I don't give a damn about Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore's plans for tonight. I thought I'd find Tweets from the local newspapers useful but I rarely read them even when they are texted to my phone. And I've found little value myself in Tweeting other than to have new blog posts and shows in the podcast feed broadcasted or when I forget to bring a notebook to an assignment and need to keep track of something.But this. Oh my. This is just too great.
I'd never heard of Dan Baum before. He's been a writer for the New Yorker and now has a book about post-Katrina New Orleans out that's getting raves. And he is making Twitter into something I can actually, finally enjoy.
Beginning on May 8 at 10:46 a.m., Baum has been Tweeting the story of how he lost his gig at The New Yorker. It is riveting. Not just how he lost it -- he hasn't totally gone through that yet -- but what it's like to be a New Yorker writer. Among the best stuff to me:
* His uncredited, unpaid wife did half his work. Yo, Miles...
* He made a paltry $90,000 a year, no benefits, for 30,000 words. (Paltry, that is, considering the enormous prestige, the fact that he was supporting a family, the fact that he was barred from writing for a list of other major magazines including Playboy and Rolling Stone, and that most mid-career hires at The New York Times make more.) He also admitted he tried for 17 years to get a New Yorker assignment, which suddenly filled me with a great deal of hope.
* His Tweets have pointed to fascinating parts of his site including successful and unsuccessful story pitches and even full stories he wrote that were killed by the New Yorker. (Of Vegas interest, by the by, is his failed pitch to do a New Yorker piece on the Binion slaying. I'm not sure if the NYer ever did anything about Binion.)
So, OK, Hunter Hillegas, Melissa Arsenuik and the rest of you who have told me I'm wrong about Twitter being over. This very narrowly focused use of the tool is working for me. But guess what? It works in this instance because it's behaving like...a storyteller. It's not what Dan had for breakfast or what he thinks of the Mets game. He's hooked me by telling a compelling yarn with actual suspense. Which is something that less than half of a percent of the folks who use Twitter, including me, do.
When Baum is done with this peculiar confessional exercise, though, and goes back to reporting the minutae of his book tour, something tells me I'll tune out. And then I'll be back to my original thesis: Twitter is over.
