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This bit from an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg has been getting well-deserved WTF's all over the place. It reminds me that I have something to share about finding talent based on experiences with the @mcsweeneys column contest. 
With the contest, @crmonks and I had 1 goal, which was to identify writers who were really good but hadn't yet made a big (or any) splash anywhere. Of course, we had almost no money to offer ($500 prize for 5 winners), so we knew we weren't attracting the well-established anyway.
We'd get maybe 2000 entries for the contest per year. We'd have well over 100 that looked like something we could quite happily publish. 100 when we had room for 5. Lesson: talent is abundant. If you're not finding talented people, you're not looking or you can't recognize talent
The key to finding the talent is that the door was open. There was no screening for entry, no one had to know anybody, just an email address and two guys who were willing to read everything that came in. It was labor intensive for sure, but not complicated.
Another key was to be genuinely interested in voices you've never heard before. This is the part I'm not convinced editors at legacy publications are truly interested in. They have brands and circulation to protect and @mcsweeneys we had no such concern.
None of our column contest winners had written 20 installments of a column over the course of a year and we didn't care that this was the case. We cared if their writing was good. The other stuff would get figured out and we'd help them do it.
I would like to brag that our record for finding talent through the @mcsweeneys column contest is an amazing testament to @crmonks and myself, but I want to make this clear, anyone could do this. You just have to commit to doing it. It is really that simple.
Everybody loves @KeatonPatti's viral tweets on forcing a bot to watch something then producing the bot-written script. We knew him first when he was "Rebunking" conspiracy theories. mcsweeneys.net/columns/rebunk…
Ali Fitzgerald just published an amazing graphic novel, "Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe," with @fantagraphics, but before that, she did Hungover Bear for McSweeney's as a column contest winner. mcsweeneys.net/columns/hungov…
You guys know @vcunningham staff writer for the New Yorker who recently wrote an amazing long form profile of Tracy Morgan? He won our column contest in 2014. mcsweeneys.net/columns/field-… It is not hard to recognize his talent in those entries.
How about @thurris who was a 2012 winner and will have her book coming out with @CatapultStory? Not hard to recognize this talent. mcsweeneys.net/columns/big-mo…
Casey Plett @caseyplett was a 2010 contest winner and a 2015 Lambda Award winner for her story collection. mcsweeneys.net/columns/balls-…
I have a whole shelf of books in my living room by people who started by writing McSweeney's columns. If two middle-aged white guys like @crmonks and I could pull it off, anyone can. Open the door (for real), be curious, let people try something they haven't done before.
I get that Goldberg is getting heat in the context of saying he's genuinely trying to do better (which is great), but I cannot bear the thought that what he's aiming for is a difficult thing to achieve because it is not. Find a good writer, assign a 10k profile, voila!
The mythology that these big important pieces for legacy publications can only be written by a select few titans of the industry and the job is to simply diversify the ranks of the titans is ridiculous. 1000's of writers could pull it off with time and resources, no problem.
The reason why those white dudes that Goldberg references seem to be able to do the work is because they are most likely to have been given the time and the resources. There is no other factor. I promise. Writing talent and the drive to use it is not scarce at all.
No offense to the current contributors to The Atlantic, many of whom I really like, but you could replace the lot of them and not notice any diminishment in quality. There would be differences because different writers write differently, but the quality would be intact.
There is a benefit to editors maintaining the myth of the rare talent because if talent is rare it takes the rare talent of editors to identify and nurture it, but talent is not rare! It isn't. I learned this every single year doing the McSweeney's column contest.
In fact, one of the toughest parts of doing the contest for @crmonks and me was looking at all the work of the talented people and knowing that we could only choose five. We would debate for days over the final 20. Talent everywhere and, sadly, we had very little to offer them!
Imagine the talent you could attract with resources. My mind reels at the thought. For a $500 prize we could get major major talent early in their careers. What if I had the Atlantic's money? Who wants to hire me?
I've got a job. Though, I've got a bunch of ideas for 10k word profiles I'll never write because I can't take a month or more off from a job to write a 10k word profile.
Gonna keep adding to this thread to show how you can find talent. @davehill77 was a 2010 column contest winner doing literal 1200 word internet columns. He now does 10k word profiles for places like The Ringer. theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644…
We lost @davehill77 early in his columnist tenure because other publications with money quickly recognized his talent and started paying him for his words, which we could not do at the same level.
