The Great Gatsby

"Now a practical tip. You get freelance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on deadline. Actually you don’t need all three. Just two."

Neil Gaiman

(Source: esquire.my, via rdjnews)

"Our salvation depends upon our printing the news."

Fairchild Publications motto

"The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

Robert Benchley

"[We live in a] world of ever-increasing and ever-complicated influences. A topsy-turvy world ajumble with color TV, chattering computers, Pill-popping promiscuity, and a world that Grandma would not only fail to recognize but would probably drop dead in. Given all those high-octane influences competing for our attention, it is strange indeed to stumble upon a newspaper with a highly selective nation-wide circulation of only 85,000 that packs any sort of wallop other than when it hits the bottom of the trash bin wrapped snugly around the day’s garbage. Women’s Wear Daily is no general release movie, no prime-time television program, no household word. Yet it is, to many, as sexy as the Pill and just as necessary. To others it is not so much the paper around the garbage— as the garbage itself. But to be fair, even those detractors admit they cannot do without their daily dose of WWD, for to most, WWD is like a dangerous drug: mild at first, but steadily more demanding. (Who could believe a newspaper that forces readers to wade through a forest of zipper ads, personnel changes in Texas department stores, and death notices for upstanding but obscure Jewish garment manufacturers could be anything, especially addictive?) Once hooked, a daily fix is necessary. It becomes a ritual rivaling the Salute to the Flag and bedtime prayers."

Katie Kelly, The Wonderful World of Women’s Wear Daily (1972)

(Source: leoncrawl)

"Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, [Hugh] Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them."

Gay Talese

What a journalist!

My first page one (albeit lower half) story in a U.S. newspaper. Can’t complain.

"You have to be there. You have to see the people. Even if you don’t think you’re getting that much, you’re getting a lot more than you realize."

Gay Talese

"Clay’s real interest, although I’m not sure he ever thought it out conceptually, was status and how it operates in New York. At Esquire, he was the creator of this idea of making charts out of what part of a restaurant you should be seated in, and rating all kinds of things by their status. And so much of Manhattan is concerned about that; that was the key to the success of New York magazine. Manhattan is in love with ambition, and Clay made New York magazine into a reflection of the drama of ambition that Manhattan is. There is no other reason to be in New York but to be around ambitious people. The quality of life is dreadful. But the people are fascinating."

Tom Wolfe (on Clay Felker)