[SIGCIS-Members] Should we aspire to be featured in or write for the New Yorker?

[Lee Vinsel]

Hello everyone,

I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too soon.

Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of text
below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few
months back. The publication on Medium, Re:form <https://medium.com/re-form>,
is edited by Sarah Rich, who has written some nice pieces on technology in
the last few months. (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal,
so the two of them make a dynamic tech duo.)

My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic
novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history
of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.

While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think Re:form
is also interested in textual ones.

Best,

Lee



* Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form
<https://medium.com/re-form>, edited by Sarah Rich, that focuses on design.
I worked with her to help get a Rich Stevens     comic
<https://medium.com/re-form/phoning-it-in-b6a9c237fad6> in there and
we're now looking for something longer and more journalistic from a
cartoonist.*

* I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if you
might pitch us.*


* The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the
section in her inaugural pos
<https://medium.com/re-form/a-field-guide-to-the-designed-world-4a15edf8f3a7>t
a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what she is    looking for in a
piece. *

*I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the
perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a
totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a
seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that
thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural
commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in
current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object
of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer
or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about
the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal
utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of
reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak
the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read
the city in a new way. *


*Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than
what I can pay for on The Nib.*

*If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch
together and send it my way.*

*Thanks!*

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate at vt.edu> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give up
> on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all had
> bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to
> excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes.
>
> I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in
> these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but
> practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what
> sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see
> up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc.  I appreciated Ian Bogost's
> post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would
> give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something
> popular."
>
> Cheers,
> Janet
>
> Dr. Janet Abbate
> Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
> Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
> Virginia Tech
> www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
>
>
>
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-- 
Assistant Professor
Program on Science and Technology Studies
College of Arts and Letters
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ 07030
AmericanScience.Blogspot.com
Twitter: @STS_News
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