Magazines Rule, the Beekman Boys Rock, Roseanne Sucks, Plus More Rules for Flacks

Magazines will always be front and center in my home

I've covered the magazine business for 20-something years now. I still can't get enough of them. Which is why they are front and center in my home (this is my coffee table at the moment) and in my life. I buy them for myself, I buy them for friends and family, I get endless ideas from them, I learn about new people and places from them, and I rip out and keep and refer back to the pages that mean something to me. I write stories for them and about them. I read books about them and the people who create them — most recently, Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries, which is delicious if you haven't dived in yet. I have artwork on my walls that is inspired by them. I have close friends and longtime colleagues who make their living off them. I still get excited when they arrive at my desk every week. Digital media has become an indispensable part of all our daily lives, but print makes me feel connected to content in a way machinery and the internet never will. Which is why a good chunk of my working life remains devoted to contributing my own words to them. And why I prefer actual books to ebooks. And why I still subscribe to three daily papers and write letters to the editor and get a thrill when they opt to print them. 

Home to 122 goats

This past Memorial Day weekend was spent over in Sharon Springs, New York, at the town's annual Garden Party, where we took a tour of the Beekman Boys' famous goat farm and picked up a passel of awesome handcrafted products of theirs and other local shopkeepers, artists and artisans — barbecue sauce, peanut butter, soaps and lotions. Meeting and visiting with the "boys" — Brent Ridge and Josh-Kilmer Purcell — in their shop, Beekman 1802 Mercantile, was good fun, though, having followed their successes in marketing and media all these years, it felt like I already knew them. (I'd actually already met Josh, a former ad guy, a time or two in passing. We have some mutual acquaintances and have been Facebook friends for a while.) It was especially interesting to chat up Brent — an expat of Martha Stewart's empire — about their terrific quarterly magazine, Beekman 1802 Almanac, one of the most beautiful and soulful lifestyle titles I've ever come across. Brent told me they had wondered whether a big, thick, lushly produced print magazine would fly in this day and age, and it did — right off the shelves. He seemed pleased that they'd sold so many subscriptions at a premium price (30 bucks for four issues; the newsstand price is 10 bucks). It's always mystified me that magazine publishers virtually give their products away — and never more than now, as they become ever more desperate to compete with digital media and hold onto readers. (Just look at the number of $5 annual subscription offers you get in your email box.) The boys have proved that consumers will — even in our digital age — pony up for a lovingly crafted, high-quality product. 

From national treasure to national disgrace

When I first read about Roseanne's horrific tweet whose contents shall not be repeated here, I literally got sick to my stomach. Then, the media reporter part of me kicked in and wondered how in the world ABC was going to deal with this mess. It wasn't too long before we all got the answer. In one quick moment, Roseanne destroyed her show, her career and the livelihoods of many people who'd taken a chance on her despite the strange, hateful fringe she's been loving up to for a while now. Someone shared this bit of nostalgia on social media: a TV Guide cover from the 80s featuring the two biggest TV stars of the day, Roseanne and Bill Cosby. How time changes things. From superstars to national punchlines in just three short decades. No matter one's successes or fame or money, it seems human beings simply cannot be trusted to not succumb to their own worst instincts.

How you PR flacks make me feel sometimes

Finally, I'd just like to say that I usually, greatly enjoy my job as a journalist. I have found that most people who've managed to survive this business for any stretch of time are a pleasure to work with, and that goes for bosses and colleagues I've had, subjects I've covered, and even the PR people whose job it is to control my access to the powers that be and at least attempt to shape the things I write about them. I am proud to say that I have many PR people I think are super at their jobs, who expertly ride that tricky line between serving their masters and getting me what I need to do my work. Many of them I consider friends. Which is why it makes the bad ones so glaringly awful. I just have to share with you that I've spent the last two weeks trying to arrange a quick and easy interview with a bureaucrat through his handlers, who seem to think they are negotiating either the release of a hostage or the terms of a 60 Minutes firing squad. After the umpteenth time of going over the broad strokes of what the talk was to entail — and even agreeing to do that which no reporter ever wants: sending over the questions in advance — I finally reached the point today where I told the flack: Look, this is now in your hands. The decision is yours whether or not this profile is going to happen. If there is not an interview set up by end of business today, I will assume my request is denied and I will find someone else to write about. By now you can probably write the end of this story yourself: Of course they caved and started scrambling to get me whatever I wanted. A close friend of mine gave me some smart advice once about getting information out of people: Act the most uninterested, get the most dirt. In her memoir, Linda Ellerbee shared a story about an interview she once tried to do with an erratic Hunter S. Thompson, who seemed more interested in mouthing off and prancing about than sitting for an agreed-upon, on-camera conversation. All she had to do was start packing up her shit and heading for the exit to get the famous writer to finally get control of himself and sit his ass down for the work at hand. Sometimes all you have to do is tell some self-important jerk you didn't really want to talk to him all that much anyway, that he's not nearly as remarkable or fascinating as he thinks he is, and that you've got a lot better things to do with your time — and just watch how fast he comes running. It's an annoying little game for an adult to have to play with another adult, but also a necessary one to get the story — and one every old reporter can relate to when it comes to wrestling these massive egos to the ground.

R.I.P. Interview (Even Though You've Been a Cold, Lifeless Corpse for a Very Long Time)

Everybody bemoaned the seemingly sudden shuttering this week of Interview — Andy Warhol's iconic and onetime influential chronicler of actors, models, rock stars, artists, writers, politicians and others who compose impolite society — following years of financial woes, alleged depravity in the ranks and, the absolute worst thing that can happen to you if you're in the business of purveying content, nonexistent readers, advertisers or buzz. But let's face it — Interview died a long, long time ago. I for one would prefer to remember it as it once was: my gateway, as a fish-out-of-water teenager in Tennessee, to a world of 80s-era New York art, culture, and debauchery. I even had framed covers of the magazine, with their striking, technicolor drawings of the most important people of the day, lining the walls of my apartment in college. (A few covers that come immediately to mind: a mesmerizing, luminous Grace Jones, a gravity-defying Dolly Parton by Robert Risko, and an uncomfortably jailbait-ish Marky Mark in his underwear, before he became Mark Wahlberg: Movie Star.) I remember experiencing Interview for the very first time when I was 14, at a now-defunct newsstand called Mosko's near the Vanderbilt campus. It's also the first place I ever saw the Sunday New York Times, newspapers printed in other languages, and art and nudie magazines. (I believe this all-important way station in my development is now a Subway sandwich shop. At least Obie's Pizza and the Elliston Place Soda Shop have survived the gentrification bulldozer.) To say flipping through the pages of Interview for the first time was a seminal moment in my history is downplaying things — I'd never come across anything like this, had never read about people and places or seen images like this, and had certainly never read writing like this. As a wannabe writer, the magazine served as my entree to and tutorial in Q&A-style journalism — and Interview did the very best of it there ever was thanks to a long line of editors and writers that includes Bob Colacello, Ingrid Sichy and Kevin Sessums. Q&As get a bad rap — a lot of people think they are the cheapest and easiest thing to produce when in reality, when done at their most expert, they can be the most intimate and revealing form of reporting. But aside from all that, and probably most significantly, the magazine was my introduction to a lady who would shape my writing style, fuel my youthful fantasies about New York City and cement my cockeyed view of the world — I refer, of course, to the one and only Fran Lebowitz. (In Martin Scorcese's documentary about Fran from a few years back, she recalls going down to the Factory in 1969, the year Interview was started, to talk Andy into hiring her to write for it. When she knocked on the door, the voice on the other side — belonging to Andy — asked, "Who is it?" Fran shot back: "Valerie Solanas!" Andy opened the door.) Like you, I haven't read Interview in years. It had become boring and pointless, one more irrelevant, heritage media brand running on the fumes of its former glory and competing with way too much other, more vital content. But I will always remember it, and revere it, for helping make me, me.

Gentlemen, Burn Your Blue Blazers and Neckties: An Ode to Working From Home

The Times has some pointers for those of us who work from home — including setting alarms to remind ourselves of certain tasks we need to get to. Personally, if I had bells going off all times of the day, I'd have to check myself into a loony bin. It seems to me that if you have a work ethic and a measure of self-discipline, it ought to make no difference whether you work in a cubicle surrounded by other drones or at Starbucks or on the wing of a 757 — or in your own home. And it doesn't much matter, despite advice to the contrary, whether or not you have a devoted workspace in your domain. I've had deadlines that got met just as timely and efficiently from the kitchen countertop next to a boiling chicken as they did the quiet second bedroom I call an office. That said, there are clearly those personalities that require the structure, procedure and camaraderie that come with office jobs. I am definitely not one of those people. During my years as a working journalist, I have been my own boss from time to time, and while it's not for everybody, I have always found it to be a productive, creative and largely happy predicament. Meanwhile, the same does not apply to all the 9-5 jobs I have had in between. (My ambivalence about my fellow man, rubbing elbows with him and breathing his second-hand air is well documented.) As a freelance person, there is tremendous satisfaction in setting your own hours, wearing t-shirts and flip-flops all day (I've saved a small fortune in dry cleaning), and being free to say yes to working for certain people and no to others. I for one don't miss languishing in pointless, unproductive staff meetings where I'm forced to pretend an unctuous CEO's stream-of-conscience blather and steaming pile of corporate-speak amount to pearls of wisdom. In office life, as in life in general, so much time is wasted listening to other people who like to hear themselves talk but say nothing. Ah, bosses. One particularly awful one even had his charges (including me) take personality tests to determine whether they were compatible with him and were, in fact, "company material." You know, there was once another group that exercised strict rules determining whether people were in or were out based on certain identifiable and perceived inferior characteristics: the Nazis. Now, there's only one person my personality has to suit: me. And I don't even own a pair of jackboots. I think I shall keep it that way. As for this week, you can find me out in my garden finishing another deadline. If it ever stops raining.