Confidence in the Media

Maggie Haberman's Forthcoming Book Raises Transparency Issues

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has written her Donald Trump book, as was long ago reported and widely expected since she started covering the former president. The book won’t be out until October, but as galleys are distributed, its contents will leak as teasers. Hey, it’s a tough market.

The objection from some will be that the book will contain stories, anecdotes and facts that were newsworthy at the time, but perhaps held back from her daily stories for later use in her catch-all tome. Haberman is not alone. Any reporter on a daily beat with book potential contends with this. Even people who skip straight to books have to figure out what contents should be excerpted and what should be held back to get people to read the complete work.

Do you need another Trump book? Or even, a Trump book?

The Middlebrow will leave the politics and the Haberman/Trump psychodramas to others. What’s interesting here is how and when nonfiction writers choose to tell all. Or even, if they ever tell all. When The Middlebrow joined Forbes Media in a junior role way back in 1999, the magazine had a national reputation for strict fact checking, on par with The New Yorker. Forbes magazine was so well known for this that its articles were acceptable fact-checking sources at Mother Jones, where The Middlebrow had previously interned, despite the political differences between the two publications.

Under that fact-checking regime and with Internet journalism emerging, reporters and writers were under strict orders that their unpublished notes and observations could not be freely disseminated in other media. The idea there was pretty clear — if you reported something that didn’t stand up to editorial scrutiny or fact checking, it was not to show up on a personal website as a means to get the information out. One of The Middlebrow’s colleagues was fired for exactly that in the early days of blogging.

Obviously, details were not generally cut for being untrue. We put true things in our stories. But they were sometimes cut because writer and editor disagreed about their significance and sometimes items that were potentially defamatory were held to higher levels of scrutiny by editors, fact checkers and the legal team.

Could some of this material later make its way into books? Certainly. Forbes and presumably The New York Times vet and approve the book deals their staffers might win. That material left out of magazine or newspaper coverage winds up in a book isn’t surprising. What could cause professional trouble is if that material was never offered up to the publication. If it wound up on the cutting room floor, so be it. The publisher and author then take the reputational and legal risk of using it. If the journalist held back details for later use in a book, that would be a problem. The publication, after all, paid for the initial reporting.

The Forbes prohibition from self-publishing material that didn’t pass editorial muster didn’t, and probably couldn’t, survive the Internet. By the latter part of the aughts, Forbes had invested in a platform called True/Slant, founded by a former assistant managing editor of the magazine. It was a lot like Substack, though it emphasized the content management system over newsletter distribution. As with Substack, one of its early adopters was Matt Taibbi, then covering the Financial Crisis and politics for Rolling Stone. Forbes eventually acquired True/Slant and used its technology and concept as the basis for its online contributor model. So, Forbes moved (quite understandably) to worrying that its journalists would publish extras outside of its platform to a near open-platform model.

All of this coincided with the rise of social media and Web 2.0, where certain journalistic standards of restraint were replaced with attempts to generate user engagement. For example, in earlier years, The Middlebrow remembers an editor telling him to resist the temptation to respond in print to letters to the editor because “as the author of the story, you really already got the last word.” A few years later, journalists were encouraged to engage with internet commenters and to create Twitter accounts to build relationships and to promote stories.

It was always a dangerous proposition. While a very few writers found fame on Twitter that they were able to turn into money or career advancement, it seemed that for most people it was unpaid work that entailed high risk (you could embarrass yourself and your employer and get yourself fired) for only potential and, if it happens, scant reward.

Still, many writers have and do use social media to establish their expertise and that means their followers expect that by following them, they will learn more than just what is in their books and stories. Another aspect of this, though, is that for some prominent writers, people follow them to yell at them (or at least to feel like peers). To go back to Haberman, again without getting too political, a lot of Twitter users follow or lurk her account because they believe that the way she has covered Trump for The Times matters and they want her to know about it.

The idea that social media is a place where media consumers can publicly critique writers for mainstream and alternative media was even embraced by The Times, which ended its ombudsman/public editor program based on the argument that social media allows media consumers to police the media through crowdsourcing. But, as comedian Dave Chappelle reminds us, “Twitter is not a real place.” The Times business and editorial brass knows this and what’s said to its writers and editors on Twitter is far more likely to be cited as an example of online incivility than to have any effect on news coverage or commentary.

The reason for this tangent is that the rise of Web 2.0 really changed standards over how journalists and nonfiction writers think about where to share what they learn in the course of their research. In a way, it’s an extension of the old book deal model where writers who are poorly paid in the first place get a small shot at real extra money for work they’ve already done. It really is a moonshot, too. Big book deals like Haberman’s get press and attention, but most advances are small and most books that are published never wind up generating royalties because they don’t make up their advances before they go out of print.

For a typical working journalist, the book deal means: you get an advance that hopefully covers the salary hit from having to take 3-6 months off of work to devote to writing the book. That advance, which is paid in thirds (on signing, on delivery, and on acceptance or publication) has to cover all sorts of expenses incurred while you’re on leave from a salaried job (like health insurance). There’s also the risk, in a financially strapped media industry, that layoffs will happen while you’re on leave, out of sight and mind while top editors make lists of who is most productive. The book comes out, there’s a party, maybe some reviews, and the best outcome for most is returning to the daily job, just with a book credit.

Very few are in the Haberman position of having a forthcoming blockbuster with enough commercial potential to justify holding anything back so that the book has unique revelations that can be used for marketing.

Another wrinkle is that a lot of these books are really like movies where you just know the best scenes are in the trailers. A great example is Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The Middlebrow read both the pre-release magazine excerpts and then the book. The excerpts were more than enough to have made the point. Heck, the publicity television interviews were probably enough. The book merely reiterates a theme over many pages. The Middlebrow finds this is true of most books that cover contemporary politics — every story has its ideal form and the old New Yorker length article is probably superior to the book for most of this. We’re not talking Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton here.

The Middlebrow doesn’t believe that journalists generally hold back useful information from their editors, publications, or readers. The rewards simply aren’t there. Haberman’s calculus might be different, though it seems that by October of 2022 any concealed revelations would have to be major, or Trump will have to be a credibly powerful presidential candidate for it to matter. For the most part, if you’ve been casually reading the papers since 2015, you know who Trump is, how he runs his business and how he governed.

Seriously, if you’re tempted to buy Haberman’s book next fall, reach out to The Middlebrow and I’ll provide five contemporary fiction alternatives where your money and spirit will be better served.