Some of the reactions to Twittering out the story of my time at the New Yorker were predictable. Many people found the choice to tell a long story on Twitter annoying. I’ll cop to misapprehending the art form; it took me a day (after receiving several blasts from readers) to figure out that I shouldn’t break sentences into more than one Tweet. I liked what happened to writing when I had to finish sentences in 140-characters; it imposed a certain poetic rhythm that seemed to calm the thing down and relieve some of its breathlessness. Thank you to those who told me to do that.

It was fun writing about the New Yorker -- the avatar of long-form -- in the most short-form medium there is. Some people wondered why I didn’t just write a long blog about my time at the New Yorker, or sell the story to some other magazine. But as the old saying goes, the master’s tools will never the dismantle the master’s house. The very weirdness of tweeting about the New Yorker seemed to increase its impact. It was also fun, for me, imagining people reading the story in real time as it popped up on their Tweetdeck -- the ultimate in micro-serialization.

It was a media stunt, to be sure. A couple of bloggers sniffed that I was doing this “just to promote” my new book, Nine Lives, as though promoting one’s book is somehow illegitimate. I do so without shame. I worked hard on the book, the reviewers loved it. and I am eager to raise it above the clutter and sell copies. Turns out there is a whole industry of advisers in self-promotion on the web, and they were generally positive about my tweets. The Technologizer, http://technologizer.com/2009/05/12/real-not-lame-twitter-viral-marketing/, was one such.

People love a fight, so a lot of bloggers seemed determined to make this Baum v. Remnick, or Baum v. New Yorker, when that wasn’t the intention. I may be a dope about a lot of things, but even I know that in a fight between me and the New Yorker, I lose. If you read the story, which can be found at www.danbaum.com, I lavish considerable praise on Remnick and the magazine, and make it pretty clear that my getting fired was my own fault. Still, I get it: man bites dog and all that. I should have expected that.

Some people wondered why, if the story makes me look foolish, I’d tell it in the first place -- as though I hadn’t said exactly why at the very start. When I’m out promoting Nine Lives, people ask me why I’m no longer working there. These are the reasons. What should I do, not tell the story? Tell the story differently than the way it really happened? Either seems antithetical to what we do as reporters. This is the story. It doesn’t make me look great, but that’s not the issue.

It’s been interesting hearing from other writers with experience at the New Yorker. And two aspects of the coverage were genuinely disturbing. I’ll address those in my next post.