WELCOME TO THE MEDIA GHETTO
BY PAMEL REDMOND SATRAN
Notorious B.I.G. may have gone back to Cali for "the women, the weather, and the weed," but we came back to Jersey for the writers.My husband, an editor at Reuters, and I spent a professionally chilly three years in the late '90s living near San Francisco, a place that claims to prize community but doesn't have any. A legion of journalists and artistes compete there for an ever-diminishing slice of a tiny cultural pie, a situation more conducive to sharklike competition than collegiality.
Montclair is a cozier sort of media ghetto. Close enough to New York that there's plenty of work to go around yet far enough from headquarters of exclusivity like Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn, Montclair is full of well-established editors and writers who are secure yet down-to-earth enough to want to be friends.
What would happen, I wondered when we moved back from California, if all these people in town got together in one room at one time? The idea was to include as diverse a group as possible: men and women, black and white, young and old, journalists and literary folk, seasoned and wet behind the ears. That idea led to Montclair Editors and Writers, or MEWs, which started with just a dozen of my friends and has swelled to a mind-blowing 700 self-identified local writers and editors. And that first party? Two hundred people showed up. Take that, San Francisco.
How did Montclair get to be the metropolitan area's premier media ghetto? For one thing, it's cheap, or at least it used to be. Back in the '80s, when we first moved here, the township was eminently more affordable than either New York City or other suburbs with comparably good schools and charming houses: Ridgewood, say, or Greenwich, Conn., or Scarsdale or Great Neck in New York state. You could be a journalist rather than a hedge fund manager and buy a house here.
Montclair is convenient to the City. You can roll out of bed, onto the No. 66 bus, and into the New York Times' offices and barely touch your toes to the ground. The commute is similarly easy to other such West Side institutions as Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst and Reuters.
And Montclair is famously hip — an important value to the scribbling class. We eat irony for lunch. Why else would Stephen Colbert, the inventor of "Truthiness," have chosen Montclair as a place to live and raise a family?
Most important, media people like to be around other media people. We moved here because my husband had colleagues who lived here, and because I relished the idea of living in a town where there were other parents of young children writing away in their home offices. And we in turn lured professional friends — a college friend who worked at the Wall Street Journal, two of my magazine editors — to town. Safety in numbers.
While Colbert is indisputably the town's most famous media personality, he's followed closely by renowned humorist and New Yorker magazine contributor Ian Frazier, as well as Jonathan Alter, Newsweek columnist and MSNBC personality. Other prominent names include Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King, CNBC anchor Tyler Mathisen, Eric Boehlert of the Huffington Post, and Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the Associated Press. On the fiction side, there's best-selling author Benilde Little, a former editor at Essence magazine, and award-winning writer Alice Ellott Dark.
Montclair's reputation as a home for the literary set goes back decades, of course. Frank Gilbreth Jr. and his sister Ernestine Gilbreth Carey immortalized the town in "Cheaper by the Dozen" in 1948. More recently, author Jon Katz captured the town's quirks and charms in his 2003 work, "The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love and Family."
It's a running joke that if a bomb were to fall on Montclair, there'd be no one left to put out the New York Times (or, for that matter, The Star-Ledger or Bergen Record). Half the Times seems to live in Montclair, including editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, sports columnist Harvey Araton, arts editor Scott Veale, investigations editor Matthew Purdy, Escapes editor Dana Jennings, hotshot reporter Charlie Bagli, and Tom Redburn, who's about to head to Paris to run the business section of the International Herald Tribune — along with, by my count, at least a dozen more. David Y. Jones, who was the Times' national editor, now sits on the boards of many of the town's literary-leaning institutions, from the library to the Montclair Arts Council.
The list goes on: Scores of reporters, essayists, magazine writers, columnists, junior editors, journalism professors, novelists, memoirists, short story writers, poets and literary agents make their homes in Montclair. Drop by Watchung Booksellers almost any Thursday night when one of them is giving a reading, and you're sure to rub shoulders with the local literati. So any time someone tries to tell me that San Francisco is famously a home for writer and journalists, all I can do is shake my head. It may have New Jersey beat in scenic vistas. But as a media haven, there's no place like Montclair.
Pamela Redmond Satran writes for Glamour, the New York Times and the Huffington Post, and is the author of "1000 Ways To Be A Slightly Better Woman."
