From the Magazine
April 2014 Issue

From Ink to Inc.

Big-name literary branding isn’t new—look at Twain or Hemingway. But today, even novice writers must nurture a social-media presence. Arianna Huffington, Nate Silver, and Ezra Klein have branded their way to the top of Journalism 2.0.
Image may contain Human Person Arianna Huffington Cell Phone Electronics Mobile Phone Phone and Hair

As if writing itself weren’t taxing enough on mind, morale, and tailbone, novice byliners who have yet to earn their aviator wings are advised by teachers and mentors to fashion a brand—to entrepreneurialize a persona that will distinguish them from all the other content providers out there trying to hurl themselves over a transom that no longer exists. In some college communication and writing courses, playing social media like a harp is considered as integral to future success as teaching your paragraphs how to roll over and fetch. I’m just glad I came along when the writing game was mostly a matter of fighting your way up Pork Chop Hill with long naps in the foxhole and didn’t require daily, hourly upkeep and depend upon the kindness of mouse clicks. Raising a brand from infancy, nurturing it, tending to it as it teeters around the track, sprucing it up when it gets stale—it sounds exhausting, like being a stage mother, a helicopter parent to your own career. The author as brand isn’t a new glossy animal in American literature. Mark Twain marketed himself as a brand, living folklore. (Tom Wolfe, in his ice-cream suits, urbanized the Twain model.) Ernest Hemingway, the bearded Neptune of the brand author, promoted Parker pens and Ballantine beer while he was alive and, in death, had his he-man imprimatur perpetuated through the Ernest Hemingway Collection, whose product line speaks to one’s inner bwana. In our own millennial time, novelists and reporters excelling in expressionistic flourishings are depreciated in favor of those who provide snapshot analysis, crunchy sound bites, and political handicapping—expertise that has an obvious social utility with a personable face attached. He/she has to both be a popularizer and project a granular familiarity with the details of the subject, or at least enough flair to fake it.

Andrew Sullivan, the peripatetic columnist, polemicist, and former editor of The New Republic, was one of the first adventurers to untie himself from the masthead and answer the Internet’s call of the wild. He ported his popular blog the Daily Dish from Time to The Atlantic to the Daily Beast before striking out on his own in 2013, establishing the Dish as an independent principality that would reject advertising and rely upon subscriptions ($19.95 a year) to remain solvent. In an earlier incarnation, Arianna Stassinopoulos strode the unworthy earth in goddess sandals as an anti-feminist scourge (The Female Woman, her answer to Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch) and splashy biographer of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso; following the dissolution of her marriage to Congressman Michael Huffington, she evolved into the czarina of the Web site that bears her name, the Huffington Post, a news-and-opinion super-aggregator that grinds up the urchin bodies of interns and unpaid freelancers into journalistic soylent green (don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan). Fareed Zakaria accomplished an equally impressive feat in journalistic branding, managing to make foreign-policy analysis seem dashing as he catapulted from print (Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, numerous books) to television (an omnipresent news analyst on panel shows and now host of his own series on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS) to perhaps, someday, his own orbiting space station where he can benevolently gaze down upon us as Sandra Bullock floats by. The brandmaster of flash is Malcolm Gladwell, who has parlayed his platform as a social-trends reporter for The New Yorker into a series of popularizing best-sellers (Outliers, The Tipping Point) and princely sums on the speakers’ circuit. His face was planted on the sides of New York buses to publicize his latest book, David and Goliath, a fitting place for the Carrie Bradshaw of Starbucks intellectuals.

Even Gladwell, eternally youthful as he appears, arose from the venerable inkwell of long-form journalism. The newer branditos seemed composed of pixels from the moment they materialized from the algorithmic beyond to wow us with their brainiac powers and peachy youth (or torrential wordage, as in the case of Glenn Greenwald, the blogger and Edward Snowden facilitator who is heading up a new nonprofit journalism operation backed by billionaire Pierre Omidyar). Nate Silver first surfaced from the dense formulas of baseball sabermetrics, the basis of Moneyball. He then trained his tabulator on politics with the FiveThirtyEight blog (named for the number of votes in the Electoral College), which called the 2008 election results with Annie Oakley accuracy. The FiveThirtyEight blog was beamed aboard the mother ship of The New York Times but never fully assimilated. After Silver made a wager with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough regarding the outcome of the 2012 election (the winnings would be given to charity), the Times ombudsperson Margaret Sullivan administered an admonishment. The wager was a “bad idea” and “inappropriate,” she wrote, and chastised: “When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. But he lost something, too: the right to act like a free agent with responsibilities to nobody’s standards but his own.” Just the sort of institutional finger-wag that would provoke a proud, proven talent such as Silver to pursue free agency, and in July of 2013 he packed up for the friendlier confines of ESPN, which bought the FiveThirtyEight name and domain (the Times only had a licensing deal) and freed him to set up his own shop, extending his statosphere beyond sports and politics into new frontiers of “computational journalism.”

What Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog was to the Times, Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog was to The Washington Post, a traffic driver and image enhancer. Like Silver, Klein was a lefty blog phenom, hired at the Post at the age of 24 and giving policy wonks a cerebral sex appeal that irked elders such as journalist Mickey Kaus, formerly of The New Republic in its neoliberal heyday, who called him a “whippersnapper,” a word you seldom hear outside of old Gabby Hayes movies. A star at the Post, Klein proposed to the powers that be an in-house start-up that would employ dozens of staffers and reportedly require a multi-year budget of $10 million, mere lunch money to someone like the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But the deal was un-doable. “[Klein] made Bezos an offer that Bezos, by any rational understanding of business, couldn’t accept,” wrote Trevor Butterworth in a much-noticed essay for the Awl on Klein and other journalistic wunderkinds. “Why, after paying a quarter of a billion dollars for a brand, would Bezos immediately diffuse that brand by investing $10 million more in an individual fiefdom?” Klein’s personal brand was no match for the overarching imperatives of the corporate brand, and so he, Post director of platforms Melissa Bell, and Dylan Matthews decamped to Vox Media, whose platform technology utilizes the latest advances in quantum mechanics, or something like that, and will allow Klein and his legion of superheroes—which also includes fellow brandito Matt Yglesias—to contextualize and analyze the news with a scope and acuity fast disappearing in the pop-up land of a thousand listicles.

Sustainability won’t be easy. Warning flags are already being flapped around, and not just because the charmed careers of these breakout artists make many of their pissy confrères in the press crave a comeuppance. The demands of being a byline superhero can spread a journalist’s time and focus so thin—all those honoraria to collect!—that he or she may start serving up skimpily researched quickies or, worse, sloppy seconds. (Fareed Zakaria was suspended for plagiarism by Time and CNN in 2012, and brand author Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign as a staff writer for The New Yorker and his book How We Decide was withdrawn by his publisher after he was discovered indulging in an ongoing orgy of plagiarism, fabrication, and rampant recycling of material.) And how big an appetite is out there for depthful journalism? It’s easier to establish a brand on the Internet than it is to ensure brand loyalty from the fidgety and the fickle. Sports is a nonstop nut obsession for Americans, so Silver’s partnership with ESPN has a natural synergy, a word you don’t hear bandied about much anymore, but political-site traffic relies heavily on the election cycles, which could cause roller-coaster dips. It is taken as an inauspicious omen that subscription revenue for Andrew Sullivan’s Dish site is suffering a bit of a fade in year two. But, for now, let’s take optimistic solace in the knowledge that Klein’s operation, like Silver’s, has been hiring and asking for résumés. Hiring!—how often has that beautiful verb been heard lately in journalism’s bare ruined choirs?