Besting Bad Contracts

(republished from the website pitchpublishprosper.com)

One of the biggest mistakes a freelancer can make has nothing to do with pitching or interviewing or how to structure a story. It has nothing at all to do with the actual craft of journalism. It involves the contract.

It’s happened to the best of us. We’re excited to have landed an assignment, so much so that when the contract arrives, we eagerly sign it—without actually reading what we’re signing. Or, if we do read it, it doesn’t occur to us to amend it; all we’re interested in is the deadline, word count, and fee.

The thing is, contracts are incredibly important. They lay out what happens if the piece is killed and what kind of legal and financial risk you might be assuming. They dictate whether you’re retaining the copyright to your work and what kind of compensation (if any) you’ll receive if a publication sells your story to a sister publication, a foreign edition, or even for TV or film development.

What’s more, contracts are not set in stone. There is no harm in asking for changes. No one is going to revoke an assignment because you ask to alter the wording of the contract. It may be that the publisher simply won’t budge. Until, that is, enough writers make a fuss–so it’s always best to take issue with anything unfair. (Mark Schrope has some great tips on how to negotiate a better contract in Chapter 21 of The Science Writers’ Handbook.)

Even if the contract turns out to be non-negotiable, you still have options: you can opt to bow out of the assignment. That seems drastic, but I guarantee you that exercising free will can be empowering—lost paycheck notwithstanding.

What to watch for: indemnity and rights

Endless crazy things show up in contracts. I recently saw (and successfully changed) a clause stating that if the magazine killed my story and paid only 25% of my fee, I was nonetheless barred from reselling the story for three months. That’s absurd. I would never sign such a thing, and neither should you.

More often, the pitfalls lie with indemnity clauses. These are how publishers try to cover their asses. They basically say that in the event of a lawsuit over your work, the publication will take absolutely no responsibility, won’t go to bat for you, and won’t shell out a dime on legal fees. An indemnity clause reads something like this:

You shall defend, indemnify and hold harmless [publication X and its parent company] from and against all claims, losses, costs, settlements, suits, demands and liabilities of every kind, including reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses, arising out of or incurred by reason of the inaccuracy, alleged breach, or actual breach of any representation, warranty, covenant, agreement, or undertaking made by you herein.

In other words, you, the lowly writer, agree to put everything you own—your life savings, your house, whatever—on the line while the deep-pocketed corporation that already has lawyers working for it risks nothing. The corporation trusts you enough to publish your story and sell advertising against it, but not enough to take any associated financial risk.

Always, always, always ask to strike the indemnity clause from the contract. As a general rule, I won’t sign a contract with an indemnity clause–at least not this extreme type. A paycheck of a few thousand dollars is hardly worth risking everything I own, however slim the chance of an actual lawsuit or related fees. I’ve occasionally turned down work because of a non-negotiable indemnity clause. I’ve also negotiated for a less-egregious version of the clause. A reasonable indemnity clause looks something like this: You agree to indemnify the publication

from any and all judgements finally sustained by a court, after appeal, for any actual breach of obligation made hereunder

Instead of you being solely responsible to any crazy person who complains, you are responsible when you actually screwed up and it’s been proven by a court. That seems a lot more sane and fair.

The other thing to pay close attention to is rights. Contracts are generally either “work made for hire”—in which you give up all rights to the article—or “first serial rights,” which means that the publisher has exclusive rights for a set period (generally 90 days, but this too is negotiable), after which the rights revert to you. The publisher may retain “nonexclusive” rights after that, which means both you and the publisher can resell or republish the piece.

As a writer, your copyright is really all you have. Why would you give it away? I avoid signing “work made for hire” contracts whenever possible. Publishers often have two versions of their standard contract and will send you the “bad” version first, on the assumption that you’ll blindly sign it. Always ask for the “good” version, the one that gives exclusive rights only for a set period of time.

The best approach to negotiating contracts is to be as professional as possible. Your editor isn’t trying to screw you over. In fact, chances are she isn’t even aware of the exact terms. Explain as clearly and diplomatically as possible what you want to change and why. But don’t apologize. This is a business transaction, and your job is to get the best possible terms for yourself as a professional. Decide beforehand what you will and won’t accept. It will make your negotiating position stronger.

How much opinion is too much? As more of us are likely to be jumping between different media — magazine features (where voicing a point of view is crucial), newspaper articles (where “objectivity” is the rule), blogging/Twitter (where I, for one, tend not to hold back–but keep my subject matter pretty narrow), etc — I think it’d be great to talk about how to strike a balance, remain true to your voice, and not have what you do for one outlet come back to bite you in the ass at another.

Many of us struggle with how much of ourselves to put online. As a freelance journalist, I write for dozens of different publications, which want varying degrees of my opinion. When I write science articles for The New York Times, I like to think my voice comes through in the storytelling; but though the pieces are features, they’re relatively objective. They’re not making an argument. They’re presenting the facts, albeit according somewhat to my interpretation, and in what I hope is my recognizable voice.

But magazines, on the other hand, want me to take a stand. When they commission a story, they’re also paying (in part) for my point of view. That needn’t involve writing in first-person, but it does mean putting more of myself on the page, and attracting the ire of readers who disagree.

Then there’s blogging and Twitter and all the rest of it. What goes where? If I really must rant about something, where to do it? Is there ever value to a public rant?

Last year, I blogged about my frustrating experiences with women’s magazines. I’d decided to hell with it—if editors didn’t want to hire me after my post, so be it. In fact, several editors contacted me afterward asking me to write for them, so I think the extra dose of “I” may have actually helped in that case. But I was aware of the risk.

But what about other situations? Lately, I’ve been on a bit of a mission to make writing contracts more writer-friendly. Many writers, especially those who are new to it, assume the only thing to do with a contract is sign and date it. But contracts are often negotiable. And the more people who contest unfair clauses, the better it is for all writers. So how much of a rabble-rouser should I be? Is tweeting or blogging about contracts too far afield of my subject matter as a journalist? Or perfectly appropriate given my status as a journalist?

I’m looking forward to a fun discussion. If you’re at Science Online, stop by and chat with us on Saturday afternoon. Or follow along on Twitter: #themeinmedia.

Its home is part of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a desert oasis that houses the highest number of endemic species (two dozen) in the U.S. Bathtub-warm springs bubble up from belowground in more than 50 locations and wind among mesquite trees, occasionally opening into small turquoise ponds. In the early 1960s, entrepreneurs used these pools as nurseries for tropical aquarium fish.

A desert oasis

Ash Meadows Wildlife Preserve was almost paved over

In a landmark decision that year, the Supreme Court granted the pupfish senior water rights – the first nonhuman species to gain legal rights to water – turning it into a tiny icon in the annals of American conservation. Seven years later, The Nature Conservancy, with 11th-hour help from a Congressional appropriation, managed to buy the land, which is now a federal wildlife preserve.

And yet, despite having won its home and saved the ecosystem, despite having gone all the way to Washington and into history books, the Devils Hole pupfish is still flailing.

Want to know why? Keep reading…

Andrew Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University Colorado and the protagonist of the Wired story

Okay, this is actually an Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish, not the Devils Hole version. But whether they’re actually distinct species is a controversial topic.

An evolutionary biologist at Harvard and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Jenkins is best known as part of the team that discovered Tiktaalik roseae, a 380-million-year-old fossil that represents the evolution of fish onto land. (Here’s Carl Zimmer, back in 2006, writing about the find.) But to me, Jenkins was a missing link himself–a connection to an earlier era in which people were charming and polite and wore suit vests.

Jenkins came to speak to my group of Knight Science Journalism fellows at MIT in the fall of 2010. There were 12 of us, and before each of our twice-weekly colloquia, we went around the room and briefly introduced ourselves to the speaker. In Jenkins’ case, it was unnecessary. Not only had he read the Knight program brochure that featured each of our photos and short bios, he’d memorized it. So Jenkins knew, for instance, before Wojciech Mikołuszko introduced himself, that the Polish journalist liked to write about dinosaurs. In a performance that blew our minds before he even began his presentation, Jenkins introduced each of us himself.

His talk, about the Tiktaalik discovery, didn’t just involve fossils and biology. It took us to the field with the scientists–brought us right there to the Canadian Arctic, where we witnessed not just the excitement of discovery but the realities of working in remote and frigid regions, where, Jenkins told us, you never, never want to be stuck without your flask of vodka. After the talk, Jenkins offered to schedule a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum for us. So on a chilly February day, we journeyed with the ultimate tour guide through the university’s collections.

You could open pretty much any drawer in the vast floor-to-ceiling cabinets of the vertebrate collection, and Jenkins could tell you exactly what was inside. The species, where it was found, some fascinating little detail about its biology.

Jenkins and the skull of some long-lost creature

The original type skull of Gorilla gorilla

Mary Carmichael makes some friends at Harvard

For the second time that year, I tagged along beside Jenkins through narrow hallways lined with cases of dead animals. We zigged and zagged passed all manner of birds and mammals, and then we arrived at another door. “Camel’s derriere,” he proclaimed. And there it was, on our right, the back end of a stuffed camel. An explorer’s signpost. He led the way through the door, up some more stairs, and into a hallway that led to Hoekstra’s office. He popped his head in. “I deliver to you one lost Knight fellow,” Jenkins said. Then he was off.

As my fellow Knight fellows have written in emails we’ve exchanged about Farish today, he was a rare, inimitable character who made science a joy. His loss is all of ours.

(Top photo credit: Matt McGrath)

How to cope with absurd amounts of data may be the defining problem of 21st-century science. As a systems biologist who uses computational modeling to find patterns in data, Peter Larsen works in the smoldering core of that problem. He also really likes jazz. While he sits in his office at Argonne National Laboratory, thinking about how to find patterns in data—and how to present those patterns in a way that means something to other humans—he often listens to jazz.

When microbiologist Jack Gilbert, Larsen’s colleague, asked about the possibility of using music to represent patterns of microbial diversity—in data from a long-running project in the Western English Channel—Larsen saw an immediate connection to jazz. Classical music is “very structured,” says Larsen. “And microbial life is not as structured.” But microbial life does have repeating motifs—daily, seasonally, pegged to longer-term El Nino or La Nina cycles. “These are very amenable,” says Larsen, “to the kind of musical approach of something like jazz.”

So Larsen made music out of microbial life in the sea.

Just to back up for a second: The data, collected by Gilbert and others, is part of an effort to examine the microbes that live in the Earth’s oceans, soils, and air. Microbes are the dominant form of life on this little planet of ours–there are roughly a nonillion of them (that’s a one with 30 zeroes)–and they’re largely responsible for how nutrients and energy and all kinds of vital chemicals move around. The English Channel project involves sequencing DNA found in the seawater and trying to piece together a sense of how some of these microbial systems work. How do thevarious organisms interact with one another? How do they respond to changing conditions like temperature, nutrients, acidity? The research generates terabytes upon terabytes of data.

To turn some of it into music, Larsen mapped environmental conditions–daylight, temperature, phosphorous level–to specific chords. When the conditions change, the chords change. Then he took the microbial concentrations at each of those environmental conditions—how much of a certain type of microbe exists at a certain temperature, say—and mapped each one to a scale. The chords play in a particular scale, depending on how the environmental conditions affect the size of the microbe communities. “The same population would sound different in the key of sunlight,” says Larsen, “than in the key of nitrogen.” The key of sunlight? That’s genius.

Finding a way to express the beauty of these systems really struck a chord (sorry) with Larsen. “Scientists are reluctant to use the words beautiful in a context of analysis,” he says, but the music allows people to understand “that these systems are in and of themselves beautiful.”

His favorite composition is called “Fifty Degrees North, Four Degrees West”—the coordinates designating the sample site in the Channel.

“In that one, there is a chord progression that is taken from the environmental parameters over the course of a year,” Larsen explains, “along with a series of five different melodies.” Each melody represents the relative abundance of a different group of microbes. As the year progresses, the pattern of chords repeats under the melody.

Larsen was initially surprised by the flurry of interest in this work. But he thinks he understands what’s going on. “This has identified a hunger for representing complex data in simple ways,” he says. I couldn’t agree more. Music tells a story, and stories are how humans make sense of the world.

As a journalist who covers the environment, I’m used to depressing news. Natural systems are shifting and unraveling; the evidence is all around us. But the mind-blowing number of talks at ESA — five days of sessions from 8 am til 5 pm, with 35 talks often running at the same time (and that’s not including posters) — means that the aggregate amount of depressing news can be enough to overwhelm the staunchest optimist.

It’s not that all the talks are doom and gloom. Many, of course, are about basic research. And there are plenty that focus on solutions: giving nature economic value, collaborating with indigenous peoples, improving science communication, democratizing science by encouraging public participation in research, promoting better conservation decisions to limit unintended consequences. I attended two talks about the Sustainability in Prisons project, an inspiring program in which prisoners raise endangered frogs, plants, and butterflies. (Ed Yong covered it for Nature; check it out.)

But many of them are depressing. And I’m sure I skipped some interesting presentations because I just couldn’t bear to hear one more way in which humans have messed things up for Earth’s other gazillion species. Open to any random page in the program and the titles sink your heart into your gut. “Artificial night lighting disrupts songbird breeding behavior.” “Limited physiological response to warming in lowland tropical frogs.” “Sediment pollution reduces detrital resource availability to consumers in agricultural stream food webs.” Enough, please, stop, mercy, I can’t take it anymore.

Even in the ESA talks that tried to emphasize paths forward, the facts at hand were often grim. Three-quarters of the planet has been modified by humans. Seventy percent of all agricultural land is pasture, but this only produces five percent of the world population’s protein and two percent of its calories. A hatchery program designed to increase salmon numbers is inadvertently contributing to the fish’s decline (because the hatchery-raised fish have far lower reproductive rates).

The official title of this year’s conference is “Life on Earth: Preserving, Utilizing, and Sustaining Our Ecosystems.” But it feels like the unofficial title might be “Life on Earth: How Fucked Are We?”

This is by no means intended as a criticism of the science. I feel deeply grateful to many of these scientists for persisting in their research, which involves painstaking, repetitive, tedious, even hazardous tasks. But the gloom overload raises a pesky question for me as a journalist. If I can’t bear to hear the news, how can I communicate it to the public? What sort of articles — or books — should I be writing? Where is the balance between grim facts and hopeful innovations? How can I continue to write about what I believe is the most important topic of our time while maintaining my sanity?

I turned to see brown smoke filling the sky from a mountain on the west side of town. It seemed as though all of Colorado was going up in flames, including Boulder. Thankfully, firefighters were able to control the Flagstaff fire well before it got out of hand. That wasn’t the case in Colorado Springs or north of Fort Collins, where hundreds of people lost their homes and thousands of acres burned to the ground.

I called my friend Michael Kodas, an award-winning journalist and photographer who’s writing a book called Megafire (to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014). At least now, I thought, he wouldn’t have to go very far to do the reporting. With the Front Range fires fully contained (though likely to burn through the summer), but with our skies still smoky from new fires in Wyoming and Montana, I plied Michael with some strong IPA and got him to tell me everything I needed to know about our blazing forests.

HR: You’re writing this book on wildfires. Presumably you weren’t surprised by all the recent fires—but perhaps you weren’t expecting them to hit so close to home? What was your reaction when the fires started across Colorado?

MK: I thought it would happen here [on the Front Range] because everything was lined up. I’ve had a number of interviews with fire managers and people who work with wildfire who have said that what they’re afraid of is a bunch of small to medium fires simultaneously across Colorado, and particularly across the Front Range.

So people had actually predicted that this would happen?

People had expressed fear that this would happen.

To help me think about all these fires, I divide the problem into three basic causes. The first is forest management, which would include everything from excess fire suppression, to logging that leaves a lot of slash on the ground, to planting trees. Ways we utilize the forest that make it more flammable.

The second is development, the fact that we have such a huge boom of population into the forest. You have a lot more human-influenced fires. And you also have a lot of resource that has to be protected. With the Healthy Forests Initiative, the Bush plan that was supposed to make the forests more resilient to fire and also help communities protect themselves, they created all these grants for community wildfire protection plans. And communities across Colorado took advantage of these grants to put together these plans. But the implementation has not been nearly as good because the money ran out—it paid for the plans, but it didn’t pay for the actual work.

One of the points made by Headwaters Economics, a think-tank in Montana, and others is that the primary funder of a lot of these initiatives is usually the homebuilders association, and what they want is to be able to justify developing farther into the “wooey.”

Sorry, what’s the wooey?

The wildland-urban interface.

Ah. The WUI. I’ve never heard it said like that.

Oh yes, it’s the best part of writing a book like this, you get to say “wooey” all the time.

Anyway, part of a story I just did dealt with how we’ve had more than 100,000 people move into Colorado’s red zone, which is the most flammable forests, since the Hayman fire in 2002. By the way, the day of the big blowup in the High Park fire outside of Fort Collins was 10 years to the day from the big blowup of the Hayman fire.

You have this development issue. With more people moving into the forest, having fireproof homes doesn’t lower the cost. You still have to fight the fires. You’ve still got power lines and reservoirs and all kinds of other kinds of resources you have to protect.

You still don’t want the fire in your neighborhood.

Right. You’re still going to be putting it out. Which speaks to the first problem, management. You’re still going to be suppressing fires that need to burn, so you’re still going to end up with a fuel problem, with a lot of fuel around these communities.

Then the final cause is climate. That’s the wild card, and that’s the one that came down this year. By June we had 2 percent of normal snowpack in the high country. Streams dry up earlier, forests dry up earlier, the forest is flammable earlier. There are areas of the West and Colorado where it’s been documented that the fire season actually starts about two months earlier. Hence the Lower North Fork fire, which was the first or second day of spring and was incredibly volatile.

So those are the three categories of causes. [To recap: management, development, climate change.]

I was in Estes Park climbing when the fire there broke out. I’d taken a day off, had a buddy who wanted to go climbing. It was hot, so we thought we’d go up there.

I feel like I should stay away from you because a fire is going to break out.

I get that from people. I was with two rangers who showed up–one of them knew a friend of mine who’s a hotshot–so we’re chatting, and then their radio squawks that there’s a fire and it’s crowning and there are homes nearby. So these guys packed up their stuff to run out.

How far from the fire were you?

Probably five miles as the crow flies, but a two-hour walk.

The point I want to make is that those three categories all came together this year, and that’s what wildfire people are afraid of. The Estes Park fire was a wire that rubbed raw against a tree in the really high winds. It’s in the high country, which dried out months before it should have, so it’s just bone dry up there when they normally would’ve had snow on the ground. And you had this series of 100 degree days, really hot. So it all came together in these fires.

I was involved with reporting on four of these Front Range fires in a single day. And it’s illustrative to me of this is what they’re afraid of. You throw all your resources at Estes Park, only you’re a long way away from Colorado Springs, or Boulder. So you have four fires that are really volatile, and all of them are threatening property.

How much did that stress our resources?

The feds are claiming they’ve got enough resources. But the various incident commanders are worried. They’ve complained a little, not a lot, and they’ve all said that they got what they needed when they needed it. But we were already at one quarter the amount of contracted air power to fight wildfires that we had 10 years ago. If you’re an incident commander looking at these huge megafires and seeing that our air power is a fraction of what it was a decade ago, you would be worried. I would be worried.

There’s also argument that we rely too much on air power. Air tankers can’t put the fire out. They can try to guide it. But it’s still firefighters that have to go in there and stomp this thing out. They seem to have enough bodies to throw at these fires. But it’s a military operation. It’s like fighting a war on multiple fronts.

And now we’re just at the start of what would normally be the fire season?

We’re finally getting the monsoon rains. But we have not had anywhere near the amount of rain we normally have. Instead we get these dry thunderstorms. A storm that comes through may be a storm that is going to dump a ton of rain—which is great if you have a fire that just got started, but bad if you have a fire that just got put out because then you’re going to have flash floods. In the Waldo Canyon fire, they simultaneously had red flag fire alerts and flash flood alerts.

The real concern is this super-thin snowpack. Because the high country forests are so dry, they can get these huge fires in the lodgepole pine forests up there where you’ve got a lot of beetle-kill and a lot of fuel. Those fuel moisture levels are much lower than normal. And that can be a problem right through the fire season. These monsoon rains aren’t going to correct the moisture deficit. It might help put out a fire but won’t help make the fuel moister.

To what extent do you think the beetle-kill trees are involved in the fires? If you’ve got a bone-dry forest that has no moisture in it, it doesn’t seem like it would make a difference whether it’s beetle-kill or not.

The relationship is really complicated. In a lodgepole forest that’s been affected by beetles, you’ve got green trees, red trees that still have needles on but are dead, and then you’ve got grey trees. The common feeling has been if we can just get through the red phase, you’re away from the immediate threat because those fires don’t crown [spread through the treetops] if they don’t have needles.

Some people I talked to said they saw that in the High Park fire, but there hasn’t been an investigation of it. It’s just from firefighters and incident commanders I spoke to. They said when it got to the grey forest it slowed down, and when it was in a red forest it ripped.

But a lodgepole pine forest has evolved to go down in these huge stand-reducing events, and when they’re dry like they are now I don’t think it’ll make that much difference if it’s a beetle-kill or a live tree.

I think what people are really afraid of is 10 years from now. Those trees die, they haven’t burned, they fall on the ground, and now the new trees have grown up. So you’ve got this potential for a really intense ground fire with a crown fire burning above it.

One of the problems is it’s so hard to do the treatments that were planned. It’s so hard to get prescribed burning done. It’s become so restrictive, there’s so much resistance from the public. So lots of times you have a plan that requires cutting the trees down and then burning them. And they just don’t.

The treatments themselves can have unintended consequence. It’s a catch-22 for these managers, because they have got to reduce the fuel load somehow. The prescribed burn that really went out of control was the one that threatened Los Alamos in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire. It was a National Park Service prescribed burn that went out of control, burned a bunch of homes [over 400] in the community of Los Alamos and threatened a nuclear laboratory.

Fuels from treatments were also implicated in the Fourmile Canyon fire. I think the figure was like 83 percent of the homes that burned there were burned by ground fires. A lot of that ground fuel was from people that had thinned their property and had these slash piles, but there’s no efficient way to get it out of there.

I wonder about that all the time when I see these big slash piles on people’s property. I always wonder, what exactly are they going to do with those?

You have to do something. There’s a researcher at Colorado State University who has said, When these fuels are on the ground, are we just moving the fuel around? Have we just turned one hazard into another hazard?

Let’s talk about the climate component. To what degree is climate change playing a role? The media coverage seems to have either portrayed it as the primary cause or ignored it.

Yeah, isn’t that the way it is? You’re either a crusader for climate or you try to ignore it? Or you’re like I was for a long time, a journalist that doesn’t understand it well enough to write it, so you’re scared of the topic?

I think climate change is seen as playing a huge role. The really thin snowpack, all these dry lightning storms that came through when we’d normally be getting afternoon rain, the high temperatures. When the Waldo Canyon fire really blew up, it was the fifth straight day of over-100 degree temperatures for Denver. The heat played a huge role.

Steve Running [a climate scientist at the University of Montana] points out that the heat has two other impacts. It increases evaporation so the fuel is that much dryer. And the temperatures stay warm at night. When the temperature drops below 70, and certainly below 60, it really slows a fire down. Wildfires tend to lay down at night. But the fires have stayed super active through the night. Many of the houses that burned in Colorado Springs burned at night. Fires can draw a huge amount of energy when temperatures stay above 70 at night.

So high temperatures at night, drought, a weak snow year, very volatile weather—the winds have been crazy this year—all those things can be attributed to the volatility you get from climate change.

Does all of this keep you up at night? I know when the Flagstaff Fire hit, I was like, am I going have to evacuate my house? How does it affect you?

I saw that fire as a nuisance. Boulder is not going to let that happen. It’s far more fire-wise, has more defensible space than a lot of communities. No, the thing that keeps me up at night is the same thing that keeps a lot of journalists up at night: Did I spell that person’s name right? Did I get that quote right? [laughs]

Yeah, but are you worried about the long-term impacts of this, as someone who lives here?

Yeah. What concerns me long term is it’s a wicked problem, and our policymakers are really bad at dealing with wicked problems. Fires are this irregular disaster, you have a really bad year and it goes away, and people have really short memories. We never seem to respond to this problem and it’s worse every time it comes back.

One thing to keep in mind is we’ve yet to have a fire that’s of the size of the Hayman, but we’ve had two now that radically exceeded the property damage. So it strikes me that we’re a lot more vulnerable than we were ten years ago.

And a lot of that is because, as you said, people are moving into the WUI.

Right. The WUI.

Is there anything else you want to mention that we didn’t cover?

No. I don’t even need to write the book now. You can just publish your blog.

–
Photo credits
Waldo Canyon fire: Don Savage Photography, via Flickr
Michael Kodas: Michael Kodas

Follow Michael on Twitter

So before he got into the topic at hand, he put on some classical Chinese music. The mood thus set, he recounted the myth of Jingwei, about a Chinese princess who drowned in a rowboat and then came back as a bird to exact revenge upon the sea. Her plan was to fill in the sea with twigs and rocks so that no one else could drown. Jingwei, he went on, is the namesake of a Drosophila gene once thought to be useless but “reincarnated” after a University of Chicago scientist named Manyuan Long discovered its purpose. (It’s involved in regulating hormone metabolism.) There’s no real romance in fly genes. But now that this one was linked to emperors and reincarnation and revenge fantasies, I paid attention. I learned something about genetics.

That story lured me in. And then, it seems, my story about that story touched someone else. Yesterday, I received an email from Manyuan Long himself. While searching for an image of Jingwei to use in a review article, Long stumbled on my blog post and became, he said, “deeply lost in the scene.” Long, a professor at the University of Chicago who still works on the jingwei gene, allowed me to share his email.

I returned back to the day twenty years ago when my doctoral mentor, Chuck Langley, at UC Davis challenged me: you must give a name to the new gene you just found in Drosophila, in order to win your PhD. The name has to reflect the long and beautiful culture in your old country, the story must be fitting to the biological property of this weird gene, and the recent research history of this gene should be a part of it. You were a boy who grew up in that anti-cultural social movement in the crazy time of the country, I am testing you how much you know the Chinese culture including its early history and literature. Tell me a name tomorrow or you fail in your last step of doctoral research!

That night, Long couldn’t sleep. He was overwhelmed by images from his childhood, and from contraband books of ancient Chinese mythology that his uncle had managed to spirit away, protecting them from the Red Guard’s infamous book burning during the cultural revolution. “My uncle, a rarely educated man,” he wrote, “hid his book collection and himself in a remote village in the mountainous southern Sichuan and secretly taught me the ancient Chinese literature and mythology.”

Seeking solace from the brutality around him, Long’s uncle immersed himself in mythology. And on that sleepless night, Long remembered the myth of Jingwei. Amazingly, he realized, her story was also the story of the gene’s research history. “Then you can guess that I passed the test and won my doctoral degree,” he wrote. “11 years later we figured out what the gene did functionally, [and] 20 years later, we found many genes in many organisms had the similar history of jingwei and indispensable functions. We persisted.”

I opened Long’s email on a warm Saturday afternoon when I was trying unsuccessfully to work. With deadlines and revisions looming and several other time-sensitive projects languishing in limbo, I couldn’t find creative inspiration anywhere. Despite two cups of coffee and a mugful of Earl Grey, I was slumped over my keyboard, staring at the greenery wilting in my yard. And then I read Long’s letter, and the fog in my brain parted, and by dinnertime I’d drafted a feature pitch that I’d been unable to translate from mind to sentences all week. Suddenly, it was so simple: Just tell the story. Surely I’m not the only writer who sometimes forgets this most basic of concepts? (Right? Anyone?) I’m grateful to Long for the reminder.

That was not only the story of a gene in a small fly, but a long old history [of] human beings survived by the beautiful desires they developed and the courage they worked against the brutality and stupidity, in the recent history of the old country or in the remote past of the central kingdom.

(Photo via Cultural China)

Quick recap: My point was that the larger problem is caused in part by the lack of female editors at men’s magazines, which publish this sort of journalism–whereas the mastheads of women’s magazines, which do not publish this sort of journalism, are staffed largely by women. So the people who might be more inclined to seek out female journalists for meaty narratives (women editors) are working at the publications where meaty narratives simply aren’t part of the mix (women’s magazines).

I am by no means the only person to have made that point. In an exchange with Sid Holt, ASME’s chief executive, earlier this week, Mother Jones co-editors-in-chief Clara Jeffery and Monika Baeurlein raised an important question: Why does it have to be this way?

Why is it that (most) men’s magazines consider ambitious reporting and storytelling to be essential to their brands, and women’s magazines don’t? Every woman we’ve ever met—including all the smart and wonderful women’s magazine editors we’ve met through ASME—wishes it were otherwise.

And Holt replied that it’s partially a question of catering to the masses.

The reason long-form journalism doesn’t have a place in women’s magazines is that the audiences are too big—it’s the same reason multiplexes show “The Hunger Games” and not “Bully.” The magazines that do publish it get away with it because their business models are different—which is another way of saying their circs are smaller.

I see his point, to some degree. Then again, newsstand sales of Vanity Fair (323,946) are barely lower than those of Seventeen (324,741), Good Housekeeping (325,351), or Vogue (348,850). And Vanity Fair is no stranger to the ASME awards. I think it’s more to do with women’s magazines’ historic missions, which, let’s face it, had nothing to do with “ambitious reporting and storytelling.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean women’s mags can’t try to bring big journalism into their mix. Women clearly want to read these sorts of stories, and I highly doubt newsstand sales of Glamour or Elle would drop if they included at least the occasional incisive 4,000-word article.

A reader of my previous post, Jessica Langlois, wondered whether many of the magazines that publish long-form journalism have more female readers than male. I didn’t know the answer, but have since learned, thanks to another reader who didn’t want to comment publicly: They do.

Among the magazines nominated in the National Magazine Awards Reporting category, the readers do skew female: The Atlantic is the only publication on the list where women make up less than half the readers, at 41 percent. Women make up 53 percent of readers at Los Angeles magazine; 51 percent at The New Yorker, and 77 percent at Vanity Fair.

So I ask again: Why does it have to be this way? If women want to read big stories just as much as men do (which clearly we do), and if there’s no lack of top-notch female journalists to pen these pieces, then what can we do to close the byline gap?

As Lucy Madison rightly pointed out on The Awl, the dearth of women among the nominees can perhaps be explained in part by the dearth of female bylines in the sort of magazines that publish long-form narrative journalism.

At the New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic and The Atlantic, for instance, less than thirty percent of the stories published in 2011 were written by women, according to this year’s VIDA Count, which did a gender breakdown of bylines in each magazine.

The VIDA Count is pretty fascinating; check out the interview with its cofounder at Mother Jones (which, by its own count, had equal numbers of male and female bylines last year.)

I’ve long bemoaned the fact that there are so few women represented among the contributing editors on many of these publications. (Contributing editors are the writers whose work you’re most likely to see in the mag; they either have contracts for a certain number of words a year or just enjoy a privileged relationship with the editors.) It’s also true that many of the magazines that publish narrative pieces are staffed largely by men. Part of the reason is that a lot of the narrative journalism is published in magazines targeted at men.

Take Esquire, for instance, which often scoops up ASME nominations and awards: On the masthead of the March issue, of the 33 editorial staffers listed –including the photo, art, and fashion people—only nine are women. And from what I can tell, only one or possibly two of those are in a position to assign stories.

I’m not necessarily faulting Esquire. The same is true in reverse at women’s magazines. The problem, though, is that women’s magazines don’t publish very much narrative journalism—the kind of stories that win ASME nominations and end up in the “Best American” collections. That same story from The Awl quoted two female editors of women’s magazines saying things I found seriously disturbing—and the fact that they said them so matter-of-factly only makes it worse.

Amy Astley, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, said competing in the hard-hitting writing long-form categories would almost directly conflict with what the magazine aims to do.

“We don’t do long-form journalism,” said Astley. “We know that our girls want to read and they like our features, but stories can’t be thousands of words long, and they have to be written to them. Which makes the tenor of the whole thing very different.”

The same rule applies to service magazines like SELF— which also do win National Magazine Awards for their often shorter personal service pieces.

“Women’s service journalism is very respectful of the fact that our readers have very little time,” Danziger said. “By nature, it’s supposed to impart a lot of information in sort of a packaged way, so that you can dive in, get it quickly and go back to your life.”

I’m sorry, what? So American women can’t cope with anything longer than a recipe or five top make-up tips? And men have all this leisure time to sit around reading magazines, perhaps also drinking a manly cocktail while the Mrs cooks dinner and tends to the kids?

Guess what, women’s mags: I’m a woman, and I have a really busy life, and I read magazine stories longer than 1000 words. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Does anyone else find this attitude incredibly offensive toward women?

Alas. None of this is likely to change soon.

As far as the ASME awards go, women are unlikely to see a huge jump in nominations unless editors either start changing the process through which they assign out pieces, or more outlets exist for general interest long-form journalism targeted at women.

Or perhaps all the attention will provoke a period of affirmative action among the editors who assign lengthy stories. As my friend Paige Williams put it on her blog, “don’t assume female long-formers can’t hang or that there just aren’t that many of us out there. We’re out here.” Amen, sister.