“But for some reason my laptop’s 16” screen is not good at showing me beautiful photos of expensive stuff that I wish I could afford the way a slick paper magazine could do so well.”
That sums things up pretty damn well. I still subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and its Quarterly Journal Magazine does an excellent job of aspirational advertising. Heck, even the Saturday edition with its Off Duty section does a great job of telling me about things that I will never be able to afford, but still want.
So which is better, the Internet, which cannot adequately induce you into aspirational buying, or old school printouts, which were mastersat it, but at what costs?
While much USAid funding was to sustain non-economic projects, some of the money directed to journalists wasn't necessarily to sustain Potemkin outlets, but simply payments to get a particular angle included (or excluded) for a subject.
So JMcG's implication isn't necessarily that Vanity Fair wouldn't have existed absent USAid, just that their coverage might have been slightly adjusted in certain cases.
There was a magazine feature in the late 80s or early 90s in which an enterprising editor mailed twenty dollars to various well-known writers and asked for one hundred words on any subject. That’s only twenty cents a word but in exchange for ready cash. Martin Amis wrote that he accepted because green American money still seemed romantic to him.
I think women are more susceptible to Internet advertising than men are. We tend to prefer to spend money on a bunch of small luxuries, like expensive lipstick and fragrances, rather than one big-ticket item like an expensive car or high-end home theater system.
Internet advertising is very good at encouraging impulse buys of small luxuries. I've always bought my cosmetics at Walgreens; but it turns out I'm a sucker for the relatively expensive mascara and lip gloss from companies that advertise on Facebook. My daughters found it hilarious that I got hooked on $28 mascara and $38 tinted moisturizers from Instagram ads, after a lifetime of insisting that the cheap stuff from the drugstore was just as good.
However, I was never much affected by the print ads for luxury items in magazines; my frugal parents had deeply imprinted on me that things like high-end automobiles, exotic vacations and Viking ranges were not for the likes of us. To me, they were more like the homes on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," in that they were just so outside my frame of reference that they may have well as been items only available on Mars.
Interestingly, looking back I don't think I was ever much influenced by the high-end makeup ads in "Vogue" either. I remember one friend who always bought her makeup from the cosmetics counter in Saks; I thought she was an idiot for spending $16 on blusher when you could get a perfectly good one from the discount store for $2.99. I think maybe I was quite aware that the models in the print cosmetics ads were individuals of stunning natural beauty, and that there was no cosmetic in the world that would ever make me look like them.
It may be the Internet's ability to target micro-demographics (in my case, middle-aged ladies who like a natural-beauty look but need a bit of help pulling it off); vs. the print ads which had to appeal to a very wide audience. Clearly, the advertisers have realized that showing me middle-aged ladies modeling the product is far more effective than trying to convince me that a tube of mascara will make me look like a 22-year-old supermodel.
Women might be more susceptible to the influencer model. I pretty woman shows you her amazing lifestyle and tells you with great confidence how much she loves the new cloud sofa from restoration hardware and something inside you says 'you'll be amazing if you can only somehow acquire one of those bizarre overpriced sofas that you have no room for'.
I think most of us were not affected by the luxury items in magazines, at least not affected into aspiring to buy them. But they did add to the enjoyment of the magazine. I may not have aspired to buy a Lamborghini (at least not after I turned 20) but I could still enjoy the pictures and admire the machine. From the point of view of the idle super rich who could afford it, the fact that the rest of us looked helplessly at those photos and drooled, well, I think it was big part of the motivation for the purchase.
There’s a high-end cars and coffee that goes on near me on nice Saturday mornings. I met up with a friend there who bought a high-end Porsche with part of an inheritance. A more joyless crowd I’ve never seen.
Wanting expensive objects is much better than having them. Having them is probably swell, but it's the desire, the research, the anticipation, the walk up to signing the papers, that's the real thrill. Showing off the fancy car to the other people at that get together is probably the most enjoyment they continue to get out of it.
I once worked for a content mill called Textbroker. I made about 1.3 cents per word. And that was what they referred to as the "5-star" level. I remember reading agrammatical drek in 2018 Vanity Fair and concluding the journolass who puked it out wouldn't make 5-star on Textbroker.
Hunter S Thompson once proclaimed that he was the spirit of a teenage girl trapped in the body of an old drug ravaged man. He and his cohort of fellow alcohol-drenched magazine-hustler laureates had talent and produced works of note here and there. But on a dollar-per-word basis, I'm not sure it's possible to distinguish the merit of one group of teenage-girl writers from the other.
I don't think the "dollar-per-word basis" is a legitimate measure for writing-quality, in a world in which people have to seek you out and pay money on a subscription model. It's not comparable to a low-quality loaf price at $1, a medium-quality loaf $2.50, and a premium-quality loaf $5. It's on a different scale.
If Mr A has a dollar-per-word contract and Mr B has a two-cent-per-word contract, it doesn't mean Mr is 50x better. It means that Mr A is good enough, better enough, at attracting attention, relevance, and paying subscribers or magazine-purchasers. The pre-Internet writing model was more like a threshold effect on an exponential scale and not a linear scale.
“Having spent a sizable fraction of the first 45 or 50 years of my life standing in front of magazine racks reading for free until my feet couldn’t stand it anymore, allow me to nostalgically reflect that the good old days of magazines were pretty glorious.”
As someone in his 50s, I can totally agree with this viewpoint! Sadly, it has become even more extreme in that you cannot even practically view anything online anymore without a paywall. Slate, New York Magazine, the Atlantic, etc. all pretty much all have a paywall. It does seem that an era of broadly accessing great viewpoints, and journalism has rapidly and dramatically closed to an end. Sad.
You should still be able to find any of them through a good library.
Which reminds me: That's another problem with Substack. No one gathers things up and distributes them in a way that will have staying-power, in the way that someone could discover them in a library; in a way that old newspapers and magazines have been preserved through microfilm.
I thought the internet was forever. Which reminds me, I need to catch up with some of my old alt.whatever usenet groups. Where's the usenet site these days? Maybe somewhere in the bowels of Substack? Or in Disqus? Anybody?
> "It does seem that an era of broadly accessing great viewpoints, and journalism has rapidly and dramatically closed to an end. Sad."
I'm not sure all that old journalism was really so great. Much of it was just the conventional wisdom repackaged with a little more style.
Part of the end of that era of journalism was because of the Blogging Era: random people writing for free on the internet often turned out to be better informed—and sometimes better stylists—than the highly paid Vanity Fair-types. Why pay to read glossy but turgid piledriving telling you what you're supposed to believe when you could get plain facts in plain prose for free? To be sure, there were plenty of dreck blogs, but once you found a reliable blogger (e.g., Sailer, Steyn, Coulter), you could usually trace your way to other good sources via their blogrolls and references.
While the Prestige Press is trying to recreate the old subscription days by retreating back behind paywalls, I'm not sure there's anything much left to protect. Their best writers have jumped ship, while their institutional credibility has been (self-)shredded.
The Blogging Era too is closing. The payable bloggers are now Substacking, while the quicktakes, trolls, and replyguys went on Twitter.
I'm not sure any of that is bad. While I liked reading Steve for free, I recognize a guy's gotta make a living, and his work is certainly worth more than the zero he was getting paid by the Prestige oligopoly, not to mention said oligopoly's increasing aversion to reality. Twitter/X has its downsides, but the pressure of ruthless mind-market competition yields occasional gems. And I do not miss wading through the pages of glossy Approved Opinion for the occasional half-truth.
In a perfect world, Sailer would be on $200,000 a year salary with NATIONAL REVIEW and writing a bi-weekly column with the occasional long piece. Can a conservative imagine the day forty-five or fifty years ago opening up NR and finding James Burnham, Joe Sobran, Richard Brookhiser, Chilton Willimason, Bill Rusher and William F. Buckley?
I don't think Ann Coulter can be classified as a blogger. Her introduction to the scene was, suddenly, in 1998 as a right-wing polemicist against Bill Clinton. As a book author, soon thereafter as a syndicated columnist, and later as a talking-head commentator.
Eventually she turned toward White-ethnonationalism and so was relegated to a place similar to bloggers, but between 1998 and ca. 2010 she had accumulated enormous prestige, of a sort anyway, that they couldn't "cancel" her.
Ann Coulter's origin, anyway, was not with blogging in the sense you use the term (outsider or unknown person who gains a following through a purely Internet path).
Yes, that's true. But it's also true for Sailer and Steyn. All three had pre-existing journalism careers before they became "bloggers". But all three also embraced the label and endorsed other bloggers. This is part of how I knew who they were, and that they were, as I wrote, "reliable".
"Blogrolls" sort of exist in Substack, only instead of the "blogger" (Substack writer) making the "blogroll" (endorsements), Substack's algorithm makes the endorsements ... to other Substack content.
Giving over blogroll/endorsement control to the platform is one the intangible compromises that Substack writers make. It may be one of the more costly ones, for the commons if not for the writer.
I did love the small thrill of getting the mail and finding a new issue of a magazine in it. I used to subscribe to a number of magazines; but over the years I let all my subscriptions lapse as the quality of the publications steadily declined.
Outside Magazine used to have some great long-form articles - Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" started out as a feature article in Outside. Sadly, the magazine declined into the same sort of dull, politically-correct drivel that one encounters everywhere, and I stopped subscribing.
The only magazine I still get in print form is Cook's Illustrated.
Hmm, Cook's Illustrated went woke, too. I canceled my subscription after almost 25 years because it stopped offering technique-centered articles telling you how to cook standard delicious dishes (say, sole meuniere) with variations (say, adding a caper sauce) to pointless ethnic exotica (some bread or other baked in remote villages in the highlands of Colombia) that probably tastes great if you encounter it while traveling in its country of origin but is pointless and time-consuming to try to make at home. Also, the quality of the graphics became irritating: all that high-contrast photography that made the lighter parts of any dish blindingly white and the darker parts so murky that you couldn't see any of the ingredients.
Cook's Illustrated's sister publication, Cook's Country, got even worse, going from rich Americana (heritage recipes, layer cake of the month, etc.) to hipster (the word "Latinx," orange and green pages with unreadable white type). It all had to do, I think with the departure/ouster of Christopher Kimball, who founded both magazines. I do subscribe to Kimball's new magazine, Milk Street, which I'd first resisted because it seemed too Anthony Bourdain-ish (street stew served from a hubcap in Burkina Faso kind of stuff), but it's settled down (at least somewhat--I could do without the big black-and-white photos of toothless Third World ladies sitting at charcoal fires peddling noodles), but it does feature a lot of simple recipes for genuinely tasty food. Kimball is a genius.
One way around many paywalls I've discovered is to quickly copy the article you want to read before the paywall pops up and then paste it into Notes, Word, email, or some other similar program.
They should let you browse and read a bunch of articles, but then after ten minutes of mooching, popup a video of a guy yelling 'Hey, dis ain't no goddam liberry!'
His first article, in the Jan. 1993 issue, is titled "Hunting for Ivan Boesky" [1937-2024].
Ivan Boesky was a corrupt, some-might-say sociopathic Wall Street'er, whose "elite diasporic ethics" sent him to prison in the late 1980s. Ivan Boesky swore that he had a religious awakening to religious Judaism, having previously failed to attach himself to his family religion, and that therefore his mega-swindling days were done.
So reformed was he, Ivan Boesky, that he generously threw in an offer to turn state's witness against other mega-fraud peddlers! The changes to his wicked ways allowed Ivan Boesky a life in reasonably comfortable exile between his spring 1990 release and his May 2024 death. Bryan Burrough, anyway, in 1992 tracked down Ivan Boesky, then two years out of prison and the article looks to still be remembered by many all these years later, a true tribute to a great piece of writing. People mentioned it highly when Boesky died in May 2024.
I don't know if long-form, written-word journalists DO this kind of leg-work much anymore. It seems rarer; a lot rarer. It was certainly still going on to a considerable degree as the 2000s-decade opened. It was certainly gone by the time the 2010s-decade closed. Ten or twenty years under the bridge, and the temptation to just quote people's tweets, and similar work, is a strong rip-current indeed.
> "...he had a religious awakening to religious Judaism, having previously failed to attach himself to his family religion, and that therefore his mega-swindling days were done."
The urge to leave my closet and ask people questions face to face?
I did that for a few years back at the beginning of the 21st Century, but it wasn't for me.
Burroughs worked hard for his $83,000 per month. He was probably overseas several months per year reporting on stories like that Italian ocean liner that overturned or the hostile takeover attempt on Gucci. He mentions in passing a divorce, which may have had something to do with travel.
Graydon Carter would call up Burroughs with extremely rough but terrific ideas for articles like: They found Mallory's frozen body at the foot of Mt. Everest. Did Mallory and Irvine make it to the top of Everest 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing? Burroughs would then go off to Tibet for a month or two and return with 10,000 words of polished prose on the biggest mystery in mountain climbing for the last three generations.
Granted, when he wasn't sleeping in a yurt in Tibet, he was staying in the Carlyle and similar five star hotels on Conde Naste's dime.
Keep in mind that he doesn't make any effort to play up his effort:
"It was glorious. Not because I felt the work was important but because the work was so enormously exciting. I was crafting narratives that I was genuinely curious to explore—and I had unlimited resources to do so. After years in the dark, I had figured out what Graydon wanted—not just the kind of story but the kind of writer he wanted me to be. At Condé Nast, writers were described as either showhorses or workhorses. Showhorses were known as much for their social visibility as for their stories. Workhorses kept their heads down and cranked out copy. I became a consummate workhorse, avoiding office politics and any hint of drama. At the few functions I attended, I watched what I drank.
"Unlike some, I never phoned or pestered Graydon; I understood he didn’t care what reporting or writing challenges I faced. Once I accepted an assignment, I simply disappeared for a month or two and returned with the story he wanted—on time, every time. If for some reason I couldn’t deliver, I let him know with plenty of notice. My mantras became “low maintenance” and “no surprises.” Simple."
Of course, the point is, and Burroughs wouldn't deny it, that lots of reporters leave their house every day and spend it talking to people face to face about deaths much less glamorous than George "Because It's There" Mallory's for less than $83,000 per year, much less per month.
This is what I had pictured writing or taking pictures for National Geographic as being like. I wonder what those guys were getting paid. Jack Baruth has often made the point that the guys writing for car magazines back in the 70s and 80s were making bank, but that those days are long in the past.
Was it a flat $83,000 per month or was it that sum plus costs? "[W]hen he wasn't sleeping in a yurt in Tibet, he was staying in the Carlyle and similar five star hotels on Conde Naste's dime" sounds like it was "plus costs," which would be substantial if what is said of his activities is accurate.
Just an aside: Conde Nast's presumably sumptuous headquarters in Greenwich used to be an Electrolux vacuum cleaner factory. I toured it on a field trip in 3rd grade. There's probably an analogy in there about our transition from a manufacturing based society to one run by the laptop class...
How much did you make with UPI Steve? We used to pay $1 a word to freelancers at a boring trade magazine where I worked in the mid 90s. I made $1 a word writing for Yahoo Internet Life, a paper magazine about the Internet in the late 90s. I’d make 25 cents per word just writing for small local or regional publications as a freelancer in the late 90s.
One of my memories in the mid 80s when I worked my first job in high school at a mall bookstore is straightening the magazine rack. Living in a small town, I always wondered who actually liked Interview magazine? Only years later did I learn that was Andy Warhol’s magazine.
Carter was said to have some kind of connection with Catholicism: Catholic school? Youthful flirtation with Jesuitry or the priesthood? I’ve never been able to pin it down, and public info on his early life is oddly scarce.
At any rate, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before he ascended to the Olympian heights of Vanity Fair, he was the editor at Spy, which was sort of a downmarket, snarkier version of Vanity, but which occasionally did some investigative reporting too. In this time, which was before the Catholic priest [mainly homosexual] pedo scandals were widely known, Carter was holding a story pitch meeting where his writers tossed article ideas at him to see what would stick.
One writer said something like, “Hey how about an article on those Catholic priests sexually abusing children?” Carter looked appalled, and, interpreting Carter’s reaction as ignorance, the writer went on, “Yeah, there’s loads of ’em and no one is reporting on it!” This caused Carter’s face to turn bright red and rather than jump on this journalism opportunity (“million dollar bill lying on the pavement”), Carter hastily brought the meeting to a close.
Embarrassment on behalf of the Church? Or a more, uh, personal cause? I can’t say, and sadly have fallen out of touch with the writer who relayed this anecdote to me.
Wikipedia notes that Carter also quashed early reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of girls.
So, draw your own conclusions, I guess.
The things you have to do to get to a million bucks a year, eh?
I didn't have a TV, so I didn't see it contemporaneously, but I did catch some internet clips later. Yeah, apparently there was a period in the 1990s where TV was actually good.
I was also surprised to find that Spy TV had glommed onto Jerry Seinfeld before everyone knew who he was.
"Spy" was a lot of fun. It made up the phrase "short-fingered vulgarian." It was modeled on "Private Eye" in England, which made up the libel-proof phrase "tired and emotional."
“Tired and emotional” was apparently taken from the press secretary for the Labour minister George Brown, who attracts stories about drunkenness like Oscar Wilde attracts witty quotations. Other Eye euphemisms include “Ugandan discussions” for extramarital affairs.
In the distant past The Saturday Evening Post would contact Ernest Hemingway in Key West and just offer him $2000(1938 money) for a quick short story and Hemingway could drink and fish for another month or two. Those were the days.
Think about the rise of Playboy. Hugh Hefner didn't date his first magazine because he wasn't sure he'd have the money to put out another. But Playboy satisfied a market in affluent America and rose to an empire that had something like 7 million subscribers by the 1970s. Playboy published thousands of writers and the monthly interview was prized. But the internet came along, tasteful photos of nude young women became passe, writers could post on the Internet and the Playboy Empire came tumbling down quite rapidly like the modern day New England Patriots. Today, I believe Playboy has a Internet presence but the print was mothballed a couple of years ago.
Churchill earned a substantial part of his interwar income from newspaper writing. He had a deal with one paper to summarize great novels into 1000 word columns. I think he was paid 1,000.00 each for those.
Churchill was probably the best-paid journalist in the world in the 1930s. Naturally, he blew his money as almost as soon as it came in. He had an opulent lifestyle and regularly lost money at French casinos. Financially, Churchill only became solvent after the Conservatives lost to Labour in 1945. Churchill was given a very handsome advance on his history of World War Two. Since he didn't have a country to run, he had plenty of time.
You'd think he would have tried to lower Labour's punitive 96% tax rates on high incomes when he regained power in 1951. It was Reagan's experience with ours that spurred him into national politics. Business owners and the already-rich had ways to shelter their income that actors and writers didn't.
I’m not sure WSC left much generational wealth to his descendants. His son Randolph always seemed hard-up for cash until he hit it big with non-fiction books for the mass market like an illustrated book on England’s stately homes (his frenemy Evelyn Waugh thought the subject had already been too well-covered but he wasn’t reckoning on the postwar lower-middle class being eager for facts about the aristocracy). The Soames cadet branch were professional politicians their whole lives with Winston’s grandson Nicholas Soames only leaving the House of Commons in 2019. Another granddaughter, Arabella Churchill became a flower child and helped found the Glastonbury Festival.
Just like his parents, Churchill ran through money and did not leave a whole lot to his children. Chartwell itself is part of the National Trust and not owned by his descendents.
In the golden age of newspapers the Hearst group also paid then-PM of Italy Mussolini for columns on banal topics like “why Italians drink wine” or “why women will never be great philosophers”.
If you gave me a large enough stack of old Playboys and Sports Illustrateds, I would never need to leave the house. Throw in MAD for good measure...
> I believe Playboy has a Internet presence but the print was mothballed a couple of years ago
It went quarterly in 2019 and fully online in 2020, but as you allude to its time had come and gone long before that. The old joke about reading Playboy for the articles falls flat because once upon a time it was well written
Jimmy Carter's interview almost cost him his election in 1976. A lot of Born Again Christians were outraged that he did an interview with Playboy and admitted that he lusted after women other than his wife.
One thing that was great (or “great”, I’m not sure) about aspirational advertising, and content, pre-web, particularly in glossy mags, was that they were a peek at a glorious world of excitement and glamour that we could (maybe) buy our way into. Now our screens show us even more of that world, but we don’t need to go out into it, or buy it, because that fantastic reality is right there on our desk, phone, or game console, more real than the analog IRL world. There’s still a need to buy and sell, to extract money from consumers, but that game is vastly different now
The internet seems to be more like a dark mirror that’s best at reflecting your envious curiosity about your peers, not superiors. E.g., Hollywood stars don’t do social media posts, and podcasts strive to create a mood of amateurishness.
Vanity Fair was really entertaining in the late 90s and the 2000s, and although it wasn't necessarily a cover to cover read for me it always had something worthwhile inside. The compensation figures above are staggering - I had always thought of magazine writers as just moderately well compensated and had to try to get books published to make real money. Carter must have been incredibly successful at driving advertising revenue because to my recollection the subscription fees were always quite low.
The Atlantic was similarly a reliably enjoyable read until its offices were moved to DC and James Bennett was made editor. It got substantially more partisan and really went off the rails sometime between the end of his reign and the beginning of Goldberg's when essentially the entire staff was comprised of progressive Millennials focused on race and climate change. Obviously it hasn't been helped since the Widow Jobs assumed ownership either.
Back at the end of the last century, I enjoyed the Atlantic. It was roughly ideologically balanced, and it always had a short story every month. Now, from the blurbs that make it into my Facebook timeline, it just seems like another mag selling rage porn to people who live in a blue bubble.
"By the way, how long until artificial intelligence platforms start selling product placement ads integrated into the AI’s answer to your question?"
Ah yes, the seemingly eternal enshittification cycle. We are at the beginning of the golden age of chatGPT. Remember back when Amazon and Google were amazing and trustworthy? If you know what you are doing, chatGPT is currently at that level and manages a few more tasks on top of it. Those servers are costly so it's only a matter of time before they realize they have to do what you said. Then after five (or ten for the dim) years of lost trust, maybe something new to fix the enshittification of GPTs.
A few years ago I told people that if you want decent product reviews, go to YouTube. The ease of puking out AI text content meant you would always find reviews praising whatever garbage you were thinking of buy. But making a video was such a time commitment you could at least trust that the author wasn't making simultaneous videos expressing the opposite opinion. With AI and content mills in India, I don't know if that is still true.
There is always archive today. Many legacy media have a paywall, but still want their articles indexed by e.g. Google. So they make it indexable but only by robots.
I use it for the irritating ones that demand you allow ads. I block the ads because they're annoying, and occasionally a vector for malware.
I used to write for military history magazines. $400 an article in some. I could run a 1/4 page ad for one of my novels in the same magazine for about $250.
“But for some reason my laptop’s 16” screen is not good at showing me beautiful photos of expensive stuff that I wish I could afford the way a slick paper magazine could do so well.”
That sums things up pretty damn well. I still subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and its Quarterly Journal Magazine does an excellent job of aspirational advertising. Heck, even the Saturday edition with its Off Duty section does a great job of telling me about things that I will never be able to afford, but still want.
So which is better, the Internet, which cannot adequately induce you into aspirational buying, or old school printouts, which were mastersat it, but at what costs?
I wonder if Condé Nast was getting USAid money.
Of course.
Why else would anybody pay to read about who was Deep Throat and the like?
While much USAid funding was to sustain non-economic projects, some of the money directed to journalists wasn't necessarily to sustain Potemkin outlets, but simply payments to get a particular angle included (or excluded) for a subject.
So JMcG's implication isn't necessarily that Vanity Fair wouldn't have existed absent USAid, just that their coverage might have been slightly adjusted in certain cases.
This needs a sarc. tag. Or not 🤪; I’ll leave that to you and your editors
Perhaps I should have attached a smiley face to that comment.
There was a magazine feature in the late 80s or early 90s in which an enterprising editor mailed twenty dollars to various well-known writers and asked for one hundred words on any subject. That’s only twenty cents a word but in exchange for ready cash. Martin Amis wrote that he accepted because green American money still seemed romantic to him.
The fact that Steve is out here in 2025 pretending the Deep State organs aren't paid to write things the Deep State likes is pretty sad.
Encounter Magazine was subsidized by the CIA during the Cold War to make being anti-Communist seem high-brow. Did Encounter pay $17 per word?
Maybe the Deep State was subsidizing Ralph Lauren to buy full page ads in "Vanity Fair?"
After all, Ralph Lauren's son married CIA director George H.W. Bush's granddaughter Lauren Bush. She changed her named to Lauren Lauren.
See, all the pieces of the puzzle are fitting together!
I never got a penny--after I left the IC in '92.
Great counter. "If its not 100% its 0%! Haha, checkmate!"
How's your Biden-has-no-handlers argument going?
I think women are more susceptible to Internet advertising than men are. We tend to prefer to spend money on a bunch of small luxuries, like expensive lipstick and fragrances, rather than one big-ticket item like an expensive car or high-end home theater system.
Internet advertising is very good at encouraging impulse buys of small luxuries. I've always bought my cosmetics at Walgreens; but it turns out I'm a sucker for the relatively expensive mascara and lip gloss from companies that advertise on Facebook. My daughters found it hilarious that I got hooked on $28 mascara and $38 tinted moisturizers from Instagram ads, after a lifetime of insisting that the cheap stuff from the drugstore was just as good.
However, I was never much affected by the print ads for luxury items in magazines; my frugal parents had deeply imprinted on me that things like high-end automobiles, exotic vacations and Viking ranges were not for the likes of us. To me, they were more like the homes on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," in that they were just so outside my frame of reference that they may have well as been items only available on Mars.
Interestingly, looking back I don't think I was ever much influenced by the high-end makeup ads in "Vogue" either. I remember one friend who always bought her makeup from the cosmetics counter in Saks; I thought she was an idiot for spending $16 on blusher when you could get a perfectly good one from the discount store for $2.99. I think maybe I was quite aware that the models in the print cosmetics ads were individuals of stunning natural beauty, and that there was no cosmetic in the world that would ever make me look like them.
It may be the Internet's ability to target micro-demographics (in my case, middle-aged ladies who like a natural-beauty look but need a bit of help pulling it off); vs. the print ads which had to appeal to a very wide audience. Clearly, the advertisers have realized that showing me middle-aged ladies modeling the product is far more effective than trying to convince me that a tube of mascara will make me look like a 22-year-old supermodel.
It's still more difficult to photoshop video convincingly. It was really obvious when Baba WaWa greased the camera lens to hide her wrinkles.
Women might be more susceptible to the influencer model. I pretty woman shows you her amazing lifestyle and tells you with great confidence how much she loves the new cloud sofa from restoration hardware and something inside you says 'you'll be amazing if you can only somehow acquire one of those bizarre overpriced sofas that you have no room for'.
I think most of us were not affected by the luxury items in magazines, at least not affected into aspiring to buy them. But they did add to the enjoyment of the magazine. I may not have aspired to buy a Lamborghini (at least not after I turned 20) but I could still enjoy the pictures and admire the machine. From the point of view of the idle super rich who could afford it, the fact that the rest of us looked helplessly at those photos and drooled, well, I think it was big part of the motivation for the purchase.
There’s a high-end cars and coffee that goes on near me on nice Saturday mornings. I met up with a friend there who bought a high-end Porsche with part of an inheritance. A more joyless crowd I’ve never seen.
Wanting expensive objects is much better than having them. Having them is probably swell, but it's the desire, the research, the anticipation, the walk up to signing the papers, that's the real thrill. Showing off the fancy car to the other people at that get together is probably the most enjoyment they continue to get out of it.
Thank god we're not rich, eh? ;)
I don’t know about you pal, but my cigars are lit with 100.00 silver certificates.
another cursed bimetallist! You'll be the ruination of this country!
I once worked for a content mill called Textbroker. I made about 1.3 cents per word. And that was what they referred to as the "5-star" level. I remember reading agrammatical drek in 2018 Vanity Fair and concluding the journolass who puked it out wouldn't make 5-star on Textbroker.
Hunter S Thompson once proclaimed that he was the spirit of a teenage girl trapped in the body of an old drug ravaged man. He and his cohort of fellow alcohol-drenched magazine-hustler laureates had talent and produced works of note here and there. But on a dollar-per-word basis, I'm not sure it's possible to distinguish the merit of one group of teenage-girl writers from the other.
I don't think the "dollar-per-word basis" is a legitimate measure for writing-quality, in a world in which people have to seek you out and pay money on a subscription model. It's not comparable to a low-quality loaf price at $1, a medium-quality loaf $2.50, and a premium-quality loaf $5. It's on a different scale.
If Mr A has a dollar-per-word contract and Mr B has a two-cent-per-word contract, it doesn't mean Mr is 50x better. It means that Mr A is good enough, better enough, at attracting attention, relevance, and paying subscribers or magazine-purchasers. The pre-Internet writing model was more like a threshold effect on an exponential scale and not a linear scale.
“Having spent a sizable fraction of the first 45 or 50 years of my life standing in front of magazine racks reading for free until my feet couldn’t stand it anymore, allow me to nostalgically reflect that the good old days of magazines were pretty glorious.”
As someone in his 50s, I can totally agree with this viewpoint! Sadly, it has become even more extreme in that you cannot even practically view anything online anymore without a paywall. Slate, New York Magazine, the Atlantic, etc. all pretty much all have a paywall. It does seem that an era of broadly accessing great viewpoints, and journalism has rapidly and dramatically closed to an end. Sad.
You should still be able to find any of them through a good library.
Which reminds me: That's another problem with Substack. No one gathers things up and distributes them in a way that will have staying-power, in the way that someone could discover them in a library; in a way that old newspapers and magazines have been preserved through microfilm.
I thought the internet was forever. Which reminds me, I need to catch up with some of my old alt.whatever usenet groups. Where's the usenet site these days? Maybe somewhere in the bowels of Substack? Or in Disqus? Anybody?
Pretty sure Usenet still exists.
> "It does seem that an era of broadly accessing great viewpoints, and journalism has rapidly and dramatically closed to an end. Sad."
I'm not sure all that old journalism was really so great. Much of it was just the conventional wisdom repackaged with a little more style.
Part of the end of that era of journalism was because of the Blogging Era: random people writing for free on the internet often turned out to be better informed—and sometimes better stylists—than the highly paid Vanity Fair-types. Why pay to read glossy but turgid piledriving telling you what you're supposed to believe when you could get plain facts in plain prose for free? To be sure, there were plenty of dreck blogs, but once you found a reliable blogger (e.g., Sailer, Steyn, Coulter), you could usually trace your way to other good sources via their blogrolls and references.
While the Prestige Press is trying to recreate the old subscription days by retreating back behind paywalls, I'm not sure there's anything much left to protect. Their best writers have jumped ship, while their institutional credibility has been (self-)shredded.
The Blogging Era too is closing. The payable bloggers are now Substacking, while the quicktakes, trolls, and replyguys went on Twitter.
I'm not sure any of that is bad. While I liked reading Steve for free, I recognize a guy's gotta make a living, and his work is certainly worth more than the zero he was getting paid by the Prestige oligopoly, not to mention said oligopoly's increasing aversion to reality. Twitter/X has its downsides, but the pressure of ruthless mind-market competition yields occasional gems. And I do not miss wading through the pages of glossy Approved Opinion for the occasional half-truth.
In a perfect world, Sailer would be on $200,000 a year salary with NATIONAL REVIEW and writing a bi-weekly column with the occasional long piece. Can a conservative imagine the day forty-five or fifty years ago opening up NR and finding James Burnham, Joe Sobran, Richard Brookhiser, Chilton Willimason, Bill Rusher and William F. Buckley?
The old boy fucked up big time turning over the wheel to the whelp.
Truer words were never spoken.
I don't think Ann Coulter can be classified as a blogger. Her introduction to the scene was, suddenly, in 1998 as a right-wing polemicist against Bill Clinton. As a book author, soon thereafter as a syndicated columnist, and later as a talking-head commentator.
Eventually she turned toward White-ethnonationalism and so was relegated to a place similar to bloggers, but between 1998 and ca. 2010 she had accumulated enormous prestige, of a sort anyway, that they couldn't "cancel" her.
Ann Coulter's origin, anyway, was not with blogging in the sense you use the term (outsider or unknown person who gains a following through a purely Internet path).
Yes, that's true. But it's also true for Sailer and Steyn. All three had pre-existing journalism careers before they became "bloggers". But all three also embraced the label and endorsed other bloggers. This is part of how I knew who they were, and that they were, as I wrote, "reliable".
Remember blogrolls? Lists of other recommended bloggers? That feature is lacking in Substack.
"Blogrolls" sort of exist in Substack, only instead of the "blogger" (Substack writer) making the "blogroll" (endorsements), Substack's algorithm makes the endorsements ... to other Substack content.
Giving over blogroll/endorsement control to the platform is one the intangible compromises that Substack writers make. It may be one of the more costly ones, for the commons if not for the writer.
True, Substack keeps trying to get me to subscribe to other stuff.
I did love the small thrill of getting the mail and finding a new issue of a magazine in it. I used to subscribe to a number of magazines; but over the years I let all my subscriptions lapse as the quality of the publications steadily declined.
Outside Magazine used to have some great long-form articles - Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" started out as a feature article in Outside. Sadly, the magazine declined into the same sort of dull, politically-correct drivel that one encounters everywhere, and I stopped subscribing.
The only magazine I still get in print form is Cook's Illustrated.
Hmm, Cook's Illustrated went woke, too. I canceled my subscription after almost 25 years because it stopped offering technique-centered articles telling you how to cook standard delicious dishes (say, sole meuniere) with variations (say, adding a caper sauce) to pointless ethnic exotica (some bread or other baked in remote villages in the highlands of Colombia) that probably tastes great if you encounter it while traveling in its country of origin but is pointless and time-consuming to try to make at home. Also, the quality of the graphics became irritating: all that high-contrast photography that made the lighter parts of any dish blindingly white and the darker parts so murky that you couldn't see any of the ingredients.
Cook's Illustrated's sister publication, Cook's Country, got even worse, going from rich Americana (heritage recipes, layer cake of the month, etc.) to hipster (the word "Latinx," orange and green pages with unreadable white type). It all had to do, I think with the departure/ouster of Christopher Kimball, who founded both magazines. I do subscribe to Kimball's new magazine, Milk Street, which I'd first resisted because it seemed too Anthony Bourdain-ish (street stew served from a hubcap in Burkina Faso kind of stuff), but it's settled down (at least somewhat--I could do without the big black-and-white photos of toothless Third World ladies sitting at charcoal fires peddling noodles), but it does feature a lot of simple recipes for genuinely tasty food. Kimball is a genius.
One way around many paywalls I've discovered is to quickly copy the article you want to read before the paywall pops up and then paste it into Notes, Word, email, or some other similar program.
Usually the paywall pops up very quickly. That’s been my experience anyway.
For some sites, a visit to Archive.is will work. Paste the URL in the bottom bar, "I want to search the archive for saved snapshots."
They should let you browse and read a bunch of articles, but then after ten minutes of mooching, popup a video of a guy yelling 'Hey, dis ain't no goddam liberry!'
I don't know if all of Bryan Burrough's articles are listed here or if some are missing:
https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/bryan-burrough
His first article, in the Jan. 1993 issue, is titled "Hunting for Ivan Boesky" [1937-2024].
Ivan Boesky was a corrupt, some-might-say sociopathic Wall Street'er, whose "elite diasporic ethics" sent him to prison in the late 1980s. Ivan Boesky swore that he had a religious awakening to religious Judaism, having previously failed to attach himself to his family religion, and that therefore his mega-swindling days were done.
So reformed was he, Ivan Boesky, that he generously threw in an offer to turn state's witness against other mega-fraud peddlers! The changes to his wicked ways allowed Ivan Boesky a life in reasonably comfortable exile between his spring 1990 release and his May 2024 death. Bryan Burrough, anyway, in 1992 tracked down Ivan Boesky, then two years out of prison and the article looks to still be remembered by many all these years later, a true tribute to a great piece of writing. People mentioned it highly when Boesky died in May 2024.
I don't know if long-form, written-word journalists DO this kind of leg-work much anymore. It seems rarer; a lot rarer. It was certainly still going on to a considerable degree as the 2000s-decade opened. It was certainly gone by the time the 2010s-decade closed. Ten or twenty years under the bridge, and the temptation to just quote people's tweets, and similar work, is a strong rip-current indeed.
> "...he had a religious awakening to religious Judaism, having previously failed to attach himself to his family religion, and that therefore his mega-swindling days were done."
Uh, I mean . . .
AI will certainly be all about product placement, if it isn't already.
The future's not all it's cracked up to be.
I'll take $2 a word.
Me, too.
"So a million dollars per year."
Presumably, they paid him extra for employing him only part-time. Still, incredibly lucrative. What did he have that you haven't got?
The urge to leave my closet and ask people questions face to face?
I did that for a few years back at the beginning of the 21st Century, but it wasn't for me.
Burroughs worked hard for his $83,000 per month. He was probably overseas several months per year reporting on stories like that Italian ocean liner that overturned or the hostile takeover attempt on Gucci. He mentions in passing a divorce, which may have had something to do with travel.
Graydon Carter would call up Burroughs with extremely rough but terrific ideas for articles like: They found Mallory's frozen body at the foot of Mt. Everest. Did Mallory and Irvine make it to the top of Everest 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing? Burroughs would then go off to Tibet for a month or two and return with 10,000 words of polished prose on the biggest mystery in mountain climbing for the last three generations.
Granted, when he wasn't sleeping in a yurt in Tibet, he was staying in the Carlyle and similar five star hotels on Conde Naste's dime.
Keep in mind that he doesn't make any effort to play up his effort:
"It was glorious. Not because I felt the work was important but because the work was so enormously exciting. I was crafting narratives that I was genuinely curious to explore—and I had unlimited resources to do so. After years in the dark, I had figured out what Graydon wanted—not just the kind of story but the kind of writer he wanted me to be. At Condé Nast, writers were described as either showhorses or workhorses. Showhorses were known as much for their social visibility as for their stories. Workhorses kept their heads down and cranked out copy. I became a consummate workhorse, avoiding office politics and any hint of drama. At the few functions I attended, I watched what I drank.
"Unlike some, I never phoned or pestered Graydon; I understood he didn’t care what reporting or writing challenges I faced. Once I accepted an assignment, I simply disappeared for a month or two and returned with the story he wanted—on time, every time. If for some reason I couldn’t deliver, I let him know with plenty of notice. My mantras became “low maintenance” and “no surprises.” Simple."
Of course, the point is, and Burroughs wouldn't deny it, that lots of reporters leave their house every day and spend it talking to people face to face about deaths much less glamorous than George "Because It's There" Mallory's for less than $83,000 per year, much less per month.
This is what I had pictured writing or taking pictures for National Geographic as being like. I wonder what those guys were getting paid. Jack Baruth has often made the point that the guys writing for car magazines back in the 70s and 80s were making bank, but that those days are long in the past.
Was it a flat $83,000 per month or was it that sum plus costs? "[W]hen he wasn't sleeping in a yurt in Tibet, he was staying in the Carlyle and similar five star hotels on Conde Naste's dime" sounds like it was "plus costs," which would be substantial if what is said of his activities is accurate.
Conde Naste's expense account was legendary.
Just an aside: Conde Nast's presumably sumptuous headquarters in Greenwich used to be an Electrolux vacuum cleaner factory. I toured it on a field trip in 3rd grade. There's probably an analogy in there about our transition from a manufacturing based society to one run by the laptop class...
How much did you make with UPI Steve? We used to pay $1 a word to freelancers at a boring trade magazine where I worked in the mid 90s. I made $1 a word writing for Yahoo Internet Life, a paper magazine about the Internet in the late 90s. I’d make 25 cents per word just writing for small local or regional publications as a freelancer in the late 90s.
One of my memories in the mid 80s when I worked my first job in high school at a mall bookstore is straightening the magazine rack. Living in a small town, I always wondered who actually liked Interview magazine? Only years later did I learn that was Andy Warhol’s magazine.
If I recall correctly, I made about as much per year as Burroughs made per month.
Graydon Carter anecdote:
Carter was said to have some kind of connection with Catholicism: Catholic school? Youthful flirtation with Jesuitry or the priesthood? I’ve never been able to pin it down, and public info on his early life is oddly scarce.
At any rate, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before he ascended to the Olympian heights of Vanity Fair, he was the editor at Spy, which was sort of a downmarket, snarkier version of Vanity, but which occasionally did some investigative reporting too. In this time, which was before the Catholic priest [mainly homosexual] pedo scandals were widely known, Carter was holding a story pitch meeting where his writers tossed article ideas at him to see what would stick.
One writer said something like, “Hey how about an article on those Catholic priests sexually abusing children?” Carter looked appalled, and, interpreting Carter’s reaction as ignorance, the writer went on, “Yeah, there’s loads of ’em and no one is reporting on it!” This caused Carter’s face to turn bright red and rather than jump on this journalism opportunity (“million dollar bill lying on the pavement”), Carter hastily brought the meeting to a close.
Embarrassment on behalf of the Church? Or a more, uh, personal cause? I can’t say, and sadly have fallen out of touch with the writer who relayed this anecdote to me.
Wikipedia notes that Carter also quashed early reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of girls.
So, draw your own conclusions, I guess.
The things you have to do to get to a million bucks a year, eh?
I enjoyed Spy’s very brief tv run. So brief I never met anyone else who watched it.
I didn't have a TV, so I didn't see it contemporaneously, but I did catch some internet clips later. Yeah, apparently there was a period in the 1990s where TV was actually good.
I was also surprised to find that Spy TV had glommed onto Jerry Seinfeld before everyone knew who he was.
"Spy" was a lot of fun. It made up the phrase "short-fingered vulgarian." It was modeled on "Private Eye" in England, which made up the libel-proof phrase "tired and emotional."
“Tired and emotional” was apparently taken from the press secretary for the Labour minister George Brown, who attracts stories about drunkenness like Oscar Wilde attracts witty quotations. Other Eye euphemisms include “Ugandan discussions” for extramarital affairs.
Bryan Burrough wrote a really good book called "Days of Rage" about left wing terrorism in the '70s.
In the distant past The Saturday Evening Post would contact Ernest Hemingway in Key West and just offer him $2000(1938 money) for a quick short story and Hemingway could drink and fish for another month or two. Those were the days.
Think about the rise of Playboy. Hugh Hefner didn't date his first magazine because he wasn't sure he'd have the money to put out another. But Playboy satisfied a market in affluent America and rose to an empire that had something like 7 million subscribers by the 1970s. Playboy published thousands of writers and the monthly interview was prized. But the internet came along, tasteful photos of nude young women became passe, writers could post on the Internet and the Playboy Empire came tumbling down quite rapidly like the modern day New England Patriots. Today, I believe Playboy has a Internet presence but the print was mothballed a couple of years ago.
Churchill earned a substantial part of his interwar income from newspaper writing. He had a deal with one paper to summarize great novels into 1000 word columns. I think he was paid 1,000.00 each for those.
Churchill was probably the best-paid journalist in the world in the 1930s. Naturally, he blew his money as almost as soon as it came in. He had an opulent lifestyle and regularly lost money at French casinos. Financially, Churchill only became solvent after the Conservatives lost to Labour in 1945. Churchill was given a very handsome advance on his history of World War Two. Since he didn't have a country to run, he had plenty of time.
You'd think he would have tried to lower Labour's punitive 96% tax rates on high incomes when he regained power in 1951. It was Reagan's experience with ours that spurred him into national politics. Business owners and the already-rich had ways to shelter their income that actors and writers didn't.
I bet Churchill kept much of his money in America. Our rates were high then, too, but there was better ways at hiding income in America.
I’m not sure WSC left much generational wealth to his descendants. His son Randolph always seemed hard-up for cash until he hit it big with non-fiction books for the mass market like an illustrated book on England’s stately homes (his frenemy Evelyn Waugh thought the subject had already been too well-covered but he wasn’t reckoning on the postwar lower-middle class being eager for facts about the aristocracy). The Soames cadet branch were professional politicians their whole lives with Winston’s grandson Nicholas Soames only leaving the House of Commons in 2019. Another granddaughter, Arabella Churchill became a flower child and helped found the Glastonbury Festival.
Just like his parents, Churchill ran through money and did not leave a whole lot to his children. Chartwell itself is part of the National Trust and not owned by his descendents.
"The Soames cadet branch"
Distaff, from Winston's daughter, not cadet, as he had only one son.
Franklin Roosevelt's high taxes created a lot of Hollywood Republicans.
In the golden age of newspapers the Hearst group also paid then-PM of Italy Mussolini for columns on banal topics like “why Italians drink wine” or “why women will never be great philosophers”.
He had a weekly books column for one British newspaper in which he gave a positive notice to Waugh’s debut novel “Decline and Fall”.
Hemingway’s low-effort parody of “Ferdinand”, the bull who wouldn’t fight:
http://www.xoxosoma.com/the-faithful-bull.html
F. Scott Fitzgerald's contract with the Saturday Evening Post was $36,000 per year for nine short stories annually.
36 grand was a lot of money back then.
If you gave me a large enough stack of old Playboys and Sports Illustrateds, I would never need to leave the house. Throw in MAD for good measure...
> I believe Playboy has a Internet presence but the print was mothballed a couple of years ago
It went quarterly in 2019 and fully online in 2020, but as you allude to its time had come and gone long before that. The old joke about reading Playboy for the articles falls flat because once upon a time it was well written
Jimmy Carter's interview almost cost him his election in 1976. A lot of Born Again Christians were outraged that he did an interview with Playboy and admitted that he lusted after women other than his wife.
One thing that was great (or “great”, I’m not sure) about aspirational advertising, and content, pre-web, particularly in glossy mags, was that they were a peek at a glorious world of excitement and glamour that we could (maybe) buy our way into. Now our screens show us even more of that world, but we don’t need to go out into it, or buy it, because that fantastic reality is right there on our desk, phone, or game console, more real than the analog IRL world. There’s still a need to buy and sell, to extract money from consumers, but that game is vastly different now
The internet seems to be more like a dark mirror that’s best at reflecting your envious curiosity about your peers, not superiors. E.g., Hollywood stars don’t do social media posts, and podcasts strive to create a mood of amateurishness.
Vanity Fair was really entertaining in the late 90s and the 2000s, and although it wasn't necessarily a cover to cover read for me it always had something worthwhile inside. The compensation figures above are staggering - I had always thought of magazine writers as just moderately well compensated and had to try to get books published to make real money. Carter must have been incredibly successful at driving advertising revenue because to my recollection the subscription fees were always quite low.
The Atlantic was similarly a reliably enjoyable read until its offices were moved to DC and James Bennett was made editor. It got substantially more partisan and really went off the rails sometime between the end of his reign and the beginning of Goldberg's when essentially the entire staff was comprised of progressive Millennials focused on race and climate change. Obviously it hasn't been helped since the Widow Jobs assumed ownership either.
Back at the end of the last century, I enjoyed the Atlantic. It was roughly ideologically balanced, and it always had a short story every month. Now, from the blurbs that make it into my Facebook timeline, it just seems like another mag selling rage porn to people who live in a blue bubble.
"By the way, how long until artificial intelligence platforms start selling product placement ads integrated into the AI’s answer to your question?"
Ah yes, the seemingly eternal enshittification cycle. We are at the beginning of the golden age of chatGPT. Remember back when Amazon and Google were amazing and trustworthy? If you know what you are doing, chatGPT is currently at that level and manages a few more tasks on top of it. Those servers are costly so it's only a matter of time before they realize they have to do what you said. Then after five (or ten for the dim) years of lost trust, maybe something new to fix the enshittification of GPTs.
A few years ago I told people that if you want decent product reviews, go to YouTube. The ease of puking out AI text content meant you would always find reviews praising whatever garbage you were thinking of buy. But making a video was such a time commitment you could at least trust that the author wasn't making simultaneous videos expressing the opposite opinion. With AI and content mills in India, I don't know if that is still true.
"Enshittification cycle..." Solid gold. Stolen by me.
enshittification is not mine. I don't know if anyone has ever added cycle to it.
There is always archive today. Many legacy media have a paywall, but still want their articles indexed by e.g. Google. So they make it indexable but only by robots.
I use it for the irritating ones that demand you allow ads. I block the ads because they're annoying, and occasionally a vector for malware.
I used to write for military history magazines. $400 an article in some. I could run a 1/4 page ad for one of my novels in the same magazine for about $250.