Yes, it’s been a long time, but it was for a good cause. And now that I have a new gig and a new routine, it’s about time I freshen this place up.

The perfect article for this is something I wrote nearly seven years ago and appeared, at that time, on the now-defunct site called MediasharX. (I also reviewed Gilmore Girls and The West Wing for MSX for a bit too.) Looking at it now, it almost seems like an historic document from another era. You see, back when I was a senior in college and beyond ready to graduate, I got a little hooked on discussing my favorite TV show online. In those days, we did that through message boards and a little thing called email. When I see what shows like Glee have going on today, with their Twitter and Facebook feeds, text updates and all the information you can imagine right at your fingertips, I can’t help but be a little jealous. In my day, we had to work for our fandom!

(And we weren’t exactly the most popular kids on the interwebs, either. You Bieber fans have no idea!)

So this is a recollection of constructing a fandom on the Internet and monetizing it—along with some media history and theory I learned in all of those comm classes. It was a lot of fun to write (and research), and it’s honestly one of the stories I’ve written that I like the most. Even if it’s outrageously dated by now.

***

If anything was learned from the Clay vs. Ruben controversy on American Idol, it’s this: Do not underestimate the power of the television fanatic. Bottles of Tabasco sauce flooded into WB network offices in 2000, courtesy of Roswell fans bent on saving their show from cancellation. One of the first organized fan campaigns fought to keep the original Star Trek on the air—and morphed into the legendary fandom that exists today.

The advent of the Internet has broadened the experience of being a fan. In the past, only the most obsessed fans gathered together at conferences or published ‘zines on their fandoms, lapping up details on the next film or comic book and revering the creators as demigods. Instead of that pathetic and bespectacled image, fans now brought together by the Internet are banding together and turning proactive to take control of their programs. They’re acting as network executives and paying for the privilege.

I’m one of them. And I only wear glasses for driving. Honest.

After going through Friends and ER, my current favorite is the ABC spy drama Alias. In many ways, I’m typical of the Internet fan. I spend much of my free time at the Web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com, nitpicking episodes and searching out spoilers with those similarly obsessed. And like many of this new breed of fan, I’m willing to put my money where my mouse is.

Aaron Nadler, a college student from Harrisburg, Penn., is a poster in the Alias forums at TWoP who assisted on a banner ad campaign hosted by fellow fans. When asked why he visits TWoP, he incredulously responds, “Why not?”

Fans all across cyberspace were thrilled to hear on Aug. 1, 2003, that the trendy Web site had resolved its ongoing financial troubles to continue its unique approach to fandom another year. The site’s forums give diehard television watchers an arena where such devotion is commonplace, but with the caveat that fandom does not automatically mean mindless adulation. When judging shows on TWoP, impartiality is discouraged. Once known as Mighty Big TV, TWoP was the place where The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin famously tussled with online fans as Benjamin, his nom de keyboard. He later dedicated a subplot on his show to illustrating his less-than-flattering impressions of TWoP users.

The site is well known across the Internet for its combination of cynicism and humor—more popularly known as “snark.” In one post, a typical TWoPer can go from proclaiming undying love for their show to ridiculing the main character’s speech pattern, makeup or very reason for existence. Mention the Pixel Challenge competition (a contest for the most creative use of Photoshop) and the words “Jennifer Garner Celebrity Hot Tub Party,” and you’ve got TWoPers across the world spitting diet soda on their keyboards. Another example of the site’s irreverent nature is the term “HoYay.” Short for “Homoeroticism, Yay!” it was jokingly invented by TWoP users to laud subtext of that very sort.

This mockery reflects the rough environment of the site. Instead of the typical juvenile gushing and flame-wars of most Internet message boards, respect is instituted in a trickle-down fashion. Moderators rule with iron fists, editing posts for failing to pass grammatical snuff and booting users who display embryonic signs of “trolling.” In turn, users are wound so tight with the thought of offending a moderator that they patrol fellow posters. Membership in the TWoP forums is a privilege for which one is not entitled by simple registration.

The restrictions only allow the most respectful cynics to post, thinning the pool to the most motivated—and articulate. “When I finally signed up, I found myself hanging about in a few of the forums—Buffy, 24, Angel, Alias—and I found an amazing group of insightful, polite and content-rich postings relating to those shows,” Nadler said. The intelligence and thoughtfulness on the site has lured many an executive producer to the thorny pages of posts, some of which certainly call for their heads. Sorkin is just one such muckety-muck. In an October 2002 article in The New York Times, Alias creator J.J. Abrams said, “I’ll accept a smart critique from anywhere, whether it’s from a 50-year-old studio executive or a 12-year-old kid in a rural town…They’re doing what I’d be doing if I weren’t working in TV.”

Alias premiered in the fall of 2001, and ever since, has become a program even fans find difficult to describe. The latter half of its most recent season had former double agent Sydney Bristow working with her father to bring down her nemesis, who had teamed with her treacherous, former KGB agent mother to locate the artifacts of a 15^th-century prophet.  She had also begun a romance with her CIA handler while her roommate was murdered and replaced by a genetically engineered double. And one throwaway scene this season confirmed that even jet-setting spies can receive their doctorates in literature. But if you want to know what happened in the one and a half seasons leading up to this, you’ll quickly learn that Abrams likes revamping his show’s premise.

With all the marketing challenges of such a Byzantine layout—It’s spiked with spy action! It’s a heartfelt family drama! It’s a rule-bending sci-fi!—ratings for Alias are tepid at best. The Nielsen ratings placed it around the 60th most popular show after its first season in the Sunday 9 p.m. timeslot, but scheduled against The Sopranos and an incarnation of the popular Law & Order franchise in its second, the ratings declined and placed it 72nd. Despite the lackluster showing, Alias has the buzz of a show exponentially more popular and a cult fanbase similar to those that sustained shows like The X-Files for years. For instance, the Alias forum is always buzzing and typifies all that is TWoP. The “Dear J.J.” topic opens a direct line from fans to creator. Humorous nicknames stemming from the popular recaps and from users themselves abound in casual conversation, such as the ever-popular “SpyDaddy.” But the rest of the forum isn’t always so complimentary.

The clichéd longing looks once exchanged between Sydney and handler Vaughn prompted one exasperated fan to plead for the other characters to play matchmaker by lining the hallways of the CIA and singing “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid. A beard and turban disguise worn by star Victor Garber in an episode last December elicited derisive snorts even from diehard fans of the actor. And many users grumbled about the blatant pandering the show made to the football audience by showcasing star Jennifer Garner’s lingerie-clad assets in the opening moments of the episode that aired after Super Bowl XXXVII in January.

The users at TWoP are media-savvy enough to understand how such a display figures into the economics of a television show—the Super Bowl gives a struggling show the lead-in of a lifetime, and by advertising a sequence straight out of Maxim, the network is just capitalizing on the demographics of a football game. Making sure Alias stays on the air is a prime concern of its fans as well, but they don’t like the effort muddying the integrity of the narrative. Sydney had never been a modest character, especially with her various disguises employing skin-tight rubber, but she is also an assertive, modern female. This was the first occasion where the objectification of her body for ratings purposes was blatantly obvious.

But instead of simply accepting commercially dictated changes like this as something they couldn’t control, the fans took matters into their own hands. In addition to making their feelings on the subject well-known in the “Dear J.J.” thread, fans turned to another method: advertising. And TWoP gave users the opportunity to spend their own money promoting their favorite show by handing over control of the forum banner ads—creating an odd, never-before-seen confluence of Internet and television advertising.

Internet users are very familiar with those pesky ads that ask you to pick a favorite color, or hit the bouncing ball, or tell you that you’re the site’s one-millionth visitor, all to get you to click. Visitors to the TWoP forums didn’t encounter any ads like this, instead seeing homemade banners crafted by amateur graphic artists. These banners advertised select shows, ones often not seen in the upper echelons of the Nielsen ratings, but worshipped by TWoP users nonetheless.

Glark, the online handle of David T. Cole, one of the three TWoP “elders,” said the decision to switch from corporate ads to those funded by users came early this year, mostly due to circumstances outside their control. “Ad brokers rarely want to place ads on pages with user-generated content due to its unpredictability,” he said. Because of this, few advertisers were buying ad space on the forums even though several hundred thousand users were taxing the limits of the servers (and the elders’ pockets) each day. The elders needed a way to generate cash to keep the popular site running in the short-term while investigating more permanent financial options. TWoP users knew that a decision on the site’s fate was coming after the end of the 2002-03 television season, and they were desperate to do something to show their support. Those two concerns met head-on in the forums’ ad space.

The setup allowed users to fire up Adobe Photoshop or other comparable graphics programs to create their own ads, or submit copy to Glark for design, which was included in the cost. Layering was also an option, which allowed any ad buyer to submit four separate ads. One ad would appear on each level of the TWoP forums, giving buyers more bang for their advertising buck. Ad creators could also designate text to appear in the banner’s alt tags. Ads initially cost $100 for 24 hours in the forums, and $50 for each consecutive day after that. These banner ads were for TWoP users alone—there was no tracking information provided for ad clients nor any of the bells and whistles associated with Internet advertising. “It was all grassroots stuff,” Glark said.

The opportunity for users to create their own ads caught on right away, and became one of the hallmarks of a site already famous for irreverent reverence. Creative promotion of individual shows began fast and furious—characters, popular couples, even wardrobe choices became fodder for banner ads. A whole thread devoted to banner ad praise—prime real estate on a Web site already strapped for bandwidth—allowed creators to interact with their instantaneous groupies. New ads would send observers scurrying to examine all the jokes in intimate detail, and an informal camaraderie blossomed amongst ad creators as they shared the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting their favorite Web site.

But this didn’t mean there was no competition. The originality and sheer number of ads created by those known as TARflies (fans of The Amazing Race) and Wingnuts (The West Wing) upped the ante for all banner makers. Within weeks, all banner ad campaigns had to incorporate layers and snarky alt tags or face ridicule. There was even competition within the same fandom. Fans of the Tara/Willow lesbian relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer created ads condemning Tara’s death, using rainbow motifs and declaring, “They are the magic.” A group of opposing fans bluntly bit back by advertising that Tara was dead, signing the banner with “Fans of moving the hell on” and setting off a blistering flame war that likely ate more bandwidth than the ads covered. The monkey employed by the opposing users in their ad has since become the icon of the TWoP “Banner Ad Wars,” and is available on t-shirts and mugs for those who wish to preserve the memory.

For Alias, the gauntlet was thrown one afternoon last spring, when one poster spotted an amusing banner ad for the HBO prison drama Oz, which said, “Our HoYay can totally shank your HoYay.” Following a casual statement about the possibility of a banner ad campaign in the “Alias in the Media” thread, the next week passed with almost a thousand dollars raised from dozens of distinct users and more than 100 separate suggestions for ad copy.

Somehow, an impromptu organization took hold. Five different sets of ads were planned, and the copy concepts were divided accordingly: general ads about the show as a whole, then ads dedicated to the family of spies, the romance, and sidekicks/enemies as well as a thank you to the show’s creators. A group of four users amicably split the stresses of collecting votes for ad copy and publishing a Web site for Alias newbies intrigued by the ads. They tweaked copy and workshopped the graphics with two amateur designers who volunteered to create the ads based on the chosen favorites.

Nadler was one of the designers and used the opportunity to hone his burgeoning commercial design skills as well as augment his passion for the show. “A picture is worth a thousand words, and a funny banner is worth a thousand misleading commercials,” he said. “I think that promos for television shows should be catchy, memorable, and (have) a positive message about the show—without giving away the ending a week early.” The fan-voted spots favored more obscure characters and plotlines rarely referenced in network advertising, and definitely treated them with the TWoP flavor of snark.

On fan-favorite Mr. Sark: “Evil has never been so sexy.” On the broken relationship between Sydney’s parents: “Love means never having to say, ‘Why did you shoot me?’” On Sydney and Vaughn: “Screwing protocol. And each other. Keep your HoYay. We’ve got SpySex.”

Even though the show can be confusing to even the most dedicated viewer, these ads filled a void that Alias fans everywhere agreed that network advertising was not addressing. ABC is widely loathed for canceling low-rated fan favorites, including Sports Night, Once and Again and Cupid. The overwhelming belief in the forum is that the network cancels complex, intelligent programs it finds too difficult to promote, earning the nickname of “ABCimians” or, more simply, “monkeys.” Nadler points to one tagline as the epitome of the network’s lack of imagination in promoting such an intricate show.

“Also, ‘Double Oh-Yeah… with a kick!’—I mean, seriously,” he said. “That had absolutely nothing to do with the show, and plenty to do with making the show look stupid.” That’s only one of many fouls fans say the network has committed, including running a repeat on the weekend that the opening of Garner’s blockbuster movie Daredevil coincided with her appearance on Saturday Night Live, and a 40-minute post-Super Bowl show earlier this year that pushed Alias out of prime time on the East Coast.

To Sabrina Pavolini of Austin, Tex., the other graphic designer, this was ABC’s worst fumble. She said that as a subsidiary of Disney, ABC is failing to capitalize on numerous cross-promotional opportunities. But she also recognizes that fans may have more enthusiasm for the process. “Your average ad person is there to do a job. There’s a very good chance that they don’t have that ‘connection’ or special feeling for the show they’re working on,” she said. “To them, it’s just another day at the office. For people who love the show, I think it becomes more than that.”

Media scholar Henry Jenkins labeled this phenomenon as “textual poaching” more than 15 years ago, referring to fan activities such as fan fiction that have since proliferated on the Internet. Fans believe they have purer views of their favorite characters and plotlines than their creators do, so they wrestle control away. Fan fiction allows fans to rewrite narratives and plotlines in their own individual ways, but the banner ad campaign gave Alias fans the opportunity to take commercial control away from ABC under the belief that they could do better. “I want (the ads) to be something people notice—something to make them think ‘Wow, those Alias fans are amazing!’” Pavolini said. “In an ideal world, the banner ads would make everyone watch Alias.”

This enthusiasm resulted in 20 separate ads completely generated by fans, in content, design and funding. The campaign debuted to great praise from both Alias fans and TWoP users, and much to the delight of the hardworking fans, the incessant ads produced numerous converts. “Quick question—when is the season premiere of Alias? Because sadly enough…it was your brilliant banner ads that have sucked me into Alias,” said one user. “Go creative minds. Banner ads: they’re like heroin.”

After that initial ad campaign, the TWoP format changed slightly. Fifty dollars gave any submitted ad a week in the banner ad pool. Each click in the forums brought up a randomly selected ad out of the dozens in the pool at any given time. The topics broadened to praising the site’s recappers to conveying birthday wishes and campaigning for presidential hopeful Howard Dean—individual messages that up to 300,000 users see every day. Alias fans have continued to donate money to TWoP via banner ads in response to the show’s season finale, which was—at the very least—controversial. Sydney and Vaughn fans were upset that he was wearing a wedding ring in the last moments of the episode; Sark fans wondered what would come of the sexy assassin now that he was in CIA custody; and the show’s inexplicable jump two years ahead in time jarred everyone. The desire to express those opinions in pixelated form kept TWoP’s coffers overflowing this summer.

Even though fans were paying much less than corporate ad brokers, the temporary funding provided by the fan-sponsored ads allowed TWoP the freedom to negotiate new contracts. This led to the joyous announcement in August that the site would remain open for at least another year. Unfortunately, these contracts include forum ads, so those created by users will soon phase out. But the ads have become so popular that Glark has pledged they will live on elsewhere on the site, perhaps as part of the Pixel Challenge. “The response was great and certainly exceeded our expectations,” he said. “Our users are a great bunch.”

Thankfully, Alias fans received relief midway through the banner ad campaign with the news that ABC had decided to renew the show for a third season. The season premiere on Sept. 28 will provide the first clue as to whether the ads created by fans will actually boost ratings. With the possibility of a fourth season hanging on improved popularity, the producers may need all the help they can get.

The TWoP banner ads have proven that dedicated, intelligent fans are willing to work to save their favorite Web sites and television programs. Pay attention, J.J. Abrams: Even a simple, snarky campaign staged by the nerds and geeks of the world can’t hurt. They have the power. Just ask Clay Aiken.

Those who know me well also know that my mother is a California public school teacher. Starting from a fairly young age, I (along with my brother) was pressed into service to help with various tasks—shutting down her room for the summer, hanging up bulletin boards, setting up computers, etc. After I graduated from college, moved back to my hometown and started a full-time job, I wasn’t really around during the day when she might have needed me. But then, my mother decided that she wanted me—with all of the infinite wisdom that comes with being a reporter—to talk to kids about how difficult it is to write, even for those of us who are paid to do it. A lot of her students get discouraged that they don’t write perfectly on the first attempt, and she really wanted me to drive home the point that we all screw it up at some point.

So if you don’t mind, I’d like to share a bit of the speech I prepared for the occasion—given that I think most of the people who might be reading this are writers themselves. As far as I recall, I didn’t stray too much from these prepared remarks (which also included props and a transparency!)…and the kids were actually into it. They asked questions and everything. Given that I couldn’t ever imagine following my mother into teaching, that was kind of a big moment.

***

Even for those of us who are paid to be good writers and editors can’t get everything right on the first try. It’s just not possible. Writing is too hard to make it come out perfectly. Even what I’m saying right now didn’t come out the way I wanted it to the first time I wrote it. When you’re writing, you’re taking a ton of information and turning it around and trying to present it in a way that’s interesting and communicates what you want to say. It’s something that’ll get easier the more you do it, so if you guys only hear one thing I say today, this is it: KEEP WRITING. It doesn’t matter what about. If you want to write something about your dog, or your favorite basketball team, or the characters from your favorite comic book or cartoon, do it. If it interests you and you have something to say, write it down. It doesn’t matter if you think it won’t be good enough. I do that all the time when I’m writing, and the worst thing you can do is let that fear scare you.

At my job, we have story meetings every Friday morning. That afternoon, we’re supposed to start making phone calls and interviewing people for our stories, and generally, we write four or five of them for each week’s paper. We get Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to do all of our research and talk to everyone we need to, and our deadline is on Thursday mornings. You’d think it would be easy to get four or five stories written with that much time, but trust me, it’s not.

Every week, it’s inevitable that there’ll be a story I have to write that I’m not that excited about—this week, I had to write a story about a break-in at a little league snack shack—and if I start staring at that blank page on my computer screen, I’ll never get it done. I can always find an excuse to go play on the Internet or check my email or something else, but the truth is, I’m always having to fight through all those voices in my brain saying, “I don’t wanna do this.” Or, on the flip side, I could be writing about something or someone who’s really cool, and I’m scared that what I’ll write will never be as cool as the subject. But that kind of thinking just shuts you down and paralyzes you.

So, for me, the process starts with giving a pep talk to myself, or sometimes, even yelling at myself to just stop wasting time and do my job. I usually put on headphones and listen to music to tune out the people who I work with—when they’re working, they’re on the phone and yelling across the newsroom at each other, and it’s really distracting. Occasionally I have to take my laptop and just leave, and work instead at a coffee shop or some place where I can concentrate.

Sometimes, I think of things I want to say a couple of paragraphs down the road, so I’ll jot it down on a piece of paper so I can remember. Because, honestly? I can’t remember anything.

Most of the time, I have to set time limits for myself. If I start writing at 3 o’clock, I’ll make myself write 20 inches of text before 4 o’clock. (In newspapers, inches are the amount of space a story takes up.) Sometimes, I do get writer’s block, so I give myself a few minutes to go downstairs and get a glass of water, or to check my favorite Web site, or go sit in my editor’s office. But if I go beyond a certain time limit, I’ll lose my train of thought. And then, generally, after a while, I find my writing groove and I’m able to get out what I need to get out. But I’m not done even if I think I am.

The most important part is going back over your work when you’re done and checking it for all sorts of stuff: Things that aren’t spelled right, commas that aren’t in the right place. Writing of mine has been published for almost five years now, and there are still times I’ll write a sentence that makes absolutely no sense or use the wrong kind of verb. I find all kinds of errors like that because when I’m writing, I get caught up in the moment and don’t go back to check what I’ve done. Sometimes, I have to read what I’ve written aloud, or at least whisper it to myself. I’ve come across way too many run-on sentences and awkward phrases while doing that, because hearing it is so much different than just reading it on paper.

There are a lot of other things I check too, but before I can look at them with a clear head, I have to stand up and stretch or do something for at least 10 minutes or so, just so I can clear out my brain and go back with fresh eyes. I check to make sure that I have a really interesting topic sentence, because you want someone who’s reading a newspaper to want to read your story.

I also make sure that I have a kind of “thesis” sentence, where I quickly sum up what I’m going to say in the story. We call that a nut graf, because we’re taking everything the story’s about and pressing it down into a tiny little space, like a nut.

I make sure that not every sentence starts with the same word or phrase, like “he” or “then” or “I” or something like that. It’s also really easy to use the same word twice in a really small space when you’re describing something. There are a lot of times I have to pull out a thesaurus to help me find something different.

I check to make sure that each sentence and each paragraph flows to the next, because you want to take your reader on a trip with you through your story, and you don’t want them to get confused if you jump around from subject to subject. Sometimes, I have to move paragraphs or sentences around if it makes more sense for them to be in a different order. That can be a really painful thing to do, but it’s necessary.

I check to make sure I’m not saying something in 10 words that I could say in two—writing too much has always been a problem for me—and I think a lot of editors and teachers appreciate it when you’re clear and you get to the point.

One of the most important things I have to do is read my story while pretending to be someone else. Of course the story will make sense to me: I’m the one who wrote it, and I know all the information that went into it, and which information that I thought wasn’t important enough. It’s a difficult thing to do, but I have to not be me for a short time. I pretend to be my mom or my editor—someone who has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about before they read my story and see if they would understand what I’m talking about, or if there’s information that needs to go there to help them along. There are a lot of times when I have to go back and add in another fact that I forgot.

For you guys, I know it’s probably hard to try to do a lot of these things. When you’re writing in class, you’re writing on paper, and it’s a lot harder to go back and erase what you’ve written and start over. You also can’t listen to music or go walk around on campus if you want to. So, here are some ideas to help you guys out:

First of all, I would keep a notepad or a piece of paper nearby when you’re writing so you can try out sentences or words that you’re not sure about without messing up. Of course, if you’re writing a sloppy copy, you may not need to worry about that so much, but it’s still a big help.

I also know that getting started can be a big problem when you’re staring at that blank sheet of paper. But you have to push through it when you’re scared like that, or else nothing’s going to happen. That may be the hardest part about writing, period. You’re sitting there, and your whole body is screaming at you to run away and go home. I know that happens because it happens to me ALL THE TIME, and I’m supposedly a professional! But once you start writing, something happens, and the flow just comes.

One thing you guys can do is give yourself a time-out if you can’t think of something to write. Look at the clock on the wall and give yourself a full minute to let your brain play and think about whatever you want. You’re just thinking, you’re not playing with your pencil or talking to your neighbor. And pick something you really like—your favorite sports team or musical group—and think about them for a full minute. Don’t go, “Ack, I only have 30 seconds left!” Just let your brain go, and at the end of that minute, you start writing. No exceptions. Thinking about something you like should get your creative juices flowing.

Most of the time, I’m writing stories about actual people and places, but I know a lot of what you guys are doing is making up your own stories, and that’s really cool. I haven’t done too much writing like that, but when I have, I almost never start at the beginning. You’re always going to have more than one draft of a story and plenty of time to go back and fix it. Let your creativity take you wherever it wants you to go.

And one thing that I think is really important when you’re writing is to enjoy yourself. It can be so much fun if you stop worrying about it and just do it, and one way to enjoy it is to make it unique like you. Write about things you like, or put personal touches into your writing. Mrs. Rost [Ed. note: Ha, that's my mother!] and I were talking just last night about writing about your favorite restaurant. You guys have gotten assignments like that, right? And of course, the first thing everyone writes is: “My favorite restaurant is…” But isn’t that boring? What if you said something like, “I remember going to McDonald’s for the first time when I was 5,” or, “I dream about Big Macs.” That’s fun to write, and interesting to read, and it gives you a good jumping-off point for the rest of your writing.

And, of course, don’t feel like you have to write perfectly on the first try. There’s no writer in the world who can do it. Maybe once, but not over and over again. Take your time, go back and reread what you’ve done, and don’t get scared. There are tons of writers out there who are way better than I am, and sometimes when I read their stuff, I start thinking that I’m really bad at what I do and I should quit. But then I go back and reread things I’ve written. Of course, there are always tiny things I wish I could go back and change, but overall, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done. Every writer has a different style, and once you find yours, it’s so totally worth all the worry and the fear.

Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.

So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH,  I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.

***

Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.

Once I began working for a beauty magazine, I had to pick it up again—along with every other major woman’s book—as part of my job. I’d flip through the new issues each month, looking for mentions of our advertisers (naturally) and new trends in cosmetics. Doing so over and over for several years gave me an impression of each title’s aim and focus…and I wasn’t surprised to see that Vogue hadn’t changed much in the dozen or so years since I’d last picked it up. Some of the images were gorgeous, of course, but many—with bland, neutral backgrounds – seemed repetitious from issue to issue. The stories on Botox and thousand-dollar clothes reeked of privilege, and it was still a gossip sheet writ large for the Upper East Side.

So naturally, I was curious to see The September Issue, a documentary about the fashion bible shot while the staff pieced together its fall fashion edition in 2007. Now that I oversee photo shoots and judge layouts of my own, I wanted to witness how they did all of that inside the vaunted Condé Nast hallways. I had to determine whether Andre Leon Talley is as ridiculous in person as his headshot and columns make him appear. And of course, Meryl Streep needed a reality check—was the real Anna Wintour actually as heartless and cunning in her disapproval?

After an afternoon at the movie theater, I learned that the answer is no—at least to the latter. While opinionated and swift in her decision-making, she was never cruel to her employees. In several scenes in her own office—which did bear a striking resemblance to the set of The Devil Wears Prada—Wintour sorted through photo options from various designers and made snap decisions about which ones would go and which would stay. Some editors would offer a half-hearted defense for a look they particularly liked, but their protests quickly faded under Wintour’s judgmental glare. She’d smile tightly, and kid around with staffers, but she never seemed to be overtly mean. (Of course, she could have been playing up her softer side for the cameras, but who knows?) Despite mentions of her icy persona in the documentary itself, I still didn’t buy it; too often, women in leadership positions who act decisively and without an overly fuzzy personality get a bum rap when men at similar levels behave the same way and no one bats a perfectly curled eyelash.

No, Anna Wintour’s problem is not that she’s unfriendly—it’s that she has no vision. There’s a certain irony in watching The September Issue now, more than two years after its footage was shot…and probably 18 months or so since print journalism’s gradual slide downward began its current sharp spiral. The scene in the documentary where Vogue’s advertising staff crows about the 644 pages of advertising they sold for the September 2007 issue—enough to qualify as the magazine’s largest ever—is a bit sad knowing that the subsequent two fall fashion-focused editions have been mere shadows of that high mark. Wintour was also able to place spread after spread throughout the issue, seemingly without having to carve any of them up to fit ads or drop any due to space issues. (Many of the spreads are of gorgeous images planned and styled by Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director and the one staffer who dares to push back at Wintour.)

This lack of vision is relevant because the documentary makes such a point of showing how influential Wintour is in the fashion industry—a point with which I doubt many would disagree. She holds private audiences with designers for previews of their collections, and she hand-picked the wunderkind Thakoon for a Vogue partnership with The Gap, propelling him toward his career in couture. As for the magazine, her main contribution is underscored as turning its focus toward celebrity culture, especially by putting famous females on the cover. (Indeed, the cover girl in September 2007 was the starlet Sienna Miller.)

But that change is one that took place in the 1990s, and something I now see lambasted in various corners as the new millennium brought on a constant rotation of starlets such as Miller, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johanssen. Over the last two years, as all magazines (especially those pushing high fashion) have taken a nosedive, Vogue has gone retro with covers featuring supermodels such as Linda Evangelista—the very thing that Wintour was lauded for reversing. Did that move bring greater financial success to Vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s? Apparently so, given the company line from Condé Nast as it’s stated in the film. As my movie-going companion pointed out, focusing on celebrities may have helped Vogue make a bigger penetration in Middle American markets that don’t necessarily follow high fashion—but given the magazine’s remaining insistence on following the New York social scene (which still alienates this blue state native), I’m not so sure that helped retain that audience.

Other than that decade-old accomplishment, what does Wintour bring to the pages of Vogue? After years of following the magazine and 90 minutes in a movie theater, I don’t know. Yes, she’s a strong leader who seems to know exactly what she wants, and quickly—but in all of those scenes where she made snap judgments, she gave no reasons behind her decision. Or, more accurately, none other than “This doesn’t seem necessary” or “There’s too much black.” While creative editing on the documentarians’ part may have a hand in this depiction, she seems like nothing more than a dictator whose word stands based on a stale military victory. Late in the film, she decides to nix the results of a photo shoot on color blocking that Coddington oversaw and order a reshoot—with apparently no new direction given. (Wintour felt free to cut multiple pages of many of Coddington’s shoots; after removing a number of spreads from an ethereal ‘20s shoot, Coddington remarked that Wintour had just put the kibosh on about $50,000 worth of work. It’s hard to believe such waste would fly in today’s magazine market.) The previous color block shoot had been shot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with bright hues all around; the reworked version appeared to have been completed in a Long Island studio with a neutral background—just like any number of Vogue spreads over the past few years.

It’s not a stretch to say that Coddington may have more artistic vision than Wintour does. The film quotes one Vogue staffer as saying that there’s no one else who can style shoot and produce beautiful photography in the same way that Coddington does—perhaps a testament to the time she spent as a model in London in her youth. It could even be argued that the film makes an argument that Coddington is best qualified to lead Vogue, perhaps while leaving Wintour a place to continue influencing fashion. Coddington cut an imposing figure in the film as she stood looking out over a regal French garden, her mass of kinky red hair flowing in the wind, before overseeing a shoot on the latest haute couture. While standing there, she lamented that her vision of a more romantic world in Vogue had dated her, while the currents of fashion (heralded by Wintour) passed her by.

But after seeing the striking work she produced for the September 2007 issue—both published and unpublished—it’s painful to think of what she may have had to sacrifice in her concepts and vision to suit smaller magazine sizes since then.

And this is where Wintour falls flat. She had one idea—the embrace of celebrity culture—that once brought Vogue great success and didn’t sustain the brand after the bottom fell out. And what’s happened since then? Competitor Elle won the race between beauty and fashion books for the September issue this year, scoring more advertising pages than Vogue. It might be prudent to do a comparison between the ads in the two magazines, to determine which advertisers Elle reeled in that Vogue did not. I highly doubt they brought in more high-end labels and retailers, so maybe the idea should be to aim a little lower, toward the affordable fashion that real people need these days.

But as Coddington illuminated in the film’s last plot point, those folks are hardly seen in Vogue anymore. She and photographer Patrick DeMarchelier enlisted the help of one of the documentary’s cameramen to appear in a shot for the color block shoot, which was then Photoshopped to appear as though a model were in the same frame. Wintour made a comment that her staff would also need to Photoshop out the cameraman’s slight belly paunch, an order that Coddington quickly reversed.

It’s a new world for print media, and The September Issue is a time capsule of how it used to be. So far, though, this new world still includes Wintour and her vague, old-school ideas of what works. But in order for Vogue to survive, it’s going to realize that it needs to change course as well.

This year, I celebrated my 25^th birthday. I can almost hear what’s running through your head when you take in that statement—she’s a member of a lazy, coddled generation, glued to her cell phone and computer, updating her MySpace page five times a day instead of working at an actual job. Believe me, I’ve heard a number of your kind tell me so. And while some of that is true—I’m writing this essay on my laptop at a local café—the rest gives me a headache on a daily basis.

My parents—my mother especially—raised me to think for myself. After all, they were the same way. They graduated from high school in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love. They weren’t hippies or protesters; they went to school and worked hard to make the world and their families better in their own way. My mother has spent the majority of the last 30 years as a resource specialist, a teacher who helps special needs and second-language students.

It was their mindset that prompted me to get started on my own story early. I worked semi-professional jobs as early as high school, when I was a gopher for a local architectural firm. That phase passed pretty quickly, and I ended up writing and interning for magazines while I was out of college for the summer. While my peers were happy partying every weekend, it was my responsibility to earn my own spending money, so I worked hard for it—and was loath to spend it.

While I now support myself, I did live with my parents for a few years after I graduated from college, but I did it to build up my own savings and start planning for retirement before I truly set out into the real world. And now, I have an IRA, and I just bought my first new car. When I went to Rome for the first time, it was on my own dime. Not only that, but I’ve won several awards and honors in my chosen profession, and I’ve written articles on topics that will be hard to top as I grow older—and as I’m told, wiser.

I’ve never been one who enjoys having someone tell them who or what they’re supposed to be. In college, a roommate of mine was so sure that I was going to be so enthralled with my first midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that he predicted I would soon be dressing up as Magenta and streaking my way across the stage. I never did. What he said made me that much more determined not to like it.

Perhaps it’s the same way with societal expectations, and once I enter an age where I am supposed to be responsible, that’s when I’ll go against the norm. It worries me that there’s such a dim view of the generation that’s supposed to be spending its time sowing wild oats and generally being stupid, when we’re the ones who are going to inherit all the problems the U.S. and the world is experiencing now. People may not think we’re ready to make a difference yet, but maybe that’s another expectation I’ll have to shatter.

For now, if you see a woman in her 20s waiting to cross the street, listening to her iPod, realize that she may not have been formed from a cookie-cutter. She might wear at least semi-fashionable clothing, but she also reads several newspapers a day (even if they’re online). She might like going to museums as much as she goes to concerts, and the first dial on her car radio might be NPR—but just before the indie rock station, of course.

***

It’s evident, of course, from the mention of my 25^th birthday and MySpace as the website du jour that I wrote this several years ago. What may also be obvious from the first line is that I initially wrote this piece as a potential entry in This I Believe, the now-defunct project from NPR that detailed various contributors’ religious and spiritual beliefs…in all of the forms those could take. Of course, I never actually sent it in.

But honestly, that’s OK. Because taking up this cause of defying ageism against the young is something I’ve done in writing since I was about 13. I sent letters to the editors of Time and the San Jose Mercury News, protesting unfair coverage of teenagers in the media. The latter actually awarded me a Silver Pen Award for my words on the matter when I was 16. I’ve just always been so irritated about being lumped in with the bad stereotypes of my generation that I’ve had to express it multiple times.

Is this piece the best example of that writing? Maybe not, but it’s definitely the most recent…and the most coherent! I could find some angrier examples, but it’s best to let those languish in obscurity.