P&W thinks you're an idiot

It's funny how this happens with a lot of magazines: after you decide to stop paying for a subscription, they offer you two years for $5 (or some such ridiculous deal that makes you feel like you were getting ripped off all along). That's what happened to me with Poets & Writers. I signed up for a year, lost interest and didn't renew, and then I got an offer for a two year subscription for practically free. Like a sucker, I took the bait.

Well, after reading the November/December 2011 issue, I think I've finally decided that 'practically free' isn't free enough.

What bothers me is this: P&W consistently reveals a bias for the 'established' publishing market--a market that I think is seriously flawed and imminently doomed to a shake-up reminiscent of what the music industry went through in the early 2000s--and they're so blind to that bias they often come across as pretentious idiots.

Witness, for example, the interview of Richard Nash, in which Gabriel Cohen (the interviewer) asks (and I'm paraphrasing here, since I don't have a copy of the issue in hand): How will readers know what's good if they don't have editors there to tell them?

Seriously, that's what he asks. As if readers are too stupid to know if they like something or not. As if readers only read because editors tell them something is worth reading.

Really, the attitude revealed by Cohen's question (and the level of delusion that attitude depends upon in order to persist), is ridiculous. It's a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

The way I see it, there are two key players in writing--the reader and the writer. Everyone else is of secondary importance. I believe this is true in every industry--the most important people are the people who make the product and the people who buy it. Anyone else who finds a way to insert themselves into that transaction, to make money from a product without making the product itself, is of peripheral importance. They might provide a valuable service, their efforts might be of benefit to the producer and the consumer, but they aren't essential, and they aren't irreplaceable.

When editors forget that, when they start considering themselves more important than the readers and the writers both, their future looks grim.

And the same can be said for magazines.