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June 9, 2009
Writers' Conference Promotes Hope for New Age in Publishing
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CONTACT:
Lewis Frumkes, Director of The Writing Center, lfrumkes@mmm.edu,
(212) 774-4810
Megan Youngblood, Communications Specialist, myoungblood@mmm.edu, (212) 517-0658
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Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic, addresses the future of publishing. | | (New York, NY) During The Writing Center’s 2009 Writers’ Conference and Intensives, editors and writers collaborated June 1-4 at Marymount Manhattan College, fostering ideas for the future of the print industry. On June 4, the conference’s keynote editor speaker J. Peter Scoblic addressed what he called “a dark time for publishing.”
With a growing 40 percent of people reading their news on the Web, Scoblic, who is the executive editor of The New Republic’s print and Web editions, said that the social change of how people get their news coupled with an economic depression has struck the newspaper industry hard.
“People have found that they can get the same content on-line for free,” Scoblic said about former newspaper readers. “And newspapers haven’t figured out a way to charge for their content (on-line) without driving readers away.”
Arguing that print can no longer exist alone as a form of journalism, Scoblic stressed that using content across multiple platforms, such as transforming a print article into a Web article or into a follow-up blog story, is necessary for publications to survive and to keep up with competition in the current economic environment. By providing primary information, he claimed, newspaper reporting still holds a value unparallel to any other medium.
“Someone who has worked a beat for many years in the newspaper industry can bring a degree of expertise that no one else can,” said Scoblic, asserting investigative reporting as the newspaper’s lasting quality.  |  | | |
Meredith Berlin, former editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, appeared on the Editors Panel.
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During one of the 12 panels, Meredith Berlin, former editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, avowed that magazines and Web content can co-exist.
“As long as you have your curiosity, you can write, you can publish,” Berlin assured writers attending the Editors Panel.
More than 200 expert and aspiring writers attended the conference. The Memoir panel—which was moderated by Lance Morrow and included panelists Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Conner, Carole Gault, Dani Shapiro, Kenneth Whyte and Bob Morris—drew the largest audience.
“I think this is because many people wish to write about themselves and record their experiences,” said Lewis Frumkes, Director of The Writing Center.
Writing Intensives led by Lance Morrow, William Zinsser, Meg Wolitzer and Ellen Sandler were held at Marymount Manhattan from Monday through Thursday. Wolitzer, who is the author of many novels including Surrender Dorothy and The Ten Year Nap, taught a creative fiction workshop. Treb Winegar, from MMC’s Office of Institutional Advancement, attended Wolitzer’s Fiction Intensive in hopes of using the setting to hearten ideas and motivation for a short fiction piece he is currently writing.
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Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland, was a keynote speaker at the Writers' Conference. | | “It was good to be at a table with other people who are serious about their writing and improving it. Most of the other people in the workshop had one or two novels they were working on and had already been to several of these kinds of workshops,” Winegar said. “It was pretty intimidating, but Meg created an environment where we could speak critically about each other’s work in a constructive way—which in some cases we produced right on the spot.”
Panelists included writers Mary Higgins Clark, Colin Harrison, Daphne Merkin, Lance Morrow, Meg Wolitzer, Bruce Jay Friedman, Ben Cheever, Tony Hendra, Jeffrey Deaver, Harry Evans, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and more. Other keynote speakers included Joseph O’Neill, the author of Netherland, and Christopher Reich, the author of the best-seller Rules of Deception.
Marymount Manhattan College is an urban, independent, liberal arts college. The mission of the College is to educate a socially and economically diverse population by fostering intellectual achievement and personal growth and by providing opportunities for career development.
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