I'm happy to welcome James Marcus aboard as Netscape's new Senior Editor and my co-lead Anchor on the site. We're looking to grow the Anchors' reporting on the site, with more Anchor Commentary, more original articles on this blog, and more original Netscape Video content, and I think James' diverse background and experience writing both online and off will help us properly discover how to best balance this hybrid social news experience that is Netscape. James will begin full-force on the site beginning January 2nd
James and I discussed whether he should write his introduction, or if I should, or if we should do it interview style. Ultimately, we decided on a format similar to an award show introduction and speech. Without further ado, I give you James Marcus, in his own words:
I was born in the literary hotbed of Paterson, New Jersey, in 1959, and grew up in the NYC area. I always wanted to be a writer. Also a visual artist (hence the B.A. I got in studio art) and a musician (hence the rock opera I wrote, based on David Copperfield, in junior high school). After a number of these vocational detours, I broke into print as a book reviewer, contributing regular pieces to The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Newsday, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. The joys of criticism, combined with the allure of free compact discs, also got me going as a fledgling music reviewer. Over the years I've written about jazz, pop, and classical music for Salon, Jazziz, CD Review, WBUR Online Arts, and a number of fly-by-night outlets that have since ceased publication (at least one of them never even started publication.)
Like most freelancers, always scrabbling after the next assignment, I've been forced to become a generalist. I've written about aluminum smelting, male jealousy, Opus Dei, erotic daydreams, and the history of defunct musical instruments. I also opened up a second front as a translator of Italian, and now have seven books to my credit, the most recent being Dino: The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis (Miramax) and Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror (Melville House). I'm also a past winner of the PEN/Renato Poggioli Translation Prize and have judged a number of translation prizes myself: always an eye-opening experience.
Since I'm sprinting through my resume here, I shouldn't omit the period I spent as a Senior Editor at
Amazon.com. That too was an eye-opening experience, which I chronicled in a book of my own, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut (The New Press). When I left the company in 2001, I was eager to put a little distance between myself and the mad, mad world of the Internet. Apparently the detoxification has been a success, because when I was offered this position at Netscape.com, I jumped at the opportunity. You could argue that citizen journalism (or whatever we care to call it) is the current equivalent of e-commerce circa 1996: a brave new world that keeps growing at a frenetic pace, even if nobody quite understands where it's going. Having tested the waters with my blog, House of Mirth, I'm ready for the full-body immersion.
10:13AMNaila Jinnah
Excellent addition!!!
I look forward to seeing your work! :)
Out of curiosity, how does one get a job at Netscape?