Ex-New Yorker writer Dan Baum  tweets at length about his firing. Gawker calls it a watershed moment for Twitter. In one of his tweets Dan says he was on staff for three years and six of his stories were killed. You can read those stories here by scrolling down to the bottom of the page. At the top of each story is a paragraph, from Dan’s point of view, why the story died. While at the New Yorker Dan still had to write story proposals. Here’s some that didn’t work.

Dan has some bones to pick with the New Yorker. In particular they don’t hire writers, they give them yearly contracts, so there’s no benefits. Here’s a tweet describing the New Yorker offices, “It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.”

But he has some nice things to say to. He loved the fact-checkers. “More than once, the fact-checkers uncovered information I hadn’t had, found crucial sources I hadn’t interviewed.” Two tweets later, “They work like soldier ants, and are invariably cheerful. Their boss, Peter Canby, is a calm and competent gentleman.”

The twittering of an ex-New Yorker staff writer raises a lot of questions. One of them being, Why not sell the story to another magazine? It highlights a classic writer’s dilmemna. In general we become writers, many of us, because we have to tell our stories. We can forget that for a while as we get older and have families. But in the end, a writer that needs to write is always more interested in readership than getting paid. By twittering his demise at the New Yorker, Baum is leaving behind a $90,000 a year paycheck but he’s getting his story out there the way he wants to tell it.

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