced the following memo from an editor at Publishers Weekly:

We are under constraints to reduce our expenses and must reduce the fee we pay to reviewers. Any reviews assigned after June 15 will be billed at $25 per review. However, you will be credited as a contributor in issues where your reviews appear. Please know that we value the work you do for us....

Et cetera.

The comments section at Critical Mass is, naturally, en fuego with discussion, and it seems to have tapped into a great deal of ill will toward PW and its policies. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of PW, weighs in with a response that reads, in part:

I hope that PW reviewers, like one of the people who posted here, see the pay as an honorarium rather than a salary, and will continue to review because they love books and believe in PW as much as we believe in them....

In the past, I've reviewed exactly twice for PW, at terms not much better than $25 per review. I won't discuss the exact terms of the "honorarium," but it was 5%-15% of what I could, and do, get elsewhere for the same amount of work. (We parted ways fairly quickly, though not, mostly, for financial reasons.)

The problem with PW's reviews, I think, is that they're so very, very weighty -- a good review in PW can result in hundreds of libraries buying a title, and a marketing department devoting more energy to promoting it. The reviews are front-and-center on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, influencing online buyers for years. In short, a good PW review (particularly a starred one) can affect sales in the same disproportionate way that a New York Times rave theater review can disproportionately affect a show's box office.

Conversely, a pan from PW can sink a fledgling writer before he or she gets out of the gate.

That's a hell of a lot of clout for a $25 review. And a hell of a lot of responsibility to give to someone who can afford to work for $25.

When your pay scale is that low, you're necessarily going to be attracting inexperienced reviewers. Not to say that they can't be good, but I wonder if editors and agents explain to authors (particularly first-time authors) that the fate of their books can lie with a reviewer who can afford the time and energy to take $25 as payment.

Is a $500 review necessarily "better" or more authoritative than a $25 review?

(Other bloggers are talking about it here and here.)

Yet another writing guide...and this one sounds good

From the L.A. Times blog Jacket Copy comes this:

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a notoriously poor speller; it's one of those endearing details of the legend of a great writer. But none of us are Fitzgeralds, so to work on the mechanics of your writing, you can get started with Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors, which Broadway Books is set to publish this month by bestselling author Bill Bryson.

Among such blind spots are those traps familiar to anyone writing about literature (it's Stephen Dedalus, not Daedalus) or about medicine (it's Down syndrome, not Down's syndrome). There are also plenty of words that writers misapply: "crass," for instance, isn't just tasteless — it's "stupid and grossly ignorant to the point of insensitivity." "A thing must be pretty bad to be crass," Bryson writes. "Enormity" doesn't refer to size but to the wickedness of something. I'm guilty of misusing that one.

I went to Bryson's site to read more about the book:

What is the difference between “immanent” and “imminent”? What is the singular form of graffiti? What is the difference between “acute” and “chronic”? What is the former name of “Moldova”? What is the difference between a cardinal number and an ordinal number? One of the English language's most skilled writers answers these and many other questions and guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage.

Hmm. I know the difference between cardinal and ordinal, and the singular form of graffiti (graffito), but I didn't know that "immanent" was even a real word, and it seems I've been misusing enormity all my life. This sounds like a useful and fun reference volume (and the best reference books are always both useful and fun).

Why New Orleans is the best news market

Headlines from this afternoon's news wrap:

"Science, Religion Square Off in Baton Rouge" (you know this can't be good)

"Lap Dances Saved By Senate Committee"

"Sex Predator Castration OK With House Panel"

And then there's this, in a Times-Picayune article about GOP troubles:

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said he doesn't agree with Davis' pessimistic assessment, but he does say "it's certainly true that national Republicans need to improve their brand. "Perhaps folks should actually take some cues from Republicans in Louisiana," Vitter said. "At home, we're the party of reform and positive changes versus failed past and the good ol' boys."

Who needs the Weekly World News?

Anais St. John interview

I have a fluffy Q&A with singer and model Anais St. John in the May issue of New Orleans Living. It's a nice photo of Anais, but I wish it was more prominent, since she is really strikingly beautiful (as well as talented, of course). As she told me: "I've never been a shy girl."

Crediting cartoonists

Matt Bors has an interesting item about The New York Times and its policy regarding editorial cartoonists: it seems the paper Photoshops out their signatures before running them in the paper. I'd never heard of such a thing, but commenters on his blog say that it's not a policy exclusive to the Times. Matt notes that many of the cartoonists have won Pulitzers for their drawing, and asks:

Would a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist be asked to put up with this level of ineptitude and insulting treatment of their craft?

I agree with him, but I'll bet that the Times (and other publications) consider editorial cartoons to be the equivalent of photographs or graphics rather than columns, and graphic elements take a standard credit line instead of a signature.

Nevertheless, I'd say that the artist's signature is an element of the drawing and shouldn't be retouched out of existence, any more than an element in a photograph should be retouched.

I wonder if they'd do it to, say, a Hirschfeld?

Stupider TV news, part II

Why should people outside the New Orleans viewing area be deprived of the "ABC26 News Wheel of Justice" and the station's newest correspondent Tat-2 the Bounty Hunter?