“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Johnson famously observed.

By the great wit’s reckoning, then, Your Author is deadwood from the neck up, since the cultural capital I’ve amassed through True/Slant, rubbing elbows with writers like Susannah Breslin and Matt Taibbi and learning from smart editors like Coates Bateman and Michael Roston, was easily the lion’s share of what made writing for the site so rewarding. That, and the rare opportunity to hook my writing desk up to an arena-strength P.A. system and rattle the Web with a 3,000-word post on whatever wild surmise or obscure obsession crossed my mind, commercial considerations be damned. Truth to tell, True/Slant’s monthly wage—like the fees most publications pay in an economy where downsized, overeducated hacks are in no short supply—is a token honorarium, compared to the glory days of freelance writing.

Obviously, those days are gone, maybe forever. Journalism and book publishing—reliable roads out of financial perdition for generations of writers, Dr. Johnson among them—are big, smoking, financial holes. Writers who’ve spent decades honing their craft, deepening their knowledge of their beats, and burnishing their brands are out on the pavement, cobbling together minimum-wage incomes from the slaughterhouse sweepings of freelance journalism, adjunct teaching, maybe even advertising copywriting (if selling their deathless prose, by the yard, to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce doesn’t violate some Adbusters-approved code of conduct). More and more Web publications pay nothing but street cred, schwag, and name recognition on a nano scale—crack rock for dilettantes, but a death knell for anyone who dreams of earning a living in the scribbling trade. Of those sites that do pay, too many are word farms where bloggers chase bonuses pegged to pageviews, using search engine-optimized headlines to goose their clickthrough rates. “Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding—or shaming—writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms,” wrote New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters in a recent Times article that portrayed sites like Politico.com as sweatshops (“In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger,” July 18). A reported story on PBS’s “Mediashift” (“Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm,” July 21) quoted a disaffected former “content creator” for Demand Media’s eHow.com, a how-to site whose freelance minions base their instructional articles on ideas generated by algorithm:

“I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” she said. ‘I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’”

‘Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,’ she said…”

In the wake of Forbes’s acquisition of True/Slant and T/S founder Lewis Dvorkin’s ascent to the status of chief product officer at Forbes, The New York Observer ran a profile of Dvorkin (“‘Darth D’Vorkin’Arrives at Forbes,” July 13) that I, as one who won’t be toiling in the fields of Forbes, Noted With Interest, as writers to The New York Times letters column like to say.

According to Observer reporter Zeke Turner, Dvorkin

“thinks of stories as product. And the most efficient way to churn out and make money from this product is to create a more efficient editing process with fewer layers. Moving forward, when I look at an operation like Forbes, I look at a mixture of a full-time staff base and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of freelance contributors. [...] That’s what we did at True/Slant…We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine? [...] The editing process online is vastly different than in print…There is a fit and finish that you must have in print. Online, it’s not about fit and finish; it’s about the flow of information, the updates of information. It’s about relevance and timeliness. It’s not about craftsmanship. Quality online does not equal craftsmanship. In print, quality does equal craftsmanship.”

Let me say that I wish Dvorkin, my editors, my former colleagues, and True/Slant every success. The thought that I might be plucked from the ranks of T/S to join the few, the proud at Forbes never entered my laughably unForbes-ian mind. I was a desultory True/Slant-er, posting infrequently and at inordinate length, on topics that were sometimes topical but often not. I’m not immune to newsiness, but refuse to be stampeded trendward, along with the rest of the goggle-eyed media herd.

In his essay “The Long Goodbye: Trying To See Past The Increasingly Harrowing Plight Of Longform Nonfiction In General Interest Magazines,” Lawrence Weschler writes,

“The magazine universe today is increasingly niche-slotted, peg-driven and attention-squeezed. There may be more magazines than ever before, but commercial forces appear to be enforcing an evermore frantic fragmentation of the readerly market. Surfers and advertisers interested in reaching surfers may have a half-dozen venues to choose from, but one is much less likely to find a beautiful extended surfing rhapsody exposed to a general audience owing simply to some writer’s glorious quirky passion. [...] Readers, after all, bore so easily nowadays—or, at any rate, editors seem convinced that they do; or maybe it’s just that the editors, squeezed by increasingly convulsive demands on their own time, can no longer themselves sustain such leisurely spans of attention.”

The unspoken goal, in too much American journalism, is not to tell people what they don’t know, or never even imagined they might want to know, but to tell people what they already know, since it logically follows that anything they don’t know is too weird to survive in what we Americans, in our inimitably irony-free way, like to call the Marketplace of Ideas. It’s this failure of editorial nerve, driven by a cringing fear of scaring off advertisers, that has rendered largely extinct the sort of narrative nonfiction Weschler elsewhere describes as “pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject, and through the sheer narrative energy of the writing, you’d find yourself becoming caught and then held, completely immersed, lost to the world for hours at a time…”

And one must tell people things they already know in language they already use—PowerPoint prose that is easily bullet-ized in the reader’s mind. Like William F. Buckley, I never scrupled at sending my reader to the OED if a sesquipedalian word was the best word for the job. Nor did I feel any obligation to smilingly submit to the intellectual straitjacket that constrains too much American journalism, namely, the presumption that a writer’s allusions and references should be bounded by the cultural literacy of Kim Kardashian.

Which isn’t to say my posts were all unalloyed brilliance. Some flew high; some were big, fat piles of fail. You’ll be the judge of which was which. My point is simply that, like Weschler in his essays, I presumed in my True/Slant posts a reader who craves wonder and laughter; who isn’t reflexively hostile to having her mind stretched or the revealed truths of his ideological niche or demographic comfort zone challenged. To those of you who wandered the forking paths of longform posts that were equal parts nonfiction hedge maze and poetic topiary, I’m immensely grateful for your generosity with your time, and with your comment-thread wisdom.

That said, I blithely disregarded the received wisdom about what works on the Web, and what markets smile on, and thus had no illusions about my fitness for the new order when regime change came to True/Slant.

Consequently, the only dog I have in this fight is a philosophical one. I agree with Dvorkin that any writer who puts pen to paper for money is self-evidently turning out “product.” But that isn’t all he’s doing. Deep down inside, most writers, even the most cynical grub-street hacks, flatter themselves that they’re Speaking Truth to Power or, hell, spinning a good yarn, at least.

The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.

At True/Slant, Dvorkin told Observer reporter Zeke Turner, “We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine?” From a managerial perspective, lowering overhead by doing away with the Middlemen Formerly Known as Editors makes spreadsheet sense. But who minds the store? Self-editing and self-publishing are fine if you’re Matt Taibbi or Susannah Breslin, reporters who roll over in their sleep and snore out perfectly parsed sentences and triple-sourced statements of fact. But what about the guy in the next cubicle, quietly sculpting the equivalent, in obsessive prose, of Richard Dreyfuss’s scale model of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming? Who’s watching him?

It gets worse. The Observer reporter quotes Dvorkin’s observation that “the most efficient way to churn [stories] out and make money from this product is to create a more efficient editing process with fewer layers.” Translated from the original managerial-ese, this means: very little editorial oversight, if any. In the Observer article, there’s talk of “screening” the “hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands” (Dvorkin’s words) of what the reporter says will be Forbes/Slant’s “amateur ‘topic-specific credible’ journalists,” but that phrasing suggests that the vetting will be limited to the hiring process, not daily editing, a concession to the Darwinian realities of the recession-hammered news business that a Forbes staffer quoted in the Observer article seems to concede when s/he acknowledges that some Forbes/Slant bloggers “will be stock-touts, and we know that, and Lewis knows that, but he says that’s a cost of the model.”

Ain’t no facepalm big enough to convey the brain-hurting wrongheadedness of this strategy. Any of my journalism students at NYU would have spotted this, from a mile off, as an ethical fail. The FDA may have made its troubled peace, in regulatory terms, with the number of fly eggs and rodent excreta it permits in the mass-produced Frankenfood brought to you by agribusiness, but journalism doesn’t work that way: turning a blind eye on one “stock-tout,” if you’re a business site, tells consumers whose market decisions depend on the impartial truth of your data that some of it may be rotten with bias. And if any of it is, the consumer has to operate as if all of it is, which sort of gives your credibility the Mussolini headkick.

I could be wrong. Dvorkin may cherry-pick a staff of lungingly aggressive reporters whose prose swings harder than Thompson or Talese, and Bateman and Roston may keep a close watch on their journalistic ethics and factual accuracy. I’ll happily eat crow on that count, because journalism could use a few more success stories right about now, and any market model that lifts off the launchpad is a victory for all of us, even Your Author.

But one thing is certain, and sad: the grim insistence that writers of every genre prioritize, above all else, the demands of chief product officers with one eye on the balance sheet and the other on the stock ticker guarantees that beguiling “pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject” will be fewer and further between, and wonder in shorter supply. Just when we need it most, the act of thinking aloud in public will fall victim to cost-benefit analyses, condemned for the sublime uselessness that makes it so useful.

To see True/Slant vanish into the ether of the Internet is a shame. And I would be fooling myself if I said that I won’t miss the thriving and intelligent online destination it had become. The people that I met here — both contributors and commentors — reminded me, on a regular basis, that people are surprising and insightful. These are details I often overlook given my rather cynical worldview. But sadly, all things end, especially in publishing.

For those interested in keeping up with me, please visit my website over at Annals of Americus. I welcome your comments and continued discussion. Annals has been up and running since January, and is filled with a catalog of writings — from personal essays and daily notes, to commentary and reporting. The site is updated daily. Last week I launched an email newsletter through the site (view it here). Please feel free to sign up if you’d like to receive updates. Also, you can follow me on Twitter or add me as a friend on Facebook. And starting this week, I begin my tenure at Thought Catalog. So please stay tuned.

Thanks to Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel, Kashmir Hill, and Chloe Angyal for all of their help this past year. I joined True/Slant in May of 2009 (brought on by Kash), and the experience has been, by far, one of the most positive I’ve had as a writer. Best wishes to all.

The best part for us writers of course is that True/Slant also paid us each month to write what we wanted to write. Financial responsibility in today’s writing world is virtually unheard of, but we were paid and paid on time. Though the amount was nothing  to write home about, and nothing to buy a home with for that matter, it did help. It was enough of a boost each month to remind me that writing as a craft, journalism as a craft, can be rewarded in the current marketplace. And it was a reminder that when writers are paid to do their work, the quality of the work survives as well.

But that seems like history now. It was an idea, a great one that worked for a time. As True/Slant transition/expires, I will not be one of the writers headed to Forbes. Forbes, alas, does not have much of a need to hire an arts and culture writer and, as an arts and culture writer, I am not sure Forbes would be the right kind of place for me either.  In signing off from The Culture Spoke I want to thank everyone who read this blog, those who stumbled upon it while Googling something they heard about, and those who read it with any kind of regularity.  All readers are welcome readers in this day and age. I am not sure where my digital writing career goes from here, but I will continue to pursue writing essays as a freelance journalist, and I will continue to write fiction. Thanks again, and thanks to everyone at True/Slant who made this happen. It was great while it lasted.

If you’ve enjoyed reading me here, you can also read me and a number of other excellent writers at my primary digs, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I also write at the Washington Examiner’s Opinion Zone blog. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Meanwhile – and for now at least – I will have this blog archived here, and will continue it there as well. So lots of places to find me if that’s something you’re interested in doing.

Thanks to all the regular readers and commenters who make this all that much more fun. Your insights, scathing criticisms, and witty banter were all very much appreciated. Come comment and berate me at these other places as well. Keeps me honest.

Adieu, adieu. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

This could be my next gig, you never know. Image via Wikipedia

I’ve learned a great deal at my time here on True/Slant – mostly that blogging is damn hard work and you’ve got to be passionate about your subject or it’s not worth it for either the reader or the writer. That said, I will continue to write about the topics I am most passionate about – living well after 40, sex, relationships, parenting, and promoting a healthy self-image for women of all ages – all served up with a dash of humor and pinch of spice.

You can find me at my blog Forty Fabulous (www.fortyfabulous.blogspot.com) and at Makeitbetter.net where, among other things, I write the monthly “Sex and the Suburbs” column. If you’re interested, follow these links to my recent pieces on Staying Sexy at Every Age and how to deal with a Sexless Marriage. And feel free to follow me on twitter.

I still have high hopes for becoming the next Oprah, even though my audition video only gained a handful of votes. Perhaps I’m better suited to  The View.

Thanks to everyone at True/Slant for allowing me to be part of such a wonderful group of writers. It has been an honor. Good luck to all.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I write my last post for True/Slant a bit worn out from a full day of kayaking yesterday. It was easy river kayaking, mainly, with just one madly technical section of Class 2 stuff, but a full day of paddling and some porting in the sun saps you a bit.

The sights and experiences were very nice: Osprey and kingfishers working the water. The boughs of huge sycamores whispering in the breeze. A shore nap of 15 minutes that felt like an hour full of dreams. A dash of adrenaline while being spun in the rapids.

Thanks for reading the Beaufinn blog. It was fun. If you would like to continue along, this blog will migrate to www.beaufinn.com/blog (or some iteration of that; Google the name) by mid-August. Web designers really slow down in the heat, don’t they?

What’s next for me? Working two contract writing jobs (corporate stuff), teaching at The College of New Jersey this fall, and staying on the ever-present quest, along with my agent, to sell one or all of the novels. Beyond that, I’d like to finally put some serious effort into the kind of mountain climbing/trekking I’d like to do. I might start in the Shawangunks, in the Catskills. I should, however, set some summiting goals for the next decade.

I have two requests of you, Beaufinn reader:

1. (Re)Read Deliverance: Yeah, yeah — macho white guys in canoes, etc. etc. Having studied with the man who write this magnificently original American narrative, I was always galled by the fact that in popular memory the story boiled down to Ned Beatty and some banjo playing (popular memory = didn’t read the novel and can’t remember much about the film).

This story is powerfully sublime; what lurks under the obvious physical action is moving and troubling, and stays in the mind for weeks after reading. Dickey wrote a very straight story in a time of postmodern literary experimentation, but the story is anything but easy. It is one of those novels you must read to understand a bit about America, particularly at a certain time (the early 1970s).

Also, read it for the wonderful owl scene, which occurs early in the action. This scene is not in the film version, but it is the strongest symbolic connector to Dickey’s poetry in the whole novel.

After that, if you can tackle the novel Dickey wrote after Deliverance, a tome called Alnilam, you’re ready for your PhD.

2. Once a week, disappear for half an hour: That’s a tough one for parents and people with demanding jobs. Maybe cut that to 15 minutes, but for that 15 minutes, belong to your own country — a one-person country located in a wholly unspecified place. Maybe you already do this, and can swing it for an hour. That’s good — now try for two hours.

Get free of the beeps, bings, pings, bongs, shouts, and the “Hey, where are you?” Leave the cell phone or PDA in the car or under a rock, give away your GPS unit, and go someplace that only you know, and only you know where you are.

Go off the grid, just for a short time. Clear your mind of the digital flotsam. You’ll be back “in network” soon enough.

You won’t need a map. Good luck.

# # #

Image via Wikipedia

Well, I haven’t posted anything in quite some time due to the forces of the outside world draining all life force and time from me … but I do want to say goodbye to everyone whose path I’ve ever crossed here on TrueSlant. We’ve had some uproarious debates — mostly about food on my page — and many laughs. This site is also where I trudged through the most gut-wrenching writing I’ve ever attempted, and I will always remember and be grateful for that. 

The group of writers and readers here really are/were a part of something special.

Thank you to Lewis for being the man with the plan, and Coates for trying his best to keep me writing even when the universe wouldn’t permit me to.

I hope to bump into you all, virtually or not, very soon. And yes, pancakes still suck.

Mike Hess

Please feel free to visit me at www.steveweinbergwriter.com

Emily. Image via Wikipedia

My old man taught me to say “so long” whenever we parted because he contended “goodbye” should be reserved for permanent occasions, like the one Emily Dickinson refers to here:

Good-by to the life I used to live,

And the world I used to know;

And kiss the hills for me, just once;

Now I am ready to go!

Goodbye seems especially ill suited for this occasion: while True/Slant writers and readers will scatter to diverse corners of cyberspace, that universe is nothing if not a network, and we will never be more than keystrokes apart.

It’s up to us to keep it going.

Nonetheless there is a passing to note here, an achievement to acknowledge, many thanks to be given.

My colleagues have written more ably and eloquently than I can of the community that thrived here, the conversations started, the friendships forged (I won’t name names, for fear of leaving one out–you know who you are).

I’ll focus on one particular accomplishment that still surprises me, happily, every time I log in.

When True/Slant came along the world needed (in addition to love) an economically viable way for readers and journalists to find one another and converse in civility.

In the end Forbes would testify to True/Slant’s economic viability, but right from the beginning True/Slant attained civility. For the most part, people here disagreed, as the saying goes, with all due respect. And without, as my colleague Caitlin Kelly said, trolls and flames.

In a comment on his own farewell post, my colleague Michael Humphrey says, “Perhaps civility will be the great legacy of T/S.”

But I believe True/Slant surpassed civility and attained a unique style of conversation better described as “collegiality.”

The difference is that we don’t just get along–that’s civility–but we trust one another. We have mutual respect and confidence in our ability and our intent.

That came to be the case not just among those who occupy True/Slant’s Mountain Lair, not just among the site’s 300 contributors, but most remarkably, among the million-plus readers who visited us each month and those who chose to return and comment.

This was a place where we knew one another to be in pursuit of the good, no matter how we might differ on the best way to get there. That’s why trolls and flames found neither purchase nor harbor here.

And this is no small achievement on my beat, which is harassed everywhere else by half-cocked skeptics. Skeptics brought their doubts to True/Slant, sure, but found they had to back them up. They had to be fully-cocked.

True/Slant’s community spanned the world, but was so coherent in its collegiality, it got so you could spot a newbie by his inappropriate bluster. It’s not hard to imagine a hypothetical True/Slanter, either commenter or contributor, who stumbles into town all roughed up by the wild ways of the world wide web, spewing sarcasm and snark and superiority, and finds that here it gets him nowhere.

He leaves in a cloud of frustration. But something draws him back, almost against his will, some scarcely definable allure in content and platform, and gradually he learns, as we all did, to disagree with all due respect.

Thank you colleagues, commenters, readers for the collegial conversation we have enjoyed. Let’s take it everywhere.

How was it achieved?

Collegiality took root in the technologies developed by Andrea Spiegel and Steve McNally and Roger Theriault, blossomed in the professionals selected by Coates Bateman and Lewis DVorkin, flourished under the hands-off leadership and hands-on assistance provided by all those people, plus editorial Jedi Master Michael Roston and our sherpas, Kashmir Hill and Katie Drummond.

Thank you, denizens of the Lair, for making this collegial conversation possible.

As many other writers before me have noted, here we were free to write. In freedom we turned to one another for examples, and we found some of the very best. They did what Emily Dickinson had long ago advised:

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”

So long, for now.

It’s just after 1pm in Budapest, which I suppose means around 7am in New York city, and another 18 hours before… what? I’m not really sure. Does the site just disappear offline with a trace? It seems hard to believe.

Curmudgeonly old bastard that I am and so rusty in these forms of expression, I would still like to say thank you to Lewis, Coates, Andrea and Michael and of course to all the other contributors, for making this site a great temporary home for my twisted rantings and ravings.

They’re all such smart and capable people and it’s probably not that often such a disreputable, flotsam and jetsam bar-fly hack like me comes into their orbit. I’ve tried not to be too much of a pain in the arse. I suppose it is possible that my repeated demands to have my name at the top of the masthead in neon, and my weekly letters demanding a dramatic increase in salary, backdated to my first post may have got on their assembled nerves just occasionally.

Thank you for putting up with me guys, and for giving a voice in the wilderness a chance to gain an audience. Not quite sure I’ll be blogging anywhere near as regularly at this site, but I guess occasionally, and the archives will be there in all their obscure glory.

So that’s it, I may even add a few bits and pieces to the site, but this not that, is the last time I’ll say an actual goodbye. Bon voyage everyone.

And to leave you, hopefully, with a twisted smile on your face, I present an episode from my 26 episode series, Space Cadets. It’s one in a series of what were wordless French animations jazzed up with some comedic after-narration. All things being equal, they should be coming soon to a late night cable television station near you.

So one way or another, I hope we’ll meet again. If not, we’ll always have True/Slant.

As for me, I have a book coming out in November. It’s called Manny Pacquiao: A Biography (Da Capo Press). Readers can find my journalism in TIME, The Atlantic and Esquire, and on my Website.

Photo: Myra Kohn.

Today, True/Slant as it currently exists, is being put to sleep, as part of its new relationship with Forbes.  You’ll still be able to access Licking Your Chops archives, but after today, there will be no new content.

My future as a Forbes contributor remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I’m about to give birth — to a book. The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook will be out in the world on September 14, and I’ll be buzzing it up this fall in DC, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Seattle — and a few other spots, still be to be confirmed. For updates on where to find my content — and me, when I”m on the road  — stop by kimodonnel.com, which is cute but will be even cuter and snazzier in just a few short weeks.

You can also keep up with me on Facebook and Twitter, and in my weekly chat on Culinate, every Thursday.

In the meantime, keep the spirit of cooking alive!

All best.

Josh, Sarah and Shane

As T/S takes its leave, my thoughts are with the three Americans hikers, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, who, exactly a year ago Saturday were taken prisoner by Iran. Three hundred and sixty-four days later they remain in prison, Sarah, ill and in solitary confinement.

The three were merely hiking in the Iraq/Iran border region when they were seized by the Iranian national police. For some time it was thought that the hikers had accidentally crossed the border in the forest. Now, some area residents say that the young Americans were inside Iraq when the Iranians themselves crossed the border and seized them — to hold for ransom.

Either way, Shane, Sarah and Josh are innocent of any criminal acts and should have been released long ago. Their families and friends have spent the last year in hell, pleading with Iranian authorities to free #SSJ (as they’re known on twitter), with no success.

Today, President Obama issued this statement:

I call on the Iranian government to immediately release Sarah, Shane and Josh. Their unjust detention has nothing to do with the issues that continue to divide the United States and the international community from the Iranian government. This is a humanitarian imperative, as these three young people are innocent of any crime. As a signatory to multiple conventions on human rights, the government of Iran should act in line with the principles of justice, and allow Sarah, Shane and Josh to be reunited with their families. This call has been echoed by people in many countries, and is shared by all who respect human freedom and decency.

For those who share the sense of outrage, there are many ways you can help. The place to begin is at the website created their families and friends.

Sarah, Shane and Josh: our hearts and thoughts are with you. Sometime soon, we’ll celebrate your release.

Thanks for reading. Love each other.

Get me rewrite! Image via Wikipedia

Away I go, 900+ posts later…

Whatever will I do with all this newfound empty time?

I started blogging here July 1, 2009, quite literally shaking with fear. Who on earth would want to listen? But, bless y’all, you did.

I found 5,000 visitors by November and 10,000 every month after that; May was my best, with more than 15,000. I never attained the Olympian heights of Taibbi et al, but people showed up.

Mystery: Who are you, anyway?

For someone whose entire career, since college, has been writing for print, not knowing your audience — always tidily demographically profiled and sliced up by the ad department (like, women 18-34) — is unnerving. Really.

So I’m proud of the audience I’ve found, because 50 percent of my followers are male, 50 percent female. I’ve been told this is highly unusual for a blogger and I’m delighted.

(I was hired to blog about women, but, typical Gemini, I flitted like a drunken butterfly from one topic to another.)

I’ve enjoyed getting to know some T/S members and hearing your distinctive voices; luckily, here, it’s remained sane and thoughtful. I’ve valued your insights, wisdom and occasional shared outrage.

I treasure the international, multi-generational friendships True/Slant has brought into my life. Some I’ve already met face to face: Fran Johns, Colin Horgan, Todd Essig, Claudia Deutsch, Nancy Miller, while I look forward to meeting many others who have reached out, including Bart Brouwers, Paul Smalera, Matthew Newton, Devon Pendleton, Dawn Reiss, Fruszina Eordogh and Nick Obourn.

Scott Bowen offered advice and support throughout the writing of my book and Jerry Lanson invited me to Boston to speak to his journalism students. Fellow T/Ser Osha Gray Davidson last week chose my blog here as a “must-follow”. I will miss them all!

Ours is so often a struggling, cut-throat business, so to find a new, talented, generous posse is rare and great and so I am sad that this party is ending.

Here, I “met”, and read the work of talented writers in Bhutan, Saudia Arabia, India, Afghanistan, Rome, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Seattle, Phoenix, Lille. I found this plenitude of perspectives astonishing. Imagine my surprised delight when even PJ Tobia, another stranger to me — in Afghanistan — sent me a story idea. Such attentiveness tells me what a great crew we were.

My first life-changing year was when I won an eight-month fellowship in Paris with 28 journos, ages 25 to 35, from 19 countries. It was the happiest year of my professional life and I remain friends, decades later, with some of them.

In its many similarities to that experience, True/Slant comes in as the second-best.

The dirty secret — as the old-news veterans know — is that very few real-time newsrooms are ever as fun, funny or collegial as this one was. There are way too many Big Egos, too much gossip, an editor who hates you, a thwarted promotion. Here, we enjoyed a level playing field and cool, supportive colleagues. Bliss.

A thank-you to Coates Bateman and Michael Roston, to Lewis, Andrea and Steve — and for allowing the unusual, editorially undisturbed fermentation that produced that unique and special True/Slant fizz.

A special merci beaucoup! to Katie Drummond, a fellow Canadian jock in NY, for recruiting me.

Next?

I’m revising my second book “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” (Portfolio, spring 2011) and pitching my usual clients like The New York Times. I’m thrilled to be a speaker at a major retail conference in September, where I’ll be addressing executives from some of industry’s key players. I’ll be doing it on crutches (the lousy hip) but figure it will win me a shred or two of sympathy.

Vegas on crutches….sounds like a blog post to me!

You can find Broadside here starting next week and I hope you’ll keep reading, and spreading the word if you like what you find.

As a a fulltime freelancer, I’m always looking for new, profitable and interesting gigs. Feel free to drop me a line through my website, (or find me on Facebook,) where you’ll find my email address and current work/activities.

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.”

— Herman Hesse

I came across that quote approximately seven months ago and it settled into my chest like a branding iron… or a sleeping cat. Either way, it was hard to breathe.

I spent a lot of time wondering how often I’d set sail for new destinations and how often I’d splashed along the shoreline, pretending that I’d set sail. I spent a lot of time looking at previous posts I’d written in various venues and came to hate all but a few, for which I reserved a special kind of loathing only writers and Catholics know about. And I spent a lot of time asking myself just what the hell I thought I was doing.

At the end of that period of time, I resolved to be a less shitty writer/blogger and set out in search of this fish we call: talent. And in order to do that, I argued, I was in need of new beginnings.

Coates Bateman and True/Slant offered one such beginning. They gave me a home and some pay and more than a little encouragement. In the stark wilderness that is the Internet, a smart wayfarer does well not to dismiss the discovery of an outpost like True/Slant. You only find so many rivers in the course of your travels, you know?

Many of the outgoing contributors to this site have asked what True/Slant’s legacy will be or for what it will be remembered or what the lessons we ought to take from its near year and a half life are. I don’t know the answers to those questions. Any website that involves more than two hundred people is bound to be sort of like an electron: it depends how and when you look at it.

But the highest common denominator is what I personally think the legacy/remembrance/lesson that is/was True/Slant should be.

The explicit idea behind this site was that if you engage quality writers, give them some space, and let them do their thing, they will generate quality content. The bet that Lewis Dvorkin, Coates Bateman, Michael Roston and the rest of the True/Slant team made was that people would respond to that quality.

They were right.

Left to our own devices, we — all of us — tended towards the highest common denominator, not the lowest. In a sea of free pornography and moronic You Tube comments, that fact is a subtle miracle all its own. It is a real and tangible reason to hold out a thumbnail of hope. And it repudiates much of what we hear and are told about ourselves on an almost continual basis.

That is ultimately what I will take away from my short experience at True/Slant. That new lands are possible, but it takes work. When you set sail, you have to mean it. And when you lose sight of the shore, you’ve only really just started.

So, if after today you want to find me, you’ll know where to look. I’m right beside you, still trying to work up the courage to set sail.

Cheers,
Scott

Thank you for following our various musings over the past year, and for your insightful comments. We’ve had a good ride. Now, our time with True/Slant draws to a close. If you want to continue to follow our Gen Y-slanted work-life revelries, you can find us at:

www.thelatticegroup.org

And if you want to get involved with The Lattice Group, do let us know. We are looking to redesign the website in the near future, and are also looking for new contributing bloggers. Be in touch at: yelizavetta@gmail.com

Keep pushing the corporate envelope, keep flattening the workplace, keep sharing at home, and keep being honest. Above all, keep the discussion going. Real change begins with real dialogue.

Thank you and goodbye!

- Liz and Astri

And in addition to audio, we’re now doing two live video shows every Thursday night at 7 p.m. ET on the CBS Digital Radio ChatAboutIt.com network!

You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or the Stitcher mobile app for iPhone, Palm Pre, Android and Blackberry.

So fare thee well and thanks for the memories, T/S!

Mr. Media Radio Links:

Mr. Media Home

iTunes

Stitcher

CBS Digital Radio/Chat About It

BlogTalkRadio

Image via Wikipedia

It seems that Erik Kain and I have unofficially agreed to create the eleventh hour Bitter Enders Club of True/Slant.

Expect no weepy goodbye post from this corner of the Intertrons, at least for the next few hours. If there is decent political news on which to write over the course of the afternoon, then dammit — we’re going to write about it.

The minutia of political reporting stops for no man… or woman… or website… or dogs, we don’t stop for dogs, either.

It's all pomp because of the circumstance. Image via Wikipedia

It feels like the last day of high school around here, or more accurately, like the high school is closing down and kicking all us kids out.

As you no doubt know by now, Forbes acquired True/Slant and is shuttering the site. As they turn off the lights, everyone is getting one last chance to say goodbye. Some of us are moving on to bigger and better things (Ivy Leaguers), others are taking some time off before heading back into the fray (Gap Year types) and a lot of us don’t yet know what we’re going to do (Sorry, Mom, I’m Not Leaving Yet). As for me, I’ve made my own yearbook of sorts and collected all my content over here while I figure out my next move. For those of you who are link-averse, it’s http://thesuburbanista.wordpress.com/

It’s sad to say goodbye to all the (virtual) new friends I made and I will miss hearing from them every day. My fellow bloggers never failed to inform, inspire and engage me. I wish we could have all stayed 2gether 4ever but alas, it was not to be.

It was a great time while it lasted and a fantastic learning opportunity. As a long-time news reporter, blogging was new to me and something I wasn’t quite comfortable with at first, as it required a complete reversal of all I had known. It had been drilled into my head from Day One of journalism school to remain neutral, don’t take sides, keep your opinion out of it and just report the facts. Over the years, I’ve done that pretty well, I think, dispassionately reporting on skinheads and murderers, creationists and global warming deniers, religious extremists, vaccine opponents and many more people, always putting aside my own feelings in service of the story.

As a blogger, though, I was supposed to share my thoughts, the more controversial the better (translation: more page views). I don’t think I ever fully accomplished that, mostly because I still work as a news reporter for a variety of publications and either have covered or could be called on at any moment to report on a topic that I might have blogged about. I never wanted a source to look up an old post, unlikely as that might be, and accuse me of not being impartial or coming into the reporting with an agenda.

I was never the most popular blogger here, so I didn’t get to sit at the cool kids table, nor was I the least popular, so I didn’t have to sit at the losers table either. I may have been somewhere in the middle, which happens to be where I’ve always liked it.

So goodbye for now and stay as cool as you are. Let’s stay in touch, even as we all move on to our next chapters. Last one out the door is a rotten egg!

Well that’s not exactly true. I don’t typically blog on Saturdays, so I will likely sign off some time today. But not yet!