Beyond celebrity: A Slate piece on the write-around

This is a great Slate piece focusing on the cult of access, the ever evolving world of well-handled "public figures" and the handlers who make them so. Music journalism is far from exempt in this game, and the cover is one such place where mags get access in trade for censored or artist controlled stories. There is at least one music magazine out there that has routinely bartered for such access with high profile (mostly female) pop stars only to openly mock them throughout the whole profile, showing the exercise in its most advanced and cynical form - "sexy" front cover at all costs, even when the consensus of the editorial department is that the subject is not worth a fair representation.

Quoting this part mostly as a way to encourage anyone who has not read Gay Talese's amazing "write around" celebrite profile, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" to click through and spend some time with one of the best pieces of mag writing ever produced:

Even the celebrity profile can be transformed with write-around investigative reporting. Consider that the story some call the greatest magazine story ever written, Gay Talese's classic "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," was a write-around. Talese painted a portrait of Sinatra from the outside, spending long, tedious hours with his flunkies and hangers-on, capturing the ripples and crosscurrents of influence and ego among the nine circles of sycophants who surrounded him that cumulatively told a story of raw power.

Access itself is not all it's cracked up to be. There's the journalistic equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. I know, I've suffered from it. I find it hard to be as cutting, or even as critical, as I really feel about people who allow me to enter their zone of privacy. I blame my parents for teaching me manners—the best investigative journalists don't have the best manners. The best investigative reporters might be called "sociopaths for truth." I think you know the type I'm talking about. And the very best of these are often good at faking empathy and then coldly eviscerating the empathized-with one.

 

Magazines, Bring Back the Write-Around!