What's In a Name?

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

A few years ago I was asked to help edit an anniversary book for a big men's magazine—one with a storied past and a shrinking future—and was given only one real caveat in making my cut from the hundreds of stories being considered.

The big stories by the big names had to remain. The big guns that had written for them back in the day were pretty big, too—some of them even carried big guns, bagging big game when they weren't winning big literary prizes.

Unfortunately the stories they wrote for this magazine had not been their best work—far from it. They had been published because of the big name attached, and though most of them were dead those pieces were being reprinted for the same reason.

I thought of this today when I found one of my colleagues toiling away in his office, editing a piece written by a current big name for another big magazine—and cursing the writer, his job, and the heavens all in one breath.

"The terrible thing is that I know someone who could have done a perfect job with this story," he told me. But the editor wanted A Big Name. Which is why my friend was sitting there with a saw and a hammer, toiling into the late hours trying to fix this unpublishable piece.

I think what many editors forget is that most magazine readers don't actually buy a magazine based on the name of the writer. They are lured by the story, the images and display text that leads them to it, perhaps. But by and large, readers tend to forget who wrote a piece they enjoyed. (Trust me, I know.)

If the people in Washington suffer from some inside-the-beltway, insider-baseball disease that keeps them from understanding what the average voter cares about (as Joan Didion famously averred), I think a lot of magazine editors in New York have an inside-Manhattan myopia that prevents them from seeing what readers care about. Stories; not names. Writing; not bylines. What's important when you open a magazine is not necessarily the sort of thing that's going to cause buzz at a cocktail party in New York.

It's a quaint complaint, I know. That don't mean it ain't true.

by Sean Elder