Chapter 168: On Startups and Innocence

Looking back, it is not surprising that innocence bordering on naivete would animate the early days of a publishing venture launched by journalists.

We journalists often project a certain “seen it all” arrogance, which belies the fact that many of us are hopeless romantics, driven by a desire to tell the world the stories we have found and worried that no one will read them. We are not the cool kids, much as we’d love to be.

My friend and partner in the early days of our venture, Mike Hoyt, was then the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, a job that necessitated keeping his writers calm, focused and productive. Mike was not the naive one. That would have been me.

I had spent the previous thirty five years of my non-teaching life as a writer. As I wrote in December, I assumed that I would go on writing forever, only to be advised that that was not to be, certainly when it came to books.

That bracing conversation with my former agent left me sitting at my desk with my head in my hands as I contemplated a future that suddenly felt bleak. I called my wife and we went out for dinner and somewhere between the second and third glasses of wine it occurred to me that while the world had changed to my disadvantage in one way – the market for mid-list authors like me, he made clear, was vanishing – the great tsunami of digital disruption had opened doors that only now I was beginning to see. Beginning with the realization that paper and ink were no longer prerequisites for publishing.

If those historically essential tools were no longer required, anyone, it stood to reason, could become a publisher. No need to ask permission and beg for access to a printing press. The revolution had already happened. I was slow to see it. Until I was forced to.

I am telling you the story of the venture that became the Big Roundtable – and since 2019 the Delacorte Review – because while many writers prefer to remain writing, there are among you – if my students are a guide – some who will want to strike out on your own and create new places where journalism can flourish – and where writers will one day be published. Journalism needs new homes for stories because so many of the publications we assumed would last forever are either gone or so diluted as to be bordering on the inconsequential.

Before getting to the practical steps – Kickstarter, design, lawyers, contracts, paying writers, and on and on and on – it is important that I address where, in retrospect, I came up short. I say this because I hope that those who might be interested in giving publishing a try, see where I went wrong and find their own, more successful paths.

I am not speaking of the many stories we published – which I am immensely proud of -- or of the opportunities we gave writers to tell the stories they needed to tell, no matter how long or obscure.

I am talking about readers. Audience. Engagement. Which remains as much a challenge for us all as it was in 2012 when Mike and I – and soon with Anna Hiatt and Cissi Falligant – launched the Big Roundtable.

I’ve told you about the year-long course I took designed to prepare journalists – and those on the business side of journalism and publishing – for the endless waves (it was not just one) of digital disruption. I learned a lot, and was often humbled, especially when it came to answering the one question that, as I soon discovered, eluded not only me but many start-ups: why does this business need to exist?

There is an essential book for anyone considering launching a publication – and really any new business: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christiansen, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Christiansen, who died in 2020, introduced the idea of disruptive innovation which held that in the wake of the kind of wholesale disruption unleashed by the digital age, the advantage lay not with legacy businesses that, seemingly days earlier had been doing just fine, but by new ventures unencumbered by doing things as they had always been done.

Small wonder that so many seemingly eternal journalism institutions which even in the early years of the 21st century were still enjoying profit margins of twenty percent – an insanely high number – were suddenly finding themselves shedding payroll, as they fought off shareholder demands for profitability, even as they were scrambling to understand what was hitting them.

Meanwhile, in what felt like a repeat of the end of the age of the dinosaurs, a slew of smaller ventures that the legacy businesses had typically ignored, were, in the harsh parlance of commerce, beginning to eat their lunch.
Of Christiansen’s many insights, the one that most resonated for me was this: that a new product succeeds when it can solve a problem for customers. A better screwdriver does not solve the problem of sore arms caused by turning screws into wood. But an electric screwdriver does.

So why did we have to exist? Who needed us? And more to the point, who was going to value what we offered enough to pay us for what we offered?

It was not enough to say – as we did in the beginning – that in providing readers with stories we could solve the problem of boredom. Bored people had no end of distractions, stories among them from publications they knew, trusted and even loved. So that wouldn’t do.

We could, instead, offer stories by new voices, writers who had yet to be discovered. People, we reasoned, love to feel they are the first to discover a song, to be able to say, you mean you haven’t heard of so-and-so? Have a listen…

Perhaps. But what about writers who already had reputations and who came to us because their stories were too long, or too detached from the news to find a home in the places where they had long been published – and which themselves were adapting to the new order by commissioning fewer pieces.

Maybe. But it was unclear whether that would pass the essential “elevator pitch” – the quick, under ten-word distillation of an idea, metaphorically delivered to an impatient superior between the first floor and, if you were lucky, the sixth. New voices and new stories from old voices. Ping. Doors open and you are left seeing the boss’ back.

It was then, after a particularly tough grilling on a presentation from my wise and incisive teachers, that I, as I wrote, I Googled “Latin for to make writers happy.” Ad Scriptorus Beatus

But what made writers happy? We asked. We learned. The answer, time and again, was the same: Being read. Being paid mattered but it was never what writers most wanted.

It was not just about being read, we began to see; it was about having the stories that mattered to them being read. Stories that existed because they emerged not in response to an event, a phenomenon, or a movie premiere. But stories that came to be because a writer needed to find it and tell it. Stories that possessed an urgency that made them feel as if, in the parlance of the craft, they jumped off the page.

It stood to reason – and perhaps more to hope – that if we could provide writers with a platform in which they could have the freedom to write their stories their way in their voices, they would produce their best work that we, in turn, would make available to readers who would be made happy by the discovery of their wonderful work.

Let me pause and talk about the stories, because this was core to the mission: I had been a writer long enough and had written for enough different publications to recognize that if I wanted to get published and, yes, paid, I needed to provide that publication with the product they wanted. An Esquire story was not an ELLE story and nor was a piece for GQ right for The New Yorker.

But what if we approached things differently, and said that there was no such thing as a Big Roundtable story? Certainly not in the subject matter or approach. We did, however, insist on one quality in the work we published: The stories had to be original works of narrative nonfiction.

Think: nonfiction short stories, built on a foundation of a beginning, middle and end (though not necessarily in that order) and propelled by the desire on the reader’s part to know what happened next.

That was it. No form. No single voice. If fiction writers could work this way, why not those of us who wrote nonfiction.

We believed that writers freed from the constraints of form and publishing schedule imperatives with which I was all too familiar, would be free to write as they wanted to write.

Readers would delight in the experience. And writers would be read.

Readers. We needed readers. And here, looking back, the innocence that would end up working so well with writers and their stories – we really did work to make writers happy – led not necessarily to a wrong turn, but one that revealed how elusive and ephemeral readers are.

I believed that if we could create a community of writers who committed to sharing each others’ work we could harness the power of a wide network and with it deliver to our happy writers a slew of soon-to-be happy readers.

This assumed certain behavior on the part of writers.

Note there that there is an I in the word writer.

I just didn’t see it.

Or perhaps didn’t want to.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture