Rolling Stone published a story by me on its website today. It's a brief entertainment news piece about the forthcoming record by Before Cars, a band fronted by Chad Channing, who was the drummer on Nirvana's Sub Pop debut Bleach.
As someone who used to write for The New York Times, I know how you can make a friend for life by giving someone positive coverage in a media venue with name magic. Unfortunately, the guy at the indie label putting out Chad's record went from very helpful to rather elusive when I informed him that I had an assignment for the website, which may or may not get parlayed into a feature for the print magazine, rather than a firm print assignment.
Kind of funny. On the one hand, we all know that the internet is killing print media, and many of us seek much of the information we want and need online. On the other hand, "only on the website" remains in our parlance as an admission of inferior coverage on the part of writers, subjects, publicists - probably even the advertisers whose collective decision-making is killing print as a medium!
Though of course I would like to add a physical copy of Rolling Stone to my clip file (along with print copies of The Times, Washington Post, The Nation magazine, Harvard's black studies journal, TriQuarterly and The Los Angeles Weekly, to name-drop a few), I think I'll celebrate my online-only publication by adapting something my friend Paul Jensen once said.
Someone had said something disparaging in Paul's presence about "fake tits". Paul wasn't going along with that stuff. He said, "The only fake tits are the ones you can't see and feel."
In that spirit, if a publication has the name "Rolling Stone" on it and the writer's fee headed your way is coming in the form of a check made out by someone who works for Rolling Stone, then it's fair to conclude that you have, in fact, been published by Rolling Stone.
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Don't forget to go read that there story of mine on the Rolling Stone website. Now that it's out on digital newstands everywhere, I'll mine my notes and write more about Chad here. A very nice man!
Before Cars has a MySpace page. That's where I got the picture.
Kind of funny. On the one hand, we all know that the internet is killing print media, and many of us seek much of the information we want and need online. On the other hand, "only on the website" remains in our parlance as an admission of inferior coverage on the part of writers, subjects, publicists - probably even the advertisers whose collective decision-making is killing print as a medium!
Though of course I would like to add a physical copy of Rolling Stone to my clip file (along with print copies of The Times, Washington Post, The Nation magazine, Harvard's black studies journal, TriQuarterly and The Los Angeles Weekly, to name-drop a few), I think I'll celebrate my online-only publication by adapting something my friend Paul Jensen once said.
Someone had said something disparaging in Paul's presence about "fake tits". Paul wasn't going along with that stuff. He said, "The only fake tits are the ones you can't see and feel."
In that spirit, if a publication has the name "Rolling Stone" on it and the writer's fee headed your way is coming in the form of a check made out by someone who works for Rolling Stone, then it's fair to conclude that you have, in fact, been published by Rolling Stone.
*
Don't forget to go read that there story of mine on the Rolling Stone website. Now that it's out on digital newstands everywhere, I'll mine my notes and write more about Chad here. A very nice man!
Before Cars has a MySpace page. That's where I got the picture.
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2 comments:
Amen bro! Keep up the good writing wherever it might be published.....(or even not published)
Yay! That's cool!
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