What’s On Your Desk? With Nick Parish
Note: What’s On Your Desk? is a series of interviews with friends who are doing interesting things. The dialogue always starts off the same way, by asking the subject to describe their workspace. The second in our series is with Nick Parish, a writer and editor living in New York, currently at Advertising Age (before that at Creativity Magazine, Flavorpill and the New York Post). I met Nick in high school in Detroit and we quickly became friends after realizing how much stuff we had in common, not the least of which was cars, media and the innovative side of life. Nick is one of those Detroit exports we’re eternally proud to see on the come up, always tearing it up and always true to his old pals.
What’s on your desk?
All the crap I accumulate around my desk area either serves to help me do work and organize things (like filing trays, hard drives, a lap board for my computer) or take my focus away from it (the radio, all the silly scrapbook-y stuff, postcards and clippings and random things that accumulate on the corkboard). I don’t have much of an attention span, so alternating between the two leads to best results.
It seems like a lot of people are figuring out how to make their workday a little more personal. In the old day that might have meant pictures on your desk but now it seems like having your Firefox plugins, favorites, music in your iTunes, etc is the new personalization. So, you tend to use both when you’re writing and editing?
Yeah, those little custom bits are great, until you get whacked and have to do a clean install of Firefox and all the things you’ve accumulated have to be re-found, and you never remember what they’re called, just ‘that thing that strips the CSS from a news story to make it easier to read’ and you have to think ‘Well, maybe I saw it on there’ and retrace your steps. Which is really a great way to check if they still matter to you. There are a couple I can’t do without. But both at home and in the office I have totems a computer just can’t match, maybe because they’re ultimately irrelevant to any specific task. Sometimes they’re significant personally and sometimes they’re just some strange artifact persistent in the space.
Tell us about your day, including what you do before / after work and what your job entails.
Phew, big question. Most days I’m up pretty early and scoping things out at home, checking out news feeds, writing and responding to emails and putting any finishing touches on things I was working on the night before. Mid-morning I go into the office and start my real day, managing Advertising Age’s events content. We do a handful of conferences every year and I’m responsible for programming them, which entails talking with the editors to suss out themes, tracking down speakers and panelists, making sure the word gets out and helping develop and produce cohesive stuff with the reams of content that emerge. Frequently I’ll leave the office in the evening and attend events or other appointments before heading home, but if the calendar’s bare I’ll try to get some exercise in. If the day was already really rugged, I’ll just abandon the evening to video games. Dinner’s usually my only decent meal, unless I had some sort of lunch engagement, so following dinner I’m generally heartened enough to sit down at home again and have a good think about new things.
You’re on the edge of what’s going on in media. What do you like about what some media brands are doing today? This might lead you to letting us know what your favorite sites, books, or magazines are, but that’s your choice.
Oh, jeebus, media habits. To the eventual reader of this interview: you are entering a world of pain. It’s all kind of a mess, really. I mean, I started at a .com, went to a massive, ancient tabloid, then to a creative trade magazine and now to a venerable old brand where I’m doing work in one of the few areas where our industry’s revenue is expanding. So I’ve seen a few different sides. And the only thing I can uniformly like is that I can control the heck out of how I experience media. I guess what I’m driving at is the things I like about some media I detest in others and am glad to be able to pick and choose. The name of the game is still information curation, but we’re so much more responsible for ourselves than ever.
I still like the biggies for minute-to-minute stuff, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, I hit those online a few times every day as they push breaking stuff out on RSS and subscribe to much of their corollary shit, like FT Alphaville for instance. I only ever buy print newspapers on the weekends or when I don’t want to carry a book but know I have a long subway ride, in which case it’s the Post, because I never feel bad to toss it away. FT Weekend every Saturday. I actually get out of bed early to make sure no one else gets the only copy my newsstand stocks. The Times, lately, deeper in the paper, there’s such a high fluff-to-info ratio I can’t tolerate it in print other than Sunday mornings, when I’m in good humor.
To actually answer your question, and focus it on magazines (because I think even though newspapers online may be annoying in their tentative and naive ways a lot of them are doing a good job adjusting) the magazine brands I dig right now are really tightly edited and art directed and pretty niche and direct. I’m willing to pay a premium for those because they’re not watered down with bullshit I know is advertiser-influenced or edited 20 times until it’s a total vanilla mess. I like magazines that have the seams showing, where you can tell there was a strong editorial influence but they’re not afraid to be quirky. The branding part of my brain knows that doesn’t really scale well or attract (and keep) advertisers but I tend to seek those out from a reader’s perspective. I really like Fantastic Man. While I’m outside their demographic, my girlfriend brought home a copy of Butt (Editor’s note: not safe for work) the other day and it was a great read. Most of the time, titles like that have a really minimal web presence but, like Butt, the website works and is still part of the mag’s artifact aesthetic. The Wire’s another good example of a magazine like this. Great editorial, vivid, interesting stuff, no-nonsense web presence that doesn’t give away all the good shit from the magazine itself, with a physical print presentation you want to keep around for a couple months. The Skateboarding Mag will never match Big Brother, the greatest skateboarding magazine of all time (and in my eternal top 5) but it’s very keep-around-able. Same for Monocle. They’re getting close to irritating with the constant every-other-page advertorial, branded-shoe-buffer schtick though.
And smaller mags can get this way but they’re just more about discovery for me than brand association or adoration. The Drake is a great fly fishing magazine representing a really sub-subculture of young fishermen and guides, not at all fuddy-duddys into spending $1,200 on a reel. F.E.D.S. for crime and street shit. I tend to look over any obscure shit that falls past me just because there might be something interesting I can glean from it. Taking a look in the basket right now there are things like Land Report (I went out west and was obsessed with ranches), and the inaugural issue of Dangerous Game Hunting, which my friend got for me in rural Michigan. The coolest thing I’ve seen this year has got to be Manzine, though. That’s awesome. Perfect tone, crappy but interesting design, heartfelt. Awesome. The spirit behind Manzine and Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet make me really stoked and hopeful.
(Unfortunately I’ve neglected the thousands of pieces that come from various channels like Twitter and shared items and small small blogs and whatnot. I’ve actually developed a theory around this that has helped me avoid overload, and guides how I run my social network gateways and filters. I first noticed it happening with Boing Boing, where I’d see 20 posts from it a day, and only a one or two that I was interested in. The more I scooted around to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr though I found people who I was friends with in real life often shared the items I was interested in. I suppose that’s because we have shared tastes already. Once this happens consistently enough I eliminate the main feed and put more credence in what the friend is sharing, sort of employing them as a reverse stringer. And I haven’t touched on books. Let’s not get into books.)
I’m glad I asked. I wanted the firehose. What makes you happy to create? What do you want to do?
I think one of the things that has made me happiest in my work in the media is seeing the copy or issue you worked on for the first time. A lot of people I have worked with are filled with dread, and fly through looking for fuckups. I’m just still in awe of the process. I remember at the Post, filing a story and then stopping at the office or being around there on a late shift as papers were being delivered, at like 10:30 or 11 at night. The fresh issues would be soft and slightly damp and smell wonderful. It was the best feeling. And you could turn to your story or see the page you laid out and think ‘Wow, that was nothing four hours ago.’ And it was, it went from being an event, something that happened, rematerialized into this tangible object through an enormous group effort. And, in the case of the Post, there were some 600,000 of them being scattered around the country as I sat there and thought about the enormity. It was magical.
Making a newspaper is fulfilling every night. Making a magazine that happens once a month, or once a quarter, so it’s a different timeline and a different set of hopes and visions you’ve moved towards. Making a website, or web story, or little funny video, or event, or screenplay, or garden, or movement, there’s an entirely different set of expectations and different progress toward a goal.
As I get older I think more about the transience of publishing, how the papers I had that were so supple and full of life are yellowed and fading, like the memories of the things that happened to prompt them, recording facts and events that rarely reemerge based on the strange swerve of the universe. I’ve been lucky so far in having great opportunities and I really hope to be able to keep moving along with my interests. I hope the next important things for me can be more lasting, things that still matter years or decades from now, things that can grow on their own once you devote attention elsewhere. I think a lot of us in the media—and I consider myself among them when things are especially dark—consider our days numbered, and get this feeling of ‘What else can I do?’ Well, we’ve always used systems to create things, sometimes exceedingly personal things, that people like, from a few raw materials and hard work and cooperation. Maybe I’m overoptimistic and sappy but I think if we keep that in mind we can move into different areas without fear and apply our skills to new and exciting challenges.
More Nick: NickParish.net
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