Vanity Fair's Big Blunder

I can't be sure why Vanity Fair editors did not put this gorgeous David Margolick piece, about the 50th anniversary of the integration of the Little Rock schools, in their print edition. Margolick is one of their marquis writers, one of the best long-form journalists working. (Full disclosure: I have met Margolick twice, and he went to my high school some years before I did.) Of course, I know what they might have been thinking -- no sooner was I picking an imaginary fight with Graydon Carter than I could hear the chorus of net-dweeb/futuro/techno-geeks: "No, man, it's way cooler to be on the web -- print is dying." But in this case that's dead wrong, and it's instructive to ask why.

First, a piece like Margolick's gains extraordinary resonance from the famous photograph of the black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, being heckled; and photographs reproduce better on VF's glossy paper than on any screen yet invented, which means it's a double shame that VF wasted the opportunity. But there's more to it. It takes nine screens to get to the end of Margolick's piece. That's nine clicks. And the piece is thousands of words long (I didn't count how many thousands), which makes it perfect for beach reading, bathtub reading, toilet reading -- but decidedly imperfect for wasting-10-minutes-at-work reading. In short, few people will get to the end on the web, but most people would get to the end in print.

Web editors have yet to reach consensus on the proper length for a web piece. Slate pieces circle around 1,000 words, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. Salon will go more screens, and so longer; and for their blogs, like Glenn Greenwald's, length is only limited by the furthest reaches of the blogger's obsessiveness (in Greenwald's case, that means very long). Interestingly, bloggers tend to go longer than more traditional journalists on the web, and the lengths are more palatable in the single-screen typepad of Blogspot format -- for whatever reason, it seems less onerous to keep scrolling down than to click to the next page. (The Atlantic bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, now tease some of their longer pieces and require a click-through to read the whole thing; to my mind, this is not an improvement.)

But there is a tension: in this multi-media age, we want more art in our pieces -- more photos, more graphs, etc. -- but that art reproduces better on paper, not on the web. Which means that if, say, photojournalism is involved, then USA Today, not a URL, is the better format. YouTube changes the equation, since we can't get YouTube on a piece of paper. But for photos, screen is decidedly an inferior medium, which is one reason that magazines and newspapers won't die out. Nor will books. Check out a daring mixed-media work like Aleph-Bet, with text by Joshua Cohen and illustrations by Michael Hafftka -- hard to see how we can do that on the web. The illos just won't be the same.

A final thought. Margolick may have submitted his piece too late to run in the issue coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Little Rock. VF works on a long lead time, many months, and sometimes there just isn't time. But only editors care about that. They don't want their editor friends at other magazines to think they're behind the times or out of step. Just as they won't run profiles of anybody who has been profiled in another magazine lately -- they don't want to seem unhip. The thing is, readers don't care. Outside the NYC publishing bubble, readers just want good pieces, no matter this month or next. To use the web as a receptacle for terrific stuff that doesn't meet editors' definition of timely is to betray the readers.

I'm grateful for the web; I'm glad to be posting on Huffington Post. But Margolick's piece deserved better. Like so many works of art, it deserved paper.

Comments

[Tria]

Instead of clicking 9 times to change screens, you can get the entire article, complete with photos, onto a single screen that's easy to scroll up and down. Here's how: click the PRINT option at the top or bottom of the article's first page. It will consolidate the article into single screen format for you to look at before deciding whether you want to print out a hard copy.

[tbone99]

Vanity Fair never fails to run its lists of most important stars,directors, icons,legislators ad infinitum,completely out of the league of the average American as are their ads.But when it comes to printing the story of one of the most important figures in American history they can't be bothered to put it in black and white..perhaps their target audience wouldn't feel comfortable seeing the true face of most of white America displayed on their coffee table.
It's especially sad when one realizes computer ownership in the black community doesn't come near levels in the U.S. as a whole, hence denying a whole community a tangible source of history and pride.Elizabeth Eckford deserves a purple heart and corresponding disability pay for PTS syndrome ,for her part in the real war that has continued in America unabated for hundreds of years.

[anastasiabeaverhousen]

Have been reading VF cover to cover for quite a few years now. It's a joy to read. The articles on the bush league administration and the war in Iraq have all been top notch.

I agree with clevelandchick - you probably could have found out the reason the piece wasn't published by simply picking up the phone.

[rlehman]

I'm a native of Southern Appalachia without a single article of designer clothing that didn't come from Goodwill and if our family makes 35,000 dollars this year I'll fall over in a dead faint. In other words, I'm everything but VF's targeted market. Yet, I read it cover to cover and web page to web page every month. VF is where I've learned more truth about our government and the world than any other one source. I'm not sure how I did without it all those years I put it in the "For New Yorker's Only" column of my periodicals categories. Maybe they made the mistake of not placing Margolick's piece in the print edition. Who cares? No magazine can be perfect, but at least I can count on VF to be truthful and to shine a glaring light on the good, the bad and the ugly of our time.

[vippy]

I, too enjoy reading Vanity Fair. I had to ask at the local PX to add this to their stock assortment and sometimes it is already gone before I can obtain a copy there. Those who read it have access to excellent journalism of
current affairs. Some I agree with some I don't. But I hate hearing that Bill Clinton exercised his power and had them remove an article on his wife - seems to me they are falling in place with the other mediocre magazines now. So sad.

[RuthAlice]

That was GQ that caved, not Vanity Fair.

[SpencerCat]

The term is "marquee" writer, not "marquis."

Copy editing aside, I agree this excellent article should have been included in the print edition of Vanity Fair.

[clevelandchick]

While that was a blunder, I have read some of the very best writing about Iraq and American politics in Vanity Fair for the last four years.

Starting with the April 2003 article called 'The Path To War' that cemented in my mind I wasn't going crazy that our government had been hijacked by unbalanced hubristic idealogues. And that they weren't to be believed about anything.

By and large Vanity Fair has been serving the public consistently hard-hitting journalism on topics the American people should be paying attention to a hell of alot better and more often than the New York Times and Washington Post.

So maybe Margolicks piece was late and couldn't make the print edition as you say at the end of your piece. But shouldn't you find out why they didn't run the piece in print before you post a criticism of them for not doing so? Just a thought.