A business not hard to perform in for a seasoned editor, but certainly
exclusive and self-protective, and not so much in the interests of editors
Fits my series on life and work in 2001-08, to be delivered
sporadically.
Also invites a series banner: An Initial Biopsy of Meretricious Medicine
Subsections below:
[intro]
Who that started in
non-medical editing wound up in med promo, and what might we conclude from
this?
What sort of
difference a placement agency made: What med-promo places you (as an editor)
seemed apt to be brought to, and others you weren’t
Tales told by timesheets: Seemingly some beautiful
windfall for a time, but an opportunistic industry is reflected, from a longer
view
To come in Part 3:
A survey of a few, mostly
smaller companies
Torre Lazur / Phoenix
Various industry
quirks
The “high privilege” of staying late (in a group for an account)
To come in Part 4 (content and/or subsection heads subject
to change):
Various industry
quirks, cont’d
Some general features of traffickers, and the routine directive of
“Check changes”
Cardinal Health in Wayne
CogniMed: An example of a firm that seemed quite frivolous in terms of
(at least) how it made some “educational” CDs, but which also proved a decisive
business challenge to a placement agency, GLG
My personal circumstances make blog posting a little slowed
down, as my mother is enduring some health straits, as my closest associates
well know.
Semi–current events
note: A fine Army-trained dog that helped take down So-and-so al-Baghdadi? Such
a dog is not far different from idealistic American young people, with talent,
who tacitly hold, to pursue an arduous (or not-conventionally-rewarding) task,
a theory of what they’re earnestly doing that is shockingly simple. Like them,
this dog could say, “I hear the order, ‘Rover, kill!,’ I see where Master is pointing, I see a raghead, I chase
him down, I bite his ass, and then I
get a tasty biscuit from Master. Where’s the complication?”
Who that started in
non-medical editing wound up in med promo, and what might we conclude from
this?
The big draw of medical promotions for me was the increased
pay (while of course I’d long learned that pay rate was never a plus in the
publishing realm)—and this increased pay of med-promo was probably also the big
draw for other editors such as I first crossed paths with in the non-medical
realm in the 1990s, who later became staffers in med-promo, though their own
taste, decisions, and commitment to the medical side were, generally, probably
quite different from mine. As an example, by the end of the ’90s, I was lucky
to make about $15 an hour for freelance editing, and it had taken me years to
get to that level. All the sudden, when I was placed by Horizon Graphics in
varying locations for med-promo, pay could be like $27 an hour, $30 an hour,
higher….
But I also found, in a few instances that accumulated over
time, that various fellows at previous, non-medical places had made the jump to
medical promo. There is no obvious general set of explanations as to why they
embraced medical-promo, but specific portraits show both the colorful types of
people you could encounter in print media (in the 1990s) and later in
med-promo, and some hints as to why they embraced med-promo may be suggested.
Side note, evidence time:
For reference as to what other kinds of editing I did in those years, here (~177 KB) is a couple scanned pages, showing an
e-mail exchange with Catherine Barr, for whom I worked on educational/reference
books, and a copyright page from a Peoples Publishing book that was probably
produced in late 2004 (my name is listed among the copy editors; Tony Pelosi’s
surname is misspelled). And for support of my med-promo talk, here (~292 KB) is a three-page scan, related to 2006
items, showing (1) a dress-guideline page for ICC, (2) a timesheet I filled out
for summertime in-house work for Cardinal Health (I’ll talk of this firm in
Part 3), and (3) an invoice typical in format with how I invoiced various
employers in those days, and this one for Cardinal.
First, two generalizations: (1) my own lesson (not cozy) about
the print-media realm, as I’ve sized things up in very recent years, is that,
at least in New Jersey, it tries to get
as much out of an editor as possible while promising as little in return as
possible (either in pay rate, “benefits,” some possible funding for
retirement, or anything else typical of compensation at normal jobs). I had my
first hard lesson in this as long ago as All American Crafts (1990-91). Hence,
I knew that, for my own purposes and interests, being a freelancer and
maximizing my control over my work arrangements (as much as possible
independent of the fiat of an employer) were essential, while for such people
as I’ll outline below, these, I think, were not agenda items of theirs.
(2) Probably for just about anyone who, as a young worker, has
gone into med-promo as a staffer, their motives (at the start) weren’t to be
dishonest, exploitative of others, etc.; and especially for the youngest and
most untested workers, ethical lapses they engaged in only came with time in
the industry, and with the unusual pressures you could see there (and with
their own lack of a frame of reference, from previous demanding jobs, that
could have steeled them against doing something wrong in med-promo). Accordingly,
as I’ll convey as this series goes on, the med-promo industry in particular
seems to value, as new workers, people with as little “encumbrance” as possible
in terms of their own work experience that would build up their judgment and
capacities when things make an ethical lapse possible.
Meanwhile, in the Big Pharma–related world, the only way you
could depict an inveterate sleaze of an operator, in a movie featuring an actor
like Tom Sizemore, is if you profiled a
character like Martin Shkreli. And that’s
definitely an exception to what you usually saw in workers (at least
lower-level), when they were on their usual behavior.
##
Libby Lichauco
[sp?], a Filipino-American (his first full name was Liberato) and a very nice
guy, had been the art department worker (the only one) at AB Bookman in 1992
when I was brought in as a new, part-time worker. Then, quite understandably,
Libby was bitter at Jake’s letting him go and his placing me in Libby’s place,
as well as in a role to do proofreading, which latter I had really applied for.
When nine years later I encountered Libby in the Quantum side of the Quantum
& Xchange duo of departments of CommonHealth in about 2001, he seemed
happily installed, and didn’t seem to recognize me. Not a problem.
Libby, very importantly, was a hands-on artist, so he would
not have normally been the type to be pressed into administrative sleaze at a
med-promo place. (There was also, in 2001-02, an “old bear” of an art guy who
worked in the Quantum/Xchange location, who apparently was an industry veteran,
and eventually, by about the middle of 2001-10, I never saw him around
anymore.) Probably, by 2001, Libby had been at Quantum for a couple years or
so, and he fit in fine; even I found CommonHealth a good place for an editor
like myself when I first arrived there as a freelancer in 2001-02.
##
When I worked at Torre Lazur in 2001 and/or 2002, I found
that Mike Colligan had been there as
a staff edtor; in 1992 he had been a fellow (newly hired) proofreader with me
at AB Bookman, while there were usually about four proofreaders at a time there
(I don’t remember if Mike had full-time or part-time hours). At AB, Mike was,
later in fall 1992, strangely put in a production-editing position, and he was
so unhappy with that arrangement that he quit AB about a week after I myself
left (to work at CPG) in winter 1993: By 2001, Mike had been at Torre, in a
proofreading/editing position (I’m pretty sure as a staffer)—and I saw his name
amid stuff around one desk that I would be placed at temporarily. I had a
feeling he had been there more than a year (perhaps at least two), but I didn’t
know how long. And by later 2001 he seemed to have left the place…I can’t fully
remember, but I never saw him there personally, and didn’t expect to.
So far, as to what “former AB colleagues” being in med-promo
means, I would say that both these men probably would have preferred a reliable
place that offered staff work for them, rather than what I seemed to be groomed
for as early as AAC and CPG, taking the freelance route because of how you
couldn’t trust small publishers. Mike, in particular, was unusual—and the
flavor of dealing with him at AB conformed with this—in that he had worked as
some kind of executive in the printing industry before working at AB, and he
had gotten burned out from the printing industry; this seemed to shape how he
just couldn’t get what it meant to work for super-cheap places, which AAC had
already given me a strong taste of.
##
Another person at Torre was Beth Shustin, who had been a twenty-something new editor at All
American Crafts, brought in in early-ish 1991 to assist Matt Jones with the newly
launching magazine PaintWorks. (I
talk about her here in this 2018 AAC follow-up entry; by the way, in this earlier entry, I said Beth started at AAC in
May 1991, but I think it was as early as February—I
had to vacate my desk in the room that I shared with Lawrice to make room for
Beth.) I actually saw Beth once (or so) at Torre—in her own office, not in an
open area such as the proofreader section was more like. She didn’t see me when
I happened to see her in her office, and in other ways as my days at Torre went
on, we didn’t have a chance to cross paths or say Hi, and this suited me fine.
(As End note 4 of the AAC entry that I just linked to says, I didn’t seek out Beth when I found she worked at
Torre, 10 years later. I had never “warmed to her” when she worked at AAC, and there
she had been strangely cool and aloof, certainly to me, and I think she didn’t
click with a lot of others there. She seemed a bit moody as a general matter,
and apparently was a bit disillusioned by what a cheapo place AAC was, which of
course you couldn’t fault her for.)
(I remember pointing out to her, in a very practical manner
and on the fly, an error in a headline or such that she’s written, regarding
subject/verb agreement, i.e., plural matching with plural or singular with
singular. This is a typical nagging-copy-editor type thing. And she seemed
balky and not getting me at first, with a bit of an uncomprehending glare or
such. This showed me at the time how a sort of “stick in the mud” of a
studently-opinionated way she had—not aggressive or contempt-suggestive, but
seemingly “often behind the curve.” In fairness, I think she was consistently
not very comfortable there, and I never understood why. Lawrice, who somewhat
similarly didn’t quite click with the truly Sussex County types, wasn’t so
balky with a range of people there.)
(Oddly, as 1991 went on, Beth bonded with Lawrice—for
passing conversation purposes—when they shared a room, at the new AAC office
building in Andover
Township
You could say that Beth would be a classic case of someone
who would much prefer the greater prestige, money, security (such as it was),
and so on of med-promo for editorial work, over the tawdry likes of AAC.
However, I don’t know where she worked between 1991 and 2001, apart from AAC
and Torre.
##
Beth Ellis, who
had been one of the content-gathering editors at The World Almanac in 1998-2001 (these are years I was there; she of
course was there both before and after this), was to be found at CommonHealth
in 2010, and a fellow freelance editor who worked beside me (so to speak) in the Ferguson department
chirped about her once as if Beth was a wonderful, illustrious med-promo
colleague. Not just on this evidence, it’s possible that Beth “came into her
own” in med-promo, or was definitely more content, in med-promo, and how much
this was a function of her personal life, I don’t know (she had seemed to be a
harried, divorced mother of two young girls in 1998-2001). I never encountered
her to talk to in 2010 at CommonHealth, and I didn’t really want to. Not that I
had a grudge; we had never been “close” at WA in ’98-’01, and she might not
have remembered me in 2010.
I think of all the people I’ve mentioned so far, Beth Ellis
is the best example of someone who surprised you a bit with what she turned out
to deeply value in an editorial job: unlike her colleague Lori Wiesenfeld, who
in 1998-2001 had been rather ahead of Beth in rank (while younger) at The World Almanac, Beth wasn’t the type
to be almost monkish in accepting the pressures and low pay of print-media
work, such as even The World Almanac
was an example of. As would be evident in 2010, Beth apparently valued what
money, prestige, somewhat lighter workload, and so forth came with med-promo,
and in this regard—among others—she was quite different from me in what it meant
to be a dedicated editor.
##
Now we come to something of an exception in this gallery of
workers.
Another person who had worked in standard media in the 1990s
(or earlier) and was in med-promo post-2001 was Karen Smaldone, who by 2004 helmed the editorial department of what
was, at the time, the flagship CommonHealth division, in its own building
virtually, which had been called Thomas Ferguson Associates, and which by 2004
may have been known as Ferguson when I first worked there (through The Guy Louise
Group). Karen had apparently opted to have me come in, after I had been in a
few divisions of CommonHealth by then, because (as I found) she had seen (from
my resume, which she had apparently gotten a copy of from GLG—though it’s
possible she had seen a copy that I’d mailed directly to Ferguson in a previous
year) that I’d worked years before at AB Bookman, and she also had worked there (but not
when I was there; I think she was there years earlier).
I think anyone who’s ever worked at AB knows enough what it
took to work there that we all give each other some kind of automatic credit,
for being able to do proficient editorial work under straitened conditions (i.e.,
experience at AB—where you had to already have a certain commitment to be
embraced by a place like that—was rather like being a Freemason who could edit,
not that you could do the certain occult hand signal that Freemasons typically do:
I mean that you were part of a “guild” with a certain commitment to a
particular high-minded value system).
##
So, a few people—maybe so different that there was no common
denominator to explain their motivations—who’d trolled through the murky waters
of 1990s non-medical publishing in New Jersey ended up in med-promo. But once I
found that some of them were in med-promo, it wasn’t as if, in the new,
rarefied realm of med-promo (like a grand ship we’d climbed into after being
“men and women overboard”), we sought each other out and chatted about old
times (and I think that not only was I unapt
to seek them out, but I doubt they
would have sought me out either, not that they had disliked me in the 1990s).
Actually, with all of Beth Shustin, Libby, and Mike, I
hadn’t crossed paths with them in nine or 10 years, and they might not have
remembered me (whether regarding shared experiences or not), and except for
Mike, I hadn’t “palled around with” any of them when working with them. And, as
a measure of how they might have changed as professionals over close to a
decade, I didn’t know how long they’d been in med-promo by 2001 or 2002.
(I think it’s an interesting comparison, which I haven’t
fully mulled over yet, that if I encountered someone with whom I’d worked for
some time at GWU’s Marvin Center 30+ years later, we’d be apt to talk about old
times, with heartiness, for some length of time.)
In general, I have a sense that all these people felt “they
were where they really should be” in med-promo, and perhaps (or probably) not
just due to the money. But as for myself, and as I’m sure made me different
from them in sheer practical terms, I felt as if I’d been through D Day, the
Battle of the Bulge, Guadalcanal, and whatever else with all my hands-on editorial
work from 1991 through 2000; and for better or worse, I really (or arguably, or
tacitly) felt “confirmed” as an editor of mainly educational and reference
works. And this made, for me, medical-editing work to be something I always
seemed to come into rarely, and also (by
the 2000s) it was something I usually approached warily, because (as CPG had first inculcated in me) there often
seemed something opportunistic or a little shaky about it. I could do the
editorial work in it, but it seemed something that I could less trust for regular work.
As may convey the point better, as we’ll see more solid
examples of, the medical-promotions world was very much about something other than, for editors, the nerdy, busily hands-on
craftwork that had been so typical of the magazines, low-level newspapers, non-glamorous
books, and educational and reference stuff I’d swum through so much of.
And if you ask, What was the first thing I saw when working
in med-promo that told me I couldn’t trust it much?, I think the answer comes
fairly easily: in spring 2001, when I saw I could be in a med-promo office for
hours, and yet only be able to bill (on the basis of what I’d actually done)
for an hour or 1.5 hours of work (yet I could be advised, as I went along with,
assigning on my timesheet X hours to another account so that in total I was
paid for 6.5 or seven hours of time there), that told me this was a far
different animal than I had grown over a decade to “trust.”
You could find fairly easily that some important measures of
your work were overlooked, or systematically ignored, by this med-promo system:
You were there at their pleasure, when supposedly you were called in because
there were hours of work for you on a given day, when really you only had an hour or two of actual work to do. As I said,
you still billed for 6.5 or seven hours. You served their ends: i.e., their ability to bill their client, the Big
Pharma company, for “6.5 hours of editorial work” when really all you’d done
was only 1.5. Meanwhile, your efficiency
as an editor, your ability to plow through, say, up to 30,000 words of
material in a day—was totally ignored. Your
efficiency in working wasn’t key: your ability, in part, to provide a pretext
for the med-promo firm to bill the Big Pharma client was what was key.
This “rule of the new game” was shown even in 2010, when
John Kearney, the so-called editorial director at Ferguson who had (tellingly
about changing times) replaced Karen Smaldone in 2007 (and I referred to him as
“Tweedle Dee” in a 2012 set of blog entries), advised me once to “slow down” in
my work. Slow down? This was by no means the lesson of m 1990s editorial work.
And if as an outsider you ask, since not everyone in the work world could do medical editing, why I
wasn’t valued for this capacity more by med-promo (having proven myself in it),
well, I might suggest that some individual medical editors valued me; but as
was more significant in terms of opportunities, manager-types who were not editors didn’t tend to click with me
much at all.
What sort of
difference a placement agency made: What med-promo places you (as an editor)
seemed apt to be brought to, and others you weren’t
An offbeat topic is: Why did Horizon Graphics, and later Guy
Louise, so often land me (and others) in certain med-promo firms and not others? In part the apparent reason
reflects simple economics: little
med-promo firms (there were also-ran places like “Hyphen,” a small, apparently
stand-alone firm—i.e., not part of a conglomerate—that went out of business by
about 2010) couldn’t afford placement-agency workers. (And in fact, when I
worked at the small place of Metaphor, in or near Mountain Lakes
But the most curious example of the phenomenon of how
placement agencies didn’t get you into certain firms was that no placement
agency ever got me into Integrated
Communications Corp., or ICC as it was also called. And no other
placement-agency editor I ever encountered seemed to be placed there, either.
And ICC was the biggest of every other med-promo place in the Parsippany area (or
other towns featuring med-promo firms) than CommonHealth, as far as I knew.
(In view of my rigorous organizing, you can consider this
profile of ICC to be “among the list of companies” in the subsection that
follows.)
Seeking work outside the grasp of a placement agency, I
eventually got what turned out to be a day’s work at ICC, in April 2006 (after
probably my intrepidly sending it letters/resumes), and then after that day’s
work, I was immediately shunted (for the next days, turning into weeks) to a
small outgrowth of them, a new, tiny firm called Trio (I had to get clear on
this; I erroneously referred to it as “Clio” in a previous, late-August
entry—but these med-promo firms can be whimsically named in any event). Trio
was newly located in a smallish suite in an office building a few blocks from
where ICC was. I was there about, as I vaguely recalled, three or four weeks
(and actually, as I find from records, it was from sometime in April to very
early June) subbing for a staff editor who was on leave.
ICC was part of the Interpublic ad-agency conglomerate,
while CommonHealth was part of WPP, a larger conglomerate (and of course
Interpublic and WPP were competitors, but not bitterly so, as far as I know).
Amusingly, when I worked at ICC and Trio in 2006, and later at Pace in 2007-08
(Pace was also under the Interpublic umbrella), they had a big, fancy
confidentiality-agreement-and-such set of papers to peruse and sign. You felt
proud to be part of a conglomerate that had such a set of papers. Meanwhile,
CommonHealth’s confidentiality agreement was a one-sheet, sketchy thing that
seems, in retrospect, almost like an embarrassment, by today’s standards. (I
signed a version of such a CommonHealth “NDA” in 2001, 2006, and 2007; the 2006
instance was related only to MBS/Vox, and the 2007 wasn’t co-signed by a
CommonHealth rep.)
As I said, Interpublic and WPP were competitors, so I
noticed for some years, starting in about 2010, that when I perused the names,
pics, and brief affiliation info of people who turned up in the “People You May
Know” section of my LinkedIn pages, you did not see—per the “affiliation” info
LinkedIn routinely showed—shared connections “across” the divide between
Interpublic and WPP, but you did see no shortage of shared connections between
people within each of those separate conglomerates’ folds. In more recent years
(since, maybe, 2015), there seems more shared connections across the divide; I’m not sure what this development means.
In any event, neither Horizon nor GLG got me into ICC for
years, and I never asked them about it. When I finally got into ICC for a day’s
work under a steely, rather witchy middle-aged woman named Barbara Kaplowitz, I
didn’t feel she really welcomed me there. (She seemed mutedly suspicious of me,
from the beginning, with her coolly assessing eyes—which parochial attitude was
atypical of numerous “manager” types I’d dealt with in med-promo up until then.
Later I found she apparently had a son who had a drug problem—so this may have
conditioned her attitude toward me, though it still would not have been fair.)
This experience at ICC, along with the years it took me to
get there (without clear logic reflected in this length of time), suggested the
place was much more closed and “picky” about whom they made part of their fold
than was CommonHealth for years until at least 2006. (In fact, despite the
negatives, over the longer term, that you could adduce about CommonHealth,
there was a lovely way that various staff workers you could be with there in
the 2001-03 honeymoon period seemed to value in general, and use with you in
particular, a collegial warmth that made
you all the more apt to soak up time there. And as it happened, the richest
time, both in amount and mood, in a three-year period that I had with
CommonHealth was in 2001-03.)
In about 2009 I found a critical assessment of ICC on a site
called “Jobvent” or such—an apparent forerunner of Glassdoor and Café Pharma, I
think—that was quite tough, if probably justifiably enough, about the firm.
This even while the former worker reporting on it had lapses in her writing
style, suggesting immaturity as a worker. My exhibit is of an e-mail I sent to myself with the “Jobvent” copy pasted to it, and you
also see handwritten notes done for a slightly unrelated purpose. When I
recently Google-searched for the original Jobvent site, which would now be at
least 10 years old, I couldn’t find it. But anyway, the ideas and sentiments
shown here aren’t so implausible if you read my other indications of this
industry.
We’ll look (in Part 3) at the agencies the placement firms did get me into.
Tales told by timesheets:
Seemingly some beautiful windfall for a time, but an opportunistic industry is
reflected, from a longer view
I started scanning (in a very
pedestrian way) a big batch of Horizon timesheets—at first, I opted for volume
that was suggestive of the experience, but the volume (on the practical side in
making the scan) got to be so much, I had to stop; and yet the volume is
important, because it shows how, with Horizon, the work flowed like wine for a
time, both showing good fortune for editors like me and also how choppily opportunistic
this kind of work turned out to be.
Composite
scan: This scan (3.6 MB!!) may be
a bit hard to read in places, but is the best I can do to present this stuff
efficiently. My original timesheets are a bit faint but not bad to read;
initial scans, hand-done piecemeal (three timesheets per page), look pretty
good in a pdf; printing these out and re-scanning for this composite degrades
the resolution. So if you want to see some of the component scans (three
timesheets per original scan), I can perhaps send some to you—but you may be
satisfied with this big set as is.
Some of the order of my
timesheets is a little odd, a function of the order of my files (and possibly
some missing sheets); I jump from September to December in 2001 (this while you
can see how MBS/Vox first started in earnest for me that month—when, as it
happened, my mother was on the cusp of getting operated on for cancer, for the
first time). Why (on one page) my sheets go from January 2002 to October 2002
is just a fluke of sloppy ordering of papers. Meanwhile, I suspect there may be
a few timesheets missing from within 2001 or 2002, though I know, as a matter
of how this work experience was, that I went for a long stretch in 2002 of
little work from Horizon.
The sheet for week ending Oct.
27, 2002, notes a place called Health Vizion (which was not part of
CommonHealth or the Interpublic group, as far as I know), and I don’t remember
this at all (or I recall very little). Per my records, I was only there one
day, so no wonder. You can see gigs for Torre Lazur sprinkled throughout; the
last time I was there, for a long time, was apparently in mid-July 2002. I
don’t think I worked there at all in 2003, though I do remember returning there
in 2005 (and I don’t know if I was there in 2004), which 2005 gig would have
been through The Guy Louise Group.
The unusually substantial
stretch I had at MBS/Vox in 2002-03 started in November 2002, as I’ve long
remembered. And if you see sheets (interspersed amid the MBS ones) for Quantum
and/or Xchange, these (as I’ve said) were two branches of CommonHealth, both
within the same office suite in Parsippany. (Strangely, I later found that another
firm was in that same building, and I don’t think it was part of CommonHealth,
called “Group DCA”—“DCA” probably stood for “direct-to-consumer advertising,”
though I never heard of the firm when working hot-and-heavy with Horizon and
GLG in 2001-07. I only learned about it in my “exiled” and researching period [gleaning
much info off the Internet] starting in about September 2010.)
Anyway, with this clot of stuff,
the real useful general impression to
appreciate is how, in the late fall of 2002, the work I got through Horizon
started getting very consistent: week after week of work, and several days per
week at some places, especially at MBS/Vox in 2003. (If I represented the
timesheets from about March 2003 until July 2003, the picture would be about
the same.) This period was almost like full-time work—but you couldn’t start to
feel “Maybe if I got a full-time job here…,” because the other times of those
years when work could be more sporadic shows that a place like MBS could never
be counted on, at least by hands-on editors, for “a regular job.”
(As it happened, I had work from
other, non-placement-agency sources anyway, such as Magazines for Libraries, which starting in 2003 would be a yearly
thing.)
So as beautiful a windfall as
eight months in a row of work could be in early-to-mid 2003, it would still
prove to be subject to chance, and
this would help support the theory that the overall nature of the med-promo industry
was on the opportunistic side (and you could be damned puzzled, sometimes, as
to why decisions to suddenly end working with an editor was made).
And this is to say nothing of
how, at (at least) one place, the way editorial work was guided (as to some specifics of what you did) made you skeptical of
wanting to be there long.
