Rob Walker (journalist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with former Road & Track writer and Formula One owner Rob Walker

Rob Walker (born 1968 in Texas) is a freelance journalist and the "Consumed" columnist for The New York Times.

His writing — on such subjects as money culture, advertising, music, and sequential artists — has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. Walker has worked as an editor for the New York Times Magazine, Money, and The American Lawyer, among other publications. He is also the former "Moneybox" columnist for Slate.com.

Contents

[edit] Consumed

"Consumed," which appears weekly in The New York Times Magazine, examines consumer behavior from a hybrid business-and-anthropology standpoint. Each column discusses a new product or consumer trend. Everything in "Consumed" already has some kind of traction with some group of consumers; the column attempts to figure out what consumers are responding to in that "product," which can be anything from dish soap to beer to a television show.

[edit] Murketing

Murketing.com is Walker's blog, descended from an earlier Walker project called the Journal of Murketing, which was an email newsletter on subjects now written about in "Consumed." "Murketing" — as originally coined by Walker in an article in Outside magazine about the energy drink Red Bull — derives from "murky:"

Usually the wizards of branding want to be extremely clear about what their product is for and who's supposed to buy it. Red Bull does just the opposite. Everything about the company and its sole product is intentionally vague, even evasive. While the drink appears to be targeted specifically at someone — extreme athletes, ravers, cosmopolitan students — the brand identity is actually pretty nebulous. You could argue that what Red Bull drinkers have in common is a taste for the edgy and faintly dangerous. But what does this really mean? Obviously any attempt to articulate such a thing would immediately destroy it. The thing about a murky brand is that you can let your customers fill in all the blanks.[1]

[edit] Buying In

A book exploring themes similar to those in Walker's "Consumed" columns, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (ISBN 1400063914), is forthcoming from Random House in June 2008.

[edit] Letters from New Orleans

Walker's book, Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press, 2005, ISBN 1891053019) is a softcover book taken from Walker's emails "to interested parties" about life in New Orleans, where he lived in the late 90s-early 00s. Subjects covered in Letters From New Orleans include celebratory gunfire, rich people, religion, the riddle of race relations in our time, robots, fine dining, drunkenness, urban decay, debutantes, the nature of identity, Gennifer Flowers, and mortality. All author proceeds from Letters from New Orleans went to relief organizations such as the Red Cross and others working with victims of Hurricane Katrina.

[edit] St. James Infirmary and NO Notes

One of the chapters in Letters from New Orleans discusses the song "St. James Infirmary." Reader feedback about that chapter led to Walker starting the "NO Notes" blog. "NO Notes" is place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) sent him.

[edit] MLK Blvd

A number of the photographs in Letters From New Orleans are from a Walker project called “MLK Blvd.” Interested in how many cities have a street named for Martin Luther King Jr., and how many of these MLK Boulevards (as in New Orleans) seem to have an awful lot of abandoned property, scary-looking bars, and small groceries that accept food stamps, Walker planned on doing some sort of photo book on the subject of this “legacy.” (This was before Walker became aware of a documentary called MLK Boulevard, or the book [written by Jonathan Tilove, with photographs by Michael Falco] called, Along Martin Luther King: Travels On Black America’s Main Street.) Eventually, Walker's project became an “open source” journalism project, housed on Flickr.com.

[edit] Titans of Finance

Titans of Finance - cover art by Josh Neufeld

Under the pseudonym, R. Walker, Walker has written a number of comic book stories. A collection of his satirical stories of the business world were released in 2001 as Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money & Business (Alternative Comics, ISBN 1891867059). Collaborating with artist Josh Neufeld, Walker tells the tales of Wall Street's most well-known Icaruses. The stories are entirely based on press accounts, with practically no embellishment. Among those profiled are Ronald O. Perelman, Al Dunlap, Mike Vranos, and Victor Niederhoffer.

Titans of Finance received a good deal of attention from the mainstream business press, including Better Investing, Fortune Small Business, U.S. News & World Report, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Money Magazine, and The New York Times.

[edit] Biographical Data

Walker is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Texas, Walker now lives with his wife, photographer and designer Ellen Susan, in Savannah, Georgia.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

Sourced consulted
Endnotes
  1. ^ Walker, Rob. "The Murketing of Red Bull." Outside, April 2002.