49 pages • 1-hour read
When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
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Themes
The Evolution of Print Journalism in the Digital Era
The title of Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, establishes Carter’s work to use his life story as a throughway to tracing print journalism’s evolution from the analogue through the digital era. Carter has a personal interest in conveying these industry shifts, as he has worked in the publishing and editorial world since he was in his early twenties. Throughout the memoir, Carter employs a narrative style in depicting his vocational mishaps, meanderings, and discoveries to render the often obscure journalism world accessible to a wide range of readers. His anecdotal accounts of his experiences—spanning from The Canadian Review to Time to Life to The Observer to Spy to Vanity Fair and finally to Air Mail—offer an in-depth, poignant human take on how the journalism world has changed as a result of technological advancement.
Carter employs a humble, self-deprecating tone in order to capture his novice status when he first entered the publishing industry. By casting himself as an inexperienced but curious individual, Carter conveys how much he had to learn in order to make sense of the print journalism world from The Canadian Review on. This job was Carter’s introduction to journalism, and taught him how to write, lay out, print, and distribute a magazine all by hand. He transferred these skills to his work at every other publication where he was employed. However, as television and the internet began to take over media, Carter realized he had to adapt with the changing times. For example, when Carter was at Life, he discovered that “the largest and most influential magazine in the country, had fallen victim to […] the three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC” (85). The publication (which was “a picture magazine” at heart) was floundering in a world now driven by video and film (85). Carter soon left Life because he realized the publication wasn’t as adaptable as he believed it should be. He found The Observer and Spy more nimble publications. Via his editorial work in these contexts, Carter was able to adjust to the advent of the digital era while maintaining the relevancy of print journalism. He consistently renders these experiences with humility, noting how much he learned from his colleagues and mentors as he developed his own voice and point of view.
Carter’s decision to launch Air Mail after his Vanity Fair retirement underscores his underlying message that editors must adapt to the times. For Carter this meant starting a new magazine in his older age and creating an online realm that fostered connection, deep thinking, and amusement. Although he acknowledges that “getting a company up and running is a young man’s game,” he holds that running Air Mail has reminded him that he “simply love[s] being an editor” (403). Therefore, Carter’s willingness to change along with print journalism conveys his deep passion for the industry; he never resisted the industry’s evolution and rather chose to evolve along with it.
The Entanglement of Success, Celebrity, and Power
Carter’s reflections on his time in the publishing industry offer a broad examination of how success, celebrity, and power relate to each other. For Carter, becoming one of the most renowned magazine editors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries didn’t happen intentionally. Carter always dreamed of living in New York City, but the humorous, self-deprecating way he describes his adolescence and early adulthood implies that he never sought out wealth and fame. Rather, Carter’s narrative accounting of his life suggests that he happened upon his elite lifestyle and career because he took chances and was willing to adapt. At the same time, his New York dream did represent the sort of glamorous lifestyle Carter ended up securing for himself:
After reading Act One and Youngblood Hawke, I knew that I wanted my adult life to be in New York, in the world of magazines or theater. The city, that shimmering vessel of opportunity and reward, was where I wanted to be. […] Movies and the magazines I read were my guideposts to the more glamorous world outside our frosted, snowy windows. I wanted an adult life of cocktails, cigarettes, bridge games, witty banter, and clothes that weren’t tartan (29-30).
Carter describes his early longings for an exciting life using vivid atmospheric details and humor. This passage also underscores how closely connected success, celebrity, and power were to Carter, even before he’d fully formulated his career path. If he wanted to find success at a magazine, he’d have to immerse himself in elite, influential circles in New York City.
Carter’s time at Vanity Fair taught him that to maintain his status in the publishing world, he had to form relationships with members of the upper social echelon. From Chapters 8-21, Carter details the numerous wealthy, famous, esteemed, established, or influential figures he worked with throughout his time with the magazine. Although some of these individuals were either frustrating or challenging to work with, Carter holds that such connections helped him to maintain his reputation. He garnered respect in the publishing world because of the people he knew—once famous people vouched for him, he was able to prove himself as an editor and take even more risks with the magazine.
Carter’s heavy emphasis on the Oscars party and the Cannes dinner also convey his personal relationship with money and power. Once he had a name for himself in publishing, he made more money and had more influence. Carter’s memoir thus captures the capitalist model of success by subtextually underscoring America’s obsession with wealth and celebrity. Carter’s representations of modern media also convey the inequities of the system; his story reiterates the socioeconomic notion that where there is money, there is power.
The Media’s Impact on Political and Cultural Narratives
Carter’s memoir braids episodes from his personal and professional life to offer a sweeping examination of how the media can affect the political and cultural narrative. When Carter first began working in the magazine world via The Canadian Review, he had an immediate sense that “more political coverage was what the magazine needed” (50). From this job on, Carter prioritized major social, cultural, and political events in his publications because he understood how reliant the populace was on media for understanding current events.
Carter’s work with Spy and Vanity Fair offered him hands-on opportunities to craft narratives about New York life, American politics, and international events. His reflections on first attempts to launch his own publication offer insight into this entanglement between media, politics, and culture:
In the evenings I had started to tinker with something I’d been mulling for a long time—a twice-weekly Berliner-size newspaper that would come out on Tuesdays for shopping ads and on Thursdays for entertainment ads. […] It was going to be based largely on the major industries that drove New York and the people who steered them: fashion, television, media, advertising, law, theater, government, and art (123).
Carter’s concept for his independent journal captures his insider knowledge of the industry. He had little interest in publishing a special-interest paper that focused on only one aspect of New York or American life. Rather, he understood that a broader publication would offer more comprehensive coverage, would reach a wider range of individuals, and would disseminate a more accessible rendering of the zeitgeist. This paper never materialized, but Carter did soon launch Spy and then moved to Vanity Fair. With both of these publications, Carter learned how to write about American life while adapting with large-scale cultural shifts and political changes.
Carter’s incorporation of political coverage into Vanity Fair reportage revitalized the magazine’s reputation. Giving attention to international and global politics in the pages of Vanity Fair was especially important given the magazine’s failure to accurately cover “the rise of fascism in Europe” leading up to World War II (323). Under Carter, the magazine “turned a corner” when it followed the 9/11 attacks and reported on the 2008 Great Recession (323). In doing so, Carter was acknowledging and using his magazine’s influence to craft a narrative about who America was and why. He had discovered America was no longer exporting tangible goods to the world, but intellectual property: “America was becoming the world’s first information and entertainment superpower” and Vanity Fair was “at the dawn of this tectonic shift” (263). Instead of avoiding coverage of taboo political conflicts or cultural shifts, Carter gave them full attention in his magazine. Carter’s work illustrates Carter’s awareness of how information spreads: if Vanity Fair didn’t tell these stories, someone else would.
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