Adam Moss
speaker
88 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Moss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My name is Adam Moss. That's easy enough. I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product with all that kind of torture in between.
So many things. First of all, when I came to love magazines, it was the late 60s, early 70s. It was a heyday of the magazine form, but also it was a really interesting time. The world was blowing up in some ways that to a young kid... Which is very attractive. And the magazines that I loved, like the New Yorks and Esquires, et cetera, they're a little smart ass. They were funny.
I mean, my first magazine I read was Mad Magazine. So it had this kind of fabulous fractured idea of what the world was that really appealed to my adolescent brain. And there was the feeling that the whole thing was created by someone or something that felt very distinct. It had a personality. And that personality... If it appealed to you, it was very powerful. It felt very personal.
And then who... Okay, so I had all of this stuff in my head, but it was unformed. And I went to work at Escort. I was very young. I was a very unformed person at that point. What were you good at? I was probably fairly intuitive. I certainly was eager. And I'd read a lot of magazines. I had a lot of data in my head based on my own fan taste.
And this guy named Lee Eisenberg, he just, for whatever reason, took an interest in me. It could have been that he just wanted me to do his work for him because he recognized that my enthusiasm was potentially valuable to him. But he also saw that my brain worked a certain way and he wanted to encourage it. It was an act of kindness. Name some things that you would do there on a given day.
We started a section on the entertainment industry. And one of Lee's ideas was that he would put a movie store with a big literary person. I remember William Styron and Candice Bergen. My job was to...
go to the thing and set up the tape recorder and then make sure everybody was happy but then he would give me the transcript he would say what do you find interesting in this slowly but surely i would see what he thought was interesting in it and then i would watch him as he constructed this thing into a exciting little bit of conversation that worked in a printed form he was extremely good so just being able to watch him
took all of that data in my head and started to organize it. That was invaluable. One of the things that I hear a lot from younger editors is that they really resent doing the older editor's job for them because they feel it's exploitive, and it is. However, it's an incredible way to learn. I mean, it's apprenticeship.
Yes, and you talk it through, and in there is sharing of ideas, but also a kind of teaching. And sometimes the teaching goes both ways. This is really, I think, actually crucial. In almost every case where there is a mentor and mentee kind of thing, it goes both ways.
There was a generational difference, not a huge one, but I brought a bunch of generational assumptions to the table that he didn't have. I think there is that element of... New eyes, fresh eyes. Yeah, fresh eyes. And as you get older, you begin to dismiss certain things that aren't fully dismissible.
It's chiefly the person who decides where the magazine's going to go, what the magazine covers and doesn't.
shaping the magazine's identity and its relationship to its readers it's a manager job the magazine is very very much a group enterprise that's one of the most wonderful things about it and it involves getting a whole bunch of people story editors like you were visual people copy editors production people all sorts of different kinds of people to work together as one so in that sense it's like a conductor of an orchestra
It's very rarely what people think of as editors, which is the person who fixes sentences. Although you did your share of that. I did my share of that, but that's not the chief job description. The chief job description is the overall direction of the thing.
I agree that I'm exacting. I would like to think that I was a little bit more clear about what it was that I was looking for, but I recognize that that's probably completely not true. And what I was doing was a kind of maddening mind control. It's a spectrum.
Being an editor, it's both an act of grandiosity and humility at the same time. So it's like you have to think big, but you have to understand that it really is a group project. And for any group project to work, everybody has to feel like there's some of them in it. And they have to feel invested in it, and they have to feel proud of it.
They have to want to make it just as badly as you want to make it. And so part of the exacting hood was not just getting people to a certain standard that I thought was appropriate, but also getting people to care as much as I did. How much of that was in the hiring, though? A lot of it's in the hiring, but a lot of it's also in the sort of day-to-day way that you all get together as a group.
A lot of it is just familial as opposed to directed towards a particular task. A lot of it is helping people find their own independence as thinkers, but also obviously think the way you want them to for the purposes of this project. Like a parent, I suppose, I would always... relish the first moment that a story editor was willing to fight with me because I just felt, okay, they've got it now.
They have their strong point of view, getting people to feel independent within an environment that they weren't entirely independent. It's a kind of weird little equilibrium, but that was what I was after.
I recognize that there's mentorship going on. It sounds pretentious to call yourself a mentor unless it's like an actual title. One's a little bit squeamish about using language like that, but the act of teaching someone, I do recognize, is crucial to being, definitely to leading, but also just, you're learning all the time.
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