The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on March 09, 2023, 09:51:48 pm ---Maybe TNY has its own idiosyncratic definition of staff writer. In the little bio section I've seen Jill Lepore identified as a staff writer--I know I saw it because it so surprised me, because of what I would understand a staff writer to be. I would think of a staff writer as a person who gets a regular paycheck and a w2--like a newspaper reporter, maybe--but Jill Lepore holds an endowed chair at Harvard. Yet she's considered a staff writer.
--- End quote ---
I think she does both. Same as Nicholas Lemann, who TNY says has been a staff writer since 1999 and became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in 2003 (thanks, Wikipedia!). Louis Menand has been a staff writer since 2001 and is also an English professor at Harvard. Atul Gawande was a staff writer until 2021 while also being a surgeon. Meanwhile, those people did all kinds of additional things, including writing bestselling books. Obviously they either have superpowers or they really made the most of their summers off!
There must be some kind of a paycheck/w2 situation for staffers or why would TNY distinguish between them, sometimes within the same person? For example, TNY calls Menand a contributor since 1991 and a staff writer since 2001.
If you google their pay, it gets complicated. Salaries.com says salaries range from $1 million to $1.3 million. Perhaps they accidentally added an extra digit. Meanwhile, Glassdoor, potentially somewhat more reliable because it's based on employee reporting, shows a range of salaries for various positions and says a journalist/reporter makes $91,000. That seems pretty low considering the job. Other staff salaries are definitely not enough to live comfortably in NYC; a fact checker, for instance, makes $63,000 according to Glassdoor. Maybe they work remotely from Wyoming or sumpn'. All the Glassdoor listings are based on one person's reporting their own salary, though.
I also happened across this NYT article about a union battle at TNY. Apparently, the magazine's "stars" did not join the union. As a union member and supporter, I'm not sure I want to read it. http://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/business/media/new-yorker-union.html
--- Quote ---I've been an editor and a copy editor in old-fashioned print media.
--- End quote ---
Oh really, where?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on March 10, 2023, 12:36:36 pm ---I think she does both.
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I'm sure she does, but I question if she's running back and forth between Cambridge and NYC on a regular basis. I wonder if she even has a desk in TNY office. This is kind of what I mean when I say perhaps TNY has its own definition of what a staff writer is. Conventionally, I would think of a staff writer as somebody who goes into an office every day and perhaps gets assigned stories rather than write about things that interest them--and I presume Jill Lepore et al. aren't getting assigned stories to write--though, of course, they may be.
--- Quote ---Obviously they either have superpowers or they really made the most of their summers off!
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No doubt they also have graduate student TAs. ;D
--- Quote ---Oh really, where?
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You want me to go back to high school and college, where I edited the paper? Checking references Being one half of a staff of two for the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania's magazine (copy editor, editor--and also producer of most of the content). Copy editing most of my colleagues' work for the eight years I wrote a history for a living. In my current job I'm categorized as a proofreader, but the work still involves fact checking and conventional stuff like fixing grammar and punctuation because the editors have too much to do with technical/tech stuff and managing committees of question writers and teaching new writers how to write questions to pay attention to their serial commas and so forth.
Then there's the two summers I spent back in ancient times as a general assignment reporter for my home town morning newspaper, where I had to deal with copy editors and the editor--not to mention snooty reporters who thought they were above the kind of stories I wrote. One assignment was to cover a suburban high school graduation--and you were expected to get every student's name in the article, and it had to be correct. One of the reporters made some sort of smart remark about how of little importance those stories were. I kind of snapped at her that if it was her kid graduating, it would be important to her. She had no comeback to that.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on March 10, 2023, 02:38:18 pm ---I'm sure she does, but I question if she's running back and forth between Cambridge and NYC on a regular basis. I wonder if she even has a desk in TNY office. This is kind of what I mean when I say perhaps TNY has its own definition of what a staff writer is. Conventionally, I would think of a staff writer as somebody who goes into an office every day and perhaps gets assigned stories rather than write about things that interest them--and I presume Jill Lepore et al. aren't getting assigned stories to write--though, of course, they may be.
--- End quote ---
Right. I don't picture Lepore, Lemann and Menand being required to show up 8 hours a day M-F, or anything like that. They might even be part-time staffers. Or, as you suggest, "staff writer" may be somewhat of a meaningless title granted to skilled writers who contribute to the TNY a lot. Whether there's a w2 involved, no way of knowing.
--- Quote ---You want me to go back to high school and college, where I edited the paper? Checking references Being one half of a staff of two for the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania's magazine (copy editor, editor--and also producer of most of the content). Copy editing most of my colleagues' work for the eight years I wrote a history for a living. In my current job I'm categorized as a proofreader, but the work still involves fact checking and conventional stuff like fixing grammar and punctuation because the editors have too much to do with technical/tech stuff and managing committees of question writers and teaching new writers how to write questions to pay attention to their serial commas and so forth.
Then there's the two summers I spent back in ancient times as a general assignment reporter for my home town morning newspaper, where I had to deal with copy editors and the editor--not to mention snooty reporters who thought they were above the kind of stories I wrote. One assignment was to cover a suburban high school graduation--and you were expected to get every student's name in the article, and it had to be correct. One of the reporters made some sort of smart remark about how of little importance those stories were. I kind of snapped at her that if it was her kid graduating, it would be important to her. She had no comeback to that.
--- End quote ---
Nice career! I'm impressed that a city big enough to have a daily paper and suburbs would also list the grads' names in the suburbs.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on March 10, 2023, 03:37:05 pm ---Nice career! I'm impressed that a city big enough to have a daily paper and suburbs would also list the grads' names in the suburbs.
--- End quote ---
"Suburbs" may be relative. ;D Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is what I would call a small city, but back in the day it had three broadsheet newspapers, a daily morning, a daily evening, and a Sunday. The two dailies were not morning and evening editions of the same paper. They were two separate papers with two separate staffs, though they used the same newsroom. One family published all three papers. (They also owned a local radio station and the local TV station.) The morning paper was Democrat, the evening paper Republican; I think the Sunday paper was non-partisan. I don't remember what the staffing was for the Sunday paper, but it was independent of the dailies; my high-school journalism teacher, the man who taught me to write, was a sports writer for the Sunday News.
It's been years now that the dailies have been collapsed into one paper that in terms of size is much smaller than the old papers. They print op-eds that are both liberal and conservative. (When I would go to visit my dad, I would be surprised at the number of anti-Trump letters to the editor.) They do have a presence online, but I've never checked it out. Maybe I should one of these days. The Sunday paper is still pretty big.
And the "paper" is printed on some pretty crappy paper, not the good newsprint like in the old days.
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on March 10, 2023, 03:37:05 pm ---....Whether there's a w2 involved, no way of knowing.
--- End quote ---
Probably a 1099 form instead.
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