My Thoughts on the Gina Tomaine Interview

The first thing that struck me about the interview with Gina Tomaine was thinking about magazines in relation to publishing; that I don't think people often think about non-literary magazines when discussing publishing, especially in literary circles. I think popular culture gives us all a specific idea of what it means to work in a magazine: Kate Hudson in "How to Lose A Guy In 10 Days" or Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada” are what immediately come to mind, and I think it’s fairly obvious that it’s over-glamorized and not necessarily the only career that a woman is allowed to have (despite how rom-coms seem to think it is). I had never thought about there being specific awards for the people who write and edit magazines, not just for the magazines themselves. It makes sense that magazines would be overly (not the word I’m looking for, something more like “moreso”, but I think it kind of gets the idea across) concerned with fact checking; I’d never thought about it much, but the fact that any mistake could seriously damage the credibility of the magazine puts that much more pressure on the people in charge of making sure that those mistakes don’t happen. It sounds like magazines operate more closely to newspapers than I would have thought. Also, the idea about editing yourself being harder than editing other people’s work definitely hit close to home; I’ve written things and edited them and thought “yes, good, this is good, this is done” and then shared it with a friend who immediately points out at least three spelling mistakes and two places where the idea I was trying to communicate was fully incomprehensible. The pressure of knowing that your writing will affect not just your reputation, but the reputation of everyone you work with is absolutely terrifying. And the scheduling aspect of it all seems incredibly overwhelming; to be working on the June edition at the end of March is absolutely mind blowing to someone who rarely starts things three hours before they’re due, let alone three months. I have to wonder how the coronavirus is affecting publication of magazines; they’re still being sent out (or at least, the ones I’m subscribed to are), but what is the cost for the people working on them? And what kind of permanent effect will it have; obviously more magazines and newspapers and publishers of all kinds are going to be shifting to digital and online platforms, but I have to wonder if physical publishing will ever fully recover from the hit it’s taking right now.