Marie Claire, the lifestyle magazine, wants to “broaden the geographic diversity” of its writers. Or so says the writer Andrea Stanley who just posted on Twitter, “Tell me who I should hire to write features at @marieclaire who doesn’t live on a coast. Maybe that person is you?”
This is little more than an influential editor at a popular magazine issuing a cattle call. Another analogy: it’s like throwing dog food into a room full of starving people and seeing who might get to it first. It’s a supremely humiliating move and designed to make writers feel like what they are: constantly precarious, always desperate, willing to take on an assignment without any basic details like, oh, pay.
It’s a terrible environment for writers in the United States right now, as hedge fund owners get bored with the idea of publishing and move on to hydroponic farming in space or whatever their restless minds yearn to explore. Publications, print and online, are shuttering everywhere, and too many readers still think writing is just a cute hobby and not work and consequently demand that every single word ever written be available for free, in perpetuity. Just this morning, November 30, 2023, various writers at Vox reported that they have been laid off, and more such cuts are likely to be made at various publications big and small. Writers are understandably desperate for anything resembling a byline, no matter the pay (and, increasingly, very few of them depend on writing alone to get by, so for many pay is not a concern—thus making matters very hard for working writers who can’t compete).
In such times, it’s hard for writers to be choosy or dignified about where they write and how they get their gigs. Attend any gathering that includes a combination of writers, editors, and publishers and the first thing that hits you as you walk in through the door is the rank stench of desperation. In these situations, editors and publishers are either kindly and well-meaning, politely responding to inquiries and handing out cards, or actual dickheads, swaggering around offering themselves, blatantly or not, for all kinds of fellatio, simulated or real, smug in the knowledge that they can quite literally make hopeful writers dance and prance in the hope of an assignment of any size or worth.
Enter Andrea Stanley, whose publicly available profile on Instagram shows her living the kind of life all writers dream of and whose bylines include the top publications of the day, including the New York Times, New York, and the Washington Post — and often in actual print. Her Linkedin profile indicates what seems to have been an untroubled rise up through the ranks and her stints include the inevitable and presumably unpaid internships at Elle and Self, which appear to have led to enviable positions at publications like Seventeen and Cosmopolitan. The point of such a close examination of her credentials is not to hurl bolts of envy at her but to ask aloud: what kind of a writer thinks it’s okay to simply issue a cattle call for writers without even a hint at what the pay might be, and in a way that deprives them of their dignity and makes them run to the feeding gate, jostling each other for space? And what kind of publication thinks it’s okay to sanction this?
Stanley’s Twitter bio describes her as a writer and editor, an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Journalism, and “currently on assignment” at Marie Claire. I haven’t found any trace of her at either NYU or Marie Claire, but that may be an error on my part. At any rate, it appears that she has been handed some measure of responsibility for assigning features to writers and thinks it would be a nifty idea to stand on the ramparts of a popular magazine and simply clang the dinner bell.
How might this have been handled differently? For starters, Stanley could have done the legwork before she set out on Twitter. She could have read some non-coastal magazines, print or online, perused writers’ websites and their work, made inquiries in her doubtless wide networks, and reached out to colleagues in the U.S and elsewhere. If she still decided that she needed more help online, the announcement should have stated something like this: “I just got hired at Marie Claire as an editor [or whatever her current job title is] and we’re looking for writers outside the usual coastal areas. Here’s a link further describing what we’re looking for, with a contact email, a description of our rates, and the kinds of writing we’re interested in. Please forward this to friends and colleagues.”
I suspect none of this occurred to Stanley, who lives in (or makes it seem like she lives in) a rarefied world of powerful publishing elites, partly because the call is code for “looking for people of colour who may not be from either coasts.” If she’d been tasked with finding, say, tech writers or climate change journalists, she might have deigned to at least include the pay (maybe, perhaps: all writers feel the sting of humiliation these days). But “geographic diversity” is also shorthand for people who are not white or, at the very least, “people who don’t live in New York or Los Angeles so, really, I don’t think you’re important enough.” So why bother to pretend that such writers are even human beings?
Andrea Stanley’s cattle call is, ultimately, not even about her or Marie Claire. It reflects a publishing world that smugly takes advantage of writers’ desperation and their desire to be published, that knows full well there will always be any number of people jumping at the chance to write for a popular publication. Most of all, it’s about a publishing world that has no problem in humiliating writers—especially the most under-represented among them—by making them sing for a supper they may never see.
Yasmin Nair writes a lot about writing and publishing. You can read more of her work on the subject here (for starters).
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