Like everyone else, I watched the Vox-Ezra Klein-Torbjorn Tannsjo-Brian Leiter fight yesterday. And truth be told, I don’t really have a dog in the fight. Vox.com is Vox.com, of course. But I don’t know Tannsjo at all and only know Leiter by reputation. (A friend of mine quipped, “They have to be like the Babe Ruth of assholes at Vox to out-asshole Leiter.”)

Also, I spend a lot of time on both sides of the editing/writing fence. I’ve had pieces get turned down, or spiked after acceptance. And I’ve had to do the rejection and spiking. This is all totally part of the writing life and part of being a professional is making your peace with this as part of the business.

What people who haven’t edited before may not understand is that the reasons for rejecting a piece can range from the straight-forward to the deeply complex. For instance, it could just be that the editor doesn’t like the piece. Or it could be that the editor likes the piece, but had previously rejected a similar piece by a long-time contributor, and doesn’t want to rub that other writer the wrong way. It could be that the editor likes the piece, but doesn’t have space to run it in a timely fashion. Or it could even be that the editor likes the piece, but thinks it would fit better at another publication.

There are hundreds of institutional, temporal, logistical, and relational considerations that go into these decisions, most of which the writer is never aware and which are too complicated and/or confidential to be explained. Which is why, to my mind, the ideal rejection is just explaining that the piece “isn’t quite right,” thanking the writer for the submission, and, if you have any good ideas on where the piece might find a home, then pointing the writer in the direction of another publication.

Again, I’ve been on both sides of those kinds of exchanges and if they follow that form, then both parties should be able to walk away happy.

All of that said, what’s offensive about the Vox situation isn’t that the site says they’re uncomfortable running a piece that implicitly questions the wisdom/morality of abortion and contraception. I don’t think that’s anything we didn’t know about the seriousness of the people at VOXDOTCOM already. (And on this score, I don’t think Ezra Klein’s explainer/non-apology really helped: Hey! We almost hired two pro-life people once!)

No, the really bad part is that Tannsjo hadn’t just submitted a piece on spec. Vox went to him and commissioned the piece. And then, when they didn’t like it, they did . . . nothing. They just sat on it.

That’s bad.

The writer/editor compact has two parts. The first is that writers should live with editorial decisions and be okay with them. But the second is that editors should deal with writers promptly, transparently, and courteously.

If you solicit a piece from someone, you owe them a great deal. They’ve just done a bunch of work for you, for free. You’re not obligated to publish them. But if you decide not to publish them, you’re obligated to let them know that fact immediately. You should apologize for the situation not working out. You should pay them a kill fee. And if you want to remain on good terms, you might help them find a different home for the piece.

You don’t just try to pocket-veto the piece and then, when pressed, send an email to the writer making it sound like it’s their fault for writing such an offensive, deviationist essay.

That’s the part of this episode which reveals things we didn’t already know about Vox.

It’s been interesting that, in all of the many, fawning pieces about Ezra Klein written in the last few months, I haven’t seen anyone ask him about the second thing he’s famous for: JournoList. The RCP guys finally brought it up during their drivecast with Klein, but since it’s video and not print, I suspect it didn’t get the attention it deserved, because his answers didn’t exactly close out the topic. Breitbart went to the trouble of making a transcript of the exchange:

They ask Klein about JournoList, the email group Klein ran several years ago that often served to coordinate coverage among left-leaning members of the media. Does such a group still exists, Cannon wonders?

Klein evades the question throughout. His first response is to rebuke Cannon for believing in “conspiracy theories”–never mind that the original JournoList was, in fact, the rare case of a conspiracy theory being true.

Then he says, “I’m not involved anymore, and if there’s–I think there still might be–there are a shit-ton of email listservs around this town,” before contending, bizarrely, that JournoList never coordinated anything.

“I hated JournoList by the end,” he adds, “I hated it so much. I spent all my time moderating flame wars on the list.” Klein mocks the idea that journalists, who want to be the first to break a story, would coordinate stories.

Cannon retorts: “You underestimate how partisan some of our colleagues are.” Klein disagrees: journalists are “cynical.”

Cannon tries once more: does JournoList still exist?

Klein: “Oh–I don’t run anything like that.”

The next time anyone considers engaging anything written by Matt Yglesias, keep the following in mind–and please note the time stamps:

Is Bobby Jindal’s reputation for intelligence anything other than ethnic stereotyping?

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 18, 2013

Fair enough! Those are hard to get. RT @nick_bunker: @mattyglesias he was a Rhodes Scholar!

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 18, 2013

For the record, now that I know more about Jindal’s life it’s clear that he’s a very smart man who just says lots of very dumb stuff.

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 18, 2013

What started it all was Yglesias proclaiming that Jindal “doesn’t understand money.” You can’t make this up.

Bobby Jindal doesn’t understand money: http://t.co/lGiZ9yucK5

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 18, 2013

I’m not quite sure why Ross Douthat is engaging Matt Yglesias on questions of demographics. Yglesias often seems to know next to nothing about the topics he writes about. But I don’t really read him, so maybe Yglesias has spent the last five years deep-diving in demographic research and has a solid understanding of the field and its history. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Anyway, here’s Douthat:

This is why the moral aspect of the case for, well, familialism — the hackles-raising argument I’ve been making that a society that isn’t replacing itself isn’t fulfilling a basic intergenerational obligation— cannot just be set aside in favor of less charged and more technocratic arguments about economic self-interest and social cohesion and public health and the sustainability of public pensions and so forth. These arguments matter, obviously, and may matter immensely as we enter our ever-grayer future. But even allowing for all of the practical problems associated with demographic decline, it is still possible to imagine a world of declining birthrates and more attenuated relationships being more comfortable, in strictly material terms, than the present or the past. Matt Yglesias has been making roughly this case, for instance, painting a portrait of a future where the surplus from technology and automation under-writes leisure pursuits (mostly virtual, I would expect) and social-service support for the many singletons left underemployed and unemployable, and everyone else finds work in the booming, ever-expanding elder-caregiver industry.

There’s a precedent, of course, for seeing technology as socio-economic liberation, as Philip Longman explains in his essential (and awesome) book on demographics, The Empty Cradle (page 114):

In the go-go year of 1966, the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress issued a report warning of a “glut of productivity.” Juanita Kreps, who would late become Jimmy Carter’s secretary of commerce, coauthored part of the study which made bold predictions about what life in the United States would be like in the mid-1980s. Productivity was growing so rapidly, the study concluded, that by 1985 the economy would provide Americans with any one of the following three choices:

A universal twenty-hour workweek

A twenty-two week standard vacation

A standard retirement age of 38

Kreps was in good company in making these predictions. Policy intellectuals at the time were infatuated with the idea that America had become an “affluent society” and that the problems of economic scarcity has essentially been solved. In 1966, Time magazine surveyed leading futurists and reported their consensus view: “By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy.” So bountiful would the economy become by 2000 that only 10 percent of Americans would be needed in the labor force, and the rest, Time reported, would “have to be paid to be idle” with inflation-adjusted government benefits of up to $40,000 a year.

Longman goes into detail about the policy consequences of this worldview. Spoiler Alert: They didn’t turn out to be useful.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias with a quick history of American news media:

The Grand Old Days of American journalism were characterized first and foremost by severely curtailed competition. There were three television networks, and outside of New York each city had basically one newspaper.

At first I thought this couldn’t be serious. I understand that the days when there were only three broadcast networks are before Yglesias’s time–but it isn’t exactly ancient history. There are lots of people who were around then. Some of them even work at Slate. You would think that, if he couldn’t be bothered to research the period, Yglesias might have queried one of them.

For instance, when I was a kid growing up outside Philadelphia, we had: the Philadelphia Inquirer,  the Daily News, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and the Philadelphia Journal. That is, in addition to the two local dailies, the Gloucester County Times and the Courier-Post.

Without thinking too hard, Boston had the Herald and the Globe (that’s off the top of my head, they may have had more); Seattle had the Seattle Times, the News-Tribune, and the Post Intelligencer; St. Louis had the Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch.

You get the idea. Back in the Grand Old Days most cities had at least two newspapers. (And that’s just counting the major papers–there were tons of smaller ethnic and alternative papers.) I know it’s hard to believe, but once upon a time the major American cities actually had morning and afternoon newspapers. And many of these cities had papers competing even within those time slots!

I know. It sounds crazy. And really, who can be expected to know about stuff that happened way back in the age of rotary dials. I don’t blame Yglesias. It would have taken him 30, maybe even 45 minutes of research to find this out because since most of these papers disappeared before the digital age it’s hard to find them mentioned on the internet.

And really, you can’t blame a journalist for not knowing something if it isn’t in Wikipedia or on Google’s first three results pages. I mean what–do you want journalists to have to read books just so they understand stupid details about what the world was like before iPhones and Twitter?

And I’m sure that from here on out Yglesias will be more careful when spouting off on topics about which he knows very little.

Oh. Wait.

Update: In the comments, Galley Reader JSG asks an interesting question: Is Yglesias’ contention that most cities once had only a single newspaper true for any major American city? Maybe someone with a Twitter account can ask him to provide an example.