The Latest Journalistic Venture: True/Slant

A new online magazine "alpha" launched Wednesday, called True/Slant. Newspapers and magazines may be folding left and right, but the Web is the Wild West and there's still lots of land there for those who want to settle it. At least I hope so. I must admit that the rise and rapid fall of conservative online mag Culture11 scared me.

But I've signed on with the True/Slant team and I hope the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg is right in predicting a bright future for the site. Here's a screenshot:


True/Slant bills itself as the "digital home for the 'New Journalist,'" and will make it easy for users to follow the stories and voices of individual writers. I think that's a cool idea, and I hope readers do too.

I'm a contributor on the site. You can check out my page, Degrees of Recession, about pursuing higher education when hiring prospects are bleak-- a subject with which I am intimately familiar. One of my first posts on the student loan movement going viral got lots of traffic (Thanks, Above The Law!), making me one of the most popular contributors this week. If you look closely at the screen grab above, you'll see that I'm just two pegs less popular than Matt Taibbi.


Which is awesome. As those who know me know, I'm a big fan of the vitriolic Rolling Stone writer.

True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism [Wall Street Journal]
Culture Shock [Washington Monthly]

Pained Metaphors

Sometimes metaphors are painful because they are mixed, tortured, over-used, or overly elaborate. Like when a metaphor has as many references as there are characters on "Heroes," basically throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, then putting it all in a blender, followed by a trash compactor, and then dumping it all into landfill.

Get my drift? Maybe not. You may have lost your way upon those tortuous metaphoric paths. Metaphors should not distract from what is written about-- they should serve to illuminate ideas and make them clearer.

Packing in too much can cause the reader's mind to wander away from your point. In other instances of a metaphor gone wrong, the timing of the metaphor is just bad. So is the case with the current issue of the New Yorker (April 13, 2009). I opened it up to the first section, Talk of the Town. George Packer's Comment starts off the magazine with:

Another week, another earthquake.

My mind immediately went to Italy and the devastating quake that rocked the town of L'Aquila, outside of Rome, on Monday.

But no, Packer crafted this pre-Rome, and goes on in the column to talk about the new financial crises that President Obama is rocked with each week. The automobile industry takeover being the latest example.

I can't really absorb it though because I am still thinking about earthquakes, collapsing building, and post-natural disaster despair around the world. Whoops.

If You Want to Skip Journalism School...

I am at approximately the halfway point in my year-and-a-half long program at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. There's a month left in this semester. Then I am on "summer break" followed by the third and final semester of my master's degree program in magazine writing.

Hopefully, in January, there will be a job out there for me. Hopefully. Or at least editors willing to buy my stuff freelance.

I've been speaking to lots of prospective students in the past few months, about journalism, journalism school, and the graduate student experience at NYU. I'm generally positive about the decision to go to NYU (for myself and others). The professors (Ted Conover, Meryl Gordon, Lawrence Weschler, Rob Boynton, etc. etc.) are amazing-- I love getting to spend hours with them each week in class, having them read my work, and having ready access to them via office hours and e-mails. They're amazing people and journalists, and it's kind of mind-blowing to get to monopolize their time.

Other good things: my fellow students (especially my four favorites-- not naming names); not being in the job market right now; having an excuse to live in New York; and being the possessor of a master's degree by the end of the year.

So those are the positive things. These are the not-so-positive things: accumulating student loan debt; writing long pieces that don't get published (freelancing stinks right now); the ego deflation that is part of "being a student"; not being taken seriously by sources; and the fear that spending time getting a master's degree in a profession in which it is not required is silly.

Being a writer and editor at Above The Law helps balance out some of the negatives. I am fully engaged in the news cycle and it's good to be doing writing and reporting that's actually being read daily by people who need it.

A lot of journalism school is studying great pieces of non-fiction. I would likely be too lazy to do that systematically on my own. But if you're less lazy than me and want to simulate the journalism school experience, read the following:

The John McPhee reader. McPhee, a long time New Yorker writer, is the journalistic God to many of us in the craft.

Gay Talese magazine pieces, notably "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold."

The New Yorker

(If you live in New York) New York Magazine

The New York Times

Optional, but recommended: The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Wired

Joan Didion

Ian Frazier. (Lawrence Weschler: "Frazier is the best journalist of my generation." And Weschler's work is pretty friggin' amazing.)

William Finnegan, notably Cold New World

The New New Journalism, by Rob Boynton. Interviewing, reporting, and writing techniques from the "new new journalists."

Joseph Mitchell, notably Up In The Old Hotel

David Foster Wallace, notably A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

There's more, but I'm tired of typing. So, yeah, for a do-it-yourself-master's-degree-in-journalism, read all that stuff, and write/report a lot. Voila! I've saved you $40K or so.

Spring Break(!!!) Part Two: Berkeley, San Fran, and Napa.... and Founding One's Own Magazine

Well, spring break is starting to seem like a distant memory, but a fond one. I love California. Coming back to cold, rainy New York, I started to wonder why we don't all just pack our belongings and head west. But spring is beginning to bloom in the city that never sleeps and I am feeling happier.

Hmmm.... to quickly sum up Berkeley/Northern California: running past cows at Inspiration Point, running past strangely gopher-like squirrels at the Berkeley Marina, running past students on Berkeley's campus (I ran a lot over spring break), inadvertently watching burlesque at El Rio in The Mission, hiking in Napa Valley (photo at right), and thrift store vintage apparel shopping in Santa Cruz.

Upon my return to New York, I saw this article in the Times: Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick . It's a California-based (of course) service that allows users to self-publish magazines:

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

NYU should probably have a course on this at the Journalism Institute, since it's how we grad students may be most likely to see our words on the printed page.

Speaking of, yet another magazine has announced it's ceasing "real" publication, though it will live on in Web form. R.I.P. Blender. I kind of loved the US-Weeklified-Rolling-Stone imitator.

Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick [New York Times]
Print Version of Blender Magazine Will Cease Publication [New York Times]

Spring Break(!!!) Part One: The City of Angels... and Doctors and Octuplets

Radio silence has fallen on the blog due to my wandering over to the West Coast for spring break. There are many funny, youth-ifying things about going back to school, but having "spring break" and "summer vacation" make me feel the most like a kid again.

I spent the first half of the week in Los Angeles, visiting my best friend since middle school and her husband, who are both doctors. Since my friend will be specializing in fertility, a recurrent topic of conversation was Octo-mom, aka Nadya Suleman, the California woman who just popped out eight little ones after fertility treatments. My friends tell me that Suleman will be making over six figures per year thanks to California's generous welfare system. When babies are born to low-income Californians, the state provides a monthly stipend. If the babies are born premature (as all the octuplets were), the stipend is higher. Now that Suleman has a litter of over 10 kids (several preceded the octuplets), she'll be making close to $10K per month, per my friends' estimates. Maybe I should drop out of J school and sign up for baby-making school. Sounds like the money's much better.

(As an aside, most fellow doctors think poorly by Suleman's doctor for his willingness to implant her with a ridiculous number of embryos. If you were to play word association games with his name, the following would come up: Unethical, disgusting, shameful, a disgrace to the profession.)

In the course of the conversation, my friend raised an interesting question being discussed within the medical community -- what to do with unused embryos? When a couple decides to undergo fertility treatments, they usually stash away at least 10 embryos. Sometimes, people don't end up using them at all. Or the first two implanted take, and they don't need the rest. What do you do with the leftovers?

Other things in L.A.: Picked up LA City Beat, an alternative weekly, and recognized an NYU journalism grad among the bylines. Good to know a few of them have found employment... Saw my dad's best friend from high school who is now a screenwriter -- economy is bad for them too... Interviewed a professional matchmaker for my dating beat -- my favorite quote from her, regarding the difficulty in finding matches for babyboomer women: “If she was ever beautiful, she expects to be with a beautiful man. Even if she was only beautiful when she was in the 7th grade. And now she’s 55, and she’s lost her figure, and her face looks like it was run over by a truck.”

Stay tuned for San Francisco adventures.

Riding the Wave

My inauguration stories are still getting picked up, so says my Livewire editor. Last week, she sent me a link to one of my stories in Wave JOURNEY's Travellers' Tales section.

This reminds me of two things:

1. Waves: Lawrence Weschler (my professor this semester and a man of wonder) encouraged our Fiction of Nonfiction class to read Bill Finnegan's excellent piece on surfing. It ran in two parts in the New Yorker in 1992. Beyond being a great exploration of the attraction of surfing, it uses surfing as a metaphor for writing. How we're all out in this dark soup of the ocean trying to figure out which stories are waves worth riding, and which ones are just going to peter out. I find myself thinking of this each time I dive into a new piece, desperately hoping it's the kind of story that will make me yell "Cowabunga" at some point.

2. This story: The first time this piece was picked up, the father of the little girl I interviewed and quoted at the end sent me the following e-mail. I thought it was adorable:

Please pass on my sincere thanks to Kashmir Hill for her inclusion of her interview of my eight-year-old daughter in her January 18th story about D.C. stores and vendors during President Obama's inauguration. Lelia will remember the event forever and was thrilled to be interviewed by a reporter. That the piece was featured in NYC Pavement Pieces is particularly gratifying to me. I am a graduate of Pratt Institute and for eight years lived in the West Village, seven of those years on Bleecker Street, a mere seven minute walk from the front door of NYU Law School (I timed the walk as part of my LSAT preparation). I have missed New York every day since leaving and would return in a New York Minute if the right opportunity arose.

As the grandson and son of newspapermen, I have a special appreciation for journalists. Please keep up the good work and let Ms. Hill know that I intend to check out her work at Above the Law, although I suspect it only will add to my current anxiousness about being a lawyer in 2009!

I was touched by this. I wrote back to him to thank him for the note, but warned him that Above The Law is a bit depressing these days. It seems like 80 percent of what we write about concerns layoffs nowadays, unfortunately.

Second Thoughts [Wave JOURNEY]

The latest byline: Interview with a professional matchmaker

My latest published piece is up on Livewire, NYU's wire service. Hopefully, it'll be picked up and run by one of Livewire's subscribers. Here's the intro:

Lisa Clampitt married her husband within two months of meeting him. Six years ago, she spotted the City University of New York professor while getting coffee. She introduced herself, and after chatting for 20 minutes, he asked her to marry him. Two dates later, they sent out Evites for the wedding.

If finding love were that easy for everybody, Clampitt would be out of work.

Clampitt, 44, is a professional matchmaker. She’s president of the high-end New York City matchmaking service VIP Life, and co-founder of a school to train matchmakers, the Matchmaking Institute.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Yup, there's seriously a Matchmaker Institute here! New York has everything.

A Matchmaker Talks About What's Really Important [Livewire]