“Editor”

One thing you start noticing while making your rounds posting flyers on bulletin boards on a college campus (for, hypothetically, say an apartment) is those people who have posted flyers everywhere. Or rather, you notice their flyers – crowding out nearly every square inch of space on every single bulletin board, taped and thumbnailed all over each others’. You start being familiar with them, time after time, as you might become familiar with the people in your field whom you see over and over again as you attend all the same conferences.

It’s a degrading task, posting flyers, though perhaps not as degrading as the process that begins after the ads of actually interacting with people and trying to sell them something they have too many options for already (again, say, hypothetically an apartment). It’s physical work which requires trekking miles through odd paths and buildings, up and down giant flights of fancy university stairways, sometimes fearing you’ve gone where you’re not supposed to go. Sometimes, you go anyway. But what I didn’t know until this week was that they, flyers, work. (Another post forthcoming on the implications I see for advertising.)

Among the most formidable competitors for space that I’ve seen, over and over, and over, which I remember best for some reason – perhaps because it’s most omnipresent, or because it’s so visually simple – has been one titled “Editor,” in large black letters, Times New Roman font or the like, on white paper, sometimes with text underneath – on the latter point I never really took much note.  I thought it would be a grad student or something seeking some extra dough.

Today I was scoping out a less crowded board and saw a space under an “Editor” flyer, when I started reading it. I won’t post the name of the “editor” but what the flyer lists is this:

Have your essay, paper, or thesis/dissertation edited at reasonable rates.

*Columbia MFA graduate

*Published writer [fiction and nonfiction]

*Former editor at Fortune Magazine

*Experienced editor/university level [7 years]

*ESL experienced editor

At the third bullet point I paused and had one of those moments that have recurred so many times: What is going on in the world?? A former of editor of Fortune Magazine is advertising their flyers next to mine.

desperate? or just really, really smart? (again, wait for my forthcoming post about how flyer advertising works) it’s possible he actually hired a flyering agency (come to think about it again, very possible/probable), not that he trekked the university himself with the hundreds of sheets and tape. Right?

Or maybe, to make sense of this, instead of speaking to the dire state of the traditional journalism/publishing industry, maybe this is simply an example of the egalitarian market – all are competing for the money of the people, and hence for the same attention for your ads. Maybe this lesson is more about laissez-fair capitalism than about falling traditional industries. I hope. I hope the same capitalistic markets can lift our own industry back up.

(Or, maybe he is exaggerating and was not that significant of an editor at Fortune Magazine. which…kind of appears to be the case after I went on his website. so perhaps I was fooled, jumped to conclusions too soon. Ah, but no more than an interesting thought exercise then.)