| Subject: Re: Truce |
| From: Robert McCain <r.s.mccain@att.net> |
| Date: 12/19/10, 18:51 |
| To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
It's not my place to advise you, BUT . . .
1. A byline in Vanity Fair (even the online version) is a helluva lot more valuable to you, career-wise, than anything else you've been doing in recent months.
2. You could probably get a lot more VF bylines by writing stuff that was more general-interest current-events/politics than by chasing after your own pet peeves and doing "inside the blogsphere" stories.
3. Rather than trying to bigfoot it in someone else's group blog, why not focus on building your brand with your own individual blog? Starting with a big fat "zero" on the Sitemeter might seem like a step down, but lots of people do it every day. And assuming you could build traffic -- I imagine you'd get occasional links from Sullivan, Greenwald and others of the atypical Left -- it would enhance your value as a freelancer, since you would be able to deliver a ready-made readership. Using your personal blog as a repository/outlet for your *idiosyncratic* work would sort of free you up to do more mundane reportorial journalism without feeling that you were losing your voice.
4. In case you haven't noticed, 2012 is an election year. About a dozen Republicans are seeking the nomination to challenge Obama. You've got an agent. You're a contributor to Vanity Fair and other publications. Uncompensated travel expenses are tax deductible. Do I have to add up that equation for you?
If you could suppress your intellectual disdain for *mere politics* -- and also suppress your appetite for playing "gotcha" -- there is a helluva lot of fun to be had in covering campaigns from the horse-race perspective. "Punch a hat-pin through your frontal lobes," as HST put it.
Such a course of action, it would seem to me, would be more fruitful as a professional endeavor for a young writer than the speculative project of building some kind of super-aggregator. Of course, schlepping around to Rotary luncheons in Iowa and New Hampshire might not be your dream job, but the mismatched quality of the assignment would in itself have a certain novelty appeal, don't you think? It would be a challenge, an experience and a potential growth experience: How does someone with your background go about doing deadline reporting in a competitive news environment?
Of course, if there is to be a truce, you'll have the common decency not to mention that I ever made any such suggestion. This e-mail never existed. And if I see you at CPAC -- or in Des Moines or Manchester -- you owe me beers.
-- RSM
--- On Sun, 12/19/10, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
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