On the Economics of Writing (About Architecture)
Stefan Novakovic
January 2023
I: Writing for a Living
I started writing for a living by accident: It was in 2015, my last month of college as an unexceptional English major with no plans after graduation, that I decided to write about cities and began my research. My brother, an architect, pointed me toward Urban Toronto, a niche news site covering the city’s development industry. I saw their call for interns. Saddled with student loans, moving to New York City for an unpaid internship was out of the question. But if this was less prestigious (and less competitive), it was closer to home—my parents’ home in Toronto, anyway, where I would be living after graduation. I gave it a shot.
I was thrilled. For three days a week, I wrote about urban development. The other four days, I worked a minimum-wage job in the gift shop at the Libeskind-designed Royal Ontario Museum, where even the floors were slanted. I preferred the writing. And so I learned as much as I could. I bought all the books on urbanism, architecture, and Toronto that I could find. At the end of the summer, the publishers at Urban Toronto offered me their assistant editor position, $1,500 a month. It wasn’t much, but more than I was making at the gift shop. I said yes.
Back at my desk, still shaking with excitement, I ran the numbers. $18,000 a year was less than minimum wage, and legally, I wouldn’t have a “job”—I’d have a full-time gig, with all the responsibilities of a permanent position and all the rights of a freelancer: a real journalist.
Urban Toronto had been founded as an online discussion forum—citizen journalism for architecture geeks in the early 2000s. By the time I joined, the website had been bought by a publishing company and had a mandate to produce daily news about development proposals or construction projects across the city.
This meant sifting through thousands of pages of public records, zoning applications, renderings, architectural drawings and urban planning rationales; I learned about architecture through the civic bureaucracy. Over two-and-a-half years, I attended about 50 community meetings and dozens of housing protests and organizing events. I would often write two or three posts a day at a twelve-hour turnaround.
In 2017 I began my first job in traditional architectural publishing, working as the assistant editor at Canadian Architect magazine and its sister publications, Canadian Interiors and Buildings. At $35,000 per year, my “job” was, legally speaking, another full-time freelance gig. The magazines were legacy print publications dating back to the mid-twentieth century, and had been part of Conrad Black’s media empire. By 2017, they were run by an independent publisher on a shoestring budget.
Although I did little serious writing—to get any meaningful writing opportunities, I wrote ad hoc print articles with no extra pay—my two years with Canadian Architect helped me learn the business—how press releases and publicists shaped the media landscape, and how magazines prioritized coverage. Reviews of new projects were the backbone of trade magazines; for a building or a book review to be published, it had to be pitched. The kind of on-the-ground, public record journalism I had learned at Urban Toronto was anathema.
After Canadian Architect, I became the web editor at Azure, a magazine that covers architecture and design internationally. For the first time, I had a real job with dental insurance—and enough money to pay the rent. Today, as Azure’s senior editor, I’m able to carve out more room to write and publish what interests me. With a monthly allocation for freelancers, I read and consider numerous pitches from writers with interesting ideas.
II: The Business of Writing
Success is often as much a function of industry savvy and shrewd networking as it is original thinking and good writing. Every magazine is delivering a product to a consumer. Publications like Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Architect and Canadian Architect are considered “trade” or business-to-business (B2B) publications. Their advertising is aimed specifically at architects and designers—product specifiers. Instead of sneakers and Snickers bars, you’ll see bathroom fixtures, windows and doors, office furniture, lighting, high-end kitchens, etc. This economic reality shapes the nature of a magazine’s content and how they present it.
If more mainstream consumer media give you tips for renovating your kitchen, trade magazines give you tips for renovating other people’s kitchens. Only, when you’re writing for a professional audience, they are never “tips”—they’re examples of new and emerging trends or design philosophies. The tone differs, and so does the perspective.
When advertisers are looking to sell door handles and ceiling baffles to industry insiders, they don’t want to see their audience insulted—or even challenged. So the mandate for trade magazines often errs on the side of celebrating design rather than critiquing it. (Twenty years ago, when many trade magazines were still filled with ads for Cadillacs and credit cards, there was less concern about losing revenue through criticism.) While there may still be room for intelligent, critical writing in these publications—The Architect’s Newspaper does a particularly good job—it’s not their bread and butter.
While trade magazines offer occasional opportunities for serious critical writing towards more established writers, it’s a hard door to open, if it budges at all. Let’s say a writer has an idea to review a new public space in their neighborhood that really works (or doesn’t), or they want to investigate whether the buttons they push at a crosswalk actually do anything. Maybe there’s a compelling building in their city with a story that hasn’t been told. Pitches like these are more likely to be published by “consumer-facing” design media, like Curbed or Bloomberg CityLab, than by B2B publications.
Alternatively, a writer wanting to critique aspects of architectural practice or discuss the ideas of Manfredo Tafuri, for example, will likely find a better reception in subscription-funded or non-profit publications like Failed Architecture, Common Edge, and the New York Review of Architecture (NYRA). For a new writer, the best place to start these days might be the New York Review of Architecture; in particular, NYRA’s weekly Skyline newsletter offers a great opportunity to write a short piece or “dispatch” about a recent lecture or event. Unlike trade magazines, these publications don’t rely on advertising revenue, and unlike more mainstream design media like Curbed and CityLab, they don’t rely on a mass audience. This means they can serve a smaller, but highly dedicated readership, and produce critical, irreverent, and creative journalism that engages with theory, materialism and global flows of capital.
III: Writing and Class
