Mag as Hell!

Freelance Fizzle! The Decline and Fall of the Writer

“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.” MORE >

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now?

In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear. MORE >

World’s Youngest Relic: Master of the New Old Journalism

It’s still possible to practice the dying art of old-school magazine journalism. But if you love it, like David Samuels, it will probably break your heart. MORE >

What Makes Annie Shoot?

The great Leibovitz realized she was never a journalist but made news with magazine covers. An artist who was once fascinated with her subjects lately seems largely fascinated with herself. MORE >

Illustration by Victor Juhasz