McSweeney's

Nick Denton, out-going managing editor of Gawker, has just introduced a new feature to his Web site called The Unspiked Files.

According to Mr. Denton:

[M]agazine articles are often dropped not because they're bad but because they're good. Or—more often—simply because they've been overtaken by events or clash with some other article or because an insecure editor has over-commissioned... Anyway, here's an alternative for journalists who've spent weeks slaving on an article only to see it spiked: Gawker's unspiked files.

Writers are invited to send Gawker killed magazine pieces. Mr. Denton continues, "we won't be providing financial compensation (and you have already been paid a kill fee, after all) but we'll run your article in full and promote in links any book or other project." 

Sounds like a good idea.  read more »

Like a parent who threatens to turn around a car full of unruly kids unless they behave this instant, Vice magazine has decided to suspend its letters page until readers can send them something worth printing.

"You know what? No letters page this month," declare the editors of the Brooklyn-based youth culture and integrated marketing magazine. "You know why? Because we aren’t receiving enough real letters. We mainly get emails now, and people don’t think when they write emails."

Lamenting the fact that they used to receive "great letters... in decorated envelopes along with goofy little tokens, tchotchkes, gizmos, and gifts inside," the editors are throwing down the gauntlet:

In protest of this state of affairs, we are suspending the letters page for one month.  read more »

London’s Sunday Times yesterday included a gushing essay by author Stephen Amidon about Dave Eggers' massively popular literary brand, McSweeney’s, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The article praises Mr. Eggers as a “charismatic and indefatigable literary style guru” whose publishing “empire” fuses just the right mix of raw talent, eccentricity and social consciousness to make McSweeney’s, as Granta was before it, the number one “talent-spotter of new American fiction.” " What really sets Eggers’s empire a part, though, is that it possesses that most elusive and valued of modern attributes: a brand," Mr. Amidon writes. His vision of the “ideal McSweeney’s reader”? He (or she) “lives in Brooklyn, wears interesting T-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalisation but uncool to go on too much about it.” In other words, the ideal McSweeney’s reader is the entire population of Williamsburg and Park Slope? Well, that certainly jives with Mr. Amidon’s subsequent suggestion that the San Fransisco-based McSweeney’s “wants to make the world a better place – or at least more like the cooler parts of Brooklyn.”

The big dogs of publishing might have Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, but the little ones have indie rock. Unclear when the flirtation became a marriage, but the benefit concert held Sunday night at Beacon Theater for 826 NYC, the McSweeney’s-sponsored reading-and-writing program for kids, seems a good indication that independent literature and independent music are happily locked in a warm, wordy bear hug.  read more »