The spiked article conundrum in the age of interweblogs
Conservative writer John Derbyshire recently had one of his articles spiked by conservative flagship magazine National Review (to which I subscribe, I might add). Some of Derbyshire’s paleo-conservative friends took that as an opportunity to slam the House That Buckley Built, but The Derb himself wants nothing to do with that kind of sentiment. In his February 2006 Diary column, Derb writes about the affair (if it at all is one):
In the old days of print-only opinion journalism, you’d send in a piece, the editor would look it over and decide whether to use it or not. If he wanted it, he’d probably have objections or quibbles to this sentence or that factoid, and let you know. There’s be some to-ing and fro-ing with the editor and his fact checkers, and eventually the piece would appear. A month or so later, a check would show up in your mailbox, assuming the magazine hadn’t gone out of business in the interim. (Which happens more often than you’d think. It’s happened three or four times to me in 25 years of opinionating.) If that editor didn’t want your piece, you’d try another editor, unless you were under exclusive contract, which you hardly ever were.
In Internet bloviating, it’s all different. The rise of the blog means that we can be our own editors, publishing our own “magazines.” When an actual old-style editorial process is involved, as with NRO, the economics of the web demands that it be a bare-bones operation, run on a shoestring, with no leisurely discussions over a three-martini lunch about the placement of a semicolon, and no fact-checking, and everyone at the production (as opposed to “content provider”) end severely overworked. You send a piece in; it appears or not; the end. The fallback editor for unpublished pieces is… yourself. Heck, this is fugitive stuff. It won’t be lying around in your dentist’s waiting room six months from now.
Even a bare-bones editorial operation has the right to decide whether or not to use a submission, though, and that applies to copy from “regulars” as much as to over-the-transom submissions. It has ever been thus, and if you call that “suppression,” well, you are living in a world of suppression. Like the captain of a man-o’-war, an editor has to be a despot. There’s no other way to do the thing. If you can’t handle that, you won’t be happy as a freelancer. I personally am very happy doing what I do. I have no issues with NR/NRO, and to the very best of my knowledge, they have none with me. The not-posted piece has not been the topic of any conversations between me and them. Quite possibly they just lost it — that happens. I’m not out of pocket: My NRO contributions (columns, Radio Derb, Window on the Week items, The Corner) are covered by a flat monthly stipend, regardless of whether a particular column (or Corner posting, or Radio Derb segment, or Window on the Week graf) goes up or not.
I do, however, feel a bit uneasy knowing that people — good friends of mine in all cases, acting with generous intentions — are using the “not posted” entries on my personal archive as sticks with which to poke fun at NR, a magazine I love — I’ve been subscribing for over 30 years — but which some of them, my friends, dislike. I am therefore going to stop posting unpublished pieces to the “Journalism” and “Web Journalism” pages on my personal website (a thing I’ve been doing for as long as I’ve had a site). I hate to waste copy, and may post these rejects somewhere else, but until I’ve sorted out the ethical niceties to my own satisfaction, I’ll keep them to myself. And all this is just me talking; none of it was commanded, suggested, prompted, or inspired by anyone at NR/NRO.
(Emphases mine)
Mr. Derbyshire is an interesting fellow. Born and raised in post-war working-class England, he found his way to Hong Kong (where he appeared as a “thug, uncredited” in a Bruce Lee movie) and mainland China (where he met his now wife) before eventually settling down in Long Island and acquiring a U.S. citizenship. I like his writing, and share, sadly, much of his pessimism regarding the future of western civilization and its people. However, he tends to gravitate towards certain aspects of human differences - differences betweens groups of humans, really - that the ideologically diverse* readership of a mainstream conservative magazine like National Review quite simply isn’t ready for yet. Least you think the magazine is as wet as some of its detractors think, Mr. Derbyshire frequently engages creationists/I.D.’ers, of which there apparently are many among the magazine’s readers. He’s also, in his own words, a mild homophobe.
Here’s the piece that was spiked.
