[For years, I’ve hung onto the March 2011 issue of Maximum PC. I can almost picture the cover in my head – green and white with that magazine sheen and a black blur that is probably some tech product I know nothing about, just floating in negative space.
I’ve kept this issue of a niche magazine – a magazine that doesn’t even have its own website – for sentimental reasons: It contains my first published work. From memory, I know it also contains a piece by Quinn Norton, who wrote for the magazine for years before the New York Times announced yesterday that the paper was bringing her onto its editorial team.
That was short-lived, as the Times rescinded its offer after some of Norton’s more offensive Tweets surfaced online. She used racial and gay slurs and said she was friends with a neo-Nazi hacker who had previously sent anti-Semitic Tweets to a Times editor and eventually was banned from Twitter. All said, that was probably not the image the newspaper was going for just a day after its CEO hinted at the inevitable death of its print product and a plan to build its digital side.
[Seven years ago, I knew I wanted to be a reporter, but I wasn’t quite sure how to make that happen. I hadn’t studied journalism or done internships during college, and I applied to positions at the newspapers in Austin and Dallas without any success. I finally saw freelancing as my way in, and getting a story in a national magazine, albeit little-known, gave me a rush of optimism. Norton also was a freelancer, and in her I found my first journalism role model.
After seeing her column in Maximum PC, I started following Norton’s work, and I was struck by her pieces for Wired that delved into Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous. I remember in particular her longform piece that bit into the harsh realities of Occupy – the activists didn’t have a cohesive goal or vision, so there was growing division in the movement, and homeless people were taking up residence in Occupy camps, which had tragically also become a place where female activists were being sexually assaulted. I admired Norton’s writing style and her ability to drill down into a topic and lay it bare in a way that I didn’t see other writers doing at the time with the same subjects she tackled.
Norton also was a female tech reporter in a segment of the journalism business that appears to be as male-dominated as the tech industry itself. While her tone on Twitter could be abrasive, she seemed ballsy to me and had a deep knowledge of technology and hacking culture that I aspired to at the time.
I never saw Norton’s use of the “n” word. I didn’t see her call people fags, either. I had no idea she kept company with white supremacists. But looking back, how did I miss such behavior, especially from someone who had my attention and admiration? How did the New York Times miss it?
[Giving it a quick skim, all 300 words of my article in Maximum PC sound pretty phony. I wrote about Stuxnet and botnets and used terms like “herder-bot communication” and acronyms like IRC and C&C. Needless to say, I didn’t go on to become a tech journalist as I had hoped I would.
Instead, I got my first job at a newspaper later that year. I traded an interest in tech journalism for investigative work. During that shift, I stopped keeping up with Norton’s work. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time until yesterday, partially because at some point, I stopped following her on Twitter. I can’t remember why.
When I heard Norton had the editorial position at the New York Times, I felt excited and nostalgic for how she inspired me as I was beginning my career. It seems that I didn’t do my research, but then, neither did the Times.
Since the paper’s landmark reporting on Harvey Weinstein last year and an ever-growing slew of big names have been dragged through the mud, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about second chances and whether or not people can change. After all, sometimes celebrities and the role models we never meet are strange, shadowy stand-ins for the people who we do know, people who are real and capable of disappointing us in ways esteemed strangers never could.
Of course, our idols can disappoint us, too.
I tried to find that old, still-shiny magazine before I started writing this, but I couldn’t. I know it’s still around the house, crammed in a drawer or box and silently filled with my first printed words, words written by someone who doesn’t really exist anymore. Here’s to throwing the thing away when I do find it.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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