Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

The Major

Observe the Major on a red carpet, and at any given moment three or four paws are on him. His heroism has been well received by the dogs, particularly those in dire need of lubrication and those that possess tongues the size of throw towels. The more feral members wanted to touch him, carve him up, put him on a platter with an apple in his mouth and masticate upon his roasted innards over a Sunday dinner.

He obliged, again and again, even after an exhausted publicist denied him the promised boudoir bounty of lanky debutantes after a long wintry afternoon of vapid interviews in which the same questions were asked and the same answers were proffered. There was always time for one more photo, one more backrub, one more comparative anecdote from some stranger involving an obscure relative that had little to do with the smoky chatter that regular people sequestered from all the madness still had the liberty to enjoy. He is known only for The Incident. He will spend the rest of his days answering questions about his role in The Incident. It will never occur to his interlocutors that he possesses interests or instincts outside this role, or that his heroism was, in fact, perfunctory. The biggest surprise for him is not that this attention has lasted this long, but that he has been continually subjected to this funny photosynthesis and that he is beginning to transform into a trailing plant. There are no other heroes for people to latch onto, although many souls who wandered too close have become trapped against his sticky anthocyanin housing. Relatives have become too occupied by his heroism to inquire about the shattered condition of loved ones. Those spectators who have not become throbbing canine-shaped insects continue to ignore the daily marvels before their eyes. Their notion of heroism remains static, even though heroism itself now requires extraordinary circumstances in order to draw attention. But they cannot see that his arms are metamorphosing into scaly vines and that he is beginning to cough up a curious green bile. Nobody thinks to water the Major or to expose him to proper sunlight. The handlers insist that the Major can find enough hale regard through constant camera flashes.

There were press releases instead of camaraderie. A few remaining sensible souls winced when developments in the Major’s personal life were reported by seemingly responsible news organizations, and when the very nature of heroism mutated with his increasingly convex form. When his tongue fell out at a SoHo House press conference, the journalists laughed at the apparent joke. He was soon reduced to lashing his remarks in crude semaphor. He deteriorated further. And when his spindly spavin withered and his dead form was contained in a pot and his remainders were trundled about across the country, the Major’s heroism extended to his sacrifice, which took several months to become fully detected by those with the keys.

This was the price of fame.

by Edward Champion

Kid Chocolate

On January 6, 1910 — precisely a century ago — the Cuban boxer Kid Chocolate proceeded to undergo a ten-round bout with his mother’s uterus. He was declared the winner by a doctor (no referees were available in the hospital) and was awarded an umbilical snip for his preborn pugilism. It is safe to say that Kid Chocolate is no longer alive. Indeed, he has not been alive for a good twenty years. But there was a time in which Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo — once referred to, in all seriousness, as The Cuban Bon Bon, a sobriquet that could not easily fly today — was undefeated. But his opponents were better and he began to lose.

Kid Chocolate would be co-opted by Clifford Odets for his play, Golden Boy, where Kid Chocolate would be synthesized into the Baltimore Chocolate Drop. Odets introduces this composite by having the boy say, “The Baltimore Chocolate Drop is not as good as you think he is.” I would have asked Odets, “Is this entirely fair?” A December 24, 1959 issue of Jet reports that Kid Chocolate owned four homes at the time. I do not know whether or not he lost them. But one of the factors that motivated Sugar Ray Robinson to become a boxer, according to Herb Boyd and Ray Robinson’s Pound for Pound, was Robinson learning that Kid Chocolate made $75,000 for a half hour of fighting in the ring.

That’s $2,500 a minute to have someone beat you to a pulp before a crowd. Is it worth it? I think most people would say so. Without accounting for inflation, Kid Chocolate made more from one fight than I have ever made in a year. If I had to fight only one fight (30 minutes a year), at the risk of brain damage, a beaten corpus, and a warped skull, but I was able to earn that kind of money, then I might seriously consider Kid Chocolate’s rates. Then again, if I were to suffer brain damage, then I wouldn’t be able to write. So perhaps it’s not worth that kind of blood money. Even if I were to spend a good deal of time getting in the appropriate shape. Which I imagine would run into my reading and writing time. I would be a rather silly boxer.

By 1965, Robinson was broke. He had made $4 million boxing and it was all gone. Robinson may have been inspired by the wrong detail. Money (or the fantasy of earning a lot of it) isn’t really a good reason to make a major life decision. But Robinson, to his credit, lived longer than Clifford Odets did. Kid Chocolate lived longer than both of them. I have a feeling that Kid Chocolate simply liked to box. He had numerous flashy moves. You can look all this up if you’re curious.

Given the choice between Kid Chocolate (or even Sugar Ray Robinson) and Clifford Odets, which one will be more remembered a century from now? Or will any of them be remembered? All three individuals interest me. But I am not sure if anybody will be interested in them one hundred years from now. There may be some boxing scholar sifting through boxes (that is, if they are preserved), attempting to put together some comprehensive history. But will boxing have changed? If the theatricality of “professional” wrestling can shift dramatically to extreme elements involving nails, glass, and boards in a few mere decades, then it’s safe to say that boxing could just as easily become more gloves-off in the future. So will anybody be interested in past versions?

It is also worth observing that these fights tend to interest spectators as they unfold in the present. If you already know the fate of the match, then the boxing bout loses its appeal. On the other hand, Odets, being a playwright who planted figures in the crowd for some of his work, was also interested in the present moment. So is it entirely fair to place Odets above the boxers?

I had originally set out to merely observe that it was Kid Chocolate’s 100th birthday. Should I live another fifty years (a possibility, but one never knows!), I will remember Kid Chocolate on his 150th birthday and perform greater justice than this silly post assembled in the early morning hours.

by Edward Champion

Dave Eggers and the Journalism Sweatshop Model

In recent months, Dave Eggers has continued to insist that newspapers, contrary to recent developments, are not dying. In May 2009, Eggers spoke before a crowd and announced, “If you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.” This prompted many, including the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles, to take Eggers up on his offer and inform him of grim realities. Eggers failed to live up to his end of the newspaper-boosting bargain, sending out a boilerplate email in response to inquires from interested parties. This email, rather predictably, offered nothing more substantive than the foolhardy optimism that one generally receives from a faith healer or a used car salesman.

If prosperity remained just around the corner, one could at least take comfort with the handsome issue, which came, as promised, with contributions from Stephen King, Nicholson Baker, and William T. Vollmann. But the more important question of whether the San Francisco Panorama was profitable was swept under the rug. Then last month, The Awl‘s Choire Sicha took a hard look at the numbers, pointing out that the Panorama required $111,000 to publish 23,000 issues. With advertising revenue of $61,000, the Panorama took a loss of 33 cents per issue. Additional problems came from the $80,000 editorial costs, which, as Sicha demonstrated, had to be split among 218 contributors. After subtracting an estimated 12 cents/word paid for contributions, noted Sicha, there was a mere $38,000 for the seven staff members, who all worked on the paper for four months. How many of the people who worked on the Panorama were unpaid? It was never officially disclosed, but Sicha’s calculations demonstrated that Eggers’s vision was nothing more than a puerile and unworkable fantasy.

None of this has prevented Eggers from flapping his mouth in interviews, continuing to claim phony expertise on how to save newspapers. And as Eggers has continued to blab, a more troubling vision, one that involves paying the writer nearly nothing, has emerged.

In an interview with The Onion A/V Club, Eggers points to the ostensible simplicity of readers “pay[ing] a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.” But as Sicha demonstrated in December, the enterprise clearly wasn’t supported by reader dollars. Could it be that a web-based model, one that cuts out an expensive $111,000 print cost, might, in fact, permit some of that money to be given to the writers and editors who perform their labors? Not in Eggers’s view. Sayeth Eggers: “The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers, and all these other sources of revenue that are sort of provisional, but haven’t been proven yet.” But is it really all that complicated to create an Excel spreadsheet listing the money coming in from advertisers and the money that you pay out to contributors, and use a formula function to determine if the enterprise is profitable? Maybe if you’re six years old or you don’t know how to use computers. But even if you’re computer illiterate, there’s this nifty little innovation called double-entry bookkeeping that’s been around since the 13th century. And you can even perform it on paper — if, like Eggers, you “just have an affection for paper.”

But Eggers’s remarks in the Onion interview reveal that he isn’t really interested in paying writers. He notes J. Malcolm Garcia, a correspondent heading to Afghanistan who offered to write something for the Panorama. As Eggers boasted, “it doesn’t even cost that much, because he was going anyway.” In other words, Garcia’s work — the substance of his investigations, the time he took in reporting — can be undervalued because he just happened to be in the region. This is a bit like asking a doctor to cut his rates because “he happens to be in the hospital” or asking your next door neighbor to perform professional services because “he happens to live next door.”

And yet Eggers claims that he has a daily respect for the people who have toiled at sweatshop wages for his beloved Panorama. Professional respect doesn’t emerge when you’re paying your editors below minimum wage or you adopt an assumptive attitude that, because some journalist happens to be in the area, you can undercut his labor. It emerges by paying the writer what she is worth. And if Eggers insists that “we’re programmed to declare something dead once a week,” he may want to look at his own programming, which has continued to perform its financial miscalculations over the course of seven months. If Eggers values the experience of old-school journalists, as he indicates in the interview, then why not pay them the money that their experience is worth? Perhaps because, contrary to his “tidy” conclusions, Eggers doesn’t know how to balance numbers and doesn’t know how to run a profitable newspaper. He doesn’t comprehend that journalism isn’t some casual hobby to be picked up like stamp collecting, but an occupation that requires dutiful compensation.

by Edward Champion

David Pogue and the Gray Lady’s Double Standard

In a post on Saturday, the NYTPicker, a website devoted to “the goings-on inside the New York Times,” pointed to the recent firing of Mary Tripsas, who was let go after writing a positive column just after taking an all-expenses paid trip from 3M. The NYTPicker also highlighted Clark Hoyt’s recent column, in which Hoyt reported that the Times had “parted company” with Joshua Robinson after Robinson had “represented himself as as a Times reporter while asking airline magazines for free tickets to cities around the world for an independent project he was proposing with a photographer.”

But David Pogue’s ongoing ethical infractions were not addressed by Hoyt and, as the NYTPicker put it, “Pogue continues to keep his gig while traveling the country — courtesy of corporations who pay him to speak at retreats and confabs, identifying himself as a NYT columnist. It’s a double standard that NYT has yet to address.”

This prompted David Pogue to leave the following comment at the NYTPicker’s site:

I spoke 30 times in 2009.

One of them was for a corporation–ONE. It was Raytheon. And that was an engagement that had been individually approved by my editors.

(As part of the Times crackdown on this issue, ALL of my speaking engagements must be individually approved. It’s been this way since June.)

The remaining 29 were for educational and non-profit outfits. Examples:Florida Virtual Schools; eCollege; Cleveland Town Hall speaker series; FOSE (government training); Society for Technical Communication; CT Librarians’ Association; CUNY; Educomm; MBL (Woods Hole); Memorial Sloan Kettering; Syracuse University.

Ooooh, look at Pogue jetting around the country for big corporations!!

You just have no idea what you’re talking about.

Actually, the NYTPicker does have some idea about what it’s talking about.

Here’s the pertinent clause from the New York Times‘s ethical guidelines: “Staff members should be sensitive to the appearance of partiality when they address groups that might figure in their coverage, especially if the setting might suggest a close relationship to the sponsoring group.”

Alas, in the examples that Mr. Pogue kindly offered to the NYTPicker, the ostensible “journalist” proved quite careless in disclosing his partiality. Had Mr. Pogue bothered to investigate or research the entities he was speaking to before accepting the invitations and the honorariums, he might have discovered that there was decidedly more than one corporation here.

As its website proudly announces, eCollege is a division of Pearson PLC, a London education and media conglomerate that specializes in making educational software.

Ergo, a corporation.

FOSE is run by the 1105 Government Information Group, part of 1105 Media, Inc., whose California corporate record can be found here.

Ergo, a corporation.

The Society for Technical Communication is a for-profit New York corporation. Here’s a link to the bylaws.

Ergo, a corporation.

The Educomm conference is run by the Professional Media Group. You can search here for the limited liability company record from the Connecticut Commercial Recording Division:

While an LLC is slightly different from a corporation under Connecticut law, it’s safe to say that the Professional Media Group’s structure is far from nonprofit.

So that makes three for-profit corporations and an LLC in a pear tree. That squarely puts the corporations in the plural and confirms the NYTPicker’s allegations.

In a further gaffe, Mr. Pogue claimed that the NYTPicker’s author was “David.” But in an embarrassing series of developments last September, the New York Times issued a retraction for misidentifying David Blum as the man behind NYTPicker.

According to the NYTPicker, New York Times editors and spokesmen have refused to answer important questions about this double standard in journalistic ethics, whereby Mr. Pogue continues to breach the Gray Lady’s ethical standards without apparent penalty.

[UPDATE: David Pogue has left a few followup comments at the NYTPicker, which has prompted this followup post.]