Make-Believe Makes a Debut on Politics Daily

1 year ago

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Woman Up Editor

Last month, the New York Times launched a "summer thriller" series. Although heartened by the decision to include fiction writing in its Sunday offering, I wondered about the newspaper's placement of the work.

Kicked off with a short story by best-selling writer Lee Child, and followed up with an installment by Dean Koontz, I criticized the venerable Times, one of the last pillars of print journalism, for choosing to put fantasy, sprung from an author's imagination, in the section dedicated to opinion.

My sister Woman Up writers argued that while an opinion section was a strange venue to look for make-believe tales, fiction was nevertheless a welcome discovery among the gray lady's pages. Ria cited National Endowment for the Arts data lamenting how literature is missing from our daily lives, and Michelle wondered what better medium than newspaper or magazine "to recruit new literary travelers."

In the dying broadsheet industry that once churned out billions of words a day on newsprint, many readers who used to neatly fold their dailies to read on trains or scatter sections wildly across the breakfast table now consume their news in front of a monitor. Less than three months ago, Politics Daily launched these hyperlinked pages to join a world of "content providers" who gather and report the news via the Internet. Over 2.4 million of you read us regularly, and we had 6.4 million unique visitors in June. Thank you.

Literature, meantime, is undergoing its own struggle for survival as book publishing faces the same difficult economics as print journalism. Happily, as with news, there is no shortage of appetite for the literary form. Sunday night, I attended a panel discussion at Politics & Prose, one of the dwindling number of independent bookstores left in America, where a group of women contributors to a small collection of short fiction titled Gravity Dancers read excerpts of their work. A love of letters was everywhere in the book-lined room. The book store was filled with authors, teachers of writing, readers of fiction and as many fans of the artistic form as could fit in the aisles and alcoves of the shop. The women talked to each other and their audience earnestly about finding mentors, attending writers' groups, and listening to their muse.

While for the Times, the thrill of thrillers was apparently fleeting (the section seems to have restored a commitment to well-argued opinion), and I still don't know if the shrinking platform of print journalism can spare the space for fiction, I am certain that just as journalism will outlive its institutions, so will literature.

I'm especially happy to report that Politics Daily has begun answering that call. Michelle Brafman's award-winning short story, "Harvard Man," is published here. Enjoy.

Filed Under: Woman Up

Tagged: fiction, gravity Dancers, GravityDancers, Politics and Prose, PoliticsAndProse, PoliticsDaily fiction, PoliticsdailyFiction, print journalism, PrintJournalism

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