The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is What happens

when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there
is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselv
es? We are now starting to see that question being answered. Clay Shirky
The whole notion of
Jarvis

long-form journalism

is writer-centered, not public-centered. Jeff

As a journalist, I ve long taken it for granted that, for example, my readers know
more than I do and it s liberating. Dan Gillmor
As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know a
nd what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and
that value is about zero. John Paton
The story is the thing.

S.?S. McClure

One
Ida M. Tarbell, a writer for McClure s Magazine, a general-interest monthly, was c
hatting with her good friend and editor, John S. Phillips, in the magazine s offic
es near New York s Madison Square Park, trying to decide what she should take on n
ext.
Tarbell, then forty-three years old, was already one of the most prominent journ
alists in America, having written popular multipart historical sketches of Napol
eon, Lincoln, and a French revolutionary figure known as Madame Roland, a modera
te republican guillotined during the Terror. Thanks in part to her work, McClure s
circulation had jumped to about 400,000, making it one of the most popular, and
profitable, publications in the country.
Phillips, a founder of the magazine, was its backbone. Presiding over an office
of bohemians and intellectuals, this father of five was as calm and deliberative
as the magazine s namesake, S.?S. McClure, was manic and extravagant. Considered
by many to be a genius, McClure was also just an impossible boss forever steaming
in from Europe, throwing the office into turmoil with new schemes, ideas, and ed
itorial changes. I can t sit still, he once told Lincoln Steffens. That s your job and
I don t see how you can do it!
At McClure s, there was always, as Tarbell would later put it, much fingering of a s
ubject before the magazine decided to launch on a story, and in this case there
was more than usual. The subject being kicked around was nothing less than the g
reat industrial monopolies, known as trusts, that had come to dominate the America
n economy and political life. It was the summer of 1901.
The natural choice, in the end, was oil. Tarbell had grown up in Pennsylvania s oi
l country; her father had run a business making oil barrels and a small refinery
; her brother worked for one of the few remaining competitors in an industry 90
percent dominated by the greatest of all monopolies, the mother of trusts, John D.
Rockefeller s Standard Oil Company. She drew up an outline, and Phillips approved
. But McClure, recovering from exhaustion, was on a doctor-ordered yearlong rest
in Switzerland. Go over, Phillips said, and show the outline to Sam.